ing my attendant knight. Felipe is the kind of man who desperately needs a woman in his
life—but not so that he can be taken care of; only so that he can have someone to care for,
someone to consecrate himself to. Having lived without such a relationship ever since his
marriage ended, he’s been adrift in life recently, but now he is organizing himself around me.
It’s lovely to be treated this way. But it also scares me. I hear him downstairs sometimes mak-
ing me dinner as I am lounging upstairs reading, and he’s whistling some happy Brazilian
samba, calling up, “Darling—would you like another glass of wine?” and I wonder if I am cap-
able of being somebody’s sun, somebody’s everything. Am I centered enough now to be the
center of somebody else’s life? But when I finally brought up the topic with him one night, he
said, “Have I asked you to be that person, darling? Have I asked you to be the center of my
life?”
I was immediately ashamed of myself for my vanity, for having assumed that he wanted
me to stay with him forever so that he could indulge my whims till the end of time.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That was a little arrogant, wasn’t it?”
“A little,” he acknowledged, then kissed my ear. “But not so much, really. Darling, of
course it’s something we have to discuss because here’s the truth—I’m wildly in love with
you.” I blanched in reflex, and he made a quick joke, trying to be reassuring: “I mean that in a
completely hypothetical way, of course.” But then he said in all seriousness, “Look, I’m fifty-
two years old. Believe me, I already know how the world works. I recognize that you don’t
love me yet the way I love you, but the truth is that I don’t really care. For some reason, I feel
the same way about you that I felt about my kids when they were small—that it wasn’t their
job to love me, it was my job to love them. You can decide to feel however you want to, but I
love you and I will always love you. Even if we never see each other again, you already
brought me back to life, and that’s a lot. And of course, I’d like to share my life with you. The
only problem is, I’m not sure how much of a life I can offer you in Bali.”
This is a concern I’ve had, too. I’ve been watching the expatriate society in Ubud, and I
know for a stone-cold fact this is not the life for me. Everywhere in this town you see the same
kind of character—Westerners who have been so ill-treated and badly worn by life that
they’ve dropped the whole struggle and decided to camp out here in Bali indefinitely, where
they can live in a gorgeous house for $200 a month, perhaps taking a young Balinese man or
woman as a companion, where they can drink before noon without getting any static about it,
where they can make a bit of money exporting a bit of furniture for somebody. But generally,
all they are doing here is seeing to it that nothing serious will ever be asked of them again.
These are not bums, mind you. This is a very high grade of people, multinational, talented
and clever. But it seems to me that everyone I meet here used to be something once
(generally “married” or “employed”); now they are all united by the absence of the one thing
nora
(Nora)
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