The peering faces of two women were framed in the rear window of that taxi; they could have been a mother and her daughter, but it seemed highly unlikely to Juan Diego that those two frightened-looking women could have been Miriam and Dorothy. It was difficult for Juan Diego to imagine Miriam and Dorothy being afraid. Who or what would frighten them? Yet the thought remained: he'd seen these two formidable women before--he was sure of it.
"It's very modern," was all Juan Diego could think of saying about the Regal Airport Hotel when he was riding on the elevator with Miriam and Dorothy. The mother and daughter had registered for him; he'd only had to show his passport. He didn't think he'd paid.
It was one of those hotel rooms where your room key was a kind of credit card; after you'd entered your room, you stuck the card in a slot that was mounted on the wall just inside the door.
"Otherwise, your lights won't work and your TV won't turn on," Dorothy had explained.
"Call us if you have any trouble with the modern devices," Miriam told Juan Diego.
"Not just trouble with the modern shit--any kind of trouble," Dorothy had added. On Juan Diego's key-card folder, she'd written her room number--and her mom's.
They're not sharing a room? Juan Diego wondered when he was alone in his room.
In the shower, his erection returned; he knew he should take a beta-blocker--he was aware he was overdue. But his erection made him hesitate. What if Miriam, or Dorothy, made herself available to him--more unimaginable, what if both of them did?
Juan Diego removed the beta-blockers from his toilet kit; he put the tablets beside the water glass, next to his bathroom sink. They were Lopressor tablets--elliptical, a bluish gray. He took out his Viagra tablets and looked at them. The Viagra were not exactly elliptical; they were somewhat football-shaped, but four-sided. The closer similarity, between the Viagra and the Lopressor, was the color of the tablets--they were both a gray-blue color.
If such a miracle as Miriam or Dorothy making herself available to him were to happen, it would be too soon to take a Viagra now, Juan Diego knew. Even so, he removed his pill-cutting device from his toilet kit; he put it next to the Viagra tablets, on the same side of his bathroom sink--just to remind himself that half of one Viagra would suffice. (As a novelist, he was always looking ahead, too.)
I'm imagining things like a horny teenager! Juan Diego thought as he was getting dressed to rejoin the ladies. His own behavior surprised him. Under these unusual circumstances, he took no medication; he hated how the beta-blockers diminished him, and he knew better than to take half of one Viagra tablet prematurely. When he got back to the United States, Juan Diego was thinking, he must remember to thank Rosemary for telling him to experiment!
It's too bad that Juan Diego wasn't traveling with his doctor friend. "To thank Rosemary" (for her instructions concerning Viagra usage) was not what the writer needed to remember. Dr. Stein could have reminded Juan Diego of the reason he was feeling like a star-crossed Romeo, limping around in an older writer's body: if you're taking beta-blockers and you skip a dose, watch out! Your body has been starved for adrenaline; your body suddenly makes more adrenaline, and more adrenaline receptors. Those misnamed dreams, which were really heightened, high-definition memories of his childhood and early adolescence, were as much the result of Juan Diego not taking a single Lopressor tablet as was his suddenly supercharged lust for two strangers--a mother and her daughter, who seemed more familiar to him than strangers ever should.
THE TRAIN, THE AIRPORT Express to Kowloon Station, cost ninety Hong Kong dollars. Maybe his shyness prevented Juan Diego from looking closely at Miriam or Dorothy on the train; it's doubtful he was genuinely interested in reading every word on both sides of his round-trip ticket, twice. Juan Diego was a little interested in comparing the Chinese characters to the corresponding words in English. SAME DAY RETURN was in small capitals, but there seemed to be no equivalent to small capitals in the unvarying Chinese characters.
The writer in Juan Diego found fault with "1 single journey"; shouldn't the numeral 1 have been written out as a word? Didn't "one single journey" look better? Almost like a title, Juan Diego thought. He wrote something on the ticket with his ever-present pen.
"What are you doing?" Miriam asked Juan Diego. "What can be so fascinating about a train ticket?"
"He's writing again," Dorothy said to her mother. "He's always writing."
" 'Adult Ticket to City,' " Juan Diego said aloud; he was reading to the women from his train ticket, which he then put away in his shirt pocket. He really didn't know how to behave on a date; he'd never known how, but these two women were especially unnerving.
"Whenever I hear the adult word, I think of something pornographic," Dorothy said, smiling at Juan Diego.
"Enough, Dorothy," her mother said.
It was already dark when their train arrived at Kowloon Station; the Kowloon harborfront was crowded with tourists, many of them taking pictures of the skyscraper-lined view, but Miriam and Dorothy glided unnoticed through the crowds. It must have been a measure of Juan Diego's infatuation with this mother and daughter that he imagined he limped less when either Miriam or Dorothy held his arm or his hand; he even believed that he managed to glide as unnoticed as the two of them.
The snug, short-sleeved sweaters the women wore under their cardigans were revealing of their breasts, yet the sweaters were somehow conservative. Maybe the conservative part was what went unnoticed about Miriam and Dorothy, Juan Diego thought; or was it that the other tourists were mostly Asian, and seemingly uninterested in these two attractive women from the West? Miriam and Dorothy wore skirts with their sweaters--also revealing, meaning tight, or so Juan Diego would have said, but their skirts were not glaringly attention-getting.
Am I the only one who can't stop looking at these women? Juan Diego wondered. He wasn't aware of fashion; he couldn't be expected to understand how neutral colors worked. Juan Diego didn't notice that Miriam and Dorothy wore skirts and sweaters that were beige and brown, or silver and gray, nor did he notice the impeccable design of their clothes. As for the fabric, he may have thought it looked welcoming to touch, but what he noticed were Miriam's and Dorothy's breasts--and their hips, of course.
Juan Diego would remember next to nothing of the train ride to Kowloon Station, and not a bit of the busy Kowloon harborfront--not even the restaurant they ate their dinner in, except that he was unusually hungry, and he enjoyed himself in Miriam and Dorothy's company. In fact, he couldn't remember when he'd last enjoyed himself as much, although later--less than a week later--he couldn't recall what they'd talked about. His novels? His childhood?
When Juan Diego met his readers, he had to be careful not to talk too much about himself--because his readers tended to ask him about himself. He often tried to steer the conversation to his readers' lives; surely he would have asked Miriam and Dorothy to tell him about themselves. What about their childhood years, their adolescence? And Juan Diego must have asked these ladies, albeit discreetly, about the men in their lives; certainly he would have been curious to know if they were attached. Yet he would remember nothing of their conversation in Kowloon--not a word beyond the absurd attention paid to the train ticket when they were en route to Kowloon Station on the Airport Express, and only a bit of bookish conversation on the train ride back to the Regal Airport Hotel.
There was one thing that stood out about their ret
urn trip--a moment of awkwardness in the sleek, sanitized underground of Kowloon Station, when Juan Diego was waiting with the two women on the train platform.
The glassy, gold-tinted interior of the station with its gleaming stainless-steel trash cans--standing like sentinels of cleanliness--gave the station platform the aura of a hospital corridor. Juan Diego couldn't find a camera or photo icon on his cell phone's so-called menu--he wanted to take a photo of Miriam and Dorothy--when the all-knowing mother took the cell phone from him.
"Dorothy and I don't do pictures--we can't stand the way we look in photographs--but let me take your photo," Miriam said to him.
They were almost alone on the platform, except for a young Chinese couple (kids, Juan Diego thought) holding hands. The young man had been watching Dorothy, who'd grabbed Juan Diego's cell phone out of her mother's hands.
"Here, let me do it," Dorothy had said to her mom. "You take terrible pictures."