Avenue of Mysteries (59 page)

That was when Juan Diego had heard a man say something at another table; it was not what the man said that was special—it was the way he said it. “That’s what I know,” the man had said. There was something memorable about the intonation. The man’s voice was both familiar and confrontational—he was sounding a little defensive, too. He sounded like a last-word kind of guy.

He was a blond, red-faced man who was having dinner with his family; it seemed he’d been having an argument with his daughter, a girl about sixteen or seventeen, Juan Diego would have guessed. There was a son, too—he was only a little older than the daughter. The son looked to be about eighteen, tops; the boy was still in high school—Juan Diego would have bet on it.

“It’s one of the O’Donnells,” Pete said. “They’re all a little loud.”

“It’s Hugh O’Donnell,” Rosemary said. “He’s on the zoning board. He always wants to know when we’re building another hospital, so he can be opposed to it.”

But Juan Diego was watching the daughter. He knew and understood the beleaguered look on the young girl’s face. She’d been trying to defend the sweater she was wearing. Juan Diego had heard her say to her father: “It’s not ‘slutty-looking’—it’s what kids wear today!”

This was what had prompted the dismissive “That’s what I know” from her red-faced father. The blond man hadn’t changed much since high school, when he’d said those hurtful things to Juan Diego. When was it—twenty-eight or twenty-nine, almost thirty, years ago?

“Hugh,
please
—” Mrs. O’Donnell was saying.

“It’s not ‘slutty-looking,’ is it?” the girl asked her brother. She turned in her chair, trying to give the smirking boy a better look at her sweater. But the boy reminded Juan Diego of what Hugh O’Donnell
used to
look like—thinner, flaxen-blond with more pink in his face. (Hugh’s face was much redder now.) The boy’s smirk was the same as his dad’s; the girl knew better than to continue modeling her sweater for him—she turned away. Anyone could see that the smirking brother lacked the courage to take his sister’s side. The look he gave her was one Juan Diego had seen before—it was a no-sympathy look, as if the brother thought his sister would be slutty-looking in
any
sweater. In the boy’s condescending gaze, his sister looked like a slut, no matter what the poor girl wore.

“Please,
both
of you—” the wife and mother started to say, but Juan Diego got up from the table. Naturally, Hugh O’Donnell recognized the limp, though he’d not seen it—or Juan Diego—for almost thirty years.

“Hi—I’m Juan Diego Guerrero. I’m a writer—I went to school with your dad,” he said to the O’Donnell children.

“Hi—” the daughter started to say, but the son didn’t say anything, and when the girl glanced at her father, she stopped speaking.

Mrs. O’Donnell blurted out something, but she didn’t finish what she was going to say—she just stopped. “Oh, I know who you are. I’ve read—” was as far as she got. There must have been more than a little of that dump-reader tenacity in Juan Diego’s expression, enough to alert Mrs. O’Donnell to the fact that Juan Diego wasn’t interested in talking about his books—or to her. Not right now.

“I was your age,” Juan Diego said to Hugh O’Donnell’s son. “Maybe your dad and I were between your ages,” he said to the daughter. “He wasn’t very nice to me, either,” Juan Diego added to the girl, who seemed to be increasingly self-conscious—not necessarily about her much-maligned sweater.

“Hey, look here—” Hugh O’Donnell started to say, but Juan Diego just pointed to Hugh, not bothering to look at him.

“I’m not talking to you—I’ve heard what you have to say,” Juan Diego told him, looking only at the children. “I was adopted by two gay men,” Juan Diego continued—after all, he did know how to tell a story. “They were partners—they couldn’t be married, not here or in Mexico, where I came from. But they loved each other, and they loved me—they were my guardians, my adoptive parents. And I loved them, of course—the way kids are supposed to love their parents. You know how that is, don’t you?” Juan Diego asked Hugh O’Donnell’s kids, but the kids couldn’t answer him, and only the girl nodded her head—just a little. The boy was absolutely frozen.

“Anyway,” Juan Diego went on, “your dad was a bully. He said my mom shaved—he meant her face. He thought she did a poor job shaving her upper lip, but she
didn’t
shave. She was a
man,
of course—she dressed as a woman, and she took hormones. The hormones helped her to look a little more like a woman. Her breasts were kind of small, but she had breasts, and her beard had stopped growing, though she still had the faintest, softest-looking trace of a mustache on her upper lip. I told your dad it was the best the hormones could do—I said it was all the estrogens could accomplish—but your dad just kept being a bully.”

Hugh O’Donnell had stood up from the table, but he didn’t speak—he just stood there.

“You know what your dad said to me?” Juan Diego asked the O’Donnell kids. “He said: ‘Your so-called mom and dad are
guys
—they both have dicks.’ That’s what he said; I guess he’s just a ‘That’s what I know’ kind of guy. Isn’t that right, Hugh?” Juan Diego asked. It was the first time Juan Diego had looked at him. “Isn’t that what you said to me?”

Hugh O’Donnell went on standing there, not speaking. Juan Diego turned his attention back to the kids.

“They died of AIDS, ten years ago—they died here, in Iowa City,” Juan Diego told the children. “The one who wanted to be a woman—I had to shave her when she was dying, because she couldn’t take the estrogens and her beard grew back, and I could tell she was sad about how much she looked like a man. She died first. My ‘so-called dad’ died a few days later.”

Juan Diego paused. He knew, without looking at her, that Mrs. O’Donnell was crying; the daughter was crying, too. Juan Diego had always
known that women were the real
readers
—women were the ones with the capacity to be affected by a story.

Looking at the implacable, red-faced father and his frozen, pink-faced son, Juan Diego would pause to wonder what
did
affect most men. What the fuck would
ever
affect most men? Juan Diego wondered.

“And
that’s
what I know,” Juan Diego told the O’Donnell kids. This time, they both nodded—albeit barely. When Juan Diego turned and limped his way back to his table, where he could see that Rosemary and Pete—and even that drunken writer—had been hanging on his every word, Juan Diego was aware that his limp was a little more pronounced than usual, as if he were consciously (or unconsciously) trying to draw more attention to it. It was almost as if Señor Eduardo and Flor were watching him—somehow, from somewhere—and they’d also been hanging on his every word.

In the car, with Pete behind the wheel, and the drunken writer in the passenger seat—because Roy or Ralph was a big guy, and a clumsy drunk, and they’d all agreed he needed the legroom—Juan Diego had sat in the backseat with Dr. Rosemary. Juan Diego had been prepared to limp home—he lived close enough to the corner of Clinton and Burlington to have walked—but Roy or Ralph needed a ride, and Rosemary had insisted that she and Pete drive Juan Diego where he was going.

“Well, that was a pretty good story—what I could understand of it,” the drunken writer said from the front seat.

“Yes, it was—very
interesting,
” was all Pete said.

“I got a little confused during the AIDS part,” Ralph or Roy soldiered on. “There were two guys—I got that, all right. One of them was a cross-dresser. Now that I think of it, it was the shaving part that was confusing—I got the AIDS part, I think,” Roy or Ralph went on.

“They’re dead—it was ten years ago. That’s all that matters,” Juan Diego said from the backseat.

“No, that’s not all,” Rosemary said. (He’d been right, Juan Diego would remember thinking: Rosemary was a little drunk—maybe more than a little, he thought.) In the backseat, Dr. Rosemary suddenly seized Juan Diego’s face in both her hands. “If I’d heard you say what you said to that asshole Hugh O’Donnell—I mean
before
I agreed to marry Pete—I would have asked you to marry me, Juan Diego,” Rosemary said.

Pete drove down Dubuque Street for a while; no one spoke. Roy or Ralph lived somewhere east of Dubuque Street, maybe on Bloomington or on Davenport—he couldn’t remember. To be kind: Roy or Ralph was
distracted; he was trying to locate Dr. Rosemary in the backseat—he was fumbling around with the rearview mirror. Finally, he found her.

“Wow—I didn’t see
that
coming,” Roy or Ralph said to her. “I mean your asking Juan Diego to marry you!”

“I did—I saw it coming,” Pete said.

But Juan Diego, who was struck silent in the backseat, was as taken aback as Roy or Ralph—or whoever that itinerant writer was. (Juan Diego hadn’t seen
that
coming, either.)

“Here we are—I think we’re here. I wish I knew where I fucking
lived,
” Roy or Ralph was saying.

“I don’t really mean I
would
have married you,” Rosemary tried to say, revising herself—either for Pete’s benefit or for Juan Diego’s; perhaps she meant it for both of them. “I just meant I
might
have asked you,” she said. This seemed more reasonable.

Without looking at her, Juan Diego knew that Rosemary was crying—the way he’d known Hugh O’Donnell’s wife and daughter had been crying.

But so much had happened. All Juan Diego could say from the backseat was: “Women are the readers.” What he also knew, even then, would have been unsayable—namely, sometimes the story begins with the epilogue. But, really, how could he have said anything like
that
? It needed a context.

Sometimes Juan Diego would feel he was still sitting with Rosemary Stein in the semidarkness of the car’s backseat, the two of them not looking at each other, and not talking. And wasn’t this what that line from Shakespeare meant, and why Edward Bonshaw had been so attached to it? “A glooming peace this morning with it brings”—well, yes, and why would such darkness ever depart? Who can happily think of what
else
happened to Juliet and her Romeo, and
not
dwell on what happened to them at the end of their story?

•
26
•

The Scattering

The dislocations of travel had been a familiar theme in Juan Diego’s early novels. Now the demons of dislocation were besetting him again; he was having trouble remembering how many days and nights he and Dorothy had stayed at El Nido.

He remembered the sex with Dorothy—not only her screaming orgasms, which were in what sounded like Nahuatl, but how she’d repeatedly called his penis “this guy,” as if Juan Diego’s penis were a nonspeaking but otherwise obtrusive presence at a noisy party. Dorothy was definitely noisy, a veritable earthquake in the world of orgasms; their near neighbors at the resort had phoned their room to inquire if everyone was all right. (But no one had used the
asswheel
word, or the more common
asshole
appellation.)

As Dorothy had told Juan Diego, the food at El Nido was good: rice noodles with shrimp sauce; spring rolls with pork or mushrooms or duck; serrano ham with pickled green mango; spicy sardines. There was also a condiment made from fermented fish, which Juan Diego had learned to be on the lookout for; he thought it gave him indigestion or heartburn. And there was flan for dessert—Juan Diego liked custard—but Dorothy told him to avoid anything with milk in it. She said she didn’t trust the milk on the “outer islands.”

Juan Diego didn’t know if only a
little
island constituted an
outer
island, or if all the islands in the Palawan group were (in Dorothy’s estimation) of the
outer
kind. When he asked her, Dorothy just shrugged. She had a killer shrug.

It was strange how being with Dorothy had made him forget Miriam, but he’d forgotten that being with Miriam (even
wanting
to be with Miriam) had once made him forget about being with Dorothy. Very strange:
how he could, simultaneously, obsess about these women and forget about them.

The coffee at the resort was overstrong, or perhaps it seemed strong because Juan Diego was drinking it black. “Have the green tea,” Dorothy told him. But the green tea was very bitter; he tried putting a little honey in it. He saw that the honey was from Australia.

“Australia is nearby, isn’t it?” Juan Diego asked Dorothy. “I’m sure the honey is safe.”

“They dilute it with something—it’s too watery,” Dorothy said. “And where’s the water come from?” she asked him. (It was her outer-islands theme, again.) “Is it bottled water, or do they boil it? I say fuck the honey,” Dorothy told him.

“Okay,” Juan Diego said. Dorothy seemed to know a lot. Juan Diego was beginning to realize that, increasingly, when he was with Dorothy or her mother, he acquiesced.

He was allowing Dorothy to give him his pills; she’d simply taken over his prescriptions. Dorothy not only decided when he should take the Viagra—always a whole tablet, not a half—but she told him when to take the beta-blockers, and when
not
to take them.

At low tide, it was Dorothy who insisted they sit overlooking the lagoon; low tide was when the reef egrets came to search the mudflats. “What are the egrets looking for?” Juan Diego had asked her.

“It doesn’t matter—they’re awesome-looking birds, aren’t they?” was all Dorothy had said.

At high tide, Dorothy held his arm as they ventured onto the beach in the horseshoe-shaped cove. The monitor lizards liked to lie in the sand; some of them were as long as an adult human arm. “You don’t want to get too close to them—they can bite, and they smell like carrion,” Dorothy had warned him. “They look like penises, don’t they? Unfriendly-looking penises,” Dorothy said.

Juan Diego had no idea what unfriendly-looking penises resembled; how
any
penis could or might look like a monitor lizard was beyond him. Juan Diego had enough trouble understanding his own penis. When Dorothy took him snorkeling in the deep water outside the lagoon, his penis stung a little.