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.92929292
Wayan once told me that sometimes when she's healing her patients she becomes an open
pipeline for God's love, and she ceases even thinking about what needs to be done next.
The intellect stops, the intuition rises and all she has to do is permit her God-ness to flow
through her. She says, "It feels like a wind comes and takes my hands."
This same wind, maybe, is the thing that blew me out of Wayan's shop that day, that
pushed me out of my hung-over anxiety about whether I was ready to start dating again,
and guided me over to Ubud's local Internet cafe, where I sat and wrote--in one effortless
draft--a fund-raising e-mail to all my friends and family across the world.
I told everyone that my birthday was coming up in July and that soon I would be turning
thirty-five. I told them that there was nothing in this world that I needed or wanted, and
that I had never been happier in my life. I told them that, if I were home in New York, I
would be planning a big stupid birthday party and I would make them all come to this
party, and they would have to buy me gifts and bottles of wine and the whole celebration
would get ridiculously expensive. Therefore, I explained, a cheaper and more lovely way
to help celebrate this birthday would be if my friends and family would care to make a
donation to help a woman named Wayan Nuriyasih buy a house in Indonesia for herself
and her children.
Then I told the whole story of Wayan and Tutti and the orphans and their situation. I
promised that whatever money was donated, I would match the donation from my own
savings. Of course I was aware, I explained, that this is a world full of untold suffering
and war and that everyone is in need right now, but what are we to do? This little group
of people in Bali had become my family, and we must take care of our families wherever
we find them. As I wrapped up the mass e-mail, I remembered something my friend
Susan had said to me before I left on this world journey nine months ago. She was afraid
I would never come home again. She said, "I know how you are, Liz. You're going to
meet somebody and fall in love and end up buying a house in Bali."
A regular Nostradamus, that Susan.
By the next morning, when I checked my e-mail, $700 had already been pledged. The
next day, donations passed what I could afford to match.
I won't go through the entire drama of the week, or try to explain what it feels like to
open e-mails every day from all over the world that all say, "Count me in!" Everyone
gave. People whom I personally knew to be broke or in debt gave, without hesitation.
One of the first responses I got was from a friend of my hairdresser's girlfriend, who'd
been forwarded the e-mail and wanted to donate $15. My most wise-ass friend John had
to make a typically sarcastic comment, of course, about how long and sappy and
emotional my letter had been ("Listen--next time you feel the need to cry about spilled
milk, make sure it's condensed, will ya?"), but then he donated money anyway. My friend
Annie's new boyfriend (a Wall Street banker whom I'd never even met) offered to double
the final sum of whatever was raised. Then that e-mail started whipping around the world,
so that I began to receive donations from perfect strangers. It was a global smothering ofgenerosity. Let's just wrap up this episode by saying that--a mere seven days after the
original plea went out over the wires--my friends and my family and a bunch of strangers
all over the world helped me come up with almost $18,000 to buy Wayan Nuriyasih a
home of her own.
I knew that it was Tutti who had manifested this miracle, through the potency of her
prayers, willing that little blue tile of hers to soften and expand around her and to
grow--like one of Jack's magic beans--into an actual home that would take care of herself
and her mother and a pair of orphans forever.
One last thing. I'm embarrassed to admit that it was my friend Bob, not me, who noticed
the obvious fact that the word "Tutti" in Italian means "Everybody." How had I not
realized that earlier? After all those months in Rome! I just didn't see the connection. So
it was Bob over in Utah who had to point it out to me. He did so in an e-mail last week,
saying, along with his pledge to donate toward the new house, "So that's the final lesson,
isn't it? When you set out in the world to help yourself, you inevitably end up helping . . .
Tutti."
93939393
I don't want to tell Wayan about it, not until all the money has been raised. It's hard to
keep a big secret like this, especially when she's in such constant worry about her future,
but I don't want to get her hopes up until it is official. So for the whole week, I keep my
mouth shut about my plans, and I keep myself occupied having dinner almost every night
with Felipe the Brazilian, who doesn't seem to mind that I own only one nice dress.
I guess I have a crush on him. After a few dinners, I'm fairly certain I have a crush on
him. He's more than he appears, this self-proclaimed "bullshit master" who knows
everyone in Ubud and is always the center of the party. I asked Armenia about him.
They've been friends for a while. I said, "That Felipe--he's got more depth than the others,
doesn't he? There's something more to him, isn't there?" She said, "Oh, yes. He's a good,
kind man. But he's been through a hard divorce. I think he's come to Bali to recover."
Ah--now this is a subject I know nothing about.
But he's fifty-two years old. This is interesting. Have I truly reached the age where a
fifty-two-year-old man is within my realm of dating consideration? I like him, though.
He's got silver hair and he's balding in an attractively Picassoesque manner. His eyes are
warm and brown. He has a gentle face and he smells wonderful. And he is an actual
grown man. The adult male of the species--a bit of a novelty in my experience.
He's been living in Bali for about five years now, working with Balinese silversmiths to
make jewelry from Brazilian gemstones for export to America. I like the fact that he was
faithfully married for almost twenty years before his marriage deteriorated for its own
multicomplicated plethora of reasons. I like the fact that he has already raised children,
and that he raised them well, and that they love him. I like that he was the parent whostayed home and tended to his children when they were little, while his Australian wife
pursued her career. (A good feminist husband, he says, "I wanted to be on the correct side
of social history.") I like his natural Brazilian over-the-top displays of affection. (When
his Australian son was fourteen years old, the boy finally had to say, "Dad, now that I'm
fourteen, maybe you shouldn't kiss me on the mouth anymore when you drop me off at
school.") I like the fact that Felipe speaks four, maybe more, languages fluently. (He
keeps claiming he doesn't speak Indonesian, but I hear him talking it all day long.) I like
that he's traveled through over fifty countries in his life, and that he sees the world as a
small and easily managed place. I like the way he listens to me, leaning in, interrupting
me only when I interrupt myself to ask if I am boring him, to which he always responds,
"I have all the time in the world for you, my lovely little darling." I like being called "my
lovely little darling."(Even if the waitress gets it, too.)
He said to me the other night, "Why don't you take a lover while you're in Bali, Liz?"
To his credit, he didn't just mean himself, though I believe he might be willing to take on
the job. He assured me that Ian--that good-looking Welsh guy--would be a fine match for
me, but there are other candidates, too. There's a chef from New York City, "a great, big,
muscular, confident fellow," whom he thinks I might like. Really there are all sorts of
men here, he said, all of them floating through Ubud, expatriates from everywhere,
hiding out in this shifting community of the planet's "homeless and assetless," many of
whom would be happy to see to it, "my lovely darling, that you have a wonderful summer
here."
"I don't think I'm ready for it," I told him. "I don't feel like going through all the effort of
romance again, you know? I don't feel like having to shave my legs every day or having
to show my body to a new lover. And I don't want to have to tell my life story all over
again, or worry about birth control. Anyway, I'm not even sure I know how to do it
anymore. I feel like I was more confident about sex and romance when I was sixteen than
I am now."
"Of course you were," Felipe said. "You were young and stupid then. Only the young and
stupid are confident about sex and romance. Do you think any of us know what we're
doing? Do you think there's any way humans can love each other without complication?
You should see how it happens in Bali, darling. All these Western men come here after
they've made a mess of their lives back home, and they decide they've had it with
Western women, and they go marry some tiny, sweet, obedient little Balinese teenage girl.
I know what they're thinking. They think this pretty little girl will make them happy,
make their lives easy. But whenever I see it happen, I always want to say the same thing.
Good luck. Because you still have a woman in front of you, my friend. And you are still a
man. It's still two human beings trying to get along, so it's going to become complicated.
And love is always complicated. But still humans must try to love each other, darling. We
must get our hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It
means we have tried for something."
I said, "My heart was broken so badly last time that it still hurts. Isn't that crazy? To still
have a broken heart almost two years after a love story ends?"
"Darling, I'm southern Brazilian. I can keep a broken heart going for ten years over a
woman I never even kissed."
We talk about our marriages, our divorces. Not in a petty way, but just to commiserate.
We compare notes about the bottomless depths of post-divorce depression. We drinkwine and eat well together and we tell each other the nicest stories we can remember
about former spouses, just to take the sting out of all that conversation about loss.
He says, "Do you want to do something with me this weekend?" and I find myself saying
yes, that would be nice. Because it would be nice.
Twice now, dropping me off in front of my house and saying goodnight, Felipe has
reached across the car to give me a goodnight kiss, and twice now I've done the same
thing--allowing myself to be pulled into him, but then ducking my head at the last
moment and tucking my cheek up against his chest. There, I let him hold me for a while.
Longer than is necessarily merely friendly. I can feel him press his face into my hair, as
my face presses somewhere against his sternum. I can smell his soft linen shirt. I really
like the way he smells. He has muscular arms, a nice wide chest. He was once a
champion gymnast back in Brazil. Of course that was in 1969, which was the year I was
born, but still. His body feels strong.
My ducking my head like this whenever he reaches for me is a kind of hiding--I'm
avoiding a simple goodnight kiss. But it's also a kind of not-hiding, too. By letting him
hold me at all during those long quiet moments at the end of the evening, I'm letting
myself be held.
Which hasn't happened for a long time.
94949494
I asked Ketut, my old medicine man, "What do you know about romance?"
He said, "What is this, romance?"
"Never mind."
