The Prince was charming, dynamic, enigmatic, a polo player, a playboy, the minister of finance. The Prince was totally ignoring me. By the end of the first week, I was still on the fringes of the Brunei party microcosm. Serena was part of the inner circle in a way I didn’t completely understand. Destiny was in a different tribe altogether and didn’t give a shit. Ari was like one of those really great retail bosses who are fun and chummy, but are still management through and through and don’t give any of the boss’s secrets away.

I was nearly halfway through my time there and, contrary to my big plans, I hadn’t gotten much of a tan, hadn’t picked up a racket, hadn’t fallen in love with a prince, and hadn’t lost a pound. Time in Brunei was slippery. As soon as you tried to get a foothold in a day it was already gone. Some days I read for hours. When I did my nails, I felt a huge sense of accomplishment. The boxed set of French-language tapes I had brought along sat unopened on the shelf. Ari had helped me put a call through to my parents late one night so I could check on my father’s health, which was steadily improving, though not so much that it didn’t warrant a heavy dose of guilt. My father sounded like himself again, but slightly deflated. My mother’s voice was worn. I kept it short, saying that I was needed on the set. You know—the set of the movie I was shooting in Singapore.

On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, the party lasted until four-thirty a.m. On the rest of the days it ended at three-thirty. We didn’t get to bed until at least five in the morning, and the blackout drapes made it easy to sleep until one or two. Bleary, hungover, starving, we’d stumble to the kitchen in our robes, wolf down the lunch that was waiting for us in big tins lined up along the counters, then flop down in front of a laser disc in the upstairs den. Sometimes we’d go to the gym on the property or hang out by the pool to catch the last of the late-afternoon sun. Then we’d eat dinner and it would be time to get ready for the party again.

I was disappointed in Brunei and in myself. I hadn’t made any kind of a splash at the party and the nights were melting away in a haze of small talk and champagne. The only good thing about my long nights of being passed over is that they gave me an opportunity to observe the subtle machinations that drove the social interactions around me. The parties were a petri dish, ideal conditions to breed fierce intimacies and fiercer resentments.

I had figured out that the tables were arranged by country: Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia. There was a hierarchy of importance. I couldn’t figure out the order exactly, but I knew the Filipino girls were on top and the Thai girls were on the bottom. The Filipino girls got their status from Fiona, who was the Prince’s favorite girlfriend and the only one who sat next to him. Other girls in the room also counted themselves in the Prince’s or one of his cronies’ favor, and their rankings shifted from time to time, causing enmities and alliances to spring up within the various camps.

For instance, Winston had once had a girlfriend in the Indonesian camp, but he had given her the shaft in favor of a girl named Tootie, who made her home in what I called Little Thailand. So now the Thai girls and the Indonesian girls were practically in a gang war, which, of course, looked like nothing from the outside. Girls at war opt for a quieter cruelty than fistfights and drive-by shootings. Girls circumvent the corporeal and go straight for each other’s souls. The bleeding is harder to stanch.

I knew, for instance, that the Thai girls enlisted the Thai servants to doctor the Indonesian girls’ drinks. Some nights the drinks were too strong, some nights too weak. They did it to mess with their minds, so the Indonesian girls would get too drunk and make fools of themselves, so they wouldn’t get drunk enough and would be too sharp, too present. This might shift in a period of a few days and some necessary alliance would make them all best friends again.

I got my insider information from a beautiful Thai girl named Yoya, with whom I had struck up a friendship. She fell somewhere on the Prince’s list of favorites, though not even she was exactly sure where. Yoya was a curvy confection, with sparkling eyes, a chubby baby face, and a braid as thick as a horsetail that brushed her ass. She was bright and irreverent and eager to use her few words of English. I needed a break from the American girls, who had begun to bore me to the point of homicidal thoughts. Before the men showed up, when Serena had me yawning into my espresso with her improbable, name-droppy tales of Hollywood parties (“So this one time I was at a Halloween party and this guy was there in you know, whaddaya call it . . . in blackface, and he was trying to flirt with me all night long and I was like I recognize that voice I know I recognize that voice and guess who it was? No seriously try to guess. Okay it was Jack Nicholson. So I wasn’t really into him or anything but I gave him my number and he would call once in a while and be like, ‘Hi baby it’s your daddy calling . . .’”), I would drift over to Little Thailand. Yoya’s best friend, Lili, would hop on someone’s lap in order to make a spot on the couch. They huddled up and pieced bizarre stories together for me. Yoya always referred to herself in the third person.

“Yesterday Yoya going to gym in the naked.”

“Yes. Yes,” agreed the other girls, leaning in and nodding.

“You went to work out naked? Ew. Why?”

“Someone watch somewhere,” she whispered, looking around for dramatic effect. “Robin watch somewhere.”

I was sure they were pulling my leg.

“You’re shitting me.”

“No shitting. Terrible going to gym that way. Stair-master. Terrible.”

“Oh, Yoya so shy,” teased Lili.

“Yoya so shy,” Yoya concurred. I couldn’t tell if she was being sincere or sarcastic. Maybe both. Maybe she was truly shy in her heart, but under the present circumstances it was comical to say so.

I didn’t need Yoya to tell me that the fulcrum of the room was Robin. Everything was a show put on for Robin, an audience of one. The men, even his closest friends, were his paid playfellows as much as the women were. But Robin didn’t seem to have any interest in me, so I turned my thoughts to audiences I imagined would have a greater appreciation for my talents. I drank champagne and studied the crystal prisms of the chandelier while I schemed about my acting career. How would I get the killer audition? How would I meet the right people? How would I make meaningful art? Where was that asshole Sean and did he miss me uncontrollably? Would he take me back when this was all over and done with? What was going on over at the Performing Garage? How was Penny’s show coming along? What would I wear while gracefully accepting my Academy Award even though I thought they were trite and gauche?

Eddie surprised me out of one such reverie by plunking himself down in the seat next to me and blurting out a question in the typically blunt Bruneian way.

“You will sing tomorrow night?”

It wasn’t really a question. If Eddie was asking me to do something it was because he had been told to do so by Robin. I looked over at Robin and saw both him and Fiona nodding at me with encouragement. I decided the two of them were having a little joke, but I was happy to be singled out for anything that proved I wasn’t just a piece of furniture.

“Of course. I’d love to.”

Eddie acted overjoyed. People around the parties, even the sensible ones like Madge, always behaved as if every little thing was so life-and-death. It was as if my refusal would have been followed by a summary execution.

They didn’t know that I was a singer of sorts. I’d grown up singing along with my father’s piano repertoire every night of my life. I’ll bet you a dollar I can sing any show tune you can name. And I can usually put on a show entertaining enough that you won’t even notice I don’t have a particularly good voice.

I suspect we were cast as the Ones simply because we already knew the words. I had the albums from A Chorus Line, Cats, and Grease, and I could sing each score by heart. Every song had an accompanying dance number rehearsed to perfection for an audience of attentive stuffed animals lined up on my bed. Whatever I lacked in talent, I made up for in dedication and enthusiasm. If you asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I responded that I wanted to be the white cat in Cats, the one with the spotlit dance solo at the top of the show.

As the camp talent show approached, a special period each day was designated for practice. Our counselor sat cross-legged in the corner of the basketball court and rewound a tape in a battered boom box again and again, chewing an enormous wad of Bubblicious while calling out the counts and the steps.

Canes out. And. Bounce up and down from the knees.

And turn.

Bounce again.

I found the dance routine embarrassingly easy. We took a rest every five minutes, during which we drank apple juice from crumpled boxes and scratched our mosquito bites through our tights. I was annoyed with the constant breaks, with the lack of commitment. The other girls were bored and slow, watching the feet in front of them rather than learning the steps. Being the One made me bossy.

“Don’t forget to smile. Smiling is the most important,” I told the other girls.

I didn’t care that they rolled their eyes. I didn’t need them to like me. I needed for us to be good. I needed for everyone to love us when the day of the show came. Randy felt the same way. We practiced our side-by-side box step when we were on break. We insisted that we do a kick line for the last bars of the song, just the two of us.

My plan was for my parents to see me shine and change their minds about allowing me to go to Stagedoor Manor the next year. I wanted to go to the sleepaway theater camp, not the camp with the endless afternoons full of soccer games and lanyard making. Everyone knew that girls from Stagedoor Manor went on to be in the casts of Annie and Really Rosie. The kids in Broadway shows slept late and went to special schools and lived their nights floating between the orchestra and the scaffolding, the scenery and the audience, in that magical kingdom where conflict is resolved by big dance-number finales. That was the kingdom where I wanted citizenship.

In response to my ardent begging, my father said, “If you want to be an ice skater or a dancer or a gymnast or something special, you have to get up at four in the morning and practice every day before school and you have to have no friends and never do sports or eat ice cream or go to parties or have boyfriends. If you want to be like that blind girl in Ice Castles, you will never go to college and you’ll ruin your feet and your back and your career will be over by the time you’re thirty. It’s okay for a hobby. Don’t get out of hand about it.”

He was just trying to be merciful, trying to spare me the heartbreak. I was too chubby for ballet; it was a waste of time. I was too uncoordinated for ice skating. I was too mediocre to really sing. “Don’t try and you won’t fail” was his motto. But I had seen Ice Castles and I knew that he had missed the point.

I knew that when my parents saw me as the One, my strong voice clearly leading all the others, my gold-glitter cane sparkling in the afternoon sun, I would convince them that I was tailor made for a life of singing and dancing, that I would happily ruin my feet. I didn’t care if I had to wake up early. I didn’t even like boys or ice cream that much anyway. They would see me shine and, even to my dad, my destiny would be undeniable.

On the day of the show, my parents were there, front and center. They snapped pictures and mouthed the words. I was adorable. They were delighted. They showered me with kisses and praise. But when I pushed again, I got the same response about the early mornings and the ice cream. In spite of my stunning debut as the One, I never did make it to Stagedoor Manor and was instead condemned to a purgatory of campouts and color war. But my father did indulge my thespian aspirations up to a point. After all, his hobby corresponded with mine.

Years later I stood next to his baby grand in the living room, rehearsing my song to audition for the school play.

“You’re no fantastic singer,” my father said. “So you’ve got to pick your song well and then you’ve got to sell it.”

A successful stockbroker, he was an expert on selling nothing. Together, we chose “Tits and Ass” from A Chorus Line for that particular audition, perhaps a strange choice for a fourteen-year-old, but it did its job. It didn’t get me the part—that went to my friend Alexis, who actually could sing—but I was the one who got the laughs, who got the attention. I was the one people talked about. So that’s what I learned to do. I still can’t ice-skate worth a damn, but I can sell it. Whatever it is, I can sell it.

“What’s Robin’s favorite song?”

“Well, he likes a couple of Malay songs. American songs? I don’t know. What can you sing?”

“I’ll sing a Malay song.”

“How long do you have?”

“Tomorrow night.”

“Too hard. Can’t do it.”

Angelique, the queen singer and rumored to be the unrequited love interest of Prince Sufri, overheard us and interrupted.

“Sing ‘Kasih.’ It’s his favorite. You can learn it. I’ll help you.”

Angelique took a sheet of blank paper out of one of Anthony’s many three-ring binders. She found a pen behind the bar, wiped the counter in front of her, and began to write out the words phonetically. She had the bubbly handwriting of a junior-high girl.

“It’s a love song. ‘Kasih’ means ‘darling.’”

Then she went over every word with me, correcting my pronunciation. Anthony handed her a cassette tape and she wrapped it in the lyric sheet.

“Just sing it simply,” she said. “You can do it.”

I was touched by Angelique’s encouragement. As she pressed the cassette into my hand, the thought flew through my mind that she’d make a good mother one day.

When I returned to our seating area, Serena narrowed her eyes at me.

“You’re singing tomorrow?” she asked. “What are you singing?”

“‘Kasih.’ ”

“Oh, God. Did Anthony tell you to sing that? Did he tell you Robin liked it or something? I hate those horrible pop songs. I’m singing tomorrow, too.”

“What are you singing?”

“At home, I’m a jazz singer. That’s what I do. I’m singing ‘Fever.’ He loves it when I sing ‘Fever.’ I used to sing it for him all the time.”

How was I going to learn a song in another language by the following night? I should have just picked a sexy little retro number like Serena had. I started out with confidence and wound up with a sour stomach that kept me awake.

I set my alarm early the next morning and quietly played the song over and over on the downstairs stereo, lying in front of the speakers and stumbling through the lyrics while my housemates slept upstairs. I pretty much kept at it all day until I went up to the main house to meet Anthony. I walked into the deserted palace by the front entrance. Daylight streamed in through the tall windows and flashed off the water in the fountain. The fake flowers, which usually looked real in the strategic evening lighting, showed their seams, their plastic dewdrops.

A door was open to the left that had been closed the first night I saw the entry hall. It was a ballroom, with a chandelier the size of a small car. A man waxed the floors with a machine. I thought of my grandmother’s favorite joke for party entrances:

Anthony accompanied me while I sang into the mike and smiled at Robin’s vacant chair as I flattened the melody and fumbled the lyrics again and again. I could see Anthony was dubious.

“Do you know any other songs?”

“I can do it.”

I sang it right once through and then wrong again.

“Okay, maybe I can’t do it.”

“Too late.” Anthony looked at his watch. “You’ll be fine. Just make it up if you forget it.”

“Super. He’ll love that.”

On my way out I walked up to the ballerina sculpture. I remembered reading somewhere that the girl who had posed for this turned out to be a prostitute, and that prostitution was the fate of many failed dancers in the time of Degas.

I ran my finger along the edge of her bronze slipper, where it met her foot. If you are rich enough, you can own art like this. You can put it in a corner where no one will ever see it, except a passing girl—half a woman, even—who once wore the same shoes and imagined herself a swan.

A new woman had joined us at our table. Her name was Leanne and she was a soap-opera actress from Hong Kong who was half Chinese, half English, and all smoky sex. She had sleepy eyes, loose, wavy hair, and a British accent attached to a voice that was thick with cigarettes—kind of Janis Joplin meets Princess Di. She wore a simple, floor-length Armani gown. It was not her first time in Brunei. Like Serena, she had a mysterious past there, but unlike Serena she was completely open about being in love with the Prince. She admitted as much to me within five seconds of meeting me. She slouched back on the couch, an arm on each armrest, a posture of elegant surrender.

“I gave up a movie role to come here but he doesn’t know it. I can’t stay away. Last time I left I swore it would be forever but I couldn’t stand the broken heart.”

There was something real but not real about Leanne. I instinctively believed she loved him but I also knew an actress when I heard one. We actresses write terrible dialogue for ourselves.

Leanne and Serena seemed close, conspiratorial, joined in common vitriol for Fiona. Earlier in the evening I had overheard them talking about her. Serena said that Fiona had been caught casting some Filipino voodoo spells in her bedroom. It was the only explanation: That cow had used witchcraft to ensnare the Prince. Did she get fatter as well as older? How old was she now, anyway? They were frightening, and so familiar—common as dirt, these mean, mean girls. And what was I? The opposite? Nice? No. What was the opposite of mean? Weak?

Eddie approached me.

“You will sing next?”

I had dressed in my best vintage ensemble and decorated my eyes with thick strokes of liquid liner. I imagined myself a slightly chubbier Audrey Hepburn from Funny Face. This was my chance to shine. And even if I blew it, at least I wasn’t doing jazz hands and singing some tired Peggy Lee song.

When Anthony began the intro, my brain emptied. I forgot everything we had worked on. I was sure I was about to be the star of a living nightmare, the kind in which you wind up on stage with no memory of what you’re supposed to be doing up there. I didn’t panic; I had faith. I know something about performing. I know that when it seems like the avalanche is about to roll over you, you face into it and keep both arms swimming as hard as you can. You smile and you sell it.

“Kasih dengarlah hatiku berkata/Aku cinta kepada dirimu sayang . . .”

The Prince flashed an impenetrable smile at me as he tapped a finger on his leg. Next to him, Fiona smiled, too. What was her deal? She didn’t seem to be the dragon lady that Serena and Leanne made her out to be.

I finished the song and the room broke into a round of applause. My Thai friends even cheered. The smile on Serena’s face was that of the runner-up in the Miss America pageant who had been so sure she was just about to claim the crown. As I passed the Prince and bowed on my way back to my seat, he reached out and grabbed my arm. I stopped and faced him, still bent at the waist, my head inclined.

He took my hand between both of his, dry and soft and perfectly manicured, and said, “Beautiful.” Then he let go.

“Yes, very lovely,” said Fiona.

I was from New York. I worked around movie stars. I was not unaccustomed to attention from almost-successful actors and the occasional after-party rock star. This touch, this crumb of approval should have meant nothing to me. But I must have been brainwashed during the course of a week, because one Midas touch from the Prince and I glowed all night.

After the lights dimmed and the disco started, I headed to the ladies’ room for a lipstick touch-up. A painting caught my eye that every other night I had passed right by. It was a classic Orientalist portrayal of alabaster odalisques and their brown-skinned servants lounging by a harem bath. I had studied this kind of painting in art history, had analyzed each racist, imperialist brushstroke. And here was a romanticized, nineteenth-century Western portrayal of a harem hanging one hundred and fifty years later on the wall of—a harem. It was positively postmodern.

A harem. Why hadn’t I realized it before? We were neither party guests nor prostitutes. We were harem girls.