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When we return to Ubud, I go straight back to Felipe’s house and don’t leave his bedroom
for approximately another month. This is only the faintest of exaggerations. I have never been
loved and adored like this before by anyone, never with such pleasure and single-minded
concentration. Never have I been so unpeeled, revealed, unfurled and hurled through the
event of lovemaking.
One thing I do know about intimacy is that there are certain natural laws which govern the
sexual experience of two people, and that these laws cannot be budged any more than grav-
ity can be negotiated with. To feel physically comfortable with someone else’s body is not a
decision you can make. It has very little to do with how two people think or act or talk or even
look. The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it
is not. When it isn’t there (as I have learned in the past, with heartbreaking clarity) you can no
more force it to exist than a surgeon can force a patient’s body to accept a kidney from the
wrong donor. My friend Annie says it all comes down to one simple question: “Do you want
your belly pressed against this person’s belly forever—or not?”
Felipe and I, as we discover to our delight, are a perfectly matched, genetically engin-
eered belly-to-belly success story. There are no parts of our bodies which are in any way al-
lergic to any parts of the other’s body. Nothing is dangerous, nothing is difficult, nothing is re-
fused. Everything in our sensual universe is—simply and thoroughly—complemented. And,
also... complimented.
“Look at you,” Felipe says, taking me to the mirror after we’ve made love again, showing
me my nude body and my hair that looks like I just came through a NASA space-training cent-
rifuge. He says, “Look how beautiful you are... every line of you is a curve... you look like
sand dunes.. .”
(Indeed, I do not think my body has looked or felt this relaxed in its life, not since I was
maybe six months old and my mother took snapshots of me all blissed-out on a towel on the
kitchen counter after a nice bath in the kitchen sink.)
And then he leads me back to the bed, saying, in Portuguese, “Vem, gostosa.”