Junot Díaz - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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.