Just yesterday Dexter gave away the tape deck to the chauffeur. Why keep it for a pretense? The presidential uncle is on the road all the time. Dexter doubts he’ll ever meet him, much less get “an interview” out of him. None of the family seems bothered that the journalist is not doing much journalism. So be it. Anyhow, his peacock-blue and orange Hawaiian shirt Dexter passed on to the gardener, who wore it on his way off the grounds on his afternoon off. One of the aunts seeing the gardener go by commented, “Ay, Dios mío, look at that pimp shirt Florentino is wearing.” Oh well, it is obvious to Dexter that he will never ever fit into this family. It’s like being on a movie set with a crew that is suffering from amnesia and thinks this is real life.
Meanwhile, things with Yo are deteriorating. This story he told Lucy about Yo needing a few hours for her journal writing is just that, a story. If nothing else, Dex is getting the hang of all this story telling. This morning early, Yo snuck into his pool house room. (“See, it can be done!” she boasted.) His eyes had lit up. A pre-breakfast reunion between the sheets, yeah!
But no, Yo had come to discuss something. They were due to leave tomorrow for the coast, but things were bound to be crazy for a few days after elections. Why not cancel the resort and stay here for the rest of Dex’s visit.
Dexter’s face fell. All these long, awkward days in the compound, he has been fantasizing about that French hotel lady baking her titties in the tropic sun. Except, of course, that lady has Yo’s face, and hands and feet, and so on. “But I thought you wanted to have some time just the two of us together.” Dex hated the whine in his voice.
“What do you mean? We’re spending the whole day together here!” She was turning and turning a bangle on her thin, tanned wrist. He wanted to kiss that wrist. He wanted to show her how much he had missed her this long month of her return to the nineteenth century. Why—if she’s so good at storytelling—why can’t she figure out some sort of fib by which she has to have sex in order to stave off an incurable disease? If Dexter can be a journalist from the Washington Post, can’t he just as well be an M.D. from the Centers for Disease Control?
“Tell you what, Dex. I promise I’ll come here tonight, okay?” She was looking around the room as if casing the joint for tonight’s subterfuge. But Dexter wasn’t satisfied. He had gotten ambitious in his fantasies. He wanted him one of those personal massages. “I’ll give you one of them tonight, too,” Yo grinned. “Come on, Dex, amorsito. This way we can be supportive of my uncle after the elections.”
“I haven’t even seen your uncle yet. Besides, he’s got a whole damn army of tanks out there to support him.”
At that Yo’s jaw had dropped and her face lit up in indignation. “I can’t believe you said that!”
“Just joking,” he added, lifting his hands up as if to show he was unarmed.
His jokes did not amuse her in the least, she informed him. She was sick, vomitously sick (“There’s no such word,” he countered), sick of his picking on her family. They weren’t perfect, but still they had been so nice and welcoming to him and this was his thanks.
“But you criticize them yourself all the time!” he countered. “And need I remind you,” he continued, “that they’re not welcoming me but some fictional journalist from the Post.” His grievances seemed suddenly deeper than he had realized. The annoyance he had felt at not being able to tell them he was a nurse, to wear his earring and use the rubberbands on his wrist for his ponytail now reached down and tapped the still-searing rejection he had felt when Winnie Sutherland informed him she was leaving him for Donald the Doughboy because he, Dex, was a loser, a guy who would never find himself. “I gave myself a goddamn makeover to please you and your fancy family and you can’t even take off three fucking days for me.”
“Please don’t curse at me,” Yo said with a great deal of sudden dignity. She stood as if proudly dusting herself off.
They were headed for a bad fight and he didn’t want a bad fight in a country where he didn’t really know anyone else but her. He needed to calm himself and her down. A joint sure would help right now. He made the mistake of suggesting it.
“Great! Just what my uncle needs, drugs on the premises. Where are your brains, Dex?” She shook her head at him in utter exasperation.
And then he said exactly the wrong thing, but this time, he did it on purpose. “It’s like you haven’t grown up yet and moved away from your family.”
“That’s such a gringo thing to say! Why should I want to move away from my family? And what? Live like you, all separate and lonely without any real connection to your history?”
“Is that what you have, a real connection? What about all your pretense and lying?”
“Ay!” she cried, slapping the air in his direction. She was by the door now, that hot temper he’d also seen in Latin ladies in the movies flashing in her eyes. And suddenly, seeing her there so mean and ornery-looking, he was not so sure any more about the joint apartment with batiks on the walls, the mattress on the floor, the dark-headed little girl and matching boy, the family vacations to Yosemite. “I shouldn’t have come down here,” he admitted. “I should’ve just stayed home.”
He doesn’t know if she even heard him say so for she was already storming out of the pool house. He waited a few minutes, hoping that she’d come back and apologize for changing plans on him, at the very least come back to make one more point. Finally, he snuck out the back way. It was while he was behind the hedges by the pool house path, soothing his aching heart with a joint that he was caught by Lucinda the fox and her gaggle of little Yo lookalikes.
“So are you going to join us?” Lucinda is peering over her shoulder to where Dexter is still standing trying to persuade the maid to let him carry the towels.
“Sure,” he says, and falls in behind all those cute fannies. But today, he can’t enjoy them. He feels as if the cage of his heart has swung open and the bright bird he thought was his has flown away.
Late that night Dexter sets out once again through the maze of the compound grounds to find Yo. Thank god for the garden lanterns as most of the house lights seem to be off, everyone fast asleep—if that’s possible. Periodically, there are blasts of firecrackers or gunpowder or perhaps thunder—it is after all a cloudy night, no sign of a star up in that murky sky. It amazes Dexter how much this place has spun its web around him that the last thing he would think of is real thunder, what would seem most natural. The blasts are probably practice runs for a revolution. By now, the election results must be known. This afternoon, when he tried to book a seat out for the next day, the young lady on the other end of the phone said, “You are confirmated but please to telephone to see if the plane leaves tomorrow.”
“If the plane leaves?” Dexter had challenged the heavily accented young lady. “What kind of a confirmation is that, sweetheart?”
There was a moment of silence and a sigh he was meant to hear. “We have the election results tomorrow,” the young lady explained as though he were a very small child who could not understand the simplest thing.
That evening, he had tried getting Yo alone for a moment to tell her he would be leaving the next day, but the compound was flooded with well-wishers dropping in to wish the family luck. The uncle was still out on the road campaigning somewhere, but he was due home that night after the booths closed and before the tanks began to roll on the streets of the capital. Everywhere there were clusters of guests around big-screened televisions the like of which Dexter had seen only in downtown bars in Atlanta. Maids in uniforms of all colors and stripes had been enlisted to pass around serving trays of what looked to be Velveeta cheese on small squares of white Wonder bread. “Delicioso,” Dexter enthused each time he refused so as not to hurt their feelings. One country’s delicacy is another country’s junk food was all he could think.
Beautiful women looped their arms through his and asked him what he thought of their crazy country, and he smiled, aware of Yo’s eyes on him. “Nicest folks possible,” he kep
t saying. “Especially the ladies.”
At one point, Lucinda and a whole gang of adult cousins set out in a caravan of cars to check the mood of the town. Somehow he had gotten roped into going—though later when all the cars disembarked at Hotel Jaragua, he realized Yo was not along. There were drinks and dancing, and later at Lucinda’s request, he whipped out his American cigarettes, a brand not unknown to the D.R. cousins. By the time the group got home just before midnight, the firecrackers or gunshots had started. Dexter had fallen instantly asleep only to be startled awake by a nearby volley of something. That’s when the determination to find Yo seized him. They should, at the very least, have a parting tête-à-tête—as close as he’s ever going to get to anything French on this island. Maybe he could also prove to Yo and to himself before he left that he could outsmart the uncle system.
Up ahead in a kind of gazebo bar, a string of lights burns. A solitary figure leans against a post, looking out at the dark garden in a musing pose, a drink in his hand. Dexter is about to slip through a break in the hedge beside the path, when the figure calls out something in Spanish.
“No hablar español,” Dexter calls back, afraid that the figure might draw a revolver and shoot this intruder wandering around the compound in the middle of the night. “Soy Dexter Hays,” Dexter adds, hoping this is an uncle he has met before for one of those captive nightcaps.
“Dexter Hays . . . Dexter Hays.” The man is sorting through some memory Rolodex trying to place him. He gestures for Dexter to come on towards the light so he can place the stranger’s face.
Once Dexter draws near, he recognizes the handsome older man, a face now famous by repetition on buttons, newspapers, billboards, posters, TV. “I’m Yo’s friend,” he elaborates, offering the man his hand.
“Right oh,” the uncle says. “The journalist from the Post. How about a drink? I’m having a quiet nightcap before pandemonium begins.”
Dexter is impressed that the man would use a word like pandemonium—as if he has some sense of irony about this whole presidential campaign he is caught up in. As if secretly under the Donald-like exterior of success and know-how, there is a touch of a free spirit like Dexter’s inside the suave uncle. A man after my own heart, Dexter thinks. And suddenly, on the eve of his departure, Dexter wants someone here to know who he really is. “Actually, sir, I’m not a journalist,” Dexter admits.
“Oh?” The uncle looks at him with curiosity; a smile crinkles the corners of his eyes. The skin of his face is so evenly smooth that Dexter wonders if he leaves his TV pancake makeup on full time. “You’re not here with the CIA or the USIA or the FBI or some such thing, are you?”
“No sir,” Dexter answers, laying on the Southern accent to make himself sound more ignorant and likeable. “I’m here because . . . well, because I’m Yo’s compañero.” He tries out the Spanish word. “Or I’m trying to be,” he concedes.
So there, Dexter is thinking. He downs the rest of his rum drink, bracing himself for the slap on the face or the challenge to a duel or whatever it is they do.
But the elegant uncle is chuckling. “Well, young man, I guess we both need some luck. May we both win!” He clinks glasses and finishes his drink and then with a slap of an abrazo and a nod in the direction of a bedroom with its light still on, the presidential uncle is gone.
Outside the bedroom door, Dexter listens a moment before tapping lightly. A chair scrapes against the floor. “¿Sí?” a voice calls out, a voice that can still tug at his heart.
He turns the knob and the door opens into a small room lined with bookshelves that are filled, not with books, but with vases and ceramic ladies with baskets on their head and other knick-knacks. A couch has been converted into a bed, a pillow propped up by one of the armrests. Next to it, at the desk, Yo sits, a lamp shining on the notebook in which she has been writing.
She looks startled to see him here, and for a brief moment, Dexter thinks she will say, my hero, you did outsmart the cunning uncles. But instead her face tightens.
“What do you want?” she asks, watching him closely. Dexter feels the way he did back at the pool with all the little girls looking him over.
He sits on the armrest of the couch, his eyes glancing down at the notebook page where he catches the familiar curves of his handwritten name. “Baby, baby,” he says, kissing her hands, “what’s happening?”
Her face relaxes into a softness he knows is just before tears. “I thought you’d fall in love with my family,” she says in a teary voice. “I hoped you’d be happy here.”
For a moment he feels the same temptation to tell a story that Yo must feel. To say, Of course, I can be happy down here. I can fit right in with the smooth uncles and cousins and manservants more sophisticated than I am. For you, I can turn myself into a Dominican Dough Boy and let the chauffeur drive the Mercedes. But Dexter knows he is too old for anything but a surface makeover. “I do like them,” he reassures her. “They’re interesting and gracious. . . . Lord, they even remind me of my folks with their Southern hospitality. But honey baby, I left home twenty years ago. I don’t want to go back.”
“But your family—” she begins.
“My family is you and me.” He kisses her forehead. At the moment, it seems the right place to kiss.
“I couldn’t live that way. I couldn’t understand myself without the rest of the clan to tell me who I am.”
“I know,” he nods sadly. It’s as if he has finally knocked at the right door. Cinderella answers, and the shoe fits, but he’s in the wrong fairytale. His prince is supposed to wake up a sleeping beauty, not fit shoes on a waking one.
“What are we going to do?” she asks him. Her look is so open and trusting as if she believes that he, Dexter Hays, could make up a happy ending to their story.
“How about one of those personal massages?” he teases. But the sad look on her face mirrors the sadness in his heart. Neither is really in the mood.
“I wonder,” she wonders aloud, “if we would have figured all this out if you hadn’t come down here?”
And so, on this, their last night together, they lie down on the small couch and fall asleep to the booming of firecrackers. Some time much later, as light is beginning to seep in through the jalousies, Dexter hears the phone ringing with the call that informs the presidential uncle that he, too, has lost.
Part III
The wedding guests
point of view
He would like to say, friends and family, we are gathered here to celebrate this coming together of Douglas Manley and Yolanda García, which means—as you can see—the coming together of rich lives and many stories, the coming together of all of you.
But he does not like to wax eloquent outdoors. It is one thing to sound the high notes under the arched cathedral ceiling in the vaguely luminous light of St. John’s and an altogether different thing out here on this hot May day in the middle of a field next to a sheep farm and under a grove of hickory trees that keep dropping their plentiful nuts (the squirrels will be happy this year) on the assembled guests.
In front of him stands his old friend, Doug, whom he has known and not known in the way it is in most friendships, full of their disclosures and abeyances. Been with him through the settled years of his first marriage, the seemingly settled years, the church building committee meetings for the new roof, the battered women’s center in the basement—boy, did they have to fight the old guard for that one! Watched him grow in stature if that is a correct phrase for a shy man who is willing to help with the food tent at the bazaar and to read the second reading, which is generally quick and easier than the first reading with its hard-to-pronounce Old Testament names, but who would prefer not to come up to the altar and receive a Parish Angel pin for his contributions to St. John’s. Watched as a weariness descended upon him, an absentness that he had meant to talk to Doug about, but never did even after the rumors leaked through the guard he as a minister kept up against such ways of knowing things. Prayed with him and fo
r him when Doug himself came with the news, vows broken, a marriage foundered, a house built on rock shifting like the sands. And then the hard years, the embattled years.
He would like to say, Doug, here is the promise of renewal. Here is the helpmeet, the ram under the bush that spares you from sacrificing your happiness.
But again, it must be almost eighty degrees even under these shades trees. Beyond Doug and Yolanda’s shoulders he sees the hazy mountains indeterminate in the heat. He should be brief. But he would like to say some of these things.
Close to her father, biting her lip, is the child of that first marriage who is now adrift between families and fighting back tears. He would like to say, Corey, it will get better, I promise you. There is an end to grief, a still point in the turning world. But the most he would get from a young teenager if he spoke in this churchy way would be a fuck-you. He recalls pouring the water of spirit over the creased little forehead, the enraged howls, the legs kicking under a christening gown that was far too pretentious for this bit of person, and he recalls, too, how when he intoned her name, a sudden quiet descended on the tiny features as if this were all she had been waiting for, her place in the world which is now being taken away from her.
He does not really know what to say to her.
And flanking Corey as if to bolster her in this, her moment of knowing that it will not be the happy story she wants—her mom and her dad reunited, egg hunts in the attic—are her grandparents, Doug’s mother and father with their older, tired versions of the granddaughter’s face, of Doug’s face. Sweet simple people. Always the phrase comes to mind, the salt of the earth, and of course the beatitudes, blessed are the meek, blessed are the clear in spirit.
Yo! Page 19
