"In all likelihood, not a shaving injury," she said. He watched her walk from the bed to the closet, peering inside; then she opened and closed the drawers where there might have been forgotten clothes. "I always sweep a hotel room before I go--every hotel room," she told him.
He couldn't stop her from having a look in the bathroom, too. Juan Diego knew he'd not left any of his toilet articles there--certainly not his Viagra, or the Lopressor pills, which he'd transferred to his carry-on. As for the first condom, he remembered only now that he'd left it in the bathtub, where it would have been lying forlornly against the drain--as if signifying an act of pitiful lewdness.
"Hello, little condom," he heard Miriam say, from the bathroom; Juan Diego was still sitting at the foot of the bloodstained bed. "I guess it doesn't matter what the maids will think," Miriam repeated, when she returned to the bedroom, "but don't most people flush those things down the toilet?"
"Si," was all Juan Diego could say. Not much inclined to male fantasies, Juan Diego certainly wouldn't have had this one.
I must have taken two Lopressor pills, he thought; he was feeling more diminished than usual. Maybe I can sleep on the plane, he thought; he knew it was too soon to speculate what might happen to his dreams. Juan Diego was so tired that he hoped his dream life might be momentarily curtailed by the beta-blockers.
"DID MY MOTHER HIT you?" Dorothy asked him when Juan Diego and Miriam got to the younger woman's hotel room.
"I did not, Dorothy," her mother said. Miriam had already begun her sweep of her daughter's room. Dorothy was half dressed--a skirt, but only a bra, no blouse or sweater. Her open suitcase was on her bed. (The bag was big enough to hold a large dog.)
"A bathroom accident," was all Juan Diego said, pointing to the toilet paper stuck to his forehead.
"I think it's stopped bleeding," Dorothy told him. She stood in her bra in front of him, picking at the toilet paper; when Dorothy plucked the paper off his forehead, the little cut began to bleed again--but not so much that she couldn't stop the bleeding by wetting one index finger and pressing it above his eyebrow. "Just hold still," the young woman said, while Juan Diego tried not to look at her fetching bra.
"For Christ's sake, Dorothy--just get dressed," her mother told her.
"And where are we going--I mean all of us?" the young woman asked her mom, not so innocently.
"First get dressed, then I'll tell you," Miriam said. "Oh, I almost forgot," she said suddenly to Juan Diego. "I have your itinerary--you should have it back." Juan Diego remembered that Miriam had taken his itinerary from him when they were still at JFK; he'd not noticed that she hadn't returned it. Now Miriam handed it to him. "I made some notes on it--about where you should stay in Manila. Not this time--you're not staying there long enough this first time for it to matter where you stay. But, trust me, you won't like where you're staying. When you come back to Manila--I mean the second time, when you're there a little longer--I made some suggestions regarding where you should stay. And I made a copy of your itinerary for us," Miriam told him, "so we can check on you."
"For us?" Dorothy repeated suspiciously. "Or for you, do you mean?"
"For us--I said 'we,' Dorothy," Miriam told her daughter.
"I'm going to see you again, I hope," Juan Diego said suddenly. "Both of you," he added--awkwardly, because he'd been looking only at Dorothy. The girl had put on a blouse, which she hadn't begun to button; she was looking at her navel, then picking at it.
"Oh, you'll see us again--definitely," Miriam was saying to him, as she walked into the bathroom, continuing her sweep.
"Yeah, definitely," Dorothy said, still attending to her belly button--she was still unbuttoned.
"Button it, Dorothy--the blouse has buttons, for Christ's sake!" her mother was shouting from the bathroom.
"I haven't left anything behind, Mother," Dorothy called into the bathroom. The young woman had already buttoned herself up when she quickly kissed Juan Diego on his mouth. He saw she had a small envelope in her hand; it looked like the hotel stationery--it was that kind of envelope. Dorothy slipped the envelope into his jacket pocket. "Don't read it now--read it later. It's a love letter!" the girl whispered; her tongue darted between his lips.
"I'm surprised at you, Dorothy," Miriam was saying, as she came back into the bedroom. "Juan Diego made more of a mess of his bathroom than you did of yours."
"I live to surprise you, Mother," the girl said.
Juan Diego smiled uncertainly at the two of them. He'd always imagined that his trip to the Philippines was a kind of sentimental journey--in the sense that it wasn't a trip he was taking for himself. In truth, he'd long thought of it as a trip he was taking for someone else--a dead friend who'd wanted to make this journey but had died before he was able to go.
Yet the journey Juan Diego found himself taking was one that seemed inseparable from Miriam and Dorothy, and what was that trip but one he was taking solely for himself?
"And you--you two--are going exactly where?" Juan Diego ventured to ask this mother and her daughter, who were veteran world travelers (clearly).
"Oh, boy--have we got shit to do!" Dorothy said darkly.
"Obligations, Dorothy--your generation overuses the shit word," Miriam told her.
"We'll see you sooner than you think," Dorothy told Juan Diego. "We end up in Manila, but not today," the young woman said enigmatically.
"We'll see you in Manila eventually," Miriam explained to him a little impatiently. She added: "If not sooner."
"If not sooner," Dorothy repeated. "Yeah, yeah!"
The young woman abruptly lifted her suitcase off the bed before Juan Diego could help her; it was such a big, heavy-looking bag, but Dorothy lifted it as if it weighed nothing at all. It gave Juan Diego a pang to remember how the young woman had lifted him--his head and shoulders, entirely off the bed--before she'd rolled him over on top of her.