did it feel like she was the one who knew me best? I thought about Suriyan and how she would never talk to me again. I thought about my own fears of actually being good, because Lola wasn’t Suriyan; with her I’d have to be someone I’d never tried to be. We were reaching College Ave. Last chance, so I made like Oscar and said, Have dinner with me, Lola. I promise, I won’t try to take your panties off.
Yeah right, she said, almost ripping her page in the turning.
I covered her hand in mine and she gave me this frustrated heart-wrenching look like she was already on her way down with me and didn’t, for the life of her, understand why.
It’s OK, I said.
No, it’s fucking not OK. You’re too
We went to her place on Handy and before I could really put a hurt on her she stopped everything, dragged me up from her toto by my ears. Why is this the face I can’t seem to forget, even now, after all these years? Tired from working, swollen from lack of sleep, a crazy mixture of ferocity and vulnerability that was and shall ever be Lola.
She looked at me until I couldn’t stand it anymore and then she said: Just don’t lie to me, Yunior.
I won’t, I promised.
Don’t laugh. My intentions were pure.
Not much more to tell. Except this:
That spring I moved back in with him. Thought about it all winter. Even at the very end I almost changed my mind. Was waiting by his door in Demarest and despite the fact that I’d been waiting all morning, at the very end I still almost ran off, but then I heard their voices on the stairwell, bringing up his things.
I don’t know who was more surprised: Oscar, Lola, or me.
In Oscar’s version, I raised my hand and said,
That fall after the Fall was dark (I read in his journal): dark. He was still thinking about doing it but he was afraid. Of his sister mainly, but also of himself. Of the possibility of a miracle, of an invincible summer. Reading and writing and watching TV with his mother. If you try anything stupid, his mother swore, I’ll haunt you my whole life. You better believe it.
I do, senora, he reported saying. I do.
Those months he couldn’t sleep, and that’s how he ended up taking his mother’s car out for midnight spins. Every time he pulled out of the house he thought it would be his last. Drove everywhere. Got lost in Camden. Found the neighborhood where I grew up. Drove through New Brunswick just when the clubs were getting out, looking at everybody, his stomach killing him. Even made it down to Wildwood. Looked for the coffee shop where he had saved Lola, but it had closed. Nothing had opened to replace it. One night he picked up a hitchhiker. An immensely pregnant girl. She barely spoke any English. Was a wetback Guatemalan with pits in her cheek. Needed to go to Perth Amboy, and Oscar, our hero, said: No te preocupas. Te traigo.
Qye Dios te bendiga, she said. Still looking ready to jump out of a window if need be. Gave her his number, Just in case, but she never called. He wasn’t surprised.
Drove so long and so far on some nights that he would actually fall asleep at the wheel. One second he was thinking about his characters and the next he’d be drifting, a beautiful intoxicating richness, about to go all the way under and then some last alarm would sound.
Lola. Nothing more exhilarating (he wrote) than saving yourself by the simple act of waking.
PART II
Men are not indispensable. But Trujillo is irreplaceable. For Trujillo is not a man. He is…a cosmic force… Those who try to compare him to his ordinary contemporaries are mistaken. He belongs to…the category of those born to a special destiny.
Of course I tried once more. It was even stupider than the first time. Fourteen months and Abuela announced that it was time for me to return to Paterson, to my mother, I couldn’t believe what she was saying. It felt like the deepest of treacheries to me. I wouldn’t feel that again until I broke with you.
But I don’t want to go! I protested. I want to stay here!
But she wouldn’t listen. She held her hands in the air like there was nothing she could do. It’s what your mother wants and it’s what I want and it’s what’s right.
But what about me!
I’m sorry, hija.
That’s life for you. All the happiness you gather to yourself, it will sweep away like it’s nothing. If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That’s enough.
I wasn’t mature. I quit the team. I stopped going to classes and speaking to all my girlfriends, even Rosio. I told Max that we were through and he looked at me like I’d just shot him between the eyes. He tried to stop me from walking away but I screamed at him, like my mother screams, and he dropped his hand like it was dead. I thought I was doing him a favor. Not wanting to hurt him any more than was necessary.
I ended up being really stupid those last weeks. I guess I wanted to disappear more than anything and so I was trying to make it so. I fooled around with someone else, that’s how messed up I was. He was the father of one of my classmates. Always after me, even when his daughter was around, so I called him. One thing you can count on in Santo Domingo. Not the lights, not the law.
Sex.
That never goes away.
I didn’t bother with the romance. I let him take me to a love motel on our first ‘date’. He was one of those vain politicos, a peledista, had his own big air-conditioned jipeta. When I pulled my pants down you never saw anybody so happy.
Until I asked him for two thousand dollars. American, I emphasized. It’s like Abuela says: Every snake always thinks it’s biting into a rat until the day it bites into a mongoose.
That was my big puta moment. I knew he had the money, otherwise I wouldn’t have asked, and it’s not like I was robbing from him. I think we did it like nine times in total, so in my opinion he got a lot more than he gave. Afterward I sat in the motel and drank rum while he snorted from these little bags of coke. He wasn’t much of a talker, which was good. He was always pretty ashamed of him self after we fucked and that made me feel great. Complained that this was the money for his daughter’s school. Blah blah blah. Steal it from the state, I told him with a smile. I kissed him when he dropped me off at the house only so that I could feel him shrink from me.
I didn’t talk to La Inca much those last weeks but she never stopped talking to me. I want you to do well at school. I want you to visit me when you can. I want you to remember where you come from. She prepared everything for my departure. I was too angry to think about her, how sad she would be when I was gone. I was the last person to share her life since my mother. She started closing up the house like she was the one who was leaving.
What? I said. You coming with me?
No, hija. I’m going to my campo for a while.
But you hate the campo!
I have to go there, she explained wearily. If only for a little while. And then Oscar called, out of the blue. Trying to make up now that I was due back. So you’re coming home.
Don’t count on it, I said.
