Avenue of Mysteries (74 page)

“And do you think Shapiro
defames
Freud?” Clark asked his adoring writing student, but poor Leslie was now afraid of him; she looked too small to speak.

Juan Diego would have sworn that was Miriam’s long arm wrapped around poor Leslie’s shaking shoulders.

“Self-analysis had enabled Freud, by extension, to analyze Shakespeare,” Shapiro had written.

No one but Freud could imagine Freud’s lust for his mother, or Freud’s jealousy of his father, Clark was saying—and how, from
self-analysis,
Freud had concluded this was (as Freud put it) “a universal event in early childhood.”

Oh, those universal events in early childhood! Juan Diego was thinking; he’d hoped Clark French would leave Freud out of the discussion. Juan Diego didn’t want to hear what Clark French thought of the Freudian theory of penis envy.

“Just
don’t,
Clark,” said a stronger-sounding female voice in the audience—not Leslie’s timid voice this time. It was Clark’s wife, Dr. Josefa Quintana, a most impressive woman. She stopped Clark from telling the audience his impressions of Freud—the saga of the untold damage done to literature
and
to young Clark’s vulnerable imagination at a formative age.

With a beginning of this oppressive kind, how could the onstage interview hope to achieve a spontaneous liftoff? It was a wonder that the audience didn’t leave—except for Leslie, whose early exit was very visible. It was a mild success that the interview got a little better. There was some mention of Juan Diego’s novels, and it registered as a small triumph that the issue of Juan Diego’s being, or his
not
being, a Mexican-American writer was discussed without further reference to Freud, James, or Twain.

But poor Leslie hadn’t left alone, not entirely. If not everyone’s idea of a mother and her daughter, those two women with Leslie were certainly
competent-looking, and the way they’d escorted Leslie up the aisle and out of the theater suggested they were used to taking charge. In fact, how Miriam and Dorothy had taken hold of the small, pretty woman might have caused some concern among the more observant members of the audience—if anyone even noticed, or had been paying attention. The unshakable grip Miriam and Dorothy had on poor Leslie could have meant they were comforting her or
abducting
her. It was hard to tell.

And where had Miriam and Dorothy gone? Juan Diego kept wondering. Why should he care? Hadn’t he wished they would just disappear? Yet what did it mean when your angels of death departed—when your personal phantasms stopped haunting you?

T
HE DINNER AFTER THE
onstage event was in the labyrinth of the Ayala Center. To an out-of-towner, the dinner guests were not discernible from one another. Juan Diego knew who his readers were—they announced themselves by their familiarity with the details of his novels—but the dinner guests Clark identified as “patrons of the arts” were aloof; their sympathies toward Juan Diego were unreadable.

You shouldn’t generalize about those people who are patrons of the arts. Some of them have read nothing; they’re often the ones who appear to have read everything. The other ones have an out-of-it expression; they seem disinclined to speak or, if they talk at all, it’s only to make an offhand remark about the salad or the seating plan—and they’re usually the ones who’ve read everything you’ve written, and everyone else you’ve ever read.

“You have to be careful around patron-des-arts types,” Clark whispered in Juan Diego’s ear. “They are not what they seem.”

Clark was wearing thin on Juan Diego—Clark could grate on anyone. There were those known things Clark and Juan Diego disagreed about, but it was when Juan Diego most agreed with Clark that Clark grated on him
more.

To be fair: Clark had prepared him to expect “a journalist or two” at the dinner party; Clark had also said he would warn Juan Diego about “the ones to watch out for.” But Clark didn’t know all the journalists.

One of the unknown journalists asked Juan Diego if the beer he was drinking was his first one, or his second.

“You want to know how many beers he’s had?” Clark asked the young man aggressively. “Do you know how many
novels
this author has written?” Clark further asked the journalist, who was wearing an untucked
white shirt. It was a dress shirt, but one that had known fresher days. By its bedraggled appearance and a mélange of stains, the shirt—and the young man wearing it—signified, if only to Clark, a life of unclean disarray.

“Do you like San Miguel?” the journalist asked Juan Diego, pointing to the beer; he was deliberately ignoring Clark.

“Name two titles of novels this author has written—just two,” Clark told the journalist. “Of the novels Juan Diego Guerrero has written, name one you’ve read—just one,” Clark said.

Juan Diego could never (
would
never) behave like Clark, but Clark was redeeming himself with each passing second; Juan Diego was remembering what he liked best about Clark French—notwithstanding all the other ways in which Clark could be Clark.

“Yes, I like San Miguel,” Juan Diego told the journalist, holding up his beer as if he were toasting the unread young man. “And I believe this is my second one.”

“You don’t have to talk to him—he hasn’t done his
homework,
” Clark said to his former teacher.

Juan Diego was thinking that his nice-guy assessment of Clark French was not quite correct; Clark
is
a nice guy, Juan Diego thought, provided you’re not a journalist who hasn’t done your homework.

As for the unprepared journalist, the young man who was not a reader, he had wandered off. “I don’t know who he is,” Clark muttered; he was disappointed in himself. “But I know
that one
—I know
her,
” Clark told Juan Diego, pointing to a middle-aged woman who’d been eyeing them from afar. (She’d been waiting for the younger journalist to drift away.) “She is a horror of insincerity—imagine a venomous hamster,” Clark hissed to Juan Diego.

“One of the ones to watch out for, I guess,” Juan Diego said; he smiled knowingly at his former student. “I feel safe with you, Clark,” Juan Diego suddenly said. This was verily spontaneous and heartfelt, but until he said it, Juan Diego hadn’t realized how unsafe he
had
felt—and for how long! (Dump kids don’t take feeling safe for granted; circus kids don’t assume a safety net is there.)

For his part, Clark felt moved to wrap his big, strong arm around his former teacher’s slender shoulders. “But I don’t think you need my protection from
this one,
” Clark whispered in Juan Diego’s ear. “She’s just a gossip.”

Clark was talking about the middle-aged woman journalist, who was
now approaching—the “venomous hamster.” Had he meant her mind ran in place, making repetitive rotations on the going-nowhere wheel? But what was
venomous
about her? “All of her questions will be recycled—stuff she saw on the Internet, the reiteration of every stupid question you were ever asked,” Clark was whispering in his former teacher’s ear. “She will not have read a single novel you’ve written, but she’ll have read everything
about
you. I’m sure you know the type,” Clark added.

“I
know,
Clark—thank you,” Juan Diego gently said, smiling at his former student. Mercifully, Josefa was there—the good Dr. Quintana was dragging her husband away. Juan Diego had not realized he’d been standing in the food line until he saw the buffet table; it was dead ahead.

“You should have the fish,” the woman journalist told him. Juan Diego saw that she’d inserted herself in the food line beside him, possibly the way venomous hamsters do.

“That looks like a cheese sauce, on the fish,” was all Juan Diego said; he helped himself to the Korean glass noodles with vegetables, and to something called Vietnamese beef.

“I don’t think I’ve seen anyone actually eat the mangled beef here,” the journalist said. She must have meant to say “shredded,” Juan Diego was thinking, but he didn’t say anything. (Maybe the Vietnamese
mangled
their beef; Juan Diego didn’t know.)

“The small, pretty woman—the one who was there tonight,” the middle-aged woman said, helping herself to the fish. “She left early,” she added, after a long pause.

“Yes, I know who you mean—Leslie someone. I don’t know her,” was all Juan Diego said.

“Leslie someone told me to tell you something,” the middle-aged woman told him, in a confiding (not quite motherly) tone.

Juan Diego waited; he didn’t want to appear too interested. And he was looking everywhere for Clark and Josefa; he realized he wouldn’t object if Clark bullied this woman journalist, just a little.

“Leslie said to tell you that the woman with Dorothy can’t be Dorothy’s mother. Leslie said the older woman isn’t old enough to be Dorothy’s mother—besides, they look nothing alike,” the journalist said.

“Do you know Miriam and Dorothy?” Juan Diego asked the frumpy-looking woman. She was wearing a peasant-style blouse—the kind of loose shirt the American hippie women wore in Oaxaca, those women who didn’t wear bras and put flowers in their hair.

“Well, I don’t
know
them—I just saw they were very much
with
Leslie,”
the woman journalist said. “And they left early, too, with Leslie. For what it’s worth, I thought the older of the two women
wasn’t
old enough to be the younger one’s mother. And they
didn’t
look anything alike—not to me,” she added.

“I saw them, too,” was all Juan Diego said. It was hard to imagine why Miriam and Dorothy were
with
Leslie, Juan Diego thought. Perhaps harder to imagine was why poor Leslie was with them.

Clark must have gone to the men’s room, Juan Diego was thinking; he was nowhere in sight. Yet an unlikely-looking savior was headed Juan Diego’s way; she was dressed badly enough to be another journalist, but there was the recognizable glint of unexpressed intimacies in her eager eyes—as if reading him had changed her life. She had stories to share, of how he’d rescued her: maybe she’d been contemplating suicide; or she was pregnant with her first child, at sixteen; or she’d lost a child when she happened to read—well, these were the kind of intimacies glinting in her I-was-saved-by-reading-you eyes. Juan Diego loved his diehard readers. The details they’d cherished in his novels seemed to sparkle in their eyes.

The woman journalist saw the diehard reader coming. Was there some partial recognition between them? Juan Diego couldn’t tell. They were women of a similar age.

“I
like
Mark Twain,” the journalist said to Juan Diego—her parting shot, as she was leaving. Was that all she had for
venom
? Juan Diego wondered.

“Be sure to tell Clark,” he told her, but she might not have heard him—she seemed to be leaving in a hurry.

“Go away!” Juan Diego’s avid reader called after the woman journalist. “She hasn’t read anything,” the new arrival announced to Juan Diego. “I’m your biggest fan.”

To tell the truth, she was a big woman, easily 170 or 180 pounds. She wore baggy blue jeans, torn at both knees, and a black T-shirt with a fierce-looking tiger between her breasts. It was a protest T-shirt, expressing anger on behalf of an endangered species. Juan Diego was so out of it, he didn’t know tigers were in trouble.

“Look at you—you’re having the beef, too!” his new biggest fan cried, wrapping an arm as seemingly strong as Clark’s around Juan Diego’s smaller shoulders. “I’ll tell you something,” the big woman told Juan Diego, leading him to her table. “You know that scene with the duck hunters? When the idiot forgets to take off the condom, and he goes
home and starts peeing in front of his wife? I
love
that scene!” the woman who loved tigers told him, pushing him ahead of her.

“Not everyone was fond of that scene,” Juan Diego tried to point out to her. He was remembering a review or two.

“Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, right?” the big woman asked him, pushing him toward a seat.

“Yes, I think so,” Juan Diego said warily. He was still looking all around for Clark and Josefa; he
did
love his diehard readers, but they could be a little overwhelming.

It was Josefa who found him, and took him to the table where she and Clark had been waiting. “The save-the-tiger woman is a journalist, too—one of the good ones,” Clark told him. “One who actually reads novels.”

“I saw Miriam and Dorothy at the onstage event,” Juan Diego told Clark. “Your friend Leslie was with them.”

“Oh, I saw Miriam with someone I didn’t know,” Josefa said.

“Her daughter, Dorothy,” Juan Diego told the doctor.

“D.,” Clark explained. (It was obvious Clark and Josefa had discussed Dorothy as
D.
)

“The woman I saw didn’t look like Miriam’s
daughter,
” Dr. Quintana said. “She wasn’t beautiful enough.”

“I’m very disappointed in Leslie,” Clark told his former teacher and his wife. Josefa said nothing.

“Very disappointed,” was all Juan Diego could say. But all he could think about was Leslie
someone.
Why would she have gone anywhere with Dorothy and Miriam? Why would she even be with them? Poor Leslie wouldn’t have been with them, Juan Diego thought—not unless she’d been
bewitched.

I
T WAS A
T
UESDAY
morning in Manila—January 11, 2011—and the weekend news from Juan Diego’s adopted country wasn’t good. This had happened on Saturday: Representative Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, had been shot in the head; she was given a fair chance to survive, if not with all her brain function. Six people were dead in the shooting rampage, including a nine-year-old girl.

The Arizona shooter was a twenty-two-year-old; he’d been firing a Glock semiautomatic pistol with a high-capacity magazine that held thirty rounds. The shooter’s reported utterances made him sound illogical
and incoherent—was he another whack-job anarchist? Juan Diego wondered.