Some Girls: My Life in a Harem

by Jillian Lauren

  Inside, the house itself was like a tacky mini-palace, decked with miles of Italian marble and plush carpets. The windows were smothered with yards of peach drapery and someone had stuffed huge silk flower arrangements into every possible niche. An odd detail caught my eye: There were at least three tissue boxes in every room, each with a decorative gold cover.

  I stood on the back porch and looked out on the property. Across acres and acres of lawn and partially obscured by a hill stood the palace. It was as big as a hotel. Up the road to the left I saw a glittering square of turquoise pool and beyond that some tennis courts. The light was beginning to wane and I realized I was starving. I took my shoes off before I walked across the freshly vacuumed tracks in the peach-colored carpeting and up the stairs to search out my room.

  I found my suitcase stashed in a room, where Destiny was already unpacking. Ari had the master, Serena had a bedroom across the hall, and Destiny and I would be rooming together. I looked around. Our bedroom was a hall of mirrors with one king-size bed in the center of it, a vanity in the corner, and a wall of closets on one side. Destiny was underwhelmed.

  “It looks like a rug dealer lives here.”

  She threw on a sweat jacket and the airbrushed words Queen Bitch bounced off every surface. There wasn’t a spot in the room where each angle of us wasn’t reflected on into infinity.

  “That Serena seems like a snot,” Destiny whispered as she began setting out piles of minuscule garments on the bed.

  “No doubt.”

  When I opened my suitcase my heart sank. Against the backdrop of our lavish bedroom, I was clearly a shabby impostor. I didn’t have two weeks of party clothes. I didn’t really have two days of party clothes. I had never even been to a proper cocktail party. I had brought thrift-store duds, hooker suits, and clubwear and hoped I could accessorize and wing it. As I hung my clothes I felt like I was clinging to the edge of the boat and dragging along in the water while everyone else sipped champagne on the deck. I steeled myself. I knew I would pull it off. I always did.

  We ate at a big, round marble table in the dining room downstairs. Serena wore a robe and had her hair already in curlers, her face dewy with moisturizer. Half ready and dressed in possibility, she looked beautiful. I still wore my travel clothes and felt covered with a film that I couldn’t rinse from my face or my eyes.

  The maids brought us a feast in large aluminum tins. It was twenty times the food we could possibly have eaten. There were delicious, oil-soaked Thai noodles and spicy chicken dishes and fruits and salads and a whole tray of tarts and pastries. The fruit tray smelled like filthy feet. Ari explained to me that the perpetrator was a fruit called durian. She began to fill us in on the protocol. We ordered our food for the next day the night before. Anything we desired would magically materialize and when we were done would just as quickly be taken away.

  “Except papaya. You’ll never see papaya here. Robin hates it,” said Serena, scraping the sauce off a piece of chicken with a spoon.

  “Who’s Robin?”

  Ari explained that with the exception of the devoutly religious Mohammed, each of the royal brothers—the Sultan, Prince Sufri, and Prince Jefri—had informal Western nicknames that we were to use at all times. We were to call Prince Jefri Robin. It sounded pretty, Sherwood Forest-y, almost feminine: Good Sir Robin. And I, his Maid Marian. I was such a dork.

  “I called him Jefri once to tease him,” added Serena.

  “Don’t try it,” said Ari.

  Day tumbled into night tumbled into party time. I could barely change my shoes fast enough to keep up. When we dressed for the party, I chose my best suit because it was sexy and was actually the most expensive item of clothing I owned. I hoped it might inspire some confidence.

  Destiny, Serena, and I waited for Ari in the foyer. As I grew accustomed to it, the house was looking less like a palace and more like a banquet hall. I pictured a gaggle of bridesmaids posed on the staircase. But it was just the three of us, facing each other awkwardly, tallying up each other’s flaws and assets as we waited for Ari’s entrance. I figured that over Destiny and her acrylic claws, I had looks but not wildness. Over Serena and her china-doll eyes, I had smarts but not looks.

  Serena leaned against a column opposite me. She was the blonde and I was the brunette. In the world of musical theater, she would be the soprano and I the alto. I was the one with the big ass who played her lines for laughs. Serena was the slender-waisted ingenue who got the guy in the end. I was Rizzo and she was Sandy. I was Ado Annie and she was what’s-her-name in the surrey. We faced off until, with a subtle shift in posture, she dismissed me as not much of a threat. One thing Sandy always forgets is that Rizzo has the best song in the show.

  The palace was too far to walk, so we drove the golf carts that were parked in our carport. Ari drove with Destiny and I hopped on with Serena, who silently steered through the winding, lit pathways, past the pools and tennis courts and palm trees. The air was humid and thick with the fragrance of tropical flowers. Not an hour out of the shower, I already felt sticky. My head raced with plans. I would make the best of my time here. I would improve my tennis game. I would get a tan. I would lose weight. And maybe I would even make a prince fall in love with me and my whole life would change in dazzling and unexpected ways. I longed for a magic pill to soothe the restlessness that prickled constantly under my skin. I’m not sure what made me think I’d find it in Brunei, but I wouldn’t be the first person who hoped to step off a plane on the other side of the world and discover their true self standing there waiting for them.

  Up close the palace reminded me of a picture I had seen once of Hearst Castle, on the California Coast. There were gold domes, columns, and twin marble staircases that curved like ribbons up to the main entrance.

  “We normally go in the side because it’s less of a hike, but I want you guys to see the entrance hall,” said Ari. “I think you’ll like it.”

  We were breathing hard when we reached the top of the stairs. We entered a cavernous cathedral of a room with a fountain at the center. I felt like I had walked onto the set of some 1930s MGM movie version of Salome. Surely a flock of harem-pants-clad showgirls was about to descend the stairs and launch into a Busby Berkeley dance number.

  “It’s all real,” said Serena.

  “Real what?”

  “Like, the gold in the carpet is real gold. That ruby is a real ruby,” she said, pointing at a ceramic tiger that stood near the fountain. The tiger held in its mouth a round, red stone the size of a tennis ball.

  I spotted what looked like a Picasso directly across from the front door—also real, I assumed. We followed Ari around a corner and there, where a hallway bisected the main foyer, a Degas ballerina sculpture stood on a pedestal, a little girl cast in bronze. She clasped her arms behind her back and pushed her chest out defiantly, her foot thrust in front of her in third position. It looked exactly like the one that I had loved visiting as a child, when my father would take me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on special Sundays to wander the wondrous galleries and then stuff ourselves with hot dogs on the steps. Each visit we chose a different gallery. We sat on a bench in front of a giant Jackson Pollock and looked for charging bulls and blooming irises and skywriters hiding in the paint splatter. We crossed our eyes and tried to reassemble the figures cut to pieces by Picasso. We stood washed in light next to the enormous wall of windows that faces the Temple of Dendur and told stories of time travel. But at the end of the day we always visited my Degas ballerinas, numinous and frozen in time, pinned like butterflies to the wall.

  When she caught me staring at the sculpture, Ari told me that Robin was an avid art collector. He had countless walls to decorate. Robin owned other palaces where he lived, still others where his three wives lived, whole office buildings where he conducted business, and hotels and estates in Singapore, London, and Los Angeles. But Ari informed me that some of his favorite art was right here. We were standing in the palace where he unwound every
night, his sunny pleasure dome.

  “Come on,” she said, with a hint of trepidation. “Let’s go in.”

  We were so close I could have walked up and touched the Degas. In fact, I felt an overwhelming compulsion to do just that. I made a note to try to sneak back and do it sometime later. Like people touch the feet of Jesus on the Pietà and hope for a blessing, I would touch the feet of the dancer and hope for grace.

  chapter 9

  We entered a downstairs room, where beautiful women lounged on every inch of the upholstery. Scattered around the party were little seating areas where low chairs and couches surrounded glass-topped coffee tables with bases in the shape of silver and gold tigers. A tableau of Asian girls decorated each area, themselves looking like tigers draped over the rocks in their cage at the zoo. Shiny hair hung down their backs and they leaned shoulder-to-shoulder, as if propping each other up. They were set against a backdrop of deep blue upholstery, jade green drapes, a dark wood bar, and creamy carpets.

  The women were of different nationalities: Thai, Filipino, Indonesian, Malaysian—maybe forty of them in all. At the far end of the room was a dance floor with a mirrored disco ball throwing lazy coins of light across the scene. Every gaze fixed on us when we walked into the room, except for those of a girl who, eyes closed, was lost in a moment of karaoke abandon. Behind her, a large screen played a video of a man and woman riding a carousel, with cryptic foreign words appearing along the bottom in yellow print.

  A dowdy white woman with a wide forehead and wire glasses saw Ari and crossed from where she stood at the bar to meet us at the doorway. This was Madge, the Brunei equivalent of Julie, the cruise director from The Love Boat. Madge was a British woman who ran the parties, managed the affairs of the household, and made sure that Prince Jefri was happy at all times and that everything was going according to plan. She wore a cell phone, still an exotic sight at that time, clipped to one side of her belt, and a walkie-talkie clipped to the other.

  Ari and Madge greeted each other with a warm hug and exchanged a few loaded pleasantries before Madge showed us to our little domain. We occupied the seats of honor, squarely in front of the door. Destiny and I followed the cues of Ari and Serena as we sank into the deep cushions of the chairs and ordered glasses of champagne from one of the army of servants who were standing by to take our order. Alcohol was illegal in public in Brunei, but it flowed at the Prince’s parties. I sipped self-consciously. I could feel that the conversation in the room was all about us. The other women stared and murmured, their foreign words floating around and mixing with the cheesy synth sounds of Asian pop karaoke music.

  Ari and Madge caught up about London and a bunch of people whose names I didn’t know yet. Then Madge got a call and answered it out in the hall, while Ari took the opportunity to school us about the men we were about to meet, the royals and cabinet ministers and air-force generals and international financiers.

  “The men with the Prince are his closest friends. Don’t talk to them unless they talk to you. Don’t show anyone the soles of your shoes; it’s considered really rude in Muslim countries.”

  While being instructed on the best way to angle my feet in order to be respectful of Muslim customs, I thought with wry amusement of what Rabbi Kaplan would say if he could see me. Stodgy Rabbi Kaplan, the thin-lipped tortoise who had stood by my side while I confidently chanted my clear haftorah. I was that rarest and least cool of things—the girl who took her Bat Mitzvah seriously, the promising student of Hebrew.

  It had been only five years earlier. I was a late bloomer and didn’t even have to wear a bra under my dress. I could still remember the heft of the silver pointer we used to keep our place when reading from the Torah scroll, a treasure hand-lettered on parchment. The goat-skin parchment looked both powdery and oily, like the thinnest pie dough rolled out on the counter. When I stood on the bimah, the scroll seemed to glow in the light from the tall stained-glass window behind me. I wanted to smell the paper, to see if it smelled like an animal or like cooking oil or like silver or like the truth. For some reason, I thought it probably smelled like autumn, like damp leaves on the ground. But I couldn’t say for sure because I was too self-conscious to lean my head down and sniff the Torah in front of the rabbi.

  I believed that God was in that scroll somehow, in the gaps between the words. God lived in the negative space, in the hushed, vaulted hallways of the temple, between my roof and the clouds, between the branches of the trees. I had no question that God existed, because I felt him. God was a palpable presence, a warmth behind me. I talked to God all the time, except when I lay terrified in my bed at night. Because as certain as I was of God the rest of the time, I was equally sure God wasn’t around then. When faced with my nightmares, I had to think quickly and start negotiating with the monsters instead. But those kind of negotiations—deals struck, promises made—dissolve with the sunrise.

  I was twelve, not thirteen, when I was Bat Mitzvahed. The younger age is permitted for girls, particularly those who have their birthday over the summer and want to have their reception during the school year, when everyone is still around. In our town at the time, the popular thing was to have a theme party following your Bar or Bat Mitzvah ceremony—the more outrageous, the better. To celebrate this sacred coming-of-age ritual, this symbolic threshold crossing, classmates of mine had mini-carnivals, costume discos, and black-tie balls. One of the town’s real estate magnates rented out Giants Stadium for his son’s reception, which was attended by actual members of the Giants as well as Giants cheerleaders in uniform. We ate kosher hot dogs in the stadium restaurant while a marching band spelled out GREG, the name of the kid being Bar Mitzvahed, on the field.

  The theme of my party was Broadway shows. Each table was crowned by a festive foam-and-fabric center-piece representing a different show. My table was A Chorus Line. In the foyer of the catering hall was a picture station, where you could get your photo printed on your very own Playbill. To be accurate, it was called a Jill’s Bill—very collectible now, I hear. A guy named RJ stood near the entrance of the catering hall eating fire and juggling. He had been in the original Broadway cast of Barnum , which, at the time, I thought was the coolest thing ever. I might have recognized the ominous portent if I had thought for a minute that performing at suburban Bat Mitzvahs probably didn’t rank highly on RJ’s list of dreams for himself.

  My mother worked so hard to make my Bat Mitzvah all I could possibly have wanted, from my dress with matching purse and shoes (designed by me and featuring lots of fabric roses and pink Swarovski crystals) to the flowers, the balloon arch, the ice-cream-sundae buffet, and the fire-eating circus performer. But with my final bite of cake, I seemed also to swallow a worm of doubt that would make a home in my belly and grow in the coming months. If God had, in fact, scooped me up in his arms and carried me over the threshold that marked the entrance to womanhood, was this a disappointing room to find on the other side? A room filled with a bunch of spoiled preteens, most of whom weren’t even my friends, wearing foam lobsters on their heads and dancing spastically to the B-52s?

  Soon after, I began to question the wisdom of God altogether. It wasn’t the Giants cheerleaders or the foam lobsters. It wasn’t even the Holocaust or the famine in Africa that broke up God and me. It may have had something to do with the archery counselor I met that summer at sleepaway camp and fell in love with, the counselor who agreed with God about the Bat Mitzvah concept: He thought twelve-year-old girls were all grown up. It may have been the fact that when our little romance was exposed and we were dragged into a room to stand before the camp director and every other counselor in the camp, with my parents on the other end of the phone line, no one stepped forward to defend me. Not my father, not anyone.

  Before that experience, I had often felt the kind of alone that comes from the suspicion that you are not only genetically different from those around you, but different in your very soul. I was a princess from another kingdom, abandoned on a doorstep by a mo
ther who couldn’t care for me because she’d been transmuted into a swan by the spell of an evil sorcerer. But after Nathan got fired, I was a different kind of alone. I was alone and ashamed of myself. It wasn’t the fault of a sorcerer that I’d wound up unlovable, by my parents or God or anyone—anyone but a guy nine years my senior. It was no one’s fault but mine.

  It wasn’t an exact cause and effect that led me to stop believing in God; more like an accumulation of evidence. First I stopped talking to God, then I kind of just forgot about him. Then I got to high school and discovered that a lot of people agreed with me about this no-God thing. I was so relieved.

  So there I was in Brunei, not believing in the Jewish God, believing instead in the pernicious influence of all organized religion, and yet suddenly feeling very Jewish indeed.

  “Don’t have your head higher than Robin’s. If you have to cross in front of him while he’s sitting, bow,” continued Ari.

  “Bow like how?”

  “You’ll see.”

  I had a déjà vu from The King and I.

  When I sit, you sit. When I kneel, you kneel. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

  “And watch what you say. When you think they can’t hear you, they can. When you think they can’t see you, they can.”

  What she meant was that there was surveillance everywhere in Brunei, even in the bathrooms; hence all the mirrors. It was a constant source of speculation and paranoia among the girls. Not exactly The King and I after all.

  A bored-looking Filipino woman stood up from a couch across the room and crossed toward us, stopping to exchange a few words here and there with a handful of the women flanking her path. She seemed to be the only woman in the room who breached the invisible barricades that separated one seating area of girls from another. She was a bit older than the average age in the room and appeared almost matronly in a black, high-necked dress and diamond drop earrings. She introduced herself to us with a vague British accent.