Some Girls: My Life in a Harem

by Jillian Lauren

  Some of the faces had changed during the two weeks we were gone. Most noticeably, with the absence of Serena, Prince Hakeem had returned to the parties. He was like a blown-up baby doll, easily three times the size of his father. Robin dropped me off at the door and I walked down the stairs alone. Prince Hakeem was on the landing in front of the door to the party room playing with an electric remote-control car that was a miniature replica of the Lamborghini out of which I had just stepped. Two slim Thai girls who looked about the right age to be dressed up for their homecoming dance slouched against each other on the stairs, giggling at his antics.

  I customarily bowed as I walked by him. It felt different to bow to Robin than it did to bow to a guy my own age with an oversize remote control in his hand. With Robin, the tone of the bow was submissive, sexual. With Prince Hakeem it was sarcastic.

  Two new girls, Delia and Trish, had taken Serena’s place. I entered to a group squeal from the Thai girls. Yoya, Tootie, and Lili smothered me with hugs. I couldn’t figure out why they were so sweet to me. Maybe because I defied convention and frequently drifted toward their island in our little archipelago of girls. I perched on the edge of their crowded couch and asked them the words in Thai for please and thank you, and in return they treated me like a long-lost childhood friend. Some girls in Brunei were good girls, sweet girls.

  Fiona greeted me with what I suppose was warmth, which for her looked something like nonchalance but not like disdain. Robin and his cronies entered to the strains of Angelique’s passionate “How Am I Supposed to Live Without You.” Eddie tapped me to leave the room about an hour after the men arrived. A guard led me to the hall of doors and opened one I hadn’t been through before. Behind door number two is a lifetime supply of Turtle Wax, behind door number six is a stack of gold bricks, behind door number three is . . . a bath. A really big bath.

  Some Orientalist painter should have been sitting in the corner, brush in hand. A bath the size of a small pool stood in the center, lined with tiny gold tiles that reflected shimmering rays of light around the steamy room. A platter stacked with fruit, honey cake, and chocolate was laid out beside the tub. The rubber duck I had bought for Robin in Malaysia floated in the water, sadly tilting to one side. I didn’t want to get in the bath and get all sweaty before he got there, but I felt stupid in my gown, so I hung my clothes and lay naked on the divan, an odalisque plucked from one of his paintings. The only thing that ruined the absolute authenticity of the harem bath fantasy was the TV mounted in the corner of the room blasting CNN as usual. I guess his plan was to show me that he wasn’t afraid to take a bath with a girl after all.

  It seemed like he had set up a romantic little interlude for us, but when Robin came in, his expression was chilly and hard. He had barely said a word to me in the car earlier in the evening. Our familiarity from Malaysia was gone. I suspected that he was probably disappointed to come back and find Serena missing, even though he was the one who had made the call that exiled her. But I had left him no choice. He knew she had a boyfriend and I knew he knew, so he couldn’t let her stay. It was my fault she was gone and he had no one left to punish, so the punishment fell on me.

  Even if Serena hadn’t been a casualty, I knew him well enough by now not to wonder why his attitude toward me had changed so rapidly. There didn’t need to be a reason. It made me nervous when he turned icy, but not as nervous as when he was kind. When he was kind, you could be sure he was setting you up for a fall. Maybe my penalty would be mild.

  “You look very nice.”

  He changed in the other room and when he came back, he hung up his robe and stepped into the bath, submerging only to the waist. I slipped in beside him and he turned me around without even kissing me. I felt myself floating up toward the ceiling as he fucked me. It was the kind of fuck that was meant to make you feel bad, but it didn’t. I was less and less tethered to my body all the time. I could tumble right out of myself at will and leave behind only a hologram. Far below me the hologram grabbed the nearby leg of the divan to steady herself. But I was free. I wasn’t one of his groveling subjects. I wasn’t even subject to the laws of gravity.

  After he was dressed, right before he left me to go back to the party, I tried out one of my memorized Malay sentences. This one I had been saving for a special occasion.

  “Aku cinta padamu,” I said.

  Like I said before, the Sultan just wanted you to suck his dick, but Robin needed your love. People who need everyone to love them are exponentially more dangerous than people who are content merely with power and money. You have to go way further to make them happy.

  “That’s nice,” he replied.

  What I had said wasn’t exactly true. What I felt for him was something like love, but not quite. It was something like love but also something like nothing at all.

  When I walked back into the room, Fiona beckoned to me and I crossed the room to resume my seat at Robin’s left and await my fate.

  chapter 19

  Prince Sufri returned to the parties after an extended stay in England. The parties changed in tenor when Sufri arrived. For starters, we began the evenings at the badminton courts. The courts were located in a cavernous, brightly lit airline hangar of a room with a spongy floor that would snag our heels and trip us unless we lifted our feet as carefully as Clydesdales.

  When Robin showed up at badminton, it was with an expression of disinterested tolerance. He stood in the corner with his arms crossed over his chest and looked often toward the door. But Sufri was the older brother and Robin deferred to him. We called Prince Sufri Ben. Ben sounded gentle. When I looked at him, the Jackson 5 song we had listened to in summer camp ran through my head. I had always thought the song was about someone’s ugly friend, until my friend Liz told me it was actually about a rat.

  The real-life Ben was disfigured by a skin condition that caused boils the size of marbles. Ari said they were a result of his cancer treatment, though I’ve seen a lot of cancer patients and have never seen anything quite like Ben’s affliction. My new roommate, Delia, with whom I’d become close, speculated it was wicked royal inbreeding.

  Ben’s throat cancer had resulted in a laryngectomy and he spoke through a cell-phone-size machine that he held to a voice box in his neck. This, combined with the skin condition, made him look and sound like a warty, flesh-toned toad. The boils distorted his face, making him bug-eyed. His sandy-colored hair was thin and stood up from his head in reedy spikes.

  Most of the American girls were freaked out by his appearance and kept their distance, fearing that it was somehow catching or that he would take a shine to them and they’d wind up obligated to stroke the moonscape of his skin. I thought they were stupid. If there is a choice between a monster and a playboy, always choose the monster. Monsters treat you better. And though I already had my assigned stall in the playboy’s stable, I befriended Ben. It was refreshing to converse with someone less cruel, less manipulative, more impressed by me than Robin had ever been. I looked at Ben and saw myself turned inside out.

  Yoya and Tootie also snuggled up to Ben, and the three of us girls grew closer as the weeks wore on. They let me in on their opinion of American girls. We were spoiled, ungrateful whiners. We spoke our own language terribly.

  Yoya mocked the California vernacular: “But, um, but, like, totally, ummmmm.”

  They didn’t exempt me from their judgments. They thought I was a spoiled whiner, too.

  “You also whine. Whine, whine,” Tootie told me cheerfully.

  “I do?”

  “But we like you anyway,” she reassured me. “You our friend anyway. ”

  Ben had a few favorites among the Filipino and Indonesian girls, but I don’t think he took it much further than requesting that they play doubles on the court in front of him. Hookers in bare feet and evening gowns playing badminton is a sight to see. While we witnessed the spectacle, Ben told me that he was hopelessly in love with Angelique, but she refused his advances, returned his gifts.
>
  Returned his gifts? I was floored. No one returned these types of gifts. That was purely the stuff of movies. It spoke either of Angelique’s exceptional virtue or of Ben’s exceptional repulsiveness. I hoped that it was a stand made on principle. I liked Angelique, and I wanted to believe that there was a woman who could not be bought, period, not just a woman who couldn’t be bought by a toad.

  Ben’s routine was to watch the girls play terrible badminton, then to herd the whole caravan into the party room to watch Angelique sing. When Ben was in the room, the singers didn’t trade off. It was the Angelique Show. After a while, Ben would walk out, demonstratively brokenhearted, with his hands in his pockets and his head inclined. After he left, things would return to the way they had gone before Ben got back from England.

  I watched him go and thought that Ben, perhaps alone among the brothers, was getting to have the human experience of having his heart broken. Unlike Robin, Ben didn’t have to get everything he ever asked for and wonder why he was still dissatisfied. Maybe it is easier in some ways for the ugly and the outcast, the men disfigured by boils and the preteen girls who eat lunch in a bathroom stall to avoid the cafeteria. We don’t have the same expectation of happiness.

  A few things changed after Serena left. The first was my new roommate, who was a righteous and down-to-earth chick. Delia was a bathing-suit model with an impossible body who had nevertheless passed her prime, knew it, and, miraculously, wasn’t in deep denial. Rather than pursuing radical cosmetic surgeries in an attempt to match her appearance to the age on her résumé, she was building a legit business as a wedding and headshot photographer. With her only-semi-ironic cheerleader attitude and her ass-length blond hair, she managed to keep a steady gait in Brunei that few could maintain.

  When Robin called Delia once and never again, which was his standard protocol for all but a few, she never made a big deal about it. Rather, she ingratiated herself with Ari and Eddie, initiated conga lines during the disco portion of the evening, and occasionally got a little drunk on the dance floor and spun around so her skirt flew up. Delia probably did better in Brunei than most of us, while paying a smaller price to the devil, or whoever exacts these things.

  The visiting dignitaries loved to invent ways to look at surfer-girl Delia, and usually requested that I accompany her. We sometimes got called to sit and sunbathe for hours out at the upper pool, long after anyone would want to be outside in that heavy, sweaty air. We brought along books, a boom box, and tons of sunblock, lest we fry. We never actually saw anyone, but Madge clued us in that there were conference rooms and dining rooms behind the opaque tint of the palace windows that overlooked the pool deck, so I guess we were meant to be the scenic view. Beyond the view of Delia and me in our bathing suits, all that was visible from the windows of the palace were the guesthouses down the hill and then the miles upon miles of rainforest surrounding the walls of the enclosure.

  Delia and I were called upon to perform other random party tricks as well. One day a guard showed up in our room with tennis whites and took us to the squash court, where we received a condescending lesson from some asshole from Dubai. What he didn’t know was that my father had put a racket in my hand when I was about four. I had quit when I was a teenager, but I could still smack a ball around. And it turned out that Delia was exactly as athletic as she looked. Even though we lost, we impressed the ambassadors from Dubai, and when word got around, we became an amusing anomaly, often called out of the party to play doubles with yet more drooling dignitaries. Imagine, girls who could do something well—more to the point, girls like us who could do something well.

  In spite of these improvements—the absence of my rival, a new friend, momentary whirlwinds of attention—the monotonous grind of the days was beginning to wear me down. Robin often ignored me, not saying more than a few words to me for days at a time. I spent many nights sitting next to an empty chair while Fiona and I made small talk. We volleyed gossip back and forth in a mannered way, like we were sitting on the sidelines of a croquet game.

  One night, Fiona and I were gossiping about Yoya and Lili.

  “I think Robin calls them together most of the time,” she told me.

  “Really? Scandalous.”

  “Indeed. Would you like more scandal?”

  “Of course.”

  “How old would you guess Yoya is?”

  “I don’t know. Young. A baby. Seventeen?”

  “Is seventeen a baby? Lower.”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Lower.”

  “What? That’s terrible.”

  “Oh, don’t be dramatic. She’s lucky to have a job. And Lili, too. But Lili’s got a scandal worse than Yoya’s.”

  “Tell.”

  “Lili is a couple of years older than Yoya, but when she was Yoya’s age she had a baby. Couldn’t leave it with her parents because they didn’t know. She had to leave her baby at an orphanage to come here.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I know everything.”

  I wanted to find out more of the story. Was it true or was it invented? But Robin came by and held out his hand to Fiona without even a glance in my direction. They walked together to the back elevator and left the party early. Fiona was the only girl who left the parties with him. I never asked her where they went.

  With all we talked about, we never talked about our respective time with Robin. I followed Fiona’s lead and in this, as in most things, she was smart. I never knew what Robin did with Fiona, so I never got a chance to compare it with the things he did with me. That way we never really knew where in Robin’s favor we were in relation to each other. This elected ignorance made it possible for us to be friends.

  I sat alone as the lights turned on and the rest of the party guests waited by the door to make a break for it when they got the all clear. I watched Lili, studied her. For what? For some previously unnoticed haze of grief that would confirm Fiona’s story? For a corner where her sweet and smiley mask had peeled back and I could see underneath that she was disfigured, broken by what she’d done?

  I imagined what Lili’s choices might have been when she’d been offered the job in Brunei. You can become a whore and pay whatever other whore is the least popular to hold your baby while you work because crying babies are bad for business or you can not be a whore and tell your family the truth and be considered a whore anyway. You can starve in Thailand with your baby or you can leave your baby behind to go have threesomes with a prince and make more money than you ever thought you’d see.

  If the baby story was in fact true about Lili, did she sit there every night and watch the bubbles rise to the top of her champagne and wonder where she could have chosen a different road, or did she thank her lucky stars that her ass was on that couch and not being pounded into a dirty mattress in a Bangkok brothel?

  The thought occurred to me that maybe my birth mother hadn’t been a ballerina at all. Maybe my music-box fantasy was exactly that. Maybe my parents had only told me she was a ballerina because it seemed like a fairy tale and fairy tales have better endings than true stories. Maybe my birth mother’s choices, too, had been between ugly and uglier.

  That night I had the recurring dream I hadn’t had in years. I am a child on the beach in Beach Haven. I play with my sand toys by the shoreline. Farther up on the sand my mother and Johnny lie sunbathing on our blanket. In the distance, walking toward me along the water’s edge, is my birth mother. I can’t see her face because she’s far away and the sun is in my eyes, but I know who she is. Then I look toward the sea and I see what has been rising behind me while my back has been turned. It’s a tsunami, churning with swirls of blue and white like in a Japanese painting. It’s as tall as a mountain and still gaining height and power.

  I want to run and warn my mother and brother. I also want to run in the direction of my birth mother to finally find out the answer to the mystery of where I came from—quick, before the wave comes and washes us all out to sea. And as I k
neel there frozen by indecision in the shadow of the wave, it crashes down on me. I tumble in the surf. I try to grab hold of the ground but you can’t hold on to sand. I feel the sand rush through my fingers and my hair as everything is swept away all at once.

  I am no wiser and no one is saved.

  Night after boring night, I sat anchored to my chair on the neglected sidelines and tried not to panic. I watched as some of the other girls began to unspool in the face of Robin’s subtle and sadistic games. Leanne, for instance, was rumored to have once rivaled Fiona for number one. Robin generally kept Leanne hovering at around number three or four, but hadn’t called for her in months. I wasn’t the only one around there being ignored. I watched Leanne get drunker, thinner, louder. She spent all day on the couch in her bathrobe smoking and watching Pretty Woman and all night pulling stunts to try to get Robin’s attention.

  One night, as Robin was leaving the party, Leanne cracked. She hurled herself to the floor, lay prostrate on the ground in front of him, and grabbed his leg. She sobbed real tears.

  “I love you. I love you. Why can’t you see that I love you more?”

  I thought about my final exchange with Sean. I love you. Don’t leave me. So unoriginal.

  Leanne’s outburst might have been the only time I witnessed genuine surprise on Robin’s face. He froze. Everyone froze. Eddie finally remembered himself and dragged Leanne off Robin’s leg, but Leanne was stronger than he’d expected. She shook Eddie off and nearly tackled Robin, falling to her knees and wrapping her arms around his waist. Robin didn’t lift a finger either to move her or to comfort her. It was Madge who finally pried Leanne away and subdued her.

  Robin didn’t kick Leanne out for this infraction. I think he enjoyed it, in fact. Nothing like a little bit of real pain to liven up an evening. But Leanne was spent. She stayed a few more weeks and left on her own. If it had been an acting job, it was an award winner. But I think it hadn’t been. I vowed not to become that girl. He wouldn’t break me down that far.