Natt knew this. She knew why I’d come to the Philippines, encouraged it, even.
“You found her, didn’t you?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I can hear it in your voice. Will she tell you what you need to know?”
“She might, but…I’m not sure I should even ask her.”
She was silent for a moment. “You’ll do what you think best.”
After my disaster with Maureen, I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to be with anyone again. And later, in Angeles, after I’d messed up my relationship with Cathy, I wasn’t sure I even knew how. I guess you’d call that a low point. It wasn’t self-pity, more self-devaluation. I was still happy, friendly Papa Jay, and it wasn’t an act. But when it came to me and women, I thought maybe it wasn’t meant to be. Natt proved me wrong.
I went back to the room, opening the door slowly in case Isabel was still asleep. Her bed was empty, but no sooner had I started to think she was gone then I heard the shower in the bathroom turn on.
I clicked on the TV to one of the international news channels and watched with my eyes but not with my mind. In my head, an entirely different show was on. Scenes were playing out rapidly, one after another. Scenes of possible conversations between Isabel and me about Larry. They ended in tears, in anger, one even in denial of Larry’s very existence. It was just my imagination running wild, thinking only the worst, unable to see anything else.
In the bathroom, the shower shut off. I rubbed a hand across my face, trying, if only for a few minutes, to think of nothing. When the bathroom door opened, I turned. Isabel came out wearing only a white towel. She jumped when she saw me.
“You scare me,” she shrieked. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
It was a lie. Her reaction was just a little too calculated, too planned. But lying was second nature to her now. For all bar girls, it was a basic mode of survival, and Isabel had been a bar girl too long to turn it off without a lot of extra effort.
When I didn’t say anything, she walked over and sat on the bed next to me. “Are you okay?” she asked, putting a hand on the back of my shoulder. “You look sad.”
“Do I?”
Her hand moved lightly downward, tracing my spine and stopping in the small of my back. She leaned into me, her towel-covered breast resting against my arm.
“You do.” Her voice was low, almost a whisper.
I could feel her breath on my shoulder, then on my chest as she leaned closer. Her wet hair draped down my back, soaking my shirt where it lay. I could feel my hands begin to tremble, and in my mind, my thoughts tumbled randomly as I desperately looked for something to anchor on.
For me, one weakness, if it was big enough, begat others, and my desire to know the truth about Larry, to fill that hole inside me, was making me weak in all things. Alone with Isabel, so beautiful and willing, and me filled with all the memories that had been playing out in my mind the last two days, I was on the edge of becoming lost.
Her lips hovered just above the skin at the nape of my neck. I wanted to pull away. I screamed at myself to pull away, but my body wasn’t listening.
“Let me make you feel better,” she said.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw her hand move to where the towel was tucked into itself. As she pulled at it, it began to fall open.
I suddenly had a vision of Natt, happy, feeding me some of the panang moo she’d made, showing me the new dress she’d bought, holding me in the night when I had trouble sleeping. And it was enough.
I reached out and gently moved the towel back up over Isabel’s chest. I looked at her, her face still close to mine but now filled with confusion. I pulled her to me, hugging her tight.
“That’s not why I came,” I whispered in her ear.
At first there was nothing, and I thought maybe she hadn’t heard me. But then her body heaved as she began to sob. She hugged me, her fingers digging into my back. I continued to hold her, letting her know that I wasn’t going anywhere.
Finally, as her sobs grew quieter and farther apart, she said in a voice barely audible, “I’m sorry.”
“No,” I said. “No sorrys. If anything, it’s my fault. I shouldn’t have visited you at the bar.”
“You wish you didn’t come see me?”
“No. Not at all.”
She frowned. “But that’s not the only reason you are here.” This wasn’t a question. If it had been, I’m not sure how I would have responded.
We sat silently beside each other for several moments, then she whispered, “I know why you came.”
Of course she did. That’s why she’d tried to do whatever she could to distract me from it.
“It’s not important. I’m just happy to see you.”
“Larry,” she said. “You came because of him.”
“At first,” I admitted. “But now I just want to buy you breakfast, and not talk about anything.”
She took a deep breath. “No one ever loved me like he did.”
A tear ran down her cheek as she leaned against my shoulder, and began crying once more.
Maybe I wasn’t the only one who wanted to talk about Larry. Isabel could have left after she found I wasn’t in the room when she woke. But she hadn’t.
At that moment I realized, without her having to tell me, that she had never talked to anyone about what had happened, that she had bottled it up inside and tried to forget. But there was no forgetting. I was testament to that. She had stayed because deep down she wanted to talk, needed to talk.
Undoubtedly, she had demons much larger than mine that needed to be put to rest.
After she got dressed, we went for a long walk down the beach. The rain had stopped, though the sky was still gray and threatening. I asked her if she wanted anything to eat, but she said she wasn’t hungry. She held my hand, and occasionally leaned against me, but it was different now. We were Papa Jay and Isabel again, Big Bro and Little Sis. What had happened to us in the room, that moment of weakness-for both of us-was forgotten.
“Did I ever tell you he sent me flowers on the twenty-fourth of every month?” she asked after we’d been walking in silence for a while.
She had, but I told her no. There were things she needed to say, not for me, but to me.
“That was when we met. When we went on our first date.”
Though the two events had happened on different nights, I realized they had indeed happened on the same date-the incident with Mr. Comb-over after midnight, and the EWR with Larry less than twenty-four hours later.
“Every month he would send those flowers,” she said. “Every month. He never missed even one.”
She fell silent again. She had drifted closer to the wound than she wanted to, and wasn’t yet ready to rip it wide open. But the inevitable had to come, and when it did, just like when we worked at The Lounge, I would be there for her.
Back in Angeles in those crazy days, those of endless parties-manufactured though they were by the very nature of the business-I somehow got the reputation of being a voice of sanity. How the hell that happened, I don’t really know. But soon, if someone had a problem, more times than not, I was the one they came to.
That’s where this Doc business came from. I’m not sure who was the first to call me that, but soon people I didn’t even know were calling me by this new nickname. Larry learned it from Cathy, Cathy from Manfred, and God knows where Manfred picked it up. Tommy? Nicky? Dieter?
But Isabel never called me Doc, which was funny, because probably more than anybody, she was my biggest “client.”
When she came back from Manila after that first time she took Larry to the airport, it was three nights before she returned to work. Alona, a Lounge girl who lived with Isabel, would come to me each night and tell me, “She sick.”