Avenue of Mysteries (33 page)

The paramedics didn’t linger with Juan Diego; they weren’t needed. Meawhile, the nose-dreamer’s friend and former student kept sending text messages, inquiring if his old teacher was all right.

Juan Diego didn’t know it, but Clark French was a famous writer—at least in the Philippines. It is too simplistic to say this was
because
the Philippines had a lot of Catholic readers, and uplifting novels of faith and belief were received in a more welcoming fashion there than such novels were greeted in the United States or in Europe. Partly true, yes, but Clark French had married a Filipino woman from a venerable Manila family—Quintana was a distinguished name in the medical community. This helped make Clark a more widely read author in the Philippines than he was in his own country.

As Clark’s onetime teacher, Juan Diego still saw his former student as needing protection; the condescending reviews Clark had received in the United States amounted to all that Juan Diego knew of the younger writer’s reputation. And Juan Diego and Clark corresponded by email, which gave Juan Diego only a general idea of where Clark French lived—namely, somewhere in the Philippines.

Clark lived in Manila; his wife, Dr. Josefa Quintana, was what Clark called a “baby doctor.” Juan Diego knew that Dr. Quintana was a higher-up at the Cardinal Santos Medical Center—“one of the leading hospitals in the Philippines,” Clark was fond of saying. A
private
hospital, Bienvenido had told Juan Diego—to distinguish Cardinal Santos from what Bienvenido disparagingly called “the dirty government hospitals.” A
Catholic
hospital was what registered with Juan Diego—the Catholic factor mingled with his annoyance at not knowing if a “baby doctor” meant that Clark’s wife was a pediatrician or an OB-GYN.

Because Juan Diego had spent his entire adult life in the same university town, and his life as a writer in Iowa City had (until now) been inseparable from that as a teacher at a single university, he hadn’t realized that Clark French was one of those
other
writers—the ones who can live anywhere, or everywhere.

Juan Diego did know that Clark was one of those writers who appeared to be at every authors’ festival; he seemed to like, or excel at, the nonwriting part of being a writer—the talking-about-it part, which Juan Diego didn’t like or do well. In fact, increasingly, as he grew older, the writing (the
doing-it
part) was the only aspect of being a writer that Juan Diego enjoyed.

Clark French traveled all over the world, but Manila was Clark’s home—his home base, anyway. Clark and his wife had no children. Because he traveled? Because she was a “baby doctor,” and she saw enough children? Or, if Josefa Quintana was the
other
kind of “baby doctor,” perhaps she’d seen too many terrible complications of an obstetrical and gynecological kind.

Whatever the reason for the no-children situation, Clark French was one of those writers who could and did write everywhere, and there wasn’t an important authors’ festival or writers’ conference that he hadn’t traveled to; the public part of being a writer did not confine him to the Philippines. Clark came “home” to Manila because his wife was there; she was the one with an actual job.

Probably because she was a doctor, and one from such a distinguished family of doctors—most medical people in the Philippines had heard of her—the paramedics who’d examined Juan Diego on the plane were somewhat indiscreet. They gave Dr. Josefa Quintana a full account of their medical (and nonmedical) findings. And Clark French was standing right beside his wife, listening in.

The sleeping passenger had an out-of-it appearance; he’d laughingly
dismissed the dead-to-the-world episode on the grounds of having been engrossed in a dream about the Virgin Mary.

“Juan Diego was dreaming about
Mary
?” Clark French interjected.

“Just her nose,” one of the medics said.

“The Virgin’s
nose
!” Clark exclaimed. He’d told his wife to be prepared for Juan Diego’s anti-Catholicism, but a tasteless joke about Mother Mary’s nose denoted to Clark that his former teacher had descended to a lower level of Catholic bashing.

The paramedics wanted Dr. Quintana to know about the Viagra and Lopressor prescriptions. Josefa had to tell Clark, in detail, about the way beta-blockers worked; she was completely correct to add that, due to common side effects of the Lopressor tablets, the Viagra might have been “necessary.”

“There was a novel in his carry-on, too—at least I think it was a novel,” one of the paramedics said.

“
What
novel?” Clark asked eagerly.

“
The Passion
by Jeanette Winterson,” the medic said. “It sounds religious.”

The young-woman paramedic spoke cautiously. (Maybe she was trying to connect the novel to the Viagra.) “It sounds pornographic,” she said.

“No, no—Winterson is
literary,
” Clark French said. “A lesbian, but literary,” he added. Clark didn’t know the novel, but he assumed it had something to do with lesbians—he wondered if Winterson had written a novel about an order of lesbian nuns.

When the paramedics moved on, Clark and his wife were left alone; they were still waiting for Juan Diego, though it had been a while, and Clark was worried about his former teacher.

“To my knowledge, he lives alone—he has
always
lived alone. What’s he doing with the Viagra?” Clark asked his wife.

Josefa was an OB-GYN (she was
that
kind of “baby doctor”); she knew a lot about Viagra. Many of her patients had asked her about Viagra; their husbands or boyfriends were taking it, or they thought they wanted to try it, and the women wanted Dr. Quintana to tell them how the Viagra would affect the men in their lives. Would the women be raped in the middle of the night, or mounted when they were just trying to make coffee in the morning—humped against the unyielding car, when they’d merely been bending over to lift the groceries out of the trunk?

Dr. Josefa Quintana said to her husband: “Look, Clark, your former teacher might not live with anybody, but he probably
likes
getting an erection—right?”

That was when Juan Diego limped into sight; Josefa saw him first—she recognized him from his book-jacket photos, and Clark had prepared her for the limp. (Naturally, Clark French had exaggerated the limp—the way writers do.)

“What for?” Juan Diego heard Clark ask his wife, the doctor. She looked a little embarrassed, Juan Diego thought, but she waved to him and smiled. She seemed very nice; it was a sincere smile.

Clark turned and saw him. There was Clark’s boyish grin, which was confused by a concurrent expression of guilt, as if Clark had been caught in the act of doing or saying something. (In this case, by responding to his wife’s professional opinion that his former teacher probably
liked
getting an erection with a doltish “What for?”)

“What
for
?” Josefa quietly repeated to her husband, before she reached to shake Juan Diego’s hand.

Clark couldn’t stop grinning; now he was pointing to Juan Diego’s giant orange albatross of a bag. “Look, Josefa—I told you Juan Diego did a lot of research for his novels. He brought all of it with him!”

The same old Clark, a lovable but embarrassing guy, Juan Diego was thinking; he then steeled himself, knowing he was about to be crushed in Clark’s athletic embrace.

In addition to the Winterson novel, there was a lined notebook in Juan Diego’s carry-on. It contained notes for the novel Juan Diego was writing—he was always writing a novel. He’d been writing his next novel since he took a translation trip to Lithuania in February 2008. The novel-in-progress was now almost two years old; Juan Diego would have guessed he had another two or three years to go.

The trip to Vilnius was his first time in Lithuania, but not the first of his translations to be published there. He’d gone to the Vilnius Book Fair with his publisher and his translator. Juan Diego was interviewed onstage by a Lithuanian actress. After a few excellent questions of her own, the actress invited the audience to ask questions; there were a thousand people, many of them young students. It was a larger and more informed audience than Juan Diego usually encountered at comparable events in the United States.

After the book fair, he’d gone with his publisher and translator to sign books at a bookstore in the old town. The Lithuanian names were
a problem—but not the first names, usually. So it was decided that Juan Diego would inscribe only his readers’ first names. For example, the actress who’d interviewed him at the book fair was a Dalia—that was easy enough, but her last name was much more challenging. His publisher was a Rasa, his translator a Daiva, but their last names were not English- or Spanish-sounding.

Everyone was most sympathetic, including the young bookseller; his English was a struggle, but he’d read everything Juan Diego had written (in Lithuanian) and he couldn’t stop talking to his favorite author.

“Lithuania is a birth-again country—we are your newborn readers!” he cried. (Daiva, the translator, explained what the young bookseller meant: since the Soviets had left, people were free to read more books—especially foreign novels.)

“We have awakened to find someone like you preexisted us!” the young man exclaimed, wringing his hands. Juan Diego was very moved.

At one point, Daiva and Rasa must have gone to the women’s room—or they just needed a break from the enthusiastic young bookseller. His first name was not so easy. (It was something like Gintaras, or maybe it was Arvydas.)

Juan Diego was looking at a bulletin board in the bookstore. There were photographs of women with what looked like lists of authors’ names next to them. There were numbers that looked like the women’s phone numbers, too. Were these women in a book club? Juan Diego recognized many of the authors’ names, his own among them. They were all fiction writers. Of course it was a book club, Juan Diego thought—no men were pictured.

“These women—they read novels. They’re in a book club?” Juan Diego asked the hovering bookseller.

The young man looked stricken—he may not have understood, or he didn’t know the English for what he wanted to say.

“All despairing readers—seeking to meet other readers for a coffee or a beer!” Gintaras or Arvydas shouted; surely the
despairing
word was not what he’d meant.

“Do you mean a
date
?” Juan Diego had asked. It was the most touching thing: women who wanted to meet men to talk about the books they’d read! He’d never heard of such a thing. “A kind of dating service?” Imagine matchmaking on the basis of what novels you liked! Juan Diego thought. But would these poor women find any men who read novels? (Juan Diego didn’t think so.)

“Mail-order brides!” the young bookseller said dismissively; with a gesture toward the bulletin board, he expressed how these women were beneath his consideration.

Juan Diego’s publisher and translator were back at his side, but not before Juan Diego looked longingly at one of the women’s photographs—it was someone who’d put Juan Diego’s name at the top of her list. She was pretty, but not too pretty; she looked a little unhappy. There were dark circles under her haunting eyes; her hair looked somewhat neglected. There was no one in her life to talk to about the wonderful novels she’d read. Her first name was Odeta; her last name must have been fifteen letters long.

“Mail-order brides?” Juan Diego asked Gintaras or Arvydas. “Surely they can’t be—”

“Pathetic ladies with no lifes, coupling with characters in novels instead of meeting real mens!” the bookseller shouted.

That was it—the spark of a new novel. Mail-order brides advertising themselves by the novels they’d read—in a bookstore, of all places! The idea was born with a title:
One Chance to Leave Lithuania.
Oh, no, Juan Diego thought. (This was what he always thought when he thought of a new novel—it always struck him, at first, as a terrible idea.)

And, naturally, it was all a mistake—just a language confusion. Gintaras or Arvydas couldn’t express himself in English. Juan Diego’s publisher and translator were laughing as they explained the bookseller’s error.

“It’s just a bunch of readers—all women,” Daiva told Juan Diego.

“They meet one another, other women, for coffee or beer, just to talk about the novelists they like,” Rasa explained.

“Kind of an impromptu book club,” Daiva told him.

“There are no mail-order brides in Lithuania,” Rasa stated.

“There must be
some
mail-order brides,” Juan Diego suggested.

The next morning, at his unpronounceable hotel, the Stikliai, Juan Diego was introduced to a policewoman from Interpol in Vilnius; Daiva and Rasa had found her and brought her to the hotel. “There are no mail-order brides in Lithuania,” the policewoman told him. She didn’t stay to have a coffee; Juan Diego didn’t catch her name. The policewoman’s grittiness could not be disguised by her hair, which was dyed a surfer-blond color, tinged with sunset-orange streaks. No amount or hue of dye could conceal what she was: not a good-time girl but a no-nonsense cop. No novels about mail-order brides in Lithuania, please;
that was the stern policewoman’s message. Yet
One Chance to Leave Lithuania
had endured.

“What about adoption?” Juan Diego had asked Daiva and Rasa. “What about orphanages or adoption agencies—there must be state services for adoptions, maybe state services for children’s rights? What about women who want or need to put their children up for adoption? Lithuania is a Catholic country, isn’t it?”

Daiva, the translator of many of his novels, understood Juan Diego very well. “Women who put their children up for adoption don’t advertise themselves in a
bookstore,
” she said, smiling at him.

“That was just the start of something,” he explained. “Novels begin somewhere; novels undergo revision.” He’d not forgotten Odeta’s face on the bookstore bulletin board, but
One Chance to Leave Lithuania
was a different novel now. The woman who was putting up a child for adoption was also a reader; she was seeking to meet other readers. She didn’t just love novels and the characters in them for themselves; she sought to leave her life in the past behind, her child included. She wasn’t thinking about meeting a man.