“You have to stand up for yourself. You could tell him something about her that would get her sent home,” suggested Taylor, twirling a lock of my hair absentmindedly around her finger.
“He’s too smart. He would know what I was doing.”
“Not necessarily. Not if you’re smart, too. Smarter. You can be, you know. He has a weakness. He’s blinded by his ego.”
Taylor’s visit to Brunei ended quickly, much to my disappointment, putting a stop to our schemes. She was sent home after three weeks and wasn’t asked back. Taylor and Robin didn’t gel. Taylor may have been brilliant in her way, but she was too calculating, didn’t have enough soft spots. She was just like him and he recognized it immediately. He preferred girls he could charm, girls he could hurt. Taylor was a good actress, but she had her limitations. She couldn’t do vulnerable. But she had stayed long enough to plant a hard, cold seed in me.
The seed that Taylor planted, Fiona watered. After Taylor left, I would escape to Fiona’s house in the afternoons to smoke and eat her chocolates. Fiona was the only girl on the property who got her own house. She slept in the master and used the other two bedrooms—the entire rooms—as closets. She had the beds removed and she rolled in wardrobe racks instead. Her suits and gowns and tennis attire and loungewear and even her pajamas were arranged first by genre and then by color. She didn’t do it herself; she delegated with a grandiose sense of entitlement.
Fiona had twice as many servants in her guesthouse as we did in ours and they were always running around doing one task or another. Fiona spoke to them almost exclusively in Thai and they actually seemed to like her. I was always apologetic with the servants. I had so much to learn.
Fiona had been a popular television actress in the Philippines. She told me that Robin had fallen in love with her while watching her show and had sought her out and invited her for a visit. Initially she was intrigued, then she was repulsed, then he won her over. On her first night in Brunei, she had walked into the party and then walked straight back out. Robin had answered her consternation with diamonds. She pulled the necklace out of a drawer crammed with jewelry boxes and tried it on for me. It was in the shape of a diamond cougar that clasped to its own tail. It curled around her neck like something captured, declawed. She had been in Brunei six months already.
We drank tea in Fiona’s living room as she reclined on the couch and chain-smoked. There was no smoking allowed anywhere; Robin loathed it. Fiona did it anyway.
I had a good, snotty cry and complained to her. The other girls were so cruel. Taylor had gone home. I missed New York. I missed Sean. I had mounting anxiety, had too many hangovers, woke every morning with a dark cloud over my head I couldn’t shake.
“I can’t take those mean bitches. I can’t take this anymore.”
“Stop being stupid. Are you here to make friends?” she asked. “That’s a mistake. I’m not your friend. Robin is not your friend. Those morons are certainly not your friends. The money is your only friend.”
I wanted to be like Fiona. I had considered myself all grown up when I was about fifteen, but I was changing my mind.
“Besides, you’ll get back at them. I have my own ideas about retribution,” she said. “Most of them include shopping.”
One morning soon after, I received the by-then familiar knock on my door, but when I got downstairs to the car, Fiona was sitting in it.
“We’re going shopping,” she said. “Robin likes to see us in traditional gowns. Don’t worry; we’ll get real clothes later. Think of this as an appetizer.”
A driver chauffeured us around to traditional Malay shops, where heavily made-up women in patterned silks fussed over us, costuming us in brightly colored sarong Kebayas and sarong Baju Kurongs, complete with matching bejeweled shoes, hair pieces, and jewelry. We must have bought ten each. The driver shelled out note after note and toted all of our bags to the car.
That night, Robin had portraits of Fiona and me taken by the fountain in the entrance hallway of the palace. I stood there all wrapped up in a traditional gown of beaded pink silk, with a glittering pink fake flower adorning my hair. Most of the photos were of each of us individually, but in some of the poses Fiona and I sat next to each other and held hands like it was a wedding portrait.
Fiona was becoming more than a friend; she was an older sister of sorts, in a pervy way. I had always wanted a sister. That night I felt that my position in the hierarchy of the harem made me a participant in something ancient. Part of it was treacherous and terrible, but part of it wasn’t so bad, this world of women with one enigma of a man who held sway over us all.
Our next shopping trip was something else entirely.
Fiona and I sat in the back of yet another car, this time heading back to the Bandar Seri Begawan airport, where we hopped on a private plane to Singapore. The interior of the plane was all white leather and gilded hardware and walls that looked like white marble veined with gold. Chic flight attendants served us drinks and lunch, fanned out magazines for us to choose from.
“Thank you, Siti. Thank you, Jing,” she said to the smiling flight attendants as we exited the plane. Fiona learned and remembered everyone’s name.
Fiona walked through the airport like she had somewhere to go, but never like she was in a rush. She always wore heels and it gave her hips a slight swing—nothing too slutty, but enough to affect a gravitational pull on the attention of the men she passed. I mirrored her gait all the way to our waiting car and then out again when we reached the Hilton, where we were staying in the Prince’s private suite. The suite occupied an entire floor, had its own full staff, and was more like a villa than a suite. The interior was classic Robin, with a big indoor fountain and lots of solid-gold doorknobs.
Fiona was a class act all the way, whereas I felt like Courtney Love stumbling around in Buckingham Palace. I resolved that if I was going to have flight attendants and pilots and drivers and maids waiting on me, I should at least be worthy of the part. I started by making a conscious effort not to use the words fuck and like in every sentence. Emulating Fiona’s British accent was going too far, but, barring that, I forced my syllables to fall in step with her proper diction. I tried to trade whatever Jersey harshness hadn’t been pounded out of me by years of acting lessons for her silky contralto.
I watched how she sat with her back like a rod at dinner and still looked relaxed. I began to keep my fork in my left hand, cutting small bites of chicken and managing to talk and still keep my mouth closed while I chewed. I studied Fiona as if doing an acting exercise. I was definitely playing a role, but it wasn’t a role that was going to be so easy to step out of. When I stood on that balcony in Singapore and felt that I was on the brink of being transformed, I had been right.
We slept over that night and ate a breakfast of bacon and eggs together in the morning. Fiona ate like a lady, but she ate every bite. She wasn’t a dieter.
“You’ll learn that Robin never keeps skinny girls around for long,” she said. “Now tell me, who can resist a man like that?”
It was true. Who doesn’t like a guy who likes his girls zaftig? I skipped the bacon but giddily helped myself to more eggs. It was such a relief.
We talked about our lives at home. She had already bought herself and her parents townhouses with her earnings from acting. Then she had given her townhouse to her sister and bought a second house for herself with her earnings from Robin; rather, with her “gifts.”
I tried to explain to her what experimental theater was and I could tell she thought it was the stupidest thing she had ever heard.
“How artistic,” she said politely.
I could tell that she found me, if not fabulous, then at least amusing; if not an equal, than at least a worthy playmate. It dawned on me that I had not climbed the ladder so quickly because Robin had fallen head over heels, though I believe he was genuinely growing fond of me. It was because Fiona had wanted a friend. Fiona was the one who had picked me, guided his affections.
> “I told Robin that you had to come along shopping with me this time,” she told me, a little reminder of who was in charge.
After breakfast, we each set off separately with a driver. I had thought we should go together, but when I told Fiona this she had shrugged me off, telling me there wouldn’t be room for both of us in the same store at the same time, which seemed ridiculous. Next to my driver sat a bodyguard with a Louis Vuitton sack full of cash, like a parody of a bag that robbers in a silent movie would use to heist a bank.
The bodyguard asked me where I wanted to go. He knew the location of all the stores in Singapore; I only needed to choose. I named the first designer I could think of: Dolce and Gabbana. Done.
Singapore reminded me of a silver, sci-fi utopia located under an oxygen dome. Like microcosms of Singapore itself, the malls were gleaming and modern. The first mall was shiny, white, and curled upward in a spiral, like the Guggenheim. I gingerly fingered the clothes at Dolce, staring at the multiple zeros on the price tags. A salesgirl hovered behind me and yanked each piece of clothing off the rack as soon as I touched it. When she had an armful she handed it off to another girl, who ran it to the dressing room. It was like a bucket brigade.
When I went to try on the clothes, I discovered that the salesgirls at designer shops in Singapore are slightly different from those at Urban Outfitters. Three of them piled into my dressing room and pretty much took my clothes off for me.
I started out slowly, trying on everything twice, looking at price tags, asking everyone’s opinions. The salesgirls clucked and pulled at the fabric and nodded approvingly. I frowned and spun in front of the mirror until my guard got fed up with me and took me by the shoulders.
He looked at me and said, “This is just your first shop.”
He picked up one dress off the bench in the dressing room and then took three others off the hanger, gave them all to the salesgirl, and spoke to her in Malay. She took them to the counter.
“Take them all. You may only shop once in your life.”
He picked a purse out of the spotlight on a glass shelf and gave it to the next girl, who took it to the front of the shop.
“But how much can I spend?” I didn’t want to reach my limit and wind up with a bunch of clothes I didn’t really love, especially if I might only shop once in my life.
“Just get them and let’s go. I’ll let you know when you’re close to your limit.”
Chanel, Hermes, Versace, Dior, Armani, Gucci. We exhausted the first mall and went to the next and yet another until everything, even the most expensive things—especially the most expensive things—started to look cheap and nauseating. We never even took the bags with us; they were sent on ahead. It was frantic. I was like some suburban mother who wins a holiday raffle and gets ten free minutes at Toys“R”Us, running through the aisles with a shopping cart, grabbing everything she can reach.
I was aware of my rabid consumerism. What about the eight-year-old slaves in China who stitched these ridiculously priced rags together? What about hungry people? Homeless people? Entire countries besieged by poverty and famine? Entire blocks of New York where the sidewalks are lined with encampments of cardboard?
This is what I told myself: It wasn’t my money to spend it was Robin’s and he wasn’t spending it on the homeless he was spending it on clothing for his mistress and if I didn’t buy that dress right there it wouldn’t help anything it wouldn’t give one abused garment worker a cubic inch more of fresh air. I was being silly, entertaining the pretensions of the bourgeois bleeding heart. Not buy a dress because people were starving? Even the guilt itself was an embarrassment, kind of like experimental theater. Fiona would have scoffed. She would have deemed my foolishness unforgivable. I convinced myself that Robin was probably a really charitable guy in other ways. After all, everyone had health care in Brunei; everyone had a good education free of charge. What was the harm if he wanted his girlfriends to look nice, too?
After the shops closed at nine p.m., security guards opened the doors for us. Salesgirls stayed late in the stores and we kept shopping, my arches aching in my sandals as we power-walked the dim corridors of the closed malls. I started throwing down Chanel gowns on the counter without even trying them on. I figured I might as well go until I hit my spending limit, but I hit a wall of exhaustion first and gave up. We drove back to the hotel close to midnight. I had been shopping since eleven that morning.
“What was my limit anyway?” I asked the bodyguard when we were in the car. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t hit it. I had certainly tried.
“You didn’t have one. No limit only for some girls. Only for very special girls.”
“Well, how much did I spend, then?”
He told me a number that left me speechless. The number far exceeded the down payment on the house I live in today. I felt drunk.
Fiona and I ate in silence. I was dehydrated and the noodles seemed gummy and tasteless. We went straight to our rooms, exhausted. Fifteen identical suitcases lined the wall. My new clothes were already folded and packed inside them. I lay on the bed and tried to squeeze my knees so tightly into my chest that I would wring the disgust out of my gut.
chapter 16
The mirror in my bathroom had begun to separate from the wall just a hair, but enough that I could see a small red light come on from time to time in the dark recesses behind it. I dragged the other girls into my bathroom to confirm it. This much was certain: Sometimes there was a light.
It was not news that we were being watched, but it could still make you feel crazy, paranoid. Who was watching? What were they watching for? Even though Taylor had gone home and I was allowed to keep my room as a single because I had so many new clothes that I needed the closet space, I never felt truly alone. It was like a pea under the mattress—enough to make me uncomfortable but not enough for me to peg exactly what was wrong.
I have heard that privacy is a construct of privilege. Privileged as I was growing up, I never felt I had a stitch of it. My father took the locks off our doors. My mother read my journal and said that it had fallen out of a drawer when the housekeeper was cleaning. I never took for granted the fact that in my own apartment in New York, no one would open doors without knocking or go through my drawers, and I didn’t have to encode my journals so intricately that even I wouldn’t understand them later. In Brunei, I was again living in a world in which not even the page was private. Anywhere I sat to write in my journal, there was a mirror behind me and behind that a camera recording every scribble.
What did the cameras see? What was my great shame? A mustache wax? Air guitar? A vibrator? I couldn’t have cared less.
No, I cursed myself because they saw a girl sit on the floor of her room and stare at the suitcases for two days, unable to unpack. Because when she half-unpacked, the room looked like it had been ransacked and it stayed that way for another three days. Because the girl managed to pull an outfit out of the rubble and paste herself together for the party every night, but every morning she woke in pieces again. All she could do was read and listen to music. She stopped working out, stopped swimming, stopped hitting the tennis balls shot out at her from a machine.
It had hit me so fast. Somewhere between Singapore and Brunei, a cannonball had come sailing out of the sky, nailed me in the gut, and knocked the wind out of me. Every day I vowed to change, to be efficient and cheery like Ari, capable and witty like Madge, mercenary and glamorous like Fiona—anything but lazy and out of control and sunk. Anything but me.
I was in the grip of the tentacles of a depression that has come and gone throughout my life, at times administering only the tiniest sting and at other times immobilizing. It wasn’t the first time I’d succumbed to it. When the shadows of depression darkened my field of vision in high school, I had blamed it on my father, on my school. Now that all those things were behind me I saw that I had been wrong; the blame rested squarely on me. I accused myself of being weak-willed, lazy, self-indulgent. The list of indictments goes o
n.
I was sure if I just tried hard enough, did enough yoga, chanted the Hare Krishna, read Freud and Jung and the Dalai Lama and Ram Dass, stopped eating chocolate, started working out more, and learned those fucking French tapes I had dragged along with me, I would heal. I was sure that if I could just scale this fortress I would reach a height with a sunny blue sky and fresh air. I would stand there and experience myself as redeemable rather than ruined. I had no idea what kind of animal I was facing.
If you had suggested to me at the time that my problems were due to some faulty wiring, some chemistry experiment gone wrong in my brain, I’d have said you were suggesting that I not take responsibility for my own choices. Now I know I was wrong. Now when I’m haunted by the specter of depression, I recognize it for what it is. I don’t systematically dismantle my life every time depression pops out from behind a tree. But at that time, I was sure it was fixable if the world would just change faster, or if I would.
Part of this illusion was sustained by the fact that changing the scenery appeared to work. When the world around me altered, for a minute or two the newness, the adrenaline, the endorphins could sometimes snap me out of my sludgy funk. I was skating on those very endorphins when I sprang out of my bed and finally unpacked my suitcases from Singapore, while simultaneously packing a suitcase for a trip to Malaysia. Fiona and I were to be included in the royal entourage for a two-week diplomatic mission to Kuala Lumpur. With the typical lack of notice, I was informed I’d be leaving the next day.
I think Ari felt sorry for me because of how I was treated by the other girls, though not too sorry. She was paid handsomely enough for all her hard work, but was never showered with the kind of immediate jewels and cash with which the girlfriends were. And we didn’t work very hard at all, in her opinion. It chafed her, but she kept it in perspective. Ari always bore a hint of disbelief about her job. After all, she had gone from taking care of a Bel Air estate to procuring prostitutes for a prince.
Some Girls: My Life in a Harem Page 14
