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I don’t want to tell Wayan about it, not until all the money has been raised. It’s hard to keep
a big secret like this, especially when she’s in such constant worry about her future, but I don’t
want to get her hopes up until it is official. So for the whole week, I keep my mouth shut about
my plans, and I keep myself occupied having dinner almost every night with Felipe the Brazili-
an, who doesn’t seem to mind that I own only one nice dress.
I guess I have a crush on him. After a few dinners, I’m fairly certain I have a crush on him.
He’s more than he appears, this self-proclaimed “bullshit master” who knows everyone in
Ubud and is always the center of the party. I asked Armenia about him. They’ve been friends
for a while. I said, “That Felipe—he’s got more depth than the others, doesn’t he? There’s
something more to him, isn’t there?” She said, “Oh, yes. He’s a good, kind man. But he’s
been through a hard divorce. I think he’s come to Bali to recover.”
Ah—now this is a subject I know nothing about.
But he’s fifty-two years old. This is interesting. Have I truly reached the age where a fifty-
two-year-old man is within my realm of dating consideration? I like him, though. He’s got silver
hair and he’s balding in an attractively Picassoesque manner. His eyes are warm and brown.
He has a gentle face and he smells wonderful. And he is an actual grown man. The adult
male of the species—a bit of a novelty in my experience.
He’s been living in Bali for about five years now, working with Balinese silversmiths to
make jewelry from Brazilian gemstones for export to America. I like the fact that he was faith-
fully married for almost twenty years before his marriage deteriorated for its own multicomplic-
ated plethora of reasons. I like the fact that he has already raised children, and that he raised
them well, and that they love him. I like that he was the parent who stayed home and tended
to his children when they were little, while his Australian wife pursued her career. (A good
feminist husband, he says, “I wanted to be on the correct side of social history.”) I like his nat-
ural Brazilian over-the-top displays of affection. (When his Australian son was fourteen years
old, the boy finally had to say, “Dad, now that I’m fourteen, maybe you shouldn’t kiss me on
the mouth anymore when you drop me off at school.”) I like the fact that Felipe speaks four,
maybe more, languages fluently. (He keeps claiming he doesn’t speak Indonesian, but I hear