The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (32 page)

88

So I was hanging out in Wayan’s shop again this morning, and she was trying to figure out how to make my hair grow faster and thicker. Having glorious thick, shiny hair herself that hangs all the way down to her butt, she feels sorry for me with my wispy blond mop. As a healer, of course, she does have a remedy to help thicken my hair, but it won’t be easy. First, I have to find a banana tree and personally cut it down. I have to “throw away the top of the tree,” then carve the trunk and roots (which are still lodged in the earth) into a big, deep bowl “like a swimming pool.” Then I have to put a piece of wood over the top of this hollow, so rainwater and dew don’t get in. Then I will come back in a few days and find that the swimming pool is now filled with the nutrient-rich liquid of the banana root, which I then must collect in bottles and bring to Wayan. She will bless the banana root juice at the temple for me, then rub the juice into my skull every day. Within a few months I will have, like Wayan, thick, shiny hair all the way down to my butt.

“Even if you are bald,” she said, “this will make you have hair.”

As we’re talking, little Tutti—just home from school—is sitting on the floor, drawing a picture of a house. Mostly, houses are what Tutti draws these days. She’s dying to have a house of her own. There’s always a rainbow in the backdrop of her pictures, and a smiling family—father and all.

This is what we do all day in Wayan’s shop. We sit and talk and Tutti draws pictures and Wayan and I gossip and tease each other. Wayan’s got a bawdy sense of humor, always talking about sex, busting me about being single, speculating on the genital endowments of all the men who pass by her shop. She keeps telling me she’s been going to the temple every evening and praying for a good man to show up in my life, to be my lover.

I told her again this morning, “No, Wayan—I don’t need it. My heart’s been broken too many times.”

She said, “I know cure for broken heart.” Authoritatively, and in a doctorly manner, Wayan ticked off on her fingers the six elements of her Fail-Proof Broken-Heart Curing Treatment: “Vitamin E, get much sleep, drink much water, travel to a place far away from the person you loved, meditate and teach your heart that this is destiny.”

“I’ve been doing everything but the vitamin E.”

“So now you cured. And now you need a new man. I bring you one, from praying.”

“Well, I’m not praying for a new man, Wayan. The only thing I’m praying for these days is to have peace with myself.”

Wayan rolled her eyes, like
Yeah, right, whatever you claim, you big
white weirdo,
and said, “That’s because you have bad memory problem. You don’t remember anymore how nice is sex. I used to have bad memory problem, too, when I was married. Every time I saw a handsome man walking down the street, I would forget I had a husband back home.”

She nearly fell over laughing. Then she composed herself and concluded, “Everybody need sex, Liz.”

At this moment, a great-looking woman came walking into the shop, smiling like a lighthouse beam. Tutti leapt up and ran into her arms, shouting, “Armenia! Armenia! Armenia!” Which, as it turned out, was the woman’s name—not some kind of strange nationalist battle cry. I introduced myself to Armenia, and she told me she was from Brazil. She was so dynamic, this woman—so Brazilian. She was gorgeous, elegantly dressed, charismatic and engaging and indeterminate in age, just
insistently
sexy.

Armenia, too, is a friend of Wayan’s, who comes to the shop frequently for lunch and for various traditional medical and beauty treatments. She sat down and talked with us for about an hour, joining our gossiping, girlish little circle. She’s in Bali for only another week before she has to fly off to Africa, or maybe it’s back to Thailand, to take care of her business. This Armenia woman, it turns out, has had just the teensiest bit of glamorous life. She used to work for the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees. Back in the 1980s she had been sent into the El Salvadoran and Nicaraguan jungles during the height of war as a negotiator of peace, using her beauty and charm and wits to get all the generals and rebels to calm down and listen to reason. (Hello, pretty power!) Now she runs a multinational marketing business called Novica, which supports indigenous artists all over the world by selling their products on the Internet. She speaks about seven or eight languages. She’s got the most fabulous pair of shoes I’ve seen since Rome.

Looking at us both, Wayan said, “Liz—why do you never try to look sexy, like Armenia? You such a pretty girl, you have good capital of nice face, nice body, nice smile. But always you wear this same broken T-shirt, same broken jeans. Don’t you want to be sexy, like her?”

“Wayan,” I said, “Armenia is
Brazilian.
It’s a completely different situation.”

“How is it different?”

“Armenia,” I said, turning to my new friend. “Can you please try to explain to Wayan what it means to be a Brazilian woman?”

Armenia laughed, but then seemed to consider the question –seriously and answered, “Well, I always tried to look nice and be feminine even in the war zones and refugee camps of Central America. Even in the worst tragedies and crisis, there’s no reason to add to everyone’s misery by looking miserable yourself. That’s my philosophy. This is why I always wore makeup and jewelry into the jungle—nothing too extravagant, but maybe just a nice gold bracelet and some earrings, a little lipstick, good perfume. Just enough to show that I still had my self-respect.”

In a way, Armenia reminds me of those great Victorian-era British lady travelers, who used to say there’s no excuse for wearing clothes in Africa that would be unsuited for an English drawing room. She’s a butterfly, this Armenia. And she couldn’t stay for too long at Wayan’s shop because she had work to do, but that didn’t stop her from inviting me to a party tonight. She knows another Brazilian expat in Ubud, she told me, and he’s hosting a special event at a nice restaurant this evening. He’ll be cooking a
feijoada
—a traditional Brazilian feast consisting of massive piles of pork and black beans. There will be Brazilian cocktails, as well. Lots of interesting expatriates from all over the world who live here in Bali. Would I care to come? They might all go out dancing later, too. She doesn’t know if I like parties, but . . .

Cocktails? Dancing? Piles of pork?

Of course I’ll come.

89

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, unselfconsciously. 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.”

90

Am 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.