I remember one hot, damp night when I woke up after a motorcycle without a muffler had blasted past our window, and I sensed that Felipe was also awake. Once more, I selected a word at random.

"Please tell me a story about fish," I requested.

Felipe thought for a long while.

Then he took his time in the moonlit room to recount a memory of going fishing with his father on overnight trips when he was just a little kid back in Brazil. They would head off to some wild river together, just the child and the man, and they would camp there for days--barefoot and shirtless the whole time, living on what they caught. Felipe wasn't as smart as his older brother Gildo (everyone agreed on this), and he wasn't as charming as

his big sister Lily (everyone agreed on that, too), but he was known in the family to be the best helper and so he was the only one who ever got to go on the fishing trips alone with his father, even though he was very small.

Felipe's main job on those expeditions was to help his dad set the nets across the river. It was all about strategy. His dad wouldn't talk to him much during the day (too busy focusing on the fishing), but every night over the open fire, he would lay out his plan--

man to man--for the next day about where they would fish. Felipe's father would ask his six-year-old son, "Did you see that tree about a mile up the river that's halfway submerged? What do you think about us going there tomorrow, to investigate?" and Felipe would squat there by the fire, all alert and serious, listening manfully, focusing on the plan, nodding his approval.

Felipe's father was not an ambitious guy, not a great thinker, not a captain of industry.

Truthfully, he was not very industrious at all. But he was a fearless swimmer. He would clench his big hunting knife in his teeth and swim across those wide rivers, checking his nets and traps while he left his little boy alone back on the bank. It was both terrifying and thrilling for Felipe to watch his father strip down to his shorts, bite that knife, and fight his way across the swift current--knowing all the while that if his father was swept away, he himself would be abandoned there in the middle of nowhere.

But his father was never swept away. He was too strong. In the nighttime heat of our bedroom in Bali, under our damp and billowing mosquito nets, Felipe showed me what a strong swimmer his dad had been. He imitated his father's beautiful stroke, lying there on his back in the humid night air, swimming, his arms faint and ghostly. Across all these lost decades, Felipe could still replicate the exact sound that his father's arms made as they sliced through the fast dark waters: "Shush-a, shush-a, shush-a . . ."

And now that memory--that sound--swam through me, too. I even felt as though I could remember it, despite having never met Felipe's father, who died years ago. In fact, there are probably only about four people alive in the whole world who remember Felipe's father at all anymore, and only one of them--until the moment Felipe shared this story with me--recalled exactly how that man had looked and sounded when he used to swim across wide Brazilian rivers in the middle years of the last century. But now I felt that I could remember it, too, in a strange and personal way.

This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark.

This act, the act of quiet nighttime talking, illustrates for me more than anything else the curious alchemy of companionship. Because when Felipe described his father's swimming stroke, I took that watery image and I stitched it carefully into the hem of my own life, and now I will carry that around with me forever. As long as I live, and even long after Felipe has gone, his childhood memory, his father, his river, his Brazil--all of this, too, has somehow become me.

A few weeks into our sojourn in Bali, there was finally a breakthrough in the immigration case.

According to our lawyer back in Philadelphia, the FBI had cleared my criminal background report. I'd passed cleanly. I was now considered a safe risk for marrying a foreigner, which meant that the Department of Homeland Security could finally begin processing Felipe's immigration application. If all went well--if they granted him the elusive golden ticket of a fiance visa--he might be allowed to return to America within the space of three months. The end was now in sight. Our marriage had now become imminent. The immigration documents, assuming Felipe secured them, would stipulate quite clearly that this man was allowed to enter America again, but for only and exactly thirty days, during which time he had to marry a particular citizen named Elizabeth Gilbert, and only a particular citizen named Elizabeth Gilbert, or he would face permanent deportation. The government would not be issuing an actual shotgun along with all the paperwork, but it did sort of have that feeling.

As this news filtered back to all our family members and friends around the world, we started getting questions from people about what kind of wedding ceremony we were planning. When would the wedding be? Where would it be? Who would be invited? I dodged everyone's questions. Truthfully, I hadn't planned anything special around a wedding ceremony simply because I found the whole idea of a public wedding entirely agitating.

I had stumbled in my studies on a letter that Anton Chekhov wrote to his fiancee, Olga Knipper, on April 26, 1901, a letter that perfectly expressed the sum of all my fears.

Chekhov wrote, "If you give me your word that not a soul in Moscow will know about our wedding until after it has taken place, I am ready to marry you on the very day of my arrival. For some reason I am horribly afraid of the wedding ceremony and the congratulations and the Champagne that you must hold in your hand while you smile vaguely. I wish we could go straight from the church to Zvenigorod. Or perhaps we could get married in Zvenigorod. Think, think, darling! You are clever, they say."

Yes! Think!

I, too, wanted to skip all the fuss and go straight to Zvenigorod--and I'd never even heard of Zvenigorod! I just wanted to get married as furtively and privately as possible, perhaps without even telling anyone. Weren't there judges and mayors out there who could execute such a job painlessly enough? When I confided these thoughts in an e-mail to my sister Catherine, she replied, "You make marriage sound like a colonoscopy." But I can attest that after months of intrusive questions from the Homeland Security Department, a colonoscopy was exactly what our upcoming wedding was beginning to feel like.

Still, as it turned out, there were some people in our lives who felt this event should be honored with a proper ceremony, and my sister was foremost among them. She sent me gentle but frequent e-mails from Philadelphia concerning the possibility of throwing a wedding party for us at her house when we returned home. It wouldn't have to be anything fancy, she promised, but still . . .

My palms dampened at the very thought of it. I protested that this really was not necessary, that Felipe and I didn't really roll that way. Catherine wrote in her next message, "What if I just happened to throw a big birthday party for myself, and you and Felipe happened to come? Would I be allowed to at least make a toast to your marriage?"