Nobody's Girl — Chapter no 19

NINETEEN

Down Under

hen I picture myself during my first few days in Australia, I haveW to laugh. I am standing behind the stove in my in-laws’ kitchen, learning how to make coffee the Italian way, one strong cup at a time. I pour water into a tiny silver percolator, then spoon finely ground coffee into the sieve-like reservoir through which hot water will soon flow. It’s a cozy scene, except for what I’m wearing: a skimpy undershirt and Daisy Duke cutoff shorts with my thong underwear protruding from the waistband. To see me, you might think I’m trying to show off my body, but that isn’t right.

While in Epstein’s employ, I’d been encouraged to wear clothes that made me look even younger than I was. Now, no longer Epstein’s captive, I was a wife—a grown woman. But I still felt—and dressed—like a teenage girl. I didn’t have the slightest idea how an adult version of me should look.

When I moved into Frank and Nina’s house, that was just the beginning of what I didn’t know. I had never loaded a dishwasher, for example, or scrambled an egg or separated laundry into darks and lights. I’d never opened a bank account or filed income taxes or made a good cup of coffee —the list went on and on. Sometimes the weight of my ignorance overwhelmed me. What is adulthood, I wondered, and will I ever master it?

What is it to be a wife? It would take time for me to figure out the answers.

Our first weekend in Australia, Robbie took me camping in Hunter Valley, north of Sydney, with a group of his friends. The place is one of the country’s major wine regions, but we had so little money that Robbie decreed we were there to rough it and enjoy the natural beauty, not to sip Shiraz. I was good with that until I saw where we were sleeping: a ramshackle shed. That weekend was quite an introduction to my new country. Yes, we saw a few Aboriginal cave paintings, but the weather was

freezing and the only kangaroo we spotted appeared to have been dead for months.

A few days after our return, I fell terribly ill with some sort of flu.

When I spiked a fever, Robbie was at work—he’d gotten a construction job.

I felt awful: clammy and hot. I didn’t want to be a pain in anyone’s ass, and —especially since I’d just learned the Aussie phrase “having a whinge” (complaining for no reason)—I was determined to be stoic. But when Robbie’s dad discovered how sick I was, he swung into action, whipping up his special zuppa di lenticchie, or lentil soup. I was too weak to get out of bed, but Frank propped me up on my pillows and then sat beside me, feeding me spoonfuls until I was full. Later, as I passed in and out of a sweaty, delirious sleep, he returned every few minutes to cool my forehead with a damp cloth. When my fever broke, Frank brought me coffee that was creamy from the raw egg he’d stirred into it.

After I’d recovered, Frank sat with me and showed me how to peel a prickly pear, teaching me to avoid the nettles, which will embed themselves like fiberglass in your fingers if you aren’t careful. He didn’t say much, just as Robbie had warned that he wouldn’t, but in those first weeks that I was in Sydney, Frank gave me more nurturing than I ever got from my own father.

The women of the Giuffre clan were more skeptical of me. Robbie’s mom, especially, is blunt and quick to call out wrongdoing, and at first she was suspicious of this skinny American who’d crash-landed on her doorstep. Then, just before Christmas, Nina took me to the home of some of Robbie’s aunties, or zias. It was cannoli-making day, and I was being drafted to help. I knew nothing about making cannoli, of course, but I quickly figured out the assembly line: pounding out the dough, then rolling it thin and wrapping it around bamboo poles that we dipped into a fryer, taking care not to burn them. Then we stuffed the crispy shells with three kinds of fillings: ricotta, vanilla cream, and chocolate. We must’ve made three hundred cannoli that day, and when I returned home, I had ricotta in my hair. But I’d passed some sort of test. The zias were proud of me.

Married life took some getting used to. I couldn’t get a work permit until we were legally married, which we would accomplish in January 2003, but already, Robbie was working all the time, trying to make good on his promise to provide for me. I helped out when I could with the Giuffre family’s catering business—hauling steam trays, doing dishes, waitressing when needed. I liked keeping busy and contributing to this family I’d just joined. But at the same time, I was struggling to come to terms with my new existence.

Robbie’s and my sex life, for example: I was fiercely attracted to him, but I still sometimes had trouble letting myself fully enjoy being with him in bed. Before Robbie, I’d been a sort of zombie when it came to sex— going through the motions, keeping my true self under a psychic lock and key. I had also been trained to do things that Robbie found downright weird.

I remember the first time I jumped out of bed right after we made love, only to return with a warm, wet washcloth. When I tried to clean Robbie up, like Epstein had required me to do, my husband took hold of my wrist. “You don’t have to do that,” he said gently. “That’s not right. Lay down with me instead.” I did as he asked, and I never brought a washcloth to bed again.

But while this should have been a relief, it also left me confused. That act, however demeaning, had been expected of me for so long, and I’d been praised for it. Now that I wasn’t doing it anymore, I was unsure what to do with myself instead. It was difficult just to relax.

“What do you like—and not like—in bed?” Robbie had asked soon after we met. Now, little by little, I began to acknowledge that there were things I wasn’t comfortable with. For example, I wasn’t wild about giving blow jobs—too many memories of unwelcome hands pushing on the back of my neck, forcing me to swallow. And receiving oral sex only reminded me of my dad. This was a lot for Robbie: hearing how much my past abusers had ruined for me, and also for him. When he first realized how much I was effectively removing from the menu of our intimate life, Robbie looked a little stunned. But then he made it okay. There were lots of ways to make each other feel good, he told me, as we lay around in bed. “I want you to feel loved,” he said.

I did feel loved, most of the time. But then my past would intervene. I didn’t want to think about the Billionaires, the Prime Minister, and all the others. But sometimes during sex, a contorted face would pop into my head, and I’d remember. This was awful in myriad ways—experiencing flashbacks in the first place, obviously, but also trying to shield Robbie from knowing it was happening. I wanted both to protect him and at the same time to keep him from knowing how damaged his new wife really was. But whenever Robbie got an inkling that I was trying to hide something, he felt as if I were shutting him out. We were a team, he said.

We needed to deal with these things together. I knew that made sense, but at times, that kind of wide-open togetherness was more than I could handle.

While we were still living with his parents in Sydney, Robbie— knowing how much I missed Mary-Jane, the Chow Chow I’d left in Florida —bought me a Jack Russell terrier. I named him Champion (Champ, for short), and he gave my days structure. Like any dog, Champ needed to be walked, which got me out of the house. But his unrelenting Jack Russell brain also demanded that I engage with him constantly. I couldn’t just retreat into my own memories—Champ wouldn’t allow it. Being driven by the needs of others was familiar to me, but with Champ, that was a healthy impulse.

Robbie and I had always planned to move out of his parents’ home eventually, but Champ’s arrival hastened that decision. Frank and Nina were from the old country, so they believed animals should be kept outside.

My need to have Champ on my lap, at the table, in our bed, made them crazy. So in early 2003, Robbie and I moved into our first apartment in Parramatta, a bustling, artsy, multicultural neighborhood. The walls of our tiny two-bedroom second-floor walk-up were thin—I remember our lovely Indian next-door neighbors had a new baby, whose cries we heard at all hours. I’m also sure they heard Robbie and me fighting. Too often, usually after drinking too much, we’d go at it hammer and tong—why didn’t I clean the house, he’d yell, when he was working so hard? Why couldn’t he come home earlier, I’d scream, when he knew I was so lonely? Sometimes he’d call me on his lunch break, and I’d just be waking up. “What are you doing,

just faffing around?” he’d ask, using Aussie slang for wasting time. “Jenna, you are acting like a child.” That made me angry. But the truth was that in some ways I still was a child.

A perfect example: We were so poor that at first we couldn’t even afford a sofa. But Robbie scrimped and saved, and one morning before he left for work, he gently nudged me awake. “I know how much you love shopping,” he said, stroking my face. “Go out today and buy us some furniture.” He handed me a thousand dollars in cash. “This won’t get us much—you’ll probably need to go to a secondhand store. But it’ll be a start.”

That night, when he came home, I proudly showed him what I’d bought for us: an Xbox game console.

“Jenna, are you kidding?” Robbie said, trying not to laugh or explode, or both.

“I thought it’d be fun,” I said. “It comes with two controllers, so we can play together.”

“But we have nowhere to sit, Jenna. What were you thinking?”

I felt embarrassed and defensive. “What I was thinking is that all you do is work,” I fumed. “I was just trying to bring some laughter into the house.”

What I didn’t say, because I was ashamed to admit it, was that the thought of going to a furniture store alone had paralyzed me. I didn’t know how to shop for furniture because I’d never seen anybody do it. I was afraid of doing it wrong. So I’d blown all our money on something I knew how to buy—a toy.

The fact was that I was unprepared to run a household. One morning I came into the kitchen and encountered the hugest spider I’d ever seen, just enjoying itself on the wall next to the sink. I can deal with many things that make other people squeamish: worms don’t scare me; snakes are a breeze.

But spiders? Ever since Forrest and my dad took me to see Arachnophobia with them, I’ve been deathly afraid. So I called Robbie at work and said I needed him to come home. “I’m sorry, sweetie,” he said, sounding distracted. “I can’t leave.”

“But it’s looking at me,” I pleaded, risking a glance at the spider’s

many eyeballs.

“Is it a huntsman?” he asked.

“What’s a huntsman?” I practically screamed. Robbie explained: The huntsman spider, also known as the giant crab spider, looks a little like a tarantula, but bigger. And, of course, one of the places on the planet that the huntsman spider thrives is Australia. The monster I was having a staring contest with looked as big as a dessert plate.

“It’s a huntsman!” I said, hoping that would motivate Robbie to come save me. But he just laughed. “Darling, you could sleep next to that spider,” he said. “It’s ugly, but it won’t hurt you.” Well, that did nothing to reassure me. So I hung up on Robbie and called his dad, who came right over with a broom. “I’ll kill it for you,” he said valiantly. “I’ll kill it dead.” And soon the huntsman was no more.

I wish my own father had treated me with similar care. Sometime in this period, I got Dad on the phone. He and my mom had separated. They’d had many problems, but now I was hearing that Mom had discovered that Dad liked to dress in women’s clothes. That was it: they were headed for divorce. They’d sold the Rackley Road house where I’d grown up, and my mom had moved to Colorado. But Dad was still living in Florida, so I asked him to get my Dodge truck back from Tony and then sell it for me. I was hoping it would fetch several thousand dollars. I also asked Dad to pawn or sell everything in a storage locker I’d rented. Among other things, the locker contained a chandelier and a few antiques my grandma Shelley had left me. Dad agreed and said he’d wire me the proceeds. But this was my father, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that when I went to collect the wire, all he’d sent me was $500, a fraction of what he’d likely been paid for my things.

That was a problem for a lot of reasons, not least of which was that I was still kicking an expensive habit—Xanax—that I used to help blot out my trauma. Back in Laos, I’d dumped most of my supply in a toilet, because I feared that being apprehended with drugs might get us thrown in jail. But I still had a small stash, and it was running out. Not that I admitted

this to Robbie. While I’d been honest with my husband about the range of damaging experiences I’d endured, I think he expected that the farther away I got from those incidents, the better I’d feel. Instead, the opposite seemed to be happening. Memories I’d tamped down for years were now coming up, unbidden, in vivid detail.

Disturbing images would pop into my head during the day—the black leather, studded collar Epstein had choked me with; the greedy, cruel look on the Prime Minister’s face as he watched me beg for my life. I was haunted by nightmares—my abusers looming over me, about to pounce, and me unable to get away. Frequently I was jolting myself awake, with my side of the bed soaked in sweat. I hated waking Robbie up, so I’d just cuddle closer to him. “You okay?” he’d mumble. “Yeah. Just another one of those dreams,” I’d say, as he wrapped his arms around me and dozed off again.

Nevertheless, I was not yet willing to acknowledge how much pain I was in or how much I’d relied on antianxiety meds in the past. The truth was that my Xanax pills had been like life rafts for me, and getting off them revealed how quickly I was sinking.

One day Robbie came home from work and found me sitting on the floor in the corner of our apartment, surrounded by blood and broken glass.

I had been cutting myself—not trying to kill myself, but instead using the clarity of inflicting my own pain to quiet my raging demons. Robbie took one look at me and called his mother. He told me later that he could just tell by the look in my eyes that this was a “mom moment.” When Nina arrived, she swooped in like a bosomy angel, kicking the shards of glass away and taking me into her arms. She must’ve held me for an hour, rocking me, telling me it would be all right. Then she took me to the bathtub, stripped off my clothes, and tenderly washed me as if I were her own child. Once again Robbie’s parents were giving me what I’d been missing since I was a tiny girl.

I would have understood if Robbie had felt angry about how utterly I was falling apart. But he was more sad than mad. Sometimes he’d reference the roller coaster that we were riding together by joking that when we first

got married, he didn’t know me from a bar of soap. But he was usually hugging and kissing me when he said something like that. He constantly told me how lucky he felt to have found me. Still, I knew he was frustrated.

And so was I.

Often I felt as if I were moving two steps forward, one step back. As I put distance between my abusive past and my nonabusive present, I could at times feel waves of peaceful energy and hope. But then that serenity did something I wished it wouldn’t. It was as if my feeling safe cleared a path for some of the most awful memories—ones that I’d locked away for years —to come to the forefront of my mind. When you’re fighting for survival, you don’t process trauma; you bury it. Well, now that I was surrounded by love, all that ugliness had decided it had been buried long enough.

Memories of Epstein tortured me. He’d been so particular about how girls looked: always reed thin, with small breasts and narrow hips. The eating disorder I’d developed in childhood was only encouraged under Epstein’s roof, where us girls were always on a diet. By contrast, the Giuffres not only love to eat; they love to feed each other. “I’ll cook for you, sweetheart, and you’ll eat everything I cook,” Robbie promised, when he discovered that my diet consisted of three things: pizza, buttered toast, or nothing. It would take years, though, for Robbie to win that battle.

At Robbie’s recommendation, I tried to read a few spiritual books that he swore held some answers. I saw immediately why he liked Way of the Peaceful Warrior: A Book That Changes Lives, Dan Millman’s 1980 autobiographical novel that endorses meditation, mindfulness, compassion, and acceptance. It started off with a quote from a collection of Buddhist scriptures—“Warriors, warriors we call ourselves. We fight for splendid virtue, for high endeavor, for sublime wisdom, therefore we call ourselves warriors.”—that made going into battle sound like a sacred act. I also tried to read Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach, the Jonathan Livingston Seagull guy. That one was just too woo-woo for me. I told Robbie, “These kinds of books love to talk about seeing colors and auras and rainbows, but I’m just trying to figure out my next step.”

I drew more comfort from being outside. Robbie’s dad had a huge fig tree in the backyard that he was very proud of. In the late spring, the fruit was abundant, not to mention delicious. But more resonant to me was how the tree changed with the seasons. Sometimes there were so many figs that they fell on the ground, creating a fruit carpet that squished underfoot.

Other times the tree looked almost naked. Whenever we visited Robbie’s parents, I took a moment with that tree—it became a symbol of resilience for me.

When we’d arrived in Australia, I’d insisted upon an unlisted phone number. Even with my new last name, I suspected Epstein and Maxwell could find me if they wanted to, and I wanted to take every precaution. And those precautions were working, at least for the time being. Still, while I had no direct connection with Epstein, he intruded. One day I walked by the living room as my mother-in-law was watching television. There, on the screen, was an actress who’d once been one of Epstein’s victims, like me.

Now there she was on Nina’s TV. “How do you know her?” Nina asked, seeing my stunned face. I didn’t know what to say, so I turned and left the room.

Then, in March 2003, Vanity Fair magazine published a lengthy profile titled “The Talented Mr. Epstein.” I don’t remember exactly when I first read it, but I do recall being shocked by its gushing tone: Epstein was described as “good-looking,” “charming,” “very generous,” and “like a king in his own world”; his Manhattan townhouse was like “someone’s private Xanadu.” There was a reference to Epstein’s love of women (“mostly young”) and a description of his “complicated past”—a reference to some of his questionable financial dealings. But the article said many people had commented that “there is something innocent, almost child-like about” him.

“Oh, is that what you call it?” I asked out loud. “Innocent?!” Then I threw the magazine across the room.