John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

“ Shhh —the poor child should be in bed,” Miriam whispered.

“But you —” Pedro began. That was as far as he got.

Juan Diego saw the gecko fall or drop from the ceiling; it was another small one. This one landed on Pedro’s head, in his hair. The startled-looking gecko had landed perfectly on top of the boy’s head, inside the open crown of the paper party hat, which in Pedro’s case was a sea-green color — not that different from the little lizard’s coloring. When Pedro felt the gecko in his hair, the boy began to scream; this retrieved Consuelo from her trance — the little girl started screaming, too.

Juan Diego would realize only later why two Filipino kids would scream about a gecko. It wasn’t the gecko that made Pedro and Consuelo scream. They were screaming because they must have imagined that Miriam was going to stab the gecko, pinning the little lizard to the top of Pedro’s head.

Juan Diego was reaching for the gecko in Pedro’s hair when the panic-stricken boy swatted the little lizard into the area of the dance floor, where his party hat also ended up. It was the drummer (the guy with the insect tattoos on his bare arms) who stomped on the gecko; he spattered some of the lizard’s innards on his tight jeans.

“Oh, man — that’s harsh,” the harmonica player said; he was the one in the other tank top, the musician with the snakes and lizards tattooed on his arms.

The lead guitarist with the burn-scar tattoo on his neck didn’t notice the spattered gecko; he was diddling with the amplifier and the speaker boxes, tweaking the sound.

But Consuelo and Pedro had seen what happened to the little gecko; their screams had turned to wails of protestation, not relieved by the teenagers who were taking them off to bed. (Screaming and wailing had brought the teenagers back to the dining room, where they’d perhaps mistaken the cries of the children for the band’s first number.)

More philosophical than some lead singers, the waif of a corpse-colored girl stared at the ceiling above the dance floor — as if she were expecting more falling geckos. “I hate those fuckin’ things,” she said to no one in particular. She also saw that the drummer was trying to wipe the lizard’s spattered innards off his jeans. “Gross,” the lead singer said matter-of-factly; the way she said it made “Gross” sound like the title of her best-known song.

“I’m betting my bedroom is closer to the dance floor than yours,” Miriam was saying to Juan Diego, as the freaked-out children were being carried away. “What I mean, darling, is that the choice of where we sleep might best be guided by how much of these Nocturnal Monkeys we want to hear.”

“Yes,” was all Juan Diego could manage to say. He saw that Auntie Carmen was no longer among the remaining adults in the vicinity of the newly emerging dance floor; either she’d been carried away with the dinner tables or she’d slipped off to bed before the little children. These Nocturnal Monkeys must not have won over Auntie Carmen with their charms. As for the actual nocturnal monkeys, the ones in the Chocolate Hills, Juan Diego imagined that Auntie Carmen might have liked them — if only to feed one to her pet moray.

“Yes,” Juan Diego repeated. It was definitely time to slip away. He stood up from the table as if he didn’t limp — as if he’d never limped — and because Miriam took immediate hold of his arm, Juan Diego almost didn’t limp as he began to walk with her.

“Not staying to welcome in the New Year?” Clark French called to his former teacher.

“Oh, we’re going to welcome it in, all right,” Miriam called to him, once more with a languid wave of one bare arm.

“Leave them alone, Clark — let them go,” Josefa said.

Juan Diego must have looked a little foolish, touching the top of his head as he limped (just slightly) away; he was wondering where his party hat had gone, not recalling how Miriam had removed it from his head with as little wasted motion as she’d expended in taking off hers.

By the time Juan Diego had climbed the stairs to the second floor, he and Miriam could hear the karaoke music from the beach club; the music was faintly audible from the outdoor balcony of the Encantador, but not for long. The distant karaoke music couldn’t compete with the eviscerating sound of the Nocturnal Monkeys — the suddenly throbbing drum, the angrily combative guitar, the harmonica’s piteous wail (an expression of feline pain).

Juan Diego and Miriam were still outside, on the balcony — he was opening the door to his hotel room — when the lead singer, that girl from the grave, began her lament. As the couple came inside the room and Juan Diego closed the door behind them, the sounds of the Nocturnal Monkeys were muted by the soft whir of the ceiling fan. There was another concealing sound: through the open windows — the breeze through the screens was offshore — the insipid karaoke song from the beach club was (mercifully) the only music that they could hear.

“That poor girl,” Miriam said; she meant the lead singer for the Nocturnal Monkeys. “Someone should call an ambulance — she’s either giving birth or being disemboweled.”

These were exactly the words Juan Diego was going to say before Miriam said them. How was that possible? Was she a writer, too? (If so, surely not the same writer.) Whatever the reason, it seemed unimportant. Lust has a way of distracting you from mysteries.

Miriam had slipped her hand into Juan Diego’s right-front pants pocket. She knew he’d already taken the Viagra tablet, and she wasn’t interested in holding his mah-jongg tile; that pretty little game block wasn’t her lucky charm.

“Darling,” Miriam began, as if no one had ever used that old-fashioned endearment before — as if no one had ever touched a man’s penis from inside his pants pocket.

In Juan Diego’s case, in fact, no one had touched his penis in this way, though he’d written a scene where such a thing happened; it unnerved him, a little, that he’d already imagined it exactly this way.

It also unnerved him that he’d forgotten the context of a conversation he’d been having with Clark. Juan Diego couldn’t remember if this had happened after or before Miriam’s gecko-stabbing arrival at their dinner table. Clark had been elaborating about a recent writing student — she sounded to Juan Diego like a protégée-in-progress, though he could tell Josefa was skeptical about her. The writing student was a “poor Leslie”—a young woman who’d suffered, somehow, and of course there was a Catholic context. But lust has a way of distracting you, and suddenly Juan Diego was with Miriam.

Across the top of the troupe tent for the young-women acrobats was a ladder bolted horizontally to two parallel two-by-fours. The rungs were loops of rope; eighteen loops ran the length of the ladder. This was where the skywalkers practiced, because the ceiling of the acrobats’ troupe tent was only twelve feet high. Even if you were hanging by your feet from the loops of rope, head down, you couldn’t kill yourself if you fell off the ladder in the troupe tent.

In the main tent, where the circus acts were performed — well, that was another matter. The exact same ladder with the eighteen rope rungs was bolted across the top of the main tent, but if you fell from that ladder, you would fall eighty feet — without a net, you would die. There was no net for the skywalk at Circo de La Maravilla.

Whether you called it Circus of The Wonder or just The Wonder, an important part of the marvel was the no-net part. Whether you meant the circus (the whole circus) when you said La Maravilla, or if you meant the actual performer when you said The Wonder — meaning La Maravilla herself — what made her so special had a lot to do with the no-net part.