John Irving: Avenue of Mysteries

“More like one of us,” Juan Diego could imagine his sister saying. (More indigenous-looking, Lupe would have thought.)

It unnerved Juan Diego that he suddenly imagined what tarted-up replications the virgin shop in Oaxaca might have made of this mother and her daughter. That Christmas-parties place would have exaggerated the slightly slipshod way the daughter dressed, but was it her clothes that looked a little slovenly or the careless way she wore them?

Juan Diego thought the virgin shop would have given the daughter’s life-size mannequin a sluttish posture — a come-on appearance, as if the fullness of her hips couldn’t possibly be contained. (Or was this Juan Diego’s fantasizing about the daughter?)

That virgin shop, which the dump kids occasionally called The Girl, would have failed to come up with a mannequin to match the mother of this twosome. The mother had an air of sophistication and entitlement about her, and her beauty was the classical kind; the mother radiated expensiveness and superiority — her sense of privilege seemed inborn. If this mother, who was only momentarily delayed in a first-class lounge at JFK, had been the Virgin Mary, no one would have sent her to the manger; someone would have made room for her at the inn. That vulgar virgin shop on Independencia couldn’t conceivably have replicated her; this mother was immune to being stereotyped — not even The Girl could have fabricated a sex-doll match for her. The mother was more “one of a kind” than she was “one of us.” There was no place for the mother in the Christmas-parties store, Juan Diego decided; she would never be for sale. And you wouldn’t want to bring her home — at least not to entertain your guests or amuse the children. No, Juan Diego thought — you would want to keep her, all for yourself.

Somehow, without his saying to this mother and her daughter a word about his feelings for them, the two women seemed to know everything about Juan Diego. And this mother and daughter, despite their apparent differences, worked together; they were a team. They quickly inserted themselves into what they believed was the utter helplessness of Juan Diego’s situation, if not his very existence. Juan Diego was tired; without hesitation, he blamed the beta-blockers. He didn’t put up much of a fight. Basically, he let these women take charge of him. Besides, this had happened after they’d been waiting for twenty-four hours in the first-class lounge of British Airways.

Juan Diego’s well-meaning colleagues, all close friends, had scheduled a two-day layover for him in Hong Kong; now it appeared that he would have only one night in Hong Kong before he had to catch an early-morning connection to Manila.

“Where are you staying in Hong Kong?” the mother, whose name was Miriam, asked him. She didn’t beat around the bush; in keeping with her penetrating stare, she was very direct.

“Where were you staying?” the daughter, whose name was Dorothy, said. You could see little of her mother in her, Juan Diego had noticed; Dorothy was as aggressive as Miriam, but not nearly as beautiful.

What was it about Juan Diego that made more aggressive people feel they had to manage his business for him? Clark French, the former student, had inserted himself into Juan Diego’s trip to the Philippines. Now two women — two strangers — were taking charge of the writer’s arrangements in Hong Kong.

Juan Diego must have looked to this mother and her daughter like a novice traveler, because he had to consult his written itinerary to learn the name of his Hong Kong hotel. While he was still fumbling in the pocket of his jacket for his reading glasses, the mother snatched the itinerary out of his hands. “Dear God — you don’t want to be at the InterContinental Grand Stanford Hong Kong,” Miriam told him. “It’s an hour’s drive from the airport.”

“It’s actually in Kowloon,” Dorothy said.

“There’s an adequate hotel at the airport,” Miriam said. “You should stay there.”

“We always stay there,” Dorothy said, sighing.

Juan Diego started to say that he would need to cancel one reservation and make another — that was as far as he got.

“Done,” the daughter said; her fingers were flying over the keyboard of her laptop. It was a marvel to Juan Diego how young people always seemed to be using their laptops, which were never plugged in. Why don’t their batteries run down? he was thinking. (And when they weren’t glued to their laptops, they were madly texting on their cell phones, which never seemed to need recharging!)

“I thought it was a long way to bring my laptop,” Juan Diego said to the mother, who looked at him in a mostly pitying way. “I left mine at home,” he said sheepishly to the hardworking daughter, who’d not once looked up from her constantly changing computer screen.

“I’m canceling your harbor-view room — two nights at the InterContinental Grand Stanford, gone. I don’t like that place, anyway,” Dorothy said. “And I’m getting you a king suite at the Regal Airport Hotel at Hong Kong International. It’s not as totally tasteless as its name — all the Christmas shit notwithstanding.”

“ One night, Dorothy,” her mother reminded the young woman.

“Got it,” Dorothy said. “There’s one thing about the Regal: the way you turn the lights on and off is weird,” she told Juan Diego.

“We’ll show him, Dorothy,” the mother said. “I’ve read everything of yours — every word you’ve written,” Miriam told him, putting her hand on his wrist.

“I’ve read almost everything,” Dorothy said.

“There’s two you haven’t read, Dorothy,” her mom said.

“ Two —big deal,” Dorothy said. “That’s almost everything, isn’t it?” the girl asked Juan Diego.

Of course he said, “Yes — almost.” He couldn’t tell if the young woman was flirting with him, or if her mother was; maybe neither of them was. The not-knowing part aged Juan Diego prematurely, too, but — to be fair — he’d been out of circulation for a while. It had been a long time since he’d dated anyone, not that he’d ever dated a lot, which two such worldly-looking travelers as this mother and daughter would have sized up about him.

Meeting him, did women think he looked wounded? Was he one of those men who’d lost the love of his life? What was it about Juan Diego that made women think he would never get over someone?

“I really like the sex in your novels,” Dorothy told him. “I like how you do it.”

“I like it better, ” Miriam said to him, giving her daughter an all-knowing look. “I have the perspective to know what really bad sex is,” Dorothy’s mom told her.

“Please, Mother — don’t paint us a picture,” Dorothy said.

Miriam wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, Juan Diego had noticed. She was a tall, trim woman, tense and impatient-looking, in a pearl-gray pantsuit, which she wore over a silvery T-shirt. Her beige-blond hair was certainly not its natural color, and she’d probably had a little work done on her face — either shortly after a divorce, or a somewhat longer time after she’d become a widow. (Juan Diego didn’t intimately know about such things; he’d had no experience with women like Miriam, with the exception of his women readers or characters in novels.)

Dorothy, the daughter, who’d said she first read one of Juan Diego’s novels when it had been “assigned” to her — in college — looked as if she could still be of university age, or only a little older.

These women weren’t on their way to Manila—“not yet,” they’d told him — but Juan Diego didn’t remember where they were going after Hong Kong, if they’d said. Miriam hadn’t told him her full name, but her accent was European-sounding — the foreign part was what registered with Juan Diego. He wasn’t an expert on accents, of course — Miriam might have been an American.