Some Girls: My Life in a Harem

by Jillian Lauren

  He was just trying to be merciful, trying to spare me the heartbreak. I was too chubby for ballet; it was a waste of time. I was too uncoordinated for ice skating. I was too mediocre to really sing. “Don’t try and you won’t fail” was his motto. But I had seen Ice Castles and I knew that he had missed the point.

  I knew that when my parents saw me as the One, my strong voice clearly leading all the others, my gold-glitter cane sparkling in the afternoon sun, I would convince them that I was tailor made for a life of singing and dancing, that I would happily ruin my feet. I didn’t care if I had to wake up early. I didn’t even like boys or ice cream that much anyway. They would see me shine and, even to my dad, my destiny would be undeniable.

  On the day of the show, my parents were there, front and center. They snapped pictures and mouthed the words. I was adorable. They were delighted. They showered me with kisses and praise. But when I pushed again, I got the same response about the early mornings and the ice cream. In spite of my stunning debut as the One, I never did make it to Stagedoor Manor and was instead condemned to a purgatory of campouts and color war. But my father did indulge my thespian aspirations up to a point. After all, his hobby corresponded with mine.

  Years later I stood next to his baby grand in the living room, rehearsing my song to audition for the school play.

  “You’re no fantastic singer,” my father said. “So you’ve got to pick your song well and then you’ve got to sell it.”

  A successful stockbroker, he was an expert on selling nothing. Together, we chose “Tits and Ass” from A Chorus Line for that particular audition, perhaps a strange choice for a fourteen-year-old, but it did its job. It didn’t get me the part—that went to my friend Alexis, who actually could sing—but I was the one who got the laughs, who got the attention. I was the one people talked about. So that’s what I learned to do. I still can’t ice-skate worth a damn, but I can sell it. Whatever it is, I can sell it.

  I pulled aside Anthony, the keyboard player.

  “What’s Robin’s favorite song?”

  “Well, he likes a couple of Malay songs. American songs? I don’t know. What can you sing?”

  “I’ll sing a Malay song.”

  “How long do you have?”

  “Tomorrow night.”

  “Too hard. Can’t do it.”

  Angelique, the queen singer and rumored to be the unrequited love interest of Prince Sufri, overheard us and interrupted.

  “Sing ‘Kasih.’ It’s his favorite. You can learn it. I’ll help you.”

  Angelique took a sheet of blank paper out of one of Anthony’s many three-ring binders. She found a pen behind the bar, wiped the counter in front of her, and began to write out the words phonetically. She had the bubbly handwriting of a junior-high girl.

  “It’s a love song. ‘Kasih’ means ‘darling.’”

  Then she went over every word with me, correcting my pronunciation. Anthony handed her a cassette tape and she wrapped it in the lyric sheet.

  “Just sing it simply,” she said. “You can do it.”

  I was touched by Angelique’s encouragement. As she pressed the cassette into my hand, the thought flew through my mind that she’d make a good mother one day.

  When I returned to our seating area, Serena narrowed her eyes at me.

  “You’re singing tomorrow?” she asked. “What are you singing?”

  “‘Kasih.’ ”

  “Oh, God. Did Anthony tell you to sing that? Did he tell you Robin liked it or something? I hate those horrible pop songs. I’m singing tomorrow, too.”

  “What are you singing?”

  “At home, I’m a jazz singer. That’s what I do. I’m singing ‘Fever.’ He loves it when I sing ‘Fever.’ I used to sing it for him all the time.”

  Anthony and I arranged to rehearse the next day at four. That night I lay awake while Destiny slept next to me. Never troubled by insomnia, she would put on her cheetah-print eye mask and be asleep three seconds after she lay down. I envied her.

  How was I going to learn a song in another language by the following night? I should have just picked a sexy little retro number like Serena had. I started out with confidence and wound up with a sour stomach that kept me awake.

  I set my alarm early the next morning and quietly played the song over and over on the downstairs stereo, lying in front of the speakers and stumbling through the lyrics while my housemates slept upstairs. I pretty much kept at it all day until I went up to the main house to meet Anthony. I walked into the deserted palace by the front entrance. Daylight streamed in through the tall windows and flashed off the water in the fountain. The fake flowers, which usually looked real in the strategic evening lighting, showed their seams, their plastic dewdrops.

  A door was open to the left that had been closed the first night I saw the entry hall. It was a ballroom, with a chandelier the size of a small car. A man waxed the floors with a machine. I thought of my grandmother’s favorite joke for party entrances:

  A ball! said the queen. If I had two, I’d be king.

  I made my way through the carpeted corridors and downstairs to the party room. It was spotless and empty, waiting once again to fill with women. I’ve always liked rooms when the party hasn’t started yet. Even more magical are theaters during the day, before the doors open, before the show begins, when the house lights are on and you can see the rafters and the scuffs on the floor. I love the feeling that anything could happen. After the party, when anything already has happened, there’s usually the inevitable fact to face that anything wasn’t all you’d hoped it would be.

  Anthony accompanied me while I sang into the mike and smiled at Robin’s vacant chair as I flattened the melody and fumbled the lyrics again and again. I could see Anthony was dubious.

  “Do you know any other songs?”

  “I can do it.”

  I sang it right once through and then wrong again.

  “Okay, maybe I can’t do it.”

  “Too late.” Anthony looked at his watch. “You’ll be fine. Just make it up if you forget it.”

  “Super. He’ll love that.”

  On my way out I walked up to the ballerina sculpture. I remembered reading somewhere that the girl who had posed for this turned out to be a prostitute, and that prostitution was the fate of many failed dancers in the time of Degas.

  I ran my finger along the edge of her bronze slipper, where it met her foot. If you are rich enough, you can own art like this. You can put it in a corner where no one will ever see it, except a passing girl—half a woman, even—who once wore the same shoes and imagined herself a swan.

  Every time Serena sang the word fever she shot her palms out in front of her and did a little dip with her hip. I was happy to note that she was no jazz singer.

  A new woman had joined us at our table. Her name was Leanne and she was a soap-opera actress from Hong Kong who was half Chinese, half English, and all smoky sex. She had sleepy eyes, loose, wavy hair, and a British accent attached to a voice that was thick with cigarettes—kind of Janis Joplin meets Princess Di. She wore a simple, floor-length Armani gown. It was not her first time in Brunei. Like Serena, she had a mysterious past there, but unlike Serena she was completely open about being in love with the Prince. She admitted as much to me within five seconds of meeting me. She slouched back on the couch, an arm on each armrest, a posture of elegant surrender.

  “I gave up a movie role to come here but he doesn’t know it. I can’t stay away. Last time I left I swore it would be forever but I couldn’t stand the broken heart.”

  There was something real but not real about Leanne. I instinctively believed she loved him but I also knew an actress when I heard one. We actresses write terrible dialogue for ourselves.

  Leanne and Serena seemed close, conspiratorial, joined in common vitriol for Fiona. Earlier in the evening I had overheard them talking about her. Serena said that Fiona had been caught casting some Filipino voodoo spells in her bedroom. It was the only explan
ation: That cow had used witchcraft to ensnare the Prince. Did she get fatter as well as older? How old was she now, anyway? They were frightening, and so familiar—common as dirt, these mean, mean girls. And what was I? The opposite? Nice? No. What was the opposite of mean? Weak?

  Eddie approached me.

  “You will sing next?”

  I had dressed in my best vintage ensemble and decorated my eyes with thick strokes of liquid liner. I imagined myself a slightly chubbier Audrey Hepburn from Funny Face. This was my chance to shine. And even if I blew it, at least I wasn’t doing jazz hands and singing some tired Peggy Lee song.

  When Anthony began the intro, my brain emptied. I forgot everything we had worked on. I was sure I was about to be the star of a living nightmare, the kind in which you wind up on stage with no memory of what you’re supposed to be doing up there. I didn’t panic; I had faith. I know something about performing. I know that when it seems like the avalanche is about to roll over you, you face into it and keep both arms swimming as hard as you can. You smile and you sell it.

  “Kasih dengarlah hatiku berkata/Aku cinta kepada dirimu sayang . . .”

  The Prince flashed an impenetrable smile at me as he tapped a finger on his leg. Next to him, Fiona smiled, too. What was her deal? She didn’t seem to be the dragon lady that Serena and Leanne made her out to be.

  I finished the song and the room broke into a round of applause. My Thai friends even cheered. The smile on Serena’s face was that of the runner-up in the Miss America pageant who had been so sure she was just about to claim the crown. As I passed the Prince and bowed on my way back to my seat, he reached out and grabbed my arm. I stopped and faced him, still bent at the waist, my head inclined.

  He took my hand between both of his, dry and soft and perfectly manicured, and said, “Beautiful.” Then he let go.

  “Yes, very lovely,” said Fiona.

  I was from New York. I worked around movie stars. I was not unaccustomed to attention from almost-successful actors and the occasional after-party rock star. This touch, this crumb of approval should have meant nothing to me. But I must have been brainwashed during the course of a week, because one Midas touch from the Prince and I glowed all night.

  After the lights dimmed and the disco started, I headed to the ladies’ room for a lipstick touch-up. A painting caught my eye that every other night I had passed right by. It was a classic Orientalist portrayal of alabaster odalisques and their brown-skinned servants lounging by a harem bath. I had studied this kind of painting in art history, had analyzed each racist, imperialist brushstroke. And here was a romanticized, nineteenth-century Western portrayal of a harem hanging one hundred and fifty years later on the wall of—a harem. It was positively postmodern.

  A harem. Why hadn’t I realized it before? We were neither party guests nor prostitutes. We were harem girls.

  chapter 11

  Even locked away in a jewel box of a room on the island of Borneo, in my dream the gestapo was pounding on my door. Nazis had figured prominently in my nightmares ever since, at eight years old, I read The Diary of Anne Frank. In my dreams I was Anne, with my ear pressed to the floor, listening to the boots on the stairs as they marched up to take us away. In my dreams I was Anne and I was already dead but I was wandering through piles of shoes and fillings. I was looking for the suitcases. I knew mine was in there. I was trying to find it so I could leave.

  As a child the night terrors had seeped into my waking life. Thoughts of the Holocaust obsessed me. Anne Frank’s diary led me to other books that didn’t leave one with a hopeful view of the human heart. I remember one book in particular from the town library, with a Star of David in flames on the front and a map of the camps printed on the inside cover. There were photographs inside. You know the ones—grainy black-and-white, the shadows between the ribs the blackest black, the naked skin on the piles of bodies the whitest white.

  I was sure it was only a matter of time before the Holocaust happened again, and I wondered how my family would react when the Nazis came for us. How can you tell who you really are on the inside? We all like to believe that we’d be brave. We’d be the hero in the movie, the one who sacrifices himself to save others, the one who does the right thing when the world around him is wrong. In the movie, the right choice is clear. And we leave the theater feeling good about ourselves because we can say, Me, I’d do the right thing.

  No one says, Me, I’d be the coward. Me, I’d rat out my neighbor to save myself. But that’s what people do, mostly. Even at eight I knew this.

  So who would I be when they came? Would I be brave? What about my parents? Would they try to hide us, try to escape? Would they kill us all rather than be taken, like the Israelites at Masada? Would they stand up and throw bricks, like the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto? Or would they dutifully hand over their papers and then sing in the lines to the showers? I secretly suspected that my parents weren’t the fighting kind. I knew it would be up to me to protect us, so I tried to be prepared. I detailed plans of how we were going to escape, and then how we were going to return to fight back. I knew that the plans to resist were probably futile, but I had resolved to fight anyway.

  How could I ensure that I’d be the brave one, that I’d be the hero? I had to practice my moves, to go over and over the scenario in my head. I sacrificed my sleep in service of this mental rehearsal. I worried that caught off guard I’d act in ways that were less than estimable. I sensed that deep in my heart I wasn’t Anne. I didn’t have that kind of a soul—the kind possessed of a love so remarkable, so bright, that it was far more impermeable than her body.

  In an attempt to help me sleep, my mother tried to convince me that we lived in different times, that the Nazis weren’t going to show up at school one day and haul me away. But I was unconvinced. I found her naive. Didn’t she understand that it was people who had done this thing? The same people who were all around us? Things were really not so different.

  “It’s not going to happen again,” my mother carefully explained for the hundredth time. “That’s why we remember it, so we won’t let it happen again.”

  “Anne Frank’s mom told her it wasn’t going to happen, but it did.”

  My waking fixation on the Holocaust eventually wore off, but the dreams never quite did. So the dream in Brunei of the gestapo knocking on my door was no surprise. But when I opened my eyes, the knocking didn’t stop. It grew progressively more insistent. Destiny and I both sat up in bed and looked at each other, but neither of us went to answer it.

  When we had arrived, Ari had taken our passports and handed them to a guard. She had said it was to update our visas or something. It had stayed with me like a hair you can’t get out of your mouth. Is that what smart girls do? Go to Southeast Asia for some questionable employment and hand over their passports upon arrival?

  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.

&nbs
p; 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.