"No--what it is? What this word means?"
"Romance." I defined. "Women and men in love. Or sometimes men and men in love, or
women and women in love. Kissing and sex and marriage--all that stuff."
"I not make sex with too many people in my life, Liss. Only with my wife."
"You're right--that's not too many people. But do you mean your first wife or your second
wife?"
"I only have one wife, Liss. She dead now."
"What about Nyomo?"
"Nyomo not really my wife, Liss. She the wife of my brother." Seeing my confused
expression, he added, "This typical Bali," and explained. Ketut's older brother, who is a
rice farmer, lives next door to Ketut and is married to Nyomo. They had three children
together. Ketut and his wife, on the other hand, were unable to have any children at all, so
they adopted one of Ketut's brother's sons in order to have an heir. When Ketut's wife
died, Nyomo began living in both family compounds, splitting her time between the twohouseholds, taking care of both her husband and his brother, and tending to the two
families of her children. She is in every way a wife to Ketut in the Balinese manner
(cooking, cleaning, taking care of household religious ceremonies and rituals) except that
they don't have sex together.
"Why not?" I asked.
"Too OLD!" he said. Then he called Nyomo over to relay the question to her, to let her
know that the American lady wants to know why they don't have sex with each other.
Nyomo about died laughing at the very thought of it. She came over and punched me in
the arm, hard.
"I only had one wife," Ketut went on. "And now she dead."
"Do you miss her?"
A sad smile. "It was her time to die. Now I tell you how I find my wife. When I am
twenty-seven years, I meet a girl and I love her."
"What year was that?" I asked, desperate as always to figure out how old he is.
"I don't know," he said. "Maybe 1920?"
(Which would make him about a hundred and twelve by now. I think we're getting closer
to solving this . . .)
"I love this girl, Liss. Very beautiful. But not good character, this girl. She only want
money. She chase other boy. She never tell truth. I think she had a secret mind inside her
other mind, nobody can see inside there. She stop to loving me, go away with other boy. I
am very sad. Broken in my heart. I pray and pray to my four spirit brothers, ask why she
not anymore love me? Then one of my spirit brothers, he tell me the truth. He say, 'This
is not your true match. Be patient.' So I be patient and then I find my wife. Beautiful
woman, good woman. Always sweet for me. Never once we argue, have always harmony
in household, always she smiling. Even when no money at home, always she smiling and
saying how happy she is to see me. When she die, I very sad in my mind."
"Did you cry?"
"Only little bit, in my eyes. But I do meditation, to clean the body from pain. I meditate
for her soul. Very sad, but happy, too. I visit her in meditation every day, even to kissing
her. She the only woman I ever make sex with. So I do not know . . . what is new word,
from today?"
"Romance?"
"Yes, romance. I do not know romance, Liss."
"So it's not really your area of expertise, eh?"
"What is this, expertise? What this word means?"
95959595
I finally sat down with Wayan and told her about the money I'd raised for her house. I
explained about my birthday wish, showed her the list of all my friends' names, and thentold her the final amount which had been raised: Eighteen thousand American dollars. At
first she was shocked to such an extent that her face looked like a mask of grief. It is
strange and true that sometimes intense emotion can cause us to respond to cataclysmic
news in exactly the opposite manner logic might dictate. This is the absolute value of
human emotion--joyful events can sometimes register on the Richter scale as pure trauma;
dreadful grief makes us sometimes burst out laughing. This news I had just handed to
Wayan was too much for her to take in, she almost received it as a cause for sorrow, so I
sat there with her for a few hours, telling her the story repeatedly and showing her the
numbers again and again, until the reality began to sink in.
Her first really articulate response (I mean, even before she burst into tears because she
realized she was going to be able to have a garden) was to urgently say, "Please, Liz, you
must explain to everyone who helped raise money that this is not Wayan's house. This is
the house of everyone who helped Wayan. If any of these people comes to Bali, they
must never stay in a hotel, OK? You tell them they come and stay at my house, OK?
Promise to tell them that? We call it Group House . . . the House for Everybody . . ."
Then she realized about the garden, and started to cry.
Slowly, though, happier realizations come to her. It was like she was a pocketbook
shaken upside down and emotions were spilling all over the place. If she had a home, she
could have a small library, for all her medical books! And a pharmacy for her traditional
remedies! And a proper restaurant with real chairs and tables (because she had to sell all
her old good chairs and tables to pay the divorce lawyer). If she had a home, she could
finally be listed in Lonely Planet, who keep wanting to mention her services, but never
can do so, because she never has a permanent address that they can print. If she had a
home, Tutti could have a birthday party someday!
Then she got very sober and serious again. "How can I thank you, Liz? I would give you
anything. If I had husband I loved, and you needed a man, I would give you my
husband."
"Keep your husband, Wayan. Just make sure Tutti goes to university."
"What would I do if you never came here?"
But I was always coming here. I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which
says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are
standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen.
"Where are you going to build your new house, Wayan?" I asked.
Like a Little Leaguer who's had his eye on a certain baseball glove in the shop window
for ages, or a romantic girl who's been designing her wedding dress since she was
thirteen, it turned out that Wayan already knew exactly the piece of land she would like
to buy. It was in the center of a nearby village, was connected to municipal water and
electricity, had a good school nearby for Tutti, was nicely located in a central place where
her patients and customers could find her on foot. Her brothers could help her build the
home, she said. She'd all but picked out the paint chips for the master bedroom already.
So we went together to visit a nice French expatriate financial adviser and real estate guy,
who was kind enough to suggest the best way to transfer the money. His suggestion was
that I keep it easy and just wire the money directly from my bank account into Wayan's
bank account and let her buy whatever land or home she wants, so I don't have to mess
around with owning property in Indonesia. As long as I didn't wire over amounts bigger
than $10,000 at a time, the IRS and CIA wouldn't suspect me of laundering drug money.Then we went to Wayan's little bank, and talked to the manager about how to set up a
wire transfer. In neat conclusion, the bank manager said, "So, Wayan. When this wire
transfer goes through, in just a few days, you should have about 180 million rupiah in
your bank account."
Wayan and I looked at each other and sparked off into a ridiculous riot of laughter. Such
an enormous sum! We kept trying to pull ourselves together, since we were in some
fancy banker's office, but we couldn't stop laughing. We stumbled out of there like
drunks, holding on to each other to not fall over.
She said, "Never have I seen a miracle happen so fast! All this time, I was begging God
to please help Wayan. And God was begging Liz to please help Wayan, too."
I added, "And Liz was begging her friends to please help Wayan, too!"
We returned to the shop, found Tutti just home from school. Wayan dropped to her knees,
grabbed her girl, and said, "A house! A house! We have a house!" Tutti executed a
fabulous fake faint, swooning cartoonishly right to the floor.
While we were all laughing, I noticed the two orphans watching this scene from the
background of the kitchen, and I could see them looking at me with something in their
faces that resembled . . . fear. As Wayan and Tutti galloped around in joy, I wondered
what the orphans were thinking. What were they so afraid of? Being left behind, maybe?
Or was I now a scary person to them because I'd produced so much money out of
nowhere? (Such an unthinkable amount of money that maybe it's like black magic?) Or
maybe when you've had such a fragile life as these kids, any change is a terror.
When there was a lull in the celebration I asked Wayan, just to be sure: "What about Big
Ketut and Little Ketut? Is this good news for them, too?"
Wayan looked over at the girls in the kitchen and must have seen the same uneasiness I
had seen, because she floated over to them and herded them into her arms and whispered
some reassuring words into the crowns of their heads. They seemed to relax into her.
Then the phone rang, and Wayan tried to pull away from the orphans to answer it, but the
skinny arms of the two Ketuts clung on to their unofficial mother relentlessly, and they
buried their heads in her belly and armpits, and even after the longest time they
refused--with a fierceness I'd never seen in them before--to let her go.
So I answered the phone, instead.
"Balinese Traditional Healing," I said. "Stop by today for our giant close-out moving
sale!"
96969696
I went out with Brazilian Felipe again, twice over the weekend. On Saturday I brought
him to meet Wayan and the kids, and Tutti made drawings of houses for him while
Wayan winked suggestively behind his back and mouthed, "New boyfriend?" and I kept
shaking my head, "No, no, no."(Though I'll tell you what--I'm not thinking about thatcute Welsh guy anymore.) I also brought Felipe to meet Ketut, my medicine man, and
Ketut read his palm and pronounced my friend, no fewer than seven times (while fixing
me with a penetrating stare), to be "a good man, a very good man, a very, very good man.
Not a bad man, Liss-- a good man."
Then on Sunday, Felipe asked me if I'd like to spend a day at the beach. It occurred to me
that I'd been living here in Bali for two months already and had not yet seen the beach,
which now seemed like sheer idiocy, so I said yes. He picked me up at my house in his
jeep and we drove an hour to this hidden little beach in Pedangbai where hardly any
tourists ever go. This place that he took me to, it was as good an imitation of paradise as
anything I'd ever seen, with blue water and white sand and the shade of palm trees. We
talked all day, interrupting our talking only to swim and nap and read, sometimes reading
aloud to each other. These Balinese women in a shack behind the beach grilled us freshly
caught fish, and we bought cold beers and chilled fruit. Dallying in the waves, we told
each other whatever was left of the life story details which we hadn't yet covered in the
past few weeks of evenings spent out together in the quietest restaurants in Ubud, talking
over bottles and bottles of wine.
He liked my body, he told me, after the initial viewing at the beach. He told me that
Brazilians have a term for exactly my kind of body (of course they do), which is
magra-falsa, translating as "fake thin," meaning that the woman looks slender enough
from a distance, but when you get up close, you can see that she's actually quite round
and fleshy, which Brazilians consider a good thing. God bless Brazilians. As we lay out
on our towels talking, he would reach over sometimes and brush sand off my nose, or
push a mutinying hair out of my face. We talked for about ten solid hours. Then it was
dark, so we packed up our things and went for a walk through the not-very-well-lit dirt
road main street of this old Balinese fishing village, linked comfortably arm-in-arm under
the stars. That's when Felipe from Brazil asked me in the most natural and relaxed of
ways (almost as if he were wondering if we should get a bite to eat), "Should we have an
affair together, Liz? What do you think?"
I liked everything about the way this was happening. Not with an action--not with an
attempted kiss or a daring move--but with a question. And the correct question, too. I
remembered something my therapist had said to me over a year ago before I'd left on this
journey. I'd told her that I thought I wanted to remain celibate for this whole year of
traveling, but worried, "What if I meet someone I really like? What should I do? Should I
get together with him or not? Should I maintain my autonomy? Or treat myself to a
romance?" My therapist replied with an indulgent smile, "You know, Liz--all this can be
discussed at the time the issue actually arises, with the person in question."
So here it all was--the time, the place, the issue and the person in question. We proceeded
to have a discussion about the idea, which came out easily, during our friendly, linked
arm-in-arm walk by the ocean. I said, "I would probably say yes, Felipe, under normal
circumstances. Whatever normal circumstances are . . ."
We both laughed. But then I showed him my hesitation. Which was this--that as much as
I might enjoy to have my body and heart folded and unfolded for a while in the expert
hands of an expat lover, something else inside me has put in a serious request that I
donate the entirety of this year of traveling all to myself. That some vital transformation
is happening in my life, and this transformation needs time and room in order to finish its
