Part 13 (1/2)

The depression always crept back in, like carbon monoxide slipping under the crack in the door: colorless, odorless, sure to rob you of your oxygen and kill you silently if undetected. I barely bothered getting out of bed until it was time to go to the parties. I spent hours at a time in the bathtub. The volume on my self-loathing turned way up. I got obsessed with the cameras everywhere, the surveillance. I imagined the men watching me and laughing at my every flaw. I began to think of these invisible watchers as ghosts, spirits, creatures from another world who lived in the house with us even though we couldn't see them.

I wasn't the only one who was haunted. Rumor was that the guesthouses had resident ghosts. There was even a night when ma.s.s hysteria had sent four of the girls in house six running out the front door in the wee hours, insisting that they each had been visited by a weight, a presence, something or someone who had crawled into bed with them.

I had thought, with not a small measure of misogyny, Why, when a bunch of girls get together, does it inevitably turn into The Crucible The Crucible? Now I wasn't so sure they'd been wrong. I kept seeing shadows flicker in the corners of the room, kept looking over my shoulder in the dark hallways. On top of this, Robin had put me in cold storage. I sat there every night maintaining my perfect posture and my strained smile as he ignored me.

When I couldn't take it anymore, I begged to leave. I told Ari that my father was having surgery and I needed to be there. My father's surgery was long over, but it's always good to couch a lie in the truth. That way you're less likely to forget what you said. Ari was sympathetic and arranged for me to go home, insisting that I promise to return in three weeks.

Maybe if I hadn't been so restless I could have stuck it out for longer and stockpiled a greater fortune. But I had no idea what it meant to be patient. I had no idea what kind of windfall I had stumbled into. I thought diamond Bulgari sets and money in $100,000 increments fell from the sky every once in a while. I told myself that maybe I'd come back and maybe I wouldn't.

Some girls in Brunei came and went like weekend guests, and some became the lady of the manor for a time. I started out the belle of the ball, but I became the crazy lady in the attic. I was more fragile than I ever would have thought. Delia, older, wiser, more mentally stable, tried to talk me out of leaving, but I was determined. The truth was, windfall or no windfall, I needed to go home to guard what was left of my sanity.

Robin was in London on business when I left. I didn't even get to say good-bye.

chapter 20.

As I packed my bags, something alternately rose and sank in me, like a tide. I'd be going home-home to New York and my real life and my real friends and family, where I could remember who I really was. Would I turn right back around?

At the party the night before I left, my friends among the Asian girls buzzed around me. They never got to go home until they were going home for good, so they wanted to hear all about what I was going to do and whom I was going to see and where I lived and what my family was like.

Winston, with his kind eyes behind wire-rimmed gla.s.ses, asked me, ”What are you going to do when you get back to reality?”

I answered coyly, carefully. This was my default mode in Brunei, even with Winston. ”This isn't reality?”

”No,” he said, with rare clarity. Everyone in Brunei usually acted like the parties would go on and on. ”This isn't reality for any of us. It's a dream and someday we'll all wake up.”

Eddie took me out into the hallway and sat down with me on the staircase, where the peach-colored carpeting shone with threads of real gold. He handed me a fat stack of notes each worth 10,000 Singapore dollars and then he put a wide, square box in my lap. I opened it to find a gold Tiffany set that belonged on Cleopatra-a basket-weave choker and a matching bracelet and earrings. The jewelry no longer shocked me. I would have been crestfallen if, after all that time, I hadn't received an outrageous gift. I had Eddie help me with the clasp.

When I returned to the party, Fiona said, ”I hope your father feels better.”

She looked at me like she was on to me.

”I know you'll be back soon. I'll say bon voyage, not good-bye.”

I added my new Tiffany set to the heart necklace, the Cartier watch, and the diamond-face Rolex that Robin had given me already, threw my jewels and my money into my carry-on to Singapore, and managed to cram the rest of my clothes into four suitcases. Ari gave me a lecture on how to get my loot and myself back into the country safely. Then she gave me a hug, my pa.s.sport, a ticket home, and a ticket to return again in three weeks. My housemates all stood behind the porch's marble banister and waved good-bye as the car pulled away.

In Singapore, I carried myself confidently, like I knew what I was doing. I pretended it wasn't my first time trying to negotiate the streets of a foreign country alone. I was a CIA operative, fluent in seven languages and highly trained for covert ops. If I faltered, if I showed a soft spot, it was all part of my cover.

Ari had instructed me to change my money at a bank in Singapore in order to avoid the IRS inquiry that would result if I changed it over in the United States. In line at the bank in Singapore, everyone stood about three centimeters from the person in front of them. I breathed in the earwax smell of the pomade in the hair of the man in front of me, could smell the bubble-gum breath of the woman behind me.

I was no longer a leaf in a stream. I was halfway home in my mind and I had a duffel bag to fill with cash and s.h.i.+t to do and I wanted those people out of my face. A belt of panic tightened around my chest and I swayed, unsteady on my feet. I felt the temptation to surrender to it, to black out, to fall into velvet darkness and wake with my skull on the granite floor. I tried to breathe. I closed my eyes. There is something about being almost to the finish line that makes me start to unravel. My mantra went from ”You are a leaf in a stream” to ”Don't blow it now.” Do. Not. Blow. This.

What would Patti Smith do? She wouldn't be there in the first place. Really, she wouldn't. I was far out on the water without my fairy G.o.dmother to guide the needle of my compa.s.s. When had that happened?

But I didn't blow it. I collected my cash and loaded it, stack by bound stack, into the duffel bag. I walked out the door with piles of hundreds. I could have bathed in it. I was back in my personal spy movie, walking down the streets of Singapore with a duffel bag full of cash, checking the reflections in store windows to see if anyone was behind me. I hailed a cab back to the hotel, where I'd make the drop to a bartender with a yellow rose on his lapel. Cut. Cut.

Next shot: morning of my departure. Whatever cash didn't fit into my two money belts I stuffed inside my stockings. I got rid of the jewelry boxes and wore the jewelry.

I threw a loose sweat suit over the top of the jewelry and became a nervous-eyed, thick-waisted girl with big gold earrings on. I sweated the whole flight to Frankfurt and then scarfed Chinese food and drank Jack Daniel's at the airport. I got back on the interminable flight feeling sick to my stomach and not nearly drunk enough.

Many hours later the spiny peaks, right-angled valleys, and soaring bridges, the floating Marvel comic metropolis that is New York seen from high above, brought tears to my eyes.

chapter 21.

I returned to a breezy, budding New York April. returned to a breezy, budding New York April.

I dragged my suitcases one at a time up the two flights of stairs and dropped them in the middle of the hovel I would now be sharing with not only Penny but also a director friend of ours named Sam. Penny and Sam had hooked up while I was gone and Sam had as good as moved in to our one-bedroom, bringing his waffle maker with him and little else. The two of them welcomed me back with a waffle dinner and a new cat they had found at the local bodega, whom they named Nada after the underground theater across the street, where Penny worked the box office.

I unpacked my designer clothes into my miniature closet with the paint peeling in tongues from the doorjamb. My only possessions until then had been a futon on the floor, a scavenged desk, and a bunch of clothes and records stacked in a wall unit fas.h.i.+oned from crates. Hippie tapestries were tacked over the windows as curtains. Dusty votive candles covered every available surface. A palace it was not. I put the rest of my jewelry, worth well over a hundred thousand dollars, in a s...o...b..x in my closet. I wondered if rats were attracted to s.h.i.+ny things or if that was just magpies. Would the tenement rats, fat and self-a.s.sured, sneak in, gnaw their way through the cardboard, and make off with my Tiffany set?

I put the clothes that wouldn't fit in the closet into two suitcases and later that week I took them with me in a cab to Jersey, figuring I could store them in the closet in my parents' garage. I dumped the suitcases as I came in and even from the downstairs I could smell onions and roasting chicken. It was the first time I'd smelled any kind of food actually being cooked in months.

My mother called out from the kitchen to my father in the backyard, ”Jill's home!” As if I'd been away at camp; as if it was still my home.

I was coming up the stairs as she came down; we met in the middle with hugs and uneasy smiles. It didn't seem to be getting any easier to hug her. It was always uncomfortable, like hugging a distant relative who had known you when you were a kid but whom you can't remember at all. And this made me feel like s.h.i.+t, because my mother was a kind lady who cooked me chickens. I kept waiting for the discomfort to disappear as time pa.s.sed, as I put more distance between my parents and me, but I hugged her and there it still was.

My father looked like he'd gained half his weight back already, and he vibrated with the same manic, distracted energy as ever. In his excitement to see me, he put me in a half headlock and rocked me back and forth. He'd been outside planting flowers and his s.h.i.+rt smelled like potting soil and gra.s.s.

Twenty minutes later I sat on the gray couch in the gray living room and looked out at their newly landscaped front yard through the gray stripes of the vertical blinds. They had asked me about the trip, of course, but had settled for my vague answers and had moved on to other things. I think they were relieved to let the subject drop.

”Did you move the fence in the front yard?” I asked.

”What fence in the front yard?” my mother responded.

”Wasn't there a fence there before?”

”No,” said my mother.

How strange. I knew every corner of the house: every china pattern, every book spine in the study, every Hanukah-present hiding place, every piece of jewelry in my mother's drawers, every bottle of liquor in the liquor cabinet. I knew where my father hid his small gun, an heirloom from his father. But I still remembered things wrong sometimes, weird things like a phantom fence in the yard. I felt like the girl who had lived in that house wasn't me, but a person I'd read about in a story. A story I couldn't quite recall.

”How long did you live here for, moron?” added my dad, though he said it affably. He was fond of using words like moron moron and and schmuck schmuck in an affectionate way. in an affectionate way.

Weeks before I had been a beautiful femme fatale, sipping champagne and overlooking a foreign city and waiting for the Prince to return home from his princely duties. Now I was a moron, with a wicked zit growing on my chin and at least two hours left before I could make a polite exit and haul a.s.s back to the city. I felt the migraine coming, as if someone had thrown a fishhook into my eye from behind and started to yank.