John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

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.

That was when Juan Diego had heard a man say something at another table; it was not what the man said that was special — it was the way he said it. “That’s what I know,” the man had said. There was something memorable about the intonation. The man’s voice was both familiar and confrontational — he was sounding a little defensive, too. He sounded like a last-word kind of guy.

He was a blond, red-faced man who was having dinner with his family; it seemed he’d been having an argument with his daughter, a girl about sixteen or seventeen, Juan Diego would have guessed. There was a son, too — he was only a little older than the daughter. The son looked to be about eighteen, tops; the boy was still in high school — Juan Diego would have bet on it.

“It’s one of the O’Donnells,” Pete said. “They’re all a little loud.”

“It’s Hugh O’Donnell,” Rosemary said. “He’s on the zoning board. He always wants to know when we’re building another hospital, so he can be opposed to it.”

But Juan Diego was watching the daughter. He knew and understood the beleaguered look on the young girl’s face. She’d been trying to defend the sweater she was wearing. Juan Diego had heard her say to her father: “It’s not ‘slutty-looking’—it’s what kids wear today!”

This was what had prompted the dismissive “That’s what I know” from her red-faced father. The blond man hadn’t changed much since high school, when he’d said those hurtful things to Juan Diego. When was it — twenty-eight or twenty-nine, almost thirty, years ago?