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 pa.s.sing 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 a.s.sume 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 ill.u.s.trious 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 s.e.xy villain. Sometimes he made me feel impossibly lovely. Sometimes I thought he was a little p.r.i.c.k 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 sh.e.l.lfish. 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 c.o.c.ktail 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! Come on, kiddo, you can do it! I gagged again before figuring out how to open my throat and swallow. 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.

chapter 17.

The guard knocked in the middle of the day and informed me I was to dress in an evening gown. Previously on the Malaysia trip Robin had called for me only at night, so it seemed strange. When we got on the elevator, the guard pushed the b.u.t.ton for the roof. My chest tightened with panic. I knew too much and they were getting rid of me. There was nothing I could do. I was trapped. I was like that guy in the gangster movie who knows he's about to get whacked for some infraction, yet has no choice but to get in the car with his soon-to-be killer. I imagined the headlines.

DESPAIRING SPURNED MISTRESS THROWS HERSELF OFF A MALAYSIAN ROOFTOP.

AMERICAN PROSt.i.tUTE DIES IN A DRUG DEAL GONE WRONG AT THE KUALA LUMPUR HILTON.

JERSEY TEEN DISAPPEARS WHILE ON HOLIDAY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA.

At least I'd die in an evening gown. But no one pitched me off the roof. Instead, I found a helicopter waiting for me on the helipad, kicking up a crazy wind. It was the first time I had been in a helicopter, and the headphones the pilot handed me wrecked my by-then-perfected five-minute updo. I imagined I looked like a Hitchc.o.c.k heroine after having been chased over a foam studio mountain while the industrial fans blew my evening gown into a twist.

The ride seemed laughably short, barely a Spider-Man hop from one roof to another. But looking down on the gridlocked traffic creeping through the streets of KL, I was sure that what was a three-minute flight would have been a three-hour drive. That helicopter flight, the drives to and from the airport, and the view from my hotel-room window were all I would see of KL. I never smelled the food smells blown out the back of the restaurants, never tried to buy a scarf from a street vendor, never ordered my own cup of tea, never even put my shoe to the Malaysian pavement except to walk from the hotel to the car, and that only twice. I had been to Malaysia, but I hadn't. I had been to the island of Borneo, but not really.

I was greeted at the helipad by two mirrored-sungla.s.ses-wearing guards, who ushered me into the door of yet another hotel suite. This one stretched on forever. I began to fix my hair, taking my time to look around and prepare for yet another marathon wait. I turned around and on a love seat at the far end of the room sat the Sultan. I jumped and nearly screamed from the shock of finding myself not alone.

"How do you like my country?" he asked, patting the seat next to him. Robin had asked me the same question.

Of course, we weren't exactly in his country at that particular minute, but I knew what the Sultan meant. The world was his oyster; everywhere was his country. And not in a John Lennon kind of way.

He seemed a football field away. In front of him, on the coffee table, was a delicate bone-china tea set edged in gold. The Sultan asked me to call him Martin as I sat next to him and poured for both of us. Talking to Martin was easier than talking to Robin. He was gracious and almost breezy, his smiling face much less imposing than the stern countenance on the money and the billboards. We finished one cup and even half of another before retiring to the bedroom. The suite where I met the Sultan of Brunei was easily ten times bigger than my whole house is now. The Pope himself couldn't have dreamed up a more lavish spectacle.

I was being pa.s.sed along after all. But I had been in Brunei long enough to understand that it was a compliment rather than an insult. I was some sort of a tribute paid, part of a system of honor and respect between brothers. I was a gift.

Just by kissing Martin I could tell how different he was from Robin. He was less complicated, less needy, less manipulative. The difference can best be explained by the following: Robin demanded that you love him; Martin just wanted you to suck his d.i.c.k. He politely requested that I do exactly that, after asking me to remove my clothes, walk back and forth, turn around, and then do a little dance. Afterward he cheerily sent me back to the helicopter with the p.r.o.nouncement that his brother had good taste.

I never saw the Sultan again, but after that it always amused me to look at his face on the Bruneian dollars. Angelique, the singer whom Prince Sufri loved, later told me that I shouldn't feel bad that he didn't ask me back. In fact, I should be flattered that I met him in the first place. She told me that he almost never f.u.c.ked Western girls and when he did he never kept them.

That night Robin was eager to know if Martin had liked me. He seemed like a little boy looking for his father's approval. Robin was always famished behind the eyes. It was the kind of hunger you could never really feed, the kind that keeps you up until five a.m. every night, the kind that drives you to f.u.c.k girl after girl, to buy Maserati after Maserati.

He looked like an alcoholic near closing time, like someone who had gotten everything he had ever wanted and despaired to discover that he still felt empty. It wasn't the first time I suspected that for all his relentless pursuit of pleasure, he actually had a hard time having fun. There aren't enough girls or cars in the world to satisfy that kind of appet.i.te.

I slept in Robin's arms and dreamed that I was the Sultan, or not exactly the Sultan but a man.

I am a man and I walk into the Kit Kat Club on Fifty-second Street, push through the curtain of thick tinsel slabs that hang in the doorway, dodge the mirrored columns, and round the corner. I sit at one of the booths along the wall and buy a lap dance from a girl whose face I can't really see, but I can feel her heat. It surprises me how profoundly naked she is in my lap. In the dream I'm awed by her softness. I think, You can buy a girl, a whole warm, velvety girl.

I never got it before. I never understood why you'd want to buy a girl, until that dream. In my dream I was so grateful to be a man.

chapter 18.

I returned from Kuala Lumpur to find Serena was gone. returned from Kuala Lumpur to find Serena was gone.

"Gone?"

"Gone. Closets cleared out. One-way ticket. Gone," said Ari.

Oh, happy day! Serena gone! I think I actually did the running man. Then it hit me. Had the jab at her that I had slipped into my pillow talk with Robin caused her to be sent home? If so, who cared? I should feel victorious. She had tried to do the same to me but it hadn't worked because she was too transparent.

I flashed back to her eating that strawberry. I knew the feeling of running your tongue over the tiny beads, antic.i.p.ating the taste, pretending, always pretending, that one bite is enough, that you don't ever need to feel full, to feel satisfied. I felt a pang of something. Not guilt, exactly. Disgust. At Serena and at myself. For what a vicious harpy she had been, for what I had been reduced to in the face of it. But isn't this who I wanted to be? The ruthless one, the one who fights and wins, even if I come out b.l.o.o.d.y? The opposite of fighter isn't lover, it's runner. Who do you want to be?

I asked Ari why Serena had gone home and she finally spilled all the beans about Serena. The story of Serena was that Serena had been number one before there was ever a Fiona. Serena had been number one before there were any other Western girls in Brunei. Robin had adored Serena once. But, like the wife of Bluebeard, she just couldn't resist the one thing that was forbidden her.

Back in the early days of the Brunei party girls, a whole eight months before, Ari, Serena, and Leanne had regularly been allowed out to the Hilton to have lunch and swim in the pool. They had gone shopping in Singapore and then gone out to the zoo together. They had each lived in their own guesthouse.

During this golden age, Prince Hakeem, Jefri's oldest son, whom I had yet to meet, would come to the parties every night. He had a friend named Arif, the handsome counterpart to the behemoth Hakeem. Arif began to show up at the Hilton pool on certain days, which were magically the days Serena happened to be there.

Serena used the house phone to arrange the trysts. Apparently our favorite frosty blue-eyed beauty also had a taste for talking dirty on said phone and not to the Prince. Robin rarely used the phone for social reasons. Why would he? Other people made his calls for him. If he wanted to talk to someone, he mentioned it to one of his aides and the person soon appeared in front of him.

Serena was the trailblazer in Brunei. She didn't know the phones were tapped. She never suspected that her private conversations would be played back for the Prince himself, who never confronted her directly, but rather would just drop hints by repeating, at opportune moments, choice phrases from her conversations with Arif. I imagine that he enjoyed how her body went stiff and dropped in temperature, how her eyes registered fear and guilt that not even she could conceal, how she broke a light sweat and tried ever harder to please him, feigning greater pa.s.sion.

The Prince didn't summarily cut off her head. He didn't even present her with a one-way ticket home. What fun would that be? It wasn't his style. If he was the Grand Inquisitor and he had you stretched out on a rack, he'd make it last for days. He'd turn the wheel in such minuscule progressions that you might not even notice you were being tortured until you saw your intestines on the ground next to you. No, he pretended he had forgiven Serena. He invited her back and sat her in a chair and proceeded to ignore her for months while he romanced every other woman in the room, but most pointedly her rival. That rival would be me.

Ari told me all this over cheese sandwiches and watermelon spears. I felt my toes turn cold. Fiona, my best buddy Fiona, must have known this and never mentioned it to me. It wasn't like she didn't warn me. "I'm not your friend," she'd said. Another useful lesson I learned in Brunei: When someone tells you something like, "I'm not your friend," believe her.

Taylor had lain next to me in bed and urged me to avenge my mistreatment. "You're smart, too," she had whispered in my ear.

Was I? I had made a move that looked good at the time, but it turned out the other players in this game had way more information than I did. With Serena gone, would I be cast aside, no longer needed in Robin's scheme to torture her? He enjoyed the infighting among the girls. Would I be less fun for him without a rival? Would I go back to New York and wait for a phone call from Ari that never came, my hope fading as the months wore on? If I had even influenced Serena's departure at all, had I been shortsighted in my manipulations?

Had Fiona seen this far ahead? Had she used me to get rid of Serena, counting on the fact that Robin would lose interest in me once Serena was gone? Or was I just constructing an elaborate soap opera in my mind?

I should have just stuck with what I was good at: looking cute and telling funny stories and selling it. My father's words came back to me, with a twist. You're no great international call girl, so you've got to sell it. You're no great international call girl, so you've got to sell it. I knew I'd never win in a match with Fiona, but I'd learned enough from her to give her a good game. Every time I started to get batty with boredom or sick with self-hatred and ready to beg for a plane ticket home, something happened to pull me back in. I knew I'd never win in a match with Fiona, but I'd learned enough from her to give her a good game. Every time I started to get batty with boredom or sick with self-hatred and ready to beg for a plane ticket home, something happened to pull me back in.

Robin got a new Lamborghini. Before I even entered the party room, a guard fetched me and brought me to the back entrance of the palace, where Robin picked me up for a spin in his car. I stepped in and the doors closed downward automatically, like the hatch of a time machine. The seats were so low I felt as if I was lying on the ground. A speed b.u.mp would have grazed my a.s.s.

We sped along jungle-flanked roads lit only by our headlights. Riding in a car with Robin was another strange intimacy, as if we were a normal couple and could go anywhere, could go out to dinner or to the movies. Except, of course, we were going straight back to the same place we went every night. I watched Robin watch the road. Something pulsed against his skin and behind his eyes and through the veins in his neck. It was as if he was struggling to hold himself back from driving five hundred miles per hour. He seemed almost unaware of me. I wondered if he wanted just to drive and keep driving, to go somewhere where he wasn't a prince at all.

"What do you think?" he asked me, surprising me out of my reflection. I think we should just leave and go to Thailand, I think we should just leave and go to Thailand, I almost said. I almost said. Bring nothing at all. Buy a new wardrobe when we get there and stay in a hut on a beach in p.h.u.ket and go cliff diving. Bring nothing at all. Buy a new wardrobe when we get there and stay in a hut on a beach in p.h.u.ket and go cliff diving.

"What do you think?" he repeated.

"Of what?"

"Of the car," he answered, annoyed. The car. Of course. As if there were anything else.

I searched for an adjective to describe the car, something to make him feel good. What I really thought: ugly, ridiculous, pathetic. But what I said was: "Tough."

"Tough?"

He looked unsatisfied.

"Beautiful. It's a beautiful car."

Beautiful got thrown around so recklessly in Brunei. Everything was beautiful: the jungle, the necklaces, the girls, the cars, his art, his home. He owned it all. It was all the same. got thrown around so recklessly in Brunei. Everything was beautiful: the jungle, the necklaces, the girls, the cars, his art, his home. He owned it all. It was all the same. Beautiful Beautiful was always what he wanted to hear. You possess beautiful; you hold it in your palm. was always what he wanted to hear. You possess beautiful; you hold it in your palm.

Some of the faces had changed during the two weeks we were gone. Most noticeably, with the absence of Serena, Prince Hakeem had returned to the parties. He was like a blown-up baby doll, easily three times the size of his father. Robin dropped me off at the door and I walked down the stairs alone. Prince Hakeem was on the landing in front of the door to the party room playing with an electric remote-control car that was a miniature replica of the Lamborghini out of which I had just stepped. Two slim Thai girls who looked about the right age to be dressed up for their homecoming dance slouched against each other on the stairs, giggling at his antics.

I customarily bowed as I walked by him. It felt different to bow to Robin than it did to bow to a guy my own age with an oversize remote control in his hand. With Robin, the tone of the bow was submissive, s.e.xual. With Prince Hakeem it was sarcastic.

Two new girls, Delia and Trish, had taken Serena's place. I entered to a group squeal from the Thai girls. Yoya, Tootie, and Lili smothered me with hugs. I couldn't figure out why they were so sweet to me. Maybe because I defied convention and frequently drifted toward their island in our little archipelago of girls. I perched on the edge of their crowded couch and asked them the words in Thai for please please and and thank you thank you, and in return they treated me like a long-lost childhood friend. Some girls in Brunei were good girls, sweet girls.

Fiona greeted me with what I suppose was warmth, which for her looked something like nonchalance but not like disdain. Robin and his cronies entered to the strains of Angelique's pa.s.sionate "How Am I Supposed to Live Without You." Eddie tapped me to leave the room about an hour after the men arrived. A guard led me to the hall of doors and opened one I hadn't been through before. Behind door number two is a lifetime supply of Turtle Wax, behind door number six is a stack of gold bricks, behind door number three is . . . a bath. A really big bath.

Some Orientalist painter should have been sitting in the corner, brush in hand. A bath the size of a small pool stood in the center, lined with tiny gold tiles that reflected shimmering rays of light around the steamy room. A platter stacked with fruit, honey cake, and chocolate was laid out beside the tub. The rubber duck I had bought for Robin in Malaysia floated in the water, sadly tilting to one side. I didn't want to get in the bath and get all sweaty before he got there, but I felt stupid in my gown, so I hung my clothes and lay naked on the divan, an odalisque plucked from one of his paintings. The only thing that ruined the absolute authenticity of the harem bath fantasy was the TV mounted in the corner of the room blasting CNN as usual. I guess his plan was to show me that he wasn't afraid to take a bath with a girl after all.

It seemed like he had set up a romantic little interlude for us, but when Robin came in, his expression was chilly and hard. He had barely said a word to me in the car earlier in the evening. Our familiarity from Malaysia was gone. I suspected that he was probably disappointed to come back and find Serena missing, even though he was the one who had made the call that exiled her. But I had left him no choice. He knew she had a boyfriend and I knew he knew, so he couldn't let her stay. It was my fault she was gone and he had no one left to punish, so the punishment fell on me.

Even if Serena hadn't been a casualty, I knew him well enough by now not to wonder why his att.i.tude toward me had changed so rapidly. There didn't need to be a reason. It made me nervous when he turned icy, but not as nervous as when he was kind. When he was kind, you could be sure he was setting you up for a fall. Maybe my penalty would be mild.

"You look very nice."

He changed in the other room and when he came back, he hung up his robe and stepped into the bath, submerging only to the waist. I slipped in beside him and he turned me around without even kissing me. I felt myself floating up toward the ceiling as he f.u.c.ked me. It was the kind of f.u.c.k that was meant to make you feel bad, but it didn't. I was less and less tethered to my body all the time. I could tumble right out of myself at will and leave behind only a hologram. Far below me the hologram grabbed the nearby leg of the divan to steady herself. But I was free. I wasn't one of his groveling subjects. I wasn't even subject to the laws of gravity.

After he was dressed, right before he left me to go back to the party, I tried out one of my memorized Malay sentences. This one I had been saving for a special occasion.

"Aku cinta padamu," I said.

Like I said before, the Sultan just wanted you to suck his d.i.c.k, but Robin needed your love. People who need everyone to love them are exponentially more dangerous than people who are content merely with power and money. You have to go way further to make them happy.

"That's nice," he replied.