(Indeed, I do not think my body has looked or felt this relaxed in its life, not since I was maybe six months old and my mother took snapshots of me all blissed-out on a towel on the kitchen counter after a nice bath in the kitchen sink.)
And then he leads me back to the bed, saying, in Portuguese, "Vem, gostosa."
Come here, my delicious one.
Felipe is also the endearment master. In bed he slips into adoring me in Portuguese, so I have graduated from being his "lovely little darling" to being his queridinha. (Literal translation: "lovely little darling.") I've been too lazy here in Bali to try to learn Indonesian or Balinese, but suddenly Portuguese is coming easily to me. Of course I'm only learning the pillow talk, but that's a fine use of Portuguese. He says, "Darling, you're going to get sick of it. You're going to get bored of how much I touch you, and how many times a day I tell you how beautiful you are."
Try me, mister.
I'm losing days here, disappearing under his sheets, under his hands. I like the feeling of not knowing what the date is. My nice organized schedule has been blown away by the breeze. I finally do stop by to see my medicine man one afternoon after a long hiatus of no visiting. Ketut sees the truth on my face before I say a word.
"You found boyfriend in Bali," he says.
"Yes, Ketut."
"Good. Be careful not get pregnant."
"I will."
"He good man?"
"You tell me, Ketut," I said. "You read his palm. You promised that he was a good man. You said it about seven times."
"I did? When?"
"Back in June. I brought him here. He was the Brazilian man, older than me. You told me you liked him."
"Never did," he insisted, and there was nothing I could do to convince him otherwise. Sometimes Ketut loses things from his recollection, as you would, too, if you were somewhere between sixty-five and a hundred and twelve years old. Most of the time he's keen and sharp, but other times I feel like I've disturbed him out of some other plane of consciousness, out of some other universe. (A few weeks ago he said to me, completely out of nowhere, "You good friend to me, Liss. Loyal friend. Loving friend." Then he sighed, stared off into space and added mournfully, "Not like Sharon." Who the hell is Sharon? What did she do to him? When I tried asking him about it, he would give me no answer. Acted suddenly like he didn't know who I was even referring to. As if I were the one who'd brought up that thieving hussy Sharon in the first place.)
"Why you never bring boyfriend here to meet me?" he asked now.
"I did, Ketut. Really I did. And you told me you liked him."
"Don't remember. He a rich man, your boyfriend?"
"No, Ketut. He's not a rich man. But he has enough money."
"Medium rich?" The medicine man wants details, spreadsheets.
"He has enough money."
My answer seemed to irritate Ketut. "You ask this man for money, he can give to you, or not?"
"Ketut, I don't want money from him. I've never taken money from a man."
"You spend every night with him?"
"Yes."
"Good. He spoil you?"
"Very much."
"Good. You still meditate?"
Yes, I do still meditate every day of the week, slithering out of Felipe's bed and over to the couch, where I can sit in silence and offer up some gratitude for all of this. Outside his porch, the ducks quack their way through the rice paddies, gossiping and splashing all over the place. (Felipe says that these flocks of busy Balinese ducks have always reminded him of Brazilian women strutting down the beaches in Rio; chatting loudly and interrupting each other constantly and waggling their bottoms with such pride.) I am so relaxed now that I kind of slide into meditation like it's a bath prepared by my lover. Naked in the morning sun, with nothing but a light blanket wrapped over my shoulders, I disappear into grace, hovering over the void like a tiny seashell balanced on a teaspoon.
Why did life ever seem difficult?
I call my friend Susan back in New York City one day, and listen as she confides to me, over the typical urban police sirens wailing in the background, the latest details of her latest broken heart. My voice comes out in the cool, smooth tones of a late-nite, jazz-radio DJ, as I tell her how she just has to let go, man, how she's gotta learn that everything is just perfect as it is already, that the universe provides, baby, that it's all peace and harmony out there…
I can almost hear her rolling her eyes as she says over the sirens, "Spoken like a woman who already had four orgasms today."
100
But all the fun and games caught up with me after a few weeks. After all those nights of not sleeping and all those days of too much lovemaking, my body struck back and I got attacked by a nasty infection in my bladder. A typical affliction of the overly sexed, especially likely to strike when you're not used to being overly sexed anymore. It came up as fast as any tragedy can strike. I was walking through town one morning doing some chores when suddenly I was buckled over with burning pain and fever. I'd had these infections before, during my wayward youth, so I knew what it was. I panicked for a moment-these things can be awful-but then thought, "Thank God my best friend in Bali is a healer," and I ran into Wayan's shop.
"I'm sick!" I said.
She took one look at me and said, "You sick from making too much sex, Liz."
I groaned, buried my face in my hands, embarrassed.
She chuckled, said, "You can't keep secrets from Wayan…"
I was in godawful pain. Anyone who's ever had this infection knows the dreadful feeling; anyone who hasn't experienced this specific suffering-well, just make up your own torturous metaphor, preferably using the term "fire poker" someplace in the sentence.
Wayan, like a veteran firefighter or an ER surgeon, never moves fast. She methodically started chopping some herbs, boiling some roots, wandering back and forth between her kitchen and me, bringing me one warm, brown, toxic-tasting concoction after another, saying, "Drink, honey…"
Whenever the next batch boiled, she would sit across from me, giving me sly, dirty looks and using the opportunity to get nosy.
"You careful not to get pregnant, Liz?"
"Not possible, Wayan. Felipe has a vasectomy."
"Felipe has a vasectomy?" she asked, in as much awe as if she were asking, "Felipe has a villa in Tuscany?" (I feel the same way about it, by the way.) "Very difficult in Bali to get a man to do this. Always the woman problem, birth control."
(Although it is true that the Indonesian birth rates are down lately due to a brilliant recent birth control incentive program: the government promised a new motorcycle to every man who would volunteer to come in for a vasectomy… though I hate to think the guys had to ride their new bikes home the same day.)
"Sex is funny," Wayan mused as she watched me grimacing in pain, drinking more of her homemade medicine.
"Yeah, Wayan, thanks. It's hilarious."
"No, sex is funny," she went on. "Make people do funny things. Everyone gets like this, at the beginning of love. Wanting too much happiness, too much pleasure, until you make yourself sick. Even to Wayan this happens at beginning of love story. Lose balance."
"I'm embarrassed," I say.
"Don't," she said. Then she added in perfect English (and perfect Balinese logic), "To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life."
I decided to call Felipe. I had some antibiotics at the house, an emergency stash I always travel with, just in case. Having had these infections before, I know how bad they can get, even traveling up into your kidneys. I didn't want to go through that, not in Indonesia. So I called him and told him what had happened (he was mortified) and asked him to bring me over the pills. It wasn't that I didn't trust Wayan's healing prowess, it's just that this was really serious pain…