The snug, short-sleeved sweaters the women wore under their cardigans were revealing of their breasts, yet the sweaters were somehow conservative. Maybe the conservative part was what went unnoticed about Miriam and Dorothy, Juan Diego thought; or was it that the other tourists were mostly Asian, and seemingly uninterested in these two attractive women from the West? Miriam and Dorothy wore skirts with their sweaters — also revealing, meaning tight, or so Juan Diego would have said, but their skirts were not glaringly attention-getting.
Am I the only one who can’t stop looking at these women? Juan Diego wondered. He wasn’t aware of fashion; he couldn’t be expected to understand how neutral colors worked. Juan Diego didn’t notice that Miriam and Dorothy wore skirts and sweaters that were beige and brown, or silver and gray, nor did he notice the impeccable design of their clothes. As for the fabric, he may have thought it looked welcoming to touch, but what he noticed were Miriam’s and Dorothy’s breasts — and their hips, of course.
Juan Diego would remember next to nothing of the train ride to Kowloon Station, and not a bit of the busy Kowloon harborfront — not even the restaurant they ate their dinner in, except that he was unusually hungry, and he enjoyed himself in Miriam and Dorothy’s company. In fact, he couldn’t remember when he’d last enjoyed himself as much, although later — less than a week later — he couldn’t recall what they’d talked about. His novels? His childhood?
When Juan Diego met his readers, he had to be careful not to talk too much about himself — because his readers tended to ask him about himself. He often tried to steer the conversation to his readers’ lives; surely he would have asked Miriam and Dorothy to tell him about themselves. What about their childhood years, their adolescence? And Juan Diego must have asked these ladies, albeit discreetly, about the men in their lives; certainly he would have been curious to know if they were attached. Yet he would remember nothing of their conversation in Kowloon — not a word beyond the absurd attention paid to the train ticket when they were en route to Kowloon Station on the Airport Express, and only a bit of bookish conversation on the train ride back to the Regal Airport Hotel.
There was one thing that stood out about their return trip — a moment of awkwardness in the sleek, sanitized underground of Kowloon Station, when Juan Diego was waiting with the two women on the train platform.
The glassy, gold-tinted interior of the station with its gleaming stainless-steel trash cans — standing like sentinels of cleanliness — gave the station platform the aura of a hospital corridor. Juan Diego couldn’t find a camera or photo icon on his cell phone’s so-called menu — he wanted to take a photo of Miriam and Dorothy — when the all-knowing mother took the cell phone from him.
“Dorothy and I don’t do pictures — we can’t stand the way we look in photographs — but let me take your photo,” Miriam said to him.
They were almost alone on the platform, except for a young Chinese couple (kids, Juan Diego thought) holding hands. The young man had been watching Dorothy, who’d grabbed Juan Diego’s cell phone out of her mother’s hands.
“Here, let me do it,” Dorothy had said to her mom. “You take terrible pictures.”
But the young Chinese man took the cell phone from Dorothy. “If I do it, I can get one of all of you,” the boy said.
“Oh, yes — thank you!” Juan Diego told him.
Miriam gave her daughter one of those looks that said: If you’d just let me do it, Dorothy, this wouldn’t be happening.
They could all hear the train coming, and the young Chinese woman said something to her boyfriend — no doubt, given the train, that he should hurry up.
He did. The photo caught Juan Diego, and Miriam and Dorothy, by surprise. The Chinese couple seemed to think it was a disappointing picture — perhaps out of focus? — but then the train was there. It was Miriam who snatched the cell phone away from the couple, and Dorothy who — even more quickly — took it from her mom. Juan Diego was already seated on the Airport Express when Dorothy gave him back his phone; it was no longer in the camera mode.
“We don’t photograph well,” was all Miriam said — to the Chinese couple, who seemed unduly disturbed by the incident. (Perhaps the pictures they took usually turned out better.)
Juan Diego was once more searching the menu on his cell phone, which was a maze of mysteries to him. What did the Media Center icon do? Nothing I want, Juan Diego was thinking, when Miriam covered his hands with hers; she leaned close to him, as if it were a noisy train (it wasn’t), and spoke to him as if they were alone, though Dorothy was very much with them and clearly heard her — every word.
“This isn’t about sex, Juan Diego, but I have a question for you,” Miriam said. Dorothy laughed harshly — loudly enough to get the attention of the young Chinese couple, who’d been whispering to each other in a nearby seat of the train. (The girl, though she sat in the boy’s lap, seemed to be upset with him for some reason.) “It truly isn’t, Dorothy,” Miriam snapped.
“We’ll see,” the scornful daughter replied.
“In A Story Set in Motion by the Virgin Mary, there’s a part where your missionary — I forget his name,” Miriam interrupted herself.
“Martin,” Dorothy quietly said.
“Yes, Martin,” Miriam quickly said. “I guess you’ve read that one,” she added to her daughter. “Martin admires Ignatius Loyola, doesn’t he?” Miriam asked Juan Diego, but before the novelist could answer her, she hurried on. “I’m thinking about the saint’s encounter with that Moor on a mule, and their ensuing discussion of the Virgin Mary,” Miriam said.
“Both the Moor and Saint Ignatius were riding mules,” Dorothy interrupted her mom.
“I know, Dorothy,” Miriam dismissively said. “And the Moor says he can believe that Mother Mary has conceived without a man, but he does not believe that she remains a virgin after she gives birth.”
“That part is about sex, you know,” Dorothy said.
“It isn’t, Dorothy,” her mother snapped.
“And after the Moor rides on, young Ignatius thinks he should go after the Muslim and kill him, right?” Dorothy asked Juan Diego.
“Right,” Juan Diego managed to say, but he wasn’t thinking about that long-ago novel or the missionary he’d named Martin, who admired Saint Ignatius Loyola. Juan Diego was thinking about Edward Bonshaw, and that life-changing day he arrived in Oaxaca.
As Rivera was driving the injured Juan Diego to the Templo de la Compañía de Jesús, when the boy was grimacing in pain with his head held in Lupe’s lap, Edward Bonshaw was also on his way to the Jesuit temple. While Rivera was hoping for a miracle, of a kind the dump boss imagined the Virgin Mary could perform, it was the new American missionary who was about to become the most credible miracle in Juan Diego’s life — a miracle of a man, not a saint, and a mixture of human frailties, if there ever was one.
Oh, how he missed Señor Eduardo! Juan Diego thought, his eyes blurring with tears.