by Y. Euny Hong
SIMON & SCHUSTER
Rockefeller Center
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
This book is a work of fiction. Although the aristocratic families mentioned in this novel — the Esterhazys of Hungary, the Sobieskis of Poland, and the Chun-ju Lee Clan of Korea — are real, the characters who are identified as descendants of these families are entirely fictional and do not have any connection to these or any other families. Further, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Or, as Evelyn Waugh wrote in a similar context, “I am not I, thou art not he or she; they are not they.”
Copyright © 2006 by Euny Hong
All rights reserved,
including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form.
SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks
of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Book design by Ellen R. Sasahara
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hong, Y. Euny.
Kept : a comedy of sex and manners / Y. Euny Hong.
p. cm.
1. Prostitutes — New York (State) — New York — Fiction. 2. Korean Americans — New York (State) — New York — Fiction. 3. Aristocracy (Social class) — Fiction. I. Title.
PR9125.9.H66K47 2006
823’.92 22 2006045001
ISBN: 1-4165-3807-0
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To my family and Mrs. Terebush
And as we bring our characters forward, I will ask leave…[to] talk about them: if they are good and kindly to love them and shake them by the hand; if they are silly, to laugh at them confidentially in the reader’s sleeve; if they are wicked and heartless, to abuse them in the strongest terms which politeness admits of.
— WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, Vanity Fair
Contents
1 Not Applicable
2 The Ogresse
3 The Anthology of Pros
4 The Widening of One of Her Parts
5 Harvard Man
6 A Treatise on Lactation
7 Down Eros, Up Mars
8 The Marrow Sucker
9 Girls and the Families Who Are Indifferent to Them
10 Krauts and Doubts
11 A Meditation on Poor Boys
12 Sunday Brunch
13 The Ball Is Round, the Game Lasts Ninety Minutes
14 Three Letters from My Father
15 Zeynep Escapes
16 A Very Brief Work History
17 Maurice Hall
18 Yevgeny in the Bath
19 Walpurgisnacht
20 The Reluctant Shiksa
21 Joshua’s Mother
22 Sitting Shivah
23 Why Bastard? Wherefore Base?
24 Joshua’s First Present
25 Dark Night of the Soul
26 Deathbed Confessional
27 Round-Eyed Girl
28 Dormouse
29 Sorry
30 Debt Repayment Schemes
31 The Cut-Rate Oracle
32 Ezra of the Peninsula
33 The Wet Nurse
34 Dead Pets
35 A Cigarette, a Prayer, a Valediction
Acknowledgments
About the Author
1
Not Applicable
AMERICA still frightens me, even though I have lived here for more than half my life. Not several years ago, the two highest-grossing musical performers in this country belonged to the country-and-western genre: Garth Brooks and Reba McEntire. I don’t even know who these people are, yet they sell more albums than all the remaining performers in the top seven combined, something like that. If these people wanted to, they could take over the entire United States and run people like me into the ocean.
I discovered this fascinating bit of music trivia from a radio show that was being piped through the examination room of a private Manhattan medical clinic, where I sat barefoot, awaiting a consultation with a doctor.
A nurse handed me a clipboard with a pen tied to it, explaining, “Since this is an elective procedure, and not medically necessary, we don’t want to commit to scheduling surgery until we discuss your comfort level with the consequences. You might want to fill out this questionnaire. The doctor will be with you shortly to chat.”
The questionnaire began:
1. Does your family have a history of hereditary illness (please include alcoholism, depression, etc.)? If so, please specify.
___YES___NO
My father is a kleptomaniac; ought I to mention that? Once, from a restaurant, he stole a ceramic chopstick stand in the shape of a tiny whale. I don’t know whether this is a hereditary trait, but, according to my father, it is an aristocratic vice. It’s impossible to rebel against being an aristocrat. For, as I was constantly reminded, everything that an aristocrat does is axiomatically aristocratic, just as anything that a cat does is, by definition, catlike behavior. How can you escape from a tautology? People like us, I was told, face no real danger of being corrupted by our own actions.
I can trace my Korean ancestry back twenty-eight generations on my father’s side and twenty-six on my mother’s side, both lines having commenced with Chinese royalty who chose to marry and settle in Korea. There are those who would call me a classist, but that term is misleading. It implies that I am in favor of maintaining a class system as such, when the truth is I don’t really give a toss about maintaining any class except my own.
It might appear that I was spoiled as a child. But how could I have been, when my family no longer has money — well, we have a little, but not gobs of it. I must say, however, that the way we lost our wealth is rather romantic. On my mother’s side, the family lands were seized and redistributed to the peasants by President Park in the 1960s. On my father’s side, come to think of it, I believe they just pissed their money away. That’s not so interesting, I suppose.
To paraphrase Tolstoy — a count, and therefore One of Us — lower-class families are lower, each in their own way, but all aristocratic families are the same.
When I was little, my father forbade me to become a professional pianist. “You can’t be a genius with your mother and me as your parents,” he said. It was simultaneously self-censure and self-praise. To be blue-blooded is to be decidedly antipathetic toward genius. Genius, after all, is a freakish, wayward gene, like the gene for six fingers or a third eye, and there’s no way such a gene could have crept into our bloodline.
I returned to the questionnaire.
2. Are your parents still living? If so, how would you rate their health?
___YES___NO
(Good, Fair, Poor)?
There wasn’t a box to tick that said, “Are your parents in good health, but unequipped for the battle of life?”
When my parents first met in the early 1960s, at a picnic sponsored by their university in Korea, the first thing that my father noticed about my mother was her pale, ghoulish complexion. For it is a fact universally acknowledged that aristocrats desire anything that smacks a little of death.
My mother is a literal blue blood; her skin gives off a bluish tint, as if she just stepped out of an ice bath. Upon closer inspection, her strange hue reveals itself to be caused by the fact that her entire vein structure is visible through her skin. Moreover, she bruises very easily, and she is always covered with blue welts that have seemingly been inflicted just from contact with the air.
Happily, I take after her in this one regard.
>
My father, on the other hand, is ruddy and sanguine, and has curiously wide feet, which is not a trait that Korean aristocrats are supposed to possess. I doubt that’s what the questionnaire intended for me to address, though.
On my father’s side, I am descended from the so-called learned aristocracy, preened from birth to serve as royal advisers on affairs of state. In practice, however, these advisers spent their time raiding the king’s coffers and sending nasty calligraphy to one another, and when the king sought their advice, they’d go “hmmm” for a bit and scratch their beards and come up with some specious analysis. That’s more or less what my family continues to do today. My grandfather was a presidential cabinet minister. As for my father, I’m not entirely sure what he does and it’s sort of understood that I’m not supposed to inquire too closely. My best guess is that he works for an organization that lends money to developing countries, though he emphatically insists it is not a bank.
He abuses his employees all the time, often making them weep loudly and soulfully, and yet they still pool together to send us fifty pounds of frozen lamb every New Year. That kind of thing happens in a class-based society.
3. If you were to lose your current spouse/partner, by choice or by your spouse’s/partner’s demise, might that cause you to regret your decision to undergo this procedure?
___YES ___NO ___NOT APPLICABLE
The weaker members of our family do tend to choose fragile spouses, as if by some self-destructive drive to avoid passing on our seed.
My cousin Min-Joon took the Korean foreign-service exam shortly after college, and failed. Twice. He then seized upon the notion of going to America and starting over as a dentist, despite the protests of his wife, his in-laws, and his own father against his joining the trade class. Min-Joon went to Chicago for dental school, then failed. Disgusted with her husband’s failure, and depressed by their constant poverty, Min-Joon’s wife took her revenge. One day, she strapped their two-year-old daughter into the car, drove it to a nearby park, poured gasoline over herself, and burned herself and the child to a crisp.
Today, my cousin is remarried and has no profession, and is living in Korea with his parents on a hefty allowance from his father. Of course I realize there’s no causal connection between his wanting to be a dentist and his wife’s setting herself on fire, but it just goes to show you that our sort doesn’t fail quietly; we fail spectacularly, with firecrackers and Maypoles. It’s best to be realistic about these things from the outset, and resist the bewitching dream of trying something new. We’re simply not equipped for that sort of thing.
Individually, members of the Lee clan may look like careworn has-beens. But collectively (if one includes both dead and living members), we are all that gods are. We created the world, then sat back and rocked with laughter as we watched it attempt to run by itself.
But then something strange happened: the world did run by itself.
Which is perhaps why my whole family should have chosen this woman’s manner of exit. That’s what the gods do when they are in their twilight. They retire to Valhalla and set it on fire.
4. If your financial profile or lifestyle were to improve dramatically in the near future, might that cause you to regret your decision to undergo this procedure?
___YES ___NO ___DON’T KNOW
This is a very American question, as it assumes that a fortune, once made, leads to an ever-upward trajectory. It’s not like that for people like me.
What most people don’t seem to realize is that children really do get disinherited, and you don’t even have to be stinking rich for this to happen. In my family, people seem to get put aside at a fairly fixed rate, and it is my constant fear that I am headed there myself. My parents are still annoyed with me over a suicide attempt I made after university — a complete accident, truly — and I haven’t seen any allowance since then except in the direst of emergencies. I left my unimportant investment-banking secretarial job seven months ago, and have fallen behind in my rent. I am also deeply in debt.
The only way to get around this problem completely is by being illegitimate to begin with. Such is the lucky fate of my aunt and uncle Jung and Key, fraternal twins five years my senior. They are the result of an affair between my late grandfather in his waning years and his mistress, who was the old-maid daughter of one of his political associates.
Jung and Key moved to New York a few years before I did. We have lived in Korea on and off, have been educated at international schools, and speak the hybrid American/Commonwealth English that is the lingua franca of such schools. We were all sent to the States for university and remained here.
Jung is widely regarded as an extraordinary beauty, though I honestly never saw what the big deal was. I suppose it’s because she’s tall and thin yet busty, with the pointy chin and nose that Koreans covet so much and a widow’s peak. Key, her own brother, is constantly admiring her breasts.
She owns a sleek, inky Italian greyhound, with papers proving that one of its ancestors appeared in a painting by Velázquez. A previous boyfriend imported the dog for her from Harrods. He gave her a Velázquez, too — not the painting itself, but a study in charcoal, now long gone.
Jung is often mistaken for being half-Caucasian, which among Koreans is a great compliment.
SIX WEEKS AGO, on April Fools’ Day, Jung rang up asking to meet with me, on urgent business. She said, “Today, twelve-thirty. Meet me at Sheepshanks, 550 West Thirty-ninth.”
“But that’s really far away for me, Jung. Can’t we at least meet on the East Side?”
“And what else were you planning to do today, in between your napping and your Winston Churchill breakfast special?”
“That’s totally unfair,” I said. “Churchill had three scotches before noon, whereas I’m not even up at noon, so which of us is the more sober lunch date, do you suppose, he or I?”
Sheepshanks was a singularly uncharming pub next to a cab dispatcher. Jung likes lunching at such venues during the daytime, since she doesn’t like to be spotted by her coworkers drinking midday.
She was already seated when I arrived, and I saw that she had ordered her usual, a shot of vodka and a cup of coffee. “I like alternating between upsies and downsies,” she would say.
She waved in greeting, eyes bleary from the vodka shot. I ordered a Mojito, was told gruffly that they didn’t mix cocktails, then ordered a scotch and soda.
“Will you be wanting that in a sake cup?” asked our waiter with a silly grin.
Jung responded, “Hey, you Papist, I think your cabbage is boiling over.” I blanched in horror until I realized this was some sort of long-standing bantering ritual.
The waiter returned shortly with my scotch. The tables were sticky and the coasters wouldn’t budge from where the waiter had placed them, so I had to drink with my left hand. I kept spilling.
“Jung, what’s that weird gray foamy stuff all over the ceiling; is that asbestos?” I said, looking around me. “Where do you even hear about these places? Why are we here?”
“We’re incognito,” said Jung. “I want to help you out, with your financial and other problems. I’m going to introduce you to a woman I know named Nausika Tartakov. She’s an ogresse.” She butted out her cigarette, though she had just lit it. The lit tip fell on the table and Jung swiped it onto her lap, absently.
“An ogresse?” I asked. “Does she have only one eye?”
“An ogresse is what the French used to call a woman who made social introductions. She wants to meet you. Don’t worry; she knows you and I look nothing alike.”
“Thanks, that is a comfort. I take it she’s a matchmaker?”
“Of sorts. Listen to this.” She pulled a pamphlet with a blank white cover from her leather tote, cleared her throat, and began to read:
Desmoiselles, this is a new Belle Époque. We are witnessing the resurgence of breeding, and when this sort of thing happens, it means that money wishes to be coupled with title. Hence a new trend among the
extraordinarily wealthy: grandes horizontales, as they were once called, or, more familiarly, courtesans.
“Where’d you get that?” I asked, trying to take the pamphlet from her. She slapped my hand away and continued reading:
In fin-de-siècle France, courtesans were highly respected. They could attend any high-profile social event on the arm of their employer, and not be worried about public scorn. In fact, the gentlemen used to arrange the courtesanship contracts with the girls’ mothers.
Desmoiselles, be one of the privileged few. Take advantage of this opportunity before the bloom falls off the rose.
Jung put the pamphlet back in her tote.
“Why are you showing me this?” I asked.
“See if you can guess.”
I felt the scotch crawling back up my throat. “For you?”
She shook her head no with an exaggerated arc.
“Me, then?”
She nodded.
“Jung, this is jaw-droppingly insulting.”
“Absolutely not. Jude, this is a revival of fortune for our sort, though not perhaps in the manner we would have liked.”
“Sounds a bit off,” I said suspiciously. Jung was prone to spinning pointlessly elaborate falsehoods. Once she told me in grisly detail how her friend had died in a fire; later, it emerged that Jung had merely had a falling-out with her friend and didn’t want to admit it.
Jung said, “There’s no pressure. Before you dismiss it, though, I should tell you that one of the courtesans, a friend of mine, is being set up with her own antique gallery on Madison Avenue. The client and you would have no claim on each other after two years, then you give each other the heave-ho, and your debt is cleared and you can keep all the money the bloke gives you.” Her bravado flagged a bit. “In fairness, I should tell you that it does come with a sting. You have to get your tubes tied during the time you’re with him, so you can’t get pregnant. Supposedly you can get that procedure reversed later. Is that true, do you think?”