The Currency of Love

by Jill Dodd

  “Adnan wants you to sleep in here, and Nora will sleep in the yellow room.” The floor is rough-hewn slate, cold for a bedroom. The twin beds are topped with stiff zebra skins, and an actual zebra leg lamp sits on the desk by the sliding glass door. Underneath is a real elephant foot that has been hollowed out to use for a trash can. A lion-skin rug is on the floor, his face frozen in his last roar. This room is cold and creepy. I think it is disgusting, and I hope it was Omar Sharif’s taste and not Adnan’s.

  Nora’s room, on the other hand, is decorated in yellow Laura Ashley floral. I hang out there instead. As night falls, the nocturnal animals outside come to life. Birds squawk, and I hear what sounds like bears growling and monkeys screeching. The estate manager slides heavy wood shutters over all the doors and windows to keep us safe. Nora and I look at each other in disbelief. Finally, she says in English, with her heavy Swedish accent, “I am not sleeping in here alone with wild animals right outside.”

  I crack up, nodding in agreement. “I’ll stay with you—have you seen my room? It’s terrifying!” We turn out the lights and giggle nervously at the noises outside, but soon I fall into a deep sleep. I have learned to sleep anywhere, anytime.

  In the morning, the scent of coffee and freshly baked bread coaxes us into the dining room, where the chef has a full breakfast waiting. The view outside the sliding glass doors is incredible. Just outside, from the pool, you can see the Mediterranean, the Strait of Gibraltar, the Rock of Gibraltar, and even Morocco. It is so beautiful that it doesn’t look real.

  Adnan flew his masseur, Tony, over to work on us, and even his chiropractor pays us a visit. I have a broken tailbone from a gymnastics fall in junior high and it always causes my lower back to ache. The chiropractor does an adjustment on me and it feels so much better. My back is straight and my posture good for the first time in years.

  But then we go to the horse stables on the property and ride Adnan’s Arabian horses. It doesn’t occur to me that it could mess up my back, but something crunches and cracks and I feels like it’s broken all over again. I am in terrible pain. I’m not a complainer though, and try to go on as usual. Tony’s massages help.

  We tour the town, shopping for souvenirs and eating lunch outside by the docks. The chef prepares delicious, healthy meals daily. Nora and I stargaze through the powerful telescope on the patio. I have never seen the moon or Venus in such detail. I don’t have to worry about a thing. Everything is taken care of. As each day passes, I relax a little deeper.

  After nearly a week, in the middle of the night, I feel someone shaking me. Dominic whispers, “There she is. She’s right here.”

  Adnan whispers playfully, “I’ve been looking all over for you.” He takes my hand. “Shhh, come, come.” He leads me to a different wing of the house. “You were supposed to be in the animal room. I even went to Dominic and Ines’s bed and pulled off all the covers looking for you. I thought you were having a threesome.” He’s giggling and way too alert.

  I’m so sleepy that his words don’t register. He brings me to his bedroom and we sit on the bed while I try to wake up.

  “I came to you as soon as I could. I just flew in.”

  “Oh you did? That’s sweet,” I say, groggily.

  “I missed you so much. Did you miss me? What have you been doing since I saw you?”

  “Just working a lot, until I came here, that is.”

  “You don’t have another boyfriend, do you?” he teases.

  “No, no. I don’t.”

  “Good. I’ve been traveling so much since I saw you—so many meetings in so many countries. But enough about work, let me make you a bath.”

  He makes a beautiful bath with scented bubbles and vanilla candles. I take off my oversize T-shirt and panties and slide in. Adnan sits on a stool next to the tub. He is engaged and attentive, listening intensely and asking me deep, challenging questions. I’m still sleepy.

  He asks, “When did you lose your virginity?”

  “Oh my god, really?”

  “Yes, really.”

  “Well, I’ve never told anyone this, but it was in the back of a truck at a drive-in movie, with my boyfriend, Jack.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “How many men have you been with?”

  “Just Jack.” I don’t mention my unwanted sex with Gerald. I’m still confused about that whole thing.

  “So, I hear you rode my Arabian horses. Did you enjoy them?”

  “Yes, they’re beautiful and so sweet.” I don’t mention my back is aching.

  “And have you met the Count? He’s a character, a good friend of mine.”

  “Umm, no, not yet. Is he coming over?”

  “Yes, I’m not sure when. Do you like the bubble bath? The scent?”

  “Yes, what is it?”

  “It’s mint. I buy it directly from Morocco. It’s my favorite.” Then he asks, “Do you want some cocaine?”

  “No. I don’t.” I sink down to my chin in the bubbles.

  “Come on, it’ll be fun. Have some.” He pours a pile on the side of the tub and maneuvers it into two fat lines with a razor blade. Then he rolls an American one-hundred-dollar bill. “Just try a little, it’s not dangerous.” He snorts a line. I am afraid of cocaine and have always refused it. “Just take a little, it’ll wake you up.”

  I don’t know why, but eventually I take the rolled bill and snort about a third of a line. My nose feels cold and burns at the same time, then my heart starts racing, and my mind becomes super clear. I feel happy and awake, like him. We talk even more and he says, “I don’t do this very often. Just to have fun sometimes.”

  “That’s good,” I say.

  I dry off and he hands me a long dark blue Arab caftan, a thaub, matching the one he is wearing. We sit on his bed, talking and laughing.

  Every single emotion I feel for him is present in that bed. I have been gradually falling in love with him and haven’t stopped thinking about him since the pirate party, the night on his ship, the times in Paris, and the thorny fruit. I keep wishing he’d make a move on me, but the fact that he hasn’t only makes me want him more. My sex drive has been raging, and my emotions longing for love. Everything bubbles to the surface, and for the first time since I moved to Paris, I am sure I want to make love.

  “The only difference between you and me is that I’m a Muslim and you’re a Christian.”

  I look at him confused. “I’m not a Christian.”

  “You’re American, so you’re Christian.”

  “I wasn’t raised with religion,” I say. “My parents hate religion.” I feel so ashamed of my ignorance.

  “Do you have any brothers and sisters?” I ask, changing the subject.

  “I have two brothers and a sister who live in the US, and a sister in London.” I later learn that his sister, Samira Khashoggi, is married to the Harrods businessman and owner of the Paris Ritz Hotel, Mohammed Al Fayed, and they are the parents of Dodi Al Fayed, who died tragically with Princess Diana in Paris.

  “So, why did you get divorced?”

  “My wife had an affair. Several actually. So I found ten girls to have sex with at the same time, as revenge.”

  My eyes get big. “That’s crazy, did you do it?”

  “Yep, all eleven of us in one bed. I kicked a couple of them out at some point.” He laughs. It is obvious to me that he is still hurt over his wife, Soraya. She bruised him badly. “I learned a valuable lesson though. I’ll never marry in the traditional way ever again. I have another arrangement. It’s not new. Thousands of years ago, so many men were killed in battle that there weren’t enough men to care for all the women and children. I’m sure you’ve read about this in the Bible.”

  “No, but it sounds familiar.” Maybe I heard it in history class?

  “If a man was killed, his brother would take his brother’s wife as his own and raise his brother’s children. Women and children needed protection, food, and shelter. It was a nece
ssity for men to take many wives. Today, in Saudi Arabia, among royalty and men of high esteem, it still goes on this way. These men are allowed to have three legal wives and eleven pleasure wives. Jill, I am one of these men.” We’re sitting crisscross applesauce in our thaubs on the bed.

  I look him dead in the eyes, trying to remember all the details. His arrangement doesn’t sound so strange, unusual maybe, but not strange. It seems like he is trying to justify or sell me on the idea of being with him, which isn’t even necessary. I’ve already fallen for him and don’t need any of his reasons. I push his speech to the back of my mind and focus on the intelligent, brown-eyed man with the long eyelashes in front of me.

  “I want you to be my pleasure wife. I’d like to make a contract with you,” he says very seriously.

  “I don’t need a contract.” I shake my head.

  “Please listen,” he says, gently holding my face in his hands. “I will provide for all of your financial needs. You can travel with me anywhere. If you need me, call me. I will always call you back within twenty-four hours and send a plane to pick you up. If you stay with me for ten years, and you want to have my child, I will marry you in a legal ceremony and we’ll have children together.”

  “You don’t need to make promises. I just want to be with you.”

  He continues, “You can date other men as long as they’re not from Saudi Arabia. It would be very embarrassing if I were at a dinner party with men from my country and we found out we were with the same woman.” He acts hesitantly, unsure if I will accept his offer. “There is another advantage to being with me. I can introduce you to a young duke, lord, or prince. Don’t fall in love with me. I’m too old for you. You need to marry a young prince, Jill. I’ll find you a prince or duke to marry.”

  I am not even sure what a duke or lord is. Can’t we get on with this? “I don’t care about a contract or a duke or lord.”

  “But I do. Before I can kiss you, I need to make a contract with you. I want you to be my pleasure wife. Will you?”

  “Yes.” We start kissing and making out on the bed. I want to make love with him.

  I stop and sit up. “Wait, I don’t have any birth control.”

  “It’s okay, I’ve had a vasectomy.”

  “Then how can you have more children?”

  “The doctors took my sperm and froze it. It’s kept in a sperm bank. I can get it whenever I want. So in ten years if you want to have a baby, we can.” I had never heard of such a thing.

  Finally, we make love. Our bodies flow together perfectly. We never sleep. I lie snuggled into his neck, my head on his shoulder, when he gets an idea. “Let’s go hunting!”

  “Hunting? Wow, where?”

  “In the nature preserve—around the house.”

  “You’re not going to kill anything, are you?”

  “If I’m lucky I will.”

  “Oh, please don’t.”

  “Come on, it’ll be fun. Get dressed and meet me in the breakfast room.”

  I throw on jeans, a sweatshirt, and tennis shoes, and come out to a beautiful breakfast on the coffee table. How does the chef always know what’s going on? Five bodyguards with submachine guns hanging across their chests stand around while I nibble and watch the sunrise. Adnan sits on the couch next to me and hands me a square, black leather envelope. I have never seen a leather envelope and have no idea what could be inside. I open it carefully to reveal a heart-shaped ring covered in diamonds and a necklace with diamond hearts all the way around. He puts the ring on my finger and fastens the necklace around my neck. I am glad it isn’t the queen of England–style jewelry like the catalogs in his Paris home.

  His driver pulls an open-topped Jeep around, we jump in and take off into the preserve surrounding the estate. When the men spot a beautiful antelope in the bushes a good distance away, they quietly roll to a stop. Adnan takes aim with his rifle, while I hold my breath, hoping he’ll miss. Thankfully, he does. He also misses the long-horned sheep and the mountain goats.

  After shooting, we go to the helipad for a tour of the area in his helicopter. The pilot drops us off at the harbor, where we jump in a superfast cigarette boat. We lie back on the engine cover holding hands, speeding and bobbing through the sea, laughing. Adnan has managed to push every single one of my happy buttons. Speedboats are my ultimate weakness. Then he takes me dress shopping.

  He tells me he needs to attend meetings in another country, and that he would meet me in Kenya. The rest of us continue vacationing in Spain. Sabine, a quiet girl from Denmark, who is about my age with dark hair and blue eyes, joins us. I assume she is a friend of Dominic and Ines’s. Adnan’s friend, known as the Count, comes to visit. Jaime de Mora y Aragón is a dapper gentleman who looks a lot like Salvador Dalí. This man knows how to entertain a table. One day, while we all enjoy an al fresco lunch, he tells stories of fighting in a foreign war, and that instead of marijuana, they used to roll and smoke black tea and ground pepper. He rolls up one of his concoctions and we all try it. It seems to work a little.

  I love spending time talking with Ines. She looks like a Swedish version of the seventies model Jerry Hall. She has an air of class and sophistication and seems so worldly and wise. She met Dominic while she was modeling in Paris. She says that she and her friends would scheme to meet a rich man by saving all their modeling money to splurge on a breakfast at the Hotel George V, where rich businessmen dined. That was how she met Dominic, as I remember. She also explains that Adnan had saved Dominic from some sort of financial trouble. Anyway, he works for Adnan now. Doing what, I don’t know.

  The whole dynamic with Dominic, Ines, and her niece makes me feel like I am in a family. I feel safe with them. Ines is like a glamorous mother, Dominic a handsome, manly father, and Nora a sister.

  I don’t know if it’s true because I wasn’t there, but there are theories about Adnan’s involvement in negotiating the release of the Iranian hostages after the November election. Ronald Reagan and George Bush worried that if they were released before the election, Jimmy Carter would be reelected. Some accounts say that Adnan was in Paris on my birthday, negotiating the October surprise. All I know for sure is that he left Spain on a business trip and was gone on my birthday, October 19.

  I turn twenty-one in Marbella, about a week after becoming Adnan’s pleasure wife. He’s gone on business, and I’m still not sure what a pleasure wife is or whether to take the whole thing seriously.

  I think about my friends in California, imagining what kind of crazy things we’d do together for my birthday. We’d probably head to Vegas and dance all night at a club. The chef prepares a special dinner and birthday cake. Everyone gives me little gifts, and we all go dancing at Jimmy’z disco. But tonight, I really miss my old friends, especially Scarlett.

  Maasai welcoming Adnan to Kenya, 1980

  LOVE IN AFRICA

  October 1980, Kenya

  We board Adnan’s private DC-9 in Málaga, Spain, and head to Nairobi, Kenya. We are each handed a thaub to wear. After a chef-prepared meal, everyone but me climbs into beds that fold out from the plane’s walls. I’m too excited to sleep and instead sit between the pilots in the cockpit, where we all talk for hours. I’m very curious about the life of private jet pilots. Flying over Egypt, they point out the Nile by the twinkling lights that snake along on either side. I had always dreamed of seeing the Nile.

  Just after sunrise, we stop to refuel in Cairo when, seemingly out of nowhere, bayonet-wielding Egyptian soldiers, wearing military uniforms and turbans, surround the plane. I am used to European soldiers in modern uniforms that look more like suits, with machine guns. These soldiers look like they’re from another time period and seem unpredictable.

  Two military officers board and the general stands guard on the plane, while the other takes our passports to the terminal. I watch the soldiers out the window, and they watch us. Finally, he returns with our passports and the general commands the soldiers to withdraw. I am relieved when we take off again fo
r Kenya.

  In Nairobi, we transfer to a small prop plane for the short flight to Adnan’s estate, where we land on an airstrip next to his house. Africa has always captivated me, yet I have only seen it on nature shows and in National Geographic. I always longed to see it in person. And an unexpected thing happens: The moment my feet hit the dirt, I feel rooted to this ground as if it were my home.

  Iridescent blue-and-green peacocks roam the roof of Adnan’s house, squawking and shaking their plumes. It is an American ranch–style home with white plaster and brown wood trim. The county of Laikipia is situated in the foothills of the Aberdares Mountains with a view of the snow-capped peaks of Mount Kenya. The property is called Ol Pejeta, an 110,000-acre private game conservancy—just one of four in Kenya.

  Frank, the estate manager, introduces himself to Nora and me and offers to take us on a Jeep ride. Nora refuses, but I never say no to adventure. Frank and I jump in the open-air Jeep and take off into the brush on dirt trails. He stops at various crossroads to show me bones and tusks from warthogs. He tells me they mark cannibal territory and warns about evil spirits. He’s obviously trying to scare me, but this kind of terrain is so similar to where I rode motorcycles in the deserts of California that it doesn’t faze me at first.

  Frank seems to take my calm nature as a challenge and drives faster and faster, crashing into and mowing over bushes and small trees. We plunge down ditches and hurl over rocks. The car’s about to flip, and with no seat belt, my body slams into the windshield and side to side.

  “Slow down! You’re going to kill us! Please stop!” I scream.