Some Girls: My Life in a Harem

by Jillian Lauren

  The person who appeared most often in the photographs was a young man who looked like a huge, blown-up baby, often stuffed into a polo uniform. Was this Prince Hakeem, Robin’s oldest son and heir? This giant couldn’t possibly be the slight Prince’s progeny. Hakeem reminded me of Francis in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. I imagined the smug, rotund teenager sitting in a bathtub the size of a swimming pool and playing with model battleships.

  The women in the photographs were all gorgeous in a painted, glossy-lipped way. They were wrapped in brocaded gowns and wore gauzy scarves covering their hair. Were these his wives? There was a smiling little girl with pigtails. I wondered at what age she’d trade them for a head scarf. Was this his daughter? The Prince himself didn’t appear in any of the pictures with the women, though he did stand next to Hakeem in one or two.

  I didn’t know exactly what I was waiting for, but I hoped that I was waiting for Robin. I suppose it should have seemed strange to me to be looking at pictures of Robin’s multiple wives while I waited for him to show up, but I had become accustomed to the Prince’s myriad of women after spending night after night at the palace. I arranged myself attractively on the divan and tried to look casual as the air-conditioning froze the room to a subarctic temperature that made me surprised I couldn’t see my breath. According to a gold clock on a table across the room, ten minutes passed, then a half hour. I finally gave up on sitting properly and pulled my knees up under my dress, rubbing the goosepimply skin of my arms. I hugged myself into the tightest ball I could while still ready to uncurl and appear sexy at any indication of a turn of the doorknob. But the door stayed closed and locked.

  An hour passed. There were no books, no magazines, no television. I walked in circles. I sat back down. I looked for a bathroom. I tried the door and it was locked. I tried a second door, also locked. I sat back down. Another hour. I was the star of a Sartre play with no audience. I considered peeing in a wastebasket. I was trembling from the cold, from hunger, from nerves. I tried to think through my searing caffeine-withdrawal headache. If they forgot about me would I just rot there like Antigone, entombed alive?

  Worse yet, what if I wasn’t waiting to be his highness’s belle du jour? What if I was awaiting another fate? If I disappeared, who would look for me? My parents, certainly. But where would they start looking? An imaginary movie set in Singapore? Whom could they pin my disappearance on? I was aware that I could have vanished at that moment and there would have been no culpability.

  But I was just being hysterical. And besides, there was nothing I could do. Was I somehow going to fashion a rope ladder from shreds of the white leather couch cushions and lower myself out the window onto the streets of Bandar Seri Begawan?

  I closed my eyes and tried to warm up. I imagined myself somewhere sunny, on a beach, maybe. Too corny. Then I imagined myself in one of Robin’s harem paintings, dipping my toes into the steaming bath. Too wet. Finally, I simply imagined I was in my bed at home, deep under the covers of my futon on the floor of my Ludlow Street hovel. I missed home. I was looking forward to going back there and being an intern at the theater again, to being just another girl on the subway again. I fell asleep on the divan with my knees pulled up under my chin.

  I woke to the sound of the door opening and found myself staring up at Robin dressed in a gray uniform with medals on his lapel and a military cap. It was the first time I had seen him wearing something other than shorts and tennis shoes. He looked the part of a prince. I sat up too quickly, like a child caught napping when she was supposed to be doing her homework. I fell victim to Stockholm Syndrome—you can’t help but fall in love with the guy who rescues you, even if it’s the guy who locked you up for four freezing hours without a bathroom in the first place. I felt a profound sense of gratitude and a deep desire to be valued by this person standing in front of me. In extreme circumstances, this combination can look very much like love.

  “You have been here long?” he asked, sitting beside me and running his hand along the chilly skin of my arm.

  “Yes.”

  He seemed to take some pleasure in this.

  “And you’re cold.”

  He placed his hand on the nape of my neck and drew me toward him for a soft kiss—not commanding, not confident, not what I had expected from this notorious playboy. I hadn’t fallen straight from a crappy retail job into the arms of a prince. Girls like Serena pretended they had come strictly to gaze at the rainbow and that the pot of gold at the end was incidental.

  I tried not to add self-delusion to my list of character flaws. I knew that we were prostitutes. Slant it any way you want, but when you’re trapped at the same party every night and you wind up making out with the guy throwing the parties, and then you magically have a handful of cash when you leave to go home, you’re a hooker. But every hooker has a little gold somewhere in her heart. Some hearts are just gilded, some are solid straight through, and some, like mine, are divided in two, one side shining and one side in shadows.

  I knew I was a hooker, but somehow I felt like Cinderella as the Handsome Prince stood and led me by the hand to the second door in the room, which was now unlocked. I half-expected him to kneel and pull a glass slipper out of his pocket. Part of this was just me being a romantic ding-dong and part of it was him. He had something. Like many true great lovers of women, Robin looked at you a certain way and you were suddenly lovely. Women will overlook all manner of philandering and cruelty, will crush their logic under a glass heel, if a man can make them feel they belong on a pedestal in the Louvre.

  The coach turned into a pumpkin, however, when Cinderella got back from the bathroom and took a look at the room next door. It was a bedroom that looked like something Hugh Hefner could only fantasize about. The walls were draped in the same lustrous black silk as the sheets and the headboard. There were mirrors on the ceiling, mirrors on the closet doors, at least three visible video cameras, chinchilla bedspreads strewn about, and a TV screen mounted near the ceiling. Two black leather chairs faced a bejeweled gold-and-silver chess set. I thought of the comment Serena had made when we had entered the palace for the first time: It’s all real. Really useless. Who was playing chess in there?

  He trained a plain gaze on me. I stood and looked back at him.

  “What do you do at home?” he asked me.

  “I’m a student. And an actress.”

  “An actress,” he said, nodding as if this was interesting. “And maybe some of this?” He waved his hand in a vague gesture at the bed.

  I felt the heat rise to my face. Serena. That bitch. I had made the mistake of mentioning the escort agency during lunch one day when my guard was down and she was acting friendly. Of course she had gone and told him. I felt a sick little drop in my stomach. I didn’t want to be seen as an escort right then, not just because it wasn’t the role I was playing for Robin but also because it wasn’t the fantasy I was living out in my own head. I stuffed the prickling of fury back down and plastered a look of innocence across my face. Now it was on. I was in the game. I would get her back.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I like actresses. I know lots of them. They have many feelings, I think. Very entertaining. Now, come here.”

  Robin reached over and pulled the strap of my sundress off my shoulder. I stepped closer to him and put his hands on my waist. He pulled me toward the bed and sat down in front of me. He folded his hands in his lap and looked at me expectantly, like someone who had never for a minute in his life worried about making someone else happy, who had never considered that it would take more than his mere presence to set someone at ease.

  Mostly because I couldn’t think of anything further to say, I dropped the other strap and stepped out of my dress, kneeling in front of him and laying my head in his lap. I ran my hands up the sides of his thighs, but he took my elbows and pulled me up. I sat on his lap and we made out for a minute before he stood up and I, who had many times mercilessly berated my mother for her mink coats, crawled under the fur blanke
t with a surge of gratitude, both for being covered and for being warm. I was so cold the beds of my fingernails were tinged with purple.

  Robin took off his clothes like he was getting ready to step into a shower, draped them neatly on the chess chair, and joined me underneath the chinchilla. He smelled compulsively clean, like soap and cologne (Calvin Klein’s Egoiste, I had learned from my trip to the bathroom). He was poreless, hairless, muscular. He had no scars, no leaky emotions, nothing notably human to speak of. He looked straight at me the whole time, his eyes obsidian, slightly sunken and weaselly. He was the kind of guy you’d swear was faking an orgasm if the physical evidence wasn’t there. I did my finest porno-inspired blowjob, heavy on the eye contact, and he seemed almost bored. That was a first.

  Robin wore some sort of talisman around his neck that looked like a mezuzah. When I was a little girl my father had worn one like it. I remember looking through the lacy silver filigree and trying to see the tiny parchment inside. I couldn’t remember what was written inside a mezuzah. It was something like “Take these words which I command you this day to heart. Teach them faithfully to your children.” I still loved the sound of those prayers even though I believed in signs and spirits and ghosts and muses and maybe in angels, but not in God at all.

  My mind was doing what it did with club customers and agency clients and, honestly, with boyfriends, too. It got away from me. It spiraled up and out of the room so that half the time when I was done having sex, I couldn’t remember it. It was kind of like riding the same subway that you’ve ridden a thousand times before: You space out and get to your stop and you’ve blanked out the stops in between. Sometimes you space out so completely that you snap back to awareness and find you’ve missed your stop and landed in Queens.

  So that’s what happened. I spaced out and woke up in Queens. I woke up and Robin was fucking me without a condom and I couldn’t find my voice to stop him. This was the height of the AIDS epidemic and friends of mine from the theater were dying at home in medieval ways. But as fast as the panic rose in me I shoved it aside. My knees slipped on the fur, my hands pressing the cool silk of the headboard.

  Afterward, he wrote something on my back with the edge of his necklace. It reminded me of the game we played as kids in summer camp. We would close our eyes and a friend would sit across from us holding our forearm. With the edge of a fingernail, the friend would write a word that we would then have to guess. It was almost impossible to guess from the actual sensation. It was really a test to see how well you knew your friend, to see if you could guess what word she’d picked to inscribe on you.

  It also reminded me of a game I played later on when I lay naked with lovers and wrote my name on their backs with my fingertips, pretending I was just tickling them. I wrote “I love you” to Sean long before I said the words. I don’t know what Robin wrote.

  I lay on my stomach and Robin lay beside me for exactly three seconds before slapping my ass, kissing me on the cheek, and popping out of bed like he had hit the emergency eject button.

  “That was very nice for me. I am late for a meeting.”

  I knew better than to say, Wait. Wait. Give me another chance and I’ll make you want to stay. I knew better even than to feel it, but feel it I did. It was unlike me.

  Was I actually taken with this guy (who was not only the least available guy on the planet but was also most likely some kind of sex addict who pencils a different girl in between every business meeting) or did I simply not want to be left alone again?

  While Robin showered and dressed to leave, I used the ceiling mirror to arrange my hair on the pillow. I wanted to brand myself into his brain, wanted to make myself into a memory that would take him off guard while he sat in a meeting or rode in the back of his car or whatever princes did. When he left, he looked as sharp and creased as when he had come in.

  I told myself I was a personal goodwill ambassador, single-handedly improving relations between Jews and Muslims the world over. I wasn’t the first Jew in a sultan’s bed. Hadassah changed her name to Esther to marry the Persian king. They made the holiday of Purim to celebrate Esther’s story.

  But there would hardly be a holiday commemorating my actions. I was no ambassador for anything other than my own wallet and my own desire to feel desired. I was barely hanging on to my own ass; I was saving no one. There had been countless women like me in the beds of kings but no one ever heard their stories, because who would care?

  After I was sure Robin wasn’t coming back, I went into the bathroom and showered. The glass wall and black marble of the shower were still streaked with water marks from Robin’s shower. I stood there with the water on my back and thought back to the morning after the first night I spent at Sean’s house. I hadn’t wanted to walk home in my tight dress from the night before, so I had worn his old college sweatshirt and a pair of his jeans, the long legs cuffed and cuffed again. When I got home, I was exhausted and dirty and my hair reeked of smoke but I hadn’t wanted to take a shower because I could still smell him on me. I had crawled into bed and taken a nap while still wearing his clothes.

  Three hours passed before my suspicions that they had once again forgotten about me took over and I panicked.

  “Hello. Help. I’m in here. Someone let me out.”

  I pounded on the door and hollered for a good fifteen minutes before someone came and turned the lock.

  chapter 12

  It was late in the afternoon when I walked back through the door of the house. I had hoped the girls would be at the pool, but instead they were lying on the couches in the upstairs den with their limbs layered over one another’s while they watched Henry & June. Serena looked up and smiled. She reached across Leanne’s thigh and plucked a strawberry from the bowl in the middle of the coffee table.

  “We were worried about you,” she lied.

  I smiled back and looked at her straight on. “No need. Here I am.”

  “Are you okay?” she asked, her brow making a small fold of concern as she nibbled on the edge of the strawberry. Serena barely ate. Under her syrupy fakeness I saw in the corners of her eyes right then something that wasn’t cruelty. It was hunger. Hunger I could relate to. It made me miss a beat. But I recovered quickly. I wasn’t going to tip my cards first just because we were both starving.

  “How’s the movie?”

  “I’m a big Henry Miller fan.”

  “Really. What’s your favorite book of his?”

  “Henry and June. This movie is based on it.”

  “I’ll have to read that. Maybe you can lend it to me.”

  I decided that Serena pretending she’d read a non-existent Henry Miller book actually made her worthy of compassion. The thought put a smug little spring in my step as I crossed in front of her on my way to my room. I resolved not to let anything she said bother me ever again. While I was turning the doorknob, she said to my back, “Don’t worry. He probably won’t call again. He usually doesn’t.”

  My resolve had lasted exactly thirteen seconds.

  That night I curled my hair and pressed my last dress, an emerald-colored vintage number from the fifties with a sweetheart neckline and a bell skirt. It was the kind of dress that made me wish my shoes matched my bag and that I was going out with someone who knew how to jitterbug.

  On the nightstand next to my side of the bed was a photograph of my grandmother as a young woman, all dressed up to go out and wearing almost the same dress. On her hands are white gloves with a pearl button at the wrist. Before she married and settled down in Newark, my grandmother traveled the world. She studied with the famous psychologist Alfred Adler in Vienna while renting a room in a fairy-tale flat from a bankrupt countess. She, too, had been a restless soul. If she were alive, I could have told her the truth about Brunei.

  Behind me Destiny slipped her brown feet, tanned to the color and texture of a baseball mitt, into her Lucite platforms. Her nightstand also held a single framed photo. It was a picture of her daughter, sun-kissed and smil
ing in front of a backdrop of ocean.

  The pictures we carry, the frames we gladly add to the weight of our luggage, are of the people we trust to love us no matter what.

  That night at the party Yoya and Lili did a rousing karaoke version of “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” They had obviously been rehearsing, because they had a few little choreographed dance moves, most notably a shoulder shimmy to the part about being barely seventeen and barely dressed, a genius lyric, made more poignant by the fact that it was actually true for most of us in the room.

  I thought what I always think when I hear that song: There are lots of songs about being seventeen. A long-haired man, wiry and handsome and looking like some kind of Cuban revolutionary, pointed this out to me once, after he found me separated from my friends, confused and tripping my face off at a Grateful Dead show when I was actually fourteen. But it’s never a good idea to say you’re fourteen. So I said seventeen. Then I told him I was lost.

  “Lots of songs about seventeen,” he said. “You’re not lost; you’re just misplaced.”

  I followed that guy back into the city, to his artist loft on Fourteenth Street. He smelled like turpentine and body odor and he had multicolored brushstrokes across the right thigh of his jeans. I had sex with him or, more specifically, he had sex with me—my first time—while I watched cartoon hallucinations dance in the darkness behind his head. I guessed that it was worth it not to be left alone in the middle of the night somewhere out on Long Island. In the morning, I stole thirty dollars out of his pants to get home. I walked with my shoes in my hands down the five flights of stairs, so as not to wake him, then put them on and ran the two blocks to the subway station.