Some Girls: My Life in a Harem (33 page)

The girls who were approaching thirty rolled their eyes as I gave Melody the rundown on all the travails of the past year. I don’t remember what was said exactly, but I do know that during the conversation, I must have mentioned my unfruitful search for my birth mother, because Melody shared her wisdom with me (both humorous and otherwise) and it included the name and phone number of a private investigator in Denver.

I woke with the information on my nightstand. I was mortified that I had poured my heart out to Melody, far more so than I had been of winding up at the bottom of a staircase with my skirt over my head. Even so, I took that slip of paper and stuck it in a book for later. You never know when you’re going to need the name of a private investigator in Denver, written in bubbly handwriting with hearts dotting the
i
’s.

 

 

 

 

W
hile Robin was gone, the sky cracked open and rained down storm after storm, wild and biblical, reminding me that beyond those palace walls was Borneo, an island of rainforests and underground rivers and famous caves. The monsoons beat at the bedroom windows, insisting that there was a world beyond our jewelry box rooms. It was during the start of the rainy season that I decided to try my hand at writing more than a journal entry.

Rain pounded the skylights above me as I finished my first, terrible short story and sent it to Colin. He responded in kind and we began to send stories back and forth. At first, I sent them with a prologue of apologies for the horrors contained within, until Colin wrote that he refused to accept any stories that I prefaced with self-deprecating remarks. He told me that even when I did things poorly, I should do them without apology.

The first story was about a girl who had to go with her mother to pack up the china in her dead grandmother’s house. The story was based on the time I went with my mother to pack up the china in my dead grandmother’s house. The second story was about a stripper who sold her soul to Satan to have her own show in Las Vegas. It was a metaphor for something but I can’t remember what.

While I was busy writing and the Prince was busy on his hajj in Mecca, a new lounge singer, named Iyen, showed up. She was a pretty Filipino girl with a fondness for
I Dream of Jeannie
ponytail falls and gauzy harem pants. When Robin returned, he fell in love with her at first sight. By the end of two weeks, she wore a ring on her finger the size of Brunei itself. I’ve tried to find out if they ever tied the knot, and if so, if they are still together, but there is a shroud of mystery around how many wives the Prince actually has, and which of them are “official.” According to one former
Washington Post
reporter I talked to, the number appears to far exceed the permitted four.

Robin was pleasant to me and when he sat to talk to me there was no buried ire left in his manner. I no longer feared his retribution. I had gone from being spoiled to being punished to being common. That was when I knew I had landed at the bottom of the chute with a thud.

Robin did sleep with me a few more times, fiancé or no, and he even took me for a spin in his new Aston Martin one night, but the charge between us was gone. A feeling of resignation hung around the girls. The Prince was in love. There was a change in him. He rarely even came inside the parties other than to hear Iyen sing. The two of them sat out on the stairs talking all night while inside we would make fun of her outfits, imagining our taste incredibly sophisticated due to our hours and hours of watching
Style with Elsa Klensch.
And we would wonder how, when we were so stylish, so expensively attired, so coiffed, so fucking slim, the Prince had chosen a chubby, fashion-challenged lounge singer over us.

I spent my twentieth birthday in Brunei and I got not one but two more incredible watches dropped in my lap by Eddie. After my official birthday party, my housemates and I hung around in our nighties and had a little birthday party of our own back at the guesthouse, with a cake and champagne brought over from the main palace by a small parade of smiling servants. I was no longer an anathema, because I no longer mattered. At least I got to have friends. But in truth, I preferred having power.

My friend Donna, a gorgeous Filipino-American kickboxer and model, held up her champagne flute and did her best Ricardo Montalban accent: “Welcome to Fantasy Island,” she said, “where all your dreams come true. Kind of.”

I had a hard time sleeping. I started writing every night from the end of the parties until sunrise, when the first light touches that part of the world in a hundred shades of luminous blue and purple, clear and full of hope.

I wrote to Colin that I just wanted to want something. I had stopped wanting anything and I felt a terrible hole where I had once had purpose. He responded in an e-mail:

Four months and five stories later, I left for New York again. I left with a fatter envelope than I had before and with the kind of jewels that should come with their own bodyguard. There is something about that kind of hard, cold, sparkling sign language for power that even I, quasi-socialist sometime-vegetarian artist—even I wanted to hold up and shout, “
Look motherfuckers: I have treasure from a prince. I am beautiful.
” But treasure loses its power as an ego boost pretty quickly and becomes just another watch, another pair of earrings, jewelry so gaudy it looks like you probably bought it at Patricia Field.

Eventually the jewels lose their sentimental value entirely and you wind up selling them to an estate-jewelry buyer in a second-floor office in the diamond district. As you sit across the small table and watch the little old man who sounds like your Uncle Leon examine your jewelry with a tiny telescope, you think of what your grandmother used to say to you when you waited until the last minute to write your English paper:
Pressure makes diamonds
.

 

I didn’t exactly know that it was going to be my last time in Brunei. But I had an intuitive flicker of resolution as I said good-bye to Robin. I looked at him hard, memorizing his face. What if I never saw him again?

I had made the most un-Patti of choices. Even with the freest, most punk fairy godmother of them all, I had wound up a well-paid piece of property—only a rental property, but still, I had severed the connection between my soul and my body so profoundly that I could barely feel my own skin anymore. If I never saw Robin again, maybe I’d be free to return to myself. I knew I was facing a long road back.

 

 

 

 

I
t took the investigator about two weeks to locate my birth mother. In Carrie’s first letter to me, she sent pictures of her family. In their holiday photo, her husband is a tall, balding, kind-eyed man in thick glasses. You can see that the older, teenage daughter has special needs. The younger one, probably around six years old, is a round-faced, pretty Latina girl. The letter told me that they were both adopted.

Carrie looks intrepid and sturdy, with no lipstick on her no-nonsense smile. The four of them stand in matching Christmas sweaters in front of an aluminum-sided house, hardened patches of gray snow scattered around the dead lawn behind them. They are one of those Midwestern families you’d pass right by at Disney World.

I inserted myself into the picture. Who would I have been if I had returned from high school every day to that little house? I imagined it like a high school movie, in which the main character has pictures of pop stars tacked to her wall and blue ribbons pinned around the edge of her vanity mirror. She lies on the bed talking to her best friend on the phone while her feet rest up on the headboard. The whole scene is washed in buttery sunshine. I knew it was ridiculous, embarrassing, but I indulged myself with imagining for a moment a world in which there could have been a possibility for me other than the one I was living, a world in which maybe I’d have been equipped to make some better choices.

Carrie sent other pictures also, color photocopies with her own captions penciled in below them. Most of them were from
The Cross and the Sword
, performed at a regional theater in Jacksonville in 1972, which is where she met my birth father, Jim.

In my favorite photo, Jim is at center stage in a heroic stance. He has long, wavy seventies hair tucked behind his ears and he wears a Renaissance Faire-looking outfit. Carrie is on one end of the line of dancers behind him. She has a wreath of flowers in her hair and is wearing a wide skirt and a peasant blouse. She is down on one knee, holding a tambourine in the air, and looking up at him.

They are both so pretty, but he is even prettier than she is. In her letter, Carrie tells me that Jim was a talented actor and a poet. To me, he looks like a shifty hustler. I can see it in the eyes. I look a lot like Carrie around the nose and mouth, but my eyes are strictly Jim.

I’ve always thought I look Jewish—New York Jewish, Russian Jewish. That is what I say when people ask me my ethnicity. I’m a Russian Polish Jew. When I recently told this to my Russian manicurist, she nodded her head and said, “I knew it.”

In this, it seemed, I resembled Carrie far more than I did my adoptive parents, who had closed the shutters and sat out the sixties as if it were a hurricane.

Carrie’s letters were written on six-by-nine white, lined paper, with a slightly serrated edge at the top—practical, not a theatrical flourish to be detected. She wrote her letters to her long-lost biological daughter on a kitchen notepad.

Was I desperately in search of her? Not exactly. But something. I was desperately in search of something and she was a part of that something.

 

Carrie’s letters recounted a young woman’s wanderings from a middle-class childhood in Bellevue, Nebraska, to a short stint at the University of Utah to a dance career in Chicago to a show in Florida, then back to Chicago, where she got into some trouble with the wrong guy at the wrong time, then back to Nebraska, where she got married and finished college, and finally to the suburbs of Boise, Idaho, where she worked as a medical technician and a dance teacher and eventually adopted two daughters of her own.

She seemed intelligent and sane. Not trashy, not crazy, just a woman who had once been restless, had once been confused.

Did you plant your garden?
I asked in my letters to her.
Did you ever wind up getting the kite with two strings up in the air?

Lindsay and Colin sat by my side on the black leather couch in our loft when I called Carrie to ask her to come visit me in New York. I figured I was ready to put one chapter of this story to bed and to open another one. What would Patti Smith do? She would look the truth in the eye and never once would she blink.

 

I have stood at the arrival gate at Newark International Airport maybe a hundred times in my life, but picking up Carrie is the most memorable.

Seared into my brain is the image of her as she moved toward me down that long hallway with her matter-of-fact walk. She was sweet-faced and big-hipped like me, wearing high-waisted jeans and a plaid flannel. We greeted each other with tight smiles. I believe that both our faces were laced with some regret that we had ever made those plans to meet. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but the execution of it was suddenly too sharp, too bright, like walking out of a dark room into the sunshine.