Kept: A Comedy of Sex and Manners

by Y. Euny Hong

  “Why so extreme? Why not the pill?”

  “The pill isn’t fail-safe. And it causes water retention. Men don’t like that.”

  “I see. Are you doing this yourself, becoming a courtesan?”

  “No need,” she said while sipping her drink, her voice vibrating inside the glass. “But think of it, Jude — it’s a job in which you’ll be valued for who you are, and not for actual performance. It’s a family tradition. In a manner of speaking.”

  5. If you were to lose family members other than your partner/spouse (e.g., parents, siblings), would you regret being childless?

  ___YES___NO___NOT APPLICABLE

  Was it possible to fail this test? I wished I had someone to confer with about this, but Jung had refused to come with me to the clinic. “Too icky,” she said. I don’t see her as often as I used to. A few weeks ago, she fell head over heels for someone in her apartment building. After their first date, she told me, “I’m in love. I want to throw up.”

  A short woman with wiry hair and wiry glasses entered the examination room. This was Dr. Spero. I told her, “I don’t understand this questionnaire. I thought this procedure was reversible.”

  She replied, “A tubal ligation involves snipping the fallopian tubes, and is permanent. We can also knot or clip the tubes, which can be undone later, but pregnancy is never one hundred percent guaranteed. That’s why we have the questionnaire.”

  “So is it more like ninety-nine percent?” I suddenly noticed her very bad makeup job. What brown-eyed person wears blue eye pencil?

  Dr. Spero continued, “If you’re aiming for ninety-nine percent, you should not be considering this at all. I really can’t recommend this for someone who’s never had children, particularly one so young. I’m sure you’re aware that there are many other methods of birth control that are very reliable. You need to consider this decision in terms of the bigger scheme of things. You have to weigh your partner’s desires against God’s design. You might be ending your family history, forever.”

  How could I make her understand?

  “Our family line has ended,” I said.

  2

  The Ogresse

  Beware of enterprises that require new clothes.

  — HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  MY AUNT JUNG introduced me, as she had promised, to Nausika Tartakov, a Russian immigrant in her late thirties. Rumor has it that Madame Tartakov falsely claimed Jewish ancestry when she was seeking refugee status in the United States. She was publicly exposed when she attended someone’s Passover seder, at which she declared that Passover was the Jewish celebration of the crucifixion of Jesus.

  Formerly a ballerina in Russia, now she worked as a dance instructor at New York’s premier dance studio, and at one point taught the tango to a certain well-known Italian-American actor for a big Hollywood movie. She married one of the many dance pupils who had fallen in love with her, and who, by good fortune, was wealthy and had angina. He left his young widow a beautiful four-story town house on East Sixty-second Street, but little else, as his legacy had been largely swallowed up by debts.

  The year her husband died, Madame Tartakov started Tartakov Translation Services. On paper, everything is aboveboard; her corporation is registered with the IRS, she pays taxes, and she sponsors her employees for H1 visas so they can work in the United States legally. And, I am told, they do a fair amount of actual translation.

  I visited Madame Tartakov at said town house.

  “Come in,” she said, leading me through a foyer of gently rotting flowers. She was very slight, maybe five feet one; lissom with a bird-like bone structure; and had dark, boyishly cut hair. Her cheekbones jutted out sharply from her tiny face, accented with wide slants of rouge that paralleled her upturned, almost Asiatic eyes.

  Her breasts were perfectly spherical, full, compact, and immobile. On her body frame, they appeared at once too large and yet too small, depending on how you looked at them. I imagined she would have to wear a little girl’s bra but with large cups.

  “Stop staring at my chest,” she said shrilly. “Ah, you are blushing, that’s very cute. Men like that. Sit down.”

  I was completely in the thrall of this heavily perfumed, diminutive harpy.

  “What is your background?” she said.

  I turned to look at the wall behind me and said, “Pink floral wallpaper with some cherrywood molding.”

  Madame Tartakov guffawed sarcastically. “HAW. HAW. NOBODY LIKES THE COMEDIENNE, OKAY?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Background. Okay. I’m descended from the last Korean royal dynasty.”

  “Mmm.” She nodded approvingly. “LET’S HAVE A LOOK,” she yelled into my face. She held my chin between her forefinger and thumb, the way one might examine a cat’s teeth, and said, “You have to massage your gingiva more often.”

  “My what?”

  “Gingiva, your gingiva. Why you cross your legs suddenly? I mean this, here, what is called?” She opened her mouth and tapped on the tobacco-stained, semigangrenous flesh surrounding her teeth.

  I felt slightly queasy. “My gums?” I asked.

  “Your gums. Yes. Also, teeth need to bleaching. And use Blistex. Your lips, they’re going to bleed all over me.

  “Good skin, but need emulsifier. Good nose; most Oriental girls have too flat nose. Eyes have too much red. Use Visine. And too small, you looking like squinting.

  “You blink too much. You are maybe allergical to your contact lenses; we have to get you a more wind-passing kind. [I think she meant more porous.] Breasts mediocre. Have you tried Rogaine? No, just for hair thicken. Good thighs, but this waist! You having the menses now or something? Annoying voice. Don’t talk when you’re making love.”

  Up to this point I had been ambivalent about becoming a courtesan, but she had pulled a cosmetic-saleswoman trick on me. She pitted my insecurities in a bloody battle against my vanity. I didn’t want to be turned down on account of not being pretty enough. If only she had not engaged in this criticism, I might have turned and run, and there might have been no tale here to tell.

  “Do you have any venereal disease?” she asked.

  “Who can say,” I said.

  “My girls are clean. I will send you to the doctor. The same doctor will also do the snip-snip. You know about this, yes?”

  “Snip-snip? I thought it was just tying my tubes.”

  “Whatever. Do I look like doctor to you? Your education is good, is important. You must be a lady. Must be, not seem. Do you know the difference between summer and winter truffle? What is significance of Caravaggio? What is the number of Muses, times the number of Furies? Good. I cannot be bothered to train. You play piano? Good, I have baby grand in parlor. You can practice.

  “Poise you lack totally, and you have arrogant face. And you walk wrong. Pick up your feet. Heel, toe, heel toe. Show me. That’s good. No, keep your fingers closed when you walk. Why your fingers spread? You think you playing guitar? GUITAR, GUITAR, GUITAR!”

  “I take it you had some assistance in writing your advertising pamphlet?” I said.

  “Shut up,” she said. “Take off shoes. Good, no foot fungus. Okay. But not this kind of cheap-o shoes.”

  “These are Bruno Maglis.”

  “You look like stewardess, okay? Most of these men don’t really want too much sex from you. They can get that somewhere else. Because honestly, darling, no one would really pay to have sex with most of my girls, if it were just sex.”

  “Then why do we have to have our tubes tied?” I asked.

  “Birth-control pill make you into bloating. Also, is for no trouble later, with baby. Sometimes girls get desperate. Trust me, I have learned this the hard way. Don’t worry; I pay for you to untie tubes later when your contract is done, and you can breed as much as you like.

  “Fee for Madame Tartakov paid monthly by men. I don’t take your money, except of course what you will owe me. Korean and Russian is the same; I not try to cheat you, if I remember. Madame Tartakov ta
kes care of her girls.

  “I give you clothes and jewelry; you pay me later. All designer label, but no logo showing. You can wear Chanel, but no big C all over the place. No Louis Vuitton with the LV all over bag. Label is for Russian mobster’s girlfriend, not for courtesan.

  “You live here with me and some of the other girls; no rent until later. Big room with nice big terrace. High-speed Internet broadband.

  “But I have rules. You do not bring men here. This is not cathouse I am running here. Okay? Ceci n’est pas un bordel.* All fucking is outside. No sex in this house. NO SEX, NO SEX, NO SEX.” She jabbed my arm three times for emphasis.

  “Ow,” I said, rubbing my arm.

  “What is this ‘ow’? Why so fragile? You must to toughen; sometimes the men swap partners. Don’t tell me you’ve never done that before.”

  “This sounds vile,” I said.

  “How much debt you have?” she asked.

  “Debt? I never really calculated. Let me have a think.”

  Madame Tartakov smiled wickedly. “Is very bad. America is country of credit, you know. How can you let this happen? You cannot buy anything now. No car, no house. You cannot even to pay plane ticket in cash now, you know that?”

  She was right. I had just been turned down for a mobile-phone plan, of all things.

  “So how much debt?” she pressed.

  I mumbled the amount.

  “Cannot hear,” she said.

  “At least fifty-five thousand dollars.”

  Madame Tartakov didn’t bat an eye. No doubt she was accustomed to dealing in much larger figures. “Your family doesn’t help you?”

  “That’s sort of the origin of the problem. You see, I borrowed against my expectations, and then it turned out I wasn’t coming into any money.”

  “What expectation? You mean inheritance?”

  “Right. I thought we had money — no, truthfully, I was always confused about that. I guess we used to, and we don’t anymore. But by the time I figured this out I was already heavily in debt.”

  She said, “I take care of all of it. I pay off all your debt. Is loan, with interest.”

  “How much interest?” I asked.

  “Is no matter, because if you work for me two years, debt is clear. And you make money on top of that, too. Debt-free, you can start all over again. So what will it be?” She began to pick her teeth with the corner of a napkin. “Will it be Madame Tartakov, or debtor’s prison?”

  “I still need to think about it,” I said.

  “Whatever. You can have trial period. Live here few weeks, then decide. Here is doctor’s number. You have to be approve by doctor for tubal ligation or you no working for me anyway. So just do checkup, okay?”

  I HAVE ALREADY told you about the checkup with Dr. Spero. Subsequently, I turned the decision over in my head for two weeks, taking advantage of Madame Tartakov’s trial period. I stayed at her house on Sixty-second Street, no strings attached — for the time being.

  During this two-week idyll, I had very little interaction with Madame. She gave ballroom-dancing lessons from the afternoon to late at night, and she was gone on the weekends, too, at professional ballroom-dancing championships around the country. She had trophies all over the sitting room, along with some photos from her days as a ballerina in Russia.

  The trial period was a cunning idea on Madame’s part, for the house was exquisitely comfortable. It had four stories in all. The kitchen occupied the entire basement level, its dankness and darkness giving it the feeling of a Victorian scullery, except that it had a Sub-Zero refrigerator and all the top-of-the-line appliances. A long pine table with beer-hall benches took up nearly the full width of the room; this was meant as a servants’ dining area, but it was so cozy that the girls ate there most nights, rather than in the upstairs dining room.

  On the ground floor, behind a set of heavy white double doors, was an enormous, sunny parlor containing two baby grand pianos. This, along with most of the house’s furnishings, had been purchased by the first Mrs. Hunsecker (Madame Tartakov being the second Mrs. Hunsecker, though she never took the name). You could tell straight away which wife was responsible for which home furnishing. The first wife was very fond of Queen Anne–style furniture, English garden chintz, and the sort of toile wallpaper that features people in three-corner hats milking cows. Madame Tartakov, meanwhile, made her stamp on the house by squeezing in Roche Bobois furniture wherever she could, which was not objectionable except insofar as it matched so poorly with the previous decor that even my father would have noticed. Madame Tartakov also had an immense collection of Murano glassware, displayed in nearly every room of the house. The upper two stories consisted of seven bedrooms and five bathrooms, occupied by Madame and eleven of the most charming girls you could ever hope to meet.

  THE FIRST TIME I saw all the girls seated in the parlor, I was very intimidated. Their complexions were glowing and clear and perfectly shaded; their cheeks were so like marzipan peaches that you wanted to bite them.

  The girls were not exceedingly pretty, however, which was greatly comforting to me. Rather, they possessed other qualities that would make even the shallowest, most uncouth of men see further than skin-deep. They had a grace so innate that their occasional drunkenness or loss of temper could not wither it; even the way they opened jars was charming. It was the sort of charm that was most apparent when the girls were completely silent and still. They kept their eyes locked on you when you spoke to them, yet at the same time they had a constant faraway look that made you always try a little harder to get their undivided attention. Their singular gift was that they inspired, in anyone who encountered them, the desire to be surrounded by them always.

  Their backgrounds made them all the more irresistible. The Scottish courtesan was descended from both Ethelred the Unready and the Thane of Cawdor, the fellow mentioned in Macbeth. Heike, a German girl, was the daughter of some impecunious Freiherr. The Walloon descended from Charlemagne. The Romanian girl called Minna was related to Vlad the Impaler, the historical figure upon whom Count Dracula was supposedly based.

  None of the girl’s families had had money for at least two generations. Many of their family homes were relinquished long ago and converted to ill-frequented museums. Poor Heike grew up not being allowed to venture downstairs in her own house from April to October of any given year, when the entire ground floor was rented out for private functions. It’s been her family’s main source of income for half a century.

  Heike was assigned to be my roommate, and (I suspect) was given the task of convincing me to join Madame Tartakov’s stable.

  Heike was different from the other girls, a full head taller and big-boned. She had short hair, in the Vidal Sassoon vein, in violation of an unspoken rule that courtesans must have hair of shoulder length or longer. She cut her own hair, using those dull safety scissors that schoolchildren use to cut paper, and smeared her coif with wax every morning until she looked like a candle wick. She eschewed tony togs in favor of Cyndi Lauper wear — petticoats and striped knee socks with a lingerie top and a jean jacket thrown over it. She never shaved her underarms. Madame was always harping on everyone else’s appearance, but she wouldn’t dream of challenging Heike, I was told.

  Nor did Heike share the kept woman’s love of jewelry. “I don’t like to look like a Christmas tree,” she said.

  For my first ten days in the house, Heike skirted around the issue of my extending my stay. It was I who broached the subject one night, as we lay in our beds. I asked, “Didn’t you have reservations about getting a tubal ligation?”

  “Are you kidding?” she said. “I would have entered into this contract just for the surgery. If it turns out to be irreversible, so much the better. I have no maternal instincts at all. Do you?”

  “I suppose not,” I said, recalling the many times I had to feign interest in people’s babies. “But I don’t like the idea of…Some of the most important families from Paris to Istanbul are represented in this h
ouse, and you’re all infertile, at least temporarily. It’s almost like a conspiracy to exterminate blue bloods everywhere.”

  Heike said sternly, “All of our families have been in a state of entropy for generations. What would our offspring have to look forward to, being bullied by the new ruling class?”

  That remark affected me greatly.

  Growing up aristo is not really what most people think it is. Especially for those who are blue-blooded but no longer part of the ruling class. Your power is all gone, but your responsibilities remain the same.

  By way of analogy: Someone terribly important takes you out to lunch. What agony it is trying to determine the proper ordering strategy! Your host has remarked on his low opinion of the tenderloin, so you can’t order that, or else it would look as though you did not value his opinion. You can’t order the rib-eye steak, because it is the most expensive item on the menu. The sardines are not an option, because they are smelly and you would be too distracted by the task of filleting them to pay attention to the conversation. In the end, you have the chicken salad. And you hate chicken salad. But in terms of price, odor, and general inoffensiveness, it is your best option.

  You have to apply the same degree of strategy and intrigue for every single thing you do. Growing up as an aristo with no power or money: you’re getting a free lunch, but you can’t even enjoy it.

  Despite the fact that your family has no fortune, you are not given many options to earn one. Commerce of any kind is unacceptable. Law is all right in the vague theoretical sense, but not as a practicing lawyer. The arts are mandatory hobbies, but are not a respectable career path. In my family, the medical profession is out. “Strictly for immigrants and upstarts,” my father would say. He once got into a disagreement with his gastroenterologist and told him, “You’re not really a doctor. Not so long ago, only doctors of philosophy were bestowed the honorific of ‘Doctor.’ That tradition ought to be revived. You should be called Mr. So-and-so, not Dr. So-and-so.” You are expected to perform reasonably well in school, yet you must accomplish this without getting dark circles under your eyes.