Some Girls: My Life in a Harem (13 page)

The passport situation flashed through my mind as, blood pulsing in my skull and my chest, I opened the door a crack. Standing there was a guard in uniform. He wore a gray wool jacket with a Nehru collar, and one of those soda-jerk caps. I opened the door all the way and he looked at my nightie with alarm.

“You are not ready?”

“Ready for what?”

“You must get ready. Five minutes.”

If he wasn’t going to tell me what was going on, there was only one real question to ask. The answer to this question will reveal almost everything a girl needs to know to prepare herself for whatever trials lie ahead.

“What do I wear?”

“Wear a dress. Wear no tall shoes. No makeup. Five minutes you must get ready. We go.”

I thought about running to Ari’s room, but I remembered that she had left for the States early that morning to deal with some business and pick up a few new girls. She had assured me the night before that we would be fine there alone and that she would return before we left to make sure our departure went smoothly. I looked to Destiny, who shrugged, equally clueless and visibly relieved that it was me and not her.

Ten minutes later, in sandals and a black sundress with a print of pink cabbage roses on it and buttons up the front, I accompanied the guard out the front door and into yet another black Mercedes with tinted windows. It smelled of new car and warm leather.

“Where are we going?”

The guard pretended he didn’t hear, picked up a cell phone, and made a call in Malay. These guards were inscrutable, and there seemed to be so many of them in on the secret. What did they think about chauffeuring the Prince’s women around all day long?

I felt strangely calm; I settled back into the upholstery. I looked out the window and watched the world roll by. I wasn’t really there. I was on a soundstage, sitting in a stationary convertible with fans blowing my hair and a screen behind me showing a winding road through the jungle. Then the scenery changed and we were in the city, whizzing down alley after alley. I had been behind a wall or a car window for my entire time in Brunei.

The car came to a stop at the back entrance of an office building, a tall, generic box of steel and glass. The driver handed me off to yet another guard, who took me wordlessly up in an elevator, down a hallway, and into a room. He gave me a glass of water and left me inside, locking the door behind him.

The interior of the room was incongruous with the businesslike exterior of the building. I had expected to see an office, but instead it was a sitting room stuffed with the same ornate furnishings as the palace, a skewed contemporary take on Louis XIV. It looked as if the Prince’s decorator had multiple personalities. The surface of a massive mahogany desk was crowded with photographs of what I assumed were the Prince’s wives and children. I looked at them, tried to look into them, to glean some insight into what their lives might be like.

The person who appeared most often in the photographs was a young man who looked like a huge, blown-up baby, often stuffed into a polo uniform. Was this Prince Hakeem, Robin’s oldest son and heir? This giant couldn’t possibly be the slight Prince’s progeny. Hakeem reminded me of Francis in
Pee-wee’s Big Adventure
. I imagined the smug, rotund teenager sitting in a bathtub the size of a swimming pool and playing with model battleships.

The women in the photographs were all gorgeous in a painted, glossy-lipped way. They were wrapped in brocaded gowns and wore gauzy scarves covering their hair. Were these his wives? There was a smiling little girl with pigtails. I wondered at what age she’d trade them for a head scarf. Was this his daughter? The Prince himself didn’t appear in any of the pictures with the women, though he did stand next to Hakeem in one or two.

I didn’t know exactly what I was waiting for, but I hoped that I was waiting for Robin. I suppose it should have seemed strange to me to be looking at pictures of Robin’s multiple wives while I waited for him to show up, but I had become accustomed to the Prince’s myriad of women after spending night after night at the palace. I arranged myself attractively on the divan and tried to look casual as the air-conditioning froze the room to a subarctic temperature that made me surprised I couldn’t see my breath. According to a gold clock on a table across the room, ten minutes passed, then a half hour. I finally gave up on sitting properly and pulled my knees up under my dress, rubbing the goosepimply skin of my arms. I hugged myself into the tightest ball I could while still ready to uncurl and appear sexy at any indication of a turn of the doorknob. But the door stayed closed and locked.

An hour passed. There were no books, no magazines, no television. I walked in circles. I sat back down. I looked for a bathroom. I tried the door and it was locked. I tried a second door, also locked. I sat back down. Another hour. I was the star of a Sartre play with no audience. I considered peeing in a wastebasket. I was trembling from the cold, from hunger, from nerves. I tried to think through my searing caffeine-withdrawal headache. If they forgot about me would I just rot there like Antigone, entombed alive?

Worse yet, what if I wasn’t waiting to be his highness’s belle du jour? What if I was awaiting another fate? If I disappeared, who would look for me? My parents, certainly. But where would they start looking? An imaginary movie set in Singapore? Whom could they pin my disappearance on? I was aware that I could have vanished at that moment and there would have been no culpability.

But I was just being hysterical. And besides, there was nothing I could do. Was I somehow going to fashion a rope ladder from shreds of the white leather couch cushions and lower myself out the window onto the streets of Bandar Seri Begawan?

I closed my eyes and tried to warm up. I imagined myself somewhere sunny, on a beach, maybe. Too corny. Then I imagined myself in one of Robin’s harem paintings, dipping my toes into the steaming bath. Too wet. Finally, I simply imagined I was in my bed at home, deep under the covers of my futon on the floor of my Ludlow Street hovel. I missed home. I was looking forward to going back there and being an intern at the theater again, to being just another girl on the subway again. I fell asleep on the divan with my knees pulled up under my chin.

I woke to the sound of the door opening and found myself staring up at Robin dressed in a gray uniform with medals on his lapel and a military cap. It was the first time I had seen him wearing something other than shorts and tennis shoes. He looked the part of a prince. I sat up too quickly, like a child caught napping when she was supposed to be doing her homework. I fell victim to Stockholm Syndrome—you can’t help but fall in love with the guy who rescues you, even if it’s the guy who locked you up for four freezing hours without a bathroom in the first place. I felt a profound sense of gratitude and a deep desire to be valued by this person standing in front of me. In extreme circumstances, this combination can look very much like love.

“You have been here long?” he asked, sitting beside me and running his hand along the chilly skin of my arm.

“Yes.”

He seemed to take some pleasure in this.

“And you’re cold.”

He placed his hand on the nape of my neck and drew me toward him for a soft kiss—not commanding, not confident, not what I had expected from this notorious playboy. I hadn’t fallen straight from a crappy retail job into the arms of a prince. Girls like Serena pretended they had come strictly to gaze at the rainbow and that the pot of gold at the end was incidental.

I tried not to add self-delusion to my list of character flaws. I knew that we were prostitutes. Slant it any way you want, but when you’re trapped at the same party every night and you wind up making out with the guy throwing the parties, and then you magically have a handful of cash when you leave to go home, you’re a hooker. But every hooker has a little gold somewhere in her heart. Some hearts are just gilded, some are solid straight through, and some, like mine, are divided in two, one side shining and one side in shadows.

I knew I was a hooker, but somehow I felt like Cinderella as the Handsome Prince stood and led me by the hand to the second door in the room, which was now unlocked. I half-expected him to kneel and pull a glass slipper out of his pocket. Part of this was just me being a romantic ding-dong and part of it was him. He had something. Like many true great lovers of women, Robin looked at you a certain way and you were suddenly lovely. Women will overlook all manner of philandering and cruelty, will crush their logic under a glass heel, if a man can make them feel they belong on a pedestal in the Louvre.

The coach turned into a pumpkin, however, when Cinderella got back from the bathroom and took a look at the room next door. It was a bedroom that looked like something Hugh Hefner could only fantasize about. The walls were draped in the same lustrous black silk as the sheets and the headboard. There were mirrors on the ceiling, mirrors on the closet doors, at least three visible video cameras, chinchilla bedspreads strewn about, and a TV screen mounted near the ceiling. Two black leather chairs faced a bejeweled gold-and-silver chess set. I thought of the comment Serena had made when we had entered the palace for the first time: It’s all real. Really useless. Who was playing chess in there?

He trained a plain gaze on me. I stood and looked back at him.

“What do you do at home?” he asked me.

“I’m a student. And an actress.”

“An actress,” he said, nodding as if this was interesting. “And maybe some of this?” He waved his hand in a vague gesture at the bed.

I felt the heat rise to my face. Serena. That bitch. I had made the mistake of mentioning the escort agency during lunch one day when my guard was down and she was acting friendly. Of course she had gone and told him. I felt a sick little drop in my stomach. I didn’t want to be seen as an escort right then, not just because it wasn’t the role I was playing for Robin but also because it wasn’t the fantasy I was living out in my own head. I stuffed the prickling of fury back down and plastered a look of innocence across my face. Now it was on. I was in the game. I would get her back.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I like actresses. I know lots of them. They have many feelings, I think. Very entertaining. Now, come here.”

Robin reached over and pulled the strap of my sundress off my shoulder. I stepped closer to him and put his hands on my waist. He pulled me toward the bed and sat down in front of me. He folded his hands in his lap and looked at me expectantly, like someone who had never for a minute in his life worried about making someone else happy, who had never considered that it would take more than his mere presence to set someone at ease.

Mostly because I couldn’t think of anything further to say, I dropped the other strap and stepped out of my dress, kneeling in front of him and laying my head in his lap. I ran my hands up the sides of his thighs, but he took my elbows and pulled me up. I sat on his lap and we made out for a minute before he stood up and I, who had many times mercilessly berated my mother for her mink coats, crawled under the fur blanket with a surge of gratitude, both for being covered and for being warm. I was so cold the beds of my fingernails were tinged with purple.

Robin took off his clothes like he was getting ready to step into a shower, draped them neatly on the chess chair, and joined me underneath the chinchilla. He smelled compulsively clean, like soap and cologne (Calvin Klein’s Egoiste, I had learned from my trip to the bathroom). He was poreless, hairless, muscular. He had no scars, no leaky emotions, nothing notably human to speak of. He looked straight at me the whole time, his eyes obsidian, slightly sunken and weaselly. He was the kind of guy you’d swear was faking an orgasm if the physical evidence wasn’t there. I did my finest porno-inspired blowjob, heavy on the eye contact, and he seemed almost bored. That was a first.

Robin wore some sort of talisman around his neck that looked like a mezuzah. When I was a little girl my father had worn one like it. I remember looking through the lacy silver filigree and trying to see the tiny parchment inside. I couldn’t remember what was written inside a mezuzah. It was something like “Take these words which I command you this day to heart. Teach them faithfully to your children.” I still loved the sound of those prayers even though I believed in signs and spirits and ghosts and muses and maybe in angels, but not in God at all.

My mind was doing what it did with club customers and agency clients and, honestly, with boyfriends, too. It got away from me. It spiraled up and out of the room so that half the time when I was done having sex, I couldn’t remember it. It was kind of like riding the same subway that you’ve ridden a thousand times before: You space out and get to your stop and you’ve blanked out the stops in between. Sometimes you space out so completely that you snap back to awareness and find you’ve missed your stop and landed in Queens.

So that’s what happened. I spaced out and woke up in Queens. I woke up and Robin was fucking me without a condom and I couldn’t find my voice to stop him. This was the height of the AIDS epidemic and friends of mine from the theater were dying at home in medieval ways. But as fast as the panic rose in me I shoved it aside. My knees slipped on the fur, my hands pressing the cool silk of the headboard.

Afterward, he wrote something on my back with the edge of his necklace. It reminded me of the game we played as kids in summer camp. We would close our eyes and a friend would sit across from us holding our forearm. With the edge of a fingernail, the friend would write a word that we would then have to guess. It was almost impossible to guess from the actual sensation. It was really a test to see how well you knew your friend, to see if you could guess what word she’d picked to inscribe on you.

It also reminded me of a game I played later on when I lay naked with lovers and wrote my name on their backs with my fingertips, pretending I was just tickling them. I wrote “I love you” to Sean long before I said the words. I don’t know what Robin wrote.