"Auntie Carmen is a pet person," Clark's wife interjected. "She cares more about fish than she does about people."
"Thank God the moray survived," Clark joined in. "I believe Morales lives with Auntie Carmen."
"It's a pity no one else does," Josefa said. "No one else would," the doctor added.
Below them, children were playing in the pool. "Lots of teenagers in this family--therefore, lots of free nannies for the little ones," Clark pointed out.
"Lots of children, period, in this family," the OB-GYN observed. "We're not all like Auntie Carmen."
"I'm taking a medication--it plays games with how I sleep," Juan Diego told them. "I'm taking beta-blockers," he said to Dr. Quintana. "As you probably know," he said to the doctor, "beta-blockers can have a depressing effect, or a diminishing one, on your real life--whereas the effect they have on your dream life is a little unpredictable."
Juan Diego didn't tell the doctor that he'd been playing games with the dosage of his Lopressor prescription. Probably he came across as being completely candid--that is, as far as Dr. Quintana and Clark French could tell.
Juan Diego's room was delightful; the sea-view windows had screens, and there was a ceiling fan--no air-conditioning would be necessary. The big bathroom was charming, and it had an outdoor shower with a pagoda-shaped bamboo roof over it.
"Take your time to freshen up before dinner," Josefa said to Juan Diego. "The jet lag--you know, the time difference--could also be influencing how the beta-blockers affect you," she told him.
"After the bigger kids take the little kids to bed, the real dinner-table conversation can get started," Clark was saying, squeezing his former teacher's shoulder.
Was this a warning not to bring up adult subjects around the children and the teenagers? Juan Diego was wondering. Juan Diego realized that Clark French, despite his bluff heartiness, was still uptight--a fortysomething prude. Clark's fellow MFA students at Iowa, if they could meet him now, would still be teasing him.
Abortion, Juan Diego knew, was illegal in the Philippines; he was curious to know what Dr. Quintana, the OB-GYN, thought about that. (And did she and her husband--Clark, the oh-so-good Catholic--feel the same about that?) Surely that was a dinner-table conversation he and Clark couldn't (or shouldn't) have before the children and the teenagers had trotted off to bed. Juan Diego hoped he might have this conversation with Dr. Quintana after Clark had trotted off to bed.
Juan Diego became so agitated thinking about this that he almost forgot about Miriam. Of course he hadn't entirely forgotten about her--not for a minute. He resisted taking an outdoor shower, not only because it was dark outside (there would be insects galore in the outdoor shower after nightfall) but because he might not hear the phone. He couldn't call Miriam--he didn't even know her last name!--nor could he call the front desk and ask to be connected to the "uninvited" woman. But if Miriam was the mystery woman, wouldn't she call him?
He elected to take a bath--no insects, and he could keep the door to the bedroom open; if she called, he could hear the phone. Naturally, he rushed his bath and there was no call. Juan Diego tried to remain calm; he plotted his next move with his medications. Not to confuse the issue, he returned the pill-cutting device to his toilet kit. The Viagra and the Lopressor prescriptions stood side by side on the counter, next to the bathroom sink.
No half-doses for me, Juan Diego decided. After dinner, he would take one whole Lopressor pill--the right amount, in other words--but not if he was with Miriam. Skipping a dose hadn't hurt him before, and a surge of adrenaline could be beneficial--even necessary--with Miriam.
The Viagra, he thought, presented him with a more complicated decision. For his rendezvous with Dorothy, Juan Diego had traded his usual half-dose for a whole one; for Miriam, he imagined, a half-dose wouldn't suffice. The complicated part was when to take it. The Viagra needed nearly an hour to work. And how long would one Viagra--a whole one, the full 100 milligrams--last?
And it was New Year's Eve! Juan Diego suddenly remembered. Certainly the teenagers would be up past midnight, if not the little children. Wouldn't most of the adults also stay up to herald the coming year?
Suppose Miriam invited him to her room? Should he bring the Viagra with him to dinner? (It was too soon to take one now.)
He dressed slowly, trying to imagine what Miriam would want him to wear. He'd written about more long-lasting, more complex, and more diverse relationships than he'd ever had. His readers--that is, the ones who'd never met him--might have imagined that he'd lived a sophisticated sexual life; in his novels, there were homosexual and bisexual experiences, and plenty of the plain-old heterosexual ones. Juan Diego made a political point of being sexually explicit in his writing; yet he'd never even lived with anyone, and the plain-old part of being a heterosexual was the kind of heterosexual he was.
Juan Diego suspected he was probably pretty boring as a lover. He would have been the first to admit that what passed for his sex life existed almost entirely in his imagination--like now, he thought ruefully. All he was doing was imagining Miriam; he didn't even know if she was the mystery guest who'd checked into the Encantador.
The conviction that he chiefly had an imaginary sex life depressed him, and he'd taken only half a Lopressor pill today; this time, he couldn't entirely blame the beta-blockers for making him feel diminished. Juan Diego decided to put one Viagra tablet in his right-front pants pocket. This way, he'd be prepared--Miriam or no Miriam.
He often put his hand in his right-front pocket; Juan Diego didn't need to see that pretty mah-jongg tile, but he liked the feel of it--so smooth. The game block had made a perfect check mark on Edward Bonshaw's pale forehead; Senor Eduardo had carried the tile with him as a keepsake. When the dear man was dying--when Senor Eduardo was not only no longer dressing himself, but wasn't wearing clothes with pockets--he'd given the mah-jongg tile to Juan Diego. The game block, once imbedded between Edward Bonshaw's blond eyebrows, would become Juan Diego's talisman.
The four-sided gray-blue Viagra tablet was not as smooth as the bam-boo-and-ivory mah-jongg tile; the game block was twice the size of the Viagra pill--his rescue pill, as Juan Diego thought of it. And if Miriam was the uninvited guest in the second-floor room near the Encantador library, the Viagra tablet in Juan Diego's right-front pants pocket was a second talisman he carried with him.
Naturally, the knock on his hotel-room door filled him with false expectations. It was only Clark, coming to take him to dinner. When Juan Diego was turning out the lights in his bathroom and bedroom, Clark advised him to turn on the ceiling fan and leave it on.
"See the gecko?" Clark said, pointing to the ceiling. A gecko, smaller than a pinky finger, was poised on the ceiling above the headboard of the bed. There wasn't much Juan Diego missed about Mexico--hence he'd never been back--but he did miss the geckos. The little one above the bed darted on its adhesive toes across the ceiling at the exact instant Juan Diego turned on the fan.
"Once the fan has been on awhile, the geckos will settle down," Clark said. "You don't want them racing around when you're trying to go to sleep."
Juan Diego was disappointed in himself for not seeing the geckos until Clark pointed one out; as he was closing his hotel-room door, he spotted a second gecko scurrying over the bathroom wall--it was lightning-fast and quickly disappeared behind the bathroom mirror.
"I miss the geckos," Juan Diego admitted to Clark. Outside, on the balcony, they could hear music coming from a noisy club for locals on the beach.
"Why don't you go back to Mexico--I mean, just to visit?" Clark asked him.
It was always like this with Clark, Juan Diego remembered. Clark wanted Juan Diego's "issues" with childhood and early adolescence to be over; Clark wanted all grievances to end in an uplifting manner, as in Clark's novels. Everyone should be saved, Clark believed; everything could be forgiven, he imagined. Clark made goodness seem tedious.
But what hadn't Juan Diego and Clark French fought about?
&nbs
p; There'd been no end to their to and fro about the late Pope John Paul II, who'd died in 2005. He'd been a young cardinal from Poland when he was elected pope, and he became a very popular pope, but John Paul's efforts to "restore normality" in Poland--this meant making abortion illegal again--drove Juan Diego crazy.
Clark French had expressed his fondness for the Polish pope's "culture of life" idea--John Paul II's name for his stance against abortion and contraception, which amounted to protecting "defenseless" fetuses from the "culture of death" idea.
"Why would you--you of all people, given what happened to you--choose a death idea over a life idea?" Clark had asked his former teacher. And now Clark was suggesting (again) that Juan Diego should go back to Mexico--just to visit!
"You know why I won't go back, Clark," Juan Diego once more answered, limping along the second-floor balcony. (Another time, when he'd had too much beer, Juan Diego had said to Clark: "Mexico is in the hands of criminals and the Catholic Church.")
"Don't tell me you blame the Church for AIDS--you're not saying safe sex is the answer to everything, are you?" Clark now asked his former teacher. This was not a very skillfully veiled reference, Juan Diego knew--not that Clark was necessarily trying to veil his references.
Juan Diego remembered how Clark had called condom use "propaganda." Clark was probably paraphrasing Pope Benedict XVI. Hadn't Benedict said something to the effect that condoms "only exacerbate" the AIDS problem? Or was that what Clark had said?
And now, because Juan Diego hadn't answered Clark's question about safe sex solving everything, Clark kept pressing the Benedict point: "Benedict's position--namely, that the only efficient way to combat an epidemic is by spiritual renovation--"
"Clark!" Juan Diego cried. "All 'spiritual renovation' means is more of the same old family values--meaning heterosexual marriage, meaning nothing but sexual abstention before marriage--"
"Sounds to me like one way to slow down an epidemic," Clark said slyly. He was as doctrinaire as ever!
"Between your Church's unfollowable rules and human nature, I'll bet on human nature," Juan Diego said. "Take celibacy--" he began.
"Maybe after the children and the teenagers have gone to bed," Clark reminded his former teacher.
They were alone on the balcony, and it was New Year's Eve; Juan Diego was pretty sure that the teenagers would be up later than the adults, but all he said was: "Think about pedophilia, Clark."
"I knew it! I knew that was next!" Clark said excitedly.
In his Christmas address in Rome--not even two weeks ago--Pope Benedict XVI had said that pedophilia was considered normal as recently as the 1970s. Clark knew that would have made Juan Diego hot under the collar. Now, naturally, his former teacher was up to his old tricks, quoting the pope as if the entire realm of Catholic theology were to blame for Benedict's suggesting there was no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself.
"Clark, Benedict said there is only a 'better than' and a 'worse than'--that's what your pope said," Clark's former teacher was telling him.
"May I remind you that the statistics on pedophilia outside the Church, in the general population, are exactly the same as the statistics inside the Church?" Clark French said to Juan Diego.
"Benedict said: 'Nothing is good or bad in itself.' He said nothing, Clark," Juan Diego told his former student. "Pedophilia isn't nothing; surely pedophilia is 'bad in itself,' Clark."
"After the children have--"
"There are no children here, Clark!" Juan Diego shouted. "We're alone, on a balcony!" he cried.
"Well--" Clark French said cautiously, looking all around; they could hear the voices of children somewhere, but no children (not even teenagers, or other adults) were anywhere in sight.
"The Catholic hierarchy believes kissing leads to sin," Juan Diego whispered. "Your Church is against birth control, against abortion, against gay marriage--your Church is against kissing, Clark!"
Suddenly, a swarm of small children ran past them on the balcony; their flip-flops made a slapping sound and their wet hair gleamed.
"After the little ones have gone to bed--" Clark French began again; conversation was a competition with him, akin to a combat sport. Clark would have made an indefatigable missionary. Clark had that Jesuitical "I know everything" way about him--always the emphasis on learning and evangelizing. The mere thought of his own martyrdom probably motivated Clark. He would happily suffer, just to make an impossible point; if you abused him, he would smile and thrive.
"Are you all right?" Clark was asking Juan Diego.
"I'm just a little out of breath--I'm not used to limping this fast," Juan Diego told him. "Or limping and talking, together."
They slowed their pace as they descended the stairs and made their way to the main lobby of the Encantador, where the dining room was. There was an overhanging roof to the hotel restaurant, and a rolled-up bamboo curtain that could be lowered as a barrier against wind and rain. The openness to the palm trees and the view of the sea gave the dining room the feeling of a spacious veranda. There were paper party hats at all the tables.
What a big family Clark French had married into! Juan Diego was thinking. Dr. Josefa Quintana must have had thirty or forty relatives, and more than half of them were children or young people.
"No one expects you to remember everyone's name," Clark whispered to Juan Diego.
"About the mystery guest," Juan Diego said suddenly. "She should sit next to me."
"Next to you?" Clark asked him.
"Certainly. All of you hate her. At least I'm neutral," Juan Diego told Clark.
"I don't hate her--no one knows her! She's inserted herself into a family--"
"I know, Clark--I know," Juan Diego said. "She should sit next to me. We're both strangers. All of you know one another."
"I was thinking of putting her at one of the children's tables," Clark told him. "Maybe at the table with the most obstreperous children."
"You see? You do hate her," Juan Diego said to him.
"I was kidding. Maybe a table of teenagers--the most sullen ones," Clark continued.
"You definitely hate her. I'm neutral," Juan Diego reminded him. (Miriam could corrupt the teenagers, Juan Diego was thinking.)
"Uncle Clark!" A small, round-faced boy tugged on Clark's hand.
"Yes, Pedro. What is it?" Clark asked the little boy.
"It's the big gecko behind the painting in the library. It came out from behind the painting!" Pedro told him.
"Not the giant gecko--not that one!" Clark cried, feigning alarm.
"Yes! The giant one!" the little boy exclaimed.
"Well, it just so happens, Pedro, that this man knows all about geckos--he's a gecko expert. He not only loves geckos; he misses geckos," Clark told the child. "This is Mr. Guerrero," Clark added, slipping away and leaving Juan Diego with Pedro. The boy instantly clutched the older man's hand.
"You love them?" the boy asked, but before Juan Diego could answer him, Pedro said: "Why do you miss geckos, Mister?"
"Ah, well--" Juan Diego started and then stopped, stalling for time. When he began to limp in the direction of the stairs to the library, his limp drew a dozen children to him; they were five-year-olds, or only a little older, like Pedro.
"He knows all about geckos--he loves them," Pedro was telling the other kids. "He misses geckos. Why?" Pedro asked Juan Diego again.
"What happened to your foot, Mister?" one of the other children, a little girl with pigtails, asked him.
"I was a dump kid. I lived in a shack near the Oaxaca basurero--basurero means 'dump'; Oaxaca is in Mexico," Juan Diego told them. "The shack my sister and I lived in had only one door. Every morning, when I got up, there was a gecko on that screen door. The gecko was so fast, it could disappear in the blink of an eye," Juan Diego told the children, clapping his hands for effect. He was limping more as he went up the stairs. "One morning, a truck backed over my right foot. The driver's side-view mirror was broken; the driver couldn't see me.
It wasn't his fault; he was a good man. He's dead now, and I miss him. I miss the dump, and the geckos," Juan Diego told the children. He was not aware that some adults were also following him upstairs to the library. Clark French was following his former teacher, too; it was, of course, Juan Diego's story that they were following.
Had the man with the limp really said he missed the dump? a few of the children were asking one another.
"If I'd lived in the basurero, I don't think I would miss it," the little girl with pigtails told Pedro. "Maybe he misses his sister," she said.
"I can understand missing geckos," Pedro told her.
"Geckos are mostly nocturnal--they're more active at night, when there are more insects. They eat insects; geckos don't hurt you," Juan Diego was saying.
"Where is your sister?" the little girl with the pigtails asked Juan Diego.
"She's dead," Juan Diego answered her; he was about to say how Lupe had died, but he didn't want to give the little ones nightmares.
"Look!" Pedro said. He pointed at a big painting; it hung over a comfortable-looking couch in the Encantador library. The gecko was enough of a giant to be almost as visible, even from a distance, as the painting. The gecko clung to the wall beside the painting; as Juan Diego and the children approached, the gecko climbed higher. The big lizard waited, watching them, about halfway between the painting and the ceiling. It really was a big gecko, almost the size of a house cat.
"The man in the painting is a saint," Juan Diego was telling the children. "He was once a student at the University of Paris; he'd been a soldier, too--he was a Basque soldier, and he was wounded."
"Wounded how?" Pedro asked.
"By a cannonball," Juan Diego told him.
"Wouldn't a cannonball kill you?" Pedro asked.
"I guess not if you're going to be a saint," Juan Diego answered.
"What was his name?" the little girl with pigtails asked; she was full of questions. "Who was the saint?"
"Your uncle Clark knows who he was," Juan Diego answered her. He was aware of Clark French watching him, and listening to him--ever the devoted student. (Clark looked like someone who might survive being shot with a cannonball.)
"Uncle Clark!" the children were calling.