Kept: A Comedy of Sex and Manners

by Y. Euny Hong

  “And the other thing is —” He pulled my forearm to his nose and took an exaggerated whiff. “You have no odor.”

  “You are Pygmalion in reverse,” I said. You don’t want the statue to be a woman; you want the woman to be a statue.”

  “No, I want the statue to be a whore.”

  “That would make sex very painful for you.”

  MADAME WAS GOOD at what she did; it was a marvel to witness such multifarious competence as mother, manager, landlady, mollycoddler to the most persnickety girls imaginable, dancer, businesswoman, and teacher of deportment and grooming. She worked hard to make the courtesan arrangement comfortable and sanitized for all parties. In addition to her rules forbidding gentleman callers, she had a no-swearing rule (from which she herself was exempt); each infraction was penalized at ten dollars. Even her payment scheme was designed to be free of iniquity. After all, it’s not as if Yevgeny left cash on the hotel dresser each morning. He paid Madame Tartakov, and she gave me pocket money after deducting her own cut and my debt repayment. A meager biweekly check was issued from Tartakov Translation Services to Judith M. Lee, with the option of direct deposit. It was almost like being a salaried employee.

  When Yevgeny and I spent time together, much of it was devoted to discussing our own exceptionalism.

  “I thought you said you were poor,” he told me one day after I’d mentioned the details of my schooling and innumerable private lessons.

  “No. I said we had no money,” I corrected. “There’s a big difference. Homeless people are poor. Aristocrats have no money.” I was talking out of my ass. He seemed pleased, however. He was getting his money’s worth.

  And I learned so much from him. He took me to wine tastings, where I helped him pronounce the Clos and Schloss names, but he knew more about wines than anyone else I’d ever met.

  We usually met at the St. Estèphe Hotel, in a suite that happened to have a piano. He would explain to me why classical pianists prefer Steinway whereas jazz pianists almost invariably choose Yamaha; why it is that when a piano is tuned, it is flattened on the fifth; why viola players are stupid. It was these conversations that made me begin to grow quite attached to him, nearly to worship him.

  But my enthrallment became complete one sultry evening in late summer. His wife was away that weekend, so he invited me to his almost-penthouse apartment near Lincoln Center (his building has three penthouses, which is impossible by definition because there can be only one; hence, “almost-penthouse”). It was exactly the sort of place I’d imagined a concert musician would have, decorated with a combination of French antiques and sleek modern Italian lounge furniture — the kind that’s red and wavy and takes up entirely too much space for the number of people that it’s supposed to sit. He had a grand piano strewn with sheet music (“Only idiots put photos and statues on their pianos,” Yevgeny told me. “Everyone knows that compromises the sound”). He had dozens of metronomes collected from all over Europe; photos of himself standing alongside Sir Neville Marriner and Daniel Barenboim; open boxes of resin for bow maintenance; a Yamaha electric piano with headphones attached; books on music theory, which were piled on ceiling-high bookshelves accessible by a rolling ladder; Italian and German dictionaries; every violin he’d ever had since he was four years old — seventeen violins in total, most of which he had acquired after meeting his moneybags wife.

  He showed me his beautiful instruments. He said, “This bow alone cost me — if I may be indelicate — fifty thousand dollars at auction. What is most tragic and unfair is that the price of violins is driven up artificially by wealthy collectors who know nothing about music. Thus the world’s best violins are out of reach for most musicians. These ignoramus petits bourgeois are destroyers of culture.”

  “Yes, yes,” I said, in rapturous agreement.

  “I think that the world would be much better off if we reintroduced a patronage system, don’t you think? We need another family like the Medicis.”

  “Yes, oh, yes,” I said. I could not believe my luck at having found a man who shared my values so exactly.

  “Barring that, however, people like me are stuck having to marry well in order to keep our art alive. You do understand that, Judith? How I so wish things were different.” He looked at me forlornly.

  Deeply moved, I said, “Play something for me.”

  Yevgeny nodded. He rubbed resin on his bow (the fifty-thousand-dollar bow), placed a violin under his chin, and from that moment he was like a man possessed. First he frowned, as if the facial tension were necessary for keeping his instrument in place. Then he raised his bow gracefully and brought it down softly on the strings, playing Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major. The third movement of that piece is incredibly fast (allegro vivacissimo, Yevgeny would later explain), and he played with the vigor of a Gypsy, his face contorting as though he were in a powerful wind tunnel. He grimaced as one in intense pain. When his bow came down hard on the strings, I could feel it in my loins.

  When he finished, he opened his eyes; the trance had ended. He blinked at me as if startled to see me there.

  I wept.

  5

  Harvard Man

  You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can’t tell him much.

  — AN ANCIENT PROVERB

  ONE OF THE HALLMARKS of a civilized person is that he must often spend a great deal more time with people he loathes than with people whose company he enjoys.

  This is particularly true in America, where it is considered unsporting to dislike someone without cause. In Europe — maybe not now, but once upon a time — “enemies” were a socially recognized reality among gentlefolk. Enemies would not be expected to make nice with each other; they’d perhaps acknowledge each other cordially, but that was all that was required of them. No one ever forced them to try to get along.

  Thorsten Sithole, a friend of Key’s, was just such a person. I didn’t understand why Key found Thor an appropriate companion. Thor descended from Mayflower stock, but if it weren’t for his father’s connections, he would be working as a nightclub bouncer, not as the investment banker that he is. He refers to the coital act as “hiding the salami.” He refers to female undergrads as “coeds” and to all taxi drivers as “Mohammed,” regardless of their ethnicity.

  Key and Thor had gone to Harvard together, where they had formed a fraternity of sorts, devoted to being mean to ugly or fat girls. Of all the mythology surrounding their organization, their favorite anecdote concerned a girl who showed up at one of their Halloween parties in a red cape with a black bustier underneath. She claimed that she was costumed as “Super-Ho, the superhero slut,” and no one could figure out who she was or how she had found out about the party. When she started having an epileptic seizure, triggered by seven tequila slammers, the boys considered calling an ambulance. They worried, however, that they might somehow be held liable for her state, so they instead rolled her out onto the street and left her for dead.

  Thor graduated from university a year later than he was supposed to. His sophomore year, he got hold of letterhead stationery from the Harvard Admissions Office and forged a rejection letter to one of his friends at Taft who had applied to Harvard that year. Thor was suspended for a year, which he spent giving scuba lessons in the Maldives.

  He professed to be an expert on all subjects and would never admit to being wrong, even in the presence of an undisputed expert on a given subject. Thor would correct blind people about Braille. He would insist that cold water was not the best method for cleaning menstrual blood off a pair of knickers.

  The mutual animosity between Thor and me is one of the cohesive forces of our little group. A well-designed social circle requires enemies as much as it requires friends.

  Our group consisted of me, Jung, Key, Thor, and Scheherazade, my roommate from Yale. Among the five of us, there are more factions and intrigues than there are members. Thor has, at different points, been obsessed with Scheherazade (or Zadie, as she is called), with Jung, a
nd — I strongly suspect — with Key. But never with me. Jung and Zadie don’t like each other much, so they stand as counter-part to me and Thor, though the latter antagonism is much more pronounced.

  ONE SATURDAY IN AUGUST, Thor held a small cocktail party. Jung, Key, and I headed to his apartment together. As we waited for the elevator in Thor’s lobby, Jung started to fiddle with my hair, smoothing it down, pulling at different strands. “You always manage to look so, you know, mal soignée,” she said.

  I said, “Who cares? It’s just Thor and the usual gang, isn’t it?”

  Jung’s eyes darted worrisomely.

  “Oh, no, Jung, is this one of your setup thingies? Is someone here meant for me?”

  “Your bra strap is showing,” she said, reaching into my blouse and adjusting it.

  I yelped. “Your hands are cold.”

  Jung said, “Goddammit, how old are you? Don’t you know how to wear a bra?”

  Key said, “Hey, can I try?” and reached, mercifully, not for my blouse but for Jung’s. With rapid reflexes, she grabbed his wrist and twisted it violently. Key and Jung started wrestling and struggling, giggling and squealing. The twins were always embarrassing me in this fashion.

  “Come on, you guys,” I said through clenched teeth, glancing shamefully at the doorman, who was picking his nose and bearing an “ah, young love” expression on his face.

  We let ourselves into Thor’s apartment and walked through the foyer, which was strewn with scrimshaw and other nautical knickknacks, harking back to some ancestor of his, who had been a whaling tycoon in Nantucket.

  A half dozen assorted tired-looking folk were assembled in Thor’s living room. Thor sat with his back to the door, his sunburned, muscular neck bulging from a tight button-down shirt. He looked like a strangulation victim. He was reading aloud to his guests from his beat-up childhood copy of the book White Fang.

  He intoned hammily; “ ‘But White Fang could not get at the soft underside of the throat. The bulldog stood too short, while its massive jaws were an added protection. White Fang darted in and out unscathed, while Cherokee’s wounds increased. Both sides of his neck and head were ripped and slashed….’”

  The small assembly in the parlor looked as if they’d been trapped for hours in an elevator. Zadie’s head was buried in her lap; another guest was loosening his tie. It was as if Thor wanted to hammer home his two irreducible traits: his being a WASP and his being an asshole.

  Jung cleared her throat. The guests were clearly relieved at our arrival. “Are the lushes here already?” said Thor. He rose clunkily from his oxblood leather armchair, put down his book, and came to the door, greeting me and Jung in his usual fashion of greeting women, by kissing us each on the hand while biting our knuckles.

  “I’ll decant another bottle,” he said. “Like Martin Luther.”

  “Martin Luther?” Key asked.

  “Yeah, you know, what he had to do when he was on trial. He said, ‘Here I stand.’”

  “Recant, not decant, you fuck-tard,” said Key. Thor shrugged his massive shoulders.

  “This new, Thor?” Jung asked as she knelt on the foyer floor and lifted up the corner of a rug to examine the tightness of the weave, a compulsive and annoying habit of hers. She said, “Nice Oriental rug.”

  “Don’t talk about me as if I’m not even here,” yelled an exuberant and studiously disheveled Zadie, who sat on a cushion on the floor, throwing her arms into the air. She feels obligated to sit on the floor a lot, because she’s half Middle Eastern, I guess. I walked over to her and we air-kissed twice, then bumped our heads because she always insists on kissing three times, left cheek, then right, then left again; I had tried to pull away before the third kiss, to no avail.

  Scheherazade Haboush is a luscious pseudo-Sapphic specimen. She has long sepia hair, naturally crimped in perfectly symmetrical ramen-noodle waves. She was wearing one of her silk scarfy head-band things, which made her look like a slender Corinthian column, with her hair sticking upward at the roots and sloping downward over her shoulders. She has deep-set Semitic eyes accented above and below by a smudge of charcoal pencil — she tends to Orientalize herself in that way, though she is only half Middle Eastern. She comes from an old, established family on both sides. Zadie’s father is in the Lebanese senate; her mother is a Park Avenue socialite. Her parents divorced when she was five, and her mother took Zadie back with her to live in America.

  Our sophomore year at Yale, Zadie was chosen to appear nude in Playboy magazine’s “Girls of the Ivy League” issue. She was offered five hundred dollars. The Yale Women’s Center offered to match that fee for her not to appear in Playboy, so Playboy upped the offer to one thousand dollars. This bidding war continued to the twenty-five-hundred-dollar mark, an offer the Women’s Center could not afford to match. Zadie’s Playboy photo shows her sitting spread-eagle on her dorm-room bed, fondling one breast while reading Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.

  Zadie and I were inseparable for a time, but these friendships with nonblood relatives have a way of not lasting very long for me. We had a falling-out two years ago, from which we never fully recovered. It arose over Risa, a maid whom we shared, back when I could afford hired help. Zadie had referred Risa to me; Zadie had her on Mondays, and I had her on Fridays. That year, I gave Risa a Christmas bonus and a small pay raise, plus time and a half for coming around on a Sunday to clean up after my Christmas party.

  “You backstabber!” Zadie shouted at me over the phone. “I’m the one who introduced you to Risa, and now you’re trying to win her loyalties.”

  Some harsh words were exchanged. I later told Jung about what an idiot Zadie had been, and Jung replied, “I hate to admit this, but Zadie’s right. You shouldn’t have done something so sneaky. Didn’t your mother teach you anything about household staff etiquette?”

  “My mother never had to share her maid. She never gave pay raises, either.”

  Jung sighed. “Modern times. Learn to adjust, and apologize to Zadie, even if she is a hysteric.”

  “But she insists I give up Risa,” I said.

  Jung was silent for a moment. “That’s different,” she finally said. “It is as hard to find a good maid as it is to find a good husband.”

  “So what do I do?”

  “You’ll have to choose between your friend and your maid.”

  Against my better nature, I chose Zadie. But, as I said, things became awkward between us.

  And then, last year, she came out.

  This is how it happened: Zadie, Thor, Key, Jung, and I were sitting in a booth at a truly awful midtown diner. Thor was telling us about the interview questions that his investment bank asked job candidates, which included brainteasers.

  He said, “Here’s one we’re not supposed to ask anymore, for reasons that will become apparent. Let’s say four of us are at my beach house at the Hamptons for the weekend. Jung, me, Key, and Zadie.”

  “What about me?” I asked.

  “Fine, you can come, Jude, but only to mix drinks. Anyway, the four of us want to have sex. I mean, not all of us, but all heterosexual combinations must have sex. But there are only two condoms. How can all the four combinations copulate, with the stipulation that you can only touch the side of a condom if it is unused, or if it has been touched only by your own fluids? In other words, no commingling of juices is permitted. How can all the heterosexual couples have safe sex?”*

  Jung said, “What makes you think that being in the Hamptons would somehow induce me to sleep with you, Thor? Not to mention my own brother.”

  “Okay, it’s two HYPOTHETICAL heterosexual couples. Christ.”

  We all had many objections to both the question and the answer. Mine was: Why am I not being included in this tryst? Jung’s was: You shouldn’t reuse condoms. Key’s was: I hate the Hamptons. Zadie’s was this: Why only heterosexual pairings?

  Thor replied, “It’s not a political statement; it’s just the way the question is worded. You can’t change th
e format of the question.”

  Zadie said abruptly, “I’m a lesbian. I thought you ought to know.”

  THOR’S PARTY was like all of his parties: a license for him to colonize everyone. He embarked on a new topic, about various steaks he’d eaten throughout the world.

  I already wanted to go home.

  Jung said, “Who’s this new doorman in your lobby, Thor? Why’d they pick an old white guy? How does that keep you safe? Doormen should be big, black, scary guys.”

  “Is la négritude inherently scary?” slurred Zadie.

  Apropos of nothing, Key said from the chaise longue, “So I have a question. What is this expression, HYP? Harvard-Yale-Princeton? Why are we all lumped together? Does anyone actually know any Princetonians?”

  We all admitted that we did not.

  “This conversation is really déclassé,” I said. “But since we’re on the subject, who’s going to the Yale-Harvard football game this year? I need a ride.”

  Thor said, “The vaunted Harvard-Yale rivalry is unilateral on Yale’s part. It is unacknowledged by Harvard. In any case, it’s called the Harvard-Yale game, you distressing woman, not the Yale-Harvard game.” I shot him a disgusted look.

  Zadie, who was now standing and doing some kind of inebriated whirling-dervish routine, said, “Are you listening to yourself, Thorsten? Do they not teach the concept of irony at Harvard?”

  “No, but they do have a course called The Concept of Dread.” The speaker was a young man sitting uncomfortably in the corner, whom I had not previously noticed. He had tight, curly brown hair and wore a chocolate-brown sweater with toothpaste flecks on it, beige corduroy trousers, brown shoes, and brown trouser socks. He had some sort of worrisome-looking black canvas pouch, the kind that bike messengers carry. He continued, “It’s the title of a Kierkegaard book. A joke has been made. You are not expected to laugh.”

  No one did.