Eat, Pray, Love

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, unself-consciously. 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 ques-
tions, 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.