He paints his whole body, feathers, masks, beautiful costumes; you should see him. The village women love him. He'll marry soon.
"And you? Will you marry soon?"
"My parents will find a girl for me, but I have things to do first."
"What kind of things?"
"Understand the world, then paint it."
If the world were just slightly lighter in weight, if the moon had remained suspended over the water and deep orange in the sky a moment longer, I could have fallen in love with Nyoman Bagus for saying that. I stared into the complex organization of his face and wondered what he thought about at night, what he saw in the dark woods to be able to paint the way he did, and why the rising of the moon was important to him, as it was to me.
The stars were beginning to brighten as the moon rose above the sea. "Where's the Southern Cross?" I asked. Nyoman Bagus lay back on the sand to survey the night sky.
"It's there." He pointed. "No, I think that one over there. Or maybe that little one out there." His arm flung back and forth across the stretch of heavens as he tried to find the constellation for me. Finally, he admitted he wasn't sure.
I lay back on the sand with him to fall into the sky's eternal mystery. Soon we were kissing each other. I tasted salt water on his lips and thought that one day he would leave the island of Bali. We must have been kissing for hours, lost in the warm scent and skin of each other, because when we looked for the moon, it was high and alone in the sky, conjuring shadows on the beach.
We drove back through an indigo haze of eerie shapes silhouetted against the sky. The villages we passed were now silent in a lantern-lit red glow, and still; the children had gone. Banyan trees, the enormous Indian fig trees considered holy, seemed to lurch through the darkness. Nyoman Bagus drove much more slowly than he had before, slowly enough to be part of a painting, almost slowly enough to understand the world.
On our way home, as night blanketed the gentle land, I realized that a million years would not be enough to repeat that fraction of eternity when we passed the place where the women had bathed, and I put my arms around his waist, and he leaned back into me, his hair and the moonlight resting on my face. When he stopped in front of my guest house, I got off the motorbike and kissed him good-bye.
CULTURAL GAFF
"I had a wonderful time. I loved it," I said. "Thank you, Nyoman, Nyoman BAAAAGUS." I tried to emphasize the word Bagus, since it meant something good. I said it louder than the Nyoman part, with as much emphasis as is possible to enunciate. But when I said his name that way, something curious happened. Nyoman Bagus narrowed his eyes and looked at me as if I didn't belong in his dimension of reality, as if I were an alien life-form he had allowed on the back of his motorbike. He blinked a couple of times. He made little inhaling noises. He opened his eyes very wide, until they took over his face, as if something was occurring to him that never had occurred to him before. His mouth dropped open. He began to laugh. He laughed without restraint, and continued to laugh while I stood there watching him. He laughed so hard he had trouble getting air. The laughing looked painful. He was still laughing when I turned to leave and go back to my guest house.
That was the last time I saw Nyoman Bagus and I like to remember him that way, convulsing on his motorbike with his head falling to his knees. It's a good way to remember someone. I still haven't figured out what cultural gaffe I made and I don't know if I ever want to.
