Page 74 of Avenue of Mysteries


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"Lots of children, period, in this family," the OB-GYN observed. "We're not all like Auntie Carmen."

"I'm taking a medication--it plays games with how I sleep," Juan Diego told them. "I'm taking beta-blockers," he said to Dr. Quintana. "As you probably know," he said to the doctor, "beta-blockers can have a depressing effect, or a diminishing one, on your real life--whereas the effect they have on your dream life is a little unpredictable."

Juan Diego didn't tell the doctor that he'd been playing games with the dosage of his Lopressor prescription. Probably he came across as being completely candid--that is, as far as Dr. Quintana and Clark French could tell.

Juan Diego's room was delightful; the sea-view windows had screens, and there was a ceiling fan--no air-conditioning would be necessary. The big bathroom was charming, and it had an outdoor shower with a pagoda-shaped bamboo roof over it.

"Take your time to freshen up before dinner," Josefa said to Juan Diego. "The jet lag--you know, the time difference--could also be influencing how the beta-blockers affect you," she told him.

"After the bigger kids take the little kids to bed, the real dinner-table conversation can get started," Clark was saying, squeezing his former teacher's shoulder.

Was this a warning not to bring up adult subjects around the children and the teenagers? Juan Diego was wondering. Juan Diego realized that Clark French, despite his bluff heartiness, was still uptight--a fortysomething prude. Clark's fellow MFA students at Iowa, if they could meet him now, would still be teasing him.

Abortion, Juan Diego knew, was illegal in the Philippines; he was curious to know what Dr. Quintana, the OB-GYN, thought about that. (And did she and her husband--Clark, the oh-so-good Catholic--feel the same about that?) Surely that was a dinner-table conversation he and Clark couldn't (or shouldn't) have before the children and the teenagers had trotted off to bed. Juan Diego hoped he might have this conversation with Dr. Quintana after Clark had trotted off to bed.

Juan Diego became so agitated thinking about this that he almost forgot about Miriam. Of course he hadn't entirely forgotten about her--not for a minute. He resisted taking an outdoor shower, not only because it was dark outside (there would be insects galore in the outdoor shower after nightfall) but because he might not hear the phone. He couldn't call Miriam--he didn't even know her last name!--nor could he call the front desk and ask to be connected to the "uninvited" woman. But if Miriam was the mystery woman, wouldn't she call him?

He elected to take a bath--no insects, and he could keep the door to the bedroom open; if she called, he could hear the phone. Naturally, he rushed his bath and there was no call. Juan Diego tried to remain calm; he plotted his next move with his medications. Not to confuse the issue, he returned the pill-cutting device to his toilet kit. The Viagra and the Lopressor prescriptions stood side by side on the counter, next to the bathroom sink.

No half-doses for me, Juan Diego decided. After dinner, he would take one whole Lopressor pill--the right amount, in other words--but not if he was with Miriam. Skipping a dose hadn't hurt him before, and a surge of adrenaline could be beneficial--even necessary--with Miriam.

The Viagra, he thought, presented him with a more complicated decision. For his rendezvous with Dorothy, Juan Diego had traded his usual half-dose for a whole one; for Miriam, he imagined, a half-dose wouldn't suffice. The complicated part was when to take it. The Viagra needed nearly an hour to work. And how long would one Viagra--a whole one, the full 100 milligrams--last?

And it was New Year's Eve! Juan Diego suddenly remembered. Certainly the teenagers would be up past midnight, if not the little children. Wouldn't most of the adults also stay up to herald the coming year?

Suppose Miriam invited him to her room? Should he bring the Viagra with him to dinner? (It was too soon to take one now.)

He dressed slowly, trying to imagine what Miriam would want him to wear. He'd written about more long-lasting, more complex, and more diverse relationships than he'd ever had. His readers--that is, the ones who'd never met him--might have imagined that he'd lived a sophisticated sexual life; in his novels, there were homosexual and bisexual experiences, and plenty of the plain-old heterosexual ones. Juan Diego made a political point of being sexually explicit in his writing; yet he'd never even lived with anyone, and the plain-old part of being a heterosexual was the kind of heterosexual he was.

Juan Diego suspected he was probably pretty boring as a lover. He would have been the first to admit that what passed for his sex life existed almost entirely in his imagination--like now, he thought ruefully. All he was doing was imagining Miriam; he didn't even know if she was the mystery guest who'd checked into the Encantador.

The conviction that he chiefly had an imaginary sex life depressed him, and he'd taken only half a Lopressor pill today; this time, he couldn't entirely blame the beta-blockers for making him feel diminished. Juan Diego decided to put one Viagra tablet in his right-front pants pocket. This way, he'd be prepared--Miriam or no Miriam.

He often put his hand in his right-front pocket; Juan Diego didn't need to see that pretty mah-jongg tile, but he liked the feel of it--so smooth. The game block had made a perfect check mark on Edward Bonshaw's pale forehead; Senor Eduardo had carried the tile with him as a keepsake. When the dear man was dying--when Senor Eduardo was not only no longer dressing himself, but wasn't wearing clothes with pockets--he'd given the mah-jongg tile to Juan Diego. The game block, once imbedded between Edward Bonshaw's blond eyebrows, would become Juan Diego's talisman.

The four-sided gray-blue Viagra tablet was not as smooth as the bam-boo-and-ivory mah-jongg tile; the game block was twice the size of the Viagra pill--his rescue pill, as Juan Diego thought of it. And if Miriam was the uninvited guest in the second-floor room near the Encantador library, the Viagra tablet in Juan Diego's right-front pants pocket was a second talisman he carried with him.

Naturally, the knock on his hotel-room door filled him with false expectations. It was only Clark, coming to take him to dinner. When Juan Diego was turning out the lights in his bathroom and bedroom, Clark advised him to turn on the ceiling fan and leave it on.

"See the gecko?" Clark said, pointing to the ceiling. A gecko, smaller than a pinky finger, was poised on the ceiling above the headboard of the bed. There wasn't much Juan Diego missed about Mexico--hence he'd never been back--but he did miss the geckos. The little one above the bed darted on its adhesive toes across the ceiling at the exact instant Juan Diego turned on the fan.

"Once the fan has been on awhile, the geckos will settle down," Clark said. "You don't want them racing around when you're trying to go to sleep."

Juan Diego was disappointed in himself for not seeing the geckos until Clark pointed one out; as he was closing his hotel-room door, he spotted a second gecko scurrying over the bathroom wall--it was lightning-fast and quickly disappeared behind the bathroom mirror.

"I miss the geckos," Juan Diego admitted to Clark. Outside, on the balcony, they could hear music coming from a noisy club for locals on the beach.

"Why don't you go back to Mexico--I mean, just to visit?" Clark asked him.

It was always like this with Clark, Juan Diego remembered. Clark wanted Juan Diego's "issues" with childhood and early adolescence to be over; Clark wanted all grievances to end in an uplifting manner, as in Clark's novels. Everyone should be saved, Clark believed; everything could be forgiven, he imagined. Clark made goodness seem tedious.

But what hadn't Juan Diego and Clark French fought about?

&nbs

p; There'd been no end to their to and fro about the late Pope John Paul II, who'd died in 2005. He'd been a young cardinal from Poland when he was elected pope, and he became a very popular pope, but John Paul's efforts to "restore normality" in Poland--this meant making abortion illegal again--drove Juan Diego crazy.

Clark French had expressed his fondness for the Polish pope's "culture of life" idea--John Paul II's name for his stance against abortion and contraception, which amounted to protecting "defenseless" fetuses from the "culture of death" idea.

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