John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

As Clark’s onetime teacher, Juan Diego still saw his former student as needing protection; the condescending reviews Clark had received in the United States amounted to all that Juan Diego knew of the younger writer’s reputation. And Juan Diego and Clark corresponded by email, which gave Juan Diego only a general idea of where Clark French lived — namely, somewhere in the Philippines.

Clark lived in Manila; his wife, Dr. Josefa Quintana, was what Clark called a “baby doctor.” Juan Diego knew that Dr. Quintana was a higher-up at the Cardinal Santos Medical Center—“one of the leading hospitals in the Philippines,” Clark was fond of saying. A private hospital, Bienvenido had told Juan Diego — to distinguish Cardinal Santos from what Bienvenido disparagingly called “the dirty government hospitals.” A Catholic hospital was what registered with Juan Diego — the Catholic factor mingled with his annoyance at not knowing if a “baby doctor” meant that Clark’s wife was a pediatrician or an OB-GYN.

Because Juan Diego had spent his entire adult life in the same university town, and his life as a writer in Iowa City had (until now) been inseparable from that as a teacher at a single university, he hadn’t realized that Clark French was one of those other writers — the ones who can live anywhere, or everywhere.

Juan Diego did know that Clark was one of those writers who appeared to be at every authors’ festival; he seemed to like, or excel at, the nonwriting part of being a writer — the talking-about-it part, which Juan Diego didn’t like or do well. In fact, increasingly, as he grew older, the writing (the doing-it part) was the only aspect of being a writer that Juan Diego enjoyed.

Clark French traveled all over the world, but Manila was Clark’s home — his home base, anyway. Clark and his wife had no children. Because he traveled? Because she was a “baby doctor,” and she saw enough children? Or, if Josefa Quintana was the other kind of “baby doctor,” perhaps she’d seen too many terrible complications of an obstetrical and gynecological kind.

Whatever the reason for the no-children situation, Clark French was one of those writers who could and did write everywhere, and there wasn’t an important authors’ festival or writers’ conference that he hadn’t traveled to; the public part of being a writer did not confine him to the Philippines. Clark came “home” to Manila because his wife was there; she was the one with an actual job.

Probably because she was a doctor, and one from such a distinguished family of doctors — most medical people in the Philippines had heard of her — the paramedics who’d examined Juan Diego on the plane were somewhat indiscreet. They gave Dr. Josefa Quintana a full account of their medical (and nonmedical) findings. And Clark French was standing right beside his wife, listening in.

The sleeping passenger had an out-of-it appearance; he’d laughingly dismissed the dead-to-the-world episode on the grounds of having been engrossed in a dream about the Virgin Mary.

“Juan Diego was dreaming about Mary ?” Clark French interjected.

“Just her nose,” one of the medics said.

“The Virgin’s nose !” Clark exclaimed. He’d told his wife to be prepared for Juan Diego’s anti-Catholicism, but a tasteless joke about Mother Mary’s nose denoted to Clark that his former teacher had descended to a lower level of Catholic bashing.

The paramedics wanted Dr. Quintana to know about the Viagra and Lopressor prescriptions. Josefa had to tell Clark, in detail, about the way beta-blockers worked; she was completely correct to add that, due to common side effects of the Lopressor tablets, the Viagra might have been “necessary.”

“There was a novel in his carry-on, too — at least I think it was a novel,” one of the paramedics said.

“ What novel?” Clark asked eagerly.

“ The Passion by Jeanette Winterson,” the medic said. “It sounds religious.”

The young-woman paramedic spoke cautiously. (Maybe she was trying to connect the novel to the Viagra.) “It sounds pornographic,” she said.

“No, no — Winterson is literary, ” Clark French said. “A lesbian, but literary,” he added. Clark didn’t know the novel, but he assumed it had something to do with lesbians — he wondered if Winterson had written a novel about an order of lesbian nuns.

When the paramedics moved on, Clark and his wife were left alone; they were still waiting for Juan Diego, though it had been a while, and Clark was worried about his former teacher.

“To my knowledge, he lives alone — he has always lived alone. What’s he doing with the Viagra?” Clark asked his wife.

Josefa was an OB-GYN (she was that kind of “baby doctor”); she knew a lot about Viagra. Many of her patients had asked her about Viagra; their husbands or boyfriends were taking it, or they thought they wanted to try it, and the women wanted Dr. Quintana to tell them how the Viagra would affect the men in their lives. Would the women be raped in the middle of the night, or mounted when they were just trying to make coffee in the morning — humped against the unyielding car, when they’d merely been bending over to lift the groceries out of the trunk?

Dr. Josefa Quintana said to her husband: “Look, Clark, your former teacher might not live with anybody, but he probably likes getting an erection — right?”

That was when Juan Diego limped into sight; Josefa saw him first — she recognized him from his book-jacket photos, and Clark had prepared her for the limp. (Naturally, Clark French had exaggerated the limp — the way writers do.)

“What for?” Juan Diego heard Clark ask his wife, the doctor. She looked a little embarrassed, Juan Diego thought, but she waved to him and smiled. She seemed very nice; it was a sincere smile.

Clark turned and saw him. There was Clark’s boyish grin, which was confused by a concurrent expression of guilt, as if Clark had been caught in the act of doing or saying something. (In this case, by responding to his wife’s professional opinion that his former teacher probably liked getting an erection with a doltish “What for?”)

“What for ?” Josefa quietly repeated to her husband, before she reached to shake Juan Diego’s hand.

Clark couldn’t stop grinning; now he was pointing to Juan Diego’s giant orange albatross of a bag. “Look, Josefa — I told you Juan Diego did a lot of research for his novels. He brought all of it with him!”

The same old Clark, a lovable but embarrassing guy, Juan Diego was thinking; he then steeled himself, knowing he was about to be crushed in Clark’s athletic embrace.

In addition to the Winterson novel, there was a lined notebook in Juan Diego’s carry-on. It contained notes for the novel Juan Diego was writing — he was always writing a novel. He’d been writing his next novel since he took a translation trip to Lithuania in February 2008. The novel-in-progress was now almost two years old; Juan Diego would have guessed he had another two or three years to go.

The trip to Vilnius was his first time in Lithuania, but not the first of his translations to be published there. He’d gone to the Vilnius Book Fair with his publisher and his translator. Juan Diego was interviewed onstage by a Lithuanian actress. After a few excellent questions of her own, the actress invited the audience to ask questions; there were a thousand people, many of them young students. It was a larger and more informed audience than Juan Diego usually encountered at comparable events in the United States.

After the book fair, he’d gone with his publisher and translator to sign books at a bookstore in the old town. The Lithuanian names were a problem — but not the first names, usually. So it was decided that Juan Diego would inscribe only his readers’ first names. For example, the actress who’d interviewed him at the book fair was a Dalia — that was easy enough, but her last name was much more challenging. His publisher was a Rasa, his translator a Daiva, but their last names were not English- or Spanish-sounding.