I’m just telling you. Don’t fuck her. You know I’ll find out. You’re a terrible liar.
Don’t be a crazy person, you say, glaring. I’m not fucking anyone. Clearly.
That night you are allowed to touch Paloma’s clit with the tip of your tongue but that’s it. She holds your head back with the force of her whole life and eventually you give up, demoralized.
It tasted, you write your boy in Panama, like beer.
You add an extra run to your workout, hoping it will cool your granos, but it doesn’t work. You have a couple dreams where you are about to touch her but then the bomb blows NYC to kingdom come and you watch the shock wave roll up and then you wake, your tongue clamped firmly between your teeth.
And then you are coming back from Chicken Holiday with a four-piece meal, a drumstick in your mouth, and there she is walking out of Pathmark, wrestling a pair of plastic bags. You consider bolting but your brother’s law holds you in place. Never run. A law he ultimately abrogated but which you right now cannot. You ask meekly: You want help with that, Miss Lora?
She shakes her head. It’s my exercise for the day. You walk back together in silence and then she says: When are you going to come by to show me that movie?
What movie?
The one you said is the real one. The nuclear war movie.
Maybe if you were someone else you would have the discipline to duck the whole thing but you are your father’s son and your brother’s brother. Two days later you are home and the silence in there is terrible and it seems like the same commercial for fixing tears in your car upholstery is on. You shower, shave, dress.
I’ll be back.
Your mom is looking at your dress shoes. Where are you going?
Out.
It’s ten o’clock, she says, but you’re already out the door.
You knock on the door once, twice, and then she opens up. She is wearing sweats and a Howard T-shirt and she tenses her forehead worriedly. Her eyes look like they belong on a giant’s face.
You don’t bother with the small talk. You just push up and kiss. She reaches around and shuts the door behind you.
Do you have a condom?
You are a worrier like that.
Nope, she says and you try to keep control but you come in her anyway.
I’m really sorry, you say.
It’s OK, she whispers, her hands on your back, keeping you from pulling out. Stay.
Her apartment is about the neatest place you’ve ever seen and for its lack of Caribbean craziness could be inhabited by a white person. On her walls she has a lot of pictures of her travels and her siblings and they all seem incredibly happy and square. So you’re the rebel? you ask her and she laughs. Something like that.
There are also pictures of some guys. A few you recognize from when you were younger and about them you say nothing.
She is very quiet, very reserved while she fixes you a cheeseburger. Actually, I hate my family, she says, squashing the patty down with a spatula until the grease starts popping.
You wonder if she feels like you do. Like it might be love. You put on Threads for her. Get ready for some real shit, you say.
Get ready for me to hide, she responds, but you two only last an hour before she reaches over and takes off your glasses and kisses you. This time your wits are back so you try to find the strength to fight her off.
I can’t, you say.
And just before she pops your rabo in her mouth she says: Really?
You try to think of Paloma, so exhausted that every morning she falls asleep on the ride to school. Paloma, who still found the energy to help you study for your SAT. Paloma, who didn’t give you any ass because she was terrified that if she got pregnant she wouldn’t abort it out of love for you and then her life would be over. You’re trying to think of her but what you’re doing is holding Miss Lora’s tresses like reins and urging her head to keep its wonderful rhythm.
You really do have an excellent body, you say after you blow your load.
Why, thank you. She motions with her head. You want to go into the bedroom?
Even more fotos. None of them will survive the nuclear blast, you are sure. Nor will this bedroom, whose window faces toward New York City. You tell her that. Well, we’ll just have to make do, she says. She gets naked like a pro and once you start she closes her eyes and rolls her head around like it’s on a broken hinge. She clasps your shoulders with a nailed grip as strong as shit and you know that after, your back is going to look like it’s been whipped.
Then she kisses your chin.
Both your father and your brother were sucios. Shit, your father used to take you on his pussy runs, leave you in the car while he ran up into cribs to bone his girlfriends. Your brother was no better, boning girls in the bed next to yours. Sucios of the worst kind and now it’s officiaclass="underline" you are one, too. You had hoped the gene missed you, skipped a generation, but clearly you were kidding yourself. The blood always shows, you say to Paloma on the ride to school next day. Yunior, she stirs from her doze, I don’t have time for your craziness, OK?
You figure you can keep it to a one-time thing. But the next day you go right back. You sit gloomily in her kitchen while she fixes you another cheeseburger.
Are you going to be OK? she asks.
I don’t know.
It’s just supposed to be fun.
I have a girlfriend.
You told me, remember?
She puts the plate on your lap, regards you critically. You know, you look like your brother. I’m sure people tell you that all the time.
Some people.
I couldn’t believe how good-looking he was. He knew it, too. It was like he never heard of a shirt.
This time you don’t even ask about the condom. You just come inside her. You are surprised at how pissed you are. But she kisses your face over and over and it moves you. No one has ever done that. The girls you boned, they were always ashamed afterward. And there was always panic. Someone heard. Fix the bed up. Open the windows. Here there is none of that.
Afterward, she sits up, her chest as unadorned as yours. So what else do you want to eat?
You try to be reasonable. You try to control yourself, to be smooth. But you’re at her apartment every fucking day. The one time you try to skip, you recant and end up slipping out of your apartment at three in the morning and knocking furtively on her door until she lets you in. You know I work, right? I know, you say, but I dreamed that something happened to you. That’s sweet of you to lie, she sighs and even though she is falling asleep she lets you bone her straight in the ass. Fucking amazing, you keep saying for all four seconds it takes you to come. You have to pull my hair while you do it, she confides. That makes me shoot like a rocket.
It should be the greatest thing, so why are your dreams worse? Why is there more blood in the sink in the morning?
You learn a lot about her life. She came up with a Dominican doctor father who was crazy. Her mother left them for an Italian waiter, fled to Rome, and that was it for pops. Always threatening to kill himself and at least once a day she would have to beg him not to and that had messed her up but good. In her youth she’d been a gymnast and there was even talk of making the Olympic team, but then the coach robbed the money and the DR had to cancel for that year. I’m not claiming I would have won, she says, but I could have done something. After that bullshit she put on a foot of height and that was it for gymnastics. Then her father got a job in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and she and her three little siblings went with him. After six months he moved them in with a fat widow, una blanca asquerosa who hated Lora. She had no friends at all in school and in ninth grade she slept with her high school history teacher. Ended up living in his house. His ex-wife was also a teacher at the school. You can only imagine what that was like. As soon as she graduated she ran off with a quiet black boy to a base in Ramstein, Germany, but that hadn’t worked. To this day I think he was gay, she says. And finally after trying to make it in Berlin she came home. She moved in with a girlfriend who had an apartment in London Terrace, dated a few guys, one of her ex’s old Air Force buddies who visited her on his leaves, a moreno with the sweetest disposition. When the girlfriend got married and moved away Miss Lora kept the apartment and got a teaching job. Made a conscious effort to stop moving. It was an OK life, she says, showing you the pictures. All things considered.