John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

“If you think you just saw the king of beasts,” Flor was still whispering to Edward Bonshaw, “think again. You’re about to meet him now,” the transvestite whispered to the missionary. “Ignacio is the king of beasts.”

“The king of pigs, ” Lupe said suddenly, but of course Juan Diego was the only one who understood her. And he would never understand everything about her.

Maybe it was nothing more than the melancholy of that moment when the dump kids arrived at La Maravilla, or else the unattached eyes in the darkness — those disembodied eyes surrounding the car speeding toward the beach resort with the bewitching name of Encantador. Who knows what made Juan Diego suddenly nod off? It might have been that moment when the road narrowed and the car slowed down, and the intriguing eyes vanished. (When the dump kids moved to the circus, there were more eyes watching them than they’d been used to.)

“At first, I thought he was daydreaming — he seemed to be in a kind of trance,” Dr. Quintana was saying.

“Is he all right?” Clark French asked his wife, the doctor.

“He’s just asleep, Clark — he fell sound asleep,” Josefa said. “It may be the jet lag, or what a bad night’s sleep your ill-advised aquarium caused him.”

“Josefa, he fell asleep when we were talking — in the middle of a conversation!” Clark cried. “Does he have narcolepsy?”

“Don’t shake him!” Juan Diego heard Clark’s wife say, but he kept his eyes closed.

“I’ve never heard of a narcoleptic writer,” Clark French was saying. “What about the drugs he’s taking?”

“The beta-blockers can affect your sleep,” Dr. Quintana told her husband.

“I was thinking of the Viagra—”

“The Viagra does only one thing, Clark.”

Juan Diego thought this was a good moment to open his eyes. “Are we here?” he asked them. Josefa was still sitting beside him in the backseat; Clark had opened the rear door and was peering into the SUV at his former teacher. “Is this the Encantador?” Juan Diego asked innocently. “Has the mystery guest arrived?”

She had, but no one had seen her. Perhaps she’d traveled a long way and was resting in her room. She seemed to know the room — that is, she had requested it. It was near the library, on the second floor of the main building; either she’d stayed at the Encantador before or she assumed that a room near the library would be quiet.

“Personally, I never nap,” Clark was saying; he had wrestled Juan Diego’s mammoth orange bag away from the boy driver and was now lugging it along an outdoor balcony of the pretty hotel, which was a magical but rambling assemblage of adjoining buildings on a hillside overlooking the sea. The palm trees obscured any view of the beach — even from the perspective of the second- and third-floor rooms — but the sea was visible. “A good night’s sleep is all I need,” Clark carried on.

“There were fish in my room last night, and an eel,” Juan Diego reminded his former student. Here he would have a second-floor room, on the same floor as the uninvited guest — in an adjacent building that was easily reached by the outdoor balcony.

“About the fish — pay no attention to Auntie Carmen,” Clark was saying. “Your room is some distance from the swimming pool. The children in the pool, in the early morning, shouldn’t wake you up.”

“Auntie Carmen is a pet person,” Clark’s wife interjected. “She cares more about fish than she does about people.”

“Thank God the moray survived,” Clark joined in. “I believe Morales lives with Auntie Carmen.”

“It’s a pity no one else does,” Josefa said. “No one else would, ” the doctor added.

Below them, children were playing in the pool. “Lots of teenagers in this family — therefore, lots of free nannies for the little ones,” Clark pointed out.

“Lots of children, period, in this family,” the OB-GYN observed. “We’re not all like Auntie Carmen.”

“I’m taking a medication — it plays games with how I sleep,” Juan Diego told them. “I’m taking beta-blockers,” he said to Dr. Quintana. “As you probably know,” he said to the doctor, “beta-blockers can have a depressing effect, or a diminishing one, on your real life — whereas the effect they have on your dream life is a little unpredictable.”

Juan Diego didn’t tell the doctor that he’d been playing games with the dosage of his Lopressor prescription. Probably he came across as being completely candid — that is, as far as Dr. Quintana and Clark French could tell.

Juan Diego’s room was delightful; the sea-view windows had screens, and there was a ceiling fan — no air-conditioning would be necessary. The big bathroom was charming, and it had an outdoor shower with a pagoda-shaped bamboo roof over it.

“Take your time to freshen up before dinner,” Josefa said to Juan Diego. “The jet lag — you know, the time difference — could also be influencing how the beta-blockers affect you,” she told him.

“After the bigger kids take the little kids to bed, the real dinner-table conversation can get started,” Clark was saying, squeezing his former teacher’s shoulder.

Was this a warning not to bring up adult subjects around the children and the teenagers? Juan Diego was wondering. Juan Diego realized that Clark French, despite his bluff heartiness, was still uptight — a fortysomething prude. Clark’s fellow MFA students at Iowa, if they could meet him now, would still be teasing him.

Abortion, Juan Diego knew, was illegal in the Philippines; he was curious to know what Dr. Quintana, the OB-GYN, thought about that. (And did she and her husband — Clark, the oh-so-good Catholic — feel the same about that?) Surely that was a dinner-table conversation he and Clark couldn’t (or shouldn’t) have before the children and the teenagers had trotted off to bed. Juan Diego hoped he might have this conversation with Dr. Quintana after Clark had trotted off to bed.

Juan Diego became so agitated thinking about this that he almost forgot about Miriam. Of course he hadn’t entirely forgotten about her — not for a minute. He resisted taking an outdoor shower, not only because it was dark outside (there would be insects galore in the outdoor shower after nightfall) but because he might not hear the phone. He couldn’t call Miriam — he didn’t even know her last name! — nor could he call the front desk and ask to be connected to the “uninvited” woman. But if Miriam was the mystery woman, wouldn’t she call him?

He elected to take a bath — no insects, and he could keep the door to the bedroom open; if she called, he could hear the phone. Naturally, he rushed his bath and there was no call. Juan Diego tried to remain calm; he plotted his next move with his medications. Not to confuse the issue, he returned the pill-cutting device to his toilet kit. The Viagra and the Lopressor prescriptions stood side by side on the counter, next to the bathroom sink.

No half-doses for me, Juan Diego decided. After dinner, he would take one whole Lopressor pill — the right amount, in other words — but not if he was with Miriam. Skipping a dose hadn’t hurt him before, and a surge of adrenaline could be beneficial — even necessary — with Miriam.

The Viagra, he thought, presented him with a more complicated decision. For his rendezvous with Dorothy, Juan Diego had traded his usual half-dose for a whole one; for Miriam, he imagined, a half-dose wouldn’t suffice. The complicated part was when to take it. The Viagra needed nearly an hour to work. And how long would one Viagra — a whole one, the full 100 milligrams — last?