Some Girls: My Life in a Harem (14 page)

I lay on my stomach and Robin lay beside me for exactly three seconds before slapping my ass, kissing me on the cheek, and popping out of bed like he had hit the emergency eject button.

“That was very nice for me. I am late for a meeting.”

I knew better than to say, Wait. Wait. Give me another chance and I’ll make you want to stay. I knew better even than to feel it, but feel it I did. It was unlike me.

Was I actually taken with this guy (who was not only the least available guy on the planet but was also most likely some kind of sex addict who pencils a different girl in between every business meeting) or did I simply not want to be left alone again?

While Robin showered and dressed to leave, I used the ceiling mirror to arrange my hair on the pillow. I wanted to brand myself into his brain, wanted to make myself into a memory that would take him off guard while he sat in a meeting or rode in the back of his car or whatever princes did. When he left, he looked as sharp and creased as when he had come in.

I told myself I was a personal goodwill ambassador, single-handedly improving relations between Jews and Muslims the world over. I wasn’t the first Jew in a sultan’s bed. Hadassah changed her name to Esther to marry the Persian king. They made the holiday of Purim to celebrate Esther’s story.

But there would hardly be a holiday commemorating my actions. I was no ambassador for anything other than my own wallet and my own desire to feel desired. I was barely hanging on to my own ass; I was saving no one. There had been countless women like me in the beds of kings but no one ever heard their stories, because who would care?

After I was sure Robin wasn’t coming back, I went into the bathroom and showered. The glass wall and black marble of the shower were still streaked with water marks from Robin’s shower. I stood there with the water on my back and thought back to the morning after the first night I spent at Sean’s house. I hadn’t wanted to walk home in my tight dress from the night before, so I had worn his old college sweatshirt and a pair of his jeans, the long legs cuffed and cuffed again. When I got home, I was exhausted and dirty and my hair reeked of smoke but I hadn’t wanted to take a shower because I could still smell him on me. I had crawled into bed and taken a nap while still wearing his clothes.

Three hours passed before my suspicions that they had once again forgotten about me took over and I panicked.

“Hello. Help. I’m in here. Someone let me out.”

I pounded on the door and hollered for a good fifteen minutes before someone came and turned the lock.

 

 

 

 

I
t was late in the afternoon when I walked back through the door of the house. I had hoped the girls would be at the pool, but instead they were lying on the couches in the upstairs den with their limbs layered over one another’s while they watched
Henry & June
. Serena looked up and smiled. She reached across Leanne’s thigh and plucked a strawberry from the bowl in the middle of the coffee table.

“We were worried about you,” she lied.

I smiled back and looked at her straight on. “No need. Here I am.”

“Are you okay?” she asked, her brow making a small fold of concern as she nibbled on the edge of the strawberry. Serena barely ate. Under her syrupy fakeness I saw in the corners of her eyes right then something that wasn’t cruelty. It was hunger. Hunger I could relate to. It made me miss a beat. But I recovered quickly. I wasn’t going to tip my cards first just because we were both starving.

“How’s the movie?”

“I’m a big Henry Miller fan.”

“Really. What’s your favorite book of his?”

“
Henry and June
. This movie is based on it.”

“I’ll have to read that. Maybe you can lend it to me.”

I decided that Serena pretending she’d read a non-existent Henry Miller book actually made her worthy of compassion. The thought put a smug little spring in my step as I crossed in front of her on my way to my room. I resolved not to let anything she said bother me ever again. While I was turning the doorknob, she said to my back, “Don’t worry. He probably won’t call again. He usually doesn’t.”

My resolve had lasted exactly thirteen seconds.

 

That night I curled my hair and pressed my last dress, an emerald-colored vintage number from the fifties with a sweetheart neckline and a bell skirt. It was the kind of dress that made me wish my shoes matched my bag and that I was going out with someone who knew how to jitterbug.

On the nightstand next to my side of the bed was a photograph of my grandmother as a young woman, all dressed up to go out and wearing almost the same dress. On her hands are white gloves with a pearl button at the wrist. Before she married and settled down in Newark, my grandmother traveled the world. She studied with the famous psychologist Alfred Adler in Vienna while renting a room in a fairy-tale flat from a bankrupt countess. She, too, had been a restless soul. If she were alive, I could have told her the truth about Brunei.

Behind me Destiny slipped her brown feet, tanned to the color and texture of a baseball mitt, into her Lucite platforms. Her nightstand also held a single framed photo. It was a picture of her daughter, sun-kissed and smiling in front of a backdrop of ocean.

The pictures we carry, the frames we gladly add to the weight of our luggage, are of the people we trust to love us no matter what.

That night at the party Yoya and Lili did a rousing karaoke version of “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” They had obviously been rehearsing, because they had a few little choreographed dance moves, most notably a shoulder shimmy to the part about being barely seventeen and barely dressed, a genius lyric, made more poignant by the fact that it was actually true for most of us in the room.

I thought what I always think when I hear that song: There are lots of songs about being seventeen. A long-haired man, wiry and handsome and looking like some kind of Cuban revolutionary, pointed this out to me once, after he found me separated from my friends, confused and tripping my face off at a Grateful Dead show when I was actually fourteen. But it’s never a good idea to say you’re fourteen. So I said seventeen. Then I told him I was lost.

“Lots of songs about seventeen,” he said. “You’re not lost; you’re just misplaced.”

I followed that guy back into the city, to his artist loft on Fourteenth Street. He smelled like turpentine and body odor and he had multicolored brushstrokes across the right thigh of his jeans. I had sex with him or, more specifically, he had sex with me—my first time—while I watched cartoon hallucinations dance in the darkness behind his head. I guessed that it was worth it not to be left alone in the middle of the night somewhere out on Long Island. In the morning, I stole thirty dollars out of his pants to get home. I walked with my shoes in my hands down the five flights of stairs, so as not to wake him, then put them on and ran the two blocks to the subway station.

I told my parents I had spent the night at my friend Julie’s. Later, when I told Julie the story, I remember we laughed and laughed when I got to the “lots of songs about seventeen” part.

 

I sat up straight and acted giggly as the servants refilled our bottomless glasses of champagne. My back was facing the door, but I felt Robin walk in behind me and my body reflexively responded as if I’d just tossed back three shots of espresso. I nervously smoothed my skirt; I brushed aside a curl that kept falling over my eye. A few minutes later, when Robin drifted into my sight line, he gave me a brief hello while looking over my head. Then he didn’t speak to me for the rest of the evening. He pulled Leanne out of her chair and had an involved conversation with her at the bar before taking his usual seat next to Fiona.

Leanne sat back down next to Serena and they acted particularly animated and interested in me. Nausea pushed up against my throat and I shoved it back down. I wanted to crawl over the table, grab Serena by her fucking French twist, and bring her pert little face down onto the glass tabletop. Instead I joined the conversation about astrological compatibility.

Robin, Leanne informed us, was a Scorpio, hence the charisma, the confidence, the power, the rampant sex drive.

Serena was a Taurus, Leanne a Pisces. Destiny told them she was a Christian, that’s all, and they could shove it.

“Scorpio is a water sign,” said Leanne. “Like Pisces. So Robin and I flow together but it’s often way too emotional. For both of us.”

I had a hard time imagining Robin getting too emotional.

“What sign are you?” she asked me.

“I’m a Leo.”

“Fire,” she responded, followed by a pause of quiet triumph.

 

Every evening Robin would disappear from the party for about a half hour sometime around midnight. While he was gone, we would look around and try to determine which girl was also missing. That night, Leanne’s chair sat empty directly across from me. I drained my champagne glass faster than usual. I might have wound up truly plastered—ugly plastered—had Robin not left early with Fiona on his arm and cut the night short.

I chided myself for the stab I felt. When I went to the bathroom to retouch my lipstick, I recognized the tight smile on my face as the same one I had seen on Serena and Leanne. The girls at the other tables, the Asian girls, didn’t seem to care too much where Robin was or whom he was with. Of course, Leanne and Fiona were Asian, too, but they had escaped exile to the lower-ranked seating areas based on celebrity status and the ability to speak perfect English.

If Robin was still absent when the disco started, we top-rung-ers often sat in snits with our arms crossed over our chests while the rest of the tables got up and danced anyway. The lucky ones slow-danced at the end of the night like it was a prom, resting their heads on their boyfriends’ shoulders. We Western girls weren’t required to have boyfriends in the Prince’s entourage. Instead, we competed with each other for the Prince.

Another night passed the same way. I didn’t bother to pretend to smile while I watched the heels of his sneakers as he climbed the long staircase to the exit.

 

One morning, Serena woke us early and told us she had received special permission (from whom was a mystery) for us to go to the Yaohan. She had fistfuls of Bruneian money to hand out. It was the first time I’d seen any money since we’d entered the country. I had been living for nearly two weeks free of commerce. Well, sort of.

I looked at the money she doled out like a Monopoly dealer, and there he was again: the Sultan, bearded and looking dignified, floating on the orange, green, and blue notes.

“What’s the exchange rate?”

“I don’t know. Who cares? We have plenty. Cover your hair. You’re not blond so it’s not as big a deal, but cover it anyway.”

We piled into a waiting Mercedes and Serena sat up front chatting with the driver. She had penetrated this world and I hadn’t. In three days I would go home and would have seen little, understood even less, and been sampled and passed over like the orange cream in a box of assorted chocolates. What was it about me? Why did I always come so close to getting what I wanted, only to get shut out at the last minute? Usually I took it upon myself to quit before I got rejected, but this time I didn’t really have the option.

When faced with such despair, a girl can always shop. We hit the Yaohan with travel goggles on, the kind that make every little thing look irresistible because it’s exotic and the money makes no sense and you feel like you’re in a video game with tinny Asian pop songs and smiling wide-faced shop girls who speak to you in rhymes and giggle at your strangeness. In this video game you gain strength by acquiring snacks and T-shirts and little stuffed animals and sweet-smelling soaps and brightly colored lip gloss.

The women in Brunei, I noticed, did not generally cover their hair, as was the custom in some other Muslim countries, though they did dress modestly. They were miles away from the striking, stylish women I had spied during my brief stay in Singapore.

Leanne and I paired off, all rivalries from the night before discarded as she led me to the Shu Uemura makeup counter. The counter girls pantomimed lessons and suggestions for us. Leanne sat me down on a stool and charitably showed me how to do my eye makeup so I didn’t constantly look like I was auditioning for
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
.

“Beautiful skin,” Leanne said, blending some blush into the apples of my cheeks. “Like Snow White. Where are you from?”

“New Jersey.”

“No, I mean, what are you?”

That question always seemed weird to me. What are you? Are you a good witch or a bad witch? I’m just Dorothy Gail from Kansas.

“Russian. Polish.”

“I thought something else.”

“I was adopted,” I said.

She paused in her ministrations and looked at me with something like interest mixed with something like sympathy.

“Do you know your real parents?”

“My adoptive parents are my real parents.”

It’s the kind of question you’re trained to answer as an adoptee, a question you hear a million times. You hear it so often you don’t even hear it anymore.

“Still,” she said.

I let the conversation drop. I wasn’t about to get into it with her. In order to get beyond my stance of defending my family, I needed to be talking to someone who could digest a little more complexity. But the truth was, she was right. The truth was, I wondered. My family was my family, but still. Still I wondered if somewhere in my DNA I would find an explanation for my restlessness, if somewhere in my biology lay the arrow pointing me in the direction I was meant to go.

Leanne turned me toward the mirror, and my makeup was subtle and lovely. I bought it all. It was the first makeup I had ever owned that hadn’t come from a Rite Aid and the first grooming tips I had received that hadn’t come from a drag queen or a stripper. Leanne and I each walked away with a hefty bag full of paints and potions. I was coming up in the world—quite a lady, with my eyeshadow palette and my mystery money. I also bought some diet tea and a new pair of sweatpants and promised myself that I’d work out the next morning. I planned yet again in my life to force myself into a thinner and more desirable body. Fuck biology. I could construct myself in whatever image I wanted. That was the freedom of not knowing the origin of your eye color. Audrey Hepburn, move over. Even if this Prince Charming had tossed me aside, there would be another and the next one wouldn’t. I would make sure of it.