Some Girls_ My Life In A Harem Part 12

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 s.h.i.+ne 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 a.s.signed stall in the playboy's stable, I befriended Ben. It was refres.h.i.+ng 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 rea.s.sured 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 pa.s.sed 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 resume, she was building a legit business as a wedding and headshot photographer. With her only-semi-ironic cheerleader att.i.tude and her a.s.s-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 a.s.shole 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 amba.s.sadors 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 wh.o.r.e and pay whatever other wh.o.r.e is the least popular to hold your baby while you work because crying babies are bad for business or you can not be a wh.o.r.e and tell your family the truth and be considered a wh.o.r.e 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 a.s.s 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 sh.o.r.eline. 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 j.a.panese 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 kneel 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 anch.o.r.ed 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 s.a.d.i.s.tic 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 Pretty Woman and all night pulling stunts to try to get Robin's attention. 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. I love you. Don't leave me. So unoriginal. 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.

After Leanne left, I began to notice that Brittany was often the girl gone from the room during disco, the girl who returned to the guesthouse after lunch. I took the opposite tack Serena had taken. First of all, Serena's method hadn't worked, and second of all, it wasn't in my nature to ostracize and torture other people. Instead, I sidled up to Brittany and made her my friend. Wasn't that what Fiona had done with me? But I flattered myself. I was no Fiona. Fiona had done more than just kiss my a.s.s for information. She had done more than my unoriginal attempt to keep my enemy closer. Fiona had created me.

Brittany had a lot to say about the shabby-chic couch and love seat she was going to buy. White, white, white-she'd always wanted a white couch. She wanted white couches flanked by wrought-iron candlesticks and a matching wrought-iron canopy bed surrounded with the most transparent white silk curtains, blowing in the breeze from the open French windows, no doubt. I was convinced she was styling her own music video starring her and Vince Neil.

"Have you spoken to Vince?" I prompted her. She never tired of the question.

"Well, he's on the road. It's hard. We keep missing each other. But I believe in us."

"You're a girl of great faith."

"Vince told me that if I ever have doubts, I should just sit very still and close my eyes and think of his face. He said that I'll be able to feel what he's doing and then I'll know in my heart he's being faithful. Also, if I concentrate hard enough, he'll feel it too and he'll know I'm thinking of him. And do you know what? It works."

If in fact she was telling the truth about her conversations with Vince, I hoped for her sake that Vince wasn't employing the same psychic technique on Brittany.

My new friend was as stimulating as an instruction manual for a dishwasher, but she did have her usefulness. For instance, she revealed to me her dieting secret. Dr. Gordon, the Prince's doctor and a regular fixture at the parties, was giving her diet pills. I'm pretty sure Robin didn't know about it, because he wouldn't have approved of his girls starving themselves.

Now, I'm a person who never turns down pills. And if you are the kind of person who never turns down pills, you must always, always turn down pills. I hadn't figured that out yet.

"Can I have one?"

"Of course. This will be great. We can be diet buddies. We can work out together. We can support each other."

Brittany pulled out a white plastic bottle that rattled with half-clear, half-blue capsules, the kind with a billion little beads inside each one. I put one in the palm of my hand and popped it into my mouth, because that's what some girls do. Hand some girls a pill from a bottle labeled in a foreign language and they'll put it right on their tongues without a second thought.

"Super," said Brittany. "Start out with one and work your way up to two a day."

I had begun about fifteen thousand diets in my eighteen years on earth. I had started my first diet when I was nine. But I wasn't done yet, not even close. I'd diet until I liked myself, G.o.ddammit. I was convinced it was possible, even though all of the evidence showed that it didn't work. Not the diet part; that usually worked just fine. It was the liking-myself part that never happened.

The landscape of my body over the years, the deposits and erosions, the seasons of it seen next to each other would look like a time-lapse movie that spans thousands of years in a few minutes. I am a curvy, st.u.r.dy la.s.s by nature, with thick peasant hands and hips to balance a laundry basket on. I generally lean toward the fecundity of spring but occasionally tilt madly toward winter. I like to, when I can, shed my leaves so that the branches are bare, brittle. I like my blood to run cold as the snow-no fuel to feed the fire that warms it.

Basically, I am a chubby girl with fits of anorexia and bulimia. And nothing makes me feel better than to have that delicious sensation of control when the numbers start peeling off the scale. In high school, I imagined I could subsist on the minerals from the air, like an orchid. I tried to grow thin, thin, thin, no longer bound to the earth, to my family and its landslide of pain.

It worked. I did it. I was finally light as a ballerina, my arms lovely ribbons, my ribs a keyboard. My skin was blue pale, my body so immaterial that it seemed to me the light of inspiration, the light of G.o.d himself, could s.h.i.+ne through me. Touch my bony chest and you could feel my heart so close to the surface that it thumped like a funk ba.s.s line through a subwoofer. Except n.o.body touched me. People turned their eyes away. I noticed, but no longer cared. I was impeccable. I had never felt so clean.

My lips turned purple. I wore layers of sweaters and filled my pockets with quarters in antic.i.p.ation of the surprise attacks of the school nurse, who would pop out of doorways and drag me onto a scale, looking for a number low enough to warrant hospitalization. Even as the spring sun revived the muddy winter lawns, I stayed cold. I wrapped my body in boots and long skirts and petticoats. I braided my hair and imagined myself a tragic consumptive character out of a Jane Austen novel.

In a condo in Roseland, a few miles down a stretch of Route 10, my grandmother grew thinner and thinner too, as her cancer gained strength and ma.s.s. She had mesothelioma, cancer of the lining of the internal organs. She got it from breathing in the asbestos fibers that had permeated the air inside the Newark schools where she had worked for so many years as a librarian. There are so many ways poison can take hold.

She told me one day, as I ma.s.saged the chain of knots that her spine had become, that she didn't want to have to watch me die, that her dying was hard enough as it was. She asked me to eat.

Her request was enough to inspire my eating a carefully measured quant.i.ty of brown rice, seaweed, and vegetables each day. I gave the eulogy at her funeral and then got out of New Jersey about five minutes after they lowered her coffin into the ground. My grandmother had been my best friend and I spent her last year so hungry that I couldn't pay attention, so self-obsessed that I forgot to ask her about her life, even though I knew she'd be dead before the year was out. If I didn't ask, who would? She never kept a journal, so her memories are gone now, a treasure buried without a map.

When I got to NYU I started drinking and the drinking led me back to eating and within six months I had gained the fifty pounds back and more. I had lost all that time, starving and distracted and unable to think clearly enough to ask her even what Vienna had been like before the war, for nothing.

And not only did I commit that crime, but I didn't learn from it. Because still, I thought this time would be different. The little pill went down with a swig of iced tea and I imagined I was swallowing not speed, not poison, but hope, help.

I took the phentermine pills and started quietly obsessing about losing weight again. I wasn't alone. Most of the girls in Brunei took pills. We drank laxative teas. Even though we could have ordered any food we wanted, we ordered plain chicken and steamed veggies and tried to fill up on lettuce sprinkled with lemon juice and balsamic vinegar. This is the Faustian bargain for many women who make their bodies their livelihood. Your body will be wors.h.i.+pped by others but hated by you. It will give others pleasure but it will give you only pain. In the mirrors at the gym, we watched for the appearance of every new hollow and cut as we did the Cindy Crawford workout on a screen the size of a whole wall, Cindy's mole the size of a tennis ball. I tirelessly admired my own clavicle.

Before I left for Brunei, Penny had given me Jeanette Winterson's s.e.xing the Cherry s.e.xing the Cherry to bring along with me. I read it while, pills or no, hunger gnawed at my stomach. The heroine in the book had a giant hiding inside her, a monster. That was me. Except inside me wasn't a giant. Inside me was a skeleton. Lurking inside me was the anorexic girl whose elbow circ.u.mference had exceeded that of her forearm. I was that kind of monster. But that monster was the real me, I thought. When I starved myself, I was becoming that real me. To reduce yourself to only the very essential elements, that was poetry. Maybe Robin wouldn't notice. Or maybe, conversely, it would make him finally notice me again. to bring along with me. I read it while, pills or no, hunger gnawed at my stomach. The heroine in the book had a giant hiding inside her, a monster. That was me. Except inside me wasn't a giant. Inside me was a skeleton. Lurking inside me was the anorexic girl whose elbow circ.u.mference had exceeded that of her forearm. I was that kind of monster. But that monster was the real me, I thought. When I starved myself, I was becoming that real me. To reduce yourself to only the very essential elements, that was poetry. Maybe Robin wouldn't notice. Or maybe, conversely, it would make him finally notice me again.

I lost fourteen pounds in only a few weeks, and at the party one night Robin told me I was getting too thin. The tricky thing about starving yourself is that it starts out feeling terrible and then it feels great until you realize you can't stop. By the time Robin mentioned it, I had already crossed that line. I knew I was hurting my chances with Robin but I was past logic. I wouldn't-I couldn't-start eating.

Fueled by ephedrine and willpower, I spent my late afternoons on the tennis courts, hitting ball after ball fired at me from the machines. I remember one particular day that when I finished, it was dusty pink twilight. I was steaming and drenched from the weather and the exertion. I walked over to the lower pool, shed my clothes, and slipped into the water. When I had cooled down, I pulled myself onto the pool deck and lay on my back, looking up at the crescent moon that was rising above the palace. At night, Brunei was breathtaking.

I lay in the shadow of a fairy-tale palace, breathing air so heavy with the smell of flowers it should have been bottled. I'm happy, I thought. Right now. Alone. In between the ground and the stars, in between the empty afternoon and the torturous evening. No mirrors. No party dresses. No one asking me for anything and nothing I want. And then the moment was over and it was time for the mirrors and the party dresses again.

A month came and went without my cycle. Was it possible that I was pregnant? A royal pregnancy was what all the girls hoped for because if you had the Prince's baby, you would be taken care of for the rest of your life. Of course, you would be taken care of under armed guard. You would be installed in a luxury apartment in Singapore and would never have another boyfriend, never even be able to go out to dinner again without being watched. At first I was scared; then I began scheming.

There was no question that I would have the baby, but I would have to get out of Brunei first. I would have to do it without anyone knowing. It would be our secret, the baby's and mine. One day I would tell her that her daddy was a fabulously wealthy, devilishly handsome Southeast Asian prince, and that I had loved him very much, but that I'd had to spirit her away to a life in which we could both be free. Maybe we would struggle, but it would be a life of such overwhelming love.

The thought of pregnancy gave me new hope, a new reason to stick it out in Brunei for a little while longer. I figured that my life with Robin was now a finite thing and that I would need all the money I could get. I hugged my chest and poked my fingertips into the sides of my b.r.e.a.s.t.s. They ached. They were definitely bigger. I strayed from my diet and snuck down to the dimly lit kitchen at five a.m. to stuff my face with cream puffs from the pastry tray. I didn't sweat it too much; I told myself I was just having cravings.

But there was no pregnancy; I was just starving. And when I started eating for my imagined two, I got my period. I sat on the toilet and lay my chest on my knees. I saw that my secret baby fantasy was at best laughable, at worst delusional. For months I had been teetering on the edge of a depressive episode, and the day I saw blood the scales tipped. Of course I hadn't been pregnant. I was all torn and sick inside. Nothing could live in me. I was toxic straight through.