Sex work is dangerous work. Yes, it’s dangerous for the obvious reasons. It exposes women to all kinds of exploitation by pimps and by glorified pimps dressed in suits and calling themselves club owners. It makes us an easy target for violence. It can put us at risk for contracting sexually transmitted diseases. But the subtler and more ubiquitous danger is that you won’t be able to tell the difference anymore between your work persona and yourself. And that girl who wears the thong so effortlessly in public might not be the one you want making major life decisions for you. But give her an inch and you know how the rest goes. She’s a stripper, after all. She’ll take all she can get. It’s her job.
I didn’t tell myself that at the time. When I made my decision to go back to Brunei, I told myself I had spent nearly all my money and had forgotten to go to Paris. Just one more time back to Brunei and I’d do it right this time. I’d go to Paris and then I’d return and find a proper agent and in no time I’d be splashed across a marquis; I’d be a name rolling up the screen, the very top of a list of credits. I told myself, too, that I missed Robin, that I had never said a proper good-bye. In retrospect, I realize that I didn’t miss Robin so much as I missed her, the girl in the penthouse suite, overlooking all of Kuala Lumpur, already a success, with nothing to do all day but dream.
Colin came upstairs from Penn’s and did some last-minute tinkering on my computer as I packed. Months before, he had convinced me to get this wacky new thing called a laptop. Colin was doing his best to set up my computer so I could send e-mail from Brunei. I figured they’d probably confiscate the whole thing, but it wouldn’t hurt to try.
“Do you think I’m making a mistake?” I asked Colin.
Ever the pragmatist, he replied, “No. No way. Plenty of women suffer in the suburbs their whole life for some jerkoff’s money. You’re just taking your punishment up front. Then you can take the money and do whatever you want. This time just figure out what that is exactly and you’ll be golden.”
In between our exchanges, Colin typed incredibly fast and talked on the phone to various clients at the same time.
“You know,” he said. “The thing that kills me is that the Prince is purchasing so little of what he could have with you. I mean, he could say, ‘Write a play by Tuesday and stage a performance of it by Friday.’ ”
“Not everyone wants to see my plays.”
“But still, it’s all that money. It makes you boring.”
“That’s true. It’s definitely boring.”
“Can you write novels in your head while you’re sitting at the parties?”
I thought about it. It hadn’t even occurred to me to write novels. But something about it appealed to me. It was kind of a good idea.
“I don’t know. I could try. I could start with a short story.”
“Try it. Write it in your head while you’re at the party, then write it down and e-mail it to me when you get back to the house at night. Don’t let the bastards make you boring.”
The plane ascended and I watched the shining towers of my Emerald City turn into spindly toys. I set my watch ahead to Singapore time. It helps you to adjust on long plane rides if you set your watch ahead right at the beginning. All I had ever wanted my whole life was to move to New York and be an actor. And there was New York below me, growing smaller and smaller, along with my family and the friendships I had forged and the offers of real acting jobs. And somehow, I couldn’t wait until it was out of sight and there was nothing but twenty hours of blue.
chapter 26
I
sleepwalked through the routine: New York to Frankfurt to Singapore to the Westin Stamford and a flight into Bandar Seri Begawan the next day. Ari told me I was to meet three newbies at the Westin and we’d have an extra day to adjust in Singapore before the final leg of the trip. Because Ari couldn’t come until a week later, I was meant to show them the ropes. She asked me to do her the favor of getting everyone through the airport in Bandar Seri Begawan and making sure they were all okay. She still trusted me. That was good.
Last time, I had passed out as soon as I got to the Westin. This time, I decided to be social as part of my penance for staying away so long. I went to the hotel restaurant to meet the new girls: Gina, someone forgettable, and Sheila. I watched them tally up the value of my outfit as I approached the table. The only obvious high-ticket item I wore was my handbag. I had drawers full of Chanel and Hermes bags by this point. I could have worn a new one every day of the month. But otherwise I traveled in jeans and no makeup. The girls’ faces fell in disappointment when they saw me. All of them wore dresses and had faces pounded with eyeliner and lip gloss.
When I hugged them hello, I began to get a sense of what Ari had meant about things changing in Brunei. These girls were savvier than the last crop; it hung about them like a perfume cloud. They looked like they had walked out of a Rampage dressing room and they smelled like the cosmetics department at Bloomie’s.
They asked about the money right away. We had barely introduced ourselves and they were falling all over each other asking how much. How much do you make a week? How much do you get altogether? Do you get jewelry? I told them what people had told me: Don’t worry, you won’t be disappointed.
Sheila was the most colorful of the bunch. She had a raspy voice and a ratty handbag. When she pulled out pictures of her one-year-old son, part of her purse’s torn lining flapped out over the side.
“This is my son,” she told us over the omnipresent plates of satay and peanut sauce. As far as I’m concerned peanut sauce is one of Southeast Asia’s great contributions to the world.
“Are you single?” she asked me, while they served our third round of drinks.
“Yes.”
“I don’t know if they already told you this, but I was a
Penthouse
Pet of the Year. I lived with the Gucciones. The Gucciones are like my family. So I’m no stranger to this kind of life.”
“Do the Gucciones own a country?”
“I get it. You’re funny. You’d love Bob junior. I’m gonna set you up with Bob junior when you get home. He lives in New York. You’re smart like Bob junior. He’d love you.”
She regaled us with stories of the goings-on at the Guccione indoor pool until we all called it a night.
The next day we did some bleary-eyed sightseeing. We went to the Singapore Zoo because it’s supposed to be so humane and gorgeous and all that. We dragged around in the steamy heat and petted baby elephants. Singaporeans and doughy Western tourists alike stared at Sheila’s cropped shirt and tight shorts. The other girls enjoyed the zoo, but I couldn’t; I never can. The gorillas make me so sad, with their human hands.
When the four of us boarded Royal Brunei Airlines the next day, I told myself that the nauseous, sinking feeling I had was the jet lag.
When we arrived at our guesthouse, I saw that Sheila, Gina, and what’s-her-name comprised only a small fraction of the new bevy of beauties. Of the last crew, only Delia was still there a year later, cheerful as ever and holding tight as she quietly built her bank account and planned for the future.
Gone were the days of single rooms and unlimited phone time. There were two full houses of American girls, and Sheila and I were assigned to be roommates. In my first hour there, I already sensed the atmosphere was rowdier, more crowded, less tightly managed. I soon learned Sheila wasn’t the only girl with
Penthouse
bragging rights. Playmates and pageant queens and bathing-suit models abounded. When we crowded around the marble table for lunch, I looked around and thought, Is this it? This is a big bunch of Pets and Bunnies and calendar girls, an adolescent-male fantasy come to life, and this is all there is?
They were just girls, real and flawed girls whose images had been smeared across the pages of magazines and airbrushed to look impossibly smooth and luscious. Maybe Robin thought the same thing. Maybe that’s why he kept ordering up more and summarily discarding them.
This surge in the American population of the harem was the first in a series of steps indicating Robin’s progressive greed and decadence. I was witnessing the very first snow flurry of the avalanche that, years later, would roll right over Robin. By the time it did, I would be long gone and reading about it in the papers. I would be sitting on a friend’s couch in Los Angeles with my jaw in my lap as I watched Sheila blab to tabloid news reporters while topless pictures of me flashed across the screen, a digital smudge blurring my eyes and my boobs—an ineffective gesture toward concealing my identity.
But that day I had only an inkling of the transformation that was happening to the world inside the palace gates. It threw me off. It was a world that had seemed so tightly regimented that I had thought it would never change.
Some things did remain the same. I had been there for exactly one hour and was lying on the couch looking up at a lizard with his belly flattened against the skylight, when a guard showed up and told Delia and me to put on bikinis and go sunbathe by the upper pool. I slathered sunblock on my New York-pale skin and grabbed a towel. We zoomed up the familiar hill in the golf cart. I practically glowed purple in the afternoon glare. I looked like I was under black light.
“Where’s Fiona?”
“Oh, sister. You’ve been gone a long time.”
The story of Fiona went like this: After nearly a year of residence there, Fiona owned countless closets full of designer clothing, houses for herself and all her family back in the Philippines, and jewels to rival the Queen of England’s. On Christmas, Prince Jefri gave her a present of a million dollars cash and an engagement ring. This was supposedly the brass ring for which we were all reaching. All of us but Fiona, apparently.
Fiona refused Robin’s proposal and took the first plane home with her clothes, her money, and her freedom. Her betrayal had beaten Serena’s by a mile. No one knew where Fiona lived or how to get in touch with her. I never saw her again, but I think of her sometimes. I think of her whenever I remember how I learned to really walk.
I chose an ivory silk minidress to wear to the party that night. Through the silk, you could see the faint outline of my nude Cosabella thong, along with the outline of my tattoo. I studied myself in the mirror and questioned my judgment for the first time since I had gotten it. I had no idea what Robin would think of it. A pussy tattoo, for God’s sake—who gets one of those? What was I thinking? Would he be disgusted?
In the party room, our little dominion had become so crowded that we were forced to shove our asses together on the ottomans. We balanced on the arms of the chairs. The really petite girls could fit two to an armchair by positioning themselves on the very edge of the cushions. Our section of the room had once looked like the first-class section of a plane compared to everyone else’s coach. Now we were all the same.
The new girls were curious about me for about three seconds. I had been here a whole year ago? But their attention faltered. The topic each girl seemed most interested in was herself. I couldn’t figure out exactly what they were talking about at any given moment, but it was usually lively at least. Each girl generally interrupted the last by elaborating on how the previous comment applied to her.
“I had a cousin who went to a holistic nutritionist who said that carbonation causes cellulite because the air bubbles get caught in your fat cells. I wonder if this champagne counts?”
“I don’t think so. Models all drink champagne and don’t have cellulite.”
“One time I was with Dave Navarro at the Sunset Marquis at like six in the morning and there were like four of us in his room watching like
The Doors
or something and we got baked and drank this like six-hundred-dollar bottle of Cristal and it was like so delicious.”
“Did you know there was this French girl who brought pot into Singapore in her suitcase lining and she got the death penalty and all the governments tried to stop them, y’know? But they didn’t care and they beheaded her anyway.”
“Yeah. That’s true. They’re total fascists. You can’t chew gum in the Singapore Airport even.”
Something in me had changed. Listening to their conversation, I didn’t want to strangle them. I didn’t even want to strangle myself with my own purse strap. I had opted, among plenty of other choices, to come back and sit in this chair again. I was more comfortable in my cage here at the zoo than I had been in the concrete jungle. It was sobering. But it also made me more serene while the hours of my life ticked away in that room. I didn’t suffer under the illusion that I had some big life to which to return. The dream of stardom that had lit my way until then was dimming, even smoldering. You could almost smell the smoke.
The hour of Robin’s arrival at the party approached. I was nervous. I noticed I was hunching my shoulders, curling in around my chest as if to quiet the flutter inside. I had to consciously pull my shoulders back, cross my legs at an attractive angle, and act like I was having a good time.
The Asian girls also showed a turnover, but it wasn’t as drastic as the Americans’. I was happy to see my friends Yoya, Tootie, and Lili, but even they were slightly reserved toward me. Tootie looked as ageless and wholesome as ever. Yoya had put on a few pounds around the hips but her face was more drawn, the weight redistributed from her round cheeks. I guess she was getting older. She must have been sixteen or so. She wore an orange Chanel suit, and her horsetail of a braid seemed to have stretched even longer.
When Robin did walk in, he looked exactly the same. He had those same tennis shorts, the same thick hair fussily feathered back. He strode in and said a few hellos, pointedly not looking in the direction of America-land. Behind him were Winston, Dan, Dr. Gordon, and the rest of the crew. I knew they wouldn’t acknowledge me until he did. When he did look over, he caught my eye and made that exaggerated fake-surprise look.