Kept: A Comedy of Sex and Manners

by Y. Euny Hong

  “Because I made you.” Her eyes misted; she looked off to the side.

  Key picked up a butter knife that lay on the table and clutched it tensely in his fist. “Exactly. And now I need you to do the same for me. Where do you find these people, Jung, in front of the men’s toilet at Port Authority? That other fellow you were tooling around with a few years back. He was color-blind, for Christ’s sake!”

  Jung let out a loud huff, half-smiling with incredulity. “So what? Unless you were planning to use him as an interior decorator, I don’t see why this would affect you.”

  “God fuck it, Jung, seven different schools and you managed to avoid taking science at any of them? Color-blindness is a genetic defect, Jung. It’s passed on through the Y chromosome. Genetic defect. You can’t introduce things like that into our family! Once it’s in our bloodline, it’s there forever, forever, forever.” He slammed his fist on the table, still tightly clutching the butter knife.

  I looked back and forth between the two, afraid to move. Jung closed her eyes briefly, then opened them and said, “What has that to do with us now, Key? That was Lance. This is Emerson. Emerson is not color-blind.”

  “Fair enough,” said Key. “Let’s say you accept Emerson’s proposal.” This was the first I’d heard that the boyfriend had proposed officially. At that moment I noticed Jung sported a new ring, a tasteful classic-cut solitaire with a platinum band.

  Key continued, “You know what will happen when you have kids? The huge Caucasian babies will shatter your pelvic bone as they exit your body. You’ll probably need a cesarean.”

  “Lots of women get cesareans. They don’t die,” said Jung.

  “It’s not just mortality you have to be concerned about. One person’s life is nothing. You have to think about the baby, you selfish cow. By breeding with a white man, you know what you would be introducing to the gene pool? Cancer. Down syndrome. Pores that exude the smell of rotting meat. Freckles. We don’t have these things in our family. You know, it says in the Bible, one drop of piss in a huge bucket of water is still piss.”

  “Oh, really,” Jung said. She folded her arms across her chest.

  Key said, “I once had to take a school trip in the fourth grade, to an orphanage outside of Seoul. There were, like, six half-white kids there, and they were all massively retarded.”

  I attempted to get a word in edgewise, but when siblings fight, they block out the rest of the world.

  Jung said, “Emerson is (a) Korean; and (b) a member of our class, and distantly friendly with our mother’s family. Perhaps you can imagine why I chose not to disclose this fact earlier. He has a pedigree superior to our own. Mother’s family will undoubtedly sanction the match.”

  “Will his family sanction it?” asked Key, snarling. “You’re illegitimate.”

  “There’s no shame in that. The only thing I have to be ashamed of is you. That’s why you’ve never met Emerson.” Key was turning pale. Jung continued, her voice escalating, “I will be married and free from you. I finally can have something for myself, and I don’t want you to get at him. I don’t want you to chase him away. Because we can’t be like the Egyptian royalty, Key, keeping everything in the family, generation after generation of sisters and brothers fucking.”

  “Jung,” said Key quietly, shaking his head in my direction. They had forgotten I was there. Until I saw their deer-in-the-headlights blanched expressions, it hadn’t occurred to me that the Egyptian reference was anything other than a distant analogy.

  24

  Joshua’s First Present

  WHEN I LEFT Jung’s apartment and returned to Madame Tartakov’s, Justine said, “There was a phone message for you. Someone named Thor. He said he wanted to talk to you, most urgently.”

  “I’m not in the mood to talk to Thor,” I said. No doubt he was in on this filthy secret, and Key had put it upon him to calm me down or give me some alternative spin to the story. “I’m taking a Seconal and then going to bed. Tell the other girls not to disturb me, okay?”

  I drifted off to sleep. The Seconal was supposed to help reduce the number of dreams, but I dreamed fitfully, that Jung and Key were Geb and Nut, Egyptian gods of the earth and sky, siblings who were also lovers. I was awakened by Justine throwing cold water on my face.

  “Ow!” I yelled, ready to slap her.

  “Judith, I’m so sorry, but you were in such a deep sleep. There’s someone at the door for you, very handsome. He says he has to talk to you, right now. He seems a bit agitated.”

  “Okay, tell him to give me a minute.” I lay in bed, trying to gather the strength to rise. I hadn’t seen Joshua since the day we had lunch with his mother. Presumably he was here to apologize.

  I sloppily applied some mascara, put on my slippers and a burgundy La Perla lingerie set, and draped a yellow silk robe over it, tying the belt but leaving my undergarments fully exposed. I headed down the stairs. The door was open halfway, blocking my view of my ardent young visitor. “You can come in, Spinoza,” I said. “At least to the foyer. Madame’s away at a dance competition.”

  When I arrived at the landing, I pulled the door open all the way, and screamed.

  I was standing face-to-face with Thor. He was red-faced and dripping with sweat, and reeked of booze.

  I gasped, frantically attempting to cover myself.

  But he did not look lascivious; he did not notice I was half-naked. I had never seen him look so slovenly. The wind was blowing through his heavily gelled hair, making it stand on end. He wore an old goose-down vest with five years’ worth of ski-lift tickets attached to the front zipper. He looked nervous, his hand shaking as he held out a letter taped to a brown-paper parcel. I took the items from him, confused. “From Joshua,” he said, stepping backward with uncharacteristic awkwardness. “I’m so sorry.” He kissed me chastely on the cheek, turned, and walked briskly away.

  I opened the letter.

  August 18

  Dear Judith,

  I apologize for this craven manner of communication; I know that I should be telling you this in person rather than sending an emissary. But at the moment, I find it more important to protect myself from further abuse than to appear — to use one of your favorite words — gallant.

  Hypocrisy runs through your veins. You always thought that I was too caught up in theory and not practice. But all along it was you who espoused etiquette without the slightest trace of underlying kindness.

  Yesterday evening, Thor invited me to meet him at a champagne lounge in Tribeca with his nimrod banking friends. As you can imagine, this would not have been my first choice either of company or of pastime, but Thor is now related to me through marriage, and I try occasionally to make nice with him. Several hours into the evening, just as I was about to excuse myself from the locker-room talk, a tall, familiar-looking woman walked past us. She headed for another table and sat alone. I recognized her as being Heike, your roommate.

  I have two points of reference with Heike: one, I met her at your doorstep the night I helped you with the German translation; two, as it happens, she is, or was, a student at Columbia, though in a different department from me. She was in my ethics class two years ago. Last night, however, she was peculiarly adamant in her denial of ever having met me in either context.

  Thor’s friends assumed I was on the make with Heike, so they dragged me and Heike to sit with them, making grotesque hooting noises. As Heike approached our table she looked aghast, her eyes transfixed on one of Thor’s colleagues who had been sitting with us, someone called Jeremy.

  I gasped: Jeremy, mergers and acquisitions, who heckled me during the charades game at the courtesans’ ball.

  Now, this cad Jeremy seemed to think Heike looked familiar, too. He started sniggering, and asked me, “So, young scholar, you are a new client of Madame Tartakov, I presume? How still waters do run deep.” Confusedly, I informed him that I spoke enough languages not to require the services of a translator (perhaps in your reticulum of fibs you have forg
otten that you told me that Tartakov ran a translation service), and that I knew Heike through her roommate, Judith Lee. At that point, Jeremy’s snigger evolved into a chilling, diabolical cackle.

  Heike made a call from her cell phone and left abruptly, without meeting whomever it was she was waiting for. Her charade, her denial of ever having met me, does her credit as a friend to you, even if she is a poor liar. So you see, it’s not just Americans who refuse to tattle; you were wrong about that.

  Then Jeremy said, “Judith Lee? As the poet says: ‘Alas, I knew her well. She hath borne me upon her back a hundred time.’”

  You can only imagine what Jeremy proceeded to tell me. Mind you, Judith, I have never harbored the illusion that you were a girl unacquainted with the world, but never could I have imagined the depravity Jeremy described. I defended your honor (such as it is!). I was going to jab a fork in his trachea. He laughed. It was Thor who pulled me out of that bar and took me home in a cab. He sat up with me all night, plying me with whiskey. He didn’t know your secret either, it seems. Thor was as shocked as I was, but he defended you to the end, which will no doubt surprise you.

  All the pieces started to come together. On several occasions you called me Yevgeny by mistake — it’s rather a strange name to be called in error more than once. Jeremy confirmed that he did indeed know a Yevgeny who was a client of that Tartakov, of that modern-day Fagin.

  You unspeakable hypocrite. To allow yourself to be bought by men is the very pinnacle of the bourgeois, which you claim to detest so. As for your tubal ligation, the reversal for which I paid, I can only assume that Tartakov is to blame. I do not begrudge you the money; you required the procedure to ease your pain, for which I was glad to be of service. I never expected the money to be paid back, in any case.

  Thor suspects the twins put you up to it. I quite agree. What a family. After your patronizing me about your lineage; what a family.

  It is with the deepest regret that I must tell you that I can have nothing more to do with you; nothing, but nothing. That you are vain, spoiled, and bigoted, I could tolerate, even indulge. That you are a liar, a strumpet, and a prostitute (I do not feel the latter two words are redundant, as you cuckolded me in the one instance and sold your body for money in the second), I cannot countenance.

  Regretfully,

  Joshua Patrick Spinoza

  P.S. This letter is accompanied by a parcel.

  Don’t get too excited.

  With shaking hands I tore open the brown paper to reveal the first and only gift I had ever received from him. He had returned my opera glasses.

  I went upstairs to pack; I couldn’t see what I was putting in my suitcase. I heard Heike clomping up the stairs. “Oh, no,” she said breathlessly, bursting into our room. “Why didn’t you call me first? Didn’t you see my note? After Joshua recognized me at the lounge, I tried calling you a half dozen times at the house. Oh, Judith, why don’t you have a cell phone?”

  I said, “I told you, I couldn’t get one. Bad credit.”

  Heike said, “I came home yesterday and waited for you in the room for hours, then I had to go and meet Boswell. I left you this note.” She pulled off a paper that she had taped to the headboard of my bed. Heike read aloud, “ ‘Extremely urgent. He knows. Speak to no one before first speaking to me. Heike.’”

  I wailed, “All right, you left a note, your ass is covered; are you happy now?”

  Heike took me into her expansive Teutonic arms and covered my head with maternal kisses as I wept. She whispered, “Schätzchen, Schätzchen,” into my ear.

  25

  Dark Night of the Soul

  JOSHUA had apparently subscribed to caller ID, for the ostensible purpose of screening my calls. I tried calling him from the house phone several times, but kept getting his answering machine. Suspicious, I asked Heike to call Joshua from her phone, and I could hear him pick up and say “Hello?” even though I had failed to reach him seconds earlier. Heike hung up on him.

  I had never been overly energetic, but now my life force was drained away.

  After Heike fell asleep one night, I pulled out my very best stationery and began to write.

  August 20

  Dearest Joshua,

  No matter how much you despise me, this can be nothing to the deep hatred I feel for myself —

  That wouldn’t do. I drew a big scribble through the page, and started again with a new sheet. I recalled that weird thing Joshua had said to me before we first made love, about how he fancied himself as Faust, teaching Helen to rhyme in sync with him. If literary allusions and big words were what he wanted, that’s what he deserved.

  Dearest Joshua,

  Upon our initial meeting, you gave the impression of being a heurist, a sophist. Your Weltanschauung does not permit for nuance and thus falls apart utterly in the face of human frailty. What good is your philosophy if it does not enable you to live in the world? The falcon cannot hear the falconer, the center cannot hold —

  Strike that. New page.

  Dearest Joshua,

  In most literature on the subject of vice (e.g., Moll Flanders; Madame Bovary), the fallen one descends gradually, by falling upon hard times while coming under the influence of charismatic and corrupt individuals. Realizing that you would not find this explanation satisfactory, I will attempt to provide a more reflective response.

  It has perhaps not escaped your notice that I am ill-suited for the struggle of life. I was raised to be polite but not considerate; conversant but not informed; charming but not likable.

  Even as I mocked you for what I perceived as a lack of real-life experience, it should be apparent to you that you are far more capable than I am of living in the world. I was gathering experiences, but with no purpose, as a relief from boredom and from the responsibilities of adult life.

  I was raised with a sense of entitlement, as you well know; indeed, this is what you despise most about me. I come from the sort of family where one can say, with a straight face, “Do you know who I am?” “Do you know who my father is?” and such. Yet I chose to live in America, which is ample proof that I did not wholly adopt this attitude; for a time, in fact, I found such attitudes repugnant. But I find that in the end you cannot escape who you are — I was raised with the need to be treated as though I were different from other people. As repulsive as you find this notion, it has helped me to survive countless setbacks and the idiocies of the modern world (e.g., as you pointed out, racism in America, a subject I do not enjoy discussing) with relative grace.

  When my aunt Jung first proposed the idea of courtesanship to me, I admit that my initial revulsion did not last long. The arrangement appealed to my sense of vanity, and to my immediate financial woes. And Madame Tartakov, like all good dictators, created a mythology that made it easy for us girls to rationalize our choice to live this life. She told us, for example, that we were all to wear garter belts because that was the secret to Aphrodite’s allure.

  I am alarmed at the ease with which I became convinced that this was the only profession that made use of all my talents. Being a courtesan allowed me to hone these feminine arts that you find so alluring.

  I am not a writer, as you are; my witticisms die, like fruit flies, shortly after being hatched. They arise most easily in the company of men, in the spirit of coquettishness. Outside of the demimonde, there would have been no forum for my wit that you so admire.

  As you know, however, I did make a half-assed effort to be a good person. Finding religion, for example. But I was so deeply convinced of my inherent goodness that in the end it became my ruin. I felt my nature was so untouchable that it could not be changed regardless of contact with the outside world.

  With you I experienced something I never had before: a partnership wherein I did not have the upper hand. You did not attempt to conquer me. You did not objectify me. This was a language I did not understand.

  Why did I become a courtesan? I did it, in the end, because my vanity prevailed over my prin
ciples, just as your male pride prevailed over yours. I mean, does someone wishing to be taken seriously really use the word “cuckolded”?

  With sincere regret,

  Judith Min-Hee Lee

  One night I got home to find Heike twisted up in her sheets and clearly hungover. “Phone calls,” she said, pulling the dress she wore the previous day over her face to block out the rising sun. “You got a bunch of phone messages while you were out. Madame was annoyed.”

  “Josh?” I asked, wishing I could sound less eager.

  “No, your aunt. Jung.”

  “Oh. Well, she can call till the cows come home.”

  Heike pulled the dress away from her face slightly, to look at me. “What’s wrong?”

  I sighed. There were so many things to be upset about that I didn’t want to talk about them all at once. “My uncle Key violated his own sister, probably since childhood, I’ve come to realize. No wonder he never really had a girlfriend. I kind of thought he might be gay or something, but now I realize he thought every other girl was just impure, beneath him. He didn’t want to commingle his bloodline with anyone else.”

  Heike listened; she was good at that. Then she said, with that same anthropological detachment that caused her to become a courtesan just for a doctoral thesis, “I think that is really incredibly cool. It’s a common literary trope that a man and woman meet as strangers, become lovers, and later discover that they are long-lost siblings. Even before they knew they were related, they felt some uncanny connection. Like Siegmund and Sieglinde in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen — The Ring Cycle. Your family is like a living mythology.”

  “Why is it that when someone has done something truly awful, people say the gods have done it also?”

  Heike said, “Incidentally, I doubt very much that Key slept with his sister in the interests of closing the bloodline. If you’re right about their doing it from childhood, and I think you probably are, it was probably motivated by something else. Pure animal lust, for example. Let me ask you something: did they have separate wet nurses?”