Some Girls: My Life in a Harem

by Jillian Lauren

  The girls Ari brought to Brunei were almost never prostitutes to begin with, but I never saw one who refused the Prince’s advances once they saw the rewards. Everyone I met in Brunei had a price and Robin met it without fail. I only once even heard an expression of remorse, and a hefty jewelry box squashed it later in the week. In fact, the girls who came from normal jobs, normal boyfriends, normal lives were the quickest to lap up the new lifestyle. I was embarrassed for them, the way they drooled all over their Rolex birthday presents. Just because you’re sequestered in some parallel-universe sorority house doesn’t mean you can’t have a little dignity.

  Ari, on the other hand, had dignity aplenty. And she seemed to retain her identity in the face of Brunei’s warping influence. She also retained a fiancé named John at home. John was a successful contractor. He had one blue eye and one green eye and was ridiculously handsome, as if he had just stepped out of an aftershave commercial. All that and he volunteered teaching swimming to autistic kids once a week. He was a perfect romantic-comedy lead, if you’re into that kind of thing.

  Even though Ari was in no way romantically involved with anyone in Brunei, it was taboo to mention John. Women like Ari and Madge were entrusted with difficult jobs involving lots of money and sensitive information, but they weren’t allowed to be married or have boyfriends. Or at least there was an agreed-upon silence around it. For Ari and Madge it was an infraction to have a boyfriend, but for Robin’s girlfriends it was suicide. You’d find yourself on the next flight home if anyone found out.

  Even Ari got lonely in Brunei, so she sometimes talked to me. Though I wouldn’t have counted “trustworthy” as one of my primary virtues right at that moment, I was still probably her best bet. It’s not that Ari trusted me, exactly, but she counted on me being smart enough to know that crossing her would in no way behoove me. Ari talked to me about her wedding plans without ever mentioning the word marriage. She sat cross-legged on the bed while I packed, eating avocado out of the shell with a spoon.

  “I’m a little anxious right now because, of course, they changed my departure date to four days sooner than I’d planned and now I’m missing appointments with the caterers and the planner. The president can meet with the architect. I’m not complaining.”

  Ari was going to marry John in six months. She called him “the president” in code, because his name was John Adams. Ari was twenty-five years old and building a house in Malibu. It made sense to me that she was anxious to hang up her traveling shoes and settle down to have a family. Might as well—hadn’t she seen enough by twenty-five?

  “Can your mother do it for you?

  “Yeah, ultimately my mother’s going to do the whole thing. I know it. But you only get to do this once, so I’d like to at least see my invitations before they get sent out,” she said. “Did I tell you already that when you get to KL you’re not to leave the hotel room for any reason unless a guard comes to get you? Very important.”

  Then, weighing in on my packing decision, she said, “Ooh, I like that dress. What is it?”

  “Dior.”

  “Take that one with you for sure.”

  I closed my suitcases and didn’t even bother to take them off the bed. I knew someone would fetch them and that they’d magically appear at my destination.

  Robin was looking for his fourth wife, and for a fourth wife it wasn’t out of the range of possibility that he’d choose from among the girls who attended the parties. For a first or second wife, that would be unthinkable. But once the royal lineage is secure, the royal boys have more room to play. I thought sometimes about what it would be like to marry Robin. It wouldn’t be so bad to have a husband who was around only once in a while, especially if you had a staff to take care of your every need and a jet to fly you to Singapore on a whim. But freedom to buy whatever you wanted wasn’t the same thing as freedom. I knew that if I married the Prince, I’d never act in another play, never backpack around Europe, never go to a movie with a male friend, never even go to a mall without a bodyguard.

  Sometimes I fell prey to fantasies of becoming a princess. It seemed so strange that it had entered my orbit of possibilities. What Disney-brained American girl hadn’t lain in bed and known deep in her heart that she was worthy of being woken from an evil spell by the kiss of a prince? That she would open her eyes and, due to no effort of her own, find that she had been saved? Who wouldn’t consider attempting to grab that gold ring, that diamond crown?

  But I wasn’t brainwashed beyond all reason. I knew I didn’t really want to marry Robin, not even at the height of my success there. If I did, I’d never again have a date on a rooftop in the rain.

  After the shopping trip to Singapore, even the few girls who had been neutral toward me before had grown bristly. So when I left for Kuala Lumpur, I happily walked out the door dressed in my most conservative Chanel suit of pink-and-gray tweed. They had pushed me so far, had been so mean that I no longer felt the need to make myself smaller so I’d be liked. Who cared if those morons weren’t my friends? That’s what Fiona would have said and that is what, after weeks of their cruelty, I finally truly felt. It was liberating. It was akin to my preteen discovery of the Ramones and my subsequent initiation into the world of punk music. I could create a whole other reality. I could actively choose to be different from the kids who made my life a misery. I could state once and for all that I wasn’t wrong, they were.

  In high school, I spent my time with the theater crowd and in the ceramics room. I made my own clothes, dyed my hair most of the primary colors in succession, and discovered a passion for punk rock. Due to the somber colors of our wardrobe choices, my friends and I were dubbed by the preppy and privileged student body the Children of Darkness, a moniker we cheerfully appropriated and wrote on the wall over our preferred table in the cafeteria.

  The Children of Darkness were an oddball crew of kids who had funny haircuts and did things like write rock operas or draw their own autobiographical comics. They opened their goth capes and tatty overcoats and enfolded me in acceptance. I could do whatever dorky thing I wanted for the school talent show and I would always have a cheering section. We were a tribe. But my new-found acceptance came with a stash of black eyeliner and decorative safety pins. And the dorky things I did for the talent show shifted from shuffling off to Buffalo to performing acoustic covers of Siouxsie and the Banshees.

  To my father, all this had signified an egregious deviation from acceptable behavior, an embarrassment to the family, a personal insult to him. He stood poised on the brink of an explosion at all times. So when I was at home, I imagined myself to be a punk version of Glinda from The Wizard of Oz, floating in a pink bubble above it all. I was untouchable, just like I was when I raised my hand and gave the vipers in Brunei a little wave good-bye.

  “Ciao.”

  What would Patti Smith do? She’d say, Fuck them. She might not be wearing a Chanel suit when she said it, but you’ve got to put your own spin on things.

  We flew in a royal caravan from a private airport. I saw faces I recognized milling about—Dan and Winston and Dr. Gordon from the parties—but no other women. I wondered if we might actually see one of Robin’s wives in person, but there were no wives and not even any Robin to be seen; just a handful of men in suits who ignored us. Dan nodded and Winston smiled.

  Winston had always been my favorite. He and his girlfriend, Tootie, were sweet together and spent the nights talking and holding hands. Sometimes I looked at them and felt a pang of envy, though it didn’t last long. She surely wasn’t earning one thousandth of what I was making, but her boyfriend actually seemed to like her. Still, if I’d had to choose, I would have picked the money.

  Fiona and I flew in our own plane again, which is definitely the way to travel. At the airport in KL, we were hustled under intense security through a hallway and straight out into the waiting cars. There was no such thing as customs when traveling under the umbrella of diplomacy. No one questioned our presence. I had learned to le
t myself be guided and not ask questions. I was a leaf in a stream, I told myself. I was living in the moment. I was practically a Zen monk.

  With our own personal guard, Fiona and I were driven to the hotel in KL and deposited into rooms next door to each other. Our guard instructed us not to leave unless summoned. He posted himself in between our doorways. I bid good-bye to her as we entered our neighboring luxury prison cells. Five minutes later she called to chat.

  “Why can’t we even hang out with each other?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry. He won’t stand out there all day. I’ll see you for dinner.”

  She showed up in her pajamas a couple of hours later, soon followed by a bottle of wine and room service. She prompted me to order whatever I wanted. Order a bottle of wine; order three.

  “Do you have any idea how many people are here?” she said. “Martin and Robin each have an entire floor for their entourage and a separate penthouse suite each for themselves. Do you really think anyone is looking at the bill?”

  We spent most of our days hanging out in each other’s rooms ordering caviar, which we ate by the spoonful out of the jar, watching movies, and drinking expensive wine. Champagne and caviar is hideously cliché but wonderful when consumed while wearing sweats and watching the Today Show via satellite. We ordered up massages and listened to music and did each other’s hair and once we even escaped to go get a pedicure in the hotel salon. I was so nervous while we were down there that I gave myself hives.

  I don’t know what Fiona did with her nights; we didn’t talk about it. Robin completely ignored me for six whole days. While Fiona was gone during the evenings, I read Artaud and Hesse and went stir-crazy. I read Artaud’s words I am not fully myself and thought, That’s me. I’m not fully myself. I don’t even know who that self is. I told myself I had to get out of there soon—to do something real, to be free.

  I called Johnny, who was home for a brief spell in between getting kicked out of one boarding school and being shipped off to another. My parents were concerned because the volume on Johnny’s Obsessive Compulsive Disorder had apparently turned way up since I had seen him last. My mother had told me during our previous phone conversation that she had a hard time getting him out the door because he had to complete so many rituals just to leave the house. He lived locked in a private world of tics, outbursts, exclamations, touching doorframes, spitting in puddles, tapping spoons against the sides of bowls.

  “Bro.”

  “Sis.”

  “How are you?”

  “Mellow. Mellow. I’m residing at the homestead for the time being. Ralph Reuben heard from his mom that you’re a slave in China.”

  “I’m in Malaysia, actually. And how did Ralph Reuben’s mom hear that?”

  “She ran into Mom at the ShopRite.”

  Fantastic. Apparently my mother was disclosing my whereabouts to everyone she saw at the supermarket.

  “Could you please tell her to be a little more discreet?”

  “Sure. I’ll let her know. That should take care of it.”

  “What are you going to do now?” I asked him.

  “Mom and Dad would very much like me to depart for yet another fine learning institution.”

  “Why did you leave school this time?”

  “I felt like I used to feel when I went to church with Anthony Dante. I always liked it until the times in the service when the little things would drop down from the back of the pews and everyone would kneel and I’d be the only one left sitting. That’s how it was at that school. I was the only Jew in church.”

  “I know how you feel.”

  Even in casual conversation, Johnny was a poet. I worried for him. He seemed fragile, translucent. Poetry didn’t get you very far and the world wasn’t kind to people with obvious expressions of mental illness. But I was 30,000 miles away and couldn’t do much to convince him to try to work it out at this next school. I couldn’t even convince myself to stay put. How could I make a suggestion to him that sounded like a prison sentence to me?

  “I love you, bro. I miss you,” I said. My voice echoed back to me over the international phone lines. The words sounded insufficient. And then there was the pause that I had learned to wait through.

  “I love you, too, sis.”

  Sitting forgotten for days, I wanted desperately to get back to New York, back into rehearsals. As Robin ignored me, his pull on me lessened. My life was disappearing, each hour dissolving while I rotted in a cage of a hotel room. When I tried to talk about Artaud to Fiona, she told me in no uncertain terms that Artaud was a maniac and I was a brat.

  “Can’t you just sit still for five minutes? It’s not like you’re being asked to dig ditches. Go ahead and write all the poetry you want right here. Learn twelve new monologues. Knock yourself out. It’s not where you are that’s the problem.”

  But Fiona was older than I was. I had no idea what a dollar meant, thought nothing of eating peanut butter straight from the jar for lunch and Pop-Tarts from the box for dinner. I hadn’t really cared that I was poor, so getting rich for doing nothing didn’t seem like a big deal. This was when I still truly believed in my heart that I had a great career ahead of me on the stage.

  I was restless, but I was still conflicted. I hadn’t completely given up on Brunei yet, wasn’t willing to concede defeat. So when I got the call that Robin had invited me upstairs, I rallied. I aimed to dazzle. I hoped to spark something that would galvanize his attentions again and that would, in turn, inspire me to stay. I dressed to accept my Oscar in a sequined Armani gown with a plunging back. Robin was an ass man; I tried to choose my attire accordingly.

  Our guard escorted me upstairs to an opulent dinner party in the penthouse suite, where I, the lone woman, sat next to Robin. I recognized many of the men around the dining table, but there were new faces, men with accents that differed from Robin’s and his usual entourage’s. Some might have been Iranian; some were British. They seemed more jocular than usual, as if celebrating some sort of success.

  It was one of those nights that flew by on a magic carpet of champagne and right moments and good timing, the kind of night in which everything clicks into place and you feel beautiful and clever. I could tell I pleased him. There was none of his usual darkness or the criticism that his phony smiles often imparted. Robin’s expression remained clear of the clouds of dissatisfaction that portended punishment, banishment from his bed for days, the flaunting of a rival girl in front of you.

  But, as with every night with him, the party wore on long after everyone else was exhausted. He was one of those people who didn’t need sleep, who judged everyone else for sleeping through their brief hours on earth. He was the kind of insomniac who, if he was a normal person, would spend many lonely late-night hours. But because he was a filthy-rich aristocrat he could pay a party full of people to stay up round-the-clock with him if he wanted.

  Robin excused the other guests at four a.m. and took me to his bedroom suite. The room had floor-to-ceiling rounded windows, as if the whole twinkling city was in our private aquarium. We fucked with the curtains open and the light off.

  After we were done, I expected to be excused with the usual smack on the ass and kiss on the cheek. Instead, the incomprehensible happened. He pushed a button on a remote control that closed the curtains, curled his body around mine, draped his arm over me, and said good night.

  It completely freaked me out. The intimacy was such a leap. In Robin’s presence, I was always electrified with tension, posed and aimed to please, never thinking of my own needs. I was so frozen in that mode that I couldn’t even kick the covers off my too-hot feet for fear of disturbing him. I lay awake, my feet sweating, heart pounding, stomach cramping. I hoped he would fall asleep first and snore or something and then I could relax. I pretended to sleep.

  “You are not sleeping.”

  He wasn’t fooled. I felt like a failure. He finally gave me a sleeping pill and took one himself.

  When we woke, we ate room-se
rvice breakfast together and watched CNN while he dressed for work. For the rest of the trip, that was how we spent our evenings and mornings. It became normal. I gave only a passing thought to the fact that Fiona was now the one waiting around alone.

  The first Gulf War had recently ended, but you could still see its aftermath on the news. Only months earlier I had protested the war in Tompkins Square Park, but by then, in Brunei, it seemed faraway—the war and Tompkins Square Park both. Most people who ask me about Brunei assume it is in the Middle East, maybe because of the oil and the brown skin. But Southeast Asia is far from Iraq and I didn’t perceive any connection. Of course, there was a connection. Every oil-rich sultan, king, president, and prime minister is slipping around in the same oil slick.

  Robin was tied into this network of oil in ways I didn’t understand and could never talk to him about. That wasn’t exactly what I was there for. But I wondered about it as I watched him scanning the news all the time, a constant stream of it superimposed on everything else he did. I lay in the huge hotel bed, the city of Kuala Lumpur humming forty floors below, and watched the ever-present CNN as Robin got ready for work, whatever work was. Morning after morning, I watched, among other things, the wizened face of Nelson Mandela addressing the world about the crumbling of apartheid.

  As Robin became something to me that looked more and more like a lover and less like an employer, I occasionally ventured to ascertain Robin’s opinions about the events we watched every day on the news. But he was usually evasive, so I didn’t ask too many questions. I knew there was no freedom of the press in Brunei, that the Sultan was an autocrat (if a genial one) and that it was a serious crime to disparage him. None of these were admirable things but I preferred to ignore them. I wasn’t there as a representative for Amnesty International. It wasn’t my country. It wasn’t my concern.