Some Girls: My Life in a Harem

by Jillian Lauren

  When I explained the situation to Sean, I got my first indication that my departure wasn’t going to be as seamless as I had anticipated. There were going to be casualties. Previously, I had simply let Sean assume I was still dancing at the club, but the deception made me feel like shit. When I took the job in Brunei, I knew I had to come clean.

  “I’m putting my foot down here,” Sean said calmly. “You cannot do this.”

  We were standing in his narrow kitchen, with the yellowed paint peeling off the walls and the chrome legs rusting out from beneath the kitchen table.

  “Are you going to give me twenty thousand dollars?”

  “Not everything is about money. You make enough money at the club.”

  The fact that he was right made me angrier, made me fight harder. The fact that I had lied to him about working at the club made me feel guilty and that made me fight harder still. Plus, I kind of did believe that my work “relationships” and my relationship with Sean were unrelated. They were light years away in my emotional landscape. I thought that he should understand and, furthermore, that he should agree.

  “I just want this money so I don’t have to worry about money for a while.”

  “That’s not how money works. More money gives you more to worry about, not less.”

  “This is a job, okay?” I explained deliberately, as if he had been struck stupid. “This has nothing at all to do with us.”

  Sean seemed to grow taller and broaden by a foot.

  “Do you know that you’re fucking insane?”

  “I am not insane. You’re a bourgeois, controlling asshole.”

  He looked like he wanted to hit me. I recognized the look; I had seen it in my father a thousand times. The difference was that Sean would never actually do it. My upbringing had led me to believe that this meant he didn’t love me enough. I had no such hesitation and I threw a plate at his head to prove it. He ducked and it hit the wall behind him, shattering. I immediately felt like an idiot. It’s so humiliating to clean up the shards of the dishware you’ve pitched across the kitchen. He looked around and sighed and I could tell he agreed with me; I should be ashamed of myself. He asked me to go.

  I didn’t understand why he insisted on standing between me and what I wanted. It was just an adventure, a stack of cash, a foreign prince. Couldn’t we give each other a little freedom? Meanwhile, I was the one who had gone through his letters, listened to his answering machine, excavated his apartment looking for relics of old girlfriends. I suppose I knew my stance was hypocritical, but I stood by it anyway. Because in the end I was going to do what I wanted to do. No one was stopping me from getting on that plane.

  I paused on the landing in the stairwell. Up a flight stood Sean in his doorway; down a flight was the door to Rivington Street. I really did love Sean. I just did it poorly.

  “Don’t leave me,” I said.

  “I’m not leaving. You are.”

  chapter 7

  I spent my last thirty dollars on a cab from Beth Israel to Kennedy Airport. The international terminal was an erector set of beams and soaring ceilings that transformed me from a throbbing vein of guilt into an anonymous traveler adrift in the midday light. Walk through the doors of Kennedy and you’re swept into a liminal state, not exactly here anymore but not there yet either.

  I spotted my fellow traveler Destiny from behind as she waited on a long check-in queue. Her teased hair aspired to brush the skylights and she wore a spandex tube dress that shifted from neon pink to neon orange, like a tropical sunset. The top of the dress smooshed her boobs into one amorphous form. My mother says tops like that make your bust look like a loaf of challah. Destiny’s loaf of challah would have fed a developing country. I gave her a quick hug and noted that she reeked of Aqua Net and Amarige. I was traveling with a superstripper. So much for anonymity, for mystery and the fluid identity that travel allows.

  The plan was for Destiny and me to fly to L.A., where we would spend the night and then hook up the next day with Ari and a girl we hadn’t met yet, named Serena. We’d travel on to Singapore, where we’d stay another night before a short flight the next day to Bandar Seri Begawan, the capital of Brunei. I dreaded the many hours that stretched out in front of me with Destiny as my traveling companion. What would we talk about? The surprising practicality of Lucite platforms?

  As we walked to our gate, every eye looked up from its newspaper and stared at Destiny. The corridor became a catwalk. That quickly, my attitude toward Destiny shifted from repulsion to loyalty. I trained my eyes straight ahead. I was used to being stared at: I had been a teenager with fuchsia hair at a preppy private school, a club-goer dressed as Marie Antoinette on a Tuesday night in July, a drinking companion to drag queens on the stoops of the Lower East Side. Stares made me feel defiant, made me affect a greater degree of self-confidence than I truthfully possessed.

  What would Patti Smith do when facing three days of international travel with a walking porno movie? She would straighten her spine and stare right back at the gawkers with a look that said, I see you. I see you, too, motherfucker.

  While we taxied down the runway, I learned that Destiny made all her own clothes, did her own acrylics, enjoyed power-lifting, had posed for Hustler, loved Jesus, and was a collage artist. I relaxed some about the next few days. They might prove more interesting than I had anticipated. I also learned that Destiny had left her five-year-old daughter at home with her mother. I didn’t think less of her for leaving her kid. You do what you have to do, right? Sometimes you have a daughter who gets left behind.

  She put a little blue pill on her tongue and got teary as she flipped through wallet picture after wallet picture of her little girl while the jet engines revved beneath us. I couldn’t summon a tear for anyone I was leaving behind, not even Sean. That, I imagined, was freedom.

  Destiny and I awoke the next morning and ate breakfast on the balcony of our airport hotel. With only a couple of hours to spare before heading back to LAX, we decided to go to Venice Beach. Seduced by images from Baywatch, we wanted to dip our toes in the Pacific, wanted to see bikini-clad beach bunnies diving for volleyballs, wanted to be Surfin’ USA for the day. We weren’t disappointed. The wind kicked off the water and blew the sky clean, turning it the kind of blue that painters use to represent heaven. On a good day, the light in L.A. can make your heart hopeful; it can make even the grungy boardwalk look like a perfectly lit movie set. We squinted and shopped for sunglasses that shone on their racks like hard candy.

  In my memories of my first time in Venice, there are cameos by characters I see today when I stroll the boardwalk. I’m almost positive that the tall man with the electric-guitar-and-amp rig whizzed by us on his roller skates playing “Purple Haze.” But I can’t be sure. I do know that the woman with the faux Gypsy getup and the cardboard sign offering psychic readings was there, because I remember she called out to me, “You’re pregnant. It’s a girl. You’ll want to hear the rest.”

  I ignored her. I’m not above card readings from waterfront charlatans, but I thought it was a mean trick to try to lure women with what was often either their dearest wish or their greatest fear. I wasn’t interested in a phantom pregnancy. Now, if she had said, “You’re going to travel to exotic lands,” or, “You’re going to meet a handsome prince and fall madly in love,” I’d have hit Destiny up for five dollars to hear more.

  I helped Destiny pick out postcards and T-shirts for her daughter. We ate at a boardwalk café connected to a little bookstore and then played on the swings in the sand. I have a picture of me dressed in black jeans and big, dark glasses, laughing hysterically as I begin to swing backward, my hair flying in the wind. Destiny caught the exact moment that my forward momentum stopped and gravity pulled me back down.

  That evening Ari met us at the airport with a freshly scrubbed face and a monogrammed tote bag. California was not New York, I decided. In the New York sex industry, I had encountered neurotic, carefully coiffed, mercenary people in positions o
f authority. That or Hells Angels. Serena stood by Ari’s side at the ticket counter. She was a platinum blonde, porcelain-skinned, poor-man’s Marilyn with mean blue eyes. She had the kind of upturned nose that grandmother would have said could catch raindrops. I immediately didn’t trust her.

  Ari, I learned as we waited, hadn’t started out as a procuress. She was a nice girl from Northern California, a rich girl, a girl with a close family who imported French wines and sold them to most of the upscale restaurants in the Bay Area. She had begun working for the royal family of Brunei as a property manager and personal assistant, whose duties included looking after one of their many palatial Bel Air estates and regularly traveling back and forth between the two countries to meet with the Prince.

  On one of Ari’s trips, the Prince casually suggested she bring a friend with her next time, preferably one who looked like Marilyn Monroe. I guess he thought that Marilyn Monroes were walking around all over the place in Los Angeles—surely everyone knew one. No one ever said no to the Prince, so Ari had scoured the city until she found Serena, a Marilyn look-alike with dreams of stardom, grudgingly working a retail job at the Beverly Center. The next time Ari returned to Brunei, she had Serena in tow.

  So these were the women with whom I was traveling halfway around the world: a Jesus-loving Hustler centerfold, an evil shadow Marilyn, and a summer-camp counselor gone wrong. This was Serena’s third trip to Brunei, but she wasn’t exactly bubbling over with helpful hints. Even after a half hour of plying her with chardonnay at the airport bar, I was no wiser about what lay ahead of me. She enjoyed her seniority, blowing us off with a little wave over her shoulder as she passed through the first-class doorway with Ari while Destiny and I stayed in business class.

  We stretched often, complained even more often, sucked down champagne, and requested extra cookies from the pretty flight attendants in long, dragon-pattern skirts. We watched Beauty and the Beast and eventually sort of slept. Business class was kind of like a flying hotel, but even a flying hotel wears on you after a while. I imagined my mother and my aunt at that moment, probably perched on plastic chairs at my father’s bedside. Then I shoved the thought aside. No point in worrying about something I had no control over. No point in rehashing a decision I’d already made. We changed planes in Tokyo and did it all over again, for a total of about eighteen hours. Thus began my hard lesson of parking it and chilling—not easy for such a restless girl. If I had learned the lesson better, I’d have become a lot richer.

  I rubbed my eyes and leaned my forehead against the window, watching the miles and miles of stormy blue slip by underneath us. By the time Singapore’s narrow hem of coastal beach appeared, I was so exhausted that I was seeing halos around all the lights and starbursts every time I blinked. My tongue and my brain had both grown a coat of fur. I was grateful to have our den mother, Ari, to take charge and herd us through customs and into the cabs to the hotel. On the ride, Serena let it slip that the royal family actually owned the hotel and that the sixty-third floor, where we would be staying, was always reserved strictly for their guests.

  The Westin Stamford Singapore is the tallest hotel in the world, a cylinder rising seventy-three floors above the harbor. When we got there, I didn’t have the energy to explore even the rest of the hotel, much less the streets of the city. I ordered satay from room service and passed out with the lights still on. When I opened my eyes eight hours later, jet-lagged and wide awake, it was just before dawn. I got out of bed, hugging my own naked ribs, and pulled the heavy drapes to reveal a navy sky shifting to cobalt. One or two stars still shone out beyond the balcony. I walked out into the warm, soft air and watched the fishing skiffs glide out of the harbor. I was alone, exactly halfway around the world from where I had started, and I had an ocean of unknown possibilities in front of me.

  I was sure that this was how I had been waiting to feel.

  chapter 8

  Two serious men dressed in matching white shirts, ties, and sunglasses greeted Ari, Serena, Destiny, and me at the airport in Bandar Seri Begawan. I thought it was funny how much they looked like secret-service agents. I was thrilled that they had received the memo about me starring in my own personal spy movie. In retrospect I realize, of course, that they were secret-service agents. It took me a while to catch on to the fact that I was the clandestine guest of the leaders of a foreign government—an extremely wealthy and therefore influential foreign government. There was a whole apparatus at work that facilitated our trips to Brunei, but we never saw the man behind the curtain. In Brunei, there were elaborate ciphers in the clothes people wore, the food they ate, their gestures, but it was a language I didn’t speak.

  A triad of huge photographs hung on the wall of the Bandar Seri Begawan airport. The same images decorated the walls of every restaurant, business, bank, and beauty shop in the country. The center picture was of Hassanal Bolkiah Mu’izzaddin Waddaulah, the Sultan of Brunei, a man I would come to know as Martin. In the photo, the Sultan wears a white military jacket laden with medals, a round hat, and a gold sash across his chest. Slightly lower and to either side of the Sultan hung pictures of his two wives: his formidable first wife, Saleha, and his scandalous second wife, Miriam, a former Royal Brunei Airlines flight attendant. The wives wear beauty-pageant makeup, elaborately beaded gowns, and enormous diamond tiaras.

  Looking up at the pictures while we waited by the luggage carousel, I imagined children playing at being kings and queens: Two little girls fight over who gets to be the queen and someone’s mother settles it by telling them there can be two queens. The mother cuts two crowns out of yellow construction paper to prove her point. The little girls are happy for a minute with their saw-toothed headgear, but somewhere they know that it’s not the same as being the only queen. They learn that sometimes you take what you can get.

  The airport doors opened and the Southeast Asian humidity hit us like a wall. It soaked into my skin immediately, slowing me down. It soaked into my suitcase, making it feel ten times heavier. An irregularity in the pavement caught the toe of my shoe and I tripped, my suitcase falling to the ground and my arms pinwheeling like in a comedy gag. Like the Powerful Katrinka. I caught myself before I went for a tumble. Everyone in our little party turned to look and I did a little dance move.

  “I meant to do that.”

  I try so hard to be graceful, but I’ve always been the girl with the bruised knees and the Band-Aids on her elbows. The stripper who wanted to be a ballerina. The circus clown who wanted to be an aerialist. Indeed, sometimes you take what you can get.

  We piled into two black Mercedes with windows tinted nearly opaque and traveled the perimeter of the city before plunging into what seemed like a jungle. Brunei was green—sticky, overgrown, ancient green. Through openings in the trees I caught glimpses of a mishmash of modern office buildings, nondescript homes, and domed mosques.

  As we drove along the water, I recognized the Kampung marsh villages from my research at the library. The villages comprised tilting shacks perched on stilts above murky marsh water. The shacks looked like they could slide off their precarious foundations at any moment. The plank walkways between them seemed no more secure to stand on than the lily pads beneath them.

  “The Sultan offered the marsh people houses, but they chose to stay where they were,” said Serena, wrinkling her nose. “It’s filthy out there. They don’t even have plumbing.”

  This reminded me of a story I had heard once about the nomadic tribes in Persia. In the seventies, the Shah, obsessed with modernization and Western culture, forced the nomads to abandon their customary migrations and settle down in houses. The nomads put their goats and camels in the houses and slept in tents in their backyards. When the Shah was deposed during the revolution, the nomads picked up and resumed their former life; they were that sure of who they were. Their abandoned houses still stand on the Iranian hillsides.

  As we drove, I caught only little slices of the sights through the trees and I wanted to see more. I
asked Ari when we’d have time to do some sightseeing.

  “You won’t.”

  “You can sometimes go to the Yaohan if you request it in advance,” said Serena. The Yaohan was the mall. “But you have to wear a baseball cap and long sleeves and people will still stare at you. I got flashed by a pervert once in the parking lot.”

  Serena was freer now that we were in Brunei. She had slid into a comfortable skin. She was the girl who knew more than we did, the tour guide. But I detected something else. She ran the nail of her middle finger back and forth on the pad of her thumb, a nervous tic. As she rattled off her knowledge about the country, I sensed it growing; Serena was definitely anxious about something.

  In about twenty minutes we reached a compound that appeared to be the size of a small city. High, off-white stucco walls surrounded the place, and above it we could see only treetops and a large blue dome in the distance. We pulled up next to a guardhouse, where a soldier stood wearing the kind of cap that an old-fashioned soda jerk would wear. I knew from a former Marine who liked to come into the Baby Doll and tell me his war stories that Marines call those caps piss-cutters. I had a mental file cabinet a mile deep where I kept those sorts of details.

  The soldier opened the gate and as it rolled back it revealed a compound that looked something like a resort in Fort Lauderdale as envisioned by Aladdin. Eight four-bedroom guesthouses were arranged in a semicircle facing a palace on a hill. A road wound around the property, and we followed it to one of the houses, where five smiling Thai housekeepers in pink uniforms waved at us from the porch and rushed to the cars when we stopped, pulling our bags from the trunk while chirping, “Hello. How are you. Hello. How are you.” They didn’t wait for our replies.