Avenue of Mysteries

3. Mother and Daughter

The handicapped man had not anticipated that he would be stranded at JFK for twenty-seven hours. Cathay Pacific sent him to the first-class lounge of British Airways. This was more comfortable than what the economy-fare passengers had to deal with — the concessionaires ran out of food, and the public toilets were not properly attended to — but the Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong, scheduled to depart at 9:15 A.M. on December 27, did not take off till noon of the following day, and Juan Diego had packed his beta-blockers with his toilet articles in his checked bag. The flight to Hong Kong was some sixteen hours. Juan Diego would have to do without his medication for more than forty-three hours; he would go without the beta-blockers for almost two days. (As a rule, dump kids don’t panic.)

While Juan Diego considered calling Rosemary to ask her if he was at risk being without his medication for an unknown period of time, he didn’t do it. He remembered what Dr. Stein had said: that if he ever had to go off the beta-blockers, for any reason, he should stop taking them gradually. (Inexplicably, the gradually part made him think there was nothing risky about stopping or restarting the beta-blockers.)

Juan Diego knew he would get scant sleep as he waited in the British Airways lounge at JFK; he looked forward to catching up on his sleep whenever he eventually boarded the sixteen-hour flight to Hong Kong. Juan Diego didn’t call Dr. Stein because he was looking forward to having a break from the beta-blockers. With any luck, he might have one of his old dreams; his all-important childhood memories might come back to him — chronologically, he hoped. (As a novelist, he was a little fussy about chronological order, a tad old-fashioned.)

British Airways did its best to make the crippled man comfortable; the other first-class passengers were aware of Juan Diego’s limp and the misshapen, custom-made shoe on his damaged foot. Everyone was very understanding; though there were not enough chairs for all the stranded passengers in the first-class lounge, no one complained that Juan Diego had put two chairs together — he’d made a kind of couch for himself, so he could elevate that tragic-looking foot.

Yes, the limp made Juan Diego look older than he was — he looked at least sixty-four, not fifty-four. And there was something else: more than a hint of resignation gave him a faraway expression, as if the lion’s share of excitement in Juan Diego’s life had resided in his distant childhood and early adolescence. After all, he’d outlived everyone he’d loved — clearly, this had aged him.

His hair was still black; only if you were near him — and you had to look closely — could you see the intermittent flecks of gray. He’d not lost any hair, but it was long, which gave him the commingled appearance of a rebellious teenager and an aging hippie — that is, of someone who was unfashionable on purpose. His dark-brown eyes were almost as black as his hair; he was still a handsome man, and a slender one, yet he made an “old” impression. Women — younger women, especially — offered him help he didn’t necessarily need.

An aura of fate had marked him. He moved slowly; he often appeared to be lost in thought, or in his imagination — as if his future were predetermined, and he wasn’t resisting it.

Juan Diego believed he was not so famous a writer that many of his readers recognized him, and strangers to his work never did. Only those who could be called his diehard fans found him. They were mostly women — older women, certainly, but many college girls were among his books’ ardent readers.

Juan Diego didn’t believe it was the subject of his novels that attracted women readers; he always said that women were the most enthusiastic readers of fiction, not men. He would offer no theory to explain this; he’d simply observed that this was true.

Juan Diego wasn’t a theorizer; he was not big on speculation. He was even a little bit famous for what he’d said in an interview when a journalist had asked him to speculate on a certain shopworn subject.

“I don’t speculate,” Juan Diego had said. “I just observe; I only describe.” Naturally, the journalist — a persistent young fellow — had pressed the point. Journalists like speculation; they’re always asking novelists if the novel is dead, or dying. Remember: Juan Diego had snatched the first novels he read from the hellfires of the basurero; he’d burned his hands saving books. You don’t ask a dump reader if the novel is dead, or dying.

“Do you know any women?” Juan Diego had asked this young man. “I mean women who read,” he said, his voice rising. “You should talk to women — ask them what they read!” (By now, Juan Diego was shouting.) “The day women stop reading — that’s the day the novel dies!” the dump reader cried.

Writers who have any audience have more readers than they know. Juan Diego was more famous than he thought.

THIS TIME, IT WAS a mother and her daughter who discovered him — as only his most passionate readers did. “I would have recognized you anywhere. You couldn’t disguise yourself from me if you tried,” the rather aggressive mother said to Juan Diego. The way she spoke to him — well, it was almost as if he had tried to disguise himself. And where had he seen such a penetrating stare before? Without a doubt, that towering and most imposing statue of the Virgin Mary—she had such a stare. It was a way the Blessed Virgin had of looking down at you, but Juan Diego could never tell if Mother Mary’s expression was pitying or unforgiving. (He couldn’t be sure in the case of this elegant-looking mother who was one of his readers, either.)

As for the daughter who was also his fan, Juan Diego thought she was somewhat easier to read. “I would have recognized you in the dark — if you just spoke to me, even less than a complete sentence, I would have known who you were,” the daughter told him a little too earnestly. “Your voice,” she said, shivering — as if she couldn’t continue. She was young and dramatic, but pretty in a kind of peasant way; there was a thickness in her wrists and ankles, a sturdiness in her hips and low-slung breasts. Her skin was darker than her mother’s; her facial features were more prominent, or less refined, and — especially in her manner of speaking — she was more blunt, more coarse.

“More like one of us,” Juan Diego could imagine his sister saying. (More indigenous-looking, Lupe would have thought.)

It unnerved Juan Diego that he suddenly imagined what tarted-up replications the virgin shop in Oaxaca might have made of this mother and her daughter. That Christmas-parties place would have exaggerated the slightly slipshod way the daughter dressed, but was it her clothes that looked a little slovenly or the careless way she wore them?

Juan Diego thought the virgin shop would have given the daughter’s life-size mannequin a sluttish posture — a come-on appearance, as if the fullness of her hips couldn’t possibly be contained. (Or was this Juan Diego’s fantasizing about the daughter?)

That virgin shop, which the dump kids occasionally called The Girl, would have failed to come up with a mannequin to match the mother of this twosome. The mother had an air of sophistication and entitlement about her, and her beauty was the classical kind; the mother radiated expensiveness and superiority — her sense of privilege seemed inborn. If this mother, who was only momentarily delayed in a first-class lounge at JFK, had been the Virgin Mary, no one would have sent her to the manger; someone would have made room for her at the inn. That vulgar virgin shop on Independencia couldn’t conceivably have replicated her; this mother was immune to being stereotyped — not even The Girl could have fabricated a sex-doll match for her. The mother was more “one of a kind” than she was “one of us.” There was no place for the mother in the Christmas-parties store, Juan Diego decided; she would never be for sale. And you wouldn’t want to bring her home — at least not to entertain your guests or amuse the children. No, Juan Diego thought — you would want to keep her, all for yourself.

Somehow, without his saying to this mother and her daughter a word about his feelings for them, the two women seemed to know everything about Juan Diego. And this mother and daughter, despite their apparent differences, worked together; they were a team. They quickly inserted themselves into what they believed was the utter helplessness of Juan Diego’s situation, if not his very existence. Juan Diego was tired; without hesitation, he blamed the beta-blockers. He didn’t put up much of a fight. Basically, he let these women take charge of him. Besides, this had happened after they’d been waiting for twenty-four hours in the first-class lounge of British Airways.

Juan Diego’s well-meaning colleagues, all close friends, had scheduled a two-day layover for him in Hong Kong; now it appeared that he would have only one night in Hong Kong before he had to catch an early-morning connection to Manila.

“Where are you staying in Hong Kong?” the mother, whose name was Miriam, asked him. She didn’t beat around the bush; in keeping with her penetrating stare, she was very direct.

“Where were you staying?” the daughter, whose name was Dorothy, said. You could see little of her mother in her, Juan Diego had noticed; Dorothy was as aggressive as Miriam, but not nearly as beautiful.

What was it about Juan Diego that made more aggressive people feel they had to manage his business for him? Clark French, the former student, had inserted himself into Juan Diego’s trip to the Philippines. Now two women — two strangers — were taking charge of the writer’s arrangements in Hong Kong.

Juan Diego must have looked to this mother and her daughter like a novice traveler, because he had to consult his written itinerary to learn the name of his Hong Kong hotel. While he was still fumbling in the pocket of his jacket for his reading glasses, the mother snatched the itinerary out of his hands. “Dear God — you don’t want to be at the InterContinental Grand Stanford Hong Kong,” Miriam told him. “It’s an hour’s drive from the airport.”

“It’s actually in Kowloon,” Dorothy said.

“There’s an adequate hotel at the airport,” Miriam said. “You should stay there.”

“We always stay there,” Dorothy said, sighing.

Juan Diego started to say that he would need to cancel one reservation and make another — that was as far as he got.

“Done,” the daughter said; her fingers were flying over the keyboard of her laptop. It was a marvel to Juan Diego how young people always seemed to be using their laptops, which were never plugged in. Why don’t their batteries run down? he was thinking. (And when they weren’t glued to their laptops, they were madly texting on their cell phones, which never seemed to need recharging!)

“I thought it was a long way to bring my laptop,” Juan Diego said to the mother, who looked at him in a mostly pitying way. “I left mine at home,” he said sheepishly to the hardworking daughter, who’d not once looked up from her constantly changing computer screen.

“I’m canceling your harbor-view room — two nights at the InterContinental Grand Stanford, gone. I don’t like that place, anyway,” Dorothy said. “And I’m getting you a king suite at the Regal Airport Hotel at Hong Kong International. It’s not as totally tasteless as its name — all the Christmas shit notwithstanding.”

“One night, Dorothy,” her mother reminded the young woman.

“Got it,” Dorothy said. “There’s one thing about the Regal: the way you turn the lights on and off is weird,” she told Juan Diego.

“We’ll show him, Dorothy,” the mother said. “I’ve read everything of yours — every word you’ve written,” Miriam told him, putting her hand on his wrist.

“I’ve read almost everything,” Dorothy said.

“There’s two you haven’t read, Dorothy,” her mom said.

“Two—big deal,” Dorothy said. “That’s almost everything, isn’t it?” the girl asked Juan Diego.

Of course he said, “Yes — almost.” He couldn’t tell if the young woman was flirting with him, or if her mother was; maybe neither of them was. The not-knowing part aged Juan Diego prematurely, too, but — to be fair — he’d been out of circulation for a while. It had been a long time since he’d dated anyone, not that he’d ever dated a lot, which two such worldly-looking travelers as this mother and daughter would have sized up about him.

Meeting him, did women think he looked wounded? Was he one of those men who’d lost the love of his life? What was it about Juan Diego that made women think he would never get over someone?

“I really like the sex in your novels,” Dorothy told him. “I like how you do it.”

“I like it better,” Miriam said to him, giving her daughter an all-knowing look. “I have the perspective to know what really bad sex is,” Dorothy’s mom told her.

“Please, Mother — don’t paint us a picture,” Dorothy said.

Miriam wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, Juan Diego had noticed. She was a tall, trim woman, tense and impatient-looking, in a pearl-gray pantsuit, which she wore over a silvery T-shirt. Her beige-blond hair was certainly not its natural color, and she’d probably had a little work done on her face — either shortly after a divorce, or a somewhat longer time after she’d become a widow. (Juan Diego didn’t intimately know about such things; he’d had no experience with women like Miriam, with the exception of his women readers or characters in novels.)

Dorothy, the daughter, who’d said she first read one of Juan Diego’s novels when it had been “assigned” to her — in college — looked as if she could still be of university age, or only a little older.

These women weren’t on their way to Manila—“not yet,” they’d told him — but Juan Diego didn’t remember where they were going after Hong Kong, if they’d said. Miriam hadn’t told him her full name, but her accent was European-sounding — the foreign part was what registered with Juan Diego. He wasn’t an expert on accents, of course — Miriam might have been an American.

As for Dorothy, she would never be as beautiful as her mother, but the girl had a sullen, neglected prettiness — of the kind that a younger woman who’s a little too heavy can get away with for a few more years. (“Voluptuous” wouldn’t always be the word Dorothy brought to mind, Juan Diego knew — realizing, if only to himself, that he was writing about these efficient women, even as he allowed them to assist him.)

Whoever they were, and wherever they were going, this mother and daughter were veterans of traveling first class on Cathay Pacific. When Flight 841 to Hong Kong finally boarded, Miriam and Dorothy wouldn’t let the doll-faced flight attendant show Juan Diego how to put on Cathay Pacific’s one-piece pajamas or operate the cocoon-like sleeping capsule. Miriam marched him through the routine of how to put on the childish pajamas, and Dorothy — the technological wizard in the two-woman family — demonstrated the mechanics of the most comfortable bed Juan Diego had ever encountered on an airplane. The two women virtually tucked him in.

I think they were both flirting with me, Juan Diego mused as he was falling asleep — certainly the daughter was. Of course Dorothy reminded Juan Diego of students he’d known over the years; many of them, he knew, had only appeared to be flirting with him. There were young women that age — some solitary, tomboyish writers among them — who’d struck the older writer as knowing only two kinds of social behavior: they knew how to flirt, and they knew how to show irreversible contempt.

Juan Diego was almost asleep when he remembered that he was taking an unplanned break from the beta-blockers; he was already beginning to dream when a mildly troubling thought occurred to him, albeit briefly, before it drifted away. The thought was: I don’t really understand what happens when you stop and restart the beta-blockers. But the dream (or memory) was overtaking him, and he let it come.