John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

One of the unknown journalists asked Juan Diego if the beer he was drinking was his first one, or his second.

“You want to know how many beers he’s had?” Clark asked the young man aggressively. “Do you know how many novels this author has written?” Clark further asked the journalist, who was wearing an untucked white shirt. It was a dress shirt, but one that had known fresher days. By its bedraggled appearance and a mélange of stains, the shirt — and the young man wearing it — signified, if only to Clark, a life of unclean disarray.

“Do you like San Miguel?” the journalist asked Juan Diego, pointing to the beer; he was deliberately ignoring Clark.

“Name two titles of novels this author has written — just two,” Clark told the journalist. “Of the novels Juan Diego Guerrero has written, name one you’ve read — just one,” Clark said.

Juan Diego could never ( would never) behave like Clark, but Clark was redeeming himself with each passing second; Juan Diego was remembering what he liked best about Clark French — notwithstanding all the other ways in which Clark could be Clark.

“Yes, I like San Miguel,” Juan Diego told the journalist, holding up his beer as if he were toasting the unread young man. “And I believe this is my second one.”

“You don’t have to talk to him — he hasn’t done his homework, ” Clark said to his former teacher.

Juan Diego was thinking that his nice-guy assessment of Clark French was not quite correct; Clark is a nice guy, Juan Diego thought, provided you’re not a journalist who hasn’t done your homework.

As for the unprepared journalist, the young man who was not a reader, he had wandered off. “I don’t know who he is,” Clark muttered; he was disappointed in himself. “But I know that one —I know her, ” Clark told Juan Diego, pointing to a middle-aged woman who’d been eyeing them from afar. (She’d been waiting for the younger journalist to drift away.) “She is a horror of insincerity — imagine a venomous hamster,” Clark hissed to Juan Diego.

“One of the ones to watch out for, I guess,” Juan Diego said; he smiled knowingly at his former student. “I feel safe with you, Clark,” Juan Diego suddenly said. This was verily spontaneous and heartfelt, but until he said it, Juan Diego hadn’t realized how unsafe he had felt — and for how long! (Dump kids don’t take feeling safe for granted; circus kids don’t assume a safety net is there.)

For his part, Clark felt moved to wrap his big, strong arm around his former teacher’s slender shoulders. “But I don’t think you need my protection from this one, ” Clark whispered in Juan Diego’s ear. “She’s just a gossip.”

Clark was talking about the middle-aged woman journalist, who was now approaching — the “venomous hamster.” Had he meant her mind ran in place, making repetitive rotations on the going-nowhere wheel? But what was venomous about her? “All of her questions will be recycled — stuff she saw on the Internet, the reiteration of every stupid question you were ever asked,” Clark was whispering in his former teacher’s ear. “She will not have read a single novel you’ve written, but she’ll have read everything about you. I’m sure you know the type,” Clark added.

“I know, Clark — thank you,” Juan Diego gently said, smiling at his former student. Mercifully, Josefa was there — the good Dr. Quintana was dragging her husband away. Juan Diego had not realized he’d been standing in the food line until he saw the buffet table; it was dead ahead.

“You should have the fish,” the woman journalist told him. Juan Diego saw that she’d inserted herself in the food line beside him, possibly the way venomous hamsters do.

“That looks like a cheese sauce, on the fish,” was all Juan Diego said; he helped himself to the Korean glass noodles with vegetables, and to something called Vietnamese beef.

“I don’t think I’ve seen anyone actually eat the mangled beef here,” the journalist said. She must have meant to say “shredded,” Juan Diego was thinking, but he didn’t say anything. (Maybe the Vietnamese mangled their beef; Juan Diego didn’t know.)

“The small, pretty woman — the one who was there tonight,” the middle-aged woman said, helping herself to the fish. “She left early,” she added, after a long pause.

“Yes, I know who you mean — Leslie someone. I don’t know her,” was all Juan Diego said.

“Leslie someone told me to tell you something,” the middle-aged woman told him, in a confiding (not quite motherly) tone.

Juan Diego waited; he didn’t want to appear too interested. And he was looking everywhere for Clark and Josefa; he realized he wouldn’t object if Clark bullied this woman journalist, just a little.

“Leslie said to tell you that the woman with Dorothy can’t be Dorothy’s mother. Leslie said the older woman isn’t old enough to be Dorothy’s mother — besides, they look nothing alike,” the journalist said.

“Do you know Miriam and Dorothy?” Juan Diego asked the frumpy-looking woman. She was wearing a peasant-style blouse — the kind of loose shirt the American hippie women wore in Oaxaca, those women who didn’t wear bras and put flowers in their hair.

“Well, I don’t know them — I just saw they were very much with Leslie,” the woman journalist said. “And they left early, too, with Leslie. For what it’s worth, I thought the older of the two women wasn’t old enough to be the younger one’s mother. And they didn’t look anything alike — not to me,” she added.

“I saw them, too,” was all Juan Diego said. It was hard to imagine why Miriam and Dorothy were with Leslie, Juan Diego thought. Perhaps harder to imagine was why poor Leslie was with them.

Clark must have gone to the men’s room, Juan Diego was thinking; he was nowhere in sight. Yet an unlikely-looking savior was headed Juan Diego’s way; she was dressed badly enough to be another journalist, but there was the recognizable glint of unexpressed intimacies in her eager eyes — as if reading him had changed her life. She had stories to share, of how he’d rescued her: maybe she’d been contemplating suicide; or she was pregnant with her first child, at sixteen; or she’d lost a child when she happened to read — well, these were the kind of intimacies glinting in her I-was-saved-by-reading-you eyes. Juan Diego loved his diehard readers. The details they’d cherished in his novels seemed to sparkle in their eyes.

The woman journalist saw the diehard reader coming. Was there some partial recognition between them? Juan Diego couldn’t tell. They were women of a similar age.

“I like Mark Twain,” the journalist said to Juan Diego — her parting shot, as she was leaving. Was that all she had for venom ? Juan Diego wondered.

“Be sure to tell Clark,” he told her, but she might not have heard him — she seemed to be leaving in a hurry.

“Go away!” Juan Diego’s avid reader called after the woman journalist. “She hasn’t read anything,” the new arrival announced to Juan Diego. “I’m your biggest fan.”

To tell the truth, she was a big woman, easily 170 or 180 pounds. She wore baggy blue jeans, torn at both knees, and a black T-shirt with a fierce-looking tiger between her breasts. It was a protest T-shirt, expressing anger on behalf of an endangered species. Juan Diego was so out of it, he didn’t know tigers were in trouble.

“Look at you — you’re having the beef, too!” his new biggest fan cried, wrapping an arm as seemingly strong as Clark’s around Juan Diego’s smaller shoulders. “I’ll tell you something,” the big woman told Juan Diego, leading him to her table. “You know that scene with the duck hunters? When the idiot forgets to take off the condom, and he goes home and starts peeing in front of his wife? I love that scene!” the woman who loved tigers told him, pushing him ahead of her.