Eat, Pray, Love

him talking it all day long.) I like that he’s traveled through over fifty countries in his life, and
that he sees the world as a small and easily managed place. I like the way he listens to me,
leaning in, interrupting me only when I interrupt myself to ask if I am boring him, to which he
always responds, “I have all the time in the world for you, my lovely little darling.” I like being
called “my lovely little darling.”(Even if the waitress gets it, too.)
He said to me the other night, “Why don’t you take a lover while you’re in Bali, Liz?”
To his credit, he didn’t just mean himself, though I believe he might be willing to take on
the job. He assured me that Ian—that good-looking Welsh guy—would be a fine match for
me, but there are other candidates, too. There’s a chef from New York City, “a great, big,
muscular, confident fellow,” whom he thinks I might like. Really there are all sorts of men
here, he said, all of them floating through Ubud, expatriates from everywhere, hiding out in
this shifting community of the planet’s “homeless and assetless,” many of whom would be
happy to see to it, “my lovely darling, that you have a wonderful summer here.”
“I don’t think I’m ready for it,” I told him. “I don’t feel like going through all the effort of ro-
mance again, you know? I don’t feel like having to shave my legs every day or having to show
my body to a new lover. And I don’t want to have to tell my life story all over again, or worry
about birth control. Anyway, I’m not even sure I know how to do it anymore. I feel like I was
more confident about sex and romance when I was sixteen than I am now.”
“Of course you were,” Felipe said. “You were young and stupid then. Only the young and
stupid are confident about sex and romance. Do you think any of us know what we’re doing?
Do you think there’s any way humans can love each other without complication? You should
see how it happens in Bali, darling. All these Western men come here after they’ve made a
mess of their lives back home, and they decide they’ve had it with Western women, and they
go marry some tiny, sweet, obedient little Balinese teenage girl. I know what they’re thinking.
They think this pretty little girl will make them happy, make their lives easy. But whenever I
see it happen, I always want to say the same thing. Good luck. Because you still have a wo-
man in front of you, my friend. And you are still a man. It’s still two human beings trying to get
along, so it’s going to become complicated. And love is always complicated. But still humans
must try to love each other, darling. We must get our hearts broken sometimes. This is a good
sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.”
I said, “My heart was broken so badly last time that it still hurts. Isn’t that crazy? To still
have a broken heart almost two years after a love story ends?”
“Darling, I’m southern Brazilian. I can keep a broken heart going for ten years over a wo-
man I never even kissed.”
We talk about our marriages, our divorces. Not in a petty way, but just to commiserate.
We compare notes about the bottomless depths of post-divorce depression. We drink wine