John Irving: Avenue of Mysteries

Some patients on beta-blockers bemoan the accompanying lethargy, both a weariness and a reduced tolerance for physical exercise, but at his age — Juan Diego was now fifty-four — what did he care? He’d been a cripple since he was fourteen; limping was his exercise. He’d had forty years of sufficient limping. Juan Diego didn’t want more exercise !

He did wish he felt more alive, not so “diminished”—the word he used to describe how the beta-blockers made him feel, when he talked to Rosemary about his lack of sexual interest. (Juan Diego didn’t say he was impotent; even to his doctor, the diminished word was where he began, and ended, the conversation.)

“I didn’t know you were in a sexual relationship,” Dr. Stein said to him; in fact, she knew very well that he wasn’t in one.

“My dear Dr. Rosemary,” Juan Diego said. “If I were in a sexual relationship, I believe I would be diminished.”

She’d given him a prescription for Viagra — six tablets a month, 100 milligrams — and told him to experiment.

“Don’t wait till you meet someone,” Rosemary said.

He hadn’t waited; he’d not met anyone, but he had experimented.

Dr. Stein had refilled his prescription every month. “Maybe half a tablet is sufficient,” Juan Diego told her, after his experiments. He hoarded the extra tablets. He’d not complained about any of the side effects from the Viagra. It allowed him to have an erection; he could have an orgasm. Why would he mind a stuffy nose?

Another side effect of beta-blockers is insomnia, but Juan Diego found nothing new or particularly upsetting about that; to lie awake in the dark with his demons was almost comforting. Many of Juan Diego’s demons had been his childhood companions — he knew them so well, they were as familiar as friends.

An overdose of beta-blockers can cause dizziness, even fainting spells, but Juan Diego wasn’t worried about dizziness or fainting. “Cripples know how to fall — falling is no big deal to us,” he told Dr. Stein.

Yet, even more than the erectile dysfunction, it was his disjointed dreams that disturbed him; Juan Diego said that his memories and his dreams lacked a followable chronology. He hated the beta-blockers because, in disrupting his dreams, they had cut him off from his childhood, and his childhood mattered more to him than childhood mattered to other adults — to most other adults, Juan Diego thought. His childhood, and the people he’d encountered there — the ones who’d changed his life, or who’d been witnesses to what had happened to him at that crucial time — were what Juan Diego had instead of religion.

Close friend though she was, Dr. Rosemary Stein didn’t know everything about Juan Diego; she knew very little about her friend’s childhood. To Dr. Stein, it probably appeared to come out of nowhere when Juan Diego spoke with uncharacteristic sharpness to her, seemingly about the beta-blockers. “Believe me, Rosemary, if the beta-blockers had taken my religion away, I would not complain to you about that ! On the contrary, I would ask you to prescribe beta-blockers for everyone !”

This amounted to more of her passionate friend’s hysterical overstatements, Dr. Stein thought. After all, he’d burned his hands saving books from burning — even books about Catholic history. But Rosemary Stein knew only bits and pieces about Juan Diego’s life as a dump kid; she knew more about her friend when he was older. She didn’t really know the boy from Guerrero.

On the day after Christmas, 2010, a snowstorm had swept through New York City. The next day, the unplowed streets of Manhattan were strewn with abandoned cars and cabs. A bus had burned on Madison Avenue, near East Sixty-second Street; spinning in the snow, its rear tires caught fire and ignited the bus. The blackened hulk had dotted the surrounding snow with ashes.

To the guests in those hotels along Central Park South, the view of the pristine whiteness of the park — and of those few brave families with young children, at play in the newly fallen snow — contrasted strangely with the absence of any vehicular traffic on the broad avenues and smaller streets. In the brightly whitened morning, even Columbus Circle was eerily quiet and empty; at a normally busy intersection, such as the corner of West Fifty-ninth Street and Seventh Avenue, not a single taxi was moving. The only cars in sight were stranded, half buried in the snow.

The virtual moonscape, which Manhattan was that Monday morning, prompted the concierge at Juan Diego’s hotel to seek special assistance for the handicapped man. This was not a day for a cripple to hail a cab, or risk riding in one. The concierge had prevailed upon a limousine company — not a very good one — to take Juan Diego to Queens, though there were conflicting reports regarding whether John F. Kennedy International Airport was open or not. On TV, they were saying that JFK was closed, yet Juan Diego’s Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong was allegedly departing on time. As much as the concierge doubted this — he was certain that the flight would be delayed, if not canceled — he had nonetheless indulged the anxious and crippled guest. Juan Diego was agitated about getting to the airport on time — though no flights were departing, or had departed, in the aftermath of the storm.

It was not Hong Kong he cared about; that was a detour Juan Diego could do without, but a couple of his colleagues had persuaded him that he shouldn’t go all the way to the Philippines without stopping to see Hong Kong en route. What was there to see? Juan Diego had wondered. While Juan Diego didn’t understand what “air miles” actually meant (or how they were calculated), he understood that his Cathay Pacific flight was free; his friends had also persuaded him that first class on Cathay Pacific was something he must experience — something else he was supposed to see, apparently.

Juan Diego thought that all this attention from his friends was because he was retiring from teaching; what else could explain why his colleagues had insisted on helping him organize this trip? But there were other reasons. Though he was young to retire, he was indeed “handicapped”—and his close friends and colleagues knew he was taking medication for his heart.

“I’m not retiring from writing !” he’d assured them. (Juan Diego had come to New York for Christmas at the invitation of his publisher.) It was “merely” the teaching he was leaving, Juan Diego said, though for years the writing and the teaching had been inseparable; together, they’d been his entire adult life. And one of his former writing students had become very involved with what Juan Diego now thought of as an aggressive takeover of his trip to the Philippines. This former student, Clark French, had made Juan Diego’s mission in Manila — as Juan Diego had thought of it, for years— Clark’s mission. Clark’s writing was as assertive, or forced, as he’d been about taking over his former teacher’s trip to the Philippines — or so Juan Diego thought.

Yet Juan Diego had done nothing to resist his former student’s well-intentioned assistance; he didn’t want to hurt Clark’s feelings. Besides, it wasn’t easy for Juan Diego to travel, and he’d heard that the Philippines could be difficult — even dangerous. A little overplanning wouldn’t hurt, he’d decided.

Before he knew it, a tour of the Philippines had materialized; his mission in Manila had given rise to side trips and distracting adventures. He worried that the purpose of his going to the Philippines had been compromised, though Clark French would have been quick to tell his former teacher that the zeal to assist him was borne of Clark’s admiration for what a noble cause (for so long!) had inspired Juan Diego to take this trip in the first place.