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I went out with Brazilian Felipe again, twice over the weekend. On Saturday I brought him
to meet Wayan and the kids, and Tutti made drawings of houses for him while Wayan winked
suggestively behind his back and mouthed, “New boyfriend?” and I kept shaking my head,
“No, no, no.”(Though I’ll tell you what—I’m not thinking about that cute Welsh guy anymore.) I
also brought Felipe to meet Ketut, my medicine man, and Ketut read his palm and pro-
nounced my friend, no fewer than seven times (while fixing me with a penetrating stare), to be
“a good man, a very good man, a very, very good man. Not a bad man, Liss—a good man.”
Then on Sunday, Felipe asked me if I’d like to spend a day at the beach. It occurred to me
that I’d been living here in Bali for two months already and had not yet seen the beach, which
now seemed like sheer idiocy, so I said yes. He picked me up at my house in his jeep and we
drove an hour to this hidden little beach in Pedangbai where hardly any tourists ever go. This
place that he took me to, it was as good an imitation of paradise as anything I’d ever seen,
with blue water and white sand and the shade of palm trees. We talked all day, interrupting
our talking only to swim and nap and read, sometimes reading aloud to each other. These
Balinese women in a shack behind the beach grilled us freshly caught fish, and we bought
cold beers and chilled fruit. Dallying in the waves, we told each other whatever was left of the
life story details which we hadn’t yet covered in the past few weeks of evenings spent out to-
gether in the quietest restaurants in Ubud, talking over bottles and bottles of wine.
He liked my body, he told me, after the initial viewing at the beach. He told me that Brazili-
ans have a term for exactly my kind of body (of course they do), which is magra-falsa, trans-
lating as “fake thin,” meaning that the woman looks slender enough from a distance, but when
you get up close, you can see that she’s actually quite round and fleshy, which Brazilians con-
sider a good thing. God bless Brazilians. As we lay out on our towels talking, he would reach
over sometimes and brush sand off my nose, or push a mutinying hair out of my face. We
talked for about ten solid hours. Then it was dark, so we packed up our things and went for a
walk through the not-very-well-lit dirt road main street of this old Balinese fishing village,
linked comfortably arm-in-arm under the stars. That’s when Felipe from Brazil asked me in the
most natural and relaxed of ways (almost as if he were wondering if we should get a bite to