Avenue of Mysteries (57 page)

Flor had been almost beautiful, but her face would be disfigured with Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions. A violet-colored lesion dangled from one of Flor’s eyebrows; another purplish lesion drooped from her nose. The latter was so prominent that Flor chose to hide it behind a bandanna. La Bandida, she called herself—“The Bandit.” But, hardest for her, Flor would lose the
la
(the feminine) in herself.

The estrogens she was taking had side effects—in particular, on her liver. Estrogens can cause a kind of hepatitis; the bile stagnates and builds. The itching that occurred with this condition drove Flor crazy. She had to stop the hormones, and her beard came back.

It seemed unfair to Juan Diego that Flor, who’d worked so hard to feminize herself, was not only dying of AIDS, but dying as a man. When Señor Eduardo’s hands were no longer steady enough to shave Flor’s face every day, Juan Diego did it. Yet, when he kissed her, Juan Diego could
feel the beard on Flor’s cheek, and he could always see the shadow of a beard—even on her clean-shaven face.

Because they were an unconventional couple, Edward Bonshaw and Flor had wanted a young doctor for their primary care physician, and Flor had wanted a woman. Their pretty GP was Rosemary Stein; she’d insisted they be tested for HIV. In 1989, Dr. Stein was only thirty-three. “Dr. Rosemary”—as Flor was the first to call her—was Juan Diego’s age. At the Virology Clinic, Flor called the infectious disease doctors by their first names—their last names were a nightmare for a Mexican to say. Juan Diego and Edward Bonshaw
—their
English was perfect—also called the infectious disease doctors “Dr. Jack” and “Dr. Abraham,” just to make Flor feel like less of a foreigner.

The waiting room in the Virology Clinic was very bland—very 1960s. The carpets were brown; the chairs were single or two-person seats with dark, vinyl-coated cushions—Naugahyde, almost certainly. The check-in desk was a burnt-orange color with a light-colored Formica top. The wall facing the check-in desk was brick. Flor said she wished the Boyd Tower building had been nothing but brick, inside and out; it upset her to think that “shit like Naugahyde and Formica” would outlive her and her dear Eduardo.

Flor had infected the Iowan, everyone supposed, though only Flor ever said so. Edward Bonshaw never accused her; he would say nothing to incriminate her. They’d taken no official vows, but they had promised each other the usual. “In sickness and in health, for as long as we both shall live,” Señor Eduardo would devotedly recite to her, when Flor would accuse herself, confessing her occasional infidelities (those return trips to Oaxaca, the partying—if only for old times’ sake).

“What about ‘forsaking all others’—I agreed to that, didn’t I?” Flor would ask her dear Eduardo; she was intent on blaming herself.

But you couldn’t take the lawlessness out of Flor. Edward Bonshaw would remain true to her—Flor was the love of his life, he always said—as he remained true to his Scottish oath, the insane one about “yielding under no winds,” which, idiotically, he couldn’t refrain from repeating in the original Latin: haud ullis labentia ventis. (This was the same lunacy he’d proclaimed to Brother Pepe, the chicken feathers heralding his arrival in Oaxaca.)

In the Virology Clinic, the blood-drawing room was next to the waiting room, which the HIV-positive patients shared, most of the time,
with the diabetics. The two groups of patients sat on opposite sides of the room. In the late eighties and early nineties, the number of AIDS patients grew, and many of the dying were visibly marked by their disease—and not only by their wasted bodies, or the Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions.

Edward Bonshaw was marked in his own way: he suffered from a seborrheic dermatitis; it was flaky and greasy-looking—mostly on his eyebrows and scalp, and on the sides of his nose. There were cheesy patches of
Candida
in Señor Eduardo’s mouth, coating his tongue white. The
Candida
would eventually go down the Iowan’s throat, into his esophagus; he had difficulty swallowing, and his lips were crusted white and fissured. In the end, Señor Eduardo could scarcely breathe, but he refused to go on a ventilator; he and Flor wanted to die together—at home, not in a hospital.

In the end, they fed Edward Bonshaw through a Hickman catheter; they told Juan Diego that the intravenous feeding was necessary for patients who couldn’t feed themselves. With the
Candida,
and the difficulty he had swallowing, Señor Eduardo was starving. A nurse—an older woman whose name was Mrs. Dodge—moved into what had been Juan Diego’s bedroom on the second floor of that duplex apartment on Melrose. For the most part, the nurse was there to take care of the catheter—Mrs. Dodge was the one who flushed out the Hickman with heparin solution.

“Otherwise, it will clot off,” Mrs. Dodge told Juan Diego, who had no idea what she meant; he didn’t ask her to explain.

The Hickman catheter dangled from the right side of Edward Bonshaw’s chest, where it had been inserted under his clavicle; it tunneled under the skin a few inches above his nipple, and entered the subclavian vein below the collarbone. Juan Diego couldn’t get used to seeing it; he would write about the Hickman catheter in one of his novels, where a number of his characters died of AIDS—some of them with the AIDS-associated, opportunistic illnesses that had afflicted Señor Eduardo and Flor. But the AIDS victims in that novel were not even remotely “based on” the Iowan or La Loca, The Queen—La Bandida, as Flor called herself.

In his own way, Juan Diego wrote about what happened to Flor and Edward Bonshaw, but he would not once write
about them.
The dump reader was self-taught, and had taught himself how to imagine, too. Maybe the self-taught part was where the dump reader got the idea that
a fiction writer
created
characters, and that you
made up
a story—you didn’t just write about the people you knew, or tell your own story, and call it a novel.

There were too many contradictions and unknowns about the real people in Juan Diego’s life—real people were too incomplete to work as characters in a novel, Juan Diego thought. And he could make up a better story than what had happened to him; the dump reader believed his own story was “too incomplete” for a novel.

When he’d taught creative writing, Juan Diego had not once told his students how they should write; he would never have suggested to his fiction-writing students that they should write a novel the way he wrote his. The dump reader wasn’t a proselytizer. The problem is that many young writers are searching for a method; young writers are vulnerable to picking up a writing process and believing there is a one-and-only way to write. (Write what you know! Only imagine! It’s all about the language!)

Take Clark French. Some students stay students all their lives: they seek and find generalizations they can live by; as writers, they want the way they write to be established as a universal and ironclad code. (Using autobiography as the basis for fiction produces drivel! Using your imagination is faking it!) Clark maintained that Juan Diego was “on the antiautobiographical side.”

Juan Diego had tried not to be drawn into taking sides.

Clark insisted that Juan Diego was “on the imagination’s side”; Juan Diego was a “fabler, not a memoirist,” Clark said.

Maybe so, Juan Diego thought, but he didn’t want to be on anyone’s
side.
Clark French had turned writing fiction into a polemical competition.

Juan Diego had tried to
de
-polemicize the conversation; he’d attempted to talk about the literature he loved, the writers who’d made him wish he could be a writer—not because he saw these writers as standard-bearers of a
way
to write, but simply because he loved what they’d written.

No surprise: the library of English-language literature at Lost Children was limited and generally not newer than the nineteenth-century models of the form, including the novels Father Alfonso and Father Octavio had designated for destruction in the hellfires of the basurero
and
those essential novels Brother Pepe or Edward Bonshaw had saved for the library’s small collection of fiction. These novels were what had inspired Juan Diego to be a novelist.

That life was not fair to dogs had prepared the dump reader for Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter.
Those matronly churchwomen gossiping about what
they
would do to Hester—brand her forehead with a hot iron, or kill her, rather than merely mark her clothes—helped prepare Juan Diego for what vestiges of American Puritanism he would encounter after moving to Iowa.

Melville’s
Moby-Dick
—most notably, Queequeg’s “coffin life-buoy”—would teach Juan Diego that foreshadowing is the storytelling companion of fate.

As for fate, and how you can’t escape yours, there was Hardy’s
The Mayor of Casterbridge.
Michael Henchard, drunk, sells his wife and daughter to a sailor in the first chapter. Henchard can never atone for what he does; in his will, Henchard requests “that no man remember me.” (Not exactly a redemption story. Clark French hated Hardy.)

And then there was Dickens—Juan Diego would cite the “Tempest” chapter from
David Copperfield.
At the end of that chapter, Steerforth’s body washes ashore and Copperfield is confronted with the remains of his former childhood idol and sly tormentor—the quintessential older boy you meet at school, your predestined abuser. Nothing more was necessary to say about Steerforth’s body on the beach, where he lies “among the ruins of the home he had wronged.” But Dickens, being Dickens, gives Copperfield more to say: “I saw him lying with his head upon his arm, as I had often seen him lie at school.”

“What more did I need to know about writing novels than what I learned from those four?” Juan Diego had asked his writing students—Clark French included.

And when Juan Diego presented those four nineteenth-century novelists to his writing students—“my
teachers,
” he called Hawthorne, Melville, Hardy, and Dickens—he never failed to mention Shakespeare, too. Señor Eduardo had shown Juan Diego that long before anyone wrote a novel, Shakespeare understood and appreciated the importance of
plot.

Shakespeare was a mistake to mention around Clark French; Clark was the Bard of Avon’s self-appointed bodyguard. Coming, as Clark did, from the only-imagine school of thought—well, you can imagine how Clark had a bug up his ass about those infidels who believed
someone else
wrote Shakespeare.

And any thoughts of Shakespeare brought Juan Diego back to Edward Bonshaw and what had happened to him and Flor.

• • •

A
T THE BEGINNING
,
WHEN
Señor Eduardo and Flor were still strong enough—when they could carry things and deal with stairs, and Flor was still driving—they made their own way to the first-floor clinic in the Boyd Tower building; it was only a third of a mile from their house on Melrose. When everything became more difficult, Juan Diego (or Mrs. Dodge) would take Flor and Edward Bonshaw across Melrose Avenue; Flor was still walking, but Señor Eduardo was in a wheelchair.

In the early to mid-1990s—before the number of deaths from AIDS plummeted (due to the new meds) and the number of HIV-positive patients in the Virology Clinic began to increase—the number of patients visiting the clinic stabilized, at about two hundred a year. Many of the patients sat in their partners’ laps in the waiting room; there was the occasional conversation about gay bars and drag shows, and there were a few flamboyant dressers—flamboyant for Iowa.

Not Flor—not anymore. Flor would lose most of her womanly appearance, and though she continued to dress as a woman, she dressed modestly; she was aware that her allure had dimmed, if not in Señor Eduardo’s adoring eyes. They held hands in the waiting room. In Iowa City, at least in Juan Diego’s memory, the
only
place Flor and Edward Bonshaw were publicly demonstrative of their affection for each other was in the waiting room of the HIV/AIDS clinic in the Boyd Tower building.

One of the AIDS patients was a young man from a Mennonite family who’d originally disowned him; they would later reclaim him. He brought vegetables from his garden to the waiting room; he handed out tomatoes to the clinic staff. The young Mennonite wore cowboy boots and a pink cowboy hat.

One of the times when Mrs. Dodge took Flor and Edward Bonshaw to the clinic, Flor said something funny to the young gardener in the pink cowboy hat.

Flor always wore her bandanna in public. La Bandida said: “You know what, cowboy? If you’ve got a couple of horses, you and I could rob a train or stick up a bank.”

Mrs. Dodge told Juan Diego that “the whole waiting room laughed”—even she laughed, she said. And the Mennonite in the pink cowboy hat went right along with the joke.

“I know North Liberty pretty well,” the cowboy said. “There’s a library that sure would be easy to knock off. You know North Liberty?” the cowboy asked Flor.

“No, I don’t,” Flor told him, “and I’m not interested in sticking up a library—I don’t read.”

This was true: Flor didn’t read. Her spoken vocabulary was very sharp—she was an excellent listener—but her Mexican accent hadn’t changed since 1970, and she never read anything. (Edward Bonshaw or Juan Diego would read aloud to her.)

It had been a comic interlude in the HIV/AIDS clinic, according to Mrs. Dodge, but Señor Eduardo was upset by Flor’s flirting with the cowboy gardener.

“I wasn’t flirting—I was making a joke,” Flor said.

Mrs. Dodge didn’t think that Flor had been flirting with the farmer. Later, when Juan Diego asked her about the episode, Mrs. Dodge said: “I think Flor is done with flirting.”

Mrs. Dodge was from Coralville. Dr. Rosemary had recommended her. The first time Edward Bonshaw said to the nurse, “In case you were wondering about my scar—” well, Mrs. Dodge knew all about it.

“Everyone in Coralville—that is, everyone of a certain age—knows that story,” Mrs. Dodge told Señor Eduardo. “The Bonshaw family was famous, because of what your father did to that poor dog.”