"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.