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 Senor 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 Senor 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 Senor 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 Senor 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 Senor Eduardo would be buried--together, as they'd requested, and with Beatrice's ashes, which Edward Bonshaw's mother had kept for him. (Senor 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; Senor 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 Senor 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 Senor 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 Senor 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. Rosem
ary 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?
* 26 *
The Scattering
The dislocations of travel had been a familiar theme in Juan Diego's early novels. Now the demons of dislocation were besetting him again; he was having trouble remembering how many days and nights he and Dorothy had stayed at El Nido.
He remembered the sex with Dorothy--not only her screaming orgasms, which were in what sounded like Nahuatl, but how she'd repeatedly called his penis "this guy," as if Juan Diego's penis were a nonspeaking but otherwise obtrusive presence at a noisy party. Dorothy was definitely noisy, a veritable earthquake in the world of orgasms; their near neighbors at the resort had phoned their room to inquire if everyone was all right. (But no one had used the asswheel word, or the more common asshole appellation.)