chapter 16
The mirror in my
bathroom had begun to separate from the wall just a hair, but
enough that I could see a small red light come on from time to time
in the dark recesses behind it. I dragged the other girls into my
bathroom to confirm it. This much was certain: Sometimes there was
a light.
It was not news that we were being watched, but
it could still make you feel crazy, paranoid. Who was watching?
What were they watching for? Even though Taylor had gone home and I
was allowed to keep my room as a single because I had so many new
clothes that I needed the closet space, I never felt truly alone.
It was like a pea under the mattress—enough to make me
uncomfortable but not enough for me to peg exactly what was
wrong.
I have heard that privacy is a construct of
privilege. Privileged as I was growing up, I never felt I had a
stitch of it. My father took the locks off our doors. My mother
read my journal and said that it had fallen out of a drawer when
the housekeeper was cleaning. I never took for granted the fact
that in my own apartment in New York, no one would open doors
without knocking or go through my drawers, and I didn’t have to
encode my journals so intricately that even I wouldn’t understand
them later. In Brunei, I was again living in a world in which not
even the page was private. Anywhere I sat to write in my journal,
there was a mirror behind me and behind that a camera recording
every scribble.
What did the cameras see? What was my great
shame? A mustache wax? Air guitar? A vibrator? I couldn’t have
cared less.
No, I cursed myself because they saw a girl sit
on the floor of her room and stare at the suitcases for two days,
unable to unpack. Because when she half-unpacked, the room looked
like it had been ransacked and it stayed that way for another three
days. Because the girl managed to pull an outfit out of the rubble
and paste herself together for the party every night, but every
morning she woke in pieces again. All she could do was read and
listen to music. She stopped working out, stopped swimming, stopped
hitting the tennis balls shot out at her from a machine.
It had hit me so fast. Somewhere between
Singapore and Brunei, a cannonball had come sailing out of the sky,
nailed me in the gut, and knocked the wind out of me. Every day I
vowed to change, to be efficient and cheery like Ari, capable and
witty like Madge, mercenary and glamorous like Fiona—anything but
lazy and out of control and sunk. Anything but me.
I was in the grip of the tentacles of a
depression that has come and gone throughout my life, at times
administering only the tiniest sting and at other times
immobilizing. It wasn’t the first time I’d succumbed to it. When
the shadows of depression darkened my field of vision in high
school, I had blamed it on my father, on my school. Now that all
those things were behind me I saw that I had been wrong; the blame
rested squarely on me. I accused myself of being weak-willed, lazy,
self-indulgent. The list of indictments goes on.
I was sure if I just tried hard enough, did
enough yoga, chanted the Hare Krishna, read Freud and Jung and the
Dalai Lama and Ram Dass, stopped eating chocolate, started working
out more, and learned those fucking French tapes I had dragged
along with me, I would heal. I was sure that if I could just scale
this fortress I would reach a height with a sunny blue sky and
fresh air. I would stand there and experience myself as redeemable
rather than ruined. I had no idea what kind of animal I was
facing.
If you had suggested to me at the time that my
problems were due to some faulty wiring, some chemistry experiment
gone wrong in my brain, I’d have said you were suggesting that I
not take responsibility for my own choices. Now I know I was wrong.
Now when I’m haunted by the specter of depression, I recognize it
for what it is. I don’t systematically dismantle my life every time
depression pops out from behind a tree. But at that time, I was
sure it was fixable if the world would just change faster, or if I
would.
Part of this illusion was sustained by the fact
that changing the scenery appeared to work. When the world around
me altered, for a minute or two the newness, the adrenaline, the
endorphins could sometimes snap me out of my sludgy funk. I was
skating on those very endorphins when I sprang out of my bed and
finally unpacked my suitcases from Singapore, while simultaneously
packing a suitcase for a trip to Malaysia. Fiona and I were to be
included in the royal entourage for a two-week diplomatic mission
to Kuala Lumpur. With the typical lack of notice, I was informed
I’d be leaving the next day.
I think Ari felt sorry for me because of how I
was treated by the other girls, though not too sorry. She was paid
handsomely enough for all her hard work, but was never showered
with the kind of immediate jewels and cash with which the
girlfriends were. And we didn’t work very hard at all, in her
opinion. It chafed her, but she kept it in perspective. Ari always
bore a hint of disbelief about her job. After all, she had gone
from taking care of a Bel Air estate to procuring prostitutes for a
prince.
The girls Ari brought to Brunei were almost
never prostitutes to begin with, but I never saw one who refused
the Prince’s advances once they saw the rewards. Everyone I met in
Brunei had a price and Robin met it without fail. I only once even
heard an expression of remorse, and a hefty jewelry box squashed it
later in the week. In fact, the girls who came from normal jobs,
normal boyfriends, normal lives were the quickest to lap up the new
lifestyle. I was embarrassed for them, the way they drooled all
over their Rolex birthday presents. Just because you’re sequestered
in some parallel-universe sorority house doesn’t mean you can’t
have a little dignity.
Ari, on the other hand, had dignity aplenty. And
she seemed to retain her identity in the face of Brunei’s warping
influence. She also retained a fiancé named John at home. John was
a successful contractor. He had one blue eye and one green eye and
was ridiculously handsome, as if he had just stepped out of an
aftershave commercial. All that and he volunteered teaching
swimming to autistic kids once a week. He was a perfect
romantic-comedy lead, if you’re into that kind of thing.
Even though Ari was in no way romantically
involved with anyone in Brunei, it was taboo to mention John. Women
like Ari and Madge were entrusted with difficult jobs involving
lots of money and sensitive information, but they weren’t allowed
to be married or have boyfriends. Or at least there was an
agreed-upon silence around it. For Ari and Madge it was an
infraction to have a boyfriend, but for Robin’s girlfriends it was
suicide. You’d find yourself on the next flight home if anyone
found out.
Even Ari got lonely in Brunei, so she sometimes
talked to me. Though I wouldn’t have counted “trustworthy” as one
of my primary virtues right at that moment, I was still probably
her best bet. It’s not that Ari trusted me, exactly, but she
counted on me being smart enough to know that crossing her would in
no way behoove me. Ari talked to me about her wedding plans without
ever mentioning the word marriage. She sat
cross-legged on the bed while I packed, eating avocado out of the
shell with a spoon.
“I’m a little anxious right now because, of
course, they changed my departure date to four days sooner than I’d
planned and now I’m missing appointments with the caterers and the
planner. The president can meet with the architect. I’m not
complaining.”
Ari was going to marry John in six months. She
called him “the president” in code, because his name was John
Adams. Ari was twenty-five years old and building a house in
Malibu. It made sense to me that she was anxious to hang up her
traveling shoes and settle down to have a family. Might as
well—hadn’t she seen enough by twenty-five?
“Can your mother do it for you?
“Yeah, ultimately my mother’s going to do the
whole thing. I know it. But you only get to do this once, so I’d
like to at least see my invitations before they get sent out,” she
said. “Did I tell you already that when you get to KL you’re not to
leave the hotel room for any reason unless a guard comes to get
you? Very important.”
Then, weighing in on my packing decision, she
said, “Ooh, I like that dress. What is it?”
“Dior.”
“Take that one with you for sure.”
I closed my suitcases and didn’t even bother to
take them off the bed. I knew someone would fetch them and that
they’d magically appear at my destination.
Robin was looking for his fourth wife, and for a
fourth wife it wasn’t out of the range of possibility that he’d
choose from among the girls who attended the parties. For a first
or second wife, that would be unthinkable. But once the royal
lineage is secure, the royal boys have more room to play. I thought
sometimes about what it would be like to marry Robin. It wouldn’t
be so bad to have a husband who was around only once in a while,
especially if you had a staff to take care of your every need and a
jet to fly you to Singapore on a whim. But freedom to buy whatever
you wanted wasn’t the same thing as freedom. I knew that if I
married the Prince, I’d never act in another play, never backpack
around Europe, never go to a movie with a male friend, never even
go to a mall without a bodyguard.
Sometimes I fell prey to fantasies of becoming a
princess. It seemed so strange that it had entered my orbit of
possibilities. What Disney-brained American girl hadn’t lain in bed
and known deep in her heart that she was worthy of being woken from
an evil spell by the kiss of a prince? That she would open her eyes
and, due to no effort of her own, find that she had been saved? Who
wouldn’t consider attempting to grab that gold ring, that diamond
crown?
But I wasn’t brainwashed beyond all reason. I
knew I didn’t really want to marry Robin, not even at the height of
my success there. If I did, I’d never again have a date on a
rooftop in the rain.
After the shopping trip to Singapore, even the
few girls who had been neutral toward me before had grown bristly.
So when I left for Kuala Lumpur, I happily walked out the door
dressed in my most conservative Chanel suit of pink-and-gray tweed.
They had pushed me so far, had been so mean that I no longer felt
the need to make myself smaller so I’d be liked. Who cared if those
morons weren’t my friends? That’s what Fiona would have said and
that is what, after weeks of their cruelty, I finally truly felt.
It was liberating. It was akin to my preteen discovery of the
Ramones and my subsequent initiation into the world of punk music.
I could create a whole other reality. I could actively choose to be
different from the kids who made my life a misery. I could state
once and for all that I wasn’t wrong, they were.
In high school, I spent my time with the theater
crowd and in the ceramics room. I made my own clothes, dyed my hair
most of the primary colors in succession, and discovered a passion
for punk rock. Due to the somber colors of our wardrobe choices, my
friends and I were dubbed by the preppy and privileged student body
the Children of Darkness, a moniker we cheerfully appropriated and
wrote on the wall over our preferred table in the cafeteria.
The Children of Darkness were an oddball crew of
kids who had funny haircuts and did things like write rock operas
or draw their own autobiographical comics. They opened their goth
capes and tatty overcoats and enfolded me in acceptance. I could do
whatever dorky thing I wanted for the school talent show and I
would always have a cheering section. We were a tribe. But my
new-found acceptance came with a stash of black eyeliner and
decorative safety pins. And the dorky things I did for the talent
show shifted from shuffling off to Buffalo to performing acoustic
covers of Siouxsie and the Banshees.
To my father, all this had signified an
egregious deviation from acceptable behavior, an embarrassment to
the family, a personal insult to him. He stood poised on the brink
of an explosion at all times. So when I was at home, I imagined
myself to be a punk version of Glinda from The
Wizard of Oz, floating in a pink bubble above it all. I was
untouchable, just like I was when I raised my hand and gave the
vipers in Brunei a little wave good-bye.
“Ciao.”
What would Patti Smith do? She’d say, Fuck them.
She might not be wearing a Chanel suit when she said it, but you’ve
got to put your own spin on things.
We flew in a royal caravan from a private
airport. I saw faces I recognized milling about—Dan and Winston and
Dr. Gordon from the parties—but no other women. I wondered if we
might actually see one of Robin’s wives in person, but there were
no wives and not even any Robin to be seen; just a handful of men
in suits who ignored us. Dan nodded and Winston smiled.
Winston had always been my favorite. He and his
girlfriend, Tootie, were sweet together and spent the nights
talking and holding hands. Sometimes I looked at them and felt a
pang of envy, though it didn’t last long. She surely wasn’t earning
one thousandth of what I was making, but her boyfriend actually
seemed to like her. Still, if I’d had to choose, I would have
picked the money.
Fiona and I flew in our own plane again, which
is definitely the way to travel. At the airport in KL, we were
hustled under intense security through a hallway and straight out
into the waiting cars. There was no such thing as customs when
traveling under the umbrella of diplomacy. No one questioned our
presence. I had learned to let myself be guided and not ask
questions. I was a leaf in a stream, I told myself. I was living in
the moment. I was practically a Zen monk.
With our own personal guard, Fiona and I were
driven to the hotel in KL and deposited into rooms next door to
each other. Our guard instructed us not to leave unless summoned.
He posted himself in between our doorways. I bid good-bye to her as
we entered our neighboring luxury prison cells. Five minutes later
she called to chat.
“Why can’t we even hang out with each other?” I
asked.
“Don’t worry. He won’t stand out there all day.
I’ll see you for dinner.”
She showed up in her pajamas a couple of hours
later, soon followed by a bottle of wine and room service. She
prompted me to order whatever I wanted. Order a bottle of wine;
order three.
“Do you have any idea how many people are here?”
she said. “Martin and Robin each have an entire floor for their
entourage and a separate penthouse suite each for themselves. Do
you really think anyone is looking at the bill?”
We spent most of our days hanging out in each
other’s rooms ordering caviar, which we ate by the spoonful out of
the jar, watching movies, and drinking expensive wine. Champagne
and caviar is hideously cliché but wonderful when consumed while
wearing sweats and watching the Today Show
via satellite. We ordered up massages and listened to music and did
each other’s hair and once we even escaped to go get a pedicure in
the hotel salon. I was so nervous while we were down there that I
gave myself hives.
I don’t know what Fiona did with her nights; we
didn’t talk about it. Robin completely ignored me for six whole
days. While Fiona was gone during the evenings, I read Artaud and
Hesse and went stir-crazy. I read Artaud’s words I am not fully myself and thought, That’s me. I’m
not fully myself. I don’t even know who that self is. I told myself
I had to get out of there soon—to do something real, to be
free.
I called Johnny, who was home for a brief spell
in between getting kicked out of one boarding school and being
shipped off to another. My parents were concerned because the
volume on Johnny’s Obsessive Compulsive Disorder had apparently
turned way up since I had seen him last. My mother had told me
during our previous phone conversation that she had a hard time
getting him out the door because he had to complete so many rituals
just to leave the house. He lived locked in a private world of
tics, outbursts, exclamations, touching doorframes, spitting in
puddles, tapping spoons against the sides of bowls.
“Bro.”
“Sis.”
“How are you?”
“Mellow. Mellow. I’m residing at the homestead
for the time being. Ralph Reuben heard from his mom that you’re a
slave in China.”
“I’m in Malaysia, actually. And how did Ralph
Reuben’s mom hear that?”
“She ran into Mom at the ShopRite.”
Fantastic. Apparently my mother was disclosing
my whereabouts to everyone she saw at the supermarket.
“Could you please tell her to be a little more
discreet?”
“Sure. I’ll let her know. That should take care
of it.”
“What are you going to do now?” I asked
him.
“Mom and Dad would very much like me to depart
for yet another fine learning institution.”
“Why did you leave school this time?”
“I felt like I used to feel when I went to
church with Anthony Dante. I always liked it until the times in the
service when the little things would drop down from the back of the
pews and everyone would kneel and I’d be the only one left sitting.
That’s how it was at that school. I was the only Jew in
church.”
“I know how you feel.”
Even in casual conversation, Johnny was a poet.
I worried for him. He seemed fragile, translucent. Poetry didn’t
get you very far and the world wasn’t kind to people with obvious
expressions of mental illness. But I was 30,000 miles away and
couldn’t do much to convince him to try to work it out at this next
school. I couldn’t even convince myself to stay put. How could I
make a suggestion to him that sounded like a prison sentence to
me?
“I love you, bro. I miss you,” I said. My voice
echoed back to me over the international phone lines. The words
sounded insufficient. And then there was the pause that I had
learned to wait through.
“I love you, too, sis.”
Sitting forgotten for days, I wanted desperately
to get back to New York, back into rehearsals. As Robin ignored me,
his pull on me lessened. My life was disappearing, each hour
dissolving while I rotted in a cage of a hotel room. When I tried
to talk about Artaud to Fiona, she told me in no uncertain terms
that Artaud was a maniac and I was a brat.
“Can’t you just sit still for five minutes? It’s
not like you’re being asked to dig ditches. Go ahead and write all
the poetry you want right here. Learn twelve new monologues. Knock
yourself out. It’s not where you are that’s the problem.”
But Fiona was older than I was. I had no idea
what a dollar meant, thought nothing of eating peanut butter
straight from the jar for lunch and Pop-Tarts from the box for
dinner. I hadn’t really cared that I was poor, so getting rich for
doing nothing didn’t seem like a big deal. This was when I still
truly believed in my heart that I had a great career ahead of me on
the stage.
I was restless, but I was still conflicted. I
hadn’t completely given up on Brunei yet, wasn’t willing to concede
defeat. So when I got the call that Robin had invited me upstairs,
I rallied. I aimed to dazzle. I hoped to spark something that would
galvanize his attentions again and that would, in turn, inspire me
to stay. I dressed to accept my Oscar in a sequined Armani gown
with a plunging back. Robin was an ass man; I tried to choose my
attire accordingly.
Our guard escorted me upstairs to an opulent
dinner party in the penthouse suite, where I, the lone woman, sat
next to Robin. I recognized many of the men around the dining
table, but there were new faces, men with accents that differed
from Robin’s and his usual entourage’s. Some might have been
Iranian; some were British. They seemed more jocular than usual, as
if celebrating some sort of success.
It was one of those nights that flew by on a
magic carpet of champagne and right moments and good timing, the
kind of night in which everything clicks into place and you feel
beautiful and clever. I could tell I pleased him. There was none of
his usual darkness or the criticism that his phony smiles often
imparted. Robin’s expression remained clear of the clouds of
dissatisfaction that portended punishment, banishment from his bed
for days, the flaunting of a rival girl in front of you.
But, as with every night with him, the party
wore on long after everyone else was exhausted. He was one of those
people who didn’t need sleep, who judged everyone else for sleeping
through their brief hours on earth. He was the kind of insomniac
who, if he was a normal person, would spend many lonely late-night
hours. But because he was a filthy-rich aristocrat he could pay a
party full of people to stay up round-the-clock with him if he
wanted.
Robin excused the other guests at four a.m. and
took me to his bedroom suite. The room had floor-to-ceiling rounded
windows, as if the whole twinkling city was in our private
aquarium. We fucked with the curtains open and the light off.
After we were done, I expected to be excused
with the usual smack on the ass and kiss on the cheek. Instead, the
incomprehensible happened. He pushed a button on a remote control
that closed the curtains, curled his body around mine, draped his
arm over me, and said good night.
It completely freaked me out. The intimacy was
such a leap. In Robin’s presence, I was always electrified with
tension, posed and aimed to please, never thinking of my own needs.
I was so frozen in that mode that I couldn’t even kick the covers
off my too-hot feet for fear of disturbing him. I lay awake, my
feet sweating, heart pounding, stomach cramping. I hoped he would
fall asleep first and snore or something and then I could relax. I
pretended to sleep.
“You are not sleeping.”
He wasn’t fooled. I felt like a failure. He
finally gave me a sleeping pill and took one himself.
When we woke, we ate room-service breakfast
together and watched CNN while he dressed for work. For the rest of
the trip, that was how we spent our evenings and mornings. It
became normal. I gave only a passing thought to the fact that Fiona
was now the one waiting around alone.
The first Gulf War had recently ended, but you
could still see its aftermath on the news. Only months earlier I
had protested the war in Tompkins Square Park, but by then, in
Brunei, it seemed faraway—the war and Tompkins Square Park both.
Most people who ask me about Brunei assume it is in the Middle
East, maybe because of the oil and the brown skin. But Southeast
Asia is far from Iraq and I didn’t perceive any connection. Of
course, there was a connection. Every oil-rich sultan, king,
president, and prime minister is slipping around in the same oil
slick.
Robin was tied into this network of oil in ways
I didn’t understand and could never talk to him about. That wasn’t
exactly what I was there for. But I wondered about it as I watched
him scanning the news all the time, a constant stream of it
superimposed on everything else he did. I lay in the huge hotel
bed, the city of Kuala Lumpur humming forty floors below, and
watched the ever-present CNN as Robin got ready for work, whatever
work was. Morning after morning, I watched, among other things, the
wizened face of Nelson Mandela addressing the world about the
crumbling of apartheid.
As Robin became something to me that looked more
and more like a lover and less like an employer, I occasionally
ventured to ascertain Robin’s opinions about the events we watched
every day on the news. But he was usually evasive, so I didn’t ask
too many questions. I knew there was no freedom of the press in
Brunei, that the Sultan was an autocrat (if a genial one) and that
it was a serious crime to disparage him. None of these were
admirable things but I preferred to ignore them. I wasn’t there as
a representative for Amnesty International. It wasn’t my country.
It wasn’t my concern.
All my political convictions, my years of
activism, were suddenly irrelevant. It’s not that I was exactly
going all out for theocracy, polygamy, and unchecked consumerism,
but it didn’t really matter what I believed.
In high school, I had bussed down to Washington
for pro-choice marches, for gay-rights rallies. I wrote papers on
the Zapatistas and planned a post-graduation trip to Chiapas. But I
never did make it to Chiapas. Instead, I decided to wed my activism
with my artistic ambitions and join the illustrious history of the
theater of protest, until I discovered that it didn’t pay very well
and the realities of self-sufficiency began to erode my ideals.
Neither art nor activism had any place in my Brunei world, which,
as the months wore on, was becoming my real world.
Closer to Robin’s interest than the end of
apartheid was the British royal divorce. Closer still was the
ticker tape of international finance, which we watched in English
but might as well have been in Malay, for all I knew about Dows and
S&Ps. My father hadn’t taught me a thing, probably because I
had never asked. But I did tell Robin my father was in finance, and
this impressed him for a minute, but he lost interest quickly.
Instead, I came up with cute stunts to keep him amused.
One morning, I teased Robin because he wouldn’t
take a bath with me.
“I will only share a bath with a duckie,” he
said.
That afternoon I sent a guard out to get a
rubber duckie, and I gave it to Robin as a present so he wouldn’t
be lonely in the tub. That day he was particularly charmed by me,
more than usual. I hadn’t planned to do what I did, but the seed
that Taylor had planted in me had taken root.
Robin liked to throw Serena’s name into
conversations, particularly when things were going well between us
and I was getting complacent. I don’t remember how it came up. Were
we talking about acting? Singing?
“Serena, I think, is a singer in a band in Los
Angeles. Isn’t she?” he asked.
“Yes, I remember she told me she sings in her
boyfriend’s band,” I replied. It was so easy. He had handed it to
me.
“Did she say that?” he asked sharply.
“That she’s a jazz singer?” I pretended the
boyfriend part had just slipped out without my even noticing.
“That’s what she told me.”
I kissed him good-bye that morning and then went
to the windows and stood there looking out over the city for a long
time. I did the same every morning. I always had a couple of hours
to kill before a guard came to fetch me and bring me to my room,
where I’d nap, order room service, read for a while, then get
dressed and do it all over again. But my favorite time of the day
was when Robin left for work, the first quiet of being alone. When
being alone got old, I sometimes called Fiona’s room, but she was
never around during the day anymore. I tried not to think of where
she was.
I kissed Robin good-bye every morning and sat
next to him every night at dinner. It was like having a boyfriend,
except he was a dictator’s brother who was married three times
already and had forty other girlfriends, one of whom I was actively
trying to deprive of her livelihood.
It’s hard to explain why I fought so hard for
Robin. Sometimes I thought he was scheming and fascinating, the
sexy villain. Sometimes he made me feel impossibly lovely.
Sometimes I thought he was a little prick and felt an overwhelming
urge to bean him in the head with the remote control. But here’s
the grimy, ugly truth: I shared Robin’s bed and I felt I was part
of something powerful and important. Power was something I’d never
experienced before. I’m not sure that I was in love with Robin as a
person, exactly, but I was in love with that feeling, ecstatically
in love. I may have gotten the two confused.
Power tasted like an oyster, like I’d swallowed
the sea, all its memories and calm and rot and brutality. It tasted
like an oyster I ate once as a kid, an oyster still flinching with
life. My father’s favorite food was shellfish. On a trip to Boston
once when I was about seven, he took me to Faneuil Hall and set a
dozen raw oysters between us and a dozen raw clams next to that. He
speared his first oyster, dunked it in the cocktail sauce, and then
slugged the whole thing down and dared me to do the same. We
actually drew a small crowd of people who wanted to see the little
girl eat oysters.
I held the creature aloft in front of me for a
beat, wanting to chicken out. It was the underside of a tongue, wet
and meant to be hidden. I put it in my mouth and tried to chew it
and it slid to the back of my throat, making me gag. The crowd
laughed. They cheered. Come on, kiddo, you can
do it! I gagged again before figuring out how to open my throat
and swallow.
It made me want to vomit, but I sucked down that
oyster and then I sucked down four more. I know it made my father
proud. And with each oyster, I understood a little more. They’re
disgusting, they’re delicious, and you swallow every last one just
to prove you can.
I had wanted something dazzling and I’d gotten
it. I was a royal mistress, standing around in La Perla underwear
and overlooking Kuala Lumpur from a penthouse suite. And if I had
the feeling that the oyster was poisoning my blood, if I had an
echo of a thought that something irretrievable was being traded, I
nudged it aside.