The Pull of Gravity Read Online Free PDF

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