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Maybe I’m not getting across how fun all this is. Truly, it’s so much odd and satisfying fun,
trying to figure all this out. Or maybe I’m just enjoying this surreal moment in my life so much
because I happen to be falling in love, and that always makes the world seem delightful, no
matter how insane your reality.
I always liked Felipe. But there’s something about the way he takes on The Saga of Way-
an’s House that brings us together during the month of August like a real couple. It’s none of
his concern, of course, what happens to this trippy Balinese medicine woman. He’s a busi-
nessman. He’s managed to live in Bali for five years without getting too entwined in the per-
sonal lives and complex rituals of the Balinese, but suddenly here he is wading with me
through muddy rice paddies and trying to find a priest who will give Wayan an auspicious date
...
“I was perfectly happy in my boring life before you came along,” he always says.
He was bored in Bali before. He was languid and killing time, a character from a Graham
Greene novel. That indolence stopped the moment we were introduced. Now that we’re to-
gether, I get to hear Felipe’s version of how we met, a delicious story I never tire of hear-
ing—about how he saw me at the party that night, standing with my back to him, and how I
did not even need to turn my head and show him my face before he had realized somewhere
deep in his gut, “That is my woman. I will do anything to have that woman.”
“And it was easy to get you,” he says. “All I had to do was beg and plead for weeks.”
“You didn’t beg and plead.”
“You didn’t notice me begging and pleading?”
He talks about how we went dancing that first night we met, and how he watched me get
all attracted to that cute Welsh guy, and how his heart sank as he saw the scene unfolding,
thinking, “I’m putting all this work into seducing this woman, and now that handsome young
guy’s just going to take her from me and bring so much complication into her life—if only she
knew how much love I could offer her.”
Which he can. He’s a caregiver by nature, and I can feel him going into a kind of orbit
around me, making me the key directional setting for his compass, growing into the role of be-