Jessica took one look at me and pulled me away from our yogamates. As we walked, she spoke hurriedly, as if in a race against our worst impulses.
“Suzanne,” she said, pulling me along by the arm, “I know you’re in a really bad mood right now, and I know we can’t go home, but we really shouldn’t go and have a coconut vanilla milkshake.” She pulled me along the trail through the forest and down the four million stairs to Campuhan. “We should be focused on the path,” she said, pushing us through the transport guys and shopkeepers on the main road into Ubud, leading with her shoulder, like a quarterback heading for a touchdown. “We should keep our eyes on the prize,” she said as we walked past the bar and into the restaurant at Casa Luna. We sat down at a table, and when the waitress came by we spoke in unison, without a moment’s hesitation.
The milkshakes were just as delicious as we remembered them.
But there was a small problem. One minute we were enjoying our milkshakes, giddy as schoolchildren, and the next, we were staring at two empty glasses.
It was a problem.
But don’t worry! We solved it very quickly.
We were on the verge of ordering another round when one of us noticed something in the menu. I don’t remember who noticed it first. Well—maybe I do. Okay, it was me. I discovered a brownie. By “discovered” I mean that I notice this brownie on the menu every single time we eat at Casa Luna and occasionally have dreams about it in which I am rubbing it all over my body.
But, really, it isn’t just a brownie. No mere brownie would inspire such dreams. It’s a brownie the size of a brick, and when you stab it with your fork, molten chocolate comes pouring out of it. In the interest of avoiding chocolate overload, they’ve kindly added an offering of three scoops of vanilla ice cream. And then, just because they can, they pour a pint of hot fudge over the entire thing.
This sinful concoction is called the Killer Brownie, and according to the menu, it is THE BEST DESSERT IN UBUD!!!!!!!
“We will have it,” I said to the waitress, who nodded and started to write it down.
“Wait!” Jessica said. She was worried. “That’s going a little too far, isn’t it? Oh no, I don’t think so. We shouldn’t, right? We should be thinking about the path! We should be thinking about the higher bird, right?”
I looked into her blue eyes and smiled. “You know what, hon? Fuck the higher bird.”
She was stunned. Then she started to giggle. “Oh, you are bad,” she said. Her voice was hushed, awestruck. “Fuck the higher bird!”
I turned back to the waitress, ashamed of nothing but the fact that we were making her wait. “One Killer Brownie,” I said. “Two spoons.”
Jessica couldn’t stop laughing. “Fuck the higher bird!” she cried, lifting her empty milkshake glass. She sounded like a kid who was just learning how to swear.
“Fuck the higher bird!” I cried, clinking my glass against hers.
“Bring me a slingshot,” she sang.
“Jess,” I said, “you rock.”
Can you imagine what happens when you have that much sugar in one sitting, after virtually none for almost two months? I’ll tell you what happens: you blow your mind. Soon we were so spazzed out, it was like every single one of our nerve endings was having its own private kundalini experience. I told Jessica she was the greatest. She told me I was the greatest.
“No, you’re the greatest.”
“No, you’re the greatest.”
“You’re greatester.”
“No you’re greatester.”
“You great!”
“You greater!”
Hmmm. We thought this was the funniest thing ever, but I don’t think it translates well to paper. Anyway, we needed something to cut the sweet or soon we were going to start flashing people. Jessica suggested we order coffees. Just two teensy little cappuccinos, just enough to bring us back down to earth.
Voulez-vous Fuck Zat Higher Bird avec moi ce soir?
From there it was a very short leap to a bottle of red wine, and then tiny glasses of port, and then we were telling each other how much we loved each other and how this was a friendship that would last forever, and that we should order another bottle of wine so that we could toast our friendship! We can’t toast our friendship with empty glasses!
“You know what?” Jessica said, eyeing the sweet and alcoholic carnage strewn across our table. “I think wine is the secret for living in the moment.”
“Our inebriation is profound.”
“Yes! It gives everything a certain … moment … quality, you know?”
“Moment-ness.”
“We’re here now.”
“Totally. I’m totally here. Now.”
The restaurant was closing as we raised our glasses one last time. Even as we toasted I felt that near-weepy, clingy sensation in my throat and chest, that impatient desire to stretch the evening a little longer, to not let it end, this drink, this conversation, this shade of light, these open hours at the restaurant. Must we go home?
“Fuck the higher bird!” Jessica said, like a resolution.
“Amen, sister,” I replied.
We paid our bill and stepped out into the night. A left turn would have brought us home quickly. A right turn was what we made, toward Monkey Forest Road. Soon our noses were pressed against the glass door of the Prada boutique.
“There she is,” I said. “Still there. Waiting.”
“She is pretty,” Jessica admitted.
“Does she look lonely to you?”
“Maybe a little.”
“Don’t be lonely,” we crooned through the glass.
“I’ll come for you soon, little one,” I said. “If you are who you say you are.”
Jessica giggled, her eyes half closed, and tried to take my hand, but missed. She tried again, grabbing at it as if it were a piece of paper caught in the wind. She patted it with her other hand and we started to walk.
We agreed that tomorrow we would rededicate ourselves to becoming yoga teachers, but that tonight the higher bird needed to be fucked by the lower bird. We agreed that it doesn’t bother the higher bird to be so utterly fucked by the lower bird, because the higher bird is, you know, higher up. In the branches.
The walk home sobered us up a bit, and we sat on the veranda for a while, drinking gallons of water. When we finally came up to bed, we lay on our sides in the darkness, our feet resting in a pool of moonlight. As we talked I sensed something rare: happiness. For a few minutes, talking with my roommate after a cathartic night of wine and chocolate, I felt that I was happy. It made my life seem possible.
“You’ll go to New York,” Jessica said, “and I’ll come and visit you. We can go to all the hip yoga studios and go shopping for beautiful clothes and we’ll drink wine!”
“Maybe …,” I said. “And maybe Jonah and I will be happy, living together. Maybe it will make us stronger. Do you think it will?”
“It could, who knows? Why not just go and have an adventure? You have no idea what it’ll be like. What’s your gut telling you?”
“That I love Jonah. I can’t imagine living without him. And if we got married it would make so many people happy. He’s already a part of my family.” I looked at Jessica’s face in the dark and felt that I could be more like her, if I let myself be. She’s open, she’s unafraid. She doesn’t seem to worry about losing time, or losing connections with people she loves. I asked her if she was ever scared when she thought about the future.
“I’m scared all the time,” she said. “But I don’t think God put me here just to die. God put me here to find myself and to find love.” Then she rolled onto her back and sighed. “I can’t wait to find love,” she said. “You’re so lucky to have it.”
• • •
JESSICA FELL ASLEEP hours ago. I should join her. But I keep replaying the last twenty-four hours from beginning to end, and then I can’t help thinking about the last few weeks, the last few months, the last few years … Jessica’s right.
I’m lucky.
Jonah is best friends with my siblings. He loves my grandparents. Grandpa asks me on a daily basis when I’m going to marry Jonah. When I move to New York, Jonah will be my family there. I should stop worrying, and stop looking for answers from a woman who has never seen me outside of this yoga world. She’s never even seen me in jeans—how can she know me well enough to advise me? I should be like Jessica, and give myself over, wholeheartedly, to whatever the future holds.
And I should go to sleep. Now.
April 21
Omigolly.
We have the day off. Thank God. We both slept in later than usual, and when we got up, Jessica didn’t bring her Starbucks mug with her to the bathroom, and she’s not sitting on the edge of the veranda drinking from it as she usually would be. We’ve been at the table for over an hour, reading, or writing in our journals, not really talking. It’s a little uncomfortable. Jessica’s not her usual self, and neither am I. I know what it is. There’s a sin at the table with us, a transgression neither of us knows exactly how to process.
Fuck the higher bird.
In one night, with one phrase, we pissed on something sacred. It reminds me of people who tried to make jokes in the month after 9/11. It’s just wrong.
Jessica wants to go into town to do a walking meditation. I think I’d better. I feel like we’re in trouble. Like her mom is going to call my mom or something. Penance.
Evening
I was thinking about something. No, make that someone. The Sailor, actually. I’ve had beers and a drink with an umbrella in it. And it’s making me think about how sometimes I want to throw myself on the Sailor but I don’t. Because of boyfriend. Cheating? Is WRONG.
It’s wrong in all its parts. Will NOT be a Jezzebel. Jezebelle. JezebWHATEVER.
But if everything’s an illusion, does it matter? And also, hello, unattachment?
I had a point. But tired now. Jonah is love.
It’s bed.
April 22
Well, gosh.
Something is happening to my yoga retreat. I’ve gone from being a monkish seeker of truth and wisdom to a drunk and randy Bridget Jones. Probably not a step up, spiritually speaking.
Yesterday I thought Jessica and I were going into town for a walking meditation. Our penance for fucking the higher bird so thoroughly the night before. Well. I was wrong. And maybe I should’ve been prepared, considering that we’ve spent all this time learning that our perceptions of the world and other people are flawed. That sometimes we believe other people are thinking or feeling things that are really our thoughts or our feelings. Jessica wasn’t interested in penance. She was interested in shoes.
Our walking meditation was a beeline to Jessica’s beaded white wedding shoes. I followed her straight into town and watched her walk into that boutique, ignoring the way the saleswoman tried to wave her off. She offered a respectable sum and walked out with her future on her feet. She said she would wear them only once, but then they would be saved for the day she gets married.
Once that was done, we walked through the market, where we ran into Marianne, her auburn hair pulled back in a pink scarf. She’d been shopping. We stood on the sidewalk, chatting for a while, and Marianne said that she and Indra had been talking and discovered that they both came to yoga in the same way, because the poses, “you know, felt like … coming home.” She spaced out for a minute, nodding, her brown eyes glassy and vacant. Then she smiled. “Wow,” she said.
Apparently she and Indra have a deep spiritual bond. Which kind of makes me want to barf, but whatever.
What’s funny is that this I’m-slipping-into-another-dimension thing Marianne does halted the moment we introduced her to the Prada store. She became very focused, suddenly, going purse-by-purse through the store before declaring, in a full, unambiguous voice, that they were lovely. She said she couldn’t be absolutely sure, but that she had read about stores like this, which sold real bags at international prices. Her whole flakey, spaced-out vibe was gone. She was all business, forking over her credit card to buy one of the larger handbags and three different wallets. I almost caved in and bought my purse, but at the last minute I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
Don’t want to be a chump. Even if my bag sang to me from its shelf, inviting me, like Marianne, to come on home.
We met Jason and Lara at Casa Luna, and the five of us went to this walk-in reflexology place Marianne had read about. That’s when the sex thoughts started. My reflexologist was a man, a very nice-looking man with a shaggy haircut and beautiful, high cheekbones. I was fully clothed for the massage, but fully clothed meant I was wearing a short sarong and a tank top. Not so fully clothed. He started on one foot, and then worked up to my ankle, grabbing my leg with both hands as if to strangle it, and working in this strangling sort of way up to my inner thigh. There, he continued to make this rotating motion with his hands, even though it was very clear—to me at least—that he wasn’t just massaging my leg anymore. Holy Christ, I was so embarrassed. But I also didn’t want him to stop.
He did, of course, and before I had anything to be really embarrassed about. Afterwards Marianne excused herself, saying she wanted to prepare for her class tomorrow. Or, as she put it, “I just want to, you know, get my bliss on.” The rest of us went back to Casa Luna for dinner, and I couldn’t help but announce that I had just had the most erotically charged massage of my life. I felt giddy and slightly perverted, telling my celibate yogamates about it. But thankfully I was not alone—Jason chimed in with stories from his travels throughout Southeast Asia, and one massage in Thailand that had an unexpected happy ending.
“I didn’t know what to do,” he said sheepishly. “The woman just grabbed hold of me before I could say no. And once she started, it was really hard to stop.”
“Hard being the operative word, ladies,” Lara said. “Now, Jason, when a masseuse asks you if you want special massage, you know what she means!”
Soon Baerbel and Marcy showed up, and they were only too happy to join in the conversation. Marcy told us that she and her husband practice tantric sex. Jessica and Lara and I listened, enthralled, as she described the workshops they attend every year to learn how to slow his orgasm and multiply hers. Our greens and rice went untouched.
“God,” Lara said. “Don’t you think Indra and Lou must be practicing tantric sex? Like Sting and Trudy Styler?”
Marcy pointed her fork at Baerbel. “Baerbel would know,” she said. Baerbel started to deny it, but Marcy interrupted her. “Oh, come on. You’ve known Lou for years.”
Baerbel tittered. “Well, yes, but this is not the sort of question I make a habit of asking.” She made a lascivious face, which on her looked very innocent and goofy, her eyes half-closed and her lips pursed. “ ‘Do you and your lover practice tantra?’ Yeah, okay, this is a very familiar question even among friends, don’t you think? And besides,” she added, lifting her water glass and drinking from it, “I don’t know Indra that well. I knew Lou’s first wife much better.”
“His first wife?” Jessica said.
“Yeah,” Baerbel said. “She was a good teacher. Very smart. I studied with them here, in the wantilan. And then, one time, Indra comes here to be their student, and the next thing you know, Lou is divorcing his wife and teaching with Indra.”
I’m not exactly sure what happened next, except that everybody freaked the fuck out. There have always been stories about yoga teachers and gurus having sex with their disciples, and I guess my yogamates took Baerbel’s story to be one of those. Marcy was incensed; she had studied with someone in California who was known for sleeping with his students, and she had vowed never to fall for a guru like that again. “But I wonder if Indra charmed him into leaving his wife,” she said. “That might sound sexist, but she’s beautiful and charismatic, and maybe Lou wasn’t a match for that?”
It sounds sort of nuts, but everyone seems to agree that Indra was at fault. If my yogamates were pissed at Indra for making Jessica feel l
ike she has money issues, this was a whole new ballgame. Suddenly, Indra, the woman who only six weeks earlier was considered practically enlightened, was nothing but Lou’s mistress, just another Jezebel homewrecker.
And then Baerbel said the magic words that transformed our little table of yogamates into yoga heretics. “Do you know what I would like to try?” she said. “I would like to try this coconut-vanilla milkshake you girls have been going on about.”
A hush went around the table. And then all hell broke loose. Milkshakes for everyone! Bitching about our teachers on a sugar high! Treason! Mutiny!
Jessica and I split off as soon as our milkshakes were drained, and found a quiet little bar where we could talk. And drink beer. I think we needed to check in with each other; I don’t know why, but Jessica and I sort of have this private connection over Indra and Lou. It’s almost like we own their love story, and hearing our yogamates talk about Indra as this temptress, this homewrecker, was disturbing. It messes with the legend we’ve created around our teachers, this myth that inspires us and gives us both so much hope for our own love lives.
We talked it out over our beers, and at the end of the night, over cocktails with umbrellas in them, we decided that it didn’t matter, any of it, because what truly mattered was that the little god who lived at the bottom of the martini glass kept telling us to order another one. And when a god speaks, you must listen.
Today, I can’t help wondering if maybe Lou’s story was similar to Indra’s. Maybe he couldn’t be himself with his ex-wife, or couldn’t grow the way he wanted to grow until he found Indra. Maybe Indra needed solitude to find herself, those years she spent alone between her first marriage and meeting Lou—and maybe Lou needed Indra to find himself.
I don’t know. Or maybe they’re a coupla homewreckers.
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