Some Girls: My Life in a Harem (10 page)

A dowdy white woman with a wide forehead and wire glasses saw Ari and crossed from where she stood at the bar to meet us at the doorway. This was Madge, the Brunei equivalent of Julie, the cruise director from
The Love Boat
. Madge was a British woman who ran the parties, managed the affairs of the household, and made sure that Prince Jefri was happy at all times and that everything was going according to plan. She wore a cell phone, still an exotic sight at that time, clipped to one side of her belt, and a walkie-talkie clipped to the other.

Ari and Madge greeted each other with a warm hug and exchanged a few loaded pleasantries before Madge showed us to our little domain. We occupied the seats of honor, squarely in front of the door. Destiny and I followed the cues of Ari and Serena as we sank into the deep cushions of the chairs and ordered glasses of champagne from one of the army of servants who were standing by to take our order. Alcohol was illegal in public in Brunei, but it flowed at the Prince’s parties. I sipped self-consciously. I could feel that the conversation in the room was all about us. The other women stared and murmured, their foreign words floating around and mixing with the cheesy synth sounds of Asian pop karaoke music.

Ari and Madge caught up about London and a bunch of people whose names I didn’t know yet. Then Madge got a call and answered it out in the hall, while Ari took the opportunity to school us about the men we were about to meet, the royals and cabinet ministers and air-force generals and international financiers.

“The men with the Prince are his closest friends. Don’t talk to them unless they talk to you. Don’t show anyone the soles of your shoes; it’s considered really rude in Muslim countries.”

 

While being instructed on the best way to angle my feet in order to be respectful of Muslim customs, I thought with wry amusement of what Rabbi Kaplan would say if he could see me. Stodgy Rabbi Kaplan, the thin-lipped tortoise who had stood by my side while I confidently chanted my clear haftorah. I was that rarest and least cool of things—the girl who took her Bat Mitzvah seriously, the promising student of Hebrew.

It had been only five years earlier. I was a late bloomer and didn’t even have to wear a bra under my dress. I could still remember the heft of the silver pointer we used to keep our place when reading from the Torah scroll, a treasure hand-lettered on parchment. The goat-skin parchment looked both powdery and oily, like the thinnest pie dough rolled out on the counter. When I stood on the bimah, the scroll seemed to glow in the light from the tall stained-glass window behind me. I wanted to smell the paper, to see if it smelled like an animal or like cooking oil or like silver or like the truth. For some reason, I thought it probably smelled like autumn, like damp leaves on the ground. But I couldn’t say for sure because I was too self-conscious to lean my head down and sniff the Torah in front of the rabbi.

I believed that God was in that scroll somehow, in the gaps between the words. God lived in the negative space, in the hushed, vaulted hallways of the temple, between my roof and the clouds, between the branches of the trees. I had no question that God existed, because I felt him. God was a palpable presence, a warmth behind me. I talked to God all the time, except when I lay terrified in my bed at night. Because as certain as I was of God the rest of the time, I was equally sure God wasn’t around then. When faced with my nightmares, I had to think quickly and start negotiating with the monsters instead. But those kind of negotiations—deals struck, promises made—dissolve with the sunrise.

I was twelve, not thirteen, when I was Bat Mitzvahed. The younger age is permitted for girls, particularly those who have their birthday over the summer and want to have their reception during the school year, when everyone is still around. In our town at the time, the popular thing was to have a theme party following your Bar or Bat Mitzvah ceremony—the more outrageous, the better. To celebrate this sacred coming-of-age ritual, this symbolic threshold crossing, classmates of mine had mini-carnivals, costume discos, and black-tie balls. One of the town’s real estate magnates rented out Giants Stadium for his son’s reception, which was attended by actual members of the Giants as well as Giants cheerleaders in uniform. We ate kosher hot dogs in the stadium restaurant while a marching band spelled out GREG, the name of the kid being Bar Mitzvahed, on the field.

The theme of my party was Broadway shows. Each table was crowned by a festive foam-and-fabric center-piece representing a different show. My table was
A Chorus Line
. In the foyer of the catering hall was a picture station, where you could get your photo printed on your very own Playbill. To be accurate, it was called a Jill’s Bill—very collectible now, I hear. A guy named RJ stood near the entrance of the catering hall eating fire and juggling. He had been in the original Broadway cast of
Barnum
, which, at the time, I thought was the coolest thing ever. I might have recognized the ominous portent if I had thought for a minute that performing at suburban Bat Mitzvahs probably didn’t rank highly on RJ’s list of dreams for himself.

My mother worked so hard to make my Bat Mitzvah all I could possibly have wanted, from my dress with matching purse and shoes (designed by me and featuring lots of fabric roses and pink Swarovski crystals) to the flowers, the balloon arch, the ice-cream-sundae buffet, and the fire-eating circus performer. But with my final bite of cake, I seemed also to swallow a worm of doubt that would make a home in my belly and grow in the coming months. If God had, in fact, scooped me up in his arms and carried me over the threshold that marked the entrance to womanhood, was this a disappointing room to find on the other side? A room filled with a bunch of spoiled preteens, most of whom weren’t even my friends, wearing foam lobsters on their heads and dancing spastically to the B-52s?

Soon after, I began to question the wisdom of God altogether. It wasn’t the Giants cheerleaders or the foam lobsters. It wasn’t even the Holocaust or the famine in Africa that broke up God and me. It may have had something to do with the archery counselor I met that summer at sleepaway camp and fell in love with, the counselor who agreed with God about the Bat Mitzvah concept: He thought twelve-year-old girls were all grown up. It may have been the fact that when our little romance was exposed and we were dragged into a room to stand before the camp director and every other counselor in the camp, with my parents on the other end of the phone line, no one stepped forward to defend me. Not my father, not anyone.

Before that experience, I had often felt the kind of alone that comes from the suspicion that you are not only genetically different from those around you, but different in your very soul. I was a princess from another kingdom, abandoned on a doorstep by a mother who couldn’t care for me because she’d been transmuted into a swan by the spell of an evil sorcerer. But after Nathan got fired, I was a different kind of alone. I was alone and ashamed of myself. It wasn’t the fault of a sorcerer that I’d wound up unlovable, by my parents or God or anyone—anyone but a guy nine years my senior. It was no one’s fault but mine.

It wasn’t an exact cause and effect that led me to stop believing in God; more like an accumulation of evidence. First I stopped talking to God, then I kind of just forgot about him. Then I got to high school and discovered that a lot of people agreed with me about this no-God thing. I was so relieved.

So there I was in Brunei, not believing in the Jewish God, believing instead in the pernicious influence of all organized religion, and yet suddenly feeling very Jewish indeed.

 

“Don’t have your head higher than Robin’s. If you have to cross in front of him while he’s sitting, bow,” continued Ari.

“Bow like how?”

“You’ll see.”

I had a déjà vu from
The King and I
.

“And watch what you say. When you think they can’t hear you, they can. When you think they can’t see you, they can.”

What she meant was that there was surveillance everywhere in Brunei, even in the bathrooms; hence all the mirrors. It was a constant source of speculation and paranoia among the girls. Not exactly
The King and I
after all.

A bored-looking Filipino woman stood up from a couch across the room and crossed toward us, stopping to exchange a few words here and there with a handful of the women flanking her path. She seemed to be the only woman in the room who breached the invisible barricades that separated one seating area of girls from another. She was a bit older than the average age in the room and appeared almost matronly in a black, high-necked dress and diamond drop earrings. She introduced herself to us with a vague British accent.

“I’m Fiona. Welcome to Brunei.”

Serena rose and kissed her on both cheeks. They looked thrilled to see each other, greeting each other like old sorority sisters and catching each other up on the latest gossip.

After Fiona left, Serena said, “I see she still hasn’t shaved her mustache.”

Fiona was Serena’s archenemy and soon to be my closest ally.

 

Within half an hour I regretted my outfit choice. I had worn my little black suit and I felt stiff compared with Serena in her flirty, swingy dress and her Grace Kelly French twist. I shifted uncomfortably and braced my thigh muscles so that I wouldn’t start to slide off the slippery upholstery.

Abruptly, the karaoke music stopped and the lights dimmed as the DJ changed hats and arranged himself in front of a keyboard. The languid couch decorations turned from slouching question marks into exclamation points. They prettily crossed their legs as a woman took her place beside the keyboard player. She began to sing Lisa Stansfield’s “All Around the World.”

I felt him coming before he entered the room. Prince Jefri walked in that night wearing shorts and a shiny Sergio Tacchini sweat jacket. He carried a squash racket, as if he’d just walked off the court. When he appeared, all the girls lit up with purpose. The pictures hadn’t lied. In person he was handsome, in spite of his outdated, feathered porno hair and thin mustache. A wave of charisma swept the room in front of him. You could almost see it, like heat radiating off asphalt on a summer day. Behind him walked ten or so identically attired men. The whole entourage stopped when he paused to take a quick glance around.

His eyes rested on us, specifically on Serena. He made an expression of phony surprise and then strolled over to give both Serena and Ari a brief kiss on the cheek. Up close, the Prince appeared tightly wound, toned muscles curving around the bone, taut skin holding it all together. He smelled like too much expensive cologne. He half-sat on the arm of Ari’s chair. What was it about Ari that seemed so out of place?
Plain
wasn’t quite the word to describe her. She was like a real strawberry in a roomful of strawberry Pop-Tarts.

When Ari introduced us to Robin he welcomed us with a practiced smile, then ignored us and turned to Serena. She became a study in coy gestures and sexy glances—chin down, eyes turned up toward him, little giggles and tosses of the head, slight rearranging of the skirt, delicate hand signals. I was cooked. I was many things, but, alas, never delicate.

As they talked, the Prince watched Serena with what seemed like fascination until something across the room caught his eye. I watched his gaze shift as his attention wavered. In that flicker of disinterest, I saw my window open. He nodded a few more times and gave her leg a familial pat before walking away.

After the Prince moved on to the next table, Eddie, the Prince’s sycophantic right-hand man, seemed to tele-port into the seat next to me. Eddie was sneaky like that; you never saw him coming. He was too accommodating for comfort, inquiring after our needs with bulging eyes that looked like they might pop right out of his head and land on Destiny’s boob-shelf. Were we meant to “entertain” the Prince’s friends? Was that the meaning of “entertainers”? I’m not sure why this was such a disappointment. I certainly wasn’t this discerning when it came to Crown Club clients. Were they clean? Did they have money? Were they relatively sane or at least not homicidal? These were the criteria. But somewhere along the journey, in my mind I had become mistress to a prince.

But Eddie left pretty quickly. Two more men, named Dan and Winston, came over and said hello. They appeared to be friendly with Serena and Ari and they didn’t give me the creeps like Eddie did but they, too, soon moved on.

There were three talented singers who changed off every few songs and sang a schlocky medley of Malay and American pop songs. The American songs were the kind played in grocery stores, the kind that can make you cry if you happen to be shopping for Cap’n Crunch and tampons at two a.m. on a lonely night.

By the end of the night I had to pinch the sides of my thighs to force my eyelids to stay open. I felt like I was in a math class in an overheated schoolroom, snapping a rubber band on my wrist so I wouldn’t fall asleep. The Prince ended up seated in a chair by the wall next to Fiona. On the other side of him was an empty chair, and though plenty of people stooped to talk to him, no one sat down in it. The rest of the men socialized and drank with the Asian girls. A few of the men laid their arm across a girl’s shoulder or held her hand. Other than the short visits at the beginning of the party, everyone ignored us. I wondered if I was supposed to be doing something more than sitting in a chair drinking champagne, but I was too tired to ask.

At some outrageously late hour, the lights dimmed even more and a dance hit from about two years before blasted from the speakers. The dance floor filled with girls immediately, while the men sat and watched. I had grown stiff with sitting and I felt like a barnacle on the chair, so when Destiny took my hand and led me to the dance floor, I didn’t protest.

The only route to the dance floor was a narrow path that crossed right in front of the Prince’s chair. All night I’d watched the bows of the women who passed in front of him. This was my chance to practice. I emulated the others, walking with a little shuffle and bending at the waist, with my head bowed. It made me want to giggle. I almost expected him to break out with a Yul Brynner- esque “’Tis a puzzlement!” Instead, he ignored us. But I felt his gaze hot on me as I passed him, and I flushed. Was it the act of bowing itself that had made me suddenly shy?