chapter 7
I spent my last thirty
dollars on a cab from Beth Israel to Kennedy Airport. The
international terminal was an erector set of beams and soaring
ceilings that transformed me from a throbbing vein of guilt into an
anonymous traveler adrift in the midday light. Walk through the
doors of Kennedy and you’re swept into a liminal state, not exactly
here anymore but not there yet either.
I spotted my fellow traveler Destiny from behind
as she waited on a long check-in queue. Her teased hair aspired to
brush the skylights and she wore a spandex tube dress that shifted
from neon pink to neon orange, like a tropical sunset. The top of
the dress smooshed her boobs into one amorphous form. My mother
says tops like that make your bust look like a loaf of challah.
Destiny’s loaf of challah would have fed a developing country. I
gave her a quick hug and noted that she reeked of Aqua Net and
Amarige. I was traveling with a superstripper. So much for
anonymity, for mystery and the fluid identity that travel
allows.
The plan was for Destiny and me to fly to L.A.,
where we would spend the night and then hook up the next day with
Ari and a girl we hadn’t met yet, named Serena. We’d travel on to
Singapore, where we’d stay another night before a short flight the
next day to Bandar Seri Begawan, the capital of Brunei. I dreaded
the many hours that stretched out in front of me with Destiny as my
traveling companion. What would we talk about? The surprising
practicality of Lucite platforms?
As we walked to our gate, every eye looked up
from its newspaper and stared at Destiny. The corridor became a
catwalk. That quickly, my attitude toward Destiny shifted from
repulsion to loyalty. I trained my eyes straight ahead. I was used
to being stared at: I had been a teenager with fuchsia hair at a
preppy private school, a club-goer dressed as Marie Antoinette on a
Tuesday night in July, a drinking companion to drag queens on the
stoops of the Lower East Side. Stares made me feel defiant, made me
affect a greater degree of self-confidence than I truthfully
possessed.
What would Patti Smith do when facing three days
of international travel with a walking porno movie? She would
straighten her spine and stare right back at the gawkers with a
look that said, I see you. I see you, too, motherfucker.
While we taxied down the runway, I learned that
Destiny made all her own clothes, did her own acrylics, enjoyed
power-lifting, had posed for Hustler, loved
Jesus, and was a collage artist. I relaxed some about the next few
days. They might prove more interesting than I had anticipated. I
also learned that Destiny had left her five-year-old daughter at
home with her mother. I didn’t think less of her for leaving her
kid. You do what you have to do, right? Sometimes you have a
daughter who gets left behind.
She put a little blue pill on her tongue and got
teary as she flipped through wallet picture after wallet picture of
her little girl while the jet engines revved beneath us. I couldn’t
summon a tear for anyone I was leaving behind, not even Sean. That,
I imagined, was freedom.
Destiny and I awoke the next morning and ate
breakfast on the balcony of our airport hotel. With only a couple
of hours to spare before heading back to LAX, we decided to go to
Venice Beach. Seduced by images from Baywatch, we wanted to dip our toes in the Pacific,
wanted to see bikini-clad beach bunnies diving for volleyballs,
wanted to be Surfin’ USA for the day. We weren’t disappointed. The
wind kicked off the water and blew the sky clean, turning it the
kind of blue that painters use to represent heaven. On a good day,
the light in L.A. can make your heart hopeful; it can make even the
grungy boardwalk look like a perfectly lit movie set. We squinted
and shopped for sunglasses that shone on their racks like hard
candy.
In my memories of my first time in Venice, there
are cameos by characters I see today when I stroll the boardwalk.
I’m almost positive that the tall man with the
electric-guitar-and-amp rig whizzed by us on his roller skates
playing “Purple Haze.” But I can’t be sure. I do know that the
woman with the faux Gypsy getup and the cardboard sign offering
psychic readings was there, because I remember she called out to
me, “You’re pregnant. It’s a girl. You’ll want to hear the
rest.”
I ignored her. I’m not above card readings from
waterfront charlatans, but I thought it was a mean trick to try to
lure women with what was often either their dearest wish or their
greatest fear. I wasn’t interested in a phantom pregnancy. Now, if
she had said, “You’re going to travel to exotic lands,” or, “You’re
going to meet a handsome prince and fall madly in love,” I’d have
hit Destiny up for five dollars to hear more.
I helped Destiny pick out postcards and T-shirts
for her daughter. We ate at a boardwalk café connected to a little
bookstore and then played on the swings in the sand. I have a
picture of me dressed in black jeans and big, dark glasses,
laughing hysterically as I begin to swing backward, my hair flying
in the wind. Destiny caught the exact moment that my forward
momentum stopped and gravity pulled me back down.
That evening Ari met us at the airport with a
freshly scrubbed face and a monogrammed tote bag. California was
not New York, I decided. In the New York sex industry, I had
encountered neurotic, carefully coiffed, mercenary people in
positions of authority. That or Hells Angels. Serena stood by Ari’s
side at the ticket counter. She was a platinum blonde,
porcelain-skinned, poor-man’s Marilyn with mean blue eyes. She had
the kind of upturned nose that grandmother would have said could
catch raindrops. I immediately didn’t trust her.
Ari, I learned as we waited, hadn’t started out
as a procuress. She was a nice girl from Northern California, a
rich girl, a girl with a close family who imported French wines and
sold them to most of the upscale restaurants in the Bay Area. She
had begun working for the royal family of Brunei as a property
manager and personal assistant, whose duties included looking after
one of their many palatial Bel Air estates and regularly traveling
back and forth between the two countries to meet with the
Prince.
On one of Ari’s trips, the Prince casually
suggested she bring a friend with her next time, preferably one who
looked like Marilyn Monroe. I guess he thought that Marilyn Monroes
were walking around all over the place in Los Angeles—surely
everyone knew one. No one ever said no to the Prince, so Ari had
scoured the city until she found Serena, a Marilyn look-alike with
dreams of stardom, grudgingly working a retail job at the Beverly
Center. The next time Ari returned to Brunei, she had Serena in
tow.
So these were the women with whom I was
traveling halfway around the world: a Jesus-loving Hustler centerfold, an evil shadow Marilyn, and a
summer-camp counselor gone wrong. This was Serena’s third trip to
Brunei, but she wasn’t exactly bubbling over with helpful hints.
Even after a half hour of plying her with chardonnay at the airport
bar, I was no wiser about what lay ahead of me. She enjoyed her
seniority, blowing us off with a little wave over her shoulder as
she passed through the first-class doorway with Ari while Destiny
and I stayed in business class.
We stretched often, complained even more often,
sucked down champagne, and requested extra cookies from the pretty
flight attendants in long, dragon-pattern skirts. We watched
Beauty and the Beast and eventually sort of
slept. Business class was kind of like a flying hotel, but even a
flying hotel wears on you after a while. I imagined my mother and
my aunt at that moment, probably perched on plastic chairs at my
father’s bedside. Then I shoved the thought aside. No point in
worrying about something I had no control over. No point in
rehashing a decision I’d already made. We changed planes in Tokyo
and did it all over again, for a total of about eighteen hours.
Thus began my hard lesson of parking it and chilling—not easy for
such a restless girl. If I had learned the lesson better, I’d have
become a lot richer.
I rubbed my eyes and leaned my forehead against
the window, watching the miles and miles of stormy blue slip by
underneath us. By the time Singapore’s narrow hem of coastal beach
appeared, I was so exhausted that I was seeing halos around all the
lights and starbursts every time I blinked. My tongue and my brain
had both grown a coat of fur. I was grateful to have our den
mother, Ari, to take charge and herd us through customs and into
the cabs to the hotel. On the ride, Serena let it slip that the
royal family actually owned the hotel and that the sixty-third
floor, where we would be staying, was always reserved strictly for
their guests.
The Westin Stamford Singapore is the tallest
hotel in the world, a cylinder rising seventy-three floors above
the harbor. When we got there, I didn’t have the energy to explore
even the rest of the hotel, much less the streets of the city. I
ordered satay from room service and passed out with the lights
still on. When I opened my eyes eight hours later, jet-lagged and
wide awake, it was just before dawn. I got out of bed, hugging my
own naked ribs, and pulled the heavy drapes to reveal a navy sky
shifting to cobalt. One or two stars still shone out beyond the
balcony. I walked out into the warm, soft air and watched the
fishing skiffs glide out of the harbor. I was alone, exactly
halfway around the world from where I had started, and I had an
ocean of unknown possibilities in front of me.
I was sure that this was how I had been waiting
to feel.