Avenue of Mysteries - Page 122

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 Senor 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. Rosem

ary 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.

Tags: John Irving Fiction
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