Avenue of Mysteries (16 page)

When Miriam knocked on his door, and he let her in, he was ready to go—except for putting the custom-made shoe on his crippled foot. That was always a little tricky; it could also be time-consuming.

“Here,” Miriam said, pushing him to the bed, “let me help you.” He sat at the foot of the bed while she put the special shoe on him; to his surprise, she seemed to know how to do it. In fact, she did it so expertly, and in such an offhand manner, that she was able to take a long look at the bloodstained bed while she secured the shoe on Juan Diego’s bad foot.

“Not a case of lost virginity, or a murder,” Miriam said, with a nod to all the blood and water on the horrifying bedsheets. “I guess it doesn’t matter what the maids will think.”

“I cut myself,” Juan Diego said. No doubt Miriam had noticed the blood-soaked toilet paper stuck to Juan Diego’s forehead, above his eyebrow.

“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?”

“Sí,” 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.

“D
ID 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.

What a strong girl! was all Juan Diego thought about it. He turned to reach for his suitcase,
not
his carry-on, and was surprised to see that Miriam had taken it—together with her own big bag. What a strong
mother
! Juan Diego was thinking. He limped out into the hallway of the hotel, hurrying to keep up with the two women; he almost didn’t notice that he scarcely limped at all.

T
HIS WAS PECULIAR
:
IN
the middle of a conversation he couldn’t remember, Juan Diego became separated from Miriam and Dorothy as they were going through the security check at Hong Kong International. He stepped toward the metal-detection device, looking back at Miriam, who was removing her shoes; he saw that her toenails were painted the same color as Dorothy’s. Then he passed through the metal-screening machine, and when he looked for the women again, both Miriam and Dorothy were gone; they had simply (or not so simply) disappeared.

Juan Diego asked one of the security guards about the two women he’d been traveling with. Where had they gone? But the security guard was an impatient young fellow, and he was distracted by an apparent problem with the metal-detection device.

“
What
women?
Which
women? I’ve seen an entire civilization of women—they must have moved on!” the guard told him.

Juan Diego thought he would try to text or call the women on his cell phone, but he’d forgotten to get their cell-phone numbers. He scrolled through his contacts, looking in vain for their nonexistent names. Nor had Miriam written her cell-phone number, or Dorothy’s, among the notes she’d made on his itinerary. Juan Diego saw just the names and addresses of alternative Manila hotels.

What a big deal Miriam had made about “the second time” he would be in Manila, Juan Diego was thinking, but he stopped thinking about it and made his slow way to the gate for his flight to the Philippines—his
first time
in Manila, he was thinking to himself (
if
he was thinking about it at all). He was preternaturally tired.

It must be the beta-blockers, Juan Diego was pondering. I guess I shouldn’t have taken two—if I did.

Even the green-tea muffin on the Cathay Pacific flight—it was a much smaller plane this time—was a little disappointing. It wasn’t such a heightened experience as eating that
first
green-tea muffin, when he and Miriam and Dorothy were arriving in Hong Kong.

Juan Diego was in the air when he remembered the love letter Dorothy had put in his jacket pocket. He took out the envelope and opened it.

“See you soon!” Dorothy had written on the Regal Airport Hotel stationery. She had pressed her lips—apparently, with fresh lipstick—to the page, leaving him the impression of her lips in intimate contact with the
soon
word. Her lipstick, he only now noticed, was the same color as her toenail polish—and her mother’s. Magenta, Juan Diego guessed he would call it.

He couldn’t miss seeing what was also in the envelope with the so-called love letter: the two empty foil wrappers, where the first and second condom had been. Maybe there
was
something wrong with the metal-screening machine at Hong Kong International, Juan Diego considered; the device hadn’t detected the foil condom wrappers. Definitely, Juan Diego was thinking, this wasn’t quite the
sentimental
journey he’d been expecting, but he was long on his way and there was no turning back now.

•
9
•

In Case You Were Wondering

Edward Bonshaw had an L-shaped scar on his forehead—from a childhood fall. He’d tripped over a sleeping dog when he was running with a mah-jongg tile clutched in his little hand. The tiny game block was made of ivory and bamboo; a corner of the pretty tile had been driven into Edward’s pale forehead above the bridge of his nose, where it made a perfect check mark between his blond eyebrows.

He’d sat up but had felt too dizzy to stand. Blood streamed down between his eyes and dripped from the end of his nose. The dog, now awake, had wagged her tail and licked the bleeding boy’s face.

Edward found the dog’s affectionate attention soothing. The boy was seven; his father had labeled him a “mama’s boy,” for no better reason than that Edward had expressed his dislike of hunting.

“Why shoot things that are alive?” he’d asked his father.

The dog didn’t like hunting, either. A Labrador retriever, she’d blundered into a neighbor’s swimming pool when she was still a puppy, and had almost drowned; thereafter, she was afraid of water—not normal for a Lab. Also “not normal,” in the unwavering opinion of Edward’s dictatorial father, was the dog’s disposition
not
to retrieve. (Neither a ball nor a stick—certainly not a dead bird.)

“What happened to the
retriever
part? Isn’t she supposed to be a Labrador
retriever
?” Edward’s cruel uncle Ian always said.

But Edward loved the nonretrieving, never-swimming Lab, and the sweet dog doted on the boy; they were both “cowardly,” in the harsh judgment of Edward’s father, Graham. To young Edward, his father’s brother—the bullying uncle Ian—was an unkind dolt.

This is all the background necessary to understand what happened next. Edward’s father and Uncle Ian were hunting pheasants; they returned
with a couple of the murdered birds, barging into the kitchen by the door to the garage.

This was the house in Coralville—at the time, a distant-seeming suburb of Iowa City—and Edward, bloody-faced, was sitting on the kitchen floor, where the nonretrieving, never-swimming Lab appeared to be eating the boy head-first. The men burst into the kitchen with Uncle Ian’s Chesapeake Bay retriever, a thoughtless male gundog of Ian’s own aggressive disposition and lack of discernible character.

“Fucking
Beatrice
!” Edward’s father shouted.

Graham Bonshaw had named the Lab
Beatrice,
the most derisively female name he could imagine; it was a name suitable for a dog that Uncle Ian said should be spayed—“so she won’t reproduce herself and further dilute a noble breed.”

The two hunters left Edward sitting on the kitchen floor while they took Beatrice outside and shot her in the driveway.

This was not quite the story you were expecting when Edward Bonshaw, in his later life, pointed to the L-shaped scar on his forehead and began, with disarming indifference, “In case you were wondering about my scar—” thereby leading you to the brutal killing of Beatrice, a dog young Edward had adored, a dog with the sweetest disposition imaginable.

And for all those years, Juan Diego remembered, Señor Eduardo had kept that pretty little mah-jongg tile—the block that had permanently checkmarked his fair forehead.

Was it the inconsequential cut from the towel rod on Juan Diego’s forehead, which had finally stopped bleeding, that triggered this nightmarish memory of Edward Bonshaw, who’d been so dearly beloved in Juan Diego’s life? Was it too short a flight, from Hong Kong to Manila, for Juan Diego to sleep soundly? It was not as short a flight as he’d imagined, but he was restless and half awake the entire two hours, and his dreams were disjointed; Juan Diego’s fitful sleep and the narrative disorder of his dreams were further evidence to him that he’d taken a double dose of beta-blockers.