Some Girls: My Life in a Harem (16 page)

The blond stewardess changed her tone to a polite flatline when she told me I would simply be standing in the Sultan’s cabin and taking drink orders. No cleaning bathrooms after all. I’m not sure what was said during that conversation, but whatever it was built an invisible wall between them and me. The toothy one stationed me by the door of a large sitting room that was lined in polished dark wood and surrounded by windows. They left me standing there and for the rest of the day the only person who talked to me was the bartender when he was filling my drink orders.

I didn’t have to stand there doing nothing for long. Soon, there was a commotion as a gaggle of nannies and kids tumbled past me and into the lounge. It must have been more than just the immediate family, because it seemed like there were a lot of them. The Sultan and the Queen followed close behind. The Sultan looked less imposing in person than he did on the money. The Queen was twice his size and wore a shapeless traditional outfit with lots of sparkles. As we sailed, I watched her sit there quietly all day and smile graciously at what people said to her. She seemed to enjoy watching the kids play, but never left her seat to join them.

All day I brought the family sodas and then cleared their glasses when they were done. I passed around trays of appetizers. The Queen smiled at me and looked me in the eye, and she even seemed apologetic when she caught my attention to ask for a refill. As if I was busy doing something else. Man, I felt like a twat. My best guess was that I was there serving Coke to the guy’s kids so he could get a good look at my ass.

The Sultan was handsome in a different way than Robin, slightly older, more serious. His mustache was more Magnum, P.I., and less Errol Flynn. He disregarded me. I began to suspect that maybe there had been an error in communication. Someone had thought to send me to the boat but hadn’t told anyone what I was doing there—not even the Sultan. But at the end of the trip, when the Sultan and the Queen left the room, he looked me in the eye for the first time, gave me a knowing smile, and actually winked. I attempted to give him a look that portrayed utter irresistibility. He was the Sultan, after all, and if I was being passed along I was going to make the best of it.

My survival instinct had kicked in. I didn’t have any reason to believe that if I was unwanted, was deemed uninteresting and undesirable, I would be thrown off a cliff or stoned to death in a public square or shoved in the trunk of a car, never to be seen again. Yet I was ready to fight with all I had to stay on the tightrope of royal favor. Maybe there didn’t need to be a threat of corporeal danger; maybe the threat of being unlovable was enough. Looking back, it was good that the fight was growing in me, because I was about to need it.

 

When we docked, no one was there to pick me up, but the specter of being forgotten no longer worried me.

I returned the uniform and napped on a bench in the ship’s galley until finally the bartender shook my shoulder and told me a driver had come to get me. Another of the more useful skills I picked up in Brunei is my ability to sleep almost anywhere with almost anything going on around me. I can curl up on a bench in a mall, a hotel bathtub, an airport floor and be asleep in seconds. When it is dark and I’m alone in my own bed, I have a harder time. For some reason, there’s little danger of nightmares when sleeping on a bench.

By the time I returned to the compound everyone else had already left for the party. I took off my clothes as I walked through the room, plopped myself into the tub, and calculated that I had exactly half an hour to get to the party if I wanted to be there before the Prince showed up. It was understood that we had better be dying of malaria if we missed the party; otherwise we risked having to retreat ten paces, land on a chute, and be punished, ignored. I powdered the tender skin of my nose, which was already turning pink from my brief moment on the ship’s deck, then threw my hair up and hopped into a golf cart.

It was after ten when I arrived and I hadn’t made it in time. Robin was already in the room, leaning on the edge of a couch and talking to Yoya. Yoya was wide-eyed and gesticulating; she looked like a little girl telling her father about a particularly egregious event that had happened that day on the school playground. Robin was listening with his arms crossed and an indulgent half smile on his face. I saw something in his expression that distracted me to the point of catching the toe of my shoe on the carpet and stumbling a bit. He looked soft, unstudied. He looked like he loved her. Not a passionate love—more of a paternal one. It could have been a trick of the low lighting, a trick of my brain, but it gave me pause.

Though they pointedly didn’t even glance in my direction, there was a treacherous energy around Serena and Leanne, a storm threatening to break and pour down on my head. It unsettled me. I steadied myself and walked toward my chair, toward the heavy storm clouds, but Eddie headed me off at the pass and yanked me right back outside. He had been waiting for me to show up.

It was Eddie who cued the girl chosen by the Prince to slip out of the party on any given night. That night I was the one. He led me down a staircase to a room I hadn’t been in before. It was a huge, round room, its perimeter lined with doors. It looked like a game show. Behind door number three is a new refrigerator, behind door number six is a tiger, behind door number seven is . . . a bedroom, where Eddie deposited me and turned the lock from the outside. It seemed all the rooms in the palace locked from the outside. Robin arrived fifteen minutes later.

“Tell me all about your day. What happened? Did you meet him?”

I sensed that it was important to Robin that his brother had approved of me. I told him some of the choice details of my day. I thought it best not to mention the wife. The wives floated around like family secrets everyone pretends not to know about—always present, never mentioned.

“What did you think of my brother?”

“He winked. He smiled. He was nice.”

“He winked?”

Robin seemed pleased and pulled out a digital camera. I had never seen one before. Was he now taking pictures of me to send to the Sultan?

“For us,” he said, in answer to my psychic question.

There was an us? I was relieved. I didn’t want to be passed off. It would make me feel like Robin had tagged my ear and put me up for auction. Even if I was a piece of property, I wanted to be more highly valued than that.

Any set of circumstances can become the normal shape of your days if you let it. The same girl who only weeks before had emphatically advised a sobbing friend to dump her cheating cad of a boyfriend could, without skipping a beat, sit on the edge of a bed hoping for love from a man with not one but probably forty or so other girlfriends, who were all sitting fifty feet away—and that wasn’t even counting his
wives
. I had morphed from Patti Smith to Patty Hearst. What would Patty Hearst do? She’d fall for Robin, if only to save herself from boredom and disgust, from becoming sick of herself and everyone else. It was a setup.

Robin had been educated at England’s finest schools, was powerful in the realms of both finance and politics, was a pathological narcissist, a professional manipulator, a sex addict, and a master collector of women. I didn’t have a chance. I thought that surely he’d never met anyone like me before. Maybe I’d be different. Maybe I’d be the one to make him happy. Maybe I’d be happy myself in return.

He plugged the camera into a monitor on an occasional table in the corner of the room and began to snap pictures of me. I could see the monitor from where I lay on the bed. There I was on the screen, a pornographic parody, a round-faced, plump-assed little girl with only thigh-highs on.

“Look at you. You are perfect,” he said later as he scrolled though the shots. “You must not change.”

I was perfect. Throw me that snazzy little beret, Patty. I’ll take it from here on out.

When we were dressed and ready to go back to the party, Robin handed me a box. In it was a gold chain with a diamond heart charm. It was the first piece of jewelry he gave me and much less extravagant than my later diamond-faced Rolexes and Bulgari sets, but it was far more intimate, my most personal gift from him. My chest flushed. I had become one of those girls who got to open jewelry boxes and discover what surprise sparkled out at her, one of those girls who lifted her hair while a necklace was fastened around her neck.

The necklace sealed the deal. When I returned to my seat wearing it, Serena and Leanne didn’t even look at me. They talked sotto voce and I distinctly heard the word
fat.
Then I heard the word
hooker.
I was exhausted, sunburned, my skin worn thin; tears sprung to my eyes. It wasn’t just Serena and Leanne. It was the years of spending lunchtime in the art room, hiding out from the same brand of cruelty, from the bared teeth that had changed only in that they were no longer fenced in by braces. You’d have thought I’d have been immune to it by then, but I never quite got used to the sting. I berated myself for my weakness—never let them see you cry.

Over the music, Fiona called to me. I turned and she waved me over. I walked and sat in the spot next to her, an empty chair in between us because Robin was making his rounds. My face was hot and I willed my eyes to absorb my tears. I didn’t want anyone to see me wipe them, so I let one just roll down my face and brushed it from my chin when I brought my drink to my lips.

Fiona didn’t acknowledge my tears or the fact that she had just rescued me. She was a marvel. I never saw her play a sloppy hand. Me, I’m sloppy by nature. As soon as I sew up one seam another busts.

I needed an ally and Fiona was it. I didn’t exactly trust her, but I was beginning to see her strategy. It was most useful to her to be friends with the girl on Robin’s left. That’s why she’d been giving my back a scratch here and there. I assumed she intended for me to scratch her back by not trying to unseat her. If so, that was fine with me. If this was what it was like to be the second favorite, I didn’t want to know what it would be like to be Fiona.

 

 

 

 

F
or the next two nights I was the girl missing from the party.

At a cue from Eddie, I snuck out and waited in that same bedroom for Robin. As I sat there I remembered a middle-school birthday party for a girl I couldn’t stand but who was so popular I couldn’t turn down the invite, a girl so popular that my mother had insisted on a new dress and a new hairstyle. A girl from a family so rich and so ridiculous that one of the party activities involved a tall glass box that blew dollar bills around while you tried to grab as many as you could in thirty seconds. I had snuck out of that party, too.

I had stolen away to meet a boy who was also way more popular than I was. He was broad in the shoulders before the other boys, but there was also something dark around his edges. There was a tiredness under his eyes, a slight jaundice to his olive skin. There was a packet of insulin needles in his backpack. There were plastic bears full of honey in the desks of all his teachers in case of a dangerous drop in blood sugar.

I don’t know what made Danny choose me out of all the girls at the party that night. He cued me with a nod of his head and we met on the putting green, then walked side by side across the grass. I took off my pink satin shoes with the tiny rose clips and then I took off my white stockings in order to feel the grass under my feet. The lawn glowed fluorescent green and the night was soft. I lay on his suit jacket and we kissed in the deep shadows of the trees and it was a new kind of sweet, getting something as unlikely as a kiss from Danny Rosen while looking up at a full spring moon.

Sneaking out of the Prince’s party was hardly as new or as sweet, but it had a similar aftertaste. Being wanted and being somewhere so strange was almost magical.

Almost, but not quite. I still had a plane ticket to leave for home the next day. Ari was slated to return from Los Angeles the next morning to see Destiny and me off. The new crop of party girls traveling with Ari would replace us. I had retrieved my suitcase from the downstairs closet and was already mostly packed.

Even after Robin came to meet me that night, he didn’t mention my plane ticket. I was disappointed that he was letting me go so easily, but I tried to console myself, telling myself that overall it had been a good experience. No need to get too dramatic; I knew that I’d get over Robin and that my time in Brunei would eventually make for an entertaining story. After everything, at least there is the story.

And I would be glad to get my money. Rumor had it they handed you an envelope, a “gift.” You put it in your bag and looked at it later. The girls all assured me that it would be way more than we had been promised. The Prince hadn’t fallen in love with me after all. My tiara-crowned fantasies were all but extinguished. But a big part of me was glad to be going home to the things I cared about: my friends, the theater, the grand love affair that is New York itself, my life that was only just starting.

I was in my chair and Fiona was in hers while Robin made his usual lazy stroll around the room with his vodka tonic in one hand and his invisible scepter in the other. Fiona was happy to chat as we sat there, and just as happy to stay quiet. She wasn’t as phony as the other girls. Either that or her phoniness was so sophisticated as to be undetectable.

I tried to memorize the faces of the girls, the corners where the wall met the ceiling, what Robin looked like with his back turned. I sealed the details in a mental photo album that I could take out and show people when nights at Max Fish approached closing time.

I watched Eddie lead Destiny out of the room to give her the notorious envelope. She gave me a wink when she walked back in. I watched as she gave her good-bye hugs to the party girls, the men and the servants she had gotten to know. Everyone was fond of her. She had been truly entertaining, with her giant boobs and outrageous outfits and frank talk.