Avenue of Mysteries (58 page)

Señor Eduardo was relieved to hear that the Bonshaw family had not escaped scrutiny in Coralville—you can’t get away with shooting your dog in the driveway. “Of course,” Mrs. Dodge went on, “I was still a young girl when I heard the story, and it wasn’t about you
or
your scar,” she told Señor Eduardo. “The story was about
Beatrice.
”

“That’s entirely as it should be—she was the one who got shot. The story
is
about Beatrice,” Edward Bonshaw declared.

“Not to me—not to anyone who loves you, Eduardo,” Flor said to him.

“You were flirting with that farmer in the pink cowboy hat!” Señor Eduardo had exclaimed.

“I wasn’t flirting,” Flor had insisted. Later, Juan Diego would think that these accusations concerning Flor’s flirtation with the young Mennonite cowboy in the clinic came the closest to recriminations that Edward Bonshaw would ever make about Flor’s return trips to Oaxaca—and what one could only imagine were the nature of Flor’s
flirtations
there.

Of course, and not only because she was pretty, this was when Juan Diego made friends with Rosemary Stein. She was Señor Eduardo’s doctor, and Flor’s doctor. Why wouldn’t Dr. Rosemary become Juan Diego’s doctor, too?

Flor told Juan Diego that he should ask Dr. Rosemary to marry him, but Juan Diego would ask her to be his doctor first. It would be embarrassing to Juan Diego to remember, later, that his first visit to Dr. Stein’s office as a patient was driven by his imagination. He wasn’t sick; there was nothing the matter with him. But Juan Diego’s exposure to seeing those AIDS-associated, opportunistic illnesses had convinced him that he should be tested for HIV.

Dr. Stein assured him that he’d done nothing to contract the virus. Juan Diego had some difficulty remembering when he’d last had sex—he couldn’t even be sure about the
year
—but he knew it was with a woman and he’d used a condom.

“And you’re not an intravenous drug user?” Dr. Rosemary had asked him.

“No—never!”

Yet he’d imagined the white plaques of
Candida
encroaching on his teeth. (Juan Diego admitted to Rosemary that he’d woken up at night and peered into his mouth and looked down his throat with a handheld mirror and a flashlight.) In the Virology Clinic, Juan Diego had heard about those patients with cryptococcal meningitis. Dr. Abraham told him the meningitis was diagnosed by a lumbar puncture—it presented with fever and headache and confusion.

Juan Diego dreamed of these things incessantly; he woke up at night with the fully imagined symptoms. “Let Mrs. Dodge take Flor and Edward to the clinic. That’s why I found her for you—let Mrs. Dodge do it,” Dr. Stein said to Juan Diego. “You’re the one with an imagination—you’re a
writer,
aren’t you?” Dr. Rosemary had asked him. “Your imagination isn’t a water faucet; you can’t turn it off at the end of the day, when you stop writing. Your imagination just keeps going, doesn’t it?” Rosemary asked.

He should have asked her to marry him
then,
before someone else asked her. But by the time Juan Diego finally knew he should ask Rosemary to marry him, she’d already said yes to someone else.

If Flor had been alive, Juan Diego could hear what she would have told him. “Shit, you’re slow—I always forget how slow you are,” Flor would have said. (It would have been just like Flor to mention his dog-paddling.)

In the end, Dr. Abraham and Dr. Jack would experiment with sublingual morphine versus morphine elixir—Edward Bonshaw and Flor were
willing guinea pigs. But, by then, Juan Diego was letting Mrs. Dodge do everything; he’d listened to Dr. Rosemary and yielded the nursing to the nurse.

It would soon be 1991; both Juan Diego and Rosemary would be thirty-five when Flor and Señor Eduardo died—Flor first, Edward Bonshaw following her in just a few days.

That area of Melrose Avenue would keep changing; those over-the-top, extravagant Victorian houses with the grand front porches had already begun to disappear. Like Flor, Juan Diego had once loved the view of the Gothic tower from the front porch of that wooden house on Melrose, but what was there to love about that old tower after you’d seen the Virology Clinic on the first floor of the Boyd Tower building—after you’d seen what was going on below that tower?

L
ONG BEFORE THE
AIDS epidemic, when Juan Diego was in his high school years, he was starting to feel slightly less enthusiasm for his Melrose Avenue neighborhood in Iowa City. For a limper, for example, West High was a long walk west on Melrose; it was more than a mile and a half. And just past the golf course, near the intersection with Mormon Trek Boulevard, there was a bad dog. There were also bullies at the high school. They weren’t the sort of bullies Flor had told him to expect. Juan Diego was a black-haired, brown-skinned, Mexican-looking boy; yet racist types weren’t very prevalent in Iowa City—they
were
represented (in small numbers, in a few incidences) at West High, but they weren’t the worst of the bullies Juan Diego would be exposed to there.

Mostly, the juvenile slings and arrows aimed at Juan Diego were about Flor and Señor Eduardo—his not-a-real-woman mother and his “fag” father. “A couple of queer lovebirds,” one kid at West High had called Juan Diego’s adoptive parents. The boy baiting him was blond, with a pink face; Juan Diego didn’t know the kid’s name.

So the lion’s share of the bigotry Juan Diego would be exposed to was sexual, not racial, but he didn’t dare tell Flor or Edward Bonshaw about it. When the lovebirds could discern that Juan Diego was troubled, when Flor and Señor Eduardo would ask what was bothering him, Juan Diego didn’t want them to know that
they
were the problem. It was easier to say he’d had some anti-Mexican stuff to deal with—one of those south-of-the-border insinuations, or an outright slur of the kind Flor had warned him about.

As for the long limp to and from West High—all along Melrose—Juan Diego didn’t complain. It would have been worse to have Flor drive him; her dropping him off and picking him up would have inspired more sexual bullying. Besides, Juan Diego was already a grind in his high school years; he was one of those nonstop students with downcast eyes—a silent male who stoically endured high school, but who had every intention of thriving in his university years, which he did. (When a dump reader’s only job is going to school, he can be reasonably happy, not to mention successful.)

And Juan Diego didn’t drive—he never would. His right foot was at an awkward angle for stepping on the gas or the brake. Juan Diego would get his driving permit, but the first time he tried driving, with Flor beside him in the passenger seat—Flor was the only licensed driver in the family; Edward Bonshaw refused to drive—Juan Diego had managed to step on both the brake and the accelerator at the same time. (This was natural to do if your right foot was pointed toward two o’clock.)

“That’s it—we’re done,” Flor had told him. “Now there are two nondrivers in our family.”

And, of course, there’d been a kid or two at West High who thought it was intolerable that Juan Diego didn’t have a driver’s license; the not-driving part was more isolating than the limp or the Mexican-looking factor. His not being a driver marked Juan Diego as queer
—queer
in the same way that some of the kids at West High had identified Juan Diego’s adoptive parents.

“Does your mom, or whatever she calls herself, shave? I mean her face—her fucking upper lip,” the blond, pink-faced kid had said to Juan Diego.

Flor had the softest-looking trace of a mustache—not that this was the most masculine-looking thing about Flor, but it was apparent. In high school, most teenagers don’t want to stand out; they don’t want their parents to stand out, either. But, to his credit, Juan Diego was never embarrassed by Señor Eduardo and Flor. “It’s the best the hormones can do. You may have noticed that her breasts are pretty small. That’s the hormones, too—there’s a limit to what the estrogens can accomplish. That’s what I know,” Juan Diego told the blond boy.

The pink-faced kid wasn’t expecting the frankness of Juan Diego’s reply. It seemed that Juan Diego had won the moment, but bullies don’t take losing well.

The blond boy wasn’t done. “Here’s what I know,” he said. “Your
so-called mom and dad are
guys.
One of them, the big one, dresses as a woman, but they both have dicks—that’s what I know.”

“They adopted me—they love me,” Juan Diego told the kid, because Señor Eduardo had told him he should always tell the truth. “And I love them—that’s what I know,” Juan Diego added.

You don’t ever exactly win these bullying episodes in high school, but if you survive them, you can win in the end—that was what Flor had always told Juan Diego, who would regret that he’d not been entirely honest with Flor or Señor Eduardo about
how
he’d been bullied, or
why.

“She shaves her face—she doesn’t do such a good job on her fucking upper lip—whoever or
whatever
she is,” the pink-faced prick of a blond boy said to Juan Diego.

“She
doesn’t
shave,” Juan Diego said to him. He traced his finger over the contours of his own upper lip the way he’d seen Lupe do it when she’d been bugging Rivera. “The hint of a mustache is just always there. It’s the best the estrogens can accomplish—like I told you.”

Years later—when Flor got sick and she had to stop the estrogens, and her beard came back—when Juan Diego was shaving Flor’s face for her, he thought of that blond bully with the pink face. Maybe I’ll see him again one day, Juan Diego had thought to himself.

“See
who
again?” Flor had asked him. Flor was no mind reader; Juan Diego realized that he must have spoken his thoughts out loud.

“Oh, no one you know—I don’t even know his name. Just a kid I remember from high school,” Juan Diego had told her.

“There’s no one I ever want to see again—definitely not from high school,” Flor said to him. (Definitely not from
Houston,
either, Juan Diego would remember thinking as he shaved her, being careful not to say
that
thought out loud.)

When Flor and Señor Eduardo died, Juan Diego was teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—in the MFA program, where he’d once been a student. After he left his second-floor bedroom in the Melrose Avenue duplex apartment, Juan Diego didn’t live on that side of the Iowa River again.

He’d had a number of boring apartments on his own, near the main campus and the Old Capitol—always close to downtown Iowa City, because he wasn’t a driver. He was a walker—well, better said, a
limper.
His friends—his colleagues and his students—all recognized that limp; they had no trouble spotting Juan Diego from a distance, or from a passing car.

Like most nondrivers, Juan Diego didn’t know the exact whereabouts
of those places he’d been driven; if he hadn’t
limped
there, if he’d been only a passenger in someone else’s car, Juan Diego never could have told you where the place was, or how to get there.

Such was the case with the Bonshaw family plot, where Flor and Señor Eduardo would be buried—together, as they’d requested,
and with
Beatrice’s ashes, which Edward Bonshaw’s mother had kept for him. (Señor Eduardo had saved his dear dog’s ashes in a safe-deposit box in a bank in Iowa City.)

Mrs. Dodge, with her Coralville connections, had known exactly where the Bonshaw burial plot was—the cemetery wasn’t in Coralville, but it was “somewhere else on the outskirts of Iowa City.” (This was the way Edward Bonshaw himself had described it; Señor Eduardo wasn’t a driver, either.)

If it hadn’t been for Mrs. Dodge, Juan Diego wouldn’t have discovered where his beloved adoptive parents wanted to be buried. And after Mrs. Dodge died, it was always Dr. Rosemary who drove Juan Diego to the mystery cemetery. As they’d wished, Edward Bonshaw and Flor had shared one headstone, inscribed with the last speech in Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet,
which Señor Eduardo had loved. Tragedies affecting young people were those that had moved the Iowan the most. (Flor would profess to having been less affected. Yet Flor had yielded to her dear Eduardo on the matter of their common-law name and the gravestone’s inscription.)

FLOR & EDWARD

BONSHAW

“A GLOOMING PEACE THIS

MORNING WITH IT BRINGS.”

ACT 5, SCENE 3

That was the way the headstone was marked. Juan Diego would question Señor Eduardo’s request. “Don’t you want, at least, to say ‘Shakespeare,’ if not
which
Shakespeare?” the dump reader had asked the Iowan.

“I don’t think it’s necessary. Those who know Shakespeare will know; those who don’t—well, they won’t,” Edward Bonshaw mused, as the Hickman catheter rose and fell on his bare chest. “And no one has to know that Beatrice’s ashes are buried with us, do they?”

Well, Juan Diego would know, wouldn’t he? As would Dr. Rosemary,
who also knew where her writer friend’s standoffishness—concerning the commitment required in permanent relationships—came from. In Juan Diego’s writing, which Rosemary also knew, where everything
came from
truly mattered.

It’s true that Dr. Rosemary Stein didn’t really know the boy from Guerrero—not the dump-kid part, not the dump-reader tenacity inside him. But she had seen Juan Diego be tenacious; the first time, it had surprised her—he was such a small man, so slightly built, and there was his identifying limp.

They were having dinner in that restaurant they went to all the time; it was near the corner of Clinton and Burlington. Just Rosemary and her husband, Pete—who was also a doctor—and Juan Diego was with one of his writer colleagues. Was it Roy? Rosemary couldn’t remember. Maybe it was Ralph, not Roy. One of the visiting writers who drank a lot; he either said nothing or he never shut up. One of those passing-through writers-in-residence; Rosemary believed they were the most badly behaved.

It was 2000—no, it was 200
1,
because Rosemary had just said, “I can’t believe it’s been ten years, but they’ve been gone ten years. My God—that’s how long they’ve been gone.” (Dr. Rosemary had been talking about Flor and Edward Bonshaw.) Rosemary was a little drunk, Juan Diego thought, but that was okay—she wasn’t on call, and Pete was always the driver when they went anywhere together.