John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

Juan Diego remembered thinking that Clark’s advice to Leslie was most unlike Clark, who hated memoirs and autobiographical fiction. Clark despised what he called “writing as therapy”; he thought the memoir-novel “dumbed down fiction and traduced the imagination.” Yet Clark had encouraged poor Leslie to pour out her heart on the page! “Leslie has a good heart,” Clark had insisted, when he’d told Juan Diego about her. “Poor Leslie has just had some bad luck with men !”

“Poor Leslie,” Clark’s wife had repeated; there’d been a pause. Then Dr. Josefa Quintana said: “I think Leslie likes women, Clark.”

“I don’t think Leslie’s a lesbian, Josefa — I think she’s just confused, ” Clark French had said.

“Poor Leslie,” Josefa had repeated; it was the lack of conviction in the way she said it that Juan Diego would remember best.

“Is Leslie pretty?” Juan Diego had asked.

Clark’s expression was the model of indifference, as if he hadn’t noticed if Leslie were pretty or not.

“Yes,” was all Dr. Quintana said.

According to Dorothy, it was entirely Leslie’s idea that Dorothy come with her and the wild boys to El Nido.

“I’m not exactly nanny material,” Dorothy had written to Juan Diego. But Leslie was pretty, Juan Diego was thinking. And if Leslie liked women — whether or not Leslie was a lesbian, or just confused —Juan Diego didn’t doubt that Dorothy would have figured her out. Whatever Dorothy was, she wasn’t confused about it.

Naturally, Juan Diego didn’t tell Clark and Josefa that Dorothy had hooked up with poor Leslie — if, indeed, Dorothy had. (In her fax, Dorothy wasn’t exactly saying if she had.)

Given the disparaging way Clark had called Dorothy “D.”—not to mention with what disgust he’d referred to Dorothy as “the daughter,” or how turned off Clark had been by the whole mother-daughter business — well, why would Juan Diego have made Clark more miserable by suggesting that poor Leslie had hooked up with “D.”?

“What happened to those children wasn’t my fault,” Dorothy had written. As a writer, Juan Diego usually sensed when a storyteller was purposely changing the subject; he knew Dorothy hadn’t gone to El Nido out of her desire to be a nanny.

He also knew that Dorothy was very direct —when she wanted to be, she could be very specific. Yet the details of exactly what happened to Leslie’s little boys were vague — perhaps purposely so?

This was what Juan Diego was thinking when his flight from Bohol landed in Manila, jolting him awake.

He couldn’t understand, of course, why the young woman seated beside him — she was in the aisle seat — was holding his hand. “I’m so sorry,” she said to him earnestly. Juan Diego waited, smiling at her. He hoped she would explain what she meant, or at least let go of his hand. “Your mother—” the young woman started to say, but she stopped, covering her face with both hands. “The dead hippie, a dead dog — a puppy —and all the rest!” she suddenly blurted out. (In lieu of saying “the Virgin Mary’s nose,” the young woman seated beside him touched the nose on her own face.)

“I see,” was all Juan Diego said.

Was he losing his mind? Juan Diego wondered. Had he talked the whole way to the stranger next to him? Was he somehow destined to meet mind readers?

The young woman was now scrutinizing her cell phone, which reminded Juan Diego to turn on his cell phone and stare at it. The little phone rewarded him by vibrating in his hand. He liked the vibration mode best. He disliked all the “tones,” as they called them. Juan Diego saw he had a text message from Clark French — not a short one.

Novelists aren’t at their best in the truncated world of text messages, but Clark was a persevering type — he was dogged, especially when he was indignant about something. Text messages were not meant for moral indignation, Juan Diego thought. “My friend Leslie has been seduced by your friend D. — the daughter!” Clark’s message began; he’d heard from poor Leslie, alas.

Leslie’s little boys were nine and ten — or seven and eight. Juan Diego was trying to remember. (Their names were impossible for him to remember.)

The boys had German-sounding names, Juan Diego thought; he was right about that. The boys’ father, Leslie’s ex-husband, was German — an international hotelier. Juan Diego couldn’t remember (or no one had told him) the German hotel magnate’s name, but that was what Leslie’s ex did: he owned hotels, and he bought out blue-ribbon hotels that were in financial straits. And Manila was a base of the German hotelier’s Asian operations — or so Clark had implied. Leslie had lived everywhere, the Philippines included; her little boys had lived all over the world.

Juan Diego read Clark’s text message on the runway, following his flight from Bohol. A kind of Catholic umbrage — a feeling of pique — emanated from it, on Leslie’s behalf. After all, poor Leslie was a person of faith — a fellow Catholic — and Clark sensed that she’d been wronged, yet again.

Clark had texted the following message: “Watch out for the water buffalo at the airport — not as docile as it appears! Werner was trampled, but not seriously injured. Little Dieter says neither he nor Werner did anything to incite charge. (Poor Leslie says Werner and Dieter are ‘innocent of provoking buffalo.’) And then little Dieter was stung by swimming things — the resort called them ‘plankton.’ Your friend D. says stinging things were the size of human thumbnails — D., swimming with Dieter, says so-called plankton resembled ‘condoms for three-year-olds,’ hundreds of them! No allergic reaction to miniature stinging condoms yet. ‘Definitely not plankton,’ D. says.”

D. says, Juan Diego thought to himself; Clark’s account of the water buffalo and the stinging things differed only slightly from Dorothy’s. The image of those “condoms for three-year-olds” was consistent, but Dorothy — in her vague way — had implied the water buffalo was provoked. She didn’t say how.

There was no water buffalo to be wary of at the airport in Manila, where Juan Diego changed planes for his connecting flight to Palawan. The new plane was a twin-engine prop — cigar-shaped, with only one seat on either side of the aisle. (Juan Diego would be in no danger of telling a total stranger the story of the ashes he and Lupe didn’t scatter at the Guadalupe shrine in Mexico City.)

But before the propeller plane taxied away from their gate, Juan Diego felt his cell phone vibrate again. Clark’s text message seemed hastier or more hysterical than before: “Werner, still sore from buffalo trampling, stung by pink jellyfish swimming vertically (like sea horses). D. says they were ‘semi-transparent and the size of index fingers.’ Necessary for poor Leslie and her boys to evacuate the island posthaste, due to Werner’s immediate allergic reaction to see-through finger things — swelling of lips, tongue, his poor penis. You will be alone with D. She is staying behind to settle cancellations of room reservations — poor Leslie’s, not yours! Avoid swimming. See you in Manila, I hope. Watch yourself around D.”

The prop plane had begun to move; Juan Diego turned off his cell phone. Regarding the second stinging episode — the pink jellyfish swimming vertically — Dorothy had sounded more like herself. “Who needs this shit? Fuck the South China Sea!” Dorothy had faxed Juan Diego, who was trying to imagine being alone with Dorothy on an isolated island, where he wouldn’t dare to swim. Why would he want to risk the stinging condoms for three-year-olds or the pink, penis-swelling jellyfish? (Not to mention the monitor lizards the size of dogs! How had Leslie’s wild boys managed to escape an encounter with the giant lizards?)