The Pull of Gravity

CHAPTER TEN

I called Natt on my mobile phone before I returned to my room to check on Isabel. Being back in the Philippines was screwing with my head more than I thought it would. No, that wasn’t right. It was finding Isabel that was doing it. I could have suppressed everything, just forgotten it all, if I hadn’t been able to locate her. I could have left there with unanswered questions, but with the knowledge that I had tried. Done is done and what can’t be learned, can’t be learned. That’s what I would have told myself.

Only I wouldn’t have been able to forget. Maybe I could have dived into my Bangkok life and worked my ass off. Loved Natt as best I could. Gone to sleep each night dead tired, woken up each morning to start it all again. That would have worked, but only for a while. My brain had a funny way of waiting until I thought my life was going great, then reminding me of things I thought I’d put behind me.

Natt knew this. She knew why I’d come to the Philippines, encouraged it, even.

“You found her, didn’t you?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I can hear it in your voice. Will she tell you what you need to know?”

“She might, but…I’m not sure I should even ask her.”

She was silent for a moment. “You’ll do what you think best.”

After my disaster with Maureen, I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to be with anyone again. And later, in Angeles, after I’d messed up my relationship with Cathy, I wasn’t sure I even knew how. I guess you’d call that a low point. It wasn’t self-pity, more self-devaluation. I was still happy, friendly Papa Jay, and it wasn’t an act. But when it came to me and women, I thought maybe it wasn’t meant to be. Natt proved me wrong.

I went back to the room, opening the door slowly in case Isabel was still asleep. Her bed was empty, but no sooner had I started to think she was gone then I heard the shower in the bathroom turn on.

I clicked on the TV to one of the international news channels and watched with my eyes but not with my mind. In my head, an entirely different show was on. Scenes were playing out rapidly, one after another. Scenes of possible conversations between Isabel and me about Larry. They ended in tears, in anger, one even in denial of Larry’s very existence. It was just my imagination running wild, thinking only the worst, unable to see anything else.

In the bathroom, the shower shut off. I rubbed a hand across my face, trying, if only for a few minutes, to think of nothing. When the bathroom door opened, I turned. Isabel came out wearing only a white towel. She jumped when she saw me.

“You scare me,” she shrieked. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

It was a lie. Her reaction was just a little too calculated, too planned. But lying was second nature to her now. For all bar girls, it was a basic mode of survival, and Isabel had been a bar girl too long to turn it off without a lot of extra effort.

When I didn’t say anything, she walked over and sat on the bed next to me. “Are you okay?” she asked, putting a hand on the back of my shoulder. “You look sad.”

“Do I?”

Her hand moved lightly downward, tracing my spine and stopping in the small of my back. She leaned into me, her towel-covered breast resting against my arm.

“You do.” Her voice was low, almost a whisper.

I could feel her breath on my shoulder, then on my chest as she leaned closer. Her wet hair draped down my back, soaking my shirt where it lay. I could feel my hands begin to tremble, and in my mind, my thoughts tumbled randomly as I desperately looked for something to anchor on.

For me, one weakness, if it was big enough, begat others, and my desire to know the truth about Larry, to fill that hole inside me, was making me weak in all things. Alone with Isabel, so beautiful and willing, and me filled with all the memories that had been playing out in my mind the last two days, I was on the edge of becoming lost.

Her lips hovered just above the skin at the nape of my neck. I wanted to pull away. I screamed at myself to pull away, but my body wasn’t listening.

“Let me make you feel better,” she said.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw her hand move to where the towel was tucked into itself. As she pulled at it, it began to fall open.

I suddenly had a vision of Natt, happy, feeding me some of the panang moo she’d made, showing me the new dress she’d bought, holding me in the night when I had trouble sleeping. And it was enough.

I reached out and gently moved the towel back up over Isabel’s chest. I looked at her, her face still close to mine but now filled with confusion. I pulled her to me, hugging her tight.

“That’s not why I came,” I whispered in her ear.

At first there was nothing, and I thought maybe she hadn’t heard me. But then her body heaved as she began to sob. She hugged me, her fingers digging into my back. I continued to hold her, letting her know that I wasn’t going anywhere.

Finally, as her sobs grew quieter and farther apart, she said in a voice barely audible, “I’m sorry.”

“No,” I said. “No sorrys. If anything, it’s my fault. I shouldn’t have visited you at the bar.”

“You wish you didn’t come see me?”

“No. Not at all.”

She frowned. “But that’s not the only reason you are here.” This wasn’t a question. If it had been, I’m not sure how I would have responded.

We sat silently beside each other for several moments, then she whispered, “I know why you came.”

Of course she did. That’s why she’d tried to do whatever she could to distract me from it.

“It’s not important. I’m just happy to see you.”

“Larry,” she said. “You came because of him.”

“At first,” I admitted. “But now I just want to buy you breakfast, and not talk about anything.”

She took a deep breath. “No one ever loved me like he did.”

A tear ran down her cheek as she leaned against my shoulder, and began crying once more.

Maybe I wasn’t the only one who wanted to talk about Larry. Isabel could have left after she found I wasn’t in the room when she woke. But she hadn’t.

At that moment I realized, without her having to tell me, that she had never talked to anyone about what had happened, that she had bottled it up inside and tried to forget. But there was no forgetting. I was testament to that. She had stayed because deep down she wanted to talk, needed to talk.

Undoubtedly, she had demons much larger than mine that needed to be put to rest.

After she got dressed, we went for a long walk down the beach. The rain had stopped, though the sky was still gray and threatening. I asked her if she wanted anything to eat, but she said she wasn’t hungry. She held my hand, and occasionally leaned against me, but it was different now. We were Papa Jay and Isabel again, Big Bro and Little Sis. What had happened to us in the room, that moment of weakness-for both of us-was forgotten.

“Did I ever tell you he sent me flowers on the twenty-fourth of every month?” she asked after we’d been walking in silence for a while.

She had, but I told her no. There were things she needed to say, not for me, but to me.

“That was when we met. When we went on our first date.”

Though the two events had happened on different nights, I realized they had indeed happened on the same date-the incident with Mr. Comb-over after midnight, and the EWR with Larry less than twenty-four hours later.

“Every month he would send those flowers,” she said. “Every month. He never missed even one.”

She fell silent again. She had drifted closer to the wound than she wanted to, and wasn’t yet ready to rip it wide open. But the inevitable had to come, and when it did, just like when we worked at The Lounge, I would be there for her.

Back in Angeles in those crazy days, those of endless parties-manufactured though they were by the very nature of the business-I somehow got the reputation of being a voice of sanity. How the hell that happened, I don’t really know. But soon, if someone had a problem, more times than not, I was the one they came to.

That’s where this Doc business came from. I’m not sure who was the first to call me that, but soon people I didn’t even know were calling me by this new nickname. Larry learned it from Cathy, Cathy from Manfred, and God knows where Manfred picked it up. Tommy? Nicky? Dieter?

But Isabel never called me Doc, which was funny, because probably more than anybody, she was my biggest “client.”

When she came back from Manila after that first time she took Larry to the airport, it was three nights before she returned to work. Alona, a Lounge girl who lived with Isabel, would come to me each night and tell me, “She sick.”

When I asked what was wrong, Alona said, “Stomach, I think,” then “headache,” and finally, “I don’t know.”

It was Thursday night before Isabel showed up again.

“Everything all right?” I asked.

“Sorry, Papa,” she said. “I didn’t feel very well.” She tried to walk past, but I reached out and touched her shoulder, stopping her.

“Stomach flu?” I asked, pretty sure it wasn’t that.

She shook her head.

“A cold, then?”

“No. Nothing like that.”

I put my hand under her chin, and tilted her head up until our eyes met. “Did something happen with Larry?” At that point, the last I knew was they were going out to dinner on Sunday night, and then she was going home.

She said nothing.

Suddenly I was concerned my assessment of Larry had been wrong. “Did he hurt you? Make you do something you didn’t want to do?”

“He would never hurt me,” she said quickly.

And then I could see it. The spark in her eye, the set of her jaw as she defended her man. Something had happened, but nothing bad, at least in Isabel’s opinion. In fact, just the opposite.

I told her to go in back and get changed. I knew I wasn’t going to get the whole story that night. It was something that would only come with time, and eventually it did.

After Larry left, Isabel had gone into a funk. First it was the sadness of saying goodbye to him. Then, despite the fact he promised her he’d come back as soon as he could, came the fear she would never see him again.

Finally, Mariella, her own cousin, the experienced, all-knowing one, and-though Isabel didn’t suspect it then-the manipulation queen of Angeles, found out and came to talk to her.

“Do you think he’s coming back?” Isabel asked her.

“Of course he’s coming back,” Mariella said. “Once you hook them, they always come back. What kind of job does he have?”

“He owns some sort of company. I can’t remember exactly. Why?”

Mariella smiled. “Good for you. But you have to be careful.”

“I don’t understand,” Isabel said.

“Don’t ask for anything yet.” Mariella gave her cousin a very serious look. “He has your cell phone number?”

Isabel nodded. “He also asked if I have an email address.”

“You don’t have one yet?”

Isabel moved her head from side to side.

“Sirang ulo ka ba?” Mariella said. “It’s so easy. We’ll go get one for you today.” Mariella took a deep breath. “When you talk to him, you tell him you love him. You tell him he’s the only man for you. You tell him you can’t wait until he comes back.”

Though all of that was true, Isabel remained quiet. Mariella, after all, had been here a lot longer than she had.

“If he asks you if you need money,” Mariella continued, “you tell him you okay right now. Some other girls might tell you different, but don’t listen to them. You got to think about the future. Like I did with David. Look at me now. He send me money every month. I only have to work when I want to. He going to buy me a house, too, when he comes in January. If you do things right, you could be like me.”

Before Isabel could even say she didn’t want to be like Mariella, that her life was not the life Isabel wished for, her cousin stood up. “Come on,” Mariella said. “We go get you an email address now.”

Several hours later, Isabel was alone again and as depressed as ever. She was even considering just going back home to her parents. Angeles was not the place for her, and she didn’t want to be there anymore.

But on Thursday morning, Larry called and life had meaning again.