Some Girls: My Life in a Harem

by Jillian Lauren

  Next shot: morning of my departure. Whatever cash didn’t fit into my two money belts I stuffed inside my stockings. I got rid of the jewelry boxes and wore the jewelry.

  I threw a loose sweat suit over the top of the jewelry and became a nervous-eyed, thick-waisted girl with big gold earrings on. I sweated the whole flight to Frankfurt and then scarfed Chinese food and drank Jack Daniel’s at the airport. I got back on the interminable flight feeling sick to my stomach and not nearly drunk enough.

  Many hours later the spiny peaks, right-angled valleys, and soaring bridges, the floating Marvel comic metropolis that is New York seen from high above, brought tears to my eyes.

  chapter 21

  I returned to a breezy, budding New York April.

  I dragged my suitcases one at a time up the two flights of stairs and dropped them in the middle of the hovel I would now be sharing with not only Penny but also a director friend of ours named Sam. Penny and Sam had hooked up while I was gone and Sam had as good as moved in to our one-bedroom, bringing his waffle maker with him and little else. The two of them welcomed me back with a waffle dinner and a new cat they had found at the local bodega, whom they named Nada after the underground theater across the street, where Penny worked the box office.

  I unpacked my designer clothes into my miniature closet with the paint peeling in tongues from the doorjamb. My only possessions until then had been a futon on the floor, a scavenged desk, and a bunch of clothes and records stacked in a wall unit fashioned from crates. Hippie tapestries were tacked over the windows as curtains. Dusty votive candles covered every available surface. A palace it was not. I put the rest of my jewelry, worth well over a hundred thousand dollars, in a shoebox in my closet. I wondered if rats were attracted to shiny things or if that was just magpies. Would the tenement rats, fat and self-assured, sneak in, gnaw their way through the cardboard, and make off with my Tiffany set?

  I put the clothes that wouldn’t fit in the closet into two suitcases and later that week I took them with me in a cab to Jersey, figuring I could store them in the closet in my parents’ garage. I dumped the suitcases as I came in and even from the downstairs I could smell onions and roasting chicken. It was the first time I’d smelled any kind of food actually being cooked in months.

  My mother called out from the kitchen to my father in the backyard, “Jill’s home!” As if I’d been away at camp; as if it was still my home.

  I was coming up the stairs as she came down; we met in the middle with hugs and uneasy smiles. It didn’t seem to be getting any easier to hug her. It was always uncomfortable, like hugging a distant relative who had known you when you were a kid but whom you can’t remember at all. And this made me feel like shit, because my mother was a kind lady who cooked me chickens. I kept waiting for the discomfort to disappear as time passed, as I put more distance between my parents and me, but I hugged her and there it still was.

  My father looked like he’d gained half his weight back already, and he vibrated with the same manic, distracted energy as ever. In his excitement to see me, he put me in a half headlock and rocked me back and forth. He’d been outside planting flowers and his shirt smelled like potting soil and grass.

  Twenty minutes later I sat on the gray couch in the gray living room and looked out at their newly landscaped front yard through the gray stripes of the vertical blinds. They had asked me about the trip, of course, but had settled for my vague answers and had moved on to other things. I think they were relieved to let the subject drop.

  “Did you move the fence in the front yard?” I asked.

  “What fence in the front yard?” my mother responded.

  “Wasn’t there a fence there before?”

  “No,” said my mother.

  How strange. I knew every corner of the house: every china pattern, every book spine in the study, every Hanukah-present hiding place, every piece of jewelry in my mother’s drawers, every bottle of liquor in the liquor cabinet. I knew where my father hid his small gun, an heirloom from his father. But I still remembered things wrong sometimes, weird things like a phantom fence in the yard. I felt like the girl who had lived in that house wasn’t me, but a person I’d read about in a story. A story I couldn’t quite recall.

  “How long did you live here for, moron?” added my dad, though he said it affably. He was fond of using words like moron and schmuck in an affectionate way.

  Weeks before I had been a beautiful femme fatale, sipping champagne and overlooking a foreign city and waiting for the Prince to return home from his princely duties. Now I was a moron, with a wicked zit growing on my chin and at least two hours left before I could make a polite exit and haul ass back to the city. I felt the migraine coming, as if someone had thrown a fishhook into my eye from behind and started to yank.

  After dinner my mother, as always, brought out the gifts. She gave me a hand-knit beret from a crafts fair, a feminist-slogan T-shirt from her trip to Washington, D.C., with her women’s organization, and a jade necklace that had been my grandmother’s. I gave her the Cartier watch that wasn’t my favorite. I thought she’d get more use out of it than I would. I wanted to give her something nice.

  I would have just left the stacks of hundreds split between my underwear drawer and my filing cabinet, but Sam marched me down to the bank on Canal Street to get a safe-deposit box. I refused to put my Rolex in it. I wanted to wear it.

  “Why don’t you just throw it in the East River?” he said. “Quit that soul-sucking job. Stay here with us. Come on, let’s do it. Let’s go throw that thing in the river.”

  Sam was a theater director, given to sweeping gestures.

  “No way.”

  Sweeping gestures were the same thing as getting mad and throwing a plate at the wall. Sweeping gestures felt dramatic and significant, but afterward you were left looking foolish because afterward nothing had changed. Things don’t explode and disappear; they explode and leave a mess all over the floor. There are always ceramic shards that escape the bristles of the broom and embed themselves in your bare feet for weeks afterward. The watch stayed.

  Three weeks dissolved the way weeks will if you let New York have its way. I enjoyed my little life with Penny and Sam, reading the Times together in the morning while drinking espresso from the new machine I had bought. I wandered New York shopping and picking up the tab for lunches with friends.

  When the date on my ticket rolled around, I called Ari and told her I needed to change it. I told her my father needed me there to care for him for a few more weeks. Truthfully, I couldn’t bear the thought of packing up and leaving again. I told myself I just needed a break, that I’d feel differently soon. I bought a pair of cowboy boots with real silver details. I bought a platform bed.

  I was struck by mad inspiration. I decided that I was going to write a one-woman show based on my experiences in the sex industry. Not terribly original, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. By day, I sat in cafés and wrote my performance-art masterpiece. I bought a video camera. I bought a microwave oven.

  After the theater closed for the night, Sam, Penny, and I would drink Baileys on our fire escape and talk about memes and the viral transmission of ideas. Across the country, Southern California was in flames with the Los Angeles riots. We talked about the impossibility of outright revolution given the brainwashing effects of consumerism. Revolution would have to happen with a collective shift of consciousness. If what we were doing didn’t in some way precipitate that shift, we deemed it worthless. Being home and among my real friends was such a relief. I could talk again. I could breathe again. Another three weeks passed this way and I pushed my departure date again as Ari’s voice grew impatient on the other end of the line.

  I bought a pair of Chanel sunglasses that made me look like a fly. I bought a stun gun because you never know.

  Sean returned my phone calls but squashed any hope I’d had of reconciliation. To get my mind off Sean, Sam took me one night to meet an old Princeton buddy of his named
Andy. Sam knocked on the doorjamb next to where the curtain hung that separated my room from the rest of the apartment. He told me that Andy had called from the late-night club held at Windows on the World. Andy was there hanging out with Moby and he wanted to know if we’d join him. Sam had told me about Andy, the former child-prodigy composer who had never lost his Texas-bred predilections for six-packs and football games. I agreed to go; I wasn’t doing anything else.

  Yet another of the valuable skills I picked up in Brunei was the ability to get ready for almost any occasion in ten minutes. I had recently dyed my hair platinum blond and had discovered that blond privilege wasn’t an invention of my low self-esteem; it was a genuine fact. And though the bleach had burned my scalp and broke the ends of my hair clean off so I had to cut it into a bob, I was enjoying the extra attention. I was the Marilyn now. I styled it in pin curls in five minutes flat.

  I was used to dressing for clubs frequented by drag queens, so I glued on false eyelashes and sported a bustier, knee-high platforms, and zebra leggings. But when we arrived, the scene was more about techno music and oversize pants. I felt out of place among the girls who slouched around Moby, starved vegans wearing pacifiers and funny hats.

  Andy was an electronica composer, as well as a computer programmer—and he looked like one. He had long, stringy hair, terrible fucked-up teeth, and smart, blue-gray eyes. With his old classmate Tom, he had recently started a company called Tomandandy. Tomandandy had created a buzz. They had composed a popular dance hit. They had scored the exploding-head scene in Oliver Stone’s JFK. Andy was goofy and unassuming, but every time I got off the dance floor, he was waiting for me with a drink in his hand, the ensuing conversation hollered over the music with his lips occasionally brushing my ear. This, I thought, is why we like our music so loud at clubs. I couldn’t understand the words. His voice was part of the music itself.

  “What?” I yelled.

  And he leaned in again to repeat himself.

  At the end of the night the crowded elevator, the one that made your ears pop as it whizzed downward from the one-hundredth floor, got stuck. It stopped quietly, without a lurch or a screech. It took us all a few minutes to figure out we weren’t moving. A woman in a yellow dress stood rigidly and stared at the unmoving numbers. Her boyfriend, who had too much gel in his hair, scratched his neck and shuffled his feet. One of the other guys began to argue with the over-gelled guy. As the minutes went by, the elevator started to smell like panic and sweat.

  Andy and I were both calm. We sat down on the floor and talked, as if we were alone.

  “Sam told me you just came back from Singapore.”

  “Brunei. I was actually in a country called Brunei.”

  “The Sultan of Brunei.”

  “Exactly.”

  I tried to describe my job in a truthful but not overly truthful way. I told him that I had been a royal guest, a couch decoration at nightly parties. I waited for the fallout but as far as I could tell there was none. He acted as if I was describing my job volunteering at the children’s hospital. He listened with interest, without judgment. This guy was unicorn rare, because all men react one way or another to the revelation that you’re a sex worker.

  “If we were caught in this elevator for the next three days and the elevator-music channel was stuck, what would you want it to be playing?” I asked him, right before the cables came to life and the suspended box in which we sat resumed its journey down.

  “Bruckner,” he said. “I would want to sit here with you and listen to Bruckner.”

  He had one up on me because he had heard of the Sultan of Brunei, but I hadn’t heard of Bruckner. When we reached the bottom floor, we walked out into the night, spent and bonded by the fact that we had averted disaster. The financial district, emptied of its bankers and executives, looked like the proud ruins of a lost civilization.

  “I want to show you something,” he said.

  He took my hand, led me to a spot dead-center between the towers, and lay down on the ground without an explanation. I lay next to him. We looked up at the identical monoliths rising to touch the low night clouds, watched as they swayed slightly in the wind. I thought it was an optical illusion.

  “No,” he said. “They’re actually moving. Architecturally a building is much stronger if it gives a little bit.”

  Years later, I would remember that night. I would remember how New York had sparkled outside the wall of windows. How the whole city had seemed to breathe to the rhythm of the dance beat that throbbed through the club, which only hours before had been an elegant restaurant. How I had remembered sitting at that same restaurant with my parents when I was a little girl. We had gone for dinner there after the ballet one night. Maybe it had been Swan Lake.

  And I would remember that while the other people in the elevator had begun to get agro and fight with each other, Andy and I had sat down in the midst of it and talked about Bruckner. As I watched the towers fall almost ten years later, I thought of the night I got stuck in the elevator of the World Trade Center. I thought of the night I met Andy.

  The next night, Andy invited me over to the Tomandandy studio—an überhip SoHo loft still under renovation. I stepped out of a cab and navigated the cobblestones in my heels. His studio took up the entire floor of an old building on the corner of Spring and Greene.

  When the elevator doors opened, the starved vegans from the other night reappeared, smoking and leaning on the window ledges along the corridor. The lights were out for some reason, something about replacing the wiring. The hipsters in the hallway were lit only by the street-lights outside and by the glowing cigarette cherries next to their faces. I walked past them to a cavernous room that reeked of fresh paint. Piled in the center of the room was a disjointed city of computer and music equipment that remained lit due to the presence of a noisy generator. Snarled piles of cords were everywhere.

  In the corner of the room, washed in the blue of a computer screen, was Andy. He turned to me and smiled his wolf smile, his upper canines so crowded and pointy that it looked like he had a whole second set of teeth growing above the first ones. I knew that I was looking at a piece of my future.

  As I moved around the darkened loft that night, drifting from one cluster of bored New Yorkers to another, I noticed a trend. I fell into conversation with a Brooklyn filmmaker and his Norwegian-model import girlfriend. The filmmaker said Andy was his best friend. I met a club promoter who said the same thing. So did a Unix programmer and so did practically everyone else I talked to. I would later discover that people often said Andy was their best friend when he barely knew their name, because Andy was the world’s greatest listener. He inspired an easy intimacy that compelled strangers at bars to tell him their secrets and often spawned rivalries for his attention. The people around Andy were close with him but antagonistic toward each other.

  Andy and I snuck away from the party and went for a walk. We made out in a TriBeCa alley under a cupola of scaffolding. I recognized that Andy was a rare find. He was in need of a de-geeking makeover, but that was an easy fix. After a few more dates, I wedged myself into his life, becoming a regular installation at the studio and a source of untold drama between Andy and his business partner, Tom. I fit seamlessly into the pattern of everyone loving Andy and hating each other.

  I was in love, real love with a real boyfriend. I thought about Robin often, but didn’t miss him at all. When the date on my ticket came around again, I didn’t show up at the airport. I didn’t call Ari to cancel. I threw the ticket in the trash and walked forward into my new life as if the old one had never existed.

  Andy was infinitely fascinating and made lots of money and pretty much did whatever I said, which made him the perfect boyfriend in my eyes. Within a month we had moved in together. My realtor cousin found us an apartment on the corner of Mott and Houston. It might have been the ugliest apartment building in all of New York, one of those brick boxes with cheap brass fixtures and polished granite lobbies. Our buildin
g was the kind of eyesore that was the precursor to the glass-block monstrosities now blanketing downtown, encroaching farther and farther east toward the river until soon the whole Lower East Side will be a mass of cheaply built condos with the Gap or Jamba Juice in their bottom-floor retail spaces.

  But apartment hunting in New York was a horror that I didn’t feel like facing; I was characteristically impatient and took the first thing that came along. Our apartment was a one-bedroom comprising two minuscule white boxes, with an Easy-Bake-size kitchen along the wall of the living room.

  I packed up and moved my entire room at Penny’s in about five hours. I gave Andy a makeover and a home and he paid our rent and gave me someone to love. We got a python. I bought us a bed, a dresser, and a couch at a cheap furniture store on Sixth Avenue. My parents came into the city to have lunch with me on weekends and my mother constantly restocked our freezer with lasagna and chicken soup. I reheated her food for our dinners and called it cooking. We were practically all grown up.

  It was my fantasy in many ways, having this normal life but still being complete freaks. An arty hooker (or a hooker-y artist, depending on the day) and a genius computer hacker, taking over the world by day while enjoying quiet nights at home watching classic films and eating Chunky Monkey. On odd nights, when the stars aligned, this is what our life looked like. But truthfully, I spent many of those nights alone. Andy was a workaholic and was almost never home. I told myself that it was ideal because I was a girl who needed her space. Andy wasn’t the only one with a career. I had my own career to think about.

  I went on auditions and went back to working at the Wooster Group a few hours a week. I filled notebooks with my scribbles of script ideas. Most afternoons I walked to Andy’s studio, sat on the long orange custom-made leather couch, and ate sushi while I watched Andy work, composing music on his elaborate computer console. He was so talented, so unassuming, so fucking smart. I envied him. He didn’t have to audition for anyone or fuck anyone or pretend to be something he wasn’t or kiss anyone’s ass or beg for a role, a job, a chance. He just had to be Andy. That’s what you get from the world for being exceptional. The rest of us have to work harder. If I were just me, just Jill, I’d be nowhere.