Eat, Pray, Love

So Felipe drops me off at my house with one last passionate embrace and I have just
enough time to shower and pull myself together when Yudhi arrives with our rental car. He
takes one look at me and says, “Dude—what time’d you get home last night?”
I say, “Dude—I didn’t get home last night.”
He says, “Duuuuuuude,” and starts laughing, probably remembering the conversation
we’d had only about two weeks earlier wherein I’d seriously posited that I might never, actu-
ally, have sex again for the rest of my life, ever. He says, “So you gave in, huh?”
“Yudhi,” I replied, “let me tell you a story. Last summer, right before I left the States, I went
to visit my grandparents in upstate New York. My grandfather’s wife—his second wife—is this
really nice lady named Gale, in her eighties now. She hauled out this old photo album and
showed me pictures from the 1930s, when she was eighteen years old and went on a trip to
Europe for a year with her two best friends and a guardian. She’s flipping through these
pages, showing me these amazing old photographs of Italy, and suddenly we get to this pic-
ture of this really cute young Italian guy, in Venice. I go, ‘Gale—who’s the hottie?’ She goes,
‘That’s the son of the people who owned the hotel where we stayed in Venice. He was my
boyfriend.’ I go, ‘Your boyfriend?’ And my grandfather’s sweet wife looks at me all sly and her
eyes get all sexy like Bette Davis, and she goes, ‘I was tired of looking at churches, Liz.’ ”
Yudhi gives me a high five. “Rock on, dude.”
We set off for our fake American road trip across Bali, me and this cool young Indonesian
musical genius in exile, the back of our car filled with guitars and beer and the Balinese equi-
valent of American road trip food—fried rice crackers and dreadfully flavored indigenous can-
dies. The details of our journey are a bit blurry to me now, smudged over my distracting
thoughts of Felipe and by the weird haziness that always accompanies a road trip in any
country of the world. What I do remember is that Yudhi and I speak American the entire
time—a language I hadn’t spoken in so long. I’d been speaking English a lot during this year,
of course, but not American, and definitely not the sort of hip-hop American Yudhi likes. So
we just indulge it, turning ourselves into MTV-watching adolescents as we drive along, razz-
ing each other like teenagers in Hoboken, calling each other dude and man and some-
times—with great tenderness—homo. A lot of our dialogue revolves around affectionate in-
sults to each other’s mothers.
“Dude, what’d you do with the map?”
“Why don’t you ask your mother what I did with the map?”
“I would, man, but she’s too fat.”
And so forth.
We don’t even penetrate the interior of Bali; we just drive along the coast, and it’s
beaches, beaches, beaches for a whole week. Sometimes we take a little fishing boat out to