Kept: A Comedy of Sex and Manners

by Y. Euny Hong

  NOT WANTING TO spend my nights alone, I asked for more shifts at Maurice Hall; I now worked there six evenings a week. It was proving fruitful. They didn’t really need salonnière services full-time, so Chester increased my responsibilities by having me check the ledgers. I had learned bookkeeping and Microsoft Excel during my brief investment-banking secretarial career, and Chester was surprised by how easily I took to my new responsibilities. Having to concentrate on a somewhat repetitive task forced some of my concerns to the background, and I now understood why Joshua thought a regular job would be good for my character. I was just so saddened that he was not around to witness my transformation.

  Incidentally, I discovered during my nights at Maurice Hall that Yevgeny was right about one thing: several of the Metropolitan Opera’s top patrons and former concertmasters were members of the club. Even so, I was not willing to help out Yevgeny, that knave of hearts. On the other hand, I had a demonstrated history of succumbing to desperation. Who could say how long my newly found moral resolve would hold out?

  WHEN A WEEK PASSED and my mood had not improved, Heike dragged me on one of my free nights to a nightclub in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, that played the kind of Euro club music she liked. It was tucked away behind the rear entrance of an emergency room, which proved to be a propitious location.

  I’m not sure how this happened, but at some point I found myself snogging a Polish boy from the neighborhood, who for some reason was wearing a windbreaker in the middle of a club. He was probably no more than eighteen, and he had arrived with another man, whom he claimed was not his lover, but then the Pole asked me to enter into a ménage à trois with them, in the bathroom.

  I said, “Loos are for waste elimination, only.”

  “Then just come home with me.”

  “No.”

  He grabbed my hand and thrust it into his pants.

  “Okay, let’s get this over with,” I listlessly agreed.

  He said, “I’m too drunk to drive now so I’m going to the bar to get a Coke first, okay?”

  “Good idea,” I said, thinking nothing of the danger of getting into a car with (a) a stranger; and (b) someone who has admitted to being too drunk to drive. I found Heike and told her that I would be leaving the club without her.

  “Good. That was the whole point,” she said.

  I waited for fifteen minutes and, assuming I was being stood up, went over to the bar to get a drink. There I found him clutching his head in his hands. He told me, “I seem to have stabbed my eyeball with my lit cigarette.”

  “How did you manage that? Are you a spastic?”

  “Take me to the hospital.”

  I guided the half-blind Pole to the emergency room across the street. At this point, I had seen most of the ERs in the greater New York area.

  An attending nurse took the Pole immediately to the doctor without doing his paperwork. Then the triage nurse asked me, “What’s your friend’s name?”

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  She scowled. “I suppose it would be a waste of time to ask you whether you have his insurance information.”

  “Your supposition is correct.”

  I stretched out on the orange plastic chairs in the waiting room and napped. An hour later, the Pole emerged with an eye patch, explaining to me that the doctor had had to use a metal brush to scrape the burned ash out of his eyeball.

  It was seven A.M. “Can you give me cab fare?” he said. I threw a twenty on the ground and left the building. My humiliation was complete.

  Or so I thought until I reached the curb and realized that I had just given that Polish cyclops the last of my cash. I walked home, my heels wobbling over the pavement.

  When I arrived home, it was nine-thirty in the morning. Heike was sitting on the sofa; when she saw me, she leaped to her feet.

  “You should be asleep,” I said, tiredly removing my shoes.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “You need to pack.”

  “Why, are you kicking me out?” I asked, disorientedly. It was difficult to carry on a conversation over the din of the nightclub still pounding in my head.

  Heike said, “Your mother called here late last night. She got the number from Jung, which I think explains why Jung was trying to call you so frenetically.”

  I was horrified. “I’m doomed. Madame didn’t tell my mother anything, did she?”

  “Judith, stop being so self-absorbed and listen to me. Your mother wants you to come home. To Korea, she means. Your cousin, the one with the cancer, is in his last stages. She and your father want you to say your good-byes to him. She wants you to fly out immediately.”

  “Oh.” I stood a minute, taking in what she had said. I was trying to force myself to be sad about my dying cousin, but Heike was right; I am selfish.

  I asked, “Did…am I going to be in trouble with Madame Tartakov if I go to Seoul?”

  “Not now that she knows how to reach your mother. She said your mother sounded so frustrated at the difficulty in finding your number, and so incoherent, that it was clearly not a ruse. Madame told me to express her condolences. And a reminder that you still owe her money, the interest of which will accrue at the usual rate as long as you are gone. Heike sighed. “Judith, Judith. How could such a young person without a gambling problem or drug addiction get into so much debt? This is not a small thing now; it’s taken over your life.”

  I nodded pitifully and quoted Mr. Micawber of David Copperfield: “ ‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the god of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and — and in short you are for ever floored. As I am!’”

  26

  Deathbed Confessional

  I CALLED MY MOTHER on the house phone. She spoke coldly of logistics, as if we were kidnappers arranging a ransom drop-off: she would book a flight for me on her card, send the car to the airport in Seoul to pick me up, the driver would hold up a sign, and so forth. She then proceeded to rattle off the highlights of the social calendar for which my presence was requested.

  “What should I do first, Mother, visit my cousin, or see a gallery exhibit in which three of your closest friends demonstrate how they overcame menopause through pottery class?”

  “What? Don’t be obnoxious. And, oh, how much do you weigh these days, anyway? There was a thing on TV last night about Maria Callas. Did you know she swallowed a tapeworm to lose weight?”

  “I’ll look into it before I get there.”

  I WAS A BIT SURPRISED that Madame was letting me go, though I suppose it helped a little that I tried not to make my discontent known. Of course it occurred to me that I might be able to take this opportunity to escape from Madame Tartakov. But the idea of stepping into an unknown future, wherein I would have to remain overseas or change my name, seemed unappealing.

  Not to mention that her parting words frightened me.

  “Bon voyage,” she said in an unfriendly tone. “By the way, I hear interesting rumor. You know Struwwelpeter Industries GmbH? Oh, I forgot, yes, you do know, because you translate document for their illegal IPO.”

  So Joshua was right about the document after all.

  “They are now under investigation for securities fraud. They think there was, what word they used — a leak. They trying now to find out who is the rat. I have some influence with someone there, can maybe convince them that it wasn’t you.”

  “Of course it wasn’t me,” I said, not entirely certain how worried I should be. “I wasn’t aware of anything illegal, and even if I were, I don’t give a rat’s — I mean, I don’t give a flying fig.”

  “You, maybe not,” she said, her eyes glistening. “But maybe someone else is giving flying fig. Like your gentleman friend.”

  The breath evacuated from my body. I wasn’t sure how she had found out about Joshua’s involvement in the translation, but there was
no point in protesting. The best thing I could do to protect him right now was to dissociate myself from him. “He’s not my gentleman friend anymore,” I said, with badly feigned nonchalance. “You might as well leave him out of this.”

  “Be that perhaps,” she said. “In any case, if this gets out, there’s very little I could do to protect your friend. Crooked businessmen are dangerous, crazy people. Who knows what jumping to conclusions they will do? By the way, your mother is a lovely woman.”

  It was a vague threat on her part, not carefully thought out. But as I had witnessed with the Zeynep situation, Madame was capable of turning an idiotic, half-baked plan for vengeance into something really scary, if she made half an effort.

  Changing her angry expression to one of smarmy charm, she said, “But listen to me, what am I saying! None of this necessary at all. Because you will stay working for me until your debt to me paid in full. Like I say to Zeynep, I am not hard-to-figure-out kind of woman. I just want money. Is this seems fair?”

  “More than fair,” I said, with a voice of cowardice and obeisance that made me despise myself.

  I FLEW from New York to Seoul, carrying two cartons of Mild Sevens that I couldn’t even smoke on the plane.

  The nicotine withdrawal made me miss Joshua. I met him, after all, at that party of Jung’s while he was exiting the toilet and I was concealing a cigarette. The enduring triptych of addiction, waste elimination, and love.

  “You look very pensive,” said the man sitting next to me. He was sipping cheap cognac and had bloodshot eyes. I truncated the conversation by putting the airline headset over my ears, tuning in to a channel that played Italian pop songs. “Ba-ba-ba-ba-bambina,” the current tune went. Four minibottles of scotch plus two Benadryls later, I was almost comfortable.

  I ENTERED THE Incheon International Airport arrivals hall and peered out joylessly at the crowd, finally spotting a squat man in a cheap suit and ugly tie. He waved; it was Driver Cho, as we called my father’s chauffeur. Whom I hate. When I was little he always used to get me in trouble with my parents, once telling them that he saw me stomping out a cigarette as he pulled up to pick me up from school. We bowed perfunctorily and he relieved me of my baggage trolley. I followed him silently to the car and we drove off.

  “Where are my parents?” I asked from the backseat.

  “They didn’t think there would be enough room for them to come along, what with your luggage, miss. But they are of course very excited to see you.” He kept staring at me disturbingly in the rearview mirror. “You’re in your father’s seat,” he said. “You shouldn’t be sitting on the right. Slide over to the left.”

  “My father’s not even here,” I said. This was a familiar argument, one I used to have with the driver constantly: the seat diagonal from the driver is the privileged seat and too good for me, even if I was the only passenger. “If it was so important to him to determine the car seating assignment, he could have come to pick me up.”

  I harrumphed and leaned my head back, pretending to sleep.

  When I got home, the driver opened the door for me and handed me a key. “They asked me to give you the house key and to tell you to let yourself in quietly. They’re asleep.”

  I grunted in thanks, declining his help with the luggage. I took my bags up the lift, let myself into the flat, and climbed straight into the cold, dusty bed in what used to be my bedroom.

  I AWOKE at six-thirty A.M. to the sound of my mother rapping on my chamber door. Late rising and jet lag are signs of poor character in the Lee house.

  I let out a slow, guttural moan.

  I lay in bed a few minutes, threw on some clothes, put my hair in a ponytail, and walked out of my room to the sitting room, blinking at the two blurry figures on the sofa. “Hi,” I mumbled in English.

  “Who taught you to talk that way?” snapped my father, as if I’d just been cussing up a storm.

  I gave the Korean morning greeting in long form, and bowed disorientedly.

  “Ungh,” my father grunted, eyes fixed on the television.

  “How was the flight?” my mother asked, sipping coffee. “We’ve already had breakfast, but there should be something left.”

  “No, thanks. I had a bit of traveler’s complaint last night, actually,” I said.

  My mother said, “Do you mean diarrhea? But you don’t look any thinner.”

  I found her insensitivity vaguely reassuring in its familiarity.

  “Did you have plans this morning?” she asked.

  How passive-aggressive of her. I said, “I have a rendezvous at the discotheque.”

  “I don’t think that anyone who would agree to meet you in a discotheque in the morning could be very reputable.”

  I’d forgotten how literal she was. I said, “I’m in Korea for one reason alone; what do you mean, do I have plans? I’m going to go view the body, of course. I mean, the invalid? Min-Joon? Are you coming with me?” I was having trouble focusing; I needed a cigarette, badly.

  “We saw your cousin yesterday,” said my mother. “We sent home the driver, though. You can go out and flag a taxi, right? Take some money out of my purse.” In spite of having chided me for the informality of my greeting, they were neglecting to say hello or good-bye; they were captivated by their television talk show, on which the subject of discussion was differing male-female attitudes as to how long a person should spend in the shower.

  COUSIN MIN-JOON was the only male scion on my father’s side, and therefore the only Lee family heir. Key didn’t count, as he was a bastard. When Min-Joon died, he would end the family line. The Lees are nevermore to have further entries in the family archives, which record only the male lineage. Posterity will see a notation in the Lee annals after my father’s and my uncle’s names, indicating that this particular branch of the family is closed for business.

  The family misfortunes were compounded by Min-Joon’s second wife, his soon-to-be widow, who had hit the mother lode. Min-Joon’s father, my uncle, had long ago transferred the land holdings to Min-Joon’s name, partly for tax purposes and partly because he found that this practice brought him good luck: the lands in his son’s name rose in value, while the lands in his daughter’s name remained stagnant. But once again the allegory of the farmer and the horse apply: good and bad luck are part of the same double-edged sword. Min-Joon’s wife now held the deed to the Lee family cemetery. Personal wills are not always legally binding in Korea, so my cousin could do nothing before his death to prevent the disappearance of the lands that had been in the Lee family for generations.

  I took a taxi to the hospital, following my mother’s directions, and was led into a pleasant-seeming ward, sweet-smelling and prettily decorated, which left me completely unprepared for how awful my cousin looked. By the time the cancer was diagnosed, it was too far gone to bother with chemotherapy, so Min-Joon still had a full head of his trademark wavy hair. Other than that, he was utterly unrecognizable. He looked like one of those X-rays of a fetal chick while it is still crouching inside the egg. It was revolting. Disgust is a very selfish creature; it does not allow for sentiment or compassion.

  “I wish I had gotten to know you better,” he said, smiling weakly. “You’re the only one of the cousins who’s come to visit me. What a wretched family.”

  I nodded politely.

  “Do you mind if I rest? I know you just got here, but I’m not having a good day. I hope you’ll understand. But I do want to tell you something. This family is hiding something. I know about it, but I don’t think I’m supposed to know.” His breathing turned to faint whistling, as though his narrow body had shrunk into a hollow reed.

  “Quiet,” I said. “You should sleep; I’ll go now.”

  “The secret lies in the archives,” he said. “You’re a clever girl, you’ll find it. Though really it’s in plain view, as most family secrets are.”

  TRUTHFULLY, I was glad my obligatory appearance at the hospital was over and done with. I could sleep in a bit, formulate a pl
an for paying off Madame’s debt, and be a child in my parents’ house once again, which, all things considered, might not be so odious after all.

  And I thought I just might try to see what Min-Joon was talking about having to do with the archives.

  But not yet. I spent two days being neither asleep nor awake, vegetating on the sofa with my parents in the sitting room.

  This was the most time I’d spent with them in a decade. I could barely hide my shock at how old they suddenly seemed. They found the room temperature too cold when I found it uncomfortably warm, they had taken to eating dinner very early in the day, and apparently they had moved all their investments from the aggressive, speculative variety to safer, low-yield securities. “It is no longer important at my age to increase my wealth,” my father said, a statement that I found utterly depressing.

  I suppose I am at an age when people start to witness a role reversal between themselves and their parents. Now it is I who must chastise them for watching entirely too much television. It is I who must gently suggest that they throw out their innumerable pens that have no ink, as otherwise it creates a great inconvenience for those who are trying to take down phone messages. And the same parents who once forbade me to yawn or sigh have now taken to farting with impunity.

  Yet there was something very tender about all of this. I was witnessing my parents at play. My father, whom I had always found terrifying and stern and the worst cultural snob I had ever met, was now addicted to Jim Carrey movies. My parents received a delivery of a half dozen such videos from the video store, and their arrival seemed to galvanize my dozing father, who eagerly popped one into the VCR. We were halfway through before my mother said with odium, “We’ve seen this one already.” My father insisted on finishing it anyway.