Some Girls: My Life in a Harem

by Jillian Lauren

  “I’m Fiona. Welcome to Brunei.”

  Serena rose and kissed her on both cheeks. They looked thrilled to see each other, greeting each other like old sorority sisters and catching each other up on the latest gossip.

  After Fiona left, Serena said, “I see she still hasn’t shaved her mustache.”

  Fiona was Serena’s archenemy and soon to be my closest ally.

  Within half an hour I regretted my outfit choice. I had worn my little black suit and I felt stiff compared with Serena in her flirty, swingy dress and her Grace Kelly French twist. I shifted uncomfortably and braced my thigh muscles so that I wouldn’t start to slide off the slippery upholstery.

  Abruptly, the karaoke music stopped and the lights dimmed as the DJ changed hats and arranged himself in front of a keyboard. The languid couch decorations turned from slouching question marks into exclamation points. They prettily crossed their legs as a woman took her place beside the keyboard player. She began to sing Lisa Stansfield’s “All Around the World.”

  I felt him coming before he entered the room. Prince Jefri walked in that night wearing shorts and a shiny Sergio Tacchini sweat jacket. He carried a squash racket, as if he’d just walked off the court. When he appeared, all the girls lit up with purpose. The pictures hadn’t lied. In person he was handsome, in spite of his outdated, feathered porno hair and thin mustache. A wave of charisma swept the room in front of him. You could almost see it, like heat radiating off asphalt on a summer day. Behind him walked ten or so identically attired men. The whole entourage stopped when he paused to take a quick glance around.

  His eyes rested on us, specifically on Serena. He made an expression of phony surprise and then strolled over to give both Serena and Ari a brief kiss on the cheek. Up close, the Prince appeared tightly wound, toned muscles curving around the bone, taut skin holding it all together. He smelled like too much expensive cologne. He half-sat on the arm of Ari’s chair. What was it about Ari that seemed so out of place? Plain wasn’t quite the word to describe her. She was like a real strawberry in a roomful of strawberry Pop-Tarts.

  When Ari introduced us to Robin he welcomed us with a practiced smile, then ignored us and turned to Serena. She became a study in coy gestures and sexy glances—chin down, eyes turned up toward him, little giggles and tosses of the head, slight rearranging of the skirt, delicate hand signals. I was cooked. I was many things, but, alas, never delicate.

  As they talked, the Prince watched Serena with what seemed like fascination until something across the room caught his eye. I watched his gaze shift as his attention wavered. In that flicker of disinterest, I saw my window open. He nodded a few more times and gave her leg a familial pat before walking away.

  After the Prince moved on to the next table, Eddie, the Prince’s sycophantic right-hand man, seemed to tele-port into the seat next to me. Eddie was sneaky like that; you never saw him coming. He was too accommodating for comfort, inquiring after our needs with bulging eyes that looked like they might pop right out of his head and land on Destiny’s boob-shelf. Were we meant to “entertain” the Prince’s friends? Was that the meaning of “entertainers”? I’m not sure why this was such a disappointment. I certainly wasn’t this discerning when it came to Crown Club clients. Were they clean? Did they have money? Were they relatively sane or at least not homicidal? These were the criteria. But somewhere along the journey, in my mind I had become mistress to a prince.

  But Eddie left pretty quickly. Two more men, named Dan and Winston, came over and said hello. They appeared to be friendly with Serena and Ari and they didn’t give me the creeps like Eddie did but they, too, soon moved on.

  There were three talented singers who changed off every few songs and sang a schlocky medley of Malay and American pop songs. The American songs were the kind played in grocery stores, the kind that can make you cry if you happen to be shopping for Cap’n Crunch and tampons at two a.m. on a lonely night.

  By the end of the night I had to pinch the sides of my thighs to force my eyelids to stay open. I felt like I was in a math class in an overheated schoolroom, snapping a rubber band on my wrist so I wouldn’t fall asleep. The Prince ended up seated in a chair by the wall next to Fiona. On the other side of him was an empty chair, and though plenty of people stooped to talk to him, no one sat down in it. The rest of the men socialized and drank with the Asian girls. A few of the men laid their arm across a girl’s shoulder or held her hand. Other than the short visits at the beginning of the party, everyone ignored us. I wondered if I was supposed to be doing something more than sitting in a chair drinking champagne, but I was too tired to ask.

  At some outrageously late hour, the lights dimmed even more and a dance hit from about two years before blasted from the speakers. The dance floor filled with girls immediately, while the men sat and watched. I had grown stiff with sitting and I felt like a barnacle on the chair, so when Destiny took my hand and led me to the dance floor, I didn’t protest.

  The only route to the dance floor was a narrow path that crossed right in front of the Prince’s chair. All night I’d watched the bows of the women who passed in front of him. This was my chance to practice. I emulated the others, walking with a little shuffle and bending at the waist, with my head bowed. It made me want to giggle. I almost expected him to break out with a Yul Brynner- esque “’Tis a puzzlement!” Instead, he ignored us. But I felt his gaze hot on me as I passed him, and I flushed. Was it the act of bowing itself that had made me suddenly shy?

  Destiny kept her back defiantly straight and yanked me along.

  “I’m a fucking American,” she said when we were out of Robin’s earshot. “Sorry, I don’t bow.”

  When we hit the dance floor Destiny went nuts, which delighted the dancing girls and watching men alike. Across the sea of women, I could see through to where the Prince was watching, his head inclined toward Fiona as she whispered in his ear. All the eyes in the room were on Destiny except for Robin’s. Robin was decidedly looking at me. I got the electrical surge that comes from being noticed, from being watched, the kind that makes your bulb glow a little brighter. The truly beautiful people of the world must live their lives buzzing with it. I looked away, but my feet were surer on the floor, my hips synced perfectly with the bass line.

  After an hour of the disco, Robin stood. All the men preternaturally sensed this and darted up a millisecond later. He shook hands with a couple of them as he left the room with Eddie in tow. As soon as he was up the stairs and out of sight, the music shut off and the lights came up. All the party guests gathered in a group near the door, where Madge stood facing them, her hand on her walkie as if she was a gunslinger and it was her revolver. A few minutes later, a crackling, unintelligible voice came from her hip and she pulled the walkie off her belt and thanked whomever it was before standing aside. Everyone walked out looking tired. Even the men were like strippers matter-of-factly cashing out for the night, different people entirely than they had been a half hour before.

  “What were we waiting for?” I asked Ari as we headed toward the golf carts.

  “We wait until he’s left the building, in case he changes his mind and wants to come back.”

  He never once came back. He just liked to know the party was always waiting.

  chapter 10

  The Prince was charming, dynamic, enigmatic, a polo player, a playboy, the minister of finance. The Prince was totally ignoring me. By the end of the first week, I was still on the fringes of the Brunei party microcosm. Serena was part of the inner circle in a way I didn’t completely understand. Destiny was in a different tribe altogether and didn’t give a shit. Ari was like one of those really great retail bosses who are fun and chummy, but are still management through and through and don’t give any of the boss’s secrets away.

  I was nearly halfway through my time there and, contrary to my big plans, I hadn’t gotten much of a tan, hadn’t picked up a racket, hadn’t fallen in love with a prince, and hadn’t lost a pound. Time in Brunei
was slippery. As soon as you tried to get a foothold in a day it was already gone. Some days I read for hours. When I did my nails, I felt a huge sense of accomplishment. The boxed set of French-language tapes I had brought along sat unopened on the shelf. Ari had helped me put a call through to my parents late one night so I could check on my father’s health, which was steadily improving, though not so much that it didn’t warrant a heavy dose of guilt. My father sounded like himself again, but slightly deflated. My mother’s voice was worn. I kept it short, saying that I was needed on the set. You know—the set of the movie I was shooting in Singapore.

  On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, the party lasted until four-thirty a.m. On the rest of the days it ended at three-thirty. We didn’t get to bed until at least five in the morning, and the blackout drapes made it easy to sleep until one or two. Bleary, hungover, starving, we’d stumble to the kitchen in our robes, wolf down the lunch that was waiting for us in big tins lined up along the counters, then flop down in front of a laser disc in the upstairs den. Sometimes we’d go to the gym on the property or hang out by the pool to catch the last of the late-afternoon sun. Then we’d eat dinner and it would be time to get ready for the party again.

  I was disappointed in Brunei and in myself. I hadn’t made any kind of a splash at the party and the nights were melting away in a haze of small talk and champagne. The only good thing about my long nights of being passed over is that they gave me an opportunity to observe the subtle machinations that drove the social interactions around me. The parties were a petri dish, ideal conditions to breed fierce intimacies and fiercer resentments.

  I had figured out that the tables were arranged by country: Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia. There was a hierarchy of importance. I couldn’t figure out the order exactly, but I knew the Filipino girls were on top and the Thai girls were on the bottom. The Filipino girls got their status from Fiona, who was the Prince’s favorite girlfriend and the only one who sat next to him. Other girls in the room also counted themselves in the Prince’s or one of his cronies’ favor, and their rankings shifted from time to time, causing enmities and alliances to spring up within the various camps.

  For instance, Winston had once had a girlfriend in the Indonesian camp, but he had given her the shaft in favor of a girl named Tootie, who made her home in what I called Little Thailand. So now the Thai girls and the Indonesian girls were practically in a gang war, which, of course, looked like nothing from the outside. Girls at war opt for a quieter cruelty than fistfights and drive-by shootings. Girls circumvent the corporeal and go straight for each other’s souls. The bleeding is harder to stanch.

  I knew, for instance, that the Thai girls enlisted the Thai servants to doctor the Indonesian girls’ drinks. Some nights the drinks were too strong, some nights too weak. They did it to mess with their minds, so the Indonesian girls would get too drunk and make fools of themselves, so they wouldn’t get drunk enough and would be too sharp, too present. This might shift in a period of a few days and some necessary alliance would make them all best friends again.

  I got my insider information from a beautiful Thai girl named Yoya, with whom I had struck up a friendship. She fell somewhere on the Prince’s list of favorites, though not even she was exactly sure where. Yoya was a curvy confection, with sparkling eyes, a chubby baby face, and a braid as thick as a horsetail that brushed her ass. She was bright and irreverent and eager to use her few words of English. I needed a break from the American girls, who had begun to bore me to the point of homicidal thoughts. Before the men showed up, when Serena had me yawning into my espresso with her improbable, name-droppy tales of Hollywood parties (“So this one time I was at a Halloween party and this guy was there in you know, whaddaya call it . . . in blackface, and he was trying to flirt with me all night long and I was like I recognize that voice I know I recognize that voice and guess who it was? No seriously try to guess. Okay it was Jack Nicholson. So I wasn’t really into him or anything but I gave him my number and he would call once in a while and be like, ‘Hi baby it’s your daddy calling . . .’”), I would drift over to Little Thailand. Yoya’s best friend, Lili, would hop on someone’s lap in order to make a spot on the couch. They huddled up and pieced bizarre stories together for me. Yoya always referred to herself in the third person.

  “Yesterday Yoya going to gym in the naked.”

  “Yes. Yes,” agreed the other girls, leaning in and nodding.

  “You went to work out naked? Ew. Why?”

  “Someone watch somewhere,” she whispered, looking around for dramatic effect. “Robin watch somewhere.”

  I was sure they were pulling my leg.

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “No shitting. Terrible going to gym that way. Stair-master. Terrible.”

  “Oh, Yoya so shy,” teased Lili.

  “Yoya so shy,” Yoya concurred. I couldn’t tell if she was being sincere or sarcastic. Maybe both. Maybe she was truly shy in her heart, but under the present circumstances it was comical to say so.

  I didn’t need Yoya to tell me that the fulcrum of the room was Robin. Everything was a show put on for Robin, an audience of one. The men, even his closest friends, were his paid playfellows as much as the women were. But Robin didn’t seem to have any interest in me, so I turned my thoughts to audiences I imagined would have a greater appreciation for my talents. I drank champagne and studied the crystal prisms of the chandelier while I schemed about my acting career. How would I get the killer audition? How would I meet the right people? How would I make meaningful art? Where was that asshole Sean and did he miss me uncontrollably? Would he take me back when this was all over and done with? What was going on over at the Performing Garage? How was Penny’s show coming along? What would I wear while gracefully accepting my Academy Award even though I thought they were trite and gauche?

  Eddie surprised me out of one such reverie by plunking himself down in the seat next to me and blurting out a question in the typically blunt Bruneian way.

  “You will sing tomorrow night?”

  It wasn’t really a question. If Eddie was asking me to do something it was because he had been told to do so by Robin. I looked over at Robin and saw both him and Fiona nodding at me with encouragement. I decided the two of them were having a little joke, but I was happy to be singled out for anything that proved I wasn’t just a piece of furniture.

  “Of course. I’d love to.”

  Eddie acted overjoyed. People around the parties, even the sensible ones like Madge, always behaved as if every little thing was so life-and-death. It was as if my refusal would have been followed by a summary execution.

  They didn’t know that I was a singer of sorts. I’d grown up singing along with my father’s piano repertoire every night of my life. I’ll bet you a dollar I can sing any show tune you can name. And I can usually put on a show entertaining enough that you won’t even notice I don’t have a particularly good voice.

  When I started out this grand singing career of mine, I was the One. Technically, there were two of us, but only technically. We stood in front of the other performers, making our own row. The rest of the seven-year-olds in group 5A wore top hats and carried canes that had been smeared with Elmer’s glue and rolled in red glitter, but ours had been rolled in gold. Randy Klein and I got the gold hats and canes.

  I suspect we were cast as the Ones simply because we already knew the words. I had the albums from A Chorus Line, Cats, and Grease, and I could sing each score by heart. Every song had an accompanying dance number rehearsed to perfection for an audience of attentive stuffed animals lined up on my bed. Whatever I lacked in talent, I made up for in dedication and enthusiasm. If you asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I responded that I wanted to be the white cat in Cats, the one with the spotlit dance solo at the top of the show.

  As the camp talent show approached, a special period each day was designated for practice. Our counselor sat cross-legged in the corner of the basketball co
urt and rewound a tape in a battered boom box again and again, chewing an enormous wad of Bubblicious while calling out the counts and the steps.

  Canes out. And. Bounce up and down from the knees.

  One. Singular sensation, every little step she takes.

  And turn.

  Dadadadadadada.

  Bounce again.

  I found the dance routine embarrassingly easy. We took a rest every five minutes, during which we drank apple juice from crumpled boxes and scratched our mosquito bites through our tights. I was annoyed with the constant breaks, with the lack of commitment. The other girls were bored and slow, watching the feet in front of them rather than learning the steps. Being the One made me bossy.

  “Don’t forget to smile. Smiling is the most important,” I told the other girls.

  I didn’t care that they rolled their eyes. I didn’t need them to like me. I needed for us to be good. I needed for everyone to love us when the day of the show came. Randy felt the same way. We practiced our side-by-side box step when we were on break. We insisted that we do a kick line for the last bars of the song, just the two of us.

  My plan was for my parents to see me shine and change their minds about allowing me to go to Stagedoor Manor the next year. I wanted to go to the sleepaway theater camp, not the camp with the endless afternoons full of soccer games and lanyard making. Everyone knew that girls from Stagedoor Manor went on to be in the casts of Annie and Really Rosie. The kids in Broadway shows slept late and went to special schools and lived their nights floating between the orchestra and the scaffolding, the scenery and the audience, in that magical kingdom where conflict is resolved by big dance-number finales. That was the kingdom where I wanted citizenship.

  In response to my ardent begging, my father said, “If you want to be an ice skater or a dancer or a gymnast or something special, you have to get up at four in the morning and practice every day before school and you have to have no friends and never do sports or eat ice cream or go to parties or have boyfriends. If you want to be like that blind girl in Ice Castles, you will never go to college and you’ll ruin your feet and your back and your career will be over by the time you’re thirty. It’s okay for a hobby. Don’t get out of hand about it.”