This had struck us both as irresistibly comic--there's no way you can do an American-style road trip in Bali. There are no great distances, first of all, on an island the size of Delaware. And the "highways" are horrible, made surreally dangerous by the dense, mad prevalence of Bali's version of the American family minivan--a small motorcycle with five people crowded on it, the father driving with one hand while holding the newborn infant with the other (football-like) while Mom sits sidesaddle behind him in her tight sarong with a basket balanced on her head, encouraging her twin toddlers not to fall off the speeding motorbike, which is probably traveling on the wrong side of the road and has no headlight. Helmets are rarely worn but are frequently--and I never did find out why--carried. Imagine scores of these heavily laden motorcycles, all speeding recklessly, all weaving and dodging across each other like some kind of crazy motorized maypole dance, and you have life on the Balinese highways. I don't know why every single Balinese person hasn't been killed already in a road accident.

But Yudhi and I decided to do it anyway, to take off for a week, rent a car and drive all over this tiny island, pretending that we are in America and that both of us are free. The idea charmed me when we came up with it last month, but the timing of it now--as I am lying in bed with Felipe and he's kissing my fingertips and forearms and shoulders, encouraging me to linger--seems unfortunate. But I have to go. And in a way, I do want to go. Not only to spend a week with my friend Yudhi, but also as a repose after my big night with Felipe, to get my head around the new reality that, as they say in the novels: I have taken a lover.

So Felipe drops me off at my house with one last passionate embrace and I have just enough time to shower and pull myself together when Yudhi arrives with our rental car. He takes one look at me and says, "Dude--what time'd you get home last night?"

I say, "Dude--I didn't get home last night."

He says, "Duuuuuuude," and starts laughing, probably remembering the conversation we'd had only about two weeks earlier wherein I'd seriously posited that I might never, actually, have sex again for the rest of my life, ever. He says, "So you gave in, huh?"

"Yudhi," I replied, "let me tell you a story. Last summer, right before I left the States, I went to visit my grandparents in upstate New York. My grandfather's wife--his second wife--is this really nice lady named Gale, in her eighties now. She hauled out this old photo album and showed me pictures from the 1930s, when she was eighteen years old and went on a trip to Europe for a year with her two best friends and a guardian. She's flipping through these pages, showing me these amazing old photographs of Italy, and suddenly we get to this picture of this really cute young Italian guy, in Venice. I go, 'Gale--who's the hottie?' She goes, 'That's the son of the people who owned the hotel where we stayed in Venice. He was my boyfriend.' I go, 'Your boyfriend?' And my grandfather's sweet wife looks at me all sly and her eyes get all sexy like Bette Davis, and she goes, 'I was tired of looking at churches, Liz.' "

Yudhi gives me a high five. "Rock on, dude."

We set off for our fake American road trip across Bali, me and this cool young Indonesian musical genius in exile, the back of our car filled with guitars and beer and the Balinese equivalent of American road trip food--fried rice crackers and dreadfully flavored indigenous candies. The details of our journey are a bit blurry to me now, smudged over my distracting thoughts of Felipe and by the weird haziness that always accompanies a road trip in any country of the world. What I do remember is that Yudhi and I speak American the entire time--a language I hadn't spoken in so long. I'd been speaking English a lot during this year, of course, but not American, and definitely not the sort of hip-hop American Yudhi likes. So we just indulge it, turning ourselves into MTV-watching adolescents as we drive along, razzing each other like teenagers in Hoboken, calling each other dude and man and sometimes--with great tenderness-- homo. A lot of our dialogue revolves around affectionate insults to each other's mothers.

"Dude, what'd you do with the map?"

"Why don't you ask your mother what I did with the map?"

"I would, man, but she's too fat."

And so forth.

We don't even penetrate the interior of Bali; we just drive along the coast, and it's beaches, beaches, beaches for a whole week. Sometimes we take a little fishing boat out to an island, see what's going on out there. There are so many kinds of beaches in Bali. We hang out one day along the long southern California-style groovy white sand surf of Kuta, then head up to the sinister black rocky beauty of the west coast, then we pass that invisible Balinese dividing line over which regular tourists never seem to go, up to the wild beaches of the north coast where only the surfers dare to tread (and only the crazy ones, at that). We sit on the beach and watch the dangerous waves, watch the lean brown and white Indonesian and Western surf-cats slice across the water like zippers ripping open the backs of the ocean's blue party dress. We watch the surfers wipe out with bone-breaking hubris against the coral and rocks, only to go back out again to surf another wave, and we gasp and say............