The Pull of Gravity (3 page)

CHAPTER THREE

I found Isabel huddled on the floor in a back room at Angie’s
.
Though I’d never been in this particular room before, the surroundings were familiar. It was a changing room, lit by two bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling, and littered with piles of clothes and shoes. The only furnishings were three well-worn chairs and a chipped full-length mirror that leaned against the wall next to the door.

“What are you doing? You can’t be in here.” The voice came from behind me. I glanced over my shoulder and saw another Filipina who was probably the unofficial mamasan.

Customers were never allowed in the back. I knew this rule only too well, but at that moment I didn’t care.

Ignoring the question, I moved quickly across the room and knelt next to Isabel. “It’s okay. It’s only me,” I said softly.

“I call the police if you don’t leave now!” the mamasan yelled.

I whipped my head around, and glared at her, my face hard as stone. “Then call them.”

The woman, a little fireplug who had to be pushing fifty, turned and rattled off something in Tagalog to one of the girls standing behind her. After so much time, my command of the local tongue was rusty, but I knew she never mentioned police. After she finished, the girl turned and pushed her way through a group of other girls who’d apparently also been following us.

“Isabel,” I said, returning my attention to her. “It’s just Jay. I’m not going to hurt you.”

“I know who you are,” she sobbed.

The mamasan fired off another string of Tagalog, this time directed at Isabel. Rusty or not, I was able to pick up a little. “What does this
something something
want?” Her meaning would have been clear even if I hadn’t understood any of it. She was blaming Isabel for my presence.

I turned back to her, willing myself to remember the right words, then said with authority, “
Police ako. Umalis ka dyan
.” Basically I told her I was with the police and to leave us the hell alone. It was a handy phrase, and one of the first bits of Tagalog I’d learned when I started working in the Philippines.

I was sure she didn’t buy it. I looked about as Filipino as the pope, but she was smart enough not to take a chance. She gave me one last glare then turned and left, pulling the door closed behind her.

Isabel, still huddled in the corner, was looking at me now. There was no fear in her eyes. What I saw was shame.

I guess I should have expected her reaction. Even though our whole history together had been spent in and around bars just like Angie’s, it didn’t matter. I wasn’t just her former papasan, I was her past. I was someone who’d known she’d gotten out of the game, a member of her surrogate family, for God’s sake. And I’d just walked in and found her working at a bar again.

I held out a hand, careful not to actually touch her. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m your friend, remember? I’m just happy to see you.”

Maybe it was that last thing that did it, or maybe she just had more shame than she could bear on her own. Instead of taking my hand, she fell into me, wrapping her arms around my neck, and burying her head in my shoulder. The sobs and tears started again, only this time the surprise of being discovered was gone. These were tears of resignation.

When her crying subsided again, I asked, “Where are your clothes?”

She nodded toward a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt folded neatly against the wall and sitting beside an expensive-looking pair of shoes. It was in the small things that the girls tried to retain some of their dignity.

“Why don’t you put them on?” I said.

Though I’d seen her nude at The Lounge hundreds of times before, I turned my back as she changed. This wasn’t The Lounge, and we weren’t those people anymore.

“I’m ready,” she said in a voice stronger than I had expected.

I turned around and smiled, then held out my hand. “Let’s go.”

•    •    •

The mamasan and most of the girls were standing in the hallway as we left. There were two new arrivals with them—scrawny, unsmiling Filipino guys trying to look tough. I could have taken either of them easily, maybe even both together, but as it turned out, I didn’t need to worry. The mamasan shouted a question in Tagalog, then Isabel said something that sent a murmur through the dancers gathered behind Mama. There was another exchange between the older woman and Isabel. Then, after a tense moment of silence, the mamasan let out a sigh of exasperation, then turned and pushed the girls out of her way as she stomped off toward the bar.

The girls that remained parted as I led Isabel in the same direction. Several giggled as we passed. One touched Isabel on the shoulder, and asked her in English, “Are you going to be okay?”

“I’ll be okay,” Isabel said.

As we entered the main room, I could see the mamasan standing near the bar. She pretended to not even notice us as we walked toward the exit.

“Sorry if I got you in trouble,” I said as I opened the front door.

“I can handle it,” Isabel replied. She slipped outside and I followed.

It was early still, barely seven p.m., but the sky was already growing dark.

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

She shrugged and leaned against me. The ordeal of seeing me again had weakened her. To a casual observer, she probably looked like my girlfriend for the evening. I certainly wasn’t the only Western guy with a beautiful Filipina on his arm.

“How about some spaghetti?” I suggested. It had once been her favorite food.

She smiled, real this time, or as real as she could muster. Still, some habits were hard to break, and instead of saying yes, she said, “It’s up to you.”

•    •    •

I took her to The Rendezvous, one of several Italian restaurants on the island. There were few customers, so we had our choice of tables.

Now that she was sitting across from me, I didn’t know what to say. Though I knew a lot about Isabel and Larry’s time together, I’d only been a tangential player in their story. It was my desire to know the rest that had taken me back to Boracay, back to Isabel, but did I have any right asking her about it?

Finally, I just said, “Feeling better?”

She sighed, then took a sip of the wine we’d ordered before she answered. “Maybe I cannot go back to Angie’s.”

I smiled. “You know how mamasans are. Tell her you’ll slip her a few extra pesos from your next date and she’ll forget everything.”

I’d been trying to make light of the moment, but it wasn’t the right thing to say. The second I alluded to her profession, I could see her pulling back into her shell.

“Hey, don’t worry about it. I’m your ‘big bro,’ remember?” I said, using one of the names she used to call me.

She smiled a little at that. “What was it they used to say back in Angeles?” she asked. “‘You can take the girl out of the bar…’ Something like that?”

“‘You can take the girl out of the bar, but you can’t take the bar out of the girl.’”

“I guess I’m proof you can’t even take the girl out of the bar.”

She flashed me another smile, but I could see tears gathering at the corners of her eyes again. I could have lied to her, and told her she wasn’t like that, but she would have known I wasn’t telling the truth.

“So then why are you working again?”

She snorted. “Why does any girl work at a bar?”

“Because the dancing outfits are so cute?”

She picked up her napkin and threw it at me, laughing a little as she did so. “You’re crazy.”

“A little bit,” I said, falling into a scripted banter we’d played out many times years ago.

“More than a little bit,” she replied, following suit.

“Then someone better come take me away, because I’m not going to change.”

We both laughed loudly, causing several customers to look over.

“See how you are?” she said. It was a playful phrase bar girls used all the time, only I’d never heard it come out of Isabel’s mouth before.

I reached over and placed my hand on top of hers. “It’s really good to see you, Isabel.”

She looked at me, her face suddenly serious again. “It’s really good to see you, too, big bro.”

•    •    •

“No wonder you’re so skinny,” she said when we finished eating. In the same amount of time she managed to put away half a basket of bread and a large plate of spaghetti and meatballs, I only finished half of my penne arrabbiata.

I smiled, “You were pretty hungry.”

“No lunch today,” she explained.

I put some money on the table, and we left.

“What now?” she asked as we stepped into the warm Philippine evening.

“Thought maybe we’d go over to my hotel.”

She looked at me with a mixture of surprise and confusion.

“Just to talk, baby sis.” I held up my left hand. “I’m a married man now.”

“What?” she asked as she hit me on the shoulder as hard as she could. “I thought that was just something to keep the girls from falling in love with you.”

“Nope. The real thing.”

“Let me see.”

She grabbed at my hand before I even had a chance to hold it out again, then she bent down to take a close look at the band that circled my finger.

“White gold?” she asked, looking up at me.

I nodded.

She turned her attention back to the ring. “The design looks Asian.”

“Thai,” I said.

“Thai?” She sounded like she didn’t understand me.

“My wife is Thai.”

“Ah,” she said knowingly. “A bar girl.”

 “No. A businesswoman.” Natt had never been a bar girl.

We walked in silence, Isabel seemingly lost in thought. After a while, she said, “Why you married a Thai girl? Why not Filipina?”

I shrugged. “She was the one I fell in love with.”

True enough, but there was more to it than that. Like my desire when I moved away from the islands to get everything Filipino out of my system, so that maybe I’d live past my sixtieth birthday. The Philippines had been like a drug that sucked me in and numbed my senses. I didn’t trust myself to break the habit any other way than cold turkey.

My answer seemed to satisfy her, though, and we walked on quietly for a few more blocks.

As we approached my hotel, a playful smile creased her face. “So where is she?”

“Who?”

“Your wife.”

“At home,” I said. “In Bangkok.”

“Bangkok?” she said surprised. “How long you been there?”

“A few years.”

She considered this for a moment. “This wife, does she know you are here?”

“Of course she does.”

“But does she know why?”

I laughed, and said yes.

She stopped and looked at me, eyes wide. “Your wife let you come here to have sex with Filipinas?”

I gently pushed on her shoulder to get us moving again. “I’m not here to have sex with Filipinas.”

It was her turn to laugh. And why not? She’d seen thousands of men come through Angeles and now Boracay, all of them, to one extent or another, arriving with the common goal of getting laid.

“If not boom-boom, then why did you come here?” she asked.

Boom-boom was bar girl slang for sex. I hadn’t heard it in over two years, and it made me pause a second before answering. “Business,” I told her.

She looked at me, raising her eyebrows. I explained how I had tried to sell my share in The Lounge before I’d moved away, but with no luck. It wasn’t until recently that I’d finally received a decent enough offer.

At the hotel, I took her over to the bar that overlooked the beach, and bought a bottle of wine. We situated ourselves at a table as far away from everyone else as possible. I could feel memories and feelings and habits from the years I had spent in Angeles straining to reassert themselves. But I had boxed them up pretty tight, so even if there was a slip here and there, I knew I could keep them in check.

We talked for a while about life on Boracay, how it was different than living in her province, and definitely different than her life in Angeles. We didn’t touch on her job except in the most general terms.

When we were halfway through the bottle, she said, “You said you were here on business. That explains Angeles, but…are you in Boracay on business, too?”

Just beyond the bar, the waves crashed rhythmically on the beach. Out on the sea, I could see the lights of a ship heading back to the main island. I watched for several seconds as they dipped and rose through the swells before I turned back to Isabel.

“No,” I told her. “I came here to find you.”

CHAPTER FOUR

I poured the remainder of the wine into Isabel’s glass, filling it nearly to the brim.

“Are you trying to get me drunk?” she asked.

I smiled and set the bottle back down. I didn’t have to get her drunk; she was doing a fine job of it on her own. I, on the other hand, was still nursing my second glass.

There were nights back on Fields Avenue when it seemed like the only way to forget everything was to drink as much as you could. Everyone did it—the tourists, the ex-pats. The girls, too.

Everyone had their reasons, the girls maybe more than anyone. Sometimes it was a boyfriend who’d stopped 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 of whether our marriage was worth the effort. When she got tired of waiting for me to do something, it was Maureen, after pulling Lily out of my arms, who left me.

Over the next six months, Maureen would let me take Lily out for lunch or a movie about once a week. But then my soon-to-be ex-wife met someone else, and my visitation rights were terminated.

Abruptly. With no warning. No goodbye.

For several weeks after that, on my off days, I would sit in my car in front of Lily’s school in the morning and watch as Maureen dropped her off. Then one day Lily stopped on the steps before entering the school, turned, looked across the street to where I was parked and waved. Caught off guard, I could only hold up my hand and wave back.

That was the last time I saw her. After that I thought it was too dangerous to take the chance. One more time and Maureen might have caught me. She might have even called the police and God knows what she would have told them.

I realized then that I had to get out of town. I’d only be miserable if I stayed.

Back in my early Navy days, I’d spent some time at Subic Bay in the Philippines. What struck me most was how cheap everything was. Even back then, there was a thriving ex-pat community made up mainly of former American military men. In the States, their pensions would have let them lead a modest life at most, possibly even forcing them to take another job. But in the Philippines, there was no need for a second job. They could afford a large house in a secured development. They could even afford a full-time cook and maid, and there’d still be money left.

A couple of my buddies had moved to Angeles City several years earlier. It was only a two-hour drive inland from Subic so it seemed like a good idea to join them. My only regret was Lily, but there was nothing I could do.

After I moved to the Philippines, and even later, after I’d started my fourth life in Bangkok, I would send Lily cards and presents on special occasions, and sometimes for no reason at all. I still do. But I’ve been smart enough not to send them to Lily directly. Instead, I’ve always mailed them to Maureen’s sister in Temecula. We had always gotten along and I think she was sad to see me go, so I’ve hoped, when the appropriate time comes, she’ll give everything to Lily.

I’ve often wondered how much Lily really remembers about me now. Perhaps I’ll never know.

•    •    •

I settled down in a three-bedroom house on a half-acre of land that had a built-in swimming pool out back. It was only a couple of blocks from where my friend Hal Dogan lived with his Filipina wife, Dolce.

“I think the real reason people like us come here,” Hal once said to me, “is to disappear.”

And he was right. Angeles City was great for that. Like a black hole, pulling you in and hiding you from the rest of the world.

We spent a lot of time after I first got there barbecuing, drinking, playing cards, watching baseball games on satellite TV, and forgetting about pretty much everything else.

For a time, things were fine, mellow and relaxed. But soon mellow and relaxed became stagnant and bored. And after three months, I began looking for something exciting to do.