Some Girls: My Life in a Harem (21 page)

It completely freaked me out. The intimacy was such a leap. In Robin’s presence, I was always electrified with tension, posed and aimed to please, never thinking of my own needs. I was so frozen in that mode that I couldn’t even kick the covers off my too-hot feet for fear of disturbing him. I lay awake, my feet sweating, heart pounding, stomach cramping. I hoped he would fall asleep first and snore or something and then I could relax. I pretended to sleep.

“You are not sleeping.”

He wasn’t fooled. I felt like a failure. He finally gave me a sleeping pill and took one himself.

When we woke, we ate room-service breakfast together and watched CNN while he dressed for work. For the rest of the trip, that was how we spent our evenings and mornings. It became normal. I gave only a passing thought to the fact that Fiona was now the one waiting around alone.

 

The first Gulf War had recently ended, but you could still see its aftermath on the news. Only months earlier I had protested the war in Tompkins Square Park, but by then, in Brunei, it seemed faraway—the war and Tompkins Square Park both. Most people who ask me about Brunei assume it is in the Middle East, maybe because of the oil and the brown skin. But Southeast Asia is far from Iraq and I didn’t perceive any connection. Of course, there was a connection. Every oil-rich sultan, king, president, and prime minister is slipping around in the same oil slick.

Robin was tied into this network of oil in ways I didn’t understand and could never talk to him about. That wasn’t exactly what I was there for. But I wondered about it as I watched him scanning the news all the time, a constant stream of it superimposed on everything else he did. I lay in the huge hotel bed, the city of Kuala Lumpur humming forty floors below, and watched the ever-present CNN as Robin got ready for work, whatever work was. Morning after morning, I watched, among other things, the wizened face of Nelson Mandela addressing the world about the crumbling of apartheid.

As Robin became something to me that looked more and more like a lover and less like an employer, I occasionally ventured to ascertain Robin’s opinions about the events we watched every day on the news. But he was usually evasive, so I didn’t ask too many questions. I knew there was no freedom of the press in Brunei, that the Sultan was an autocrat (if a genial one) and that it was a serious crime to disparage him. None of these were admirable things but I preferred to ignore them. I wasn’t there as a representative for Amnesty International. It wasn’t my country. It wasn’t my concern.

All my political convictions, my years of activism, were suddenly irrelevant. It’s not that I was exactly going all out for theocracy, polygamy, and unchecked consumerism, but it didn’t really matter what I believed.

In high school, I had bussed down to Washington for pro-choice marches, for gay-rights rallies. I wrote papers on the Zapatistas and planned a post-graduation trip to Chiapas. But I never did make it to Chiapas. Instead, I decided to wed my activism with my artistic ambitions and join the illustrious history of the theater of protest, until I discovered that it didn’t pay very well and the realities of self-sufficiency began to erode my ideals. Neither art nor activism had any place in my Brunei world, which, as the months wore on, was becoming my real world.

Closer to Robin’s interest than the end of apartheid was the British royal divorce. Closer still was the ticker tape of international finance, which we watched in English but might as well have been in Malay, for all I knew about Dows and S&Ps. My father hadn’t taught me a thing, probably because I had never asked. But I did tell Robin my father was in finance, and this impressed him for a minute, but he lost interest quickly. Instead, I came up with cute stunts to keep him amused.

One morning, I teased Robin because he wouldn’t take a bath with me.

“I will only share a bath with a duckie,” he said.

That afternoon I sent a guard out to get a rubber duckie, and I gave it to Robin as a present so he wouldn’t be lonely in the tub. That day he was particularly charmed by me, more than usual. I hadn’t planned to do what I did, but the seed that Taylor had planted in me had taken root.

Robin liked to throw Serena’s name into conversations, particularly when things were going well between us and I was getting complacent. I don’t remember how it came up. Were we talking about acting? Singing?

“Serena, I think, is a singer in a band in Los Angeles. Isn’t she?” he asked.

“Yes, I remember she told me she sings in her boyfriend’s band,” I replied. It was so easy. He had handed it to me.

“Did she say that?” he asked sharply.

“That she’s a jazz singer?” I pretended the boyfriend part had just slipped out without my even noticing. “That’s what she told me.”

I kissed him good-bye that morning and then went to the windows and stood there looking out over the city for a long time. I did the same every morning. I always had a couple of hours to kill before a guard came to fetch me and bring me to my room, where I’d nap, order room service, read for a while, then get dressed and do it all over again. But my favorite time of the day was when Robin left for work, the first quiet of being alone. When being alone got old, I sometimes called Fiona’s room, but she was never around during the day anymore. I tried not to think of where she was.

I kissed Robin good-bye every morning and sat next to him every night at dinner. It was like having a boyfriend, except he was a dictator’s brother who was married three times already and had forty other girlfriends, one of whom I was actively trying to deprive of her livelihood.

It’s hard to explain why I fought so hard for Robin. Sometimes I thought he was scheming and fascinating, the sexy villain. Sometimes he made me feel impossibly lovely. Sometimes I thought he was a little prick and felt an overwhelming urge to bean him in the head with the remote control. But here’s the grimy, ugly truth: I shared Robin’s bed and I felt I was part of something powerful and important. Power was something I’d never experienced before. I’m not sure that I was in love with Robin as a person, exactly, but I was in love with that feeling, ecstatically in love. I may have gotten the two confused.

Power tasted like an oyster, like I’d swallowed the sea, all its memories and calm and rot and brutality. It tasted like an oyster I ate once as a kid, an oyster still flinching with life. My father’s favorite food was shellfish. On a trip to Boston once when I was about seven, he took me to Faneuil Hall and set a dozen raw oysters between us and a dozen raw clams next to that. He speared his first oyster, dunked it in the cocktail sauce, and then slugged the whole thing down and dared me to do the same. We actually drew a small crowd of people who wanted to see the little girl eat oysters.

I held the creature aloft in front of me for a beat, wanting to chicken out. It was the underside of a tongue, wet and meant to be hidden. I put it in my mouth and tried to chew it and it slid to the back of my throat, making me gag. The crowd laughed. They cheered.
Come on, kiddo, you can do it!
I gagged again before figuring out how to open my throat and swallow.

It made me want to vomit, but I sucked down that oyster and then I sucked down four more. I know it made my father proud. And with each oyster, I understood a little more. They’re disgusting, they’re delicious, and you swallow every last one just to prove you can.

I had wanted something dazzling and I’d gotten it. I was a royal mistress, standing around in La Perla underwear and overlooking Kuala Lumpur from a penthouse suite. And if I had the feeling that the oyster was poisoning my blood, if I had an echo of a thought that something irretrievable was being traded, I nudged it aside.

 

 

 

 

T
he guard knocked in the middle of the day and informed me I was to dress in an evening gown. Previously on the Malaysia trip Robin had called for me only at night, so it seemed strange. When we got on the elevator, the guard pushed the button for the roof. My chest tightened with panic. I knew too much and they were getting rid of me. There was nothing I could do. I was trapped. I was like that guy in the gangster movie who knows he’s about to get whacked for some infraction, yet has no choice but to get in the car with his soon-to-be killer. I imagined the headlines.

At least I’d die in an evening gown. But no one pitched me off the roof. Instead, I found a helicopter waiting for me on the helipad, kicking up a crazy wind. It was the first time I had been in a helicopter, and the headphones the pilot handed me wrecked my by-then-perfected five-minute updo. I imagined I looked like a Hitchcock heroine after having been chased over a foam studio mountain while the industrial fans blew my evening gown into a twist.

The ride seemed laughably short, barely a Spider-Man hop from one roof to another. But looking down on the gridlocked traffic creeping through the streets of KL, I was sure that what was a three-minute flight would have been a three-hour drive. That helicopter flight, the drives to and from the airport, and the view from my hotel-room window were all I would see of KL. I never smelled the food smells blown out the back of the restaurants, never tried to buy a scarf from a street vendor, never ordered my own cup of tea, never even put my shoe to the Malaysian pavement except to walk from the hotel to the car, and that only twice. I had been to Malaysia, but I hadn’t. I had been to the island of Borneo, but not really.

I was greeted at the helipad by two mirrored-sunglasses-wearing guards, who ushered me into the door of yet another hotel suite. This one stretched on forever. I began to fix my hair, taking my time to look around and prepare for yet another marathon wait. I turned around and on a love seat at the far end of the room sat the Sultan. I jumped and nearly screamed from the shock of finding myself not alone.

“How do you like my country?” he asked, patting the seat next to him. Robin had asked me the same question.

Of course, we weren’t exactly in his country at that particular minute, but I knew what the Sultan meant. The world was his oyster; everywhere was his country. And not in a John Lennon kind of way.

He seemed a football field away. In front of him, on the coffee table, was a delicate bone-china tea set edged in gold. The Sultan asked me to call him Martin as I sat next to him and poured for both of us. Talking to Martin was easier than talking to Robin. He was gracious and almost breezy, his smiling face much less imposing than the stern countenance on the money and the billboards. We finished one cup and even half of another before retiring to the bedroom. The suite where I met the Sultan of Brunei was easily ten times bigger than my whole house is now. The Pope himself couldn’t have dreamed up a more lavish spectacle.

I was being passed along after all. But I had been in Brunei long enough to understand that it was a compliment rather than an insult. I was some sort of a tribute paid, part of a system of honor and respect between brothers. I was a gift.

Just by kissing Martin I could tell how different he was from Robin. He was less complicated, less needy, less manipulative. The difference can best be explained by the following: Robin demanded that you love him; Martin just wanted you to suck his dick. He politely requested that I do exactly that, after asking me to remove my clothes, walk back and forth, turn around, and then do a little dance. Afterward he cheerily sent me back to the helicopter with the pronouncement that his brother had good taste.

I never saw the Sultan again, but after that it always amused me to look at his face on the Bruneian dollars. Angelique, the singer whom Prince Sufri loved, later told me that I shouldn’t feel bad that he didn’t ask me back. In fact, I should be flattered that I met him in the first place. She told me that he almost never fucked Western girls and when he did he never kept them.

That night Robin was eager to know if Martin had liked me. He seemed like a little boy looking for his father’s approval. Robin was always famished behind the eyes. It was the kind of hunger you could never really feed, the kind that keeps you up until five a.m. every night, the kind that drives you to fuck girl after girl, to buy Maserati after Maserati.

He looked like an alcoholic near closing time, like someone who had gotten everything he had ever wanted and despaired to discover that he still felt empty. It wasn’t the first time I suspected that for all his relentless pursuit of pleasure, he actually had a hard time having fun. There aren’t enough girls or cars in the world to satisfy that kind of appetite.

I slept in Robin’s arms and dreamed that I was the Sultan, or not exactly the Sultan but a man.

I am a man and I walk into the Kit Kat Club on Fifty-second Street, push through the curtain of thick tinsel slabs that hang in the doorway, dodge the mirrored columns, and round the corner. I sit at one of the booths along the wall and buy a lap dance from a girl whose face I can’t really see, but I can feel her heat. It surprises me how profoundly naked she is in my lap. In the dream I’m awed by her softness. I think, You can buy a girl, a whole warm, velvety girl.

I never got it before. I never understood why you’d want to buy a girl, until that dream. In my dream I was so grateful to be a man.

 

 

 

 

I
returned from Kuala Lumpur to find Serena was gone.

“Gone?”

“Gone. Closets cleared out. One-way ticket. Gone,” said Ari.

Oh, happy day! Serena gone! I think I actually did the running man. Then it hit me. Had the jab at her that I had slipped into my pillow talk with Robin caused her to be sent home? If so, who cared? I should feel victorious. She had tried to do the same to me but it hadn’t worked because she was too transparent.