2007 - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (31 page)

Ybón had attended the UASD a long time ago but she was no college girl, she had lines around her eyes and seemed, to Oscar at least, mad open, mad worldly, had the sort of intense zipper-gravity that hot middle-aged women exude effortlessly. The next time he ran into her in front of her house (he had watched for her), she said, Good morning, Mr. de León, in English. How are you? I am well, he said. And you? She beamed. I am well, thank you. He didn’t know what to do with his hands so he laced them behind his back like a gloomy parson. And for a minute there was nothing and she was unlocking her gate and he said, desperately, It is very hot. Ay sí, she said. And I thought it was just my menopause. And then looking over her shoulder at him, curious perhaps at this strange character who was trying not to look at her at all, or recognizing how in crush he was with her and feeling charitable, she said, Come inside. I’ll give you a drink.

The casa near empty — his abuela’s crib was spare but this was on some next shit — Haven’t had the time to move in yet, she said offhandedly — and because there wasn’t any furniture besides a kitchen table, a chair, a bureau, a bed, and a TV, they had to sit on the bed. (Oscar peeped the astrology books under the bed and a collection of Paulo Coelho’s novels. She followed his gaze and said with a smile, Paulo Coelho saved my life.) She gave him a beer, had a double scotch, then for the next six hours regaled him with tales from her life. You could tell she hadn’t had anyone to talk to in a long time. Oscar reduced to nodding and trying to laugh when she laughed. The whole time he was sweating bullets. Wondering if this is when he should try something. It wasn’t until midway through their chat that it hit Oscar that the job Ybón talked so volubly about was prostitution. It was
Holy Shit!
the Sequel. Even though putas were one of Santo Domingo’s premier exports, Oscar had never been in a prostitute’s house in his entire life.

Staring out her bedroom window, he saw his abuela on her front lawn, looking for him. He wanted to raise the window and call to her but Ybón didn’t allow for any interruptions.

Ybón was an odd odd bird. She might have been talkative, the sort of easygoing woman a brother can relax around, but there was something slightly detached about her too; as though (Oscar’s words now) she were some marooned alien princess who existed partially in another dimension; the sort of woman who, cool as she was, slips out of your head a little too quickly, a quality she recognized and was thankful for, as though she relished the short bursts of attention she provoked from men, but not anything sustained. She didn’t seem to mind being the girl you called every couple of months at eleven at night, just to see what she was ‘up to’. As much relationship as she could handle. Reminds me of the morir-vivir plants we played with as kids, except in reverse.

Her Jedi mind-tricks did not, however, work on Oscar. When it came to girls, the brother had a mind like a yogi. He latched on and stayed latched. By the time he left her house that night and walked home through the Island’s million attack mosquitoes he was lost.

(Did it matter that Ybón started mixing Italian in with her Spanish after her fourth drink or that she almost fell flat on her face when she showed him out? Of course not!)

He was in love.

His mother and his abuela met him at the door; excuse the stereotype, but both had their hair in rolos and couldn’t believe his sinvergüencería. Do you know that woman’s a PUTA? Do you know she bought that house CULEANDO?

For a moment he was overwhelmed by their rage, and then he found his footing and shot back, Do you know her aunt was a JUDGE? Do you know her father worked for the PHONE COMPANY?

You want a woman, I’ll get you a good woman, his mother said, peering angrily out the window. But that puta’s only going to take your money.

I don’t need your help. And she ain’t a puta.

La Inca laid one of her Looks of Incredible Power on him. Hijo, obey your mother.

For a moment he almost did. Both women focusing all their energies on him, and then he tasted the beer on his lips and shook his head.

His do Rudolfo, who was watching the game on the TV, took that moment to call out, in his best Grandpa Simpson voice: Prostitutes ruined my life.

More miracles. The next morning Oscar woke up and despite the tremendous tidings in his heart, despite the fact that he wanted to run over to Ybón’s house and shackle himself to her bed, he didn’t. He knew he had to cogerlo con — take it easy, knew he had to rein in his lunatic heart or he would blow it. Whatever
it
was. Of course the nigger was entertaining mad fantasies inside his head. What do you expect? He was a not-so-fat fatboy who’d never kissed a girl, never even lain in bed with one, and now the world was waving a beautiful puta under his nose. Ybón, he was sure, was the Higher Power’s last-ditch attempt to put him back on the proper path of Dominican male-itude. If he blew this, well, it was back to playing Villains and Vigilantes for him. This is it, he told himself. His chance to win. He decided to play the oldest card in the deck. The wait. So for one whole day he moped around the house, tried to write but couldn’t, watched a comedy show where black Dominicans in grass skirts put white Dominicans in safari outfits into cannibal cookpots and everybody wondered aloud where their biscocho was. Scary. By noon he had driven Dolores, the thirty-eight-year-old heavily scarred ‘muchacha’ who cooked and cleaned for the family, up a wall.

The next day at one he pulled on a clean chacabana and strolled over to her house. (Well, he sort of trotted.) A red Jeep was parked outside, nose to nose with her Pathfinder. A Policía Nacional plate. He stood in front of her gate while the sun stomped down on him. Felt like a stooge. Of course she was married. Of course she had boyfriends. His optimism, that swollen red giant, collapsed down to an obliterating point of gloom from which there was no escape. Didn’t stop him coming back the next day but no one was home, and by the time he saw her again, three days later, he was starting to think that she had warped back to whatever Forerunner world had spawned her. Where were you? he said, trying not to sound as miserable as he felt. I thought maybe you fell in the tub or something. She smiled and gave her ass a little shiver. I was making the patria strong, mi amor.

He had caught her in front of the TV, doing aerobics in a pair of sweat pants and what might have been described as a halter-top. It was hard for him not to stare at her body. When she first let him in she’d screamed, Oscar, querido! Come in! Come in!

I know what Negroes are going to say. Look, he’s writing Suburban Tropical now. A puta and she’s not an underage snort addicted mess? Not believable. Should I go down to the Feria and pick me up a more representative model? Would it be better if I turned Ybón into this other puta I know, Jahyra, a friend and a neighbor in Villa Juana, who still lives in one of those old-style pink wooden houses with the zinc roof? Jahyra — your quintessential Caribbean puta, half cute, half not — who’d left home at the age of fifteen and lived in Curazao, Madrid, Amsterdam, and Rome, who also has two kids, who’d gotten an enormous breast job when she was sixteen in Madrid, bigger almost than Luba from
Love and Rockets
(but not as big as Beli), who claimed, proudly, that her aparato had paved half the streets in her mother’s hometown. Would it be better if I had Oscar meet Ybón at the World Famous Lavacarro, where Jahyra works six days a week, where a brother can get his head
and
his fenders polished while he waits, talk. about convenience? Would this be better? Yes?

But then I’d be lying. I know I’ve thrown a lot of fantasy and sci-fi in the mix but this is supposed to be a
true
account of the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Can’t we believe that an Ybón can exist and that a brother like Oscar might be due a little luck after twenty-three years?

This is your chance. If blue pill, continue. If red pill, return to the Matrix.

In their photos, Ybón looks young. It’s her smile and the way she perks up her body for every shot as if she’s presenting herself to the world, as if she’s saying, Ta-da, here I am, take it or leave it. She dressed young too, but she was a solid thirty-six, perfect age for anybody but a stripper. In the close-ups you can see the crow’s-feet, and she complained all the time about her little belly, the way her breasts and her ass were starting to lose their firm, which was why, she said, she had to be in the gym five days a week. When you’re sixteen a body like this is free; when you’re forty — pffft! — it’s a full-time occupation. The third time Oscar came over, Ybón doubled up on the scotches again and then took down her photo albums from the closet and showed him all the pictures of herself when she’d been sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, always on a beach, always in an early-eighties bikini, always with big hair, always smiling, always with her arms around some middle-aged eighties yakoub. Looking at those old hairy blancos, Oscar couldn’t help but feel hopeful. (Let me guess, he said, these are your uncles?) Each photo had a date and a place at the bottom and this was how he was able to follow Ybón’s puta’s progress through Italy, Portugal, and Spain. I was so beautiful in those days, she said wistfully. It was true, her smile could have put out a sun, but Oscar didn’t think she was any less fine now, the slight declensions in her appearances only seemed to add to her luster (the last bright before the fade) and he told her so.

You’re so sweet, mi amor. She knocked back another double and rasped, What’s your sign?

How lovesick he became! He stopped writing and began to go over to her house nearly every day, even when he knew she was working, just in case she’d caught ill or decided to quit the profession so she could marry him. The gates of his heart had swung open and he felt light on his feet, he felt weightless, he felt
lithe
. His abuela steady gave him shit, told him that not even God loves a puta. Yeah, his tío laughed, but everybody knows that God
loves
a puto. His tío seemed thrilled that he no longer had a pájaro for a nephew. I can’t believe it, he said proudly. The palomo is finally a man. He put Oscar’s neck in the NJ State Police-patented nigger-killer lock. When did it happen? I want to play that date as soon I get home.

Here we go again: Oscar and Ybón at her house, Oscar and Ybón at the movies, Oscar and Ybón at the beach. Ybón talked, voluminously, and Oscar slipped some words in too. Ybón told him about her two sons, Sterling and Perfecto, who lived with their grandparents in Puerto Rico, whom she saw only on holidays. (They’d known only her photo and her money the whole time she’d been in Europe, and when she’d finally returned to the Island they were little men and she didn’t have the heart to tear them from the only family they’d ever known. That would have made me roll my eyes, but Oscar bought it hook, line, and sinker.) She told him about the two abortions she’d had, told him about the time she’d been jailed in Madrid, told him how hard it was to sell your ass, asked, Can something be impossible and not impossible at once? Talked about how if she hadn’t studied English at the UASD she probably would have had it a lot worse. Told him of a trip she’d taken to Berlin in the company of a rebuilt Brazilian trannie, a friend, how sometimes the trains would go so slow you could have plucked a passing flower without disturbing its neighbors. She told him about her Dominican boyfriend, the capitán, and her foreign boyfriends: the Italian, the German, and the Canadian, the three benditos, how they each visited her on different months. You’re lucky they all have families, she said. Or I’d have been
working
this whole summer. (He wanted to ask her not to talk about any of these dudes but she would only have laughed. So all he said was, I could have shown them around Zurza; I hear they love tourists, and she laughed and told him to play nice.) He, in turn, talked about the one time he and his dork college buddies had driven up to Wisconsin for a gaming convention, his only big trip, how they had camped out at a Winnebago reservation and drank Pabst with some of the local Indians. He talked about his love for his sister Lola and what had happened to her. He talked about trying to take his own life. This is the only time that Ybón didn’t say anything. Instead she poured them both drinks and raised her glass. To life!

They never discussed the amount of time they spent together. Maybe we should get married, he said once, not joking, and she said, I’d make a terrible wife. He was around so often that he even got to see her in a couple of her notorious ‘moods,’ when her alien-princess part pushed to the fore and she became very cold and uncommunicative, when she called him an idiot americano for spilling his beer. On these days she opened her door and threw herself in bed and didn’t do anything. Hard to be around her but he would say, Hey, I heard Jesus is down at the Plaza Central giving out condoms; he’d convince her to see a movie, the going out and sitting in a theater seemed to put the princess in partial check. Afterward she’d be a little easier; she’d take him to an Italian restaurant and no matter how much her mood had improved she’d insist on drinking herself ridiculous. So bad he’d have to put her in the truck and drive them home through a city he did not know. (Early on he hit on this great scheme: he called Clives, the evangelical taxista his family always used, who would swing by no sweat and lead him home.) When he drove she always put her head in his lap and talked to him, sometimes in Italian, sometimes in Spanish, sometimes about the beatings the women had given each other in prison, sometimes sweet stuff, and having her mouth so close to his nuts was finer than one might imagine.

He didn’t meet her on the street like he told you. His cousins, los idiotas, took him to a cabaret and that’s where he first saw her. And that’s where ella se metió por sus ojos.

I never wanted to come back to Santo Domingo. But after I was let go from jail I had trouble paying back the people I owed, and my mother was sick, and so I just came back.

It was hard at first. Once you’ve been fuera, Santo Domingo is the smallest place in the world. But if I’ve learned anything in my travels it’s that a person can get used to anything. Even Santo Domingo.