and turning to vapor. And Wayan is supposed to get evicted from her shop in September,
which is around the time I leave the country. Which is in about three weeks.
But it's turning out to be almost impossible for Wayan to find a piece of land she deems
appropriate for a home. Setting aside all the practical considerations, she has to examine
the taksu-- the spirit--of each place. As a healer, Wayan's sense of taksu, even by Balinese
standards, is supremely acute. I found one place that I thought was perfect, but Wayansaid it was possessed by angry demons. The next piece of land was rejected because it
was too close to a river, which, as everyone knows, is where ghosts live. (The night after
she saw that place, Wayan says, she dreamt of a beautiful woman in torn clothes,
weeping, and that did it--we could not buy this land.) Then we found a lovely little shop
near town, with a backyard and everything, but it was located on a corner, and only
somebody who wants to go bankrupt and die young would ever live in a house located on
a corner. As everyone knows.
"Don't even try talking her out of it," Felipe advised me. "Trust me, darling. Don't get
between the Balinese and their taksu."
Then last week Felipe found a place that seemed to fit the criteria exactly--a small, pretty
piece of land, close to central Ubud, on a quiet road, next to a rice field, plenty of space
for a garden and well within our budget. When I asked Wayan, "Should we buy it?" she
replied, "Don't know yet, Liz. Not too fast, for making decisions like this. I need talk to a
priest first."
She explained that she would need to consult a priest in order to find an auspicious day
upon which to purchase the land, if she does decide to buy it at all. Because nothing
significant can be done in Bali before an auspicious day is chosen. But she can't even ask
the priests for the auspicious date upon which to buy the land until she decides if she
really wants to live there. Which is a commitment she refuses to make until she's had an
auspicious dream. Aware of my dwindling days here, I asked Wayan, like a good New
Yorker, "How soon can you arrange to have an auspicious dream?"
Wayan replied, like a good Balinese, "Cannot be rushed, this." Although, she mused, it
might help if she could go to one of the major temples in Bali with an offering, and pray
to the gods to bring her an auspicious dream . . .
"OK," I said. "Tomorrow Felipe can drive you to the major temple and you can make an
offering and ask the gods to please send you an auspicious dream."
Wayan would love to, she said. It's a great idea. Only one problem. She's not permitted to
enter any temples for this entire week.
Because she is . . . menstruating.
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Maybe I'm not getting across how fun all this is. Truly, it's so much odd and satisfying
fun, trying to figure all this out. Or maybe I'm just enjoying this surreal moment in my
life so much because I happen to be falling in love, and that always makes the world
seem delightful, no matter how insane your reality.
I always liked Felipe. But there's something about the way he takes on The Saga of
Wayan's House that brings us together during the month of August like a real couple. It'snone of his concern, of course, what happens to this trippy Balinese medicine woman.
He's a businessman. He's managed to live in Bali for five years without getting too
entwined in the personal lives and complex rituals of the Balinese, but suddenly here he
is wading with me through muddy rice paddies and trying to find a priest who will give
Wayan an auspicious date . . .
"I was perfectly happy in my boring life before you came along," he always says.
He was bored in Bali before. He was languid and killing time, a character from a Graham
Greene novel. That indolence stopped the moment we were introduced. Now that we're
together, I get to hear Felipe's version of how we met, a delicious story I never tire of
hearing--about how he saw me at the party that night, standing with my back to him, and
how I did not even need to turn my head and show him my face before he had realized
somewhere deep in his gut, "That is my woman. I will do anything to have that woman."
"And it was easy to get you," he says. "All I had to do was beg and plead for weeks."
"You didn't beg and plead."
"You didn't notice me begging and pleading?"
He talks about how we went dancing that first night we met, and how he watched me get
all attracted to that cute Welsh guy, and how his heart sank as he saw the scene unfolding,
thinking, "I'm putting all this work into seducing this woman, and now that handsome
young guy's just going to take her from me and bring so much complication into her
life--if only she knew how much love I could offer her."
Which he can. He's a caregiver by nature, and I can feel him going into a kind of orbit
around me, making me the key directional setting for his compass, growing into the role
of being my attendant knight. Felipe is the kind of man who desperately needs a woman
in his life--but not so that he can be taken care of; only so that he can have someone to
care for, someone to consecrate himself to. Having lived without such a relationship ever
since his marriage ended, he's been adrift in life recently, but now he is organizing
himself around me. It's lovely to be treated this way. But it also scares me. I hear him
downstairs sometimes making me dinner as I am lounging upstairs reading, and he's
whistling some happy Brazilian samba, calling up, "Darling--would you like another
glass of wine?" and I wonder if I am capable of being somebody's sun, somebody's
everything. Am I centered enough now to be the center of somebody else's life? But
when I finally brought up the topic with him one night, he said, "Have I asked you to be
that person, darling? Have I asked you to be the center of my life?"
I was immediately ashamed of myself for my vanity, for having assumed that he wanted
me to stay with him forever so that he could indulge my whims till the end of time.
"I'm sorry," I said. "That was a little arrogant, wasn't it?"
"A little," he acknowledged, then kissed my ear. "But not so much, really. Darling, of
course it's something we have to discuss because here's the truth--I'm wildly in love with
you." I blanched in reflex, and he made a quick joke, trying to be reassuring: "I mean that
in a completely hypothetical way, of course." But then he said in all seriousness, "Look,
I'm fifty-two years old. Believe me, I already know how the world works. I recognize that
you don't love me yet the way I love you, but the truth is that I don't really care. For some
reason, I feel the same way about you that I felt about my kids when they were
small--that it wasn't their job to love me, it was my job to love them. You can decide to
feel however you want to, but I love you and I will always love you. Even if we never see
each other again, you already brought me back to life, and that's a lot. And of course, I'dlike to share my life with you. The only problem is, I'm not sure how much of a life I can
offer you in Bali."
This is a concern I've had, too. I've been watching the expatriate society in Ubud, and I
know for a stone-cold fact this is not the life for me. Everywhere in this town you see the
same kind of character--Westerners who have been so ill-treated and badly worn by life
that they've dropped the whole struggle and decided to camp out here in Bali indefinitely,
where they can live in a gorgeous house for $200 a month, perhaps taking a young
Balinese man or woman as a companion, where they can drink before noon without
getting any static about it, where they can make a bit of money exporting a bit of
furniture for somebody. But generally, all they are doing here is seeing to it that nothing
serious will ever be asked of them again. These are not bums, mind you. This is a very
high grade of people, multinational, talented and clever. But it seems to me that everyone
I meet here used to be something once (generally "married" or "employed"); now they are
all united by the absence of the one thing they seem to have surrendered completely and
forever: ambition. Needless to say, there's a lot of drinking.
Of course, the precious Balinese town of Ubud is not such a bad place to putter away
your life, ignoring the passing of the days. I suppose in that way it's similar to places like
Key West, Florida, or Oaxaca, Mexico. Most expats in Ubud, when you ask them how
long they've lived here, aren't really sure. For one thing, they aren't really sure how much
time has passed since they moved to Bali. But for another thing, it's like they aren't really
sure if they do live here. They belong to nowhere, unanchored. Some of them like to
imagine that they're just hanging out for a while, just running the engine on idle at the
traffic light, waiting for the signal to change. But after seventeen years of that you start to
wonder . . . does anybody ever leave?
There is much to enjoy in their lazy company, in these long Sunday afternoons spent at
brunch, drinking champagne and talking about nothing. Still, when I am around this
scene, I feel somewhat like Dorothy in the poppy fields of Oz. Be careful! Don't fall
asleep in this narcotic meadow, or you could doze away the rest of your life here!
So what will become of me and Felipe? Now that there is, it seems, a "me and Felipe"?
He told me not long ago, "Sometimes I wish you were a lost little girl and I could scoop
you up and say, 'Come and live with me now, let me take care of you forever.' But you
aren't a lost little girl. You're a woman with a career, with ambition. You are a perfect
snail: you carry your home on your back. You should hold on to that freedom for as long
as possible. But all I'm saying is this--if you want this Brazilian man, you can have him.
I'm yours already."
I'm not sure what I want. I do know that there's a part of me which has always wanted to
hear a man say, "Let me take care of you forever," and I have never heard it spoken
before. Over the last few years, I'd given up looking for that person, learned how to say
this heartening sentence to myself, especially in times of fear. But to hear it from
someone else now, from someone who is speaking sincerely . . .
I was thinking about all this last night after Felipe fell asleep, and I was curled up beside
him, wondering what would become of us. What are the possible futures? What about the
geography question between us--where would we live? Then there's the age difference to
consider. Though, when I called my mother the other day to tell her I'd met a really nice
man, but--brace yourself, Mom!--"he's fifty-two years old," she was completely
non-flummoxed. All she said was, "Well, I've got news for you, Liz. You're thirty-five."(Excellent point, Ma. I'm lucky to get anyone at such a withered age.) Truthfully, though,
I don't really mind the age difference, either. I actually like that Felipe is so much older. I
think it's sexy. Makes me feel kind of . . . French.
What will happen with us?
Why am I worrying about this, by the way?
What have I not yet learned about the futility of worry?
So after a while, I stopped thinking about all this and just held him while he slept. I am
falling in love with this man. Then I fell asleep beside him and had two memorable
dreams.
Both were about my Guru. In the first dream, my Guru informed me that she was closing
down her Ashrams and that she would no longer be speaking, teaching or publishing
books. She gave her students one final speech, in which she said, "You've had more than
enough teachings. You have been given everything you need to know in order to be free.
It's time for you to go out in the world and live a happy life."
The second dream was even more confirming. I was eating in a terrific restaurant in New
York City with Felipe. We were having a wonderful meal of lamb chops and artichokes
and fine wine and we were talking and laughing happily. I looked across the room and
saw Swamiji, my Guru's master, deceased since 1982. But he was alive that night, right
there in a snazzy New York restaurant. He was eating dinner with a group of his friends
and they also seemed to be having a merry time of it. Our eyes met across the room and
Swamiji smiled at me and raised his wineglass in a toast.
And then--quite distinctly--this small Indian Guru who had spoken precious little English
during his lifetime mouthed this one word to me across the distance: Enjoy.
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I haven't seen Ketut Liyer in so long. Between my involvement with Felipe and my
struggle to secure a home for Wayan, my long afternoons of aimless conversation about
spirituality on the medicine man's porch have long since ended. I've stopped by his house
a few times, just to say hello and to drop off a gift of fruit for his wife, but we haven't
spent any quality time together since back in June. Whenever I try to apologize to Ketut
for my absence, though, he laughs like a man who has already been shown the answers to
every test in the universe and says, "Everything working perfect, Liss."
Still, I miss the old man, so I stopped by to hang out with him this morning. He beamed
at me, as usual, saying, "I am very happy to meet you!" (I never was able to break him of
that habit.)
"I am happy to see you, too, Ketut."
"You leaving soon, Liss?""Yes, Ketut. In less than two weeks. That's why I wanted to come over today. I wanted to
thank you for everything you've given me. If it wasn't for you, I never would've come
back to Bali."
"Always you were coming back to Bali," he said without doubt or drama. "You still
