John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

And it was New Year’s Eve! Juan Diego suddenly remembered. Certainly the teenagers would be up past midnight, if not the little children. Wouldn’t most of the adults also stay up to herald the coming year?

Suppose Miriam invited him to her room? Should he bring the Viagra with him to dinner? (It was too soon to take one now.)

He dressed slowly, trying to imagine what Miriam would want him to wear. He’d written about more long-lasting, more complex, and more diverse relationships than he’d ever had. His readers — that is, the ones who’d never met him — might have imagined that he’d lived a sophisticated sexual life; in his novels, there were homosexual and bisexual experiences, and plenty of the plain-old heterosexual ones. Juan Diego made a political point of being sexually explicit in his writing; yet he’d never even lived with anyone, and the plain-old part of being a heterosexual was the kind of heterosexual he was.

Juan Diego suspected he was probably pretty boring as a lover. He would have been the first to admit that what passed for his sex life existed almost entirely in his imagination — like now, he thought ruefully. All he was doing was imagining Miriam; he didn’t even know if she was the mystery guest who’d checked into the Encantador.

The conviction that he chiefly had an imaginary sex life depressed him, and he’d taken only half a Lopressor pill today; this time, he couldn’t entirely blame the beta-blockers for making him feel diminished. Juan Diego decided to put one Viagra tablet in his right-front pants pocket. This way, he’d be prepared — Miriam or no Miriam.

He often put his hand in his right-front pocket; Juan Diego didn’t need to see that pretty mah-jongg tile, but he liked the feel of it — so smooth. The game block had made a perfect check mark on Edward Bonshaw’s pale forehead; Señor Eduardo had carried the tile with him as a keepsake. When the dear man was dying — when Señor Eduardo was not only no longer dressing himself, but wasn’t wearing clothes with pockets — he’d given the mah-jongg tile to Juan Diego. The game block, once imbedded between Edward Bonshaw’s blond eyebrows, would become Juan Diego’s talisman.

The four-sided gray-blue Viagra tablet was not as smooth as the bam-boo-and-ivory mah-jongg tile; the game block was twice the size of the Viagra pill — his rescue pill, as Juan Diego thought of it. And if Miriam was the uninvited guest in the second-floor room near the Encantador library, the Viagra tablet in Juan Diego’s right-front pants pocket was a second talisman he carried with him.

Naturally, the knock on his hotel-room door filled him with false expectations. It was only Clark, coming to take him to dinner. When Juan Diego was turning out the lights in his bathroom and bedroom, Clark advised him to turn on the ceiling fan and leave it on.

“See the gecko?” Clark said, pointing to the ceiling. A gecko, smaller than a pinky finger, was poised on the ceiling above the headboard of the bed. There wasn’t much Juan Diego missed about Mexico — hence he’d never been back — but he did miss the geckos. The little one above the bed darted on its adhesive toes across the ceiling at the exact instant Juan Diego turned on the fan.

“Once the fan has been on awhile, the geckos will settle down,” Clark said. “You don’t want them racing around when you’re trying to go to sleep.”

Juan Diego was disappointed in himself for not seeing the geckos until Clark pointed one out; as he was closing his hotel-room door, he spotted a second gecko scurrying over the bathroom wall — it was lightning-fast and quickly disappeared behind the bathroom mirror.

“I miss the geckos,” Juan Diego admitted to Clark. Outside, on the balcony, they could hear music coming from a noisy club for locals on the beach.

“Why don’t you go back to Mexico — I mean, just to visit ?” Clark asked him.

It was always like this with Clark, Juan Diego remembered. Clark wanted Juan Diego’s “issues” with childhood and early adolescence to be over; Clark wanted all grievances to end in an uplifting manner, as in Clark’s novels. Everyone should be saved, Clark believed; everything could be forgiven, he imagined. Clark made goodness seem tedious.

But what hadn’t Juan Diego and Clark French fought about?

There’d been no end to their to and fro about the late Pope John Paul II, who’d died in 2005. He’d been a young cardinal from Poland when he was elected pope, and he became a very popular pope, but John Paul’s efforts to “restore normality” in Poland — this meant making abortion illegal again — drove Juan Diego crazy.

Clark French had expressed his fondness for the Polish pope’s “culture of life” idea — John Paul II’s name for his stance against abortion and contraception, which amounted to protecting “defenseless” fetuses from the “culture of death” idea.

“Why would you — you of all people, given what happened to you — choose a death idea over a life idea?” Clark had asked his former teacher. And now Clark was suggesting (again) that Juan Diego should go back to Mexico — just to visit !

“You know why I won’t go back, Clark,” Juan Diego once more answered, limping along the second-floor balcony. (Another time, when he’d had too much beer, Juan Diego had said to Clark: “Mexico is in the hands of criminals and the Catholic Church.”)

“Don’t tell me you blame the Church for AIDS — you’re not saying safe sex is the answer to everything, are you?” Clark now asked his former teacher. This was not a very skillfully veiled reference, Juan Diego knew — not that Clark was necessarily trying to veil his references.

Juan Diego remembered how Clark had called condom use “propaganda.” Clark was probably paraphrasing Pope Benedict XVI. Hadn’t Benedict said something to the effect that condoms “only exacerbate” the AIDS problem? Or was that what Clark had said?

And now, because Juan Diego hadn’t answered Clark’s question about safe sex solving everything, Clark kept pressing the Benedict point: “ Benedict’s position — namely, that the only efficient way to combat an epidemic is by spiritual renovation —”

“Clark!” Juan Diego cried. “All ‘spiritual renovation’ means is more of the same old family values — meaning heterosexual marriage, meaning nothing but sexual abstention before marriage—”

“Sounds to me like one way to slow down an epidemic,” Clark said slyly. He was as doctrinaire as ever!

“Between your Church’s unfollowable rules and human nature, I’ll bet on human nature,” Juan Diego said. “Take celibacy—” he began.

“Maybe after the children and the teenagers have gone to bed,” Clark reminded his former teacher.

They were alone on the balcony, and it was New Year’s Eve; Juan Diego was pretty sure that the teenagers would be up later than the adults, but all he said was: “Think about pedophilia, Clark.”

“I knew it! I knew that was next!” Clark said excitedly.

In his Christmas address in Rome — not even two weeks ago — Pope Benedict XVI had said that pedophilia was considered normal as recently as the 1970s. Clark knew that would have made Juan Diego hot under the collar. Now, naturally, his former teacher was up to his old tricks, quoting the pope as if the entire realm of Catholic theology were to blame for Benedict’s suggesting there was no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself.

“Clark, Benedict said there is only a ‘better than’ and a ‘worse than’—that’s what your pope said,” Clark’s former teacher was telling him.