Eat, Pray, Love (39 page)

I
can’t remember the last time I got dressed up, but this evening I dug out my one fancy spaghetti-strap dress from the bottom of my backpack and slithered it on. I even wore lipstick. I can’t remember the last time I wore lipstick, but I know it wasn’t anywhere near India. I stopped at Armenia’s house on the way over to the party, and she draped me in some of her fancy jewelry, let me borrow her fancy perfume, let me store my bicycle in her backyard so I could arrive at the party in her fancy car, like a proper adult woman.

The dinner with the expatriates was great fun, and I felt myself revisiting all these long-dormant aspects of my personality. I even got a little bit drunk, which was notable after all the purity of my last few months of praying at the Ashram and sipping tea in my Balinese flower garden. And I was flirting! I hadn’t flirted in ages. I’d only been hanging around with monks and medicine men lately, but suddenly I was dusting off the old sexuality again. Though I couldn’t really tell who I was flirting with. I was kind of spreading it around everywhere. Was I attracted to the witty Australian former journalist sitting next to me? (“We’re all drunks here,” he quipped. “We write
references
for other drunks.”) Or was it the quiet intellectual German down the table? (He promised to lend me novels from his personal library.) Or was it the handsome older Brazilian man who had cooked this giant feast for all of us in the first place? (I liked his kind brown eyes and his accent. And his cooking, of course. I said something very provocative to him, out of nowhere. He was making a joke at his own expense, saying, “I’m a full catastrophe of a Brazilian man—I can’t dance, I can’t play soccer and I can’t play any musical instruments.” For some reason I replied, “Maybe so. But I have a feeling you could play a very good Casanova.” Time stopped solid for a long, long moment, then, as we looked at each other frankly, like,
That was an interesting idea to lay on this table.
The boldness of my statement hovered in the air around us like a fragrance. He didn’t deny it. I looked away first, feeling myself blush.)

His
feijoada
was amazing, anyway. Decadent, spicy and rich—everything you can’t normally get in Balinese food. I ate plate after plate of the pork and decided that it was official: I can never be a vegetarian, not with food like this in the world. And then we went out dancing at this local nightclub, if you can call it a nightclub. It was more like a groovy beach shack, only without the beach. There was a live band of Balinese kids playing good reggae music, and the place was mixed up with revelers of all ages and nationalities, expats and tourists and locals and gorgeous Balinese boys and girls, all dancing freely, unself-consciously. Armenia hadn’t come along, claiming she had to work the next day, but the handsome older Brazilian man was my host. He wasn’t such a bad dancer as he claimed. Probably he can play soccer, too. I liked having him nearby, opening doors for me, complimenting me, calling me “darling.” Then again, I noticed that he called everyone “darling”—even the hairy male bartender. Still, the attention was nice . . .

It had been so long since I’d been in a bar. Even in Italy I didn’t go to bars, and I hadn’t been out much during the David years, either. I think the last time I’d gone dancing was back when I was married . . . back when I was
happily
married, come to think of it. Dear God, it had been ages. Out on the dance floor I ran into my friend Stefania, a lively young Italian girl I’d met recently in a meditation class in Ubud, and we danced together, hair flying everywhere, blond and dark, spinning merrily around. Sometime after midnight, the band stopped playing and people mingled.

That’s when I met the guy named Ian. Oh, I really liked this guy. Right away I really liked him. He was very good-looking, in a kind of Sting-meets-Ralph-Fiennes’s-younger-brother sort of way. He was Welsh, so he had that lovely voice. He was articulate, smart, asked questions, spoke to my friend Stefania in the same baby Italian that I speak. It turned out that he was the drummer in this reggae band, that he played bongos. So I made a joke that he was a “bonga-leer,” like those guys in Venice, but with percussion instead of boats, and somehow we hit it off, started laughing and talking.

Felipe came over then—that was the Brazilian’s name, Felipe. He invited us all to go out to this funky local restaurant owned by European expatriates, a wildly permissive place that never closes, he promised, where beer and bullshit are served at all hours. I found myself looking to Ian (
did he want to go?)
and when he said yes, I said yes, also. So we all went to the restaurant and I sat with Ian and we talked and joked all night, and, oh, I really liked this guy. He was the first man I’d met in a long while who I really liked
in that way,
as they say. He was a few years older than me, had led a most interesting life with all the good résumé points (liked
The Simpsons,
traveled all over the world, lived in an Ashram once, mentioned Tolstoy, seemed to be employed, etc.). He’d started his career in the British Army in Northern Ireland as a bomb squad expert, then became an international mine-field detonation guy. Built refugee camps in Bosnia, was now taking a break in Bali to work on music . . . all very alluring stuff.

I could not believe I was still up at 3:30 AM, and not to meditate, either! I was up in the middle of the night and wearing a dress and talking to an attractive man. How terribly radical. At the end of the evening, Ian and I admitted to each other how nice it had been to meet. He asked if I had a phone number and I told him I didn’t, but that I did have e-mail, and he said, “Yeah, but e-mail just feels so . . . ech . . .” So at the end of the night we didn’t exchange anything but a hug. He said, “We’ll see each other again when they”—pointing to the gods up in the sky—“say so.”

Just before dawn, Felipe the handsome older Brazilian man offered me a ride home. As we rode up the twisting back roads he said, “Darling, you’ve been talking to the biggest bullshitter in Ubud all night long.”

My heart sank.

“Is Ian really a bullshitter?” I asked. “Tell me the truth now and save me the trouble later.”

“Ian?” said Felipe. He laughed. “No, darling! Ian is a serious guy. He’s a good man. I meant
myself.
I’m the biggest bullshitter in Ubud.”

We rode along in silence for a while.

“And I’m just teasing, anyway,” he added.

Then another long silence and he asked, “You like Ian, don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. My head wasn’t clear. I’d been drinking too many Brazilian cocktails. “He’s attractive, intelligent. It’s been a long time since I thought about liking anybody.”

“You’re going to have a wonderful few months here in Bali. You wait and see.”

“But I don’t know how much more socializing I can do, Felipe. I only have the one dress. People will start to notice that I’m wearing the same thing all the time.”

“You’re young and beautiful, darling. You only need the one dress.”

A
m I young and beautiful?

I thought I was old and divorced.

I can barely sleep at all this night, so unaccustomed to these odd hours, the dance music still thrumming in my head, my hair smelling of cigarettes, my stomach protesting the alcohol. I doze a bit, then wake as the sun comes up, just as I am accustomed to. Only this morning I am not rested and I am not at peace and I’m in no condition whatsoever for meditation. Why am I so agitated? I had a nice night, didn’t I? I got to meet some interesting people, got to dress up and dance around, had flirted with some men . . .

MEN.

The agitation gets more jagged at the thought of that word, turning into a minor panic assailment.
I don’t know how to do this anymore.
I used to be the biggest and boldest and most shameless of flirts when I was in my teens and twenties. I seem to remember that it was once fun, meeting some guy, spooling him in toward me, spooning out the veiled invitations and the provocations, casting all caution aside and letting the consequences spill how they will.

But now I am feeling only panic and uncertainty. I start blowing the whole evening up into something much huger than it was, imagining myself getting involved with this Welsh guy who hadn’t even given me an e-mail address. I can see all the way into our future already, including the arguments over his smoking habit. I wonder if giving myself to a man again will ruin my journey/writing/life, etc. On the other hand—some romance would be nice. It’s been a long, dry time. (I remember Richard from Texas advising me at one point, vis-à-vis my love life, “You need a
droughtbreaker,
baby. Gotta go find yo’self a
rainmaker.”)
Then I imagine Ian zooming over on his motorbike with his handsome bomb-squad torso to make love to me in my garden, and how nice that would be. This not-entirely-unpleasant thought somehow screeches me, however, into a horrible skid about how I just don’t want to go through any heartache again. Then I start to miss David more than I have in months, thinking,
Maybe I should call him and see if he wants to try getting together again . . .
(Then I receive a very accurate channeling of my old friend Richard, saying,
Oh, that’s genius, Groceries—didja get a lobotomy last night, in addition to gettin’ a little tipsy?)
It’s never a far leap from ruminating about David to obsessing about the circumstances of my divorce, and so soon I start brooding (just like old times) about my ex-husband, my divorce . . .

I thought we were done with this topic, Groceries.

And then I start thinking about Felipe, for some reason—that handsome older Brazilian man. He’s nice.
Felipe.
He says I am young and beautiful and that I will have a wonderful time here time in Bali. He’s right, right? I should relax and have some fun, right? But this morning it doesn’t feel fun.

I don’t know how to do this anymore.

“W
hat is this life? Do you understand? I don’t.”

This was Wayan talking.

I was back in her restaurant, eating her delicious and nutritious multivitamin lunch special, hoping it would help ease my hangover and my anxiety. Armenia the Brazilian woman was there, too, looking, as always, like she’d just stopped by the beauty parlor on her way home from a weekend at a spa. Little Tutti was sitting on the floor, drawing pictures of houses, as usual.

Wayan had just learned that the lease on her shop was going to come up for renewal at the end of August—only three months from now—and that her rent would be raised. She would probably have to move again because she couldn’t afford to stay here. Except that she only had about fifty dollars in the bank, and no idea where to go. Moving would take Tutti out of school again. They needed a home—a real home. This is no way for a Balinese person to live.

“Why does suffering never end?” Wayan asked. She wasn’t crying, merely posing a simple, unanswerable and weary question. “Why must everything be repeat and repeat, never finish, never resting? You work so hard one day, but the next day, you must only work again. You eat, but the next day, you are already hungry. You find love, then love go away. You are born with nothing—no watch, no T-shirt. You work hard, then you die with nothing—no watch, no T-shirt. You are young, then you are old. No matter how hard you work, you cannot stop getting old.”

“Not Armenia,” I joked. “She doesn’t get old, apparently.”

Wayan said, “But this is because Armenia is
Brazilian,”
catching on now to how the world works. We all laughed, but it was a fair breed of gallows humor, because there’s nothing funny about Wayan’s situation in the world right now. Here are the facts: Single mom, precocious child, hand-to-mouth business, imminent poverty, virtual homelessness. Where will she go? Can’t live with the ex-husband’s family, obviously. Wayan’s own family are rice farmers way out in the countryside and poor. If she goes and lives with them, it’s the end of her business as a healer in town because her patients won’t be able to reach her and you can pretty much forget about Tutti ever getting enough education to go someday to Animal Doctor College.

Other factors have emerged over time. Those two shy girls I noticed on the first day, hiding in the back of the kitchen? It turns out that these are a pair of orphans Wayan has adopted. They are both named Ketut (just to further confuse this book) and we call them Big Ketut and Little Ketut. Wayan found the Ketuts starving and begging in the marketplace a few months ago. They were abandoned there by a Dickensian character of a woman—possibly a relative—who acts as a sort of begging child pimp, depositing parentless children in various marketplaces across Bali to beg for money, then picking the kids up every night in a van, collecting their proceeds and giving them a shack somewhere in which to sleep. When Wayan first found Big and Little Ketut, they hadn’t eaten for days, had lice and parasites, the works. She thinks the younger one is maybe ten and the older one might be thirteen, but they don’t know their own ages or even their last names. (Little Ketut knows only that she was born the same year as “the big pig” in her village; this hasn’t helped the rest of us establish a timeline.) Wayan has taken them in and cares for them as lovingly as she does her own Tutti. She and the three children all sleep on the same mattress in the one bedroom behind the shop.

How a Balinese single mother facing eviction found it in her heart to take in two extra homeless children is something that reaches far beyond any understanding I’ve ever had about the meaning of compassion.

I want to help them.

That was it. This is what that trembling feeling was, which I’d experienced so profoundly after meeting Wayan for the first time. I wanted to help this single mother with her daughter and her extra orphans. I wanted to valet-park them into a better life. It’s just that I hadn’t been able to figure out how to do it. But today as Wayan and Armenia and I were eating our lunch and weaving our typical conversation of empathy and chopsbusting, I looked over at little Tutti and noticed that she was doing something rather odd. She was walking around the shop with a single, small square of pretty cobalt blue ceramic tile resting on the palms of her upturned hands, singing in a chanting sort of way. I watched her for a while, just to see what she was up to. Tutti played with that tile for a long time, tossing it in the air, whispering to it, singing to it, then pushing it along the floor like it was a Matchbox car. Finally she sat upon it in a quiet corner, eyes closed, singing to herself, buried in some mystical, invisible compartment of space all her own.

I asked Wayan what this was all about. She said that Tutti had found the tile outside the construction site of a fancy hotel project down the road and had pocketed it. Ever since Tutti had found the tile, she kept saying to her mother, “Maybe if we have a house someday, it can have a pretty blue floor, like this.” Now, according to Wayan, Tutti often likes to sit perched on that one tiny blue square for hours on end, shutting her eyes and pretending she’s inside her own house.

What can I say? When I heard that story, and looked at that child deep in meditation upon her small blue tile, I was like:
OK, that does it.

And I excused myself from the shop to go take care of this intolerable state of affairs once and for all.