Avenue of Mysteries (72 page)

Juan Diego didn’t know there
were
literary stalkers; he doubted that Leslie (a writing
student
) was besieged by them, but she’d told Clark that Juan Diego had been seduced by a “groupie who preys on writers.” (Clark persisted in calling Dorothy just plain “D.”) Leslie had told Clark that Dorothy was a “woman of possibly satanic intentions.” The
satanic
word never failed to excite Clark.

The reason there were so many text messages from Clark was that Juan Diego had turned off his cell phone before the flight from Laoag to Manila; not until he was leaving the restaurant with Miriam did he remember to turn it back on. By then, Clark French’s imagination had taken a fearful and protective turn.

“Are you all right?” Clark’s most recent text message began. “What if D.
is
satanic? I’ve met Miriam—I thought
she
was satanic!”

Juan Diego saw he’d missed a text message from Bienvenido, too. It was true that Clark French had made most of the arrangements for Juan Diego in Manila, but Bienvenido knew that Mr. French’s former teacher was back in town
and
that he had changed hotels. Bienvenido didn’t exactly contradict Miriam’s warnings about Sunday, but he wasn’t as adamant.

“Best to lie low tomorrow, due to crowds attending the Black Nazarene event—at least avoid any proximity to the procession routes,” Bienvenido texted him. “I’ll be your driver Monday, for the onstage interview with Mr. French and the dinner afterward.”

“WHAT onstage interview with you Monday, Clark—WHAT dinner afterward?” Juan Diego immediately texted Clark French, before addressing the
satanic
situation that had so excited his former writing student.

Clark called to explain. There was a small theater in Makati City, very near Juan Diego’s hotel—“small but pleasant,” Clark described it. On Monday nights, when the theater was dark, the company hosted onstage
interviews with authors. A local bookstore provided copies of the authors’ books, for signing; Clark was often the interviewer. There was a dinner afterward for patrons of the writers’ onstage series—“not a lot of people,” Clark assured him, “but a way for you to have some contact with your Filipino readers.”

Clark French was the only writer Juan Diego knew who sounded like a publicist. And, like a publicist, Clark mentioned the media last. There would be a journalist or two, at the onstage event
and
the dinner, but Clark said he would warn Juan Diego about the ones to watch out for. (Clark should just stay home and
write
! Juan Diego thought.)

“And your friends will be there,” Clark suddenly said.

“Who, Clark?” Juan Diego asked.

“Miriam and her daughter. I saw the guest list for dinner—it just says ‘Miriam and her daughter, friends of the author.’ I thought you would know they were coming,” Clark told him.

Juan Diego looked carefully around his hotel suite. Miriam was in the bathroom; it was almost midnight—she was probably getting ready for bed. Limping his way to the kitchen area of the suite, Juan Diego lowered his voice when he spoke on his cell phone to Clark.

“D. is for
Dorothy,
Clark—Dorothy is Miriam’s daughter. I slept with Dorothy before I slept with Miriam,” Juan Diego reminded his former writing student. “I slept with Dorothy before she met Leslie, Clark.”

“You admitted you didn’t know Miriam and her daughter
well,
” Clark reminded his old teacher.

“As I told you, they’re mysteries to me, but your friend Leslie has her own issues—Leslie is just jealous, Clark.”

“I don’t deny that poor Leslie has
issues
—” Clark started to say.

“One of her boys was trampled by a water buffalo—the same boy was later stung by pink jellyfish swimming vertically,” Juan Diego whispered into his cell phone. “The other boy was stung by plankton resembling condoms for three-year-olds.”

“Stinging condoms—don’t remind me!” Clark cried.

“Not condoms—the stinging plankton
looked like
condoms, Clark.”

“Why are you whispering?” Clark asked his old writing teacher.

“I’m with Miriam,” Juan Diego whispered; he was limping around the kitchen area, trying to keep an eye on the closed bathroom door.

“I’ll let you go,” Clark whispered. “I thought Tuesday would be a good day for the American Cemetery—”

“Yes, in the afternoon,” Juan Diego interrupted him.

“I’ve booked Bienvenido for Tuesday morning, too,” Clark told him. “I thought maybe you would like to see the National Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe—the one here, in Manila. There are only a couple of buildings, just an old church and monastery—nothing as grand as your Mexico City version. The church and monastery are in a slum, Guadalupe Viejo—the slum is on a hill above the Pasig River,” Clark carried on.

“Guadalupe Viejo—a slum,” was all Juan Diego managed to say.

“You sound tired. We’ll decide this later,” Clark abruptly said.

“Guadalupe, sí—” Juan Diego started to say. The bathroom door was open; he saw Miriam in the bedroom—she had only a towel around her, and she was closing the bedroom curtains.

“That’s a ‘yes’ to Guadalupe Viejo—you want to go there?” Clark French was asking.

“Yes, Clark,” Juan Diego told him.

Guadalupe Viejo didn’t sound like a slum—to a dump kid, Guadalupe Viejo sounded more like a destination. It seemed to Juan Diego that the very existence of the National Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Manila was more of a reason for his taking this trip to the Philippines than the sentimental promise he’d made to the good gringo. More than the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial, Guadalupe Viejo sounded like where a dump reader from Oaxaca would
end up
—to use Dorothy’s blunt way of putting it. And if it was true that an aura of fate had marked him, didn’t Guadalupe Viejo sound like Juan Diego Guerrero’s kind of place?

“You’re shivering, darling—do you have a chill?” Miriam asked him when he came into the bedroom.

“No, I was just talking to Clark French,” Juan Diego told her. “There’s an onstage event Clark and I are doing—an interview together. I hear you and Dorothy are coming.”

“We don’t get to go to a lot of literary events,” Miriam said, smiling. She’d spread the towel for her feet on the carpet, on her side of the bed. She was already under the covers. “I put out your pills,” she said matter-of-factly. “I didn’t know if it was a Lopressor or a Viagra night,” Miriam told him in that insouciant way of hers.

Juan Diego was aware he’d been alternating nights: he chose the nights when he wanted to feel adrenalized; he resigned himself to those other nights, when he knew he would feel diminished. He was aware that his skipping a dose of the beta-blockers—specifically, to unblock the adrenaline receptors in his body, to give himself an adrenaline release—
was dangerous. But Juan Diego didn’t remember when it became routine for him to have
either
“a Lopressor or a Viagra night,” as Miriam had put it—a while ago, he imagined.

Juan Diego was struck by what was the same about Miriam and Dorothy; this had nothing to do with how they looked, or their sexual behavior. What was the same about these two women was how they were able to manipulate him—not to mention that whenever he was with one of them, he was inclined to forget about the other one. (Yet he forgot
and
obsessed about both of them!)

There was a word for how he was behaving, Juan Diego thought—not only with these women but with his beta-blockers. He was behaving
childishly,
Juan Diego was thinking—not unlike the way he and Lupe had behaved about the virgins, at first preferring Guadalupe to the Mary Monster, until Guadalupe disappointed them. And then the Virgin Mary actually had done something—enough to get the dump kids’ attention, not only with her nose-for-a-nose trick but with her unambiguous tears.

The Ascott was not El Escondrijo—no ghosts, unless Miriam was one, and any number of outlets where Juan Diego could have plugged in and charged his cell phone. Yet he chose an outlet in the area of the bathroom sink, because the bathroom was private. And Juan Diego hoped that—whether she was a ghost or not—Miriam might have fallen asleep before he was finished using the bathroom.

“Enough sex, Dorothy,” he’d heard Miriam say—that oft-repeated line—and, more recently, “it’s never as much about sex as you seem to think it is.”

Tomorrow was Sunday. Juan Diego would be flying home to the United States on Wednesday. He’d not only had enough sex, Juan Diego was thinking—he’d had enough of these two mysterious women, whoever they were. One way to stop obsessing about them was to stop having sex with them, Juan Diego thought. He used the pill-cutting device to slice one of the oblong Lopressor tablets in half; he took his prescribed dose of the beta-blockers, plus this additional half.

Bienvenido had said it was “best to lie low” on Sunday; Juan Diego would
lie low,
all right—he would miss most of Sunday in a diminished state. And it wasn’t the crowds or the religious insanity of the Black Nazarene procession Juan Diego was intentionally missing. He wished Miriam and Dorothy would just disappear; it was feeling diminished, as usual, that he wanted.

Juan Diego was making an effort to be normal again—not to mention
that he was trying, albeit belatedly, to follow his doctor’s orders. (Dr. Rosemary Stein was often on his mind, if not always as his doctor.)

“Dear Dr. Rosemary,” he began his text to her—once again sitting with his hard-to-understand cell phone on the bathroom toilet. Juan Diego wanted to tell her he’d taken some liberties with his Lopressor prescription; he wanted to explain about the unusual circumstances, the two interesting (or at least interested) women. Yet Juan Diego wanted to assure Rosemary that he wasn’t lonely, or pathetic; he also wanted to promise her that he would stop fooling around with the required dose of his beta-blockers, but it seemed to take him
hours
just to write “Dear Dr. Rosemary”—the stupid cell phone was an insult to any writer! Juan Diego could never remember which stupid key you pushed to capitalize a letter.

That was when a simpler solution occurred to Juan Diego: he could send Rosemary the photograph of him with Miriam and Dorothy at Kowloon Station; that way, his message could be both shorter and funnier. “I met these two women, who caused me to diddle around with my Lopressor prescription. Fear not! Am back on track and abstinent again. Love—”

That would be the briefest way to confess to Dr. Rosemary, wouldn’t it? And the tone wasn’t self-pitying—no hint of the longing or lost opportunity attached to that night in the car on Dubuque Street, when Rosemary had seized Juan Diego’s face and said, “I would have asked you to marry me.”

Poor Pete was driving. Poor Rosemary tried to revise what she’d said; “I just meant I
might
have asked you,” was the way Rosemary said it. And, without looking at her, Juan Diego had known she was crying.

Ah, well—it was best for Juan Diego
and
his dear Dr. Rosemary not to dwell on that night in the car on Dubuque Street. And how could he send her that photo taken at Kowloon Station? Juan Diego didn’t know how to find the photo on his stupid cell phone—not to mention how to attach the photo to a text. On the infuriating keypad of his little phone, even the key for “clear” wasn’t spelled out. The correct key for “clear” was marked
CLR
—there was room on the keypad for two more letters, in Juan Diego’s opinion. He angrily cleared his text message to Rosemary, one letter at a time.

Clark French would know how to find the photo that young Chinese man took at Kowloon Station; he could show Juan Diego how to send the photo with a text message to Dr. Rosemary. Clark knew how to do
everything, except what to do with poor Leslie, Juan Diego was thinking as he limped to bed.

No dogs were barking, no gamecocks were crowing, but—not unlike New Year’s Eve at the Encantador—Juan Diego could discern no detectable breathing from Miriam.

Miriam was asleep on her left side, with her back turned toward him. Juan Diego thought he could lie on his left side and put his arm around her; he wanted to put his hand on her heart, not on her breast. He wanted to feel if her heart was beating or not.

Dr. Rosemary Stein could have told him that you can feel a pulse better in other places. Naturally, Juan Diego felt Miriam—all over her chest!—but he couldn’t feel her heartbeat.

While he was groping all around, his feet touched her feet; if Miriam was alive, and not a spectral presence, surely she must have felt him touching her. Nevertheless, Juan Diego was bravely trying to assert his familiarity with the spiritual world.

The boy who’d been born in Guerrero was no stranger to spirits; Oaxaca was a town full of holy virgins. Even that Christmas-parties place, the virgin shop on Independencia—even one of those sex-doll replicas of the city’s famous virgins—was a
little
holy. And Juan Diego was a Lost Children kid; surely the nuns, and the two old priests at the Temple of the Society of Jesus, had exposed the dump reader to the spiritual world. Even the dump boss was a believer; Rivera had been a Mary worshiper. Juan Diego wasn’t afraid of Miriam or Dorothy—whoever, or whatever, they were. As el jefe had said: “We don’t need to
declare
what a miracle is or isn’t—we
saw
it.”

It didn’t matter who or what Miriam was. If Miriam and Dorothy were Juan Diego’s personal angels of death, he was unimpressed. They wouldn’t be his first or his only miracle. As Lupe had told him: “We’re the miraculous ones.” All this was what Juan Diego believed, or what he tried to believe—what he sincerely
wanted
to believe—while he went on touching Miriam.

The sudden, sharp intake of Miriam’s breath nonetheless startled him. “It’s a Lopressor night, I’m guessing,” she said to him in her low, husky voice.

He tried to reply to her nonchalantly. “How did you know?” Juan Diego asked her.

“Your hands and feet, darling,” Miriam told him. “Your extremities are already turning colder.”