John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

Juan Diego could tread water a long time, but he wasn’t a good swimmer. He liked to dog-paddle — that was his preferred stroke, a slow dog paddle (not that anyone could dog-paddle fast).

The dog paddle had posed a problem for the serious swimmers in the indoor pool at the old Iowa Field House. Juan Diego swam laps very slowly; he was known as the dog-paddler in the slow lane.

People were always suggesting swimming lessons for Juan Diego, but he’d had swimming lessons; the dog paddle was his choice. (The way dogs swam was good enough for Juan Diego; novels progressed slowly, too.)

“Leave the kid alone,” Flor once told a lifeguard at the pool. “Have you seen this boy walk ? His foot isn’t just crippled —it weighs a ton. Full of metal — you try doing more than a dog paddle with an anchor attached to one leg!”

“My foot isn’t full of metal,” Juan Diego told Flor, when they were on their way home from the Field House.

“It’s a good story, isn’t it?” was all Flor said. But she wouldn’t tell her story. The pony on that postcard was just a glimpse of Flor’s story, the only view of what happened to her in Houston that Edward Bonshaw would ever have.

“Hi, Mister!” Consuelo kept calling from the beach. Pedro had waded into the shallow water; the boy was being extra cautious. Pedro seemed to be pointing at potentially deadly things on the bottom of the sea.

“Here’s one!” Pedro shouted to Consuelo. “There’s a whole bunch!” The little girl in the pigtails wouldn’t venture into the water.

The Bohol Sea did not seem menacing to Juan Diego, who was slowly dog-paddling his way to shore. He wasn’t worried about the killer gherkins, or whatever Pedro was worried about. Juan Diego was tired from treading water, which was the same as swimming to him, but he’d waited to come ashore until he could stop crying.

In truth, he hadn’t really stopped — he was just tired of how long he’d waited for the crying to end. In the shallow water, as soon as Juan Diego could touch the bottom, he decided to walk ashore the rest of the way — even though this meant he would resume limping.

“Be careful, Mister — they’re everywhere,” Pedro said, but Juan Diego didn’t see the first sea urchin he stepped on (or the next one, or the one after that). The hard-shelled, spine-covered spheres were no fun to step on, even if you didn’t limp.

“Too bad about the sea urchins, Mister,” Consuelo was saying, as Juan Diego came ashore on his hands and knees — both his feet were tingling from the painful spines.

Pedro had run off to fetch Dr. Quintana. “It’s okay to cry, Mister — the sea urchins really hurt,” Consuelo was saying; she sat beside him on the beach. His tears, maybe exacerbated by such a long time in the salt water, just kept coming. He could see Josefa and Pedro running toward him along the beach; Clark French lagged behind — he ran like a freight train, slow to start but steadily gaining speed.

Juan Diego’s shoulders were shaking — too much treading water, perhaps; the dog paddle is a lot of work for your arms and shoulders. The little girl in pigtails put her small, thin arms around him.

“It’s okay, Mister,” Consuelo tried to comfort him. “Here comes the doctor — you’re going to be okay.”

What is it with me and women doctors? Juan Diego was wondering. (He should have married one, he knew.)

“Mister has been stepping on sea urchins,” Consuelo explained to Dr. Quintana, who knelt in the sand beside Juan Diego. “Of course, he’s got other things to cry about,” the little girl in the pigtails said.

“He misses stuff — geckos, the dump,” Pedro began to enumerate to Josefa.

“Don’t forget his sister,” Consuelo said to Pedro. “A lion killed Mister’s sister,” Consuelo explained to Dr. Quintana, in case the doctor hadn’t heard the litany of woes Juan Diego was suffering — and now, on top of everything, he’d stepped on sea urchins!

Dr. Quintana was gently touching Juan Diego’s feet. “The trouble with sea urchins is their spines are movable — they don’t get you just once,” the doctor was saying.

“It’s not my feet — it’s not the sea urchins,” Juan Diego tried to tell her quietly.

“What?” Josefa asked; she bent her head closer, to hear him.

“I should have married a woman doctor,” he whispered to Josefa; Clark and the children couldn’t hear him.

“Why didn’t you?” Dr. Quintana asked, smiling at him.

“I didn’t ask her soon enough — she said yes to someone else,” Juan Diego said softly.

How could he have told Dr. Quintana more? It was impossible to tell Clark French’s wife why he’d never married — why a lifetime partner, a companion till the end, was a friend he’d never made. Not even if Clark and the children hadn’t been there on the beach could Juan Diego have told Josefa why he’d not dared to emulate the match Edward Bonshaw had made with Flor.

Casual acquaintances, even colleagues and close friends — including those students he’d befriended, and had seen a bit of socially (not only in class or in teacher-writer conferences) — all presumed that Juan Diego’s adoptive parents had been a couple no one would have (or could have) sought to emulate. They’d been so queer —in every sense of the word! Surely, this was the commonplace version of why Juan Diego had never married anyone, why he’d not even made an effort to find that companion for life, the one so many people believed they wanted. (Surely, Juan Diego knew, this was the story Clark French would have imparted to his wife about his former teacher — an obdurate bachelor, in Clark’s eyes, and a godless secular humanist.)

Only Dr. Stein — dear Dr. Rosemary! — understood, Juan Diego believed. Dr. Rosemary Stein didn’t know everything about her friend and patient; she didn’t understand dump kids — she hadn’t been there when he’d been a child and a young adolescent. But Rosemary did know Juan Diego when he’d lost Señor Eduardo and Flor; Dr. Stein had been their doctor, too.

Dr. Rosemary, as Juan Diego thought of her — most fondly — knew why he’d never married. It wasn’t because Flor and Edward Bonshaw had been a queer couple; it was because those two had loved each other so much that Juan Diego couldn’t imagine ever finding a partnership as good as theirs — they’d been inimitable. And he’d loved them not only as parents, not to mention as “adoptive” parents. He’d loved them as the best (meaning, the most unattainable) couple he ever knew.

“He misses stuff,” Pedro had said, citing geckos and the dump.

“Don’t forget his sister,” Consuelo had said.

More than a lion had killed Lupe, Juan Diego knew, but he could no more say that — to any of them, there on the beach — than he could have become a skywalker. Juan Diego could no more have saved his sister than he could have become The Wonder.

And if he had asked Dr. Rosemary Stein to marry him — that is, before she’d said yes to someone else — who knows if she would have accepted the dump reader’s proposal?

“How was the swimming?” Clark French asked his former teacher. “I mean before the sea urchins,” Clark needlessly explained.

“Mister likes to bob around in one place,” Consuelo answered. “Don’t you, Mister?” the little girl in pigtails asked.

“Yes, I do, Consuelo,” Juan Diego told her.

“Treading water, a little dog-paddling — it’s a lot like writing a novel, Clark,” the dump reader told his former student. “It feels like you’re going a long way, because it’s a lot of work, but you’re basically covering old ground — you’re hanging out in familiar territory.”