The Pull of Gravity

writing to them, other times it was news from home. It could be money, or competition with another girl, or nothing at all. And sometimes they’d come to work and suddenly remember what they did for a living, and start believing the words some of the locals spat at them as they walked by. Puta. Whore. Walanghiya ka talaga.

I had a feeling Isabel was drinking for all of those reasons. I had seen the behavior so many times in other girls, it was like watching a rerun on TV. Everything was predictable-the nervous laughter, tangents into harmless topics, the rapid consumption of wine.

But I also knew she was drinking to put off what she must have figured out I’d come to talk about. Because when I’d said I’d come to find her, the only logical conclusion was that I was there because of Larry. And while neither of us had even mentioned his name yet, I could see him lingering in the shadows in her eyes.

I glanced away, suddenly struck by my own callousness. Yes, talking about Larry would ease my mind, and allow me to put my time in the Philippines behind me forever, but what would talking about him do for her? I’d been blind to my own selfishness, and realized that I couldn’t force my needs onto her. There was something I could do for her, though.

Isabel was in the middle of telling me a meaningless story about one of the other girls at Angie’s. I let her finish, then asked, “Where do you live?”

“What?”

“Your apartment. Is it far?”

“Nothing’s far here.”

“Do you want to stay here tonight?” I said, knowing my hotel room had to be worlds better than where she called home.

“With you?” She sat back in her chair and took a good look at me. “What about your wife?”

I stood up. “Are you coming?”

She sat there unmoving for several seconds. I almost thought she hadn’t heard me, but then she pushed back her chair and got up unsteadily. “Okay.”

An open-air walkway ran around the building. My room was on the second floor facing the ocean. In Hawaii, a view like that would have cost several hundred dollars a night. Here, it was barely forty.

I unlocked my door and pushed it open. Isabel went in first, and I followed. I put my room key into the slot on the wall next to the light switch and turned it. Suddenly the air conditioning unit mounted under the window kicked on. No key, no electricity-an easy way for the hotel to save money.

My room was large, with tile floors, two queen-sized beds, a desk, and a TV mounted on the wall.

“Yours is the one next to the window,” I said.

“Mine?” She reached out to lean against the dresser but missed. I caught her on the way down, and guided her over to her bed so she could sit. “Don’t you want me? You said I was the reason you came here.”

“Not to sleep with you.”

“Then why…?” Her eyes suddenly closed, and she lay back on the bed, her legs still dangling over the edge. “Doc, I don’t feel too well.”

I picked her up and moved her gently to the head of the bed. She said something that sounded like the start of a question, but it soon turned into a groan as her head lolled back. Once she was situated, I removed her shoes, then folded the part of the bedspread she wasn’t lying on over her. Her eyes remained shut, and her breathing became deep and regular.

It was just after eleven p.m., still early by Asian standards. I took a cold bottle of water from the small room refrigerator, and stepped outside onto the breezeway. Leaning against the railing, I listened to the ocean. The sound of rain or waves crashing on a beach always relaxed me, like there was nothing but the here and now. Natt told me that water temporarily awakened the dormant Buddhist she was convinced was sleeping beneath my skin.

I took a drink out of the bottle and chuckled silently to myself.

Isabel had called me Doc. That was a name I hadn’t heard in a long time. I couldn’t recall ever hearing Isabel call me anything but Papa Jay or big bro. So when she used my old nickname, it was almost as effective in reverting me to my old Angeles self as seeing her again had been. I don’t recall the person who first started calling me that. Only a select few did, ex-pats mainly. To most of the girls I had been Papa Jay or just plain Papa. But Larry had called me Doc. That’s probably where she’d picked it up.

And there he was again.

Larry.

Right in the middle of things, yet a subject avoided at all costs.

The total sum of the time he and I had spent together couldn’t have been much more than a month. But it had been spread over a couple years, and in that time he had somehow become my best friend.

“Fuck you for dying, Larry,” I said softly, then raised my bottle into the air.

My aunt Marla used to like to categorize people.

“She’s a drug addict.” “The only thing important to him is cash.” “He’s an anarchist.” “A hippie.” “A woman hater.” “A man hater.” “Stingy.” “Soft.”

She had hundreds. Within minutes of meeting someone for the first time, she had him locked away in one of her boxes-sized up, figured out and filed away. And no matter what that person did in the future, they were always that “shifty-eyed scammer” or that “loose-legged home wrecker.”

The boxes gave her life structure, but they were harsh and damning. I’m sure her rigidity was responsible for her death.

I’ve often wondered how she would have described me. Not the boy me, because back then I had been her “helpful Jay.” Rather, the forty-eight-year-old me with the thirty-four-year-old Thai wife in Bangkok and a life uncommon behind me. Where would I have fit in on her personal periodic table? My guess is I’d have been her “nasty, whoring, no-good nephew.”

A small part of me used to wonder if I had spent more time with her, would any of her system of universal order have rubbed off on me?

I’m glad I never found out.

My life was already screwed up before I ever got on that plane and moved to the Philippines. I’d spent my career in the Navy basically keeping my head down and not getting into trouble. I never really considered myself a military man, but every time I had to either reenlist or get out, I opted for reenlistment. The truth was, I didn’t really know what else to do. And after a while I was more than halfway to my twenty years and a guaranteed lifetime pension. Getting out at that point seemed stupid. So I traveled the world on large gray ships, and pondered what I’d do when I retired.

About two years before I hit my twenty, while I was stationed in San Diego, I met a girl. Maureen was only twenty-six years old and I was nearly ten years her senior. But she seemed to love me, and I was tired of being alone. The only thing that made me hesitate asking her to marry me was that she had a six-year-old daughter named Lily. I finally decided she was cool enough, so I popped the question to her mother.

It’s funny how things turned out sometimes. We were married for three years. Three miserable, horrible years. Neither of us was more to blame than the other. We were just wrong for each other. And yet when it came time to call it off, the one thing that stopped me was Lily. The girl who had made me pause before proposing to her mother had become an important part of my life. I loved her like she was my own. I still love her.

Lily used to make up these wild stories that maybe I was her real father, but I just couldn’t remember because I had amnesia. I’d play along, and tell her I would go see a doctor, and get an X-ray of my head to be sure. She’d laugh, but there was always a little bit of hope in her eyes.

That last year Maureen got a night job. I guess she thought that if we didn’t see each other as much, maybe everything would be okay. By then, I was no longer in the service, and was only working part-time at a machine shop while taking a few classes at the community college. So evenings became my time with Lily. I helped with her homework, taught her how to play the opening to “Stairway to Heaven” on the guitar, and talked to her about anything she wanted to discuss. Sometimes when it was only the two of us, Lily would even call me Dad.

It was those evenings I really wanted to hold on to. They made me put off thinking about Maureen’s question