John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

“Hugh, please —” Mrs. O’Donnell was saying.

“It’s not ‘slutty-looking,’ is it?” the girl asked her brother. She turned in her chair, trying to give the smirking boy a better look at her sweater. But the boy reminded Juan Diego of what Hugh O’Donnell used to look like — thinner, flaxen-blond with more pink in his face. (Hugh’s face was much redder now.) The boy’s smirk was the same as his dad’s; the girl knew better than to continue modeling her sweater for him — she turned away. Anyone could see that the smirking brother lacked the courage to take his sister’s side. The look he gave her was one Juan Diego had seen before — it was a no-sympathy look, as if the brother thought his sister would be slutty-looking in any sweater. In the boy’s condescending gaze, his sister looked like a slut, no matter what the poor girl wore.

“Please, both of you—” the wife and mother started to say, but Juan Diego got up from the table. Naturally, Hugh O’Donnell recognized the limp, though he’d not seen it — or Juan Diego — for almost thirty years.

“Hi — I’m Juan Diego Guerrero. I’m a writer — I went to school with your dad,” he said to the O’Donnell children.

“Hi—” the daughter started to say, but the son didn’t say anything, and when the girl glanced at her father, she stopped speaking.

Mrs. O’Donnell blurted out something, but she didn’t finish what she was going to say — she just stopped. “Oh, I know who you are. I’ve read—” was as far as she got. There must have been more than a little of that dump-reader tenacity in Juan Diego’s expression, enough to alert Mrs. O’Donnell to the fact that Juan Diego wasn’t interested in talking about his books — or to her. Not right now.

“I was your age,” Juan Diego said to Hugh O’Donnell’s son. “Maybe your dad and I were between your ages,” he said to the daughter. “He wasn’t very nice to me, either,” Juan Diego added to the girl, who seemed to be increasingly self-conscious — not necessarily about her much-maligned sweater.

“Hey, look here—” Hugh O’Donnell started to say, but Juan Diego just pointed to Hugh, not bothering to look at him.

“I’m not talking to you — I’ve heard what you have to say,” Juan Diego told him, looking only at the children. “I was adopted by two gay men,” Juan Diego continued — after all, he did know how to tell a story. “They were partners — they couldn’t be married, not here or in Mexico, where I came from. But they loved each other, and they loved me — they were my guardians, my adoptive parents. And I loved them, of course — the way kids are supposed to love their parents. You know how that is, don’t you?” Juan Diego asked Hugh O’Donnell’s kids, but the kids couldn’t answer him, and only the girl nodded her head — just a little. The boy was absolutely frozen.

“Anyway,” Juan Diego went on, “your dad was a bully. He said my mom shaved — he meant her face. He thought she did a poor job shaving her upper lip, but she didn’t shave. She was a man, of course — she dressed as a woman, and she took hormones. The hormones helped her to look a little more like a woman. Her breasts were kind of small, but she had breasts, and her beard had stopped growing, though she still had the faintest, softest-looking trace of a mustache on her upper lip. I told your dad it was the best the hormones could do — I said it was all the estrogens could accomplish — but your dad just kept being a bully.”

Hugh O’Donnell had stood up from the table, but he didn’t speak — he just stood there.

“You know what your dad said to me?” Juan Diego asked the O’Donnell kids. “He said: ‘Your so-called mom and dad are guys —they both have dicks.’ That’s what he said; I guess he’s just a ‘That’s what I know’ kind of guy. Isn’t that right, Hugh?” Juan Diego asked. It was the first time Juan Diego had looked at him. “Isn’t that what you said to me?”

Hugh O’Donnell went on standing there, not speaking. Juan Diego turned his attention back to the kids.

“They died of AIDS, ten years ago — they died here, in Iowa City,” Juan Diego told the children. “The one who wanted to be a woman — I had to shave her when she was dying, because she couldn’t take the estrogens and her beard grew back, and I could tell she was sad about how much she looked like a man. She died first. My ‘so-called dad’ died a few days later.”

Juan Diego paused. He knew, without looking at her, that Mrs. O’Donnell was crying; the daughter was crying, too. Juan Diego had always known that women were the real readers —women were the ones with the capacity to be affected by a story.

Looking at the implacable, red-faced father and his frozen, pink-faced son, Juan Diego would pause to wonder what did affect most men. What the fuck would ever affect most men? Juan Diego wondered.

“And that’s what I know,” Juan Diego told the O’Donnell kids. This time, they both nodded — albeit barely. When Juan Diego turned and limped his way back to his table, where he could see that Rosemary and Pete — and even that drunken writer — had been hanging on his every word, Juan Diego was aware that his limp was a little more pronounced than usual, as if he were consciously (or unconsciously) trying to draw more attention to it. It was almost as if Señor Eduardo and Flor were watching him — somehow, from somewhere — and they’d also been hanging on his every word.

In the car, with Pete behind the wheel, and the drunken writer in the passenger seat — because Roy or Ralph was a big guy, and a clumsy drunk, and they’d all agreed he needed the legroom — Juan Diego had sat in the backseat with Dr. Rosemary. Juan Diego had been prepared to limp home — he lived close enough to the corner of Clinton and Burlington to have walked — but Roy or Ralph needed a ride, and Rosemary had insisted that she and Pete drive Juan Diego where he was going.

“Well, that was a pretty good story — what I could understand of it,” the drunken writer said from the front seat.

“Yes, it was — very interesting, ” was all Pete said.

“I got a little confused during the AIDS part,” Ralph or Roy soldiered on. “There were two guys — I got that, all right. One of them was a cross-dresser. Now that I think of it, it was the shaving part that was confusing — I got the AIDS part, I think,” Roy or Ralph went on.

“They’re dead — it was ten years ago. That’s all that matters,” Juan Diego said from the backseat.

“No, that’s not all,” Rosemary said. (He’d been right, Juan Diego would remember thinking: Rosemary was a little drunk — maybe more than a little, he thought.) In the backseat, Dr. Rosemary suddenly seized Juan Diego’s face in both her hands. “If I’d heard you say what you said to that asshole Hugh O’Donnell — I mean before I agreed to marry Pete — I would have asked you to marry me, Juan Diego,” Rosemary said.

Pete drove down Dubuque Street for a while; no one spoke. Roy or Ralph lived somewhere east of Dubuque Street, maybe on Bloomington or on Davenport — he couldn’t remember. To be kind: Roy or Ralph was distracted; he was trying to locate Dr. Rosemary in the backseat — he was fumbling around with the rearview mirror. Finally, he found her.

“Wow — I didn’t see that coming,” Roy or Ralph said to her. “I mean your asking Juan Diego to marry you!”

“I did — I saw it coming,” Pete said.

But Juan Diego, who was struck silent in the backseat, was as taken aback as Roy or Ralph — or whoever that itinerant writer was. (Juan Diego hadn’t seen that coming, either.)