The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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 tío 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 sweatpants 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!

A NOTE FROM YOUR AUTHOR
     
    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?