Part 10 (1/2)

When I went to try on the clothes, I discovered that the salesgirls at designer shops in Singapore are slightly different from those at Urban Outfitters. Three of them piled into my dressing room and pretty much took my clothes off for me.

I started out slowly, trying on everything twice, looking at price tags, asking everyone's opinions. The salesgirls clucked and pulled at the fabric and nodded approvingly. I frowned and spun in front of the mirror until my guard got fed up with me and took me by the shoulders.

He looked at me and said, ”This is just your first shop.”

He picked up one dress off the bench in the dressing room and then took three others off the hanger, gave them all to the salesgirl, and spoke to her in Malay. She took them to the counter.

”Take them all. You may only shop once in your life.”

He picked a purse out of the spotlight on a gla.s.s shelf and gave it to the next girl, who took it to the front of the shop.

”But how much can I spend?” I didn't want to reach my limit and wind up with a bunch of clothes I didn't really love, especially if I might only shop once in my life.

”Just get them and let's go. I'll let you know when you're close to your limit.”

Chanel, Hermes, Versace, Dior, Armani, Gucci. We exhausted the first mall and went to the next and yet another until everything, even the most expensive things-especially the most expensive things-started to look cheap and nauseating. We never even took the bags with us; they were sent on ahead. It was frantic. I was like some suburban mother who wins a holiday raffle and gets ten free minutes at Toys”R”Us, running through the aisles with a shopping cart, grabbing everything she can reach.

I was aware of my rabid consumerism. What about the eight-year-old slaves in China who st.i.tched these ridiculously priced rags together? What about hungry people? Homeless people? Entire countries besieged by poverty and famine? Entire blocks of New York where the sidewalks are lined with encampments of cardboard?

This is what I told myself: It wasn't my money to spend it was Robin's and he wasn't spending it on the homeless he was spending it on clothing for his mistress and if I didn't buy that dress right there it wouldn't help anything it wouldn't give one abused garment worker a cubic inch more of fresh air. I was being silly, entertaining the pretensions of the bourgeois bleeding heart. Not buy a dress because people were starving? Even the guilt itself was an embarra.s.sment, kind of like experimental theater. Fiona would have scoffed. She would have deemed my foolishness unforgivable. I convinced myself that Robin was probably a really charitable guy in other ways. After all, everyone had health care in Brunei; everyone had a good education free of charge. What was the harm if he wanted his girlfriends to look nice, too?

After the shops closed at nine p.m., security guards opened the doors for us. Salesgirls stayed late in the stores and we kept shopping, my arches aching in my sandals as we power-walked the dim corridors of the closed malls. I started throwing down Chanel gowns on the counter without even trying them on. I figured I might as well go until I hit my spending limit, but I hit a wall of exhaustion first and gave up. We drove back to the hotel close to midnight. I had been shopping since eleven that morning.

”What was my limit anyway?” I asked the bodyguard when we were in the car. I couldn't believe I hadn't hit it. I had certainly tried.

”You didn't have one. No limit only for some girls. Only for very special girls.”

”Well, how much did I spend, then?”

He told me a number that left me speechless. The number far exceeded the down payment on the house I live in today. I felt drunk.

Fiona and I ate in silence. I was dehydrated and the noodles seemed gummy and tasteless. We went straight to our rooms, exhausted. Fifteen identical suitcases lined the wall. My new clothes were already folded and packed inside them. I lay on the bed and tried to squeeze my knees so tightly into my chest that I would wring the disgust out of my gut.

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 s.p.a.ce, 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 st.i.tch 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 succ.u.mbed 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 Da.s.s, stopped eating chocolate, started working out more, and learned those f.u.c.king 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 prost.i.tutes for a prince.

The girls Ari brought to Brunei were almost never prost.i.tutes 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 embarra.s.sed 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 ident.i.ty in the face of Brunei's warping influence. She also retained a fiance 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 marriage. She sat cross-legged on the bed while I packed, eating avocado out of the sh.e.l.l 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 pa.s.sion 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.