It’s cool and shadowy in a banyan. I say in a banyan because it’s almost like walking into a room. These trees are enormous. If a ficus plant took a bite out of one of the cakes in Alice in Wonderland that turns you into a giant, it would become a banyan. But what really makes the banyan special is its trunk. It consists of hundreds of roots bulging above-ground that taper upward into as many skinny trunks, like a forest’s worth of saplings huddled together for comfort. These branchlike trunks climb toward the sky in a disordered cluster that unfurls at the top in an explosion of limbs and foliage.
If people and trees are both blessed with personalities, then this ecstatic tree is Jessica’s soul mate. While we were under its cover, Jessica started to weep. Jessica is always weeping, it’s one of her processes, I think, but this was the most euphoric form of weeping I’ve ever seen, her head tilted upward and her eyes joyful as tears streamed from them. She shook her head from side to side and said, “Oh, Suzanne! It’s just so beautiful!”
Su told me that the banyan is sacred because each trunk is both separate and part of the whole tree. Each trunk is an offering to the banyan tree and the banyan tree itself. That’s why it gets all the good offerings—because the banyan tree symbolizes the nature of existence.
Lou’s still chanting the kyries, and I’ve joined in, but when I say Kyrie Eleison, I think banyan eleison. Banyan have mercy. I’m turning into a pagan. Indra told me to think of God this way; she calls God the Great Zucchini. I told her that it was a shame that even her vegetable God had to be phallic.
March 13
Today I stumbled upon Jessica weeping again, but this time she was sitting on the veranda in her loose cotton pants and white tank top, listening to her yellow Walkman. I was squinting in the sun—I had been lying down upstairs, resting after a hearty lunch of green leaves and fermented soybeans, so it took me a minute to adjust to the brightness. I crouched down next to Jessica and put my hand on her shoulder. I know this is her process, but I’m always afraid when I see her crying that it’s something serious.
Which is funny, really—because it’s always something serious. Jessica is processing her childhood and her relationship with her parents. When she discovers something particularly disturbing, she cries with joy, as if she has uncovered some ugly but invaluable prehistoric fossil. She told me she has dreams in which she makes love to her mother using her sister’s detached penis, which she calls a lingam, and when she told me about this dream she described it as “a reminder of my own repression, the necessary repression we all must suffer if we’re going to live within society. But, ah! This necessary repression takes us so far away from our Ancient Selves! Our animal selves! I don’t want to make love to my mother with my sister’s lingam,” she said. “I want to love my mother with my sister.” She cried and spoke as if she were reciting something memorized. “I want us all to love each other.”
“I know what you mean,” I said.
But on the veranda today I was nervous to see her crying again, so I put my hand on her shoulder and she opened her eyes. “Oh, wow,” she said, speaking a little too loudly with the Walkman on. “My teacher is talking about the lingam and the yoni and it really makes me think of Indra and Lou.” She sighed. “Ah! He’s so good!”
“What kind of teacher is he?” I asked.
“Gender clarity.” She wiped her chin, catching a few tears that clung there and then studied her hand as if her tears were tea leaves. She was still looking at her hand as she spoke. “Did you see Indra and Lou in the rice fields yesterday?”
I told her I hadn’t, and she whipped her headphones off. “Ah,” she wailed, “they’re just so beautiful!”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “But what were they doing?”
Jessica said that when she went for her walking meditation yesterday, she broke out of her reverie when she noticed that Indra and Lou were about ten feet away from her, walking single file through the rice paddies. They weren’t speaking to each other, just walking, their posture exquisite and their faces serene.
I’ve seen them walk like this. Jessica’s not wrong—it’s arresting. They could be dancers, both of them.
“They weren’t speaking or anything, but then—” she laughed up at the sun, shaking her head until her dangling coral earrings were shivering.
“What happened, Jess?”
She wiped her eyes, sighing, still laughing a little. “Oh, gosh,” she said. “Well, there was a two-foot jump between where one path ended and another began, and Lou turned around to Indra and—still! Not saying a word!—he took her hand and helped her across to the other path!”
She smiled and laughed and cried all at once.
She didn’t have to explain to me why this moved her to tears. I’m still thinking about the way Indra and Lou looked together the night we exorcised their blender.
She pushed her hair off her forehead. “It was just so beautiful,” she said. “They really love each other. As man and woman.” She sighed and looked out at the green. “As lingam and yoni,” she said softly, “in their truest nature.”
You know what’s crazy? This girl is for real. She means every word of it. Those lingams and yonis are coming straight from her heart. Which sounds sort of icky. But what’s crazier still, if you translate what she’s saying into cringe-proof English, I kind of know what she means.
Later
Jessica’s diary is a spiral-bound notebook covered in construction paper cutouts of flowers and vines and Sanskrit symbols. Faceless male and female forms dance hand in hand around its border like pygmy paper dolls. In the center of this spiritual garden her prize roses bloom:
Loving-kindness
Mindfulness
Serenity
Bliss
Bounty
Beneath this list she’s taped a small white tag from a tea bag that reads, When you worry, you’re praying for what you don’t want.
Evening
I was doing a backbend over the open side of the wantilan this afternoon, looking up into trees and blue sky, and it occurred to me that this is exactly where I’m supposed to be. There was a light breeze, and it made me notice that I’ve actually grown accustomed to the heat. I don’t feel like I’m in a sauna anymore. I’ve figured out where to put my mat so that the geckos don’t shit all over it in practice. Things are looking up.
Jessica and I are sitting on the veranda right now, both of us writing in our journals. The sun is setting and I can hear the women getting their instruments out in the wantilan.
Now they’re beginning to play. Why don’t we all have symphonies playing for us as the sun goes down? It’s hard to imagine how I could ever feel troubled in this environment. It’s perfect. It’s especially good for daydreaming, which is something I’ve been doing a lot of lately. I’ve decided Jonah and I need to completely remodel our life together. If we’re going to live together, I want it to be a new start. I’m picturing us in an apartment in New York that’s like a citified tree house. Plants and natural fibers everywhere—pussywillow branches, river stones. I want us to sit on the floor. I don’t want a single chair in the house! I am going to be the anti-chair brigade! Chairs tighten your hips. I want dozens of meditation pillows and open hips.
Now, I’m not saying I’m going to insist we start referring to our privates as lingam and yoni or anything. But I must persuade Jonah to try yoga. I want him to start meditating. I feel like we’ll be better together if we meditate more. We’ll be less resentful of each other. I’ll be less resentful of his independence, and he’ll be less resentful of my inability to say no to my enormous family and all the demands they place on us. Even at three thousand miles away, there will be demands, mark my words. But we’ll roll with the punches, breathing deeply and wearing loose, comfortable clothing. We’ll have sex by candlelight and wrap ourselves in silk sarongs afterwards. (NOTE TO SELF: Buy sarongs.)
March 14
So, today I wrote a long e-mail to Jonah. I told him I wanted us to be better, to grow t
ogether. I told him that if we were going to live together, we needed to be equals and that I needed to learn to put him before my family.
The hardest thing for me to admit is that I have a tendency to act as if I love my family more than I love him. This past year, Jonah went away for the holidays and came home on New Year’s Day. He and I hadn’t seen each other in two weeks. He called me the morning he got in, and his voice was so excited, he couldn’t wait to see me and he wanted to have the whole day together, cooking and talking.
I wanted to see him, too …
But my sister and I had already rented four movies and bought our body weight in German Gummi Bears. So I told Jonah we’d get together the next day. He was so angry he hung up on me. It makes me want to cry just thinking about it—how could I be such an asshole?
Sometimes I think I love Jonah the way a child loves. I accept his love as a given, and I don’t think about giving much back. I’m sure Jonah would rather have one of those thoughtful girlfriends who makes homemade cards for his birthday and surprises him with cupcakes when he’s had a hard day.
I will become that girlfriend. I will learn to live in the moment, not always thinking about how cool it would be if we did this or that, but actually doing those things. I will surprise him with cupcakes. I just have to learn how to make them.
Flour. I bet they have flour in them.
There’s a picture of us on my nightstand. I’m sitting on Jonah’s lap and kissing him on the cheek while he looks at the camera. When I look at it, I can feel his clean-shaven face on mine. It makes me miss him terribly. I look at it every night before bed in the hopes that I’ll dream about him.
March 15
Love. Jessica and I are all about it. We are in love with love. We stayed up late last night talking about our relationships. Or rather, my relationship and Jessica’s desire for one. Jessica’s path seems to be about finding a spiritual connection with another human being more than anything else; I think she considers a love union the only spiritual happiness she’ll ever need.
I told her I wasn’t so sure about that. But now I think I said that because I’m afraid that what I have isn’t a spiritual union. What I have is fun, and it’s deep and dear and familiar. But spiritual? Huh. I don’t know. But does a relationship need to be spiritual to be good? I don’t think so. Quoth the Beatles: All you need is love.
That said, our conversation started after I went into Ubud to check e-mail. Jonah had written me, but he didn’t respond to what I had said about how I want us to be better. How I need us to be better. He said nothing about it. Just that he missed me and loved me and that getting ready for New York was extremely stressful.
I’m trying to be understanding about it. Maybe he’s not in the right space to talk about heavy stuff when he’s trying to move. But neither one of us is ever in the right space to talk about this stuff.
So I told Jessica about Jonah, and then—perhaps because Jessica isn’t from my world, and so I feel like I can tell her things—I told her the story I’ve never written about, because it’s too—something. Too potent, too much of a fantasy? I think I’m scared of it. I don’t know. I told her about the Sailor, and the novel he gave me that I keep cracking open but can’t bring myself to read. Maybe talking with Jessica has emboldened me, but for the first time in three years, I want to write it all down.
The Sailor is too old for me, but I love the idea of him. I’ve clocked many hours daydreaming about the few times we’ve met. He’s eighteen years older than me, and when we’re together, we talk books. That’s all. In groups, he stays quiet until the conversation turns interesting. But when he gets talking, he can talk books like nobody I’ve ever known. His eyes are very blue and there seems to be no end to his mind.
If it weren’t for my office job, we probably never would have met. As I told Jessica, about a month before Jonah and I started dating, I ended up at the fortieth-birthday party of my co-worker’s brother, the Sailor. This would have been three years ago, right after my twenty-second birthday.
I had heard about the Sailor for years. When the phones were slow at work, my bosses were lenient enough to let me read at my desk. The Sailor’s sister stopped by to chat occasionally, and when she noticed what I was reading, she’d often start laughing. “You and my brother are reading the same book, again,” she’d say. “I need to put you two in the same room together.”
During my freshman year of college his sister gave me an issue of Harper’s to read, and it had his name on the mailing sticker. I remember I spent a lot of time looking at it. Maybe it was the thought that there was a man out there reading the same books I was, thinking about the same characters, the same ideas, that excited my romantic sensibilities, but I was already primed when I met him. In person he was bigger and more grizzled than I had imagined. He looked like a man who went to sea. He had a beard and a broad chest. I had never kissed a man with a beard.
All it took was a glass of Scotch and a conversation about Russian poetry to change that. The next day he went back to sea, I went back to school, and by the time he came ashore again, I was in love with a sweet, funny guy my own age. Jonah.
I told Jessica this story only because there are times when I feel like I have to talk about the Sailor. I wonder, now, if it’s because Jessica is such a romantic that it inspires me to dive into emotions I haven’t indulged since my first months with Jonah. Like passion. The Sailor is so passionate he almost scares me. What I have with Jonah is sweet, settled, real. There aren’t a lot of illusions between us anymore, and it’s the illusions, the mystery, that make a love romantic.
I couldn’t help but show Jessica the book he gave me, and his Bon Voyage note, which is completely innocent and yet thrums like an amulet.
I’m both attracted to and repelled by this novel. Its cover looks like the Balinese night; green and dark blue, jungly, mysterious. I feel like I know what the Sailor was trying to tell me in giving me this book. As I told Jess, it’s not just any book.
After the Sailor came back from sea, he called me and wanted to take me out, but I said no. I was in such a deep swoon over Jonah that I wanted to spend every minute with him, and when I couldn’t be with him, I listened to the mix tape he made me over and over again, replaying the moment we met, our first kiss, our first nights together, on an endless loop.
I told the Sailor as much, and then he asked if he could at least take me to lunch to give me a Christmas present. He said he’d been thinking about my green eyes, and that they made him think I’d like some Spanish literature.
I still said no, although I liked the thought. The rest of the day I couldn’t stop guessing what book he might have meant. Was it a Spanish writer, or a Spanish-language writer? Modern? Classic? Don Quixote?
I never asked him.
The next time we saw each other, it was at a dinner party a year later. He showed up late, and we found our way outside so I could smoke. We did nothing but talk about books for a few hours, but the conversation was almost too good for it not to be cheating. We were both reading Anna Akhmatova at the time, and her poem “Lot’s Wife” brought tears to both our eyes, especially the line I keep thinking of since my conversation with Indra: “But in my heart I never will deny her / Who suffered death because she chose to turn.”
Finally I said I had to go. He pulled me into him as we said good-bye, and told me he was waiting for me. His blue eyes were intense and sad. And this is what was strange—he said that, about how he was waiting for me, and there was a part of me that wanted to tell him I was waiting for him, too. Which is just crazy.
I didn’t say I was waiting for him, of course. I just sort of giggled and reminded him that I had a boyfriend, and then squirmed away. Very suave. Since then he’s been nothing but friendly, and I try not to mention what I’m reading when I see him.
But there have been times when I’ve been walking somewhere, or up late at night, and I find myself silently chanting, I would love some Spanish literature. I would love some S
panish literature.
I saw him briefly just before I left for Bali, when his sister and some friends from the office came by the pub while I was working my shift. He told me about a book on Indonesia by V. S. Naipaul that he loved, and I said I’d like to read it. He promised to send it in to work with his sister.
The next day I went into the office, and from ten feet away I could see that his sister had left not one, but two books on my desk. I knew that the second book would be the one from three years ago, the one he had wanted to give me, that I had refused. The book is by a Colombian writer, Álvaro Mutis. It’s called Maqroll. It’s languishing in my suitcase in the armoire. I can feel it in there, thrumming.
Later
I’m just up from a dream that I was in a museum, or an armory, someplace grand and old. And the Sailor was there, and he picked me up in his arms and walked toward a sweeping marble staircase. And I was happy. I looked over his shoulder and saw Jonah weeping. And this is the worst part—Jonah was crying, and I felt nothing.
I snuggled into the Sailor’s arms just as Indra had nestled into Lou’s side, and let him carry me away.
March 16
Talking about the Sailor makes me think about the Sailor, which makes me dream about the Sailor, which makes me want to talk about the Sailor even more. But the thing I must remember about him is that he’s just a fantasy. I don’t even really know him all that well. I just like the idea of romance. But dreaming of Jonah crying while the Sailor carries me away? That’s not romantic, it’s heartbreaking. I don’t want to start thinking there could actually be something real with the Sailor.
Romance cannot be trusted. What’s real is me and Jonah. Our future together, our community of family and friends, our plans.
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