The Pull of Gravity (12 page)

He looked startled. “No. That’s not what I mean at all. I just want you to be her friend. Be there for her if she needs someone to talk to.”

I relaxed a little. “I do that already.”

“I realize that. But,” he paused, knowing the words he was about to say were trite, but not knowing any other way to say it, “she’s special.”

“I know.”

“It’s like she’s the only—”

“Larry,” I said, stopping him. “I know.”

He smiled sheepishly, and again silence descended on us. As the girls walked out of the water and began heading in our direction, Larry said, “I’m going to send her money every month.”

“That’s between you and her.”

He looked over at me. “If something happens and she needs more, if
you
think she needs more, that’s when I want you to contact me. You don’t have to tell me what it’s for. Is that okay?”

I smiled and nodded. “That’s okay.”

•    •    •

A lot had changed during that week away, the most important being Isabel and Larry’s love moving from potential to genuine. It was still too early to talk of marriage, but we all knew it was waiting on the road ahead. As for Cathy and me, we’d moved from coy teasing to secret lovers. I had told both her and Isabel that I didn’t want the rest of the girls to know what was going on. I couldn’t have it interfering with my job. Did I really believe it would remain secret forever? No. But I hoped it would for a while.

And it was also on that trip that Larry and I moved from acquaintances to friends—good friends, even. I was going to miss the son of a bitch when he left in a few days.

As we drove from the airport in Manila back to Angeles, Larry had the driver make a quick stop at a store. He darted inside and five minutes later returned with a bottle of cheap champagne and a stack of paper cups.

Once we were back on the road, he poured each of us a cupful of the wine.

“To a great vacation,” he said.

“To a great vacation,” we all echoed.

Soon we’d be back in Angeles, at the party that never stopped, but at that moment, we were just four friends having a little party of our own.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

We had been walking in silence on the beach for fifteen minutes. The clouds had actually begun to break up some, and I was beginning to think maybe we’d miss most of the storm. Others must have been thinking the same thing, as the regular noises of the beach—the fishermen preparing their boats, the tourists talking and laughing and playing on the sand, and the young kids walking up and down selling necklaces and sunglasses and candy bars—that had been missing earlier returned. For a while we stood down at the water’s edge, letting the warm sea wash over our feet.

Because it suddenly felt natural to do so, I began talking about Larry. And once I started, I found it hard to stop.

I told her about the first time I had met him. I talked about the jerk with the comb-over and Larry’s offer of tea. Her face grew pained as I went on, but she didn’t try to change the subject. Most of what I told her was stuff she already knew, but just hadn’t thought about since she locked it all up in that place she kept her most painful memories. I imagined that room was crammed full, mostly with memories of Larry, but not all. When I got to that trip the four of us took to Boracay, Isabel finally teared up. After I told her what Larry had said to me as we watched her and Cathy play in the water, a few tears escaped.

“You know you meant everything to him,” I said.

She nodded.

“Even then,” I said.

She nodded again.

“He wasn’t like the other guys I’ve met since he—” she stopped herself, then said, “after him. He was not like anyone I ever meet in Angeles, or here, or even at home, before.” Before she’d come to work at The Lounge, she meant. Before she started the job that had become her life.

We walked on for a bit, then she said, “Except maybe you.”

“No,” I said. “Not me. I was like everyone else.”

She shook her head, but said nothing.

I went back to our vacation on Boracay, talking about our trip home, and how, though I felt refreshed and able to handle work again, I was sad it was over.

“What I remember most,” she said, “was that monkey.”

It took me a second, then I laughed. “I’d forgotten all about that,” I said.

That damn monkey. It had to have been our third or fourth day there. We were on the beach, not far from Boat Station 1. This guy, a local who looked sixty but was probably not much more than forty-five, was offering tourists the chance to take a picture with his monkey. It was small, with reddish hair and a bored look on its face. The local guy had it tethered to a palm tree with a piece of dirty rope that was tied to a homemade leather collar around the monkey’s neck.

“For some reason, Larry really wanted to get us all to take a picture with it,” I said, remembering.

“He told me he’d never seen a monkey that close before.” Isabel was barely able to keep from laughing. “Even at the zoo, he never got that close.”

“That stupid, fucking monkey,” I said.

Larry had spotted the guy and his monkey first, and had sprinted ahead of us. By the time we caught up, he was leaning down, his hand outstretched, but not yet touching the animal.

“What’s his name?” Larry asked the owner.

“Julio,” the guy said.

“Hey there, Julio.” Larry was like a little kid. “Can I pet him?”

Julio’s owner shrugged. “You want to take a picture with him?”

Larry’s eyes lit up. “Hell, yeah.”

“Three hundred pesos.”

Cathy immediately jumped in, speaking in Tagalog so fast I couldn’t understand her. Two minutes later, with the price down to a hundred pesos, we were grouped with our backs to the ocean, the monkey sitting quietly on Larry’s shoulder.

Larry had given the owner his digital camera and had explained how it worked, but the guy seemed to be having problems getting the shot. Several times Larry had to walk over—the monkey still on his shoulder, grabbing Larry’s hair so as not to fall—to show the guy what he needed to do.

On the third trip, I guess the monkey had had enough. He shrieked in annoyance. Isabel jumped one way while Cathy jumped the other, each screaming in surprise and fear. This new complication didn’t sit well with Julio, who grabbed on harder to Larry’s hair, shrieking again.

Instinctively, Larry reached up to pull the monkey off his head, but Julio just slapped his hand away. This whole time the owner kept trying to get the camera to work, impervious to the noise and confusion.

Julio apparently decided he’d had enough of the entire event. He screeched once more, then leaped onto the sandy beach and ran back to his spot at the base of the palm tree.

“Are you all right?” I asked Larry.

“What?” he said. He was holding his head where Julio had been hanging on.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he said after a moment’s hesitation. “I think so. Except I can’t hear a damn thing in this ear.” He massaged the outside of the ear Julio had been screaming into.

Julio’s owner walked up and held out the camera. Larry took it from him.

“I think you should give us our money back,” I said.

The guy stared at me, like he didn’t understand, when I knew he did. Cathy and Isabel had rejoined us by now, both of them keeping a wary eye on Julio. Cathy told the guy in Tagalog to give Larry his money back, but the guy basically told her no refunds, then started to walk away. Cathy reached out to stop him, but Larry put a hand on her arm.

“It’s okay,” Larry said. “Let him keep the money.”

He held up the camera. “Who knows? Maybe we got the shot.” He smiled broadly. “Besides, I can’t say I’ve ever had a monkey angry at me before.”

We all started laughing. And several times over the next few hours, Cathy or Isabel would impulsively reach over and tug on Larry’s hair.

Later, when we had a chance to look at the results, we found that the guy with the monkey had been able to get only one picture taken, a close-up of his own feet. Larry printed out copies and gave one to each of us. Mine was pinned to the wall behind the bar in The Lounge. For all I know, it could still be there.

•    •    •

The memory brought a welcome change to Isabel’s mood. No doubt, for the last three years, only one memory of Larry had dominated her thoughts—that he was gone. That he’d been killed on a dark street only a few blocks away from The Lounge. It certainly was the image I couldn’t get out of my mind.

Now she seemed willing to talk. More than that, she sounded as if she had come in search of me to make me remember.

“I hated going back to Angeles after that,” she said. The sun had begun to dominate the sky again so we stopped under the shade of a couple of palm trees, sitting down on warm, white sand. “I was scared of that first night after he leave for America, when I have to be back at work talking to some other guy. I was afraid they’d touch me, like that other customer did. Or whisper something stupid in my ear. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding.

“I thought, what do I do when one of them ask me to go bar fine? But I could not make enough money anywhere else. My family, they rely on me,
di ba
?” She paused, not expecting an answer from me, but momentarily lost in thought. “But Larry seemed to know anyway. He told me the last night before he go home from that trip what he and you agree on.”

She looked at me, eyes moist but not tearing, then smiled and leaned into my shoulder.

•    •    •

“I wish she didn’t have to work here,” Larry said. “No offense, but I worry about her all the time. I know you try to take care of her, but you don’t work every night. And she’s not the only girl you have to watch over.”

We were sitting at the counter in The Pit Stop overlooking Fields Avenue. It was three in the afternoon on the day before Larry was to return to California, and two days after our return from Boracay. As usual, it was hot, and the electric fans Carter had mounted near the ceiling were doing little to relieve the discomfort. I could already feel my shirt sticking to my back. My only relief was from the large iced tea sitting on the counter in front of me.

There wasn’t really anything I could say, so I took a sip of my drink.

Larry was right; I couldn’t be Isabel’s keeper. Nor would I want to be. That wasn’t what he was asking. I’d known him long enough at this point to be fairly certain he wasn’t one of those guys who wanted to control their
honey ko’s
every move. Those were the guys who figured out how to pinpoint their girls’ cell-phone location after a call. They were the ones who had their friends go into the bars to see if their girlfriend was still working after she said she’d stopped, or had them try to bar fine her after she swore she only worked for lady drinks and didn’t go out on EWR, or follow her to see if she had a Filipino boyfriend on the side, never realizing that if she did have someone else, the man on the side was the foreign guy, not the Filipino boyfriend.

Larry’s concern didn’t seem to be rooted in a sense of control and jealousy. His concern seemed more genuine, more obvious. There was nothing beyond the desire for Isabel to have the best life she could have.

On the street in front of us, there was a steady trickle of girls in their street clothes, walking past on their way toward the bars where they worked. Some were dressed in a simple shirt and jeans, while others looked like they were ready for a night on the town. There were the stunners and spinners and cherry girls and all the other types that populated the bars of the district. They were in pairs and groups and occasionally alone. Some walked down the street talking and laughing with each other, while some walked purposefully, eyes straight ahead as if unaware of anyone around them. Then there were those who were fully aware of everything. These were the ones who would glance over at the guys they passed, smiling and waving and joking with them before turning their attention elsewhere. Always working, always on.

Because I was on the inside, part of the Angeles inner circle, I knew a lot of the girls, maybe not all by name, but at least by face. And they knew me, too. So when they saw me I would get the smile and the wave, but I would also get “Hi, Papa,” “You haven’t come to see me in a long time, Papa,” and “I miss you, Papa.”

It was a parade of sorts. Unofficial and unorganized, yet so memorable and eye-pleasing that many guys who visited Fields considered it one of the highlights of the day. Some guys would follow the ones they found particularly intriguing back to the girl’s bar, or sometimes they’d even try to get a girl to skip work altogether and go with them on the spot.

Larry, though, didn’t seem to notice any of it. His eyes were focused on the roof of Jolly Jack’s, directly across the street. “I have a question for you.”

“Okay.”

“How do I make her understand that I’m just trying to help?” he asked.

“I’m not quite following you.”

He looked over at me and smiled. “Sorry,” he said. “Here’s my problem. I told you I was going to send money every month, right?”

I nodded.

“I’m planning on it being enough so that she doesn’t have to work anymore,” he said. “But she says she doesn’t want me to send her anything at all.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

He took a deep breath, shrugging slightly. “I told her she could go back home to her family, but she doesn’t want to do that. She said she’s not after my money. She said she’s not one of those girls, and that she has a job and makes her own living.”

It’s funny—if someone like Mariella had said that to a guy, I would have known she was just playing him, making it so that he thought she cared about him, before she would finally give in and say yes. The guy would probably offer her even more money in the end. But with Isabel, it was different. I’d seen with my own eyes what Larry meant to her. And if she had told him she didn’t want his money, she meant it.

“Every time I bring up the subject, she cuts me off,” he said. “She doesn’t even want to talk about it. I don’t know if it’s pride or what, but, Doc, I’ve got to do something.”

“Some of it’s pride,” I said. I took another sip of my iced tea. “She wants you to know that she’s not like the other girls here.”

“I know she’s not. I tell her that all the time.”

“That doesn’t matter. Look around,” I said, gesturing to the street where the parade of girls was at full force. For the first time, he seemed to notice. “See those guys over there?” I pointed toward a group of men gathered near the entrance of The Eight Ball, talking to the door girls while keeping an eye on the parade. “This is Isabel’s life, day after day. These are the only people she knows right now. This is her reality. When she says she’s not like the other girls, that’s not completely true.”

I could see Larry’s eyes narrowing.

 “Let me finish,” I said. “When she says that, what she really means is that she’s not like those girls who are here only to take the guys for as much money as they can. She’s telling you she’s not one of the ones who’ll have multiple guys around the world who think of her as their girlfriend and send her money every month. The fact that she is just the opposite, and not the only girl on Fields who is, doesn’t really matter. Because of this place, what it is, she’s afraid that your first inclination will be to think she’s just another money-hungry bar girl.”

“But I never believed she was one of them,” he said.

I looked at him silently for a moment. “Before you go judging
them
,” I said, my tone dead serious, “remember they’re only doing what they’ve learned to do to survive. And they wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for all of us.” I glanced across the street at the guys still camped out in front of The Eight Ball, then looked at Larry. “All of you.”

“No, no. You’re right,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m just worried about Isabel.”

“I know you are,” I said.

As the girls continued to walk by, I noticed another familiar face. It was Jade. She used to be one of the dancers at The Lounge when I first started, but she was getting old for the job. I think she was about twenty-seven then. She’d been offered a position as a mamasan at one of the smaller bars, and had jumped at the opportunity. She always had a good head for business, and had moved on from that small bar to become a mamasan at a much larger place called The Rack.