Avenue of Mysteries

25. Act 5, Scene 3

The way you remember or dream about your loved ones — the ones who are gone — you can’t stop their endings from jumping ahead of the rest of their stories. You don’t get to choose the chronology of what you dream, or the order of events in which you remember someone. In your mind — in your dreams, in your memories — sometimes the story begins with the epilogue.

In Iowa City, the first centralized HIV clinic — with nursing, social services, and teaching components — opened in June 1988. The clinic was held in Boyd Tower — it was called a tower, but it wasn’t. So-called Boyd Tower was a new five-story building tacked onto the old hospital. The Boyd Tower building was part of the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, and the HIV/AIDS clinic was on the first floor. It was called the Virology Clinic. At the time, there was some concern about advertising an HIV/AIDS clinic; there was a legitimate fear that both the patients and the hospital would be discriminated against.

HIV/AIDS was associated with sex and drugs; the disease was uncommon enough in Iowa that many locals thought of it as an “urban” problem. Among rural Iowans, some patients were exposed to both homophobia and xenophobia.

Juan Diego could remember when the Boyd Tower building was under construction, in the early seventies; there was (there still is) an actual tower, the Gothic tower on the north side of the old General Hospital. When Juan Diego first moved to Iowa City with Señor Eduardo and Flor, they lived in a duplex apartment in an overelaborate wedding cake of a Victorian house with a dilapidated front porch. Juan Diego’s bedroom and bathroom, and Señor Eduardo’s study, were on the second floor.

The rickety front porch was of little use to Edward Bonshaw or Flor, but Juan Diego remembered how he’d once loved it. From the porch, he could see the Iowa Field House (where the indoor pool was) and Kinnick Stadium. That decaying front porch on Melrose Avenue was a great location for student-watching, especially on those autumn Saturdays when the Iowa football team had a home game. (Señor Eduardo referred to Kinnick Stadium as the Roman Colosseum.)

Juan Diego wasn’t interested in American football. Out of curiosity, at first — and, later, to be with his friends — Juan Diego would occasionally go to the games in Kinnick Stadium, but what he really liked was sitting on the front porch of that old wooden house on Melrose, just watching all the young people go by. (“I suppose I like the sound of the band, from a distance — and imagining the cheerleaders, up close,” Flor would say, in her hard-to-read way.)

Juan Diego would be finishing his undergraduate studies at Iowa when the Boyd Tower building was completed; from their Melrose Avenue neighborhood, the distinctively different family of three could see the Gothic tower on the old General Hospital. (Flor later said she’d lost her fondness for that old tower.)

Flor was the first to have symptoms; when she was diagnosed, of course Edward Bonshaw would be tested. Flor and Señor Eduardo tested positive for HIV in 1989. That insidious pneumonia Pneumocystis carinii, PCP, was the earliest presentation of AIDS for both of them. That cough, the shortness of breath, the fever — Flor and the Iowan were put on Bactrim. (Edward Bonshaw would develop a rash from the Bactrim.)

Flor had been almost beautiful, but her face would be disfigured with Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions. A violet-colored lesion dangled from one of Flor’s eyebrows; another purplish lesion drooped from her nose. The latter was so prominent that Flor chose to hide it behind a bandanna. La Bandida, she called herself—“The Bandit.” But, hardest for her, Flor would lose the la (the feminine) in herself.

The estrogens she was taking had side effects — in particular, on her liver. Estrogens can cause a kind of hepatitis; the bile stagnates and builds. The itching that occurred with this condition drove Flor crazy. She had to stop the hormones, and her beard came back.

It seemed unfair to Juan Diego that Flor, who’d worked so hard to feminize herself, was not only dying of AIDS, but dying as a man. When Señor Eduardo’s hands were no longer steady enough to shave Flor’s face every day, Juan Diego did it. Yet, when he kissed her, Juan Diego could feel the beard on Flor’s cheek, and he could always see the shadow of a beard — even on her clean-shaven face.

Because they were an unconventional couple, Edward Bonshaw and Flor had wanted a young doctor for their primary care physician, and Flor had wanted a woman. Their pretty GP was Rosemary Stein; she’d insisted they be tested for HIV. In 1989, Dr. Stein was only thirty-three. “Dr. Rosemary”—as Flor was the first to call her — was Juan Diego’s age. At the Virology Clinic, Flor called the infectious disease doctors by their first names — their last names were a nightmare for a Mexican to say. Juan Diego and Edward Bonshaw—their English was perfect — also called the infectious disease doctors “Dr. Jack” and “Dr. Abraham,” just to make Flor feel like less of a foreigner.

The waiting room in the Virology Clinic was very bland — very 1960s. The carpets were brown; the chairs were single or two-person seats with dark, vinyl-coated cushions — Naugahyde, almost certainly. The check-in desk was a burnt-orange color with a light-colored Formica top. The wall facing the check-in desk was brick. Flor said she wished the Boyd Tower building had been nothing but brick, inside and out; it upset her to think that “shit like Naugahyde and Formica” would outlive her and her dear Eduardo.

Flor had infected the Iowan, everyone supposed, though only Flor ever said so. Edward Bonshaw never accused her; he would say nothing to incriminate her. They’d taken no official vows, but they had promised each other the usual. “In sickness and in health, for as long as we both shall live,” Señor Eduardo would devotedly recite to her, when Flor would accuse herself, confessing her occasional infidelities (those return trips to Oaxaca, the partying — if only for old times’ sake).

“What about ‘forsaking all others’—I agreed to that, didn’t I?” Flor would ask her dear Eduardo; she was intent on blaming herself.

But you couldn’t take the lawlessness out of Flor. Edward Bonshaw would remain true to her — Flor was the love of his life, he always said — as he remained true to his Scottish oath, the insane one about “yielding under no winds,” which, idiotically, he couldn’t refrain from repeating in the original Latin: haud ullis labentia ventis. (This was the same lunacy he’d proclaimed to Brother Pepe, the chicken feathers heralding his arrival in Oaxaca.)

In the Virology Clinic, the blood-drawing room was next to the waiting room, which the HIV-positive patients shared, most of the time, with the diabetics. The two groups of patients sat on opposite sides of the room. In the late eighties and early nineties, the number of AIDS patients grew, and many of the dying were visibly marked by their disease — and not only by their wasted bodies, or the Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions.

Edward Bonshaw was marked in his own way: he suffered from a seborrheic dermatitis; it was flaky and greasy-looking — mostly on his eyebrows and scalp, and on the sides of his nose. There were cheesy patches of Candida in Señor Eduardo’s mouth, coating his tongue white. The Candida would eventually go down the Iowan’s throat, into his esophagus; he had difficulty swallowing, and his lips were crusted white and fissured. In the end, Señor Eduardo could scarcely breathe, but he refused to go on a ventilator; he and Flor wanted to die together — at home, not in a hospital.

In the end, they fed Edward Bonshaw through a Hickman catheter; they told Juan Diego that the intravenous feeding was necessary for patients who couldn’t feed themselves. With the Candida, and the difficulty he had swallowing, Señor Eduardo was starving. A nurse — an older woman whose name was Mrs. Dodge — moved into what had been Juan Diego’s bedroom on the second floor of that duplex apartment on Melrose. For the most part, the nurse was there to take care of the catheter — Mrs. Dodge was the one who flushed out the Hickman with heparin solution.

“Otherwise, it will clot off,” Mrs. Dodge told Juan Diego, who had no idea what she meant; he didn’t ask her to explain.

The Hickman catheter dangled from the right side of Edward Bonshaw’s chest, where it had been inserted under his clavicle; it tunneled under the skin a few inches above his nipple, and entered the subclavian vein below the collarbone. Juan Diego couldn’t get used to seeing it; he would write about the Hickman catheter in one of his novels, where a number of his characters died of AIDS — some of them with the AIDS-associated, opportunistic illnesses that had afflicted Señor Eduardo and Flor. But the AIDS victims in that novel were not even remotely “based on” the Iowan or La Loca, The Queen — La Bandida, as Flor called herself.

In his own way, Juan Diego wrote about what happened to Flor and Edward Bonshaw, but he would not once write about them. The dump reader was self-taught, and had taught himself how to imagine, too. Maybe the self-taught part was where the dump reader got the idea that a fiction writer created characters, and that you made up a story — you didn’t just write about the people you knew, or tell your own story, and call it a novel.

There were too many contradictions and unknowns about the real people in Juan Diego’s life — real people were too incomplete to work as characters in a novel, Juan Diego thought. And he could make up a better story than what had happened to him; the dump reader believed his own story was “too incomplete” for a novel.

When he’d taught creative writing, Juan Diego had not once told his students how they should write; he would never have suggested to his fiction-writing students that they should write a novel the way he wrote his. The dump reader wasn’t a proselytizer. The problem is that many young writers are searching for a method; young writers are vulnerable to picking up a writing process and believing there is a one-and-only way to write. (Write what you know! Only imagine! It’s all about the language!)

Take Clark French. Some students stay students all their lives: they seek and find generalizations they can live by; as writers, they want the way they write to be established as a universal and ironclad code. (Using autobiography as the basis for fiction produces drivel! Using your imagination is faking it!) Clark maintained that Juan Diego was “on the antiautobiographical side.”

Juan Diego had tried not to be drawn into taking sides.

Clark insisted that Juan Diego was “on the imagination’s side”; Juan Diego was a “fabler, not a memoirist,” Clark said.

Maybe so, Juan Diego thought, but he didn’t want to be on anyone’s side. Clark French had turned writing fiction into a polemical competition.

Juan Diego had tried to de-polemicize the conversation; he’d attempted to talk about the literature he loved, the writers who’d made him wish he could be a writer — not because he saw these writers as standard-bearers of a way to write, but simply because he loved what they’d written.

No surprise: the library of English-language literature at Lost Children was limited and generally not newer than the nineteenth-century models of the form, including the novels Father Alfonso and Father Octavio had designated for destruction in the hellfires of the basurero and those essential novels Brother Pepe or Edward Bonshaw had saved for the library’s small collection of fiction. These novels were what had inspired Juan Diego to be a novelist.

That life was not fair to dogs had prepared the dump reader for Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Those matronly churchwomen gossiping about what they would do to Hester — brand her forehead with a hot iron, or kill her, rather than merely mark her clothes — helped prepare Juan Diego for what vestiges of American Puritanism he would encounter after moving to Iowa.

Melville’s Moby-Dick—most notably, Queequeg’s “coffin life-buoy”—would teach Juan Diego that foreshadowing is the storytelling companion of fate.

As for fate, and how you can’t escape yours, there was Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. Michael Henchard, drunk, sells his wife and daughter to a sailor in the first chapter. Henchard can never atone for what he does; in his will, Henchard requests “that no man remember me.” (Not exactly a redemption story. Clark French hated Hardy.)

And then there was Dickens — Juan Diego would cite the “Tempest” chapter from David Copperfield. At the end of that chapter, Steerforth’s body washes ashore and Copperfield is confronted with the remains of his former childhood idol and sly tormentor — the quintessential older boy you meet at school, your predestined abuser. Nothing more was necessary to say about Steerforth’s body on the beach, where he lies “among the ruins of the home he had wronged.” But Dickens, being Dickens, gives Copperfield more to say: “I saw him lying with his head upon his arm, as I had often seen him lie at school.”

“What more did I need to know about writing novels than what I learned from those four?” Juan Diego had asked his writing students — Clark French included.

And when Juan Diego presented those four nineteenth-century novelists to his writing students—“my teachers,” he called Hawthorne, Melville, Hardy, and Dickens — he never failed to mention Shakespeare, too. Señor Eduardo had shown Juan Diego that long before anyone wrote a novel, Shakespeare understood and appreciated the importance of plot.

Shakespeare was a mistake to mention around Clark French; Clark was the Bard of Avon’s self-appointed bodyguard. Coming, as Clark did, from the only-imagine school of thought — well, you can imagine how Clark had a bug up his ass about those infidels who believed someone else wrote Shakespeare.

And any thoughts of Shakespeare brought Juan Diego back to Edward Bonshaw and what had happened to him and Flor.

• • •

AT THE BEGINNING, WHEN Señor Eduardo and Flor were still strong enough — when they could carry things and deal with stairs, and Flor was still driving — they made their own way to the first-floor clinic in the Boyd Tower building; it was only a third of a mile from their house on Melrose. When everything became more difficult, Juan Diego (or Mrs. Dodge) would take Flor and Edward Bonshaw across Melrose Avenue; Flor was still walking, but Señor Eduardo was in a wheelchair.

In the early to mid-1990s — before the number of deaths from AIDS plummeted (due to the new meds) and the number of HIV-positive patients in the Virology Clinic began to increase — the number of patients visiting the clinic stabilized, at about two hundred a year. Many of the patients sat in their partners’ laps in the waiting room; there was the occasional conversation about gay bars and drag shows, and there were a few flamboyant dressers — flamboyant for Iowa.

Not Flor — not anymore. Flor would lose most of her womanly appearance, and though she continued to dress as a woman, she dressed modestly; she was aware that her allure had dimmed, if not in Señor Eduardo’s adoring eyes. They held hands in the waiting room. In Iowa City, at least in Juan Diego’s memory, the only place Flor and Edward Bonshaw were publicly demonstrative of their affection for each other was in the waiting room of the HIV/AIDS clinic in the Boyd Tower building.

One of the AIDS patients was a young man from a Mennonite family who’d originally disowned him; they would later reclaim him. He brought vegetables from his garden to the waiting room; he handed out tomatoes to the clinic staff. The young Mennonite wore cowboy boots and a pink cowboy hat.

One of the times when Mrs. Dodge took Flor and Edward Bonshaw to the clinic, Flor said something funny to the young gardener in the pink cowboy hat.

Flor always wore her bandanna in public. La Bandida said: “You know what, cowboy? If you’ve got a couple of horses, you and I could rob a train or stick up a bank.”

Mrs. Dodge told Juan Diego that “the whole waiting room laughed”—even she laughed, she said. And the Mennonite in the pink cowboy hat went right along with the joke.

“I know North Liberty pretty well,” the cowboy said. “There’s a library that sure would be easy to knock off. You know North Liberty?” the cowboy asked Flor.

“No, I don’t,” Flor told him, “and I’m not interested in sticking up a library — I don’t read.”

This was true: Flor didn’t read. Her spoken vocabulary was very sharp — she was an excellent listener — but her Mexican accent hadn’t changed since 1970, and she never read anything. (Edward Bonshaw or Juan Diego would read aloud to her.)

It had been a comic interlude in the HIV/AIDS clinic, according to Mrs. Dodge, but Señor Eduardo was upset by Flor’s flirting with the cowboy gardener.

“I wasn’t flirting — I was making a joke,” Flor said.

Mrs. Dodge didn’t think that Flor had been flirting with the farmer. Later, when Juan Diego asked her about the episode, Mrs. Dodge said: “I think Flor is done with flirting.”

Mrs. Dodge was from Coralville. Dr. Rosemary had recommended her. The first time Edward Bonshaw said to the nurse, “In case you were wondering about my scar—” well, Mrs. Dodge knew all about it.

“Everyone in Coralville — that is, everyone of a certain age — knows that story,” Mrs. Dodge told Señor Eduardo. “The Bonshaw family was famous, because of what your father did to that poor dog.”

Señor Eduardo was relieved to hear that the Bonshaw family had not escaped scrutiny in Coralville — you can’t get away with shooting your dog in the driveway. “Of course,” Mrs. Dodge went on, “I was still a young girl when I heard the story, and it wasn’t about you or your scar,” she told Señor Eduardo. “The story was about Beatrice.”

“That’s entirely as it should be — she was the one who got shot. The story is about Beatrice,” Edward Bonshaw declared.

“Not to me — not to anyone who loves you, Eduardo,” Flor said to him.

“You were flirting with that farmer in the pink cowboy hat!” Señor Eduardo had exclaimed.

“I wasn’t flirting,” Flor had insisted. Later, Juan Diego would think that these accusations concerning Flor’s flirtation with the young Mennonite cowboy in the clinic came the closest to recriminations that Edward Bonshaw would ever make about Flor’s return trips to Oaxaca — and what one could only imagine were the nature of Flor’s flirtations there.

Of course, and not only because she was pretty, this was when Juan Diego made friends with Rosemary Stein. She was Señor Eduardo’s doctor, and Flor’s doctor. Why wouldn’t Dr. Rosemary become Juan Diego’s doctor, too?

Flor told Juan Diego that he should ask Dr. Rosemary to marry him, but Juan Diego would ask her to be his doctor first. It would be embarrassing to Juan Diego to remember, later, that his first visit to Dr. Stein’s office as a patient was driven by his imagination. He wasn’t sick; there was nothing the matter with him. But Juan Diego’s exposure to seeing those AIDS-associated, opportunistic illnesses had convinced him that he should be tested for HIV.

Dr. Stein assured him that he’d done nothing to contract the virus. Juan Diego had some difficulty remembering when he’d last had sex — he couldn’t even be sure about the year—but he knew it was with a woman and he’d used a condom.

“And you’re not an intravenous drug user?” Dr. Rosemary had asked him.

“No — never!”

Yet he’d imagined the white plaques of Candida encroaching on his teeth. (Juan Diego admitted to Rosemary that he’d woken up at night and peered into his mouth and looked down his throat with a handheld mirror and a flashlight.) In the Virology Clinic, Juan Diego had heard about those patients with cryptococcal meningitis. Dr. Abraham told him the meningitis was diagnosed by a lumbar puncture — it presented with fever and headache and confusion.

Juan Diego dreamed of these things incessantly; he woke up at night with the fully imagined symptoms. “Let Mrs. Dodge take Flor and Edward to the clinic. That’s why I found her for you — let Mrs. Dodge do it,” Dr. Stein said to Juan Diego. “You’re the one with an imagination — you’re a writer, aren’t you?” Dr. Rosemary had asked him. “Your imagination isn’t a water faucet; you can’t turn it off at the end of the day, when you stop writing. Your imagination just keeps going, doesn’t it?” Rosemary asked.

He should have asked her to marry him then, before someone else asked her. But by the time Juan Diego finally knew he should ask Rosemary to marry him, she’d already said yes to someone else.

If Flor had been alive, Juan Diego could hear what she would have told him. “Shit, you’re slow — I always forget how slow you are,” Flor would have said. (It would have been just like Flor to mention his dog-paddling.)

In the end, Dr. Abraham and Dr. Jack would experiment with sublingual morphine versus morphine elixir — Edward Bonshaw and Flor were willing guinea pigs. But, by then, Juan Diego was letting Mrs. Dodge do everything; he’d listened to Dr. Rosemary and yielded the nursing to the nurse.

It would soon be 1991; both Juan Diego and Rosemary would be thirty-five when Flor and Señor Eduardo died — Flor first, Edward Bonshaw following her in just a few days.

That area of Melrose Avenue would keep changing; those over-the-top, extravagant Victorian houses with the grand front porches had already begun to disappear. Like Flor, Juan Diego had once loved the view of the Gothic tower from the front porch of that wooden house on Melrose, but what was there to love about that old tower after you’d seen the Virology Clinic on the first floor of the Boyd Tower building — after you’d seen what was going on below that tower?

LONG BEFORE THE AIDS epidemic, when Juan Diego was in his high school years, he was starting to feel slightly less enthusiasm for his Melrose Avenue neighborhood in Iowa City. For a limper, for example, West High was a long walk west on Melrose; it was more than a mile and a half. And just past the golf course, near the intersection with Mormon Trek Boulevard, there was a bad dog. There were also bullies at the high school. They weren’t the sort of bullies Flor had told him to expect. Juan Diego was a black-haired, brown-skinned, Mexican-looking boy; yet racist types weren’t very prevalent in Iowa City — they were represented (in small numbers, in a few incidences) at West High, but they weren’t the worst of the bullies Juan Diego would be exposed to there.

Mostly, the juvenile slings and arrows aimed at Juan Diego were about Flor and Señor Eduardo — his not-a-real-woman mother and his “fag” father. “A couple of queer lovebirds,” one kid at West High had called Juan Diego’s adoptive parents. The boy baiting him was blond, with a pink face; Juan Diego didn’t know the kid’s name.

So the lion’s share of the bigotry Juan Diego would be exposed to was sexual, not racial, but he didn’t dare tell Flor or Edward Bonshaw about it. When the lovebirds could discern that Juan Diego was troubled, when Flor and Señor Eduardo would ask what was bothering him, Juan Diego didn’t want them to know that they were the problem. It was easier to say he’d had some anti-Mexican stuff to deal with — one of those south-of-the-border insinuations, or an outright slur of the kind Flor had warned him about.

As for the long limp to and from West High — all along Melrose — Juan Diego didn’t complain. It would have been worse to have Flor drive him; her dropping him off and picking him up would have inspired more sexual bullying. Besides, Juan Diego was already a grind in his high school years; he was one of those nonstop students with downcast eyes — a silent male who stoically endured high school, but who had every intention of thriving in his university years, which he did. (When a dump reader’s only job is going to school, he can be reasonably happy, not to mention successful.)

And Juan Diego didn’t drive — he never would. His right foot was at an awkward angle for stepping on the gas or the brake. Juan Diego would get his driving permit, but the first time he tried driving, with Flor beside him in the passenger seat — Flor was the only licensed driver in the family; Edward Bonshaw refused to drive — Juan Diego had managed to step on both the brake and the accelerator at the same time. (This was natural to do if your right foot was pointed toward two o’clock.)

“That’s it — we’re done,” Flor had told him. “Now there are two nondrivers in our family.”

And, of course, there’d been a kid or two at West High who thought it was intolerable that Juan Diego didn’t have a driver’s license; the not-driving part was more isolating than the limp or the Mexican-looking factor. His not being a driver marked Juan Diego as queer—queer in the same way that some of the kids at West High had identified Juan Diego’s adoptive parents.

“Does your mom, or whatever she calls herself, shave? I mean her face — her fucking upper lip,” the blond, pink-faced kid had said to Juan Diego.

Flor had the softest-looking trace of a mustache — not that this was the most masculine-looking thing about Flor, but it was apparent. In high school, most teenagers don’t want to stand out; they don’t want their parents to stand out, either. But, to his credit, Juan Diego was never embarrassed by Señor Eduardo and Flor. “It’s the best the hormones can do. You may have noticed that her breasts are pretty small. That’s the hormones, too — there’s a limit to what the estrogens can accomplish. That’s what I know,” Juan Diego told the blond boy.

The pink-faced kid wasn’t expecting the frankness of Juan Diego’s reply. It seemed that Juan Diego had won the moment, but bullies don’t take losing well.

The blond boy wasn’t done. “Here’s what I know,” he said. “Your so-called mom and dad are guys. One of them, the big one, dresses as a woman, but they both have dicks — that’s what I know.”

“They adopted me — they love me,” Juan Diego told the kid, because Señor Eduardo had told him he should always tell the truth. “And I love them — that’s what I know,” Juan Diego added.

You don’t ever exactly win these bullying episodes in high school, but if you survive them, you can win in the end — that was what Flor had always told Juan Diego, who would regret that he’d not been entirely honest with Flor or Señor Eduardo about how he’d been bullied, or why.

“She shaves her face — she doesn’t do such a good job on her fucking upper lip — whoever or whatever she is,” the pink-faced prick of a blond boy said to Juan Diego.

“She doesn’t shave,” Juan Diego said to him. He traced his finger over the contours of his own upper lip the way he’d seen Lupe do it when she’d been bugging Rivera. “The hint of a mustache is just always there. It’s the best the estrogens can accomplish — like I told you.”

Years later — when Flor got sick and she had to stop the estrogens, and her beard came back — when Juan Diego was shaving Flor’s face for her, he thought of that blond bully with the pink face. Maybe I’ll see him again one day, Juan Diego had thought to himself.

“See who again?” Flor had asked him. Flor was no mind reader; Juan Diego realized that he must have spoken his thoughts out loud.

“Oh, no one you know — I don’t even know his name. Just a kid I remember from high school,” Juan Diego had told her.

“There’s no one I ever want to see again — definitely not from high school,” Flor said to him. (Definitely not from Houston, either, Juan Diego would remember thinking as he shaved her, being careful not to say that thought out loud.)

When Flor and Señor Eduardo died, Juan Diego was teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop — in the MFA program, where he’d once been a student. After he left his second-floor bedroom in the Melrose Avenue duplex apartment, Juan Diego didn’t live on that side of the Iowa River again.

He’d had a number of boring apartments on his own, near the main campus and the Old Capitol — always close to downtown Iowa City, because he wasn’t a driver. He was a walker — well, better said, a limper. His friends — his colleagues and his students — all recognized that limp; they had no trouble spotting Juan Diego from a distance, or from a passing car.

Like most nondrivers, Juan Diego didn’t know the exact whereabouts of those places he’d been driven; if he hadn’t limped there, if he’d been only a passenger in someone else’s car, Juan Diego never could have told you where the place was, or how to get there.

Such was the case with the Bonshaw family plot, where Flor and Señor Eduardo would be buried — together, as they’d requested, and with Beatrice’s ashes, which Edward Bonshaw’s mother had kept for him. (Señor Eduardo had saved his dear dog’s ashes in a safe-deposit box in a bank in Iowa City.)

Mrs. Dodge, with her Coralville connections, had known exactly where the Bonshaw burial plot was — the cemetery wasn’t in Coralville, but it was “somewhere else on the outskirts of Iowa City.” (This was the way Edward Bonshaw himself had described it; Señor Eduardo wasn’t a driver, either.)

If it hadn’t been for Mrs. Dodge, Juan Diego wouldn’t have discovered where his beloved adoptive parents wanted to be buried. And after Mrs. Dodge died, it was always Dr. Rosemary who drove Juan Diego to the mystery cemetery. As they’d wished, Edward Bonshaw and Flor had shared one headstone, inscribed with the last speech in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, which Señor Eduardo had loved. Tragedies affecting young people were those that had moved the Iowan the most. (Flor would profess to having been less affected. Yet Flor had yielded to her dear Eduardo on the matter of their common-law name and the gravestone’s inscription.)

FLOR & EDWARD

BONSHAW

“A GLOOMING PEACE THIS

MORNING WITH IT BRINGS.”

ACT 5, SCENE 3

That was the way the headstone was marked. Juan Diego would question Señor Eduardo’s request. “Don’t you want, at least, to say ‘Shakespeare,’ if not which Shakespeare?” the dump reader had asked the Iowan.

“I don’t think it’s necessary. Those who know Shakespeare will know; those who don’t — well, they won’t,” Edward Bonshaw mused, as the Hickman catheter rose and fell on his bare chest. “And no one has to know that Beatrice’s ashes are buried with us, do they?”

Well, Juan Diego would know, wouldn’t he? As would Dr. Rosemary, who also knew where her writer friend’s standoffishness — concerning the commitment required in permanent relationships — came from. In Juan Diego’s writing, which Rosemary also knew, where everything came from truly mattered.

It’s true that Dr. Rosemary Stein didn’t really know the boy from Guerrero — not the dump-kid part, not the dump-reader tenacity inside him. But she had seen Juan Diego be tenacious; the first time, it had surprised her — he was such a small man, so slightly built, and there was his identifying limp.

They were having dinner in that restaurant they went to all the time; it was near the corner of Clinton and Burlington. Just Rosemary and her husband, Pete — who was also a doctor — and Juan Diego was with one of his writer colleagues. Was it Roy? Rosemary couldn’t remember. Maybe it was Ralph, not Roy. One of the visiting writers who drank a lot; he either said nothing or he never shut up. One of those passing-through writers-in-residence; Rosemary believed they were the most badly behaved.

It was 2000—no, it was 2001, because Rosemary had just said, “I can’t believe it’s been ten years, but they’ve been gone ten years. My God — that’s how long they’ve been gone.” (Dr. Rosemary had been talking about Flor and Edward Bonshaw.) Rosemary was a little drunk, Juan Diego thought, but that was okay — she wasn’t on call, and Pete was always the driver when they went anywhere together.

That was when Juan Diego had heard a man say something at another table; it was not what the man said that was special — it was the way he said it. “That’s what I know,” the man had said. There was something memorable about the intonation. The man’s voice was both familiar and confrontational — he was sounding a little defensive, too. He sounded like a last-word kind of guy.

He was a blond, red-faced man who was having dinner with his family; it seemed he’d been having an argument with his daughter, a girl about sixteen or seventeen, Juan Diego would have guessed. There was a son, too — he was only a little older than the daughter. The son looked to be about eighteen, tops; the boy was still in high school — Juan Diego would have bet on it.

“It’s one of the O’Donnells,” Pete said. “They’re all a little loud.”

“It’s Hugh O’Donnell,” Rosemary said. “He’s on the zoning board. He always wants to know when we’re building another hospital, so he can be opposed to it.”

But Juan Diego was watching the daughter. He knew and understood the beleaguered look on the young girl’s face. She’d been trying to defend the sweater she was wearing. Juan Diego had heard her say to her father: “It’s not ‘slutty-looking’—it’s what kids wear today!”

This was what had prompted the dismissive “That’s what I know” from her red-faced father. The blond man hadn’t changed much since high school, when he’d said those hurtful things to Juan Diego. When was it — twenty-eight or twenty-nine, almost thirty, years ago?

“Hugh, please—” Mrs. O’Donnell was saying.

“It’s not ‘slutty-looking,’ is it?” the girl asked her brother. She turned in her chair, trying to give the smirking boy a better look at her sweater. But the boy reminded Juan Diego of what Hugh O’Donnell used to look like — thinner, flaxen-blond with more pink in his face. (Hugh’s face was much redder now.) The boy’s smirk was the same as his dad’s; the girl knew better than to continue modeling her sweater for him — she turned away. Anyone could see that the smirking brother lacked the courage to take his sister’s side. The look he gave her was one Juan Diego had seen before — it was a no-sympathy look, as if the brother thought his sister would be slutty-looking in any sweater. In the boy’s condescending gaze, his sister looked like a slut, no matter what the poor girl wore.

“Please, both of you—” the wife and mother started to say, but Juan Diego got up from the table. Naturally, Hugh O’Donnell recognized the limp, though he’d not seen it — or Juan Diego — for almost thirty years.

“Hi — I’m Juan Diego Guerrero. I’m a writer — I went to school with your dad,” he said to the O’Donnell children.

“Hi—” the daughter started to say, but the son didn’t say anything, and when the girl glanced at her father, she stopped speaking.

Mrs. O’Donnell blurted out something, but she didn’t finish what she was going to say — she just stopped. “Oh, I know who you are. I’ve read—” was as far as she got. There must have been more than a little of that dump-reader tenacity in Juan Diego’s expression, enough to alert Mrs. O’Donnell to the fact that Juan Diego wasn’t interested in talking about his books — or to her. Not right now.

“I was your age,” Juan Diego said to Hugh O’Donnell’s son. “Maybe your dad and I were between your ages,” he said to the daughter. “He wasn’t very nice to me, either,” Juan Diego added to the girl, who seemed to be increasingly self-conscious — not necessarily about her much-maligned sweater.

“Hey, look here—” Hugh O’Donnell started to say, but Juan Diego just pointed to Hugh, not bothering to look at him.

“I’m not talking to you — I’ve heard what you have to say,” Juan Diego told him, looking only at the children. “I was adopted by two gay men,” Juan Diego continued — after all, he did know how to tell a story. “They were partners — they couldn’t be married, not here or in Mexico, where I came from. But they loved each other, and they loved me — they were my guardians, my adoptive parents. And I loved them, of course — the way kids are supposed to love their parents. You know how that is, don’t you?” Juan Diego asked Hugh O’Donnell’s kids, but the kids couldn’t answer him, and only the girl nodded her head — just a little. The boy was absolutely frozen.

“Anyway,” Juan Diego went on, “your dad was a bully. He said my mom shaved — he meant her face. He thought she did a poor job shaving her upper lip, but she didn’t shave. She was a man, of course — she dressed as a woman, and she took hormones. The hormones helped her to look a little more like a woman. Her breasts were kind of small, but she had breasts, and her beard had stopped growing, though she still had the faintest, softest-looking trace of a mustache on her upper lip. I told your dad it was the best the hormones could do — I said it was all the estrogens could accomplish — but your dad just kept being a bully.”

Hugh O’Donnell had stood up from the table, but he didn’t speak — he just stood there.

“You know what your dad said to me?” Juan Diego asked the O’Donnell kids. “He said: ‘Your so-called mom and dad are guys—they both have dicks.’ That’s what he said; I guess he’s just a ‘That’s what I know’ kind of guy. Isn’t that right, Hugh?” Juan Diego asked. It was the first time Juan Diego had looked at him. “Isn’t that what you said to me?”

Hugh O’Donnell went on standing there, not speaking. Juan Diego turned his attention back to the kids.

“They died of AIDS, ten years ago — they died here, in Iowa City,” Juan Diego told the children. “The one who wanted to be a woman — I had to shave her when she was dying, because she couldn’t take the estrogens and her beard grew back, and I could tell she was sad about how much she looked like a man. She died first. My ‘so-called dad’ died a few days later.”

Juan Diego paused. He knew, without looking at her, that Mrs. O’Donnell was crying; the daughter was crying, too. Juan Diego had always known that women were the real readers—women were the ones with the capacity to be affected by a story.

Looking at the implacable, red-faced father and his frozen, pink-faced son, Juan Diego would pause to wonder what did affect most men. What the fuck would ever affect most men? Juan Diego wondered.

“And that’s what I know,” Juan Diego told the O’Donnell kids. This time, they both nodded — albeit barely. When Juan Diego turned and limped his way back to his table, where he could see that Rosemary and Pete — and even that drunken writer — had been hanging on his every word, Juan Diego was aware that his limp was a little more pronounced than usual, as if he were consciously (or unconsciously) trying to draw more attention to it. It was almost as if Señor Eduardo and Flor were watching him — somehow, from somewhere — and they’d also been hanging on his every word.

In the car, with Pete behind the wheel, and the drunken writer in the passenger seat — because Roy or Ralph was a big guy, and a clumsy drunk, and they’d all agreed he needed the legroom — Juan Diego had sat in the backseat with Dr. Rosemary. Juan Diego had been prepared to limp home — he lived close enough to the corner of Clinton and Burlington to have walked — but Roy or Ralph needed a ride, and Rosemary had insisted that she and Pete drive Juan Diego where he was going.

“Well, that was a pretty good story — what I could understand of it,” the drunken writer said from the front seat.

“Yes, it was — very interesting,” was all Pete said.

“I got a little confused during the AIDS part,” Ralph or Roy soldiered on. “There were two guys — I got that, all right. One of them was a cross-dresser. Now that I think of it, it was the shaving part that was confusing — I got the AIDS part, I think,” Roy or Ralph went on.

“They’re dead — it was ten years ago. That’s all that matters,” Juan Diego said from the backseat.

“No, that’s not all,” Rosemary said. (He’d been right, Juan Diego would remember thinking: Rosemary was a little drunk — maybe more than a little, he thought.) In the backseat, Dr. Rosemary suddenly seized Juan Diego’s face in both her hands. “If I’d heard you say what you said to that asshole Hugh O’Donnell — I mean before I agreed to marry Pete — I would have asked you to marry me, Juan Diego,” Rosemary said.

Pete drove down Dubuque Street for a while; no one spoke. Roy or Ralph lived somewhere east of Dubuque Street, maybe on Bloomington or on Davenport — he couldn’t remember. To be kind: Roy or Ralph was distracted; he was trying to locate Dr. Rosemary in the backseat — he was fumbling around with the rearview mirror. Finally, he found her.

“Wow — I didn’t see that coming,” Roy or Ralph said to her. “I mean your asking Juan Diego to marry you!”

“I did — I saw it coming,” Pete said.

But Juan Diego, who was struck silent in the backseat, was as taken aback as Roy or Ralph — or whoever that itinerant writer was. (Juan Diego hadn’t seen that coming, either.)

“Here we are — I think we’re here. I wish I knew where I fucking lived,” Roy or Ralph was saying.

“I don’t really mean I would have married you,” Rosemary tried to say, revising herself — either for Pete’s benefit or for Juan Diego’s; perhaps she meant it for both of them. “I just meant I might have asked you,” she said. This seemed more reasonable.

Without looking at her, Juan Diego knew that Rosemary was crying — the way he’d known Hugh O’Donnell’s wife and daughter had been crying.

But so much had happened. All Juan Diego could say from the backseat was: “Women are the readers.” What he also knew, even then, would have been unsayable — namely, sometimes the story begins with the epilogue. But, really, how could he have said anything like that? It needed a context.

Sometimes Juan Diego would feel he was still sitting with Rosemary Stein in the semidarkness of the car’s backseat, the two of them not looking at each other, and not talking. And wasn’t this what that line from Shakespeare meant, and why Edward Bonshaw had been so attached to it? “A glooming peace this morning with it brings”—well, yes, and why would such darkness ever depart? Who can happily think of what else happened to Juliet and her Romeo, and not dwell on what happened to them at the end of their story?