Kept: A Comedy of Sex and Manners

by Y. Euny Hong

  I stood there waiting for something to happen, only to have him say “Good night,” unlatch the wrought-iron fence, and walk briskly into the indigo night.

  Being a complete obsessive fool, I sat up until breakfast looking up correct and form and careful and obsession and odious in the Oxford English Dictionary, and pondering all the possible nuances of his parting words to me.

  11

  A Meditation on Poor Boys

  THE TRUTH was that Joshua was correct in his initial assessment of me at Thor’s party. I do care about money. It’s not something I’m proud of. I don’t require a great deal, mind you; this is a common misconception that people have about me. I don’t need to sit in a private box at the Met, though certainly that would be nice. But I do have many needs about which I cannot be flexible.

  I am healthy, but not robust. It’s the princess-and-the-pea problem, one of the chief downsides of my lineage. I have dust allergies, and thus require two HEPA air filters in my room, which have cartridges that are expensive and must be replaced frequently. I am also allergic to household cleaning agents, and therefore require the services of a maid, which Madame Tartakov pays for but adds to my growing debt. I go into an asthmatic fit if I’m anywhere near furniture made of particle board, which contains formaldehyde, so all my furniture has to be solid wood, and preferably antique, as I am also allergic to new varnishes and the sawdust that one often finds in new furniture. I was even allergic to the door to the room that Heike and I share; it’s made of particle board, and one humid night the door released its toxic vapors into the air and I woke up covered with hives. Madame Tartakov replaced the door, adding it to my tab.

  My father once said, “Allergies are an ailment arising from migration. That’s why all Americans have allergies; it doesn’t happen to those who stay where they belong. If you had stayed in Korea all your life, this never would have happened to you.”

  Twice weekly I see a therapist who charges $220 an hour, and that’s her reduced rate. Depression: Zoloft, 20 mg daily. To counteract fatigue caused by Zoloft: Adderall, 10 mg. To counteract insomnia caused by Adderall: Ativan, 1 mg. I have no insurance to cover this. I have very sensitive feet, which means that I can buy only shoes made by Bruno Magli, whose superior tanning processes allow the leather to stretch with the wearer’s foot. I have chronic insomnia, as I have said, so I have special mattresses and pillows. Because of my skin sensitivities, my bedsheets have to have a thread count of greater than 380 threads per square inch; otherwise, no kidding, I wake up with a full-body rug burn. My frailty requires no extravagances, but rather a lot of little expenses that add up. To save money, I pluck my eyebrows by myself.

  My need for money arises from far more than just my health: for a racial minority in this country, there is no gray area between the peasant and the upper middle. Last year, I was doing some laundry in a nearby launderette when an elderly woman came up to me and said, “Give me a roll of quarters for a twenty.”

  I said, “This is the Kazantzakis Laundry. Do I look like a Kazantzakis to you?”

  “You just look like you work here,” said the woman. “Can you change this twenty or do I take my business elsewhere?”

  I put a quart of bleach into this woman’s dark laundry when she wasn’t looking.

  I would be a courtesan my whole life to a man fifty times worse than Yevgeny if it meant I would never again be mistaken for a laundress.

  IT IS THURSDAY, and I have a hectic afternoon ahead; first, coffee with Joshua, then Yevgeny later on.

  “I think I sorted out who Joshua is,” Heike said as she pulled bobby pins from my hair; she had set it for me the night before and now she was smoothing out the curls. “I was in a class with him at Columbia, Ethics and Gender Equality. He’s totally brilliant, very intense, if you go for that sort of thing. But he brushes his teeth constantly, before and after each class. And he has toothpaste Flecken all over his shirt, always.”

  “Yes, I know,” I moaned.

  Heike said, “Did you ever notice he looks like Garry Kasparov? Except not as suave. Joshua seemed a little like brown flour — unraffiniert? Unrefined?”

  “Trust me, this has not escaped my notice,” I said. “In fact, I’m just not sure at all about this Joshua character. First of all: he wants to meet for coffee. Come on. Should a girl in a silk dress have to sit at a sticky Formica table?”

  ENTERING CAFÉ BUDAPEST, I squeezed between the tables looking for Joshua, my shopping bags brushing up against the other patrons. The shabby pseudobohemians with five-hundred-dollar glasses, rejoicing over their escape from suburbia, looked on with annoyance.

  “Hi, Spinoza,” I said, approaching his table, which was covered with papers. He didn’t notice me because he was seated with, oh my God, a mousy Bolshevik girl with butt-hugging paint-stained jeans and a Walter Benjamin book in her hand. She said adenoidally, “You spilled my coffee all over my term paper.”

  “It shouldn’t matter in the age of mechanical reproduction,” I said, referring to an essay contained in the book she held. The girl actually pondered my words for a second, frowned, then left for the counter to refresh her coffee and flirt with the geek manning the register.

  “Have I told you about Benjamin?” Joshua said, squinting as he tried to recall.

  “No, you didn’t tell me about Benjamin, for crying out loud. I read it on my own. Who was that?”

  “Just a girl from Columbia,” he said.

  I looked over to the counter where she was leaning with her chin in her hand. Annoyingly, she wasn’t actually that hideous; she had a sleek chestnut-brown ponytail and smooth skin with well-formed dimples on either side of her mouth.

  “I guess she’s so skinny because she’s a Communist,” I said.

  Joshua, unamused, looked me up and down and said, “Do you never wear trousers, ever?”

  “Meaning, what, like that girl’s spark-plug-factory uniform? Bite me.”

  “Where would the upper classes be if they couldn’t put people down,” he said prudishly. “The master needs the slave. The slave doesn’t need the master.”

  I harrumphed and took a seat. My silk dress fluttered inelegantly in the airstream that seeped from a hole in the vinyl chair cushion. It made a flatulent noise as I sat. I smoothed my hem over my knees.

  “Hegel, I presume,” I said.

  Joshua nodded. “Right. Your froufrou costume notwithstanding, you’re not as out of place here as you are trying to appear,” Joshua said. “Have you considered going back to school?”

  “I could do without the condescension.”

  “You studied philosophy before, right? You could continue your studies, get a Ph.D.”

  “And why would I want to do that?”

  “Because right now you’re just engaging in palaver. You’ve reached a level in your education at which it is very dangerous to stop.”

  I said, “ ‘A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep or taste not the Pierian Spring’?”

  “Something like that. See what I mean? You have what is sometimes referred to as a ‘polite education.’”

  “What’s wrong with that? Polite is good.”

  “If you leave it at that, you will remain a dilettante.”

  “Says the man who leaves Lincoln Center at intermission because he thinks Puccini operas are supposed to end before the denouement.”

  “How m-m-many times do you intend to bring that up? Anyway, my observation wasn’t meant as an insult. You have this problem because, and only because, you’re so very clever.” He blushed.

  “One more remark like that, and my heart will harden to you for good,” I said.

  “Oh, come now, what is it with you? You’d rather I say that I am entranced by the swell of your bosom.”

  “Unrealistic, but that’s the right idea,” I said, shrugging. This was pointless.

  Suddenly, his eyes became hard and determined; he took the cigarette from my hand, and butted it out in the ashtray before me. He leaned across
the little table, gripped my head with both his hands, and kissed me. First gently, as one would expect from a sullen bookish type, then forcefully, then finally tugging my lower lip with his teeth. His smoldering look passed; the sullen expression returned, and he stared into his coffee.

  Whence did this corsair appear, I wondered, breathlessly.

  The atmosphere was shattered by the shrill voice of Bolshevik Girl, crying, “Joshua!” She ran from the counter to our table with some desperation, her long bushy ponytail swishing buoyantly. She tugged at Joshua’s arm, whining, “Come on, we’re going to be late for the lecture.”

  “What lecture?” I asked, seething.

  The girl said smugly, “The French Department got Luce Irigiray to speak about Plato’s Cave as a metaphor for the womb.”

  “You’re right, Joshua,” I said. “I’m missing out on so much by not continuing my education.”

  The girl frowned. The two of them walked out of the café with an enviable sense of purpose.

  LATER THAT EVENING, Yevgeny was late coming to our room at the St. Estèphe. He strolled into our hotel room; I had settled in an hour before and was sitting in a big fluffy bathrobe, watching Cagney & Lacey reruns on the telly while painting my nails. “Sorry I had to cancel last time,” he said. “Wife came into town at the last second. Maybe this will induce you to forgive me?” He tossed a Tiffany & Co. box on the bed. I opened the box; it was a Paloma Picasso necklace-and-earring set — platinum and diamond — and exclusive to Tiffany. Not extravagant by Jung’s standards, but, as Thor pointed out so indelicately, a girl has to price herself realistically. Only Yevgeny understands how bourgeois I really am inside. The very nature of our relationship obviates the need for me to conceal such things from him.

  “Wheee!!” I said with unfeigned abandon, leaping off the bed and circling my arms around Yevgeny’s neck. He helped me don the jewelry, these symbols of my captivity and his devotion. He gave me a quick peck on the lips and said, “Lemme put my coat away. Continue with what you were doing. Please.”

  I resumed painting my toenails. “Except that,” said Yevgeny. “Feet are repulsive. Don’t get nail clippings all over the bed.” Yevgeny sat next to me on the bed, removing his shoes. “Oh, my God, what happened?” He grimaced. “Your pinky toenail is cleft down the middle.”

  “That’s congenital,” I said. “It signifies I’m descended from Han Chinese. As opposed to Mongols, I mean.”

  “So the husband your parents picked out for you has a cleft toenail also?”

  “My parents do not have a husband picked out for me; come on. I’m related to all the Korean persons of eligible breeding. We are all consanguinés.”

  “Thanks for translating the English to French; that’s really helpful,” said Yevgeny sarcastically.

  “I’m not in the mood for this, Spinoza.”

  “Who’s Spinoza?”

  Uh-oh. “A famous atheist.”

  “I’m sure my parents would have set up a wife for me, I mean, in the old country and pre-Communism. Don’t you find that a little grim, the prospect of anyone marrying a near-stranger?”

  “Not necessarily.” I recited, “ ‘Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance…it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life.’”

  Yevgeny raised his eyebrows. “Confucius?” he asked.

  “No, dummy, Pride and Prejudice,” I said, very much irked. Joshua would not have made such a gaffe.

  Yevgeny tucked himself under the bedcovers. “I don’t think it’s salutary for women to read so many novels,” he said.

  HOW DISTINCTLY I remember; it was in late November. I was at Joshua’s apartment, the first time I had been there since the night he sucked so alarmingly at the veal marrow.

  I was beginning to wonder why he invited me over; as soon as I arrived he became engrossed in a book called The Kantian Sublime. So I turned the television on at a loud volume, began channel surfing, and started to needle him about our last meeting.

  “How was the vagina monologue?” I asked.

  “The what?

  “Didn’t you go with that Bolshevik woman to some dubious lecture about how Plato is living in a vagina?”

  “Oh, that,” said Joshua, grimacing. “You’re right, it was pretty intolerable. I was just going along to make nice with Sandy Snell.”

  For a second I misinterpreted “make nice” as “make love.” Realizing my error offered some — but not total — relief. I said, “And what has this Smell creature done to merit your groveling obeisance?”

  “It’s Snell, not Smell. She had this wrong idea about me a while ago and I felt kind of guilty about it.”

  “By ‘wrong idea,’ I assume you mean the notion that you were romantically involved.”

  “Approximately and exactly. How did you know?” he said. Even a bookish man is still just a man; the facts of the Snell matter were stupidly obvious, yet Joshua trembled with the fear that I was clairvoyant.

  “Please be someone whom I can respect,” I said. “She is making you believe you are in her emotional debt for scorning her. That is her power over you. I know you just think I’m horrible and misanthropic, so you probably don’t believe me.”

  He looked away, giving the appearance that his attention was elsewhere, but I’d come to notice that this meant he was ruminating. He said, “You practice what the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur would have called ‘the hermeneutics of suspicion.’”

  “Why are you always quoting at me like some troubadour? It’s degrading.”

  “I’m trying to teach you to rhyme, as Doctor Faustus teaches Helen of Troy, so they can shout rhyming couplets at each other. Thereby representing the union of pure intellect with life.”

  I said, “You know how Faust ends: Intellect loses out. Life triumphs over philosophy.”

  “Did I tell you about Faust already,” asked Joshua, face aglow. “That was a very good summary of the book’s themes, Judith.”

  I said, “No, you arrogant prick. I’ve read fucking Faust. And why is it that whenever I say something erudite, you become simultaneously condescending and amorous?”

  “Sorry, can’t help it,” Joshua said. He took the remote control from my hand and switched off the television.

  “Hey,” I objected.

  He put down his book and turned sideways to face me, then reached under my skirt and undid one of the straps of my garter belt.

  I choked with surprise at his lack of hesitation; even the slight tremor in his hand had magically steadied. “What about your Kant?” I asked.

  “What about yours?” he said.

  “What about your objection to puns?” I said, tingling.

  He rolled up the sleeves of his oxford shirt, revealing the thin but sinewy forearms that had so forcefully restrained me in the cab that day we went to the opera. He put his hand on my knee, tucking his fingers just beneath my skirt hem.

  I pushed away his hand with nervous excitement, then picked up an ugly IKEA cushion from the sofa and clutched it defensively.

  He pried the cushion from my hands and threw it on the floor. He said, “You don’t seem the ‘close your eyes and think of England’ type to me.”

  He placed both his hands on my knees and leaned toward me. The freshly laundered cotton smell from his shirt commingled with the smell of deodorant, and with that whiff of tea and cumin that seemed to be permanently ground into his sweat glands, I was ready to be enveloped by him.

  Then he stood up.

  “Where are you going? What’s wrong?” I asked worriedly.

  I was still sitting on the sofa. With a sloe-eyed expression, he stood over me, raised his right knee, and wedged it between mine, prying my legs apart.

  He grabbed my legs just below the knees and slid me slightly forward in my seat toward him. He knelt on the floor, keeping my legs spread apart with his torso. He slid his hands up my thighs, leaned his head forward toward my chest, and looked up at me
seductively, sticking out his tongue and flattening it against my nipple, through my dress. I was not wearing a brassiere.

  “This is silk, you know,” I said. “It’s not supposed to get wet.”

  He continued to press his tongue on me until his saliva seeped through to my breast. I gasped.

  He plunged his front teeth down. He tugged at the nipple, which was now almost dangerously sharp, then gently slid his teeth from side to side, as if testing a coin to see whether it was made of real gold. I clutched his hair. He slid over to the other breast to repeat the pattern. (Aside: Why do men always do to one breast what they have done to the other, right down to maintaining the identical rhythm, manner, and duration of attention paid to each tit? Is it a form of obsessive compulsion, as with those people who have to chew an equal number of times on either side of the mouth? And why does it apply only to breasts? I don’t recall, for example, any gentleman caller who insisted on alternating sides with me on the sidewalk so that he could hold both my right and left hands.) While doing so, he slid his hand up my thigh, then down toward my knee, then up, then down, slowly, slowly drawing higher upward on my thigh. Finally he rested his fingers between my legs, massaging my stately pleasure dome.

  He said, “The undergarments are silk as well. Well, you ruined those on your own, it seems. Might as well make the best of it.”

  I was startled at the violence of what came next. He bit down on the crotch area of my panties, grabbing only silk, not skin, and used his teeth to tear a hole into the fabric.

  I cried out.

  He used his powerful tongue to enlarge the opening he had torn in the panties. When my orifice was sufficiently accessible, he pressed his tongue sharply inside me, his saliva commingling with my own nether nectars. (Aside: I think Jung would be shocked to learn how skilled Joshua was at this. Bookish men have a great deal of stamina, I find, and, having been denied the satisfaction of their sexual curiosity in their adolescence, they develop an unending fantasy about taking long drinks from the Pierian Spring.)