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We didn’t sleep at all, of course. And then, it was ridiculous—I had to go. I had to go back
to my house stupidly early the next morning because I had a date to meet my friend Yudhi.
He and I had long ago planned that this was the very week we were going to leave on a big
cross-Balinese road trip together. This was an idea we’d come up with one evening at my
house when Yudhi said that, aside from his wife and Manhattan, what he most missed about
America was driving—just taking off with a car and some friends and going on an adventure
across those great distances, on all those fabulous interstate highways. I told him, “OK, so
we’ll go on a road trip here in Bali together, American-style.”
This had struck us both as irresistibly comic—there’s no way you can do an Americ-
an-style road trip in Bali. There are no great distances, first of all, on an island the size of
Delaware. And the “highways” are horrible, made surreally dangerous by the dense, mad pre-
valence of Bali’s version of the American family minivan—a small motorcycle with five people
crowded on it, the father driving with one hand while holding the newborn infant with the other
(football-like) while Mom sits sidesaddle behind him in her tight sarong with a basket balanced
on her head, encouraging her twin toddlers not to fall off the speeding motorbike, which is
probably traveling on the wrong side of the road and has no headlight. Helmets are rarely
worn but are frequently—and I never did find out why—carried. Imagine scores of these heav-
ily laden motorcycles, all speeding recklessly, all weaving and dodging across each other like
some kind of crazy motorized maypole dance, and you have life on the Balinese highways. I
don’t know why every single Balinese person hasn’t been killed already in a road accident.
But Yudhi and I decided to do it anyway, to take off for a week, rent a car and drive all
over this tiny island, pretending that we are in America and that both of us are free. The idea
charmed me when we came up with it last month, but the timing of it now—as I am lying in
bed with Felipe and he’s kissing my fingertips and forearms and shoulders, encouraging me
to linger—seems unfortunate. But I have to go. And in a way, I do want to go. Not only to
spend a week with my friend Yudhi, but also as a repose after my big night with Felipe, to get
my head around the new reality that, as they say in the novels: I have taken a lover.