Avenue of Mysteries

8. Two Condoms

What can you believe about a fiction writer’s dreams? In his dreams, obviously, Juan Diego felt free to imagine what Brother Pepe was thinking and feeling. But in whose point of view were Juan Diego’s dreams? (Not in Pepe’s.)

Juan Diego would have been happy to talk about this, and about other aspects of his resurgent dream life, though it seemed to him that now was not the time. Dorothy was playing with his penis; as the novelist had observed, the young woman brought to this postcoital play the same unwavering scrutiny she tended to bring to her cell phone and laptop. And Juan Diego wasn’t much inclined to male fantasies, not even as a fiction writer.

“I think you can do it again,” the naked girl was saying. “Okay — maybe not immediately, but pretty soon. Just look at this guy!” she exclaimed. She’d not been shy the first time, either.

At his age, Juan Diego didn’t do a lot of looking at his penis, but Dorothy had — from the start.

What happened to foreplay? Juan Diego had wondered. (Not that he’d had much experience with foreplay or afterplay.) He’d been trying to explain to Dorothy the Mexican glorification of Our Lady of Guadalupe. They’d been cuddled together in Juan Diego’s dimly lit bed, where they were barely able to hear the muted radio — as if from a faraway planet — when the brazen girl had pulled back the covers and taken a look at his adrenaline-charged, Viagra-enhanced erection.

“The problem began with Cortés, who conquered the Aztec Empire in 1521—Cortés was very Catholic,” Juan Diego was saying to the young woman. Dorothy lay with her warm face against his stomach, staring at his penis. “Cortés came from Extremadura; the Extremadura Guadalupe, I mean a statue of the virgin, was supposedly carved by Saint Luke, the evangelist. It was discovered in the fourteenth century,” Juan Diego continued, “when the virgin pulled one of her tricky apparitions — you know, an appearance before a humble-shepherd type. She commanded him to dig at the site of her apparition; the shepherd found the icon on the spot.”

“This is not an old man’s penis — this is one alert-looking guy you have here,” Dorothy said, not remotely apropos of the Guadalupe subject. Thus she’d begun; Dorothy didn’t waste time.

Juan Diego did his best to ignore her. “The Guadalupe of Extremadura was dark-skinned, not unlike most Mexicans,” Juan Diego pointed out to Dorothy, although it disconcerted him to be speaking to the back of the dark-haired young woman’s head. “Thus the Extremadura Guadalupe was the perfect proselytizing tool for those missionaries who followed Cortés to Mexico; Guadalupe became the ideal icon to convert the natives to Christianity.”

“Uh-huh,” Dorothy replied, slipping Juan Diego’s penis into her mouth.

Juan Diego was not, and had never been, a sexually confident man; lately, discounting his solo experiments with Viagra, he’d had no sexual relationships at all. Yet Juan Diego managed a cavalier response to Dorothy’s going down on him — he kept talking. It must have been the novelist in him: he could concentrate on the long haul; he’d never been much of a short-story writer.

“It was ten years after the Spanish conquest, on a hill outside Mexico City—” Juan Diego said to the young woman sucking his penis.

“Tepeyac,” Dorothy briefly interrupted herself; she pronounced the word perfectly before she slipped his cock back in her mouth. Juan Diego was nonplussed that such an unscholarly-looking girl knew the name of the place, but he tried to be as nonchalant about that as he was pretending to be about the blow job.

“It was an early morning in December 1531—” Juan Diego began again.

He felt a sharp nick from Dorothy’s teeth when the impulsive girl spoke quickly, not pausing to take his penis out of her mouth: “In the Spanish Empire, this particular morning was the Feast of the Immaculate Conception — no coincidence, huh?”

“Yes, however—” Juan Diego started to say, but he stopped himself. Dorothy was now sucking him in a way that suggested the young woman would not bother to interject her points of clarification again. The novelist struggled ahead. “The peasant Juan Diego, for whom I was named, saw a vision of a girl. She was surrounded by light; she was only fifteen or sixteen, but when she spoke to him, this peasant Juan Diego allegedly understood — from her words, or so we’re expected to believe — that this girl either was the Virgin Mary or was, somehow, like the Virgin Mary. And what she wanted was a church — a whole church, in her honor — to be built on the site where she appeared to him.”

To which, in probable disbelief, Dorothy grunted — or she made a similarly noncommittal sound, subject to interpretation. If Juan Diego had to guess, Dorothy knew the story, and, regarding the prospect of the Virgin Mary (or someone like her) appearing as a young teenager and expecting a hapless peasant to build a whole church for her, Dorothy’s nonverbal utterance conveyed more than a hint of sarcasm.

“What was the poor peasant to do?” Juan Diego asked — a rhetorical question if Dorothy had ever heard one, to judge by the young woman’s sudden snort. This rude snorting sound made Juan Diego—not the peasant, the other Juan Diego — flinch. The novelist no doubt feared another sharp nick from the busy girl’s teeth, but he was spared further pain — at least for the moment.

“Well, the peasant told his hard-to-believe story to the Spanish archbishop—” the novelist persevered.

“Zumárraga!” Dorothy managed to blurt out before she made a quickly passing gagging sound.

What an unusually well-informed young woman — she even knew the name of the doubting archbishop! Juan Diego was amazed.

Dorothy’s apparent grasp of these specific details momentarily deterred Juan Diego from continuing his version of Guadalupe’s history; he stopped short of the miraculous part of the story, either daunted by Dorothy’s knowledge of a subject that had long obsessed him or (at last!) distracted by the blow job.

“And what did that doubting archbishop do?” Juan Diego asked. He was testing Dorothy, and the gifted young woman didn’t disappoint him — except that she stopped sucking his cock. Her mouth released his penis with an audible pop, once more making him flinch.

“The asshole bishop told the peasant to prove it, as if that were the peasant’s job,” Dorothy said with disdain. She moved up Juan Diego’s body, sliding his penis between her breasts.

“And the poor peasant went back to the virgin and asked her for a sign, to prove her identity,” Juan Diego went on.

“As if that were her fucking job,” Dorothy said; she was all the while kissing his neck and nibbling the lobes of his ears.

At that point, it became confusing — that is, it’s impossible to delineate who said what to whom. After all, they both knew the story, and they were in a rush to move past the storytelling process. The virgin told Juan Diego (the peasant) to gather flowers; that there were flowers growing in December possibly stretches the boundaries of credibility — that the flowers the peasant found were Castilian roses, not native to Mexico, is more of a stretch.

But this was a miracle story, and by the time Dorothy or Juan Diego (the novelist) got to the part of the narrative where the peasant showed the flowers to the bishop — the virgin had arranged the roses in the peasant’s humble cloak — Dorothy had already produced a small marvel of her own. The enterprising young woman had brought forth her own condom, which she’d managed to put on Juan Diego while the two of them were talking; the girl was a multitasker, a quality the novelist had noticed and much admired in the young people he’d known in his life as a teacher.

The small circle of Juan Diego’s sexual contacts did not include a woman who carried her own condoms and was an expert at putting them on; nor had he ever encountered a girl who assumed the superior position with as much familiarity and assertiveness as Dorothy did.

Juan Diego’s inexperience with women — especially with young women of Dorothy’s aggressiveness and sexual sophistication — had left him at a loss for words. It’s doubtful that Juan Diego could have completed this essential part of the Guadalupe story — namely, what happened when the poor peasant opened his cape of roses for Bishop Zumárraga.

Dorothy, even as she settled herself so solidly on Juan Diego’s penis — her breasts, falling forward, brushed the novelist’s face — was the one who reiterated that part of the tale. When the flowers fell out of the cloak, there in their place, imprinted on the fabric of the poor peasant’s rustic cape, was the very image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, her hands clasped in prayer, her eyes modestly downcast.

“It wasn’t so much that the image of Guadalupe was imprinted on the stupid cloak,” the young woman, who was rocking back and forth on top of Juan Diego, was saying. “It was the virgin herself — I mean, the way she looked. That must have impressed the bishop.”

“What do you mean?” Juan Diego managed to say breathlessly. “How did Guadalupe look?”

Dorothy threw back her head and shook her hair; her breasts wobbled over him, and Juan Diego held his breath at the sight of a rivulet of sweat that ran between them.

“I mean her demeanor!” Dorothy panted. “Her hands were held in such a way that you couldn’t even see her boobs, if she actually had boobs; her eyes looked down, but you could still see a spooky light in her eyes. I don’t mean in the dark part—”

“The iris—” Juan Diego started to say.

“Not in her irises — in her pupils!” Dorothy gasped. “I mean in the center part — there was a creepy light in her eyes.”

“Yes!” Juan Diego grunted; he’d always thought so — he’d just not met anyone who agreed with him until now. “But Guadalupe was different — not just her dark skin,” he struggled to say; it was becoming harder and harder to breathe, with Dorothy bouncing on him. “She spoke Nahuatl, the local language — she was an Indian, not Spanish. If she was a virgin, she was an Aztec virgin.”

“What did the dipshit bishop care about that?” Dorothy asked him. “Guadalupe’s demeanor was so fucking modest, so Mary-like!” the hardworking young woman cried.

“¡Sí!” Juan Diego shouted. “Those manipulative Catholics—” he’d scarcely started to say, when Dorothy grabbed his shoulders with what felt like supernatural strength. She pulled his head and shoulders entirely off the bed — she rolled him over, on top of her.

Yet in that instant when she was still on top of him, and Juan Diego was looking up at her — into her eyes — he’d seen how Dorothy was regarding him.

What was it Lupe had said, so long ago? “If you want to worry about something, you ought to worry about how Guadalupe was looking at you. Like she’s still making up her mind about you. Guadalupe hasn’t decided about you,” the clairvoyant child had told him.

Wasn’t that how Dorothy was looking at Juan Diego in the half-second before she wrestled him over and pulled him on top of her? It had been, albeit briefly, a scary look. And now, beneath him, Dorothy resembled a woman possessed. Her head thrashed from side to side; her hips thrust against him with such a powerful, upward force that Juan Diego clung to her like a man in fear of falling. But falling where? The bed was huge; there was no danger of falling off it.

At first, he imagined that his nearness to an orgasm was responsible for how acute his hearing had become. Was that the muted radio he heard? The unknown language was both disturbing and strangely familiar. Don’t they speak Mandarin here? Juan Diego wondered, but there was nothing Chinese about the woman’s voice on the radio — nor was this voice muted. In the violence of their lovemaking, had one of Dorothy’s flailing hands — or her arm, or a leg — struck the panel of push-buttons on the night table? The woman on the radio, in whatever foreign language she was speaking, was — in fact—screaming.

This was when Juan Diego realized that the screaming woman was Dorothy. The radio had remained as muted as before; it was Dorothy’s orgasm that was amplified, above any expectation and beyond all reason.

There was an unwelcome confluence of Juan Diego’s next two thoughts: coincident to his strictly physical awareness that he was coming, in a more sensational manner than he’d ever done so before, was the conviction that he should definitely take two beta-blockers — at the earliest opportunity. But this unexamined idea had a brother (or a sister). Juan Diego thought he knew what language Dorothy was speaking, although it had been many years since he’d last heard someone speak it. What Dorothy was screaming, just before she came, sounded like Nahuatl — the language Our Lady of Guadalupe spoke, the language of the Aztecs. But Nahuatl belonged to a group of languages of central and southern Mexico and Central America. Why would — how could — Dorothy speak it?

“Aren’t you going to answer your phone?” Dorothy was calmly asking him in English. She’d arched her back, with both hands held behind her head on the pillow, to make it easier for Juan Diego to reach over her for the phone on the night table. Was it the dimness of the light that made Dorothy’s skin appear darker than it really was? Or was she truly more dark-skinned than Juan Diego had noticed until now?

He had to stretch to reach the ringing phone; first his chest, then his stomach, touched Dorothy’s breasts.

“It’s my mother, you know,” the languid young woman told him. “Knowing her, she called my room first.”

Maybe three beta-blockers, Juan Diego was thinking. “Hello?” he said sheepishly into the phone.

“Your ears must be ringing,” Miriam told him. “I’m surprised you could hear the phone.”

“I can hear you,” Juan Diego said, more loudly than he’d intended; his ears were still ringing.

“The entire floor, if not the whole hotel, must have heard Dorothy,” Miriam added. Juan Diego couldn’t think of what to say. “If my daughter has recovered her faculties of speech, I would like to speak with her. Or I could give you the message,” Miriam continued, “and you could tell Dorothy — when she is once again herself.”

“She is herself,” Juan Diego said, with an absurdly misplaced and exaggerated dignity. What a ridiculous thing this was to say about anyone! Why wouldn’t Dorothy be herself? Who else would the young woman in bed with him be? Juan Diego wondered, handing Dorothy the phone.

“What a surprise, Mother,” the young woman said laconically. Juan Diego couldn’t hear what Miriam was saying to her daughter, but he was aware that Dorothy didn’t say much.

Juan Diego thought this mother-daughter conversation might be an opportune moment for him to discreetly remove the condom, but when he rolled off Dorothy, and lay on his side with his back turned to her, he discovered — to his surprise — that the condom had already been removed.

It must be a generational thing — these young people today! Juan Diego marveled. Not only are they able to make a condom appear out of nowhere; they can, as quickly, make a condom disappear. But where is it? Juan Diego wondered. When he turned toward Dorothy, the girl wrapped one of her strong arms around him — hugging him to her breasts. He could see the foil wrapper on the night table — he’d not noticed it before — but the condom itself was nowhere to be seen.

Juan Diego, who’d once referred to himself as a “keeper of details” (he meant as a novelist), wondered where the used condom was: perhaps tucked under Dorothy’s pillow, or carelessly discarded in the disheveled bed. Possibly, disposing of a condom in this fashion was a generational thing, too.

“I am aware that he has an early-morning flight, Mother,” Dorothy was saying. “Yes, I know that’s why we’re staying here.”

I have to pee, Juan Diego was thinking, and I mustn’t forget to take two Lopressor pills the next time I’m in the bathroom. But when he tried to slip away from the dimly lit bed, Dorothy’s strong arm tightened around the back of his neck; his face was pressed against her nearest breast.

“But when is our flight?” he heard Dorothy ask her mother. “We aren’t going to Manila next, are we?” Either the prospect of Dorothy and Miriam being with him in Manila, or the feeling of Dorothy’s breast against his face, had given Juan Diego an erection. And then he heard Dorothy say: “You’re kidding, right? Since when are you ‘expected in’ Manila?”

Uh-oh, Juan Diego thought — but if my heart can handle being with a young woman like Dorothy, surely I can survive being in Manila with Miriam. (Or so he thought.)

“Well, he’s a gentleman, Mother — of course he didn’t call me,” Dorothy said, taking Juan Diego’s hand and holding it against her far breast. “Yes, I called him. Don’t tell me you didn’t think about it,” the caustic young woman said.

With one breast pressed into his face and another held fast in his inadequate hand, Juan Diego was reminded of something Lupe liked to say — often inappropriately. “No es buen momento para un terremoto,” Lupe used to say. “It’s not a good moment for an earthquake.”

“Fuck you, too,” Dorothy said, hanging up the phone. It may not have been a good moment for an earthquake, but it also wouldn’t have been an appropriate time for Juan Diego to go to the bathroom.

“There’s a dream I have,” he started to say, but Dorothy sat up suddenly, pushing him to his back.

“You don’t want to hear what I dream about — believe me,” she told him. She’d curled up, with her face on his belly but turned away from him; once again, Juan Diego was looking at the back of Dorothy’s dark-haired head. When Dorothy began playing with his penis, the novelist wondered what the right words were for this—this postcoital play, he imagined.

“I think you can do it again,” the naked girl was saying. “Okay — maybe not immediately, but pretty soon. Just look at this guy!” she exclaimed. He was as hard as the first time; the young woman didn’t hesitate to mount him.

Uh-oh, Juan Diego thought again. He was thinking only about how much he had to pee — he wasn’t speaking symbolically — when he said, “It’s not a good moment for an earthquake.”

“I’ll show you an earthquake,” Dorothy said.

THE NOVELIST AWOKE WITH the certain feeling that he had died and gone to Hell; he’d long suspected that if Hell existed (which he doubted), there would be bad music playing constantly — in the loudest possible competition with the news in a foreign language. When he woke up, that was the case, but Juan Diego was still in bed — in his brightly lit and blaring room at the Regal Airport Hotel. Every light in his room was on, at the brightest possible setting; the music on his radio and the news on his TV were cranked to the highest possible volume.

Had Dorothy done this as she was leaving? The young woman was gone, but had she bequeathed to Juan Diego her idea of an amusing wake-up call? Or perhaps the girl had left in a huff. Juan Diego couldn’t remember. He felt he’d been more soundly asleep than he’d ever been before, but for no longer than five minutes.

He hit the panel of push-buttons on his night table, hurting the heel of his right hand. The volume on the radio and TV were muted sufficiently for him to hear, and answer, the ringing phone: it was someone yelling at him in an Asian-sounding language (whatever “Asian-sounding” sounds like).

“I’m sorry — I don’t understand you,” Juan Diego replied in English. “Lo siento—” he started to say in Spanish, but the caller didn’t wait.

“You asswheel!” the Asian-sounding person shouted.

“I think you mean asshole—” the writer answered, but the angry caller had hung up. Only then did Juan Diego notice that the foil wrappers for his first and second condom were missing from his night table; Dorothy must have taken them with her, or thrown them in a wastebasket.

Juan Diego saw that the second condom was still on his penis; in fact, it was the only evidence he had that he’d once more “performed.” He had no memory past that moment when Dorothy had mounted him for another try. The earthquake she’d promised to show him was lost in time; if the young woman had again broken the sound barrier in a language that sounded like Nahuatl (but it couldn’t have been), that moment hadn’t been captured in memory or in a dream.

The novelist knew only that he’d been asleep and hadn’t dreamed — not even a nightmare. Juan Diego got out of bed and limped to the bathroom; that he didn’t have to pee forewarned him that he already had. He hoped he hadn’t peed in the bed, or in the condom, or on Dorothy, but he could see — when he got to the bathroom — that the cap on his Lopressor prescription was off. He must have taken one (or two) of the beta-blockers when he’d gotten up to pee.

But how long ago was that? Was it before or after Dorothy left? And had he taken only one Lopressor, as he’d been prescribed, or the two he’d imagined that he should have taken? Actually, of course, he should not have taken two. A double dose of beta-blockers wasn’t recommended as a remedy for missing a dose.

There was already a gray light outside, not to mention the blazing light in his hotel room; Juan Diego knew he had an early-morning flight. He’d not unpacked much, so he didn’t have a lot to do. He was, however, meticulous about how he packed the articles in his toilet kit; this time, he would put the Lopressor prescription (and the Viagra) in his carry-on.

He flushed the second condom down the toilet but was disconcerted that he couldn’t find the first. And when had he peed? At any moment, he imagined, Miriam would be calling him or knocking on his door, telling him it was time to go; hence he pulled back the top sheet and looked under the pillows, hoping to find the first condom. The damn thing was not in any of the wastebaskets — neither were the foil wrappers.

Juan Diego was standing under the shower when he saw the missing condom circling the drain at the bottom of the bathtub. It had unrolled itself and resembled a drowned slug; the only explanation had to be that the first condom he’d used with Dorothy had been stuck to his back, or his ass, or the back of one leg.

How embarrassing! He hoped Dorothy hadn’t seen it. If he’d skipped taking a shower, he might have boarded his flight to Manila with the used condom attached to him.

Unfortunately, he was still in the shower when the telephone rang. To men his age, Juan Diego knew — and surely the odds were worse for crippled men his age — bad accidents happened in bathtubs. Juan Diego turned off the shower and almost daintily stepped out of the tub. He was dripping wet and aware of how slippery the tiles on the bathroom floor could be, but when he grabbed a towel, the towel rod was reluctant to release it; Juan Diego tugged at the towel harder than he should have. The aluminum towel rod pulled free of the bathroom wall, bringing the porcelain mounting with it. The porcelain shattered on the floor, scattering the wet tiles with translucent ceramic chips; the aluminum rod hit Juan Diego in the face, cutting his forehead above one eyebrow. He limped, dripping, into the bedroom, holding the towel to his bleeding head.

“Hello!” he cried into the phone.

“Well, you’re awake — that’s a start,” Miriam told him. “Don’t let Dorothy go back to sleep.”

“Dorothy isn’t here,” Juan Diego said.

“She’s not answering her phone — she must be in the shower or something,” her mother said. “Are you ready to leave?”

“How about ten minutes?” Juan Diego asked.

“Make it eight, but shoot for five — I’ll come get you,” Miriam told him. “We’ll get Dorothy last — girls her age are the last to be ready,” her mother explained.

“I’ll be ready,” Juan Diego told her.

“Are you all right?” Miriam asked him.

“Yes, of course,” he replied.

“You sound different,” she told him, then hung up.

Different? Juan Diego wondered. He saw he’d bled on the exposed bedsheets; the water had dripped from his hair and diluted the blood from the cut on his forehead. The water had turned the blood a pinker color, and there was more blood than there should have been; it was a small cut, but it kept bleeding.

Yes, facial cuts bleed a lot — and he’d just stepped out of a hot shower. Juan Diego tried to wipe the blood off the bed with his towel, but the towel was bloodier than the bedsheets; he managed to make more of a mess. The side of the bed nearest the night table looked like the site of a ritualistic-sex slaying.

Juan Diego went back in the bathroom, where there was more blood and water — and the scattered ceramic chips from the shattered porcelain mounting. He put cold water on his face — on his forehead, especially, to try to stop the stupid cut from bleeding. Naturally, he had a virtual lifetime supply of Viagra, and his despised beta-blockers — and don’t forget the fussy pill-cutting device — but no Band-Aids. He stuck a wad of toilet paper on the profusely bleeding but tiny cut, temporarily stanching the flow of blood.

When Miriam knocked on his door, and he let her in, he was ready to go — except for putting the custom-made shoe on his crippled foot. That was always a little tricky; it could also be time-consuming.

“Here,” Miriam said, pushing him to the bed, “let me help you.” He sat at the foot of the bed while she put the special shoe on him; to his surprise, she seemed to know how to do it. In fact, she did it so expertly, and in such an offhand manner, that she was able to take a long look at the bloodstained bed while she secured the shoe on Juan Diego’s bad foot.

“Not a case of lost virginity, or a murder,” Miriam said, with a nod to all the blood and water on the horrifying bedsheets. “I guess it doesn’t matter what the maids will think.”

“I cut myself,” Juan Diego said. No doubt Miriam had noticed the blood-soaked toilet paper stuck to Juan Diego’s forehead, above his eyebrow.

“In all likelihood, not a shaving injury,” she said. He watched her walk from the bed to the closet, peering inside; then she opened and closed the drawers where there might have been forgotten clothes. “I always sweep a hotel room before I go—every hotel room,” she told him.

He couldn’t stop her from having a look in the bathroom, too. Juan Diego knew he’d not left any of his toilet articles there — certainly not his Viagra, or the Lopressor pills, which he’d transferred to his carry-on. As for the first condom, he remembered only now that he’d left it in the bathtub, where it would have been lying forlornly against the drain — as if signifying an act of pitiful lewdness.

“Hello, little condom,” he heard Miriam say, from the bathroom; Juan Diego was still sitting at the foot of the bloodstained bed. “I guess it doesn’t matter what the maids will think,” Miriam repeated, when she returned to the bedroom, “but don’t most people flush those things down the toilet?”

“Sí,” was all Juan Diego could say. Not much inclined to male fantasies, Juan Diego certainly wouldn’t have had this one.

I must have taken two Lopressor pills, he thought; he was feeling more diminished than usual. Maybe I can sleep on the plane, he thought; he knew it was too soon to speculate what might happen to his dreams. Juan Diego was so tired that he hoped his dream life might be momentarily curtailed by the beta-blockers.

“DID MY MOTHER HIT you?” Dorothy asked him when Juan Diego and Miriam got to the younger woman’s hotel room.

“I did not, Dorothy,” her mother said. Miriam had already begun her sweep of her daughter’s room. Dorothy was half dressed — a skirt, but only a bra, no blouse or sweater. Her open suitcase was on her bed. (The bag was big enough to hold a large dog.)

“A bathroom accident,” was all Juan Diego said, pointing to the toilet paper stuck to his forehead.

“I think it’s stopped bleeding,” Dorothy told him. She stood in her bra in front of him, picking at the toilet paper; when Dorothy plucked the paper off his forehead, the little cut began to bleed again — but not so much that she couldn’t stop the bleeding by wetting one index finger and pressing it above his eyebrow. “Just hold still,” the young woman said, while Juan Diego tried not to look at her fetching bra.

“For Christ’s sake, Dorothy — just get dressed,” her mother told her.

“And where are we going — I mean all of us?” the young woman asked her mom, not so innocently.

“First get dressed, then I’ll tell you,” Miriam said. “Oh, I almost forgot,” she said suddenly to Juan Diego. “I have your itinerary — you should have it back.” Juan Diego remembered that Miriam had taken his itinerary from him when they were still at JFK; he’d not noticed that she hadn’t returned it. Now Miriam handed it to him. “I made some notes on it — about where you should stay in Manila. Not this time — you’re not staying there long enough this first time for it to matter where you stay. But, trust me, you won’t like where you’re staying. When you come back to Manila — I mean the second time, when you’re there a little longer — I made some suggestions regarding where you should stay. And I made a copy of your itinerary for us,” Miriam told him, “so we can check on you.”

“For us?” Dorothy repeated suspiciously. “Or for you, do you mean?”

“For us—I said ‘we,’ Dorothy,” Miriam told her daughter.

“I’m going to see you again, I hope,” Juan Diego said suddenly. “Both of you,” he added — awkwardly, because he’d been looking only at Dorothy. The girl had put on a blouse, which she hadn’t begun to button; she was looking at her navel, then picking at it.

“Oh, you’ll see us again — definitely,” Miriam was saying to him, as she walked into the bathroom, continuing her sweep.

“Yeah, definitely,” Dorothy said, still attending to her belly button — she was still unbuttoned.

“Button it, Dorothy — the blouse has buttons, for Christ’s sake!” her mother was shouting from the bathroom.

“I haven’t left anything behind, Mother,” Dorothy called into the bathroom. The young woman had already buttoned herself up when she quickly kissed Juan Diego on his mouth. He saw she had a small envelope in her hand; it looked like the hotel stationery — it was that kind of envelope. Dorothy slipped the envelope into his jacket pocket. “Don’t read it now — read it later. It’s a love letter!” the girl whispered; her tongue darted between his lips.

“I’m surprised at you, Dorothy,” Miriam was saying, as she came back into the bedroom. “Juan Diego made more of a mess of his bathroom than you did of yours.”

“I live to surprise you, Mother,” the girl said.

Juan Diego smiled uncertainly at the two of them. He’d always imagined that his trip to the Philippines was a kind of sentimental journey — in the sense that it wasn’t a trip he was taking for himself. In truth, he’d long thought of it as a trip he was taking for someone else — a dead friend who’d wanted to make this journey but had died before he was able to go.

Yet the journey Juan Diego found himself taking was one that seemed inseparable from Miriam and Dorothy, and what was that trip but one he was taking solely for himself?

“And you — you two—are going exactly where?” Juan Diego ventured to ask this mother and her daughter, who were veteran world travelers (clearly).

“Oh, boy — have we got shit to do!” Dorothy said darkly.

“Obligations, Dorothy — your generation overuses the shit word,” Miriam told her.

“We’ll see you sooner than you think,” Dorothy told Juan Diego. “We end up in Manila, but not today,” the young woman said enigmatically.

“We’ll see you in Manila eventually,” Miriam explained to him a little impatiently. She added: “If not sooner.”

“If not sooner,” Dorothy repeated. “Yeah, yeah!”

The young woman abruptly lifted her suitcase off the bed before Juan Diego could help her; it was such a big, heavy-looking bag, but Dorothy lifted it as if it weighed nothing at all. It gave Juan Diego a pang to remember how the young woman had lifted him—his head and shoulders, entirely off the bed — before she’d rolled him over on top of her.

What a strong girl! was all Juan Diego thought about it. He turned to reach for his suitcase, not his carry-on, and was surprised to see that Miriam had taken it — together with her own big bag. What a strong mother! Juan Diego was thinking. He limped out into the hallway of the hotel, hurrying to keep up with the two women; he almost didn’t notice that he scarcely limped at all.

THIS WAS PECULIAR: IN the middle of a conversation he couldn’t remember, Juan Diego became separated from Miriam and Dorothy as they were going through the security check at Hong Kong International. He stepped toward the metal-detection device, looking back at Miriam, who was removing her shoes; he saw that her toenails were painted the same color as Dorothy’s. Then he passed through the metal-screening machine, and when he looked for the women again, both Miriam and Dorothy were gone; they had simply (or not so simply) disappeared.

Juan Diego asked one of the security guards about the two women he’d been traveling with. Where had they gone? But the security guard was an impatient young fellow, and he was distracted by an apparent problem with the metal-detection device.

“What women? Which women? I’ve seen an entire civilization of women — they must have moved on!” the guard told him.

Juan Diego thought he would try to text or call the women on his cell phone, but he’d forgotten to get their cell-phone numbers. He scrolled through his contacts, looking in vain for their nonexistent names. Nor had Miriam written her cell-phone number, or Dorothy’s, among the notes she’d made on his itinerary. Juan Diego saw just the names and addresses of alternative Manila hotels.

What a big deal Miriam had made about “the second time” he would be in Manila, Juan Diego was thinking, but he stopped thinking about it and made his slow way to the gate for his flight to the Philippines — his first time in Manila, he was thinking to himself (if he was thinking about it at all). He was preternaturally tired.

It must be the beta-blockers, Juan Diego was pondering. I guess I shouldn’t have taken two — if I did.

Even the green-tea muffin on the Cathay Pacific flight — it was a much smaller plane this time — was a little disappointing. It wasn’t such a heightened experience as eating that first green-tea muffin, when he and Miriam and Dorothy were arriving in Hong Kong.

Juan Diego was in the air when he remembered the love letter Dorothy had put in his jacket pocket. He took out the envelope and opened it.

“See you soon!” Dorothy had written on the Regal Airport Hotel stationery. She had pressed her lips — apparently, with fresh lipstick — to the page, leaving him the impression of her lips in intimate contact with the soon word. Her lipstick, he only now noticed, was the same color as her toenail polish — and her mother’s. Magenta, Juan Diego guessed he would call it.

He couldn’t miss seeing what was also in the envelope with the so-called love letter: the two empty foil wrappers, where the first and second condom had been. Maybe there was something wrong with the metal-screening machine at Hong Kong International, Juan Diego considered; the device hadn’t detected the foil condom wrappers. Definitely, Juan Diego was thinking, this wasn’t quite the sentimental journey he’d been expecting, but he was long on his way and there was no turning back now.