Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

Liz decides she must help Wayan. She sends emails to her friends and family telling them Wayan’s story and asking them to celebrate her 35th birthday with donations for Wayans’s house. Liz will match the donations from her savings. The donations pour in. In seven days, she has raised $18,000. She knows Tutti manifested it with her prayers and her little blue tile. It was her friend, Bob, in Utah, who pointed out that the name “Tutti” in Italian means “Everybody.” “When you set out in the world to help yourself, you inevitably end up helping. . . Tutti” (303).

Liz will not tell Wayan until all the money has been raised. In the meantime, she is having dinner almost every night with Felipe and has a crush on him. Armenia tells her he went through a hard divorce. Liz knows about that. He is 52 and has lived in Bali for five years, working with Balinese silversmiths to make jewelry with Brazilian gemstones for export. She likes many things about him: married for 20 years, raised successful children, played stay-at-home dad while his Australian wife pursued her career, speaks four or five languages, and traveled to over 50 countries. He asks Liz, “Why don’t you take a lover while you’re in Bali?” (304).

He doesn’t mean just himself. There’s Ian, a chef from New York, and other expatriates. She doesn’t think she’s ready. She lost her teenage confidence about sex and romance. He says love is always complicated. They talk about their marriages and divorces, but when he takes her home and reaches over to kiss her goodnight, she ducks. She lets him hold her. And when he suggests they spend a weekend together, she thinks it would be nice.

Liz asks Ketut about sex and romance, and he says he only has had sex with one woman, his wife. Nyomo is not his wife. She’s his brother’s wife. Ketut and his wife never had any children, so they adopted his brother’s son. When Ketut’s wife died, Nyomo started living in both family compounds, but they never have sex. When Ketut was 27, he fell in love with a girl of bad character who ran away with someone else. His spirit brothers told him to be patient. Then he met his wife. They lived in complete harmony. When she died, he was sad. He visits her in meditation each day. He does not understand the word “romance.” When she says it isn’t his area of expertise, he doesn’t know that word either, “expertise.”

When Liz tells Wayan about the money for her house, Wayan says that Liz must tell everyone who contributed it is not Wayan’s house, but the “Group House,” the House for Everybody. Anyone who visits Bali can stay there instead of in a hotel. Wayan begins to realize that she can have a garden, a library, a pharmacy, and a listing in Lonely Planet for her services. She wonders what she would have done if Liz had never come, but Liz says she was always coming there.

Wayan already knows the piece of land she wants, and she and Liz consult an expatriate financial advisor about the best way to transfer the funds. Then they go to the bank. When they tell Tutti the news, she does a “false faint” in ecstasy. Liz notices the orphans in the kitchen, with looks of fear on their faces. She asks, “What about Big Ketut and Little Ketut? Is this good news for them, too?” (311). Wayan goes to them and speaks reassuringly. They cling to her.

Liz spends more time with Felipe. She takes him to meet Wayan and then to Ketut who reads his palm and pronounces him a “good man.” Felipe takes her to the beach for a day. They swim, nap, read, eat grilled fish, and drink cold beer. He tells her he likes her body. They talk for 10 hours, pack up, then take a walk. He asks her if they should have an affair. This creates a dilemma for Liz with her vow to remain celibate for a year. She recalls her therapist said she could deal with it when it happened. She tells Felipe she probably would under “normal circumstances.”

Felipe comments that her year-long search is for a “balance between devotion and pleasure” (314), but he doesn’t see where the pleasure comes in. She says she ate a lot of pasta in Italy, and he dismisses it. He tells her he thinks she worries about a man coming into her life and taking everything away again. He loves her body, knows her life story, and has had a vasectomy. She still says “No.”

She has a history of making quick decisions about men and falling in love with the highest potential of a man instead of the man himself. If she had been born in a more patriarchal era, her father would have screened the men. When she decided to marry, her father didn’t interfere. She feels it is too soon for her to take a suiter. She goes home, and in sexual longing wakes up at two o’clock in the morning and eats a pound of fried potatoes. When that doesn’t work, she masturbates. That doesn’t work either. But then she finally sleeps. When she wakes up, she is glad she decided to stay alone.

She is surprised the next night, however, when Felipe asks her to come into his bed. She does. He explains his terms, “that he wanted absolutely nothing from me whatsoever except permission to adore me for as long as I wanted him to” (318). They crawl through the white mosquito netting around his bed, and it looks to her like a parachute escorting her out of the obsolete airplane that has been her past life onto the island inhabited by this handsome Brazilian sailor.

She returns home early the next morning to join Yudhi for a week-long American-style road trip in a rented car, even though it’s impossible on an island the size of the state of Delaware. When he asks what time she got home the night before, she confesses she didn’t. He says she “gave in.” She illustrates her action with the story of looking at a photo album with her step-grandmother. When they got to a picture of a cute Italian man, Liz asked “Who’s the hottie?” Her grandmother said, “I was tired of looking at churches, Liz” (321).

On the road, she and Yudhi talk in American English, insult each other’s mothers, stop at beaches, swim, eat junk food, drink beer at ten o’clock in the morning, make friends everywhere, and join in local rituals, ceremonies, and dances. She calls Felipe every day, and he tells her the things he plans to do with her body when she returns. On the last day of their trip, Yudhi draws a map of Manhattan in the sand, and they point out their favorite spots in New York. Yudhi, homesick for New York, fiddles with two sticks representing the 9/11 twin towers and asks her if he will ever see America again. She doesn’t have an answer.

Liz spends the next month in Felipe’s bed. She has never been loved like this before. She says they are a “perfectly matched, genetically engineered belly-to-belly success story” (325). She is his “lovely little darling.” When she finally stops by to see Ketut, he observes that she has found a boyfriend and warns her not to get pregnant. He asks if the boyfriend is a good man, and Liz reminds him she brought Felipe there and he read his palm. Ketut does not remember it. Liz has noticed Ketut “loses things from his recollection” (327). When he asks if the boyfriend is rich and if he would give her money, she says she has never taken money from a man, but the boyfriend “has enough.” Ketut asks if she still meditates. Yes, but she is relaxed about it. She calls her friend, Susan, in New York, and advises her to “let go.” Everything is perfect. The universe provides peace and harmony. Susan replies, “Spoken like a woman who already had four orgasms today” (328).