John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

“First get dressed, then I’ll tell you,” Miriam said. “Oh, I almost forgot,” she said suddenly to Juan Diego. “I have your itinerary — you should have it back.” Juan Diego remembered that Miriam had taken his itinerary from him when they were still at JFK; he’d not noticed that she hadn’t returned it. Now Miriam handed it to him. “I made some notes on it — about where you should stay in Manila. Not this time — you’re not staying there long enough this first time for it to matter where you stay. But, trust me, you won’t like where you’re staying. When you come back to Manila — I mean the second time, when you’re there a little longer — I made some suggestions regarding where you should stay. And I made a copy of your itinerary for us, ” Miriam told him, “so we can check on you.”

“For us ?” Dorothy repeated suspiciously. “Or for you, do you mean?”

“For us —I said ‘we,’ Dorothy,” Miriam told her daughter.

“I’m going to see you again, I hope,” Juan Diego said suddenly. “ Both of you,” he added — awkwardly, because he’d been looking only at Dorothy. The girl had put on a blouse, which she hadn’t begun to button; she was looking at her navel, then picking at it.

“Oh, you’ll see us again — definitely,” Miriam was saying to him, as she walked into the bathroom, continuing her sweep.

“Yeah, definitely, ” Dorothy said, still attending to her belly button — she was still unbuttoned.

“Button it, Dorothy — the blouse has buttons, for Christ’s sake!” her mother was shouting from the bathroom.

“I haven’t left anything behind, Mother,” Dorothy called into the bathroom. The young woman had already buttoned herself up when she quickly kissed Juan Diego on his mouth. He saw she had a small envelope in her hand; it looked like the hotel stationery — it was that kind of envelope. Dorothy slipped the envelope into his jacket pocket. “Don’t read it now — read it later. It’s a love letter!” the girl whispered; her tongue darted between his lips.

“I’m surprised at you, Dorothy,” Miriam was saying, as she came back into the bedroom. “Juan Diego made more of a mess of his bathroom than you did of yours.”

“I live to surprise you, Mother,” the girl said.

Juan Diego smiled uncertainly at the two of them. He’d always imagined that his trip to the Philippines was a kind of sentimental journey — in the sense that it wasn’t a trip he was taking for himself. In truth, he’d long thought of it as a trip he was taking for someone else — a dead friend who’d wanted to make this journey but had died before he was able to go.

Yet the journey Juan Diego found himself taking was one that seemed inseparable from Miriam and Dorothy, and what was that trip but one he was taking solely for himself?

“And you — you two —are going exactly where ?” Juan Diego ventured to ask this mother and her daughter, who were veteran world travelers (clearly).

“Oh, boy — have we got shit to do!” Dorothy said darkly.

“ Obligations, Dorothy — your generation overuses the shit word,” Miriam told her.

“We’ll see you sooner than you think,” Dorothy told Juan Diego. “We end up in Manila, but not today,” the young woman said enigmatically.

“We’ll see you in Manila eventually, ” Miriam explained to him a little impatiently. She added: “If not sooner.”

“If not sooner,” Dorothy repeated. “Yeah, yeah!”

The young woman abruptly lifted her suitcase off the bed before Juan Diego could help her; it was such a big, heavy-looking bag, but Dorothy lifted it as if it weighed nothing at all. It gave Juan Diego a pang to remember how the young woman had lifted him —his head and shoulders, entirely off the bed — before she’d rolled him over on top of her.

What a strong girl! was all Juan Diego thought about it. He turned to reach for his suitcase, not his carry-on, and was surprised to see that Miriam had taken it — together with her own big bag. What a strong mother ! Juan Diego was thinking. He limped out into the hallway of the hotel, hurrying to keep up with the two women; he almost didn’t notice that he scarcely limped at all.

THIS WAS PECULIAR: IN the middle of a conversation he couldn’t remember, Juan Diego became separated from Miriam and Dorothy as they were going through the security check at Hong Kong International. He stepped toward the metal-detection device, looking back at Miriam, who was removing her shoes; he saw that her toenails were painted the same color as Dorothy’s. Then he passed through the metal-screening machine, and when he looked for the women again, both Miriam and Dorothy were gone; they had simply (or not so simply) disappeared.

Juan Diego asked one of the security guards about the two women he’d been traveling with. Where had they gone? But the security guard was an impatient young fellow, and he was distracted by an apparent problem with the metal-detection device.

“ What women? Which women? I’ve seen an entire civilization of women — they must have moved on!” the guard told him.

Juan Diego thought he would try to text or call the women on his cell phone, but he’d forgotten to get their cell-phone numbers. He scrolled through his contacts, looking in vain for their nonexistent names. Nor had Miriam written her cell-phone number, or Dorothy’s, among the notes she’d made on his itinerary. Juan Diego saw just the names and addresses of alternative Manila hotels.

What a big deal Miriam had made about “the second time” he would be in Manila, Juan Diego was thinking, but he stopped thinking about it and made his slow way to the gate for his flight to the Philippines — his first time in Manila, he was thinking to himself ( if he was thinking about it at all). He was preternaturally tired.

It must be the beta-blockers, Juan Diego was pondering. I guess I shouldn’t have taken two — if I did.

Even the green-tea muffin on the Cathay Pacific flight — it was a much smaller plane this time — was a little disappointing. It wasn’t such a heightened experience as eating that first green-tea muffin, when he and Miriam and Dorothy were arriving in Hong Kong.

Juan Diego was in the air when he remembered the love letter Dorothy had put in his jacket pocket. He took out the envelope and opened it.

“See you soon!” Dorothy had written on the Regal Airport Hotel stationery. She had pressed her lips — apparently, with fresh lipstick — to the page, leaving him the impression of her lips in intimate contact with the soon word. Her lipstick, he only now noticed, was the same color as her toenail polish — and her mother’s. Magenta, Juan Diego guessed he would call it.

He couldn’t miss seeing what was also in the envelope with the so-called love letter: the two empty foil wrappers, where the first and second condom had been. Maybe there was something wrong with the metal-screening machine at Hong Kong International, Juan Diego considered; the device hadn’t detected the foil condom wrappers. Definitely, Juan Diego was thinking, this wasn’t quite the sentimental journey he’d been expecting, but he was long on his way and there was no turning back now.

Edward Bonshaw had an L-shaped scar on his forehead — from a childhood fall. He’d tripped over a sleeping dog when he was running with a mah-jongg tile clutched in his little hand. The tiny game block was made of ivory and bamboo; a corner of the pretty tile had been driven into Edward’s pale forehead above the bridge of his nose, where it made a perfect check mark between his blond eyebrows.