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"You must have driven the mystery lady from the airport," Juan Diego said to him, waving the wine away, but the boy seemed not to understand. Josefa spoke to him in Tagalog; even then, the boy driver looked confused. He gave Dr. Quintana what sounded like an overlong answer.
"He says he didn't drive her--he says she just appeared in the driveway. No one saw her car or driver," Josefa said.
"The plot thickens!" Clark French declared. "No wine for him--he drinks only beer," Clark was telling the boy driver, who was a lot less confident as a waiter than he'd been behind the wheel.
"Yes, sir," the boy said.
"You shouldn't have provided your former teacher with all that beer," Auntie Carmen said suddenly to Clark. "Were you drunk?" Auntie Carmen asked Juan Diego. "Whatever possessed you to turn off the air-conditioning? No one turns off the air-conditioning in Manila!"
"That's enough, Carmen," Dr. Quintana told her aunt. "Your precious aquarium is not dinner-table conversation. You say 'no sex,' I say 'no fish.' Got it?"
"It was my fault, Auntie," Clark started in. "The aquarium was my idea--"
"I was freezing cold," Juan Diego explained to the eel woman. "I hate air-conditioning," he told everyone. "I probably did have too much beer--"
"Don't apologize," Josefa said to him. "They were just fish."
"Just fish!" Auntie Carmen cried.
Dr. Quintana leaned across the table, touching Auntie Carmen's leathery hand. "Do you want to hear how many vaginas I've seen in the last week--in the last month?" she asked her aunt.
"Josefa!" Clark cried.
"No fish, no sex," Dr. Quintana told the eel woman. "You want to talk about fish, Carmen? Just watch out."
"I hope Morales is okay," Juan Diego said to Aun
tie Carmen, in an effort to be pacifying.
"Morales is different--the experience changed him," Auntie Carmen said haughtily.
"No eels, either, Carmen," Josefa said. "You just watch out."
Women doctors--how Juan Diego loved them! He'd adored Dr. Marisol Gomez; he was devoted to his dear friend Dr. Rosemary Stein. And here was the wonderful Dr. Josefa Quintana! Juan Diego was fond of Clark, but did Clark deserve a wife like this?
She "just appears," the little girl with pigtails had said about the mystery lady. And hadn't the boy driver confirmed that the lady just appeared?
Yet the aquarium conversation had been intense; no one, not even Juan Diego, was thinking about the uninvited guest--not at that moment when the little gecko fell (or dropped) from the ceiling. The gecko landed in the untouched ceviche next to Juan Diego; it was as if the tiny creature knew this was an unguarded salad plate. The gecko appeared to drop into the conversation at the only empty seat.
The lizard was as slender as a ballpoint pen, and only half as long. Two women shrieked; one was a well-dressed woman seated directly opposite the mystery guest's unoccupied seat--she had her eyeglasses spattered with the citrus marinade. A wedge of mango slipped off the salad plate in the direction of the older man who'd been introduced to Juan Diego as a retired surgeon. (He and Juan Diego sat on either side of the empty seat.) The surgeon's wife, one of those readers of "a certain age," had shrieked more loudly than the well-dressed woman, who was now calm and wiping her eyeglasses.
"Damn those things," the well-dressed woman said.
"Just who invited you?" the retired surgeon asked the little gecko, who now crouched (unmoving) in the unfamiliar ceviche. Everyone but Auntie Carmen laughed; the anxious-looking little gecko was no laughing matter to her, apparently. The gecko looked ready to spring, but where?
Later everyone would say that the gecko had distracted all of them from the slender woman in the beige silk dress. She had just appeared, they would all think later; no one saw her approaching the table, though she was very watchable in that perfectly fitted, sleeveless dress. She seemed to glide unnoticed to the chair that was waiting for her--not even the gecko saw her coming, and geckos are acutely alert. (If you're a gecko and you want to stay alive, you'd better be alert.)
Juan Diego would remember seeing only the briefest flash of the woman's slim wrist; he never saw the salad fork in her hand, not until she'd stabbed the gecko through its twig-size spine--pinning it to a wedge of mango on her plate.
"Got you," Miriam said.
This time, only Auntie Carmen cried out--as if she'd been stabbed. You can always count on the children to see everything; maybe the kids had seen Miriam coming, and they'd had the good sense to watch her.
"I didn't think human beings could be as fast as geckos," Pedro would say to Juan Diego another day. (They were in the second-floor library, staring at the Saint Ignatius Loyola painting, waiting for the giant gecko to make an appearance, but that big gecko was never seen again.)
"Geckos are really, really fast--you can't catch one," Juan Diego would tell the little boy.
"But that lady--" Pedro started to say; he just stopped.
