The Pull of Gravity Read Online Free PDF Page B

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