John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

“Here we are — I think we’re here. I wish I knew where I fucking lived, ” Roy or Ralph was saying.

“I don’t really mean I would have married you,” Rosemary tried to say, revising herself — either for Pete’s benefit or for Juan Diego’s; perhaps she meant it for both of them. “I just meant I might have asked you,” she said. This seemed more reasonable.

Without looking at her, Juan Diego knew that Rosemary was crying — the way he’d known Hugh O’Donnell’s wife and daughter had been crying.

But so much had happened. All Juan Diego could say from the backseat was: “Women are the readers.” What he also knew, even then, would have been unsayable — namely, sometimes the story begins with the epilogue. But, really, how could he have said anything like that ? It needed a context.

Sometimes Juan Diego would feel he was still sitting with Rosemary Stein in the semidarkness of the car’s backseat, the two of them not looking at each other, and not talking. And wasn’t this what that line from Shakespeare meant, and why Edward Bonshaw had been so attached to it? “A glooming peace this morning with it brings”—well, yes, and why would such darkness ever depart? Who can happily think of what else happened to Juliet and her Romeo, and not dwell on what happened to them at the end of their story?

The dislocations of travel had been a familiar theme in Juan Diego’s early novels. Now the demons of dislocation were besetting him again; he was having trouble remembering how many days and nights he and Dorothy had stayed at El Nido.

He remembered the sex with Dorothy — not only her screaming orgasms, which were in what sounded like Nahuatl, but how she’d repeatedly called his penis “this guy,” as if Juan Diego’s penis were a nonspeaking but otherwise obtrusive presence at a noisy party. Dorothy was definitely noisy, a veritable earthquake in the world of orgasms; their near neighbors at the resort had phoned their room to inquire if everyone was all right. (But no one had used the asswheel word, or the more common asshole appellation.)

As Dorothy had told Juan Diego, the food at El Nido was good: rice noodles with shrimp sauce; spring rolls with pork or mushrooms or duck; serrano ham with pickled green mango; spicy sardines. There was also a condiment made from fermented fish, which Juan Diego had learned to be on the lookout for; he thought it gave him indigestion or heartburn. And there was flan for dessert — Juan Diego liked custard — but Dorothy told him to avoid anything with milk in it. She said she didn’t trust the milk on the “outer islands.”

Juan Diego didn’t know if only a little island constituted an outer island, or if all the islands in the Palawan group were (in Dorothy’s estimation) of the outer kind. When he asked her, Dorothy just shrugged. She had a killer shrug.

It was strange how being with Dorothy had made him forget Miriam, but he’d forgotten that being with Miriam (even wanting to be with Miriam) had once made him forget about being with Dorothy. Very strange: how he could, simultaneously, obsess about these women and forget about them.

The coffee at the resort was overstrong, or perhaps it seemed strong because Juan Diego was drinking it black. “Have the green tea,” Dorothy told him. But the green tea was very bitter; he tried putting a little honey in it. He saw that the honey was from Australia.

“Australia is nearby, isn’t it?” Juan Diego asked Dorothy. “I’m sure the honey is safe.”

“They dilute it with something — it’s too watery,” Dorothy said. “And where’s the water come from?” she asked him. (It was her outer-islands theme, again.) “Is it bottled water, or do they boil it? I say fuck the honey,” Dorothy told him.

“Okay,” Juan Diego said. Dorothy seemed to know a lot. Juan Diego was beginning to realize that, increasingly, when he was with Dorothy or her mother, he acquiesced.

He was allowing Dorothy to give him his pills; she’d simply taken over his prescriptions. Dorothy not only decided when he should take the Viagra — always a whole tablet, not a half — but she told him when to take the beta-blockers, and when not to take them.

At low tide, it was Dorothy who insisted they sit overlooking the lagoon; low tide was when the reef egrets came to search the mudflats. “What are the egrets looking for?” Juan Diego had asked her.

“It doesn’t matter — they’re awesome-looking birds, aren’t they?” was all Dorothy had said.

At high tide, Dorothy held his arm as they ventured onto the beach in the horseshoe-shaped cove. The monitor lizards liked to lie in the sand; some of them were as long as an adult human arm. “You don’t want to get too close to them — they can bite, and they smell like carrion,” Dorothy had warned him. “They look like penises, don’t they? Unfriendly-looking penises,” Dorothy said.

Juan Diego had no idea what unfriendly-looking penises resembled; how any penis could or might look like a monitor lizard was beyond him. Juan Diego had enough trouble understanding his own penis. When Dorothy took him snorkeling in the deep water outside the lagoon, his penis stung a little.

“It’s just the salt water, and because you’ve been having a lot of sex,” Dorothy told him. She seemed to know more about his penis than Juan Diego did. And the stinging soon stopped. (It was more like tingling than stinging, truthfully.) Juan Diego wasn’t under attack from those stinging things — the plankton that looked like condoms for three-year-olds. There were no upright-swimming index fingers — those stinging pink things, swimming vertically, like sea horses, the jellyfish he’d heard about only from Dorothy and Clark.

As for Clark, Juan Diego started getting inquiring text messages from his former student before he and Dorothy left El Nido and Lagen Island.

“D. is STILL with you, isn’t she?” the first such text message from Clark inquired.

“What should I tell him?” Juan Diego asked Dorothy.

“Oh, Leslie is texting Clark, too — is she?” Dorothy had asked. “I’m just not answering her. You would think Leslie and I had been going steady, or something.”

But Clark French kept texting his former teacher. “As far as poor Leslie knows, D. has just DISAPPEARED. Leslie was expecting D. to meet her in Manila. But poor Leslie is suspicious — she knows you know D. What do I tell her?”

“Tell Clark we’re leaving for Laoag. Leslie will know where that is. Everyone knows where Laoag is. Don’t get more specific,” Dorothy told Juan Diego.

But when Juan Diego did exactly that — when he sent Clark a text that he was “off to Laoag with D.”—he heard back from his former student almost immediately.

“D. is fucking you, isn’t she? You understand: I’m not the one who wants to know!” Clark texted him. “Poor Leslie is asking ME. What do I tell her?”

Dorothy saw his consternation as he stared at his cell phone. “Leslie is a very possessive person,” Dorothy said to Juan Diego, without needing to ask him if the text was from Clark. “We have to let Leslie know she doesn’t own us. This is all because your former student is too uptight to fuck her, and Leslie knows her tits won’t stay perky forever, or something.”

“You want me to blow off your bossy girlfriend?” Juan Diego asked Dorothy.

“I guess you’ve never had to blow off a bossy girlfriend,” Dorothy said; without waiting for Juan Diego to admit that he hadn’t had a bossy girlfriend — or many other kinds of girlfriends — Dorothy told him how he should handle the situation.