Kept: A Comedy of Sex and Manners

by Y. Euny Hong

  He thought for a moment and said, “I’ll give you three months, during which time I’ll cover my fee to that Tartakov woman.”

  “That’s not enough time,” I said coolly.

  “I’ll make it worth your while. If you succeed, I’ll cover the rest of your debt to Madame. Well, in installments.”

  I didn’t believe him. “But regardless of the outcome of my efforts, three months’ payment to Madame. In advance.”

  He looked hesitant. “Won’t Tartakov be suspicious if she gets it all at once?”

  “Pay me. I’ll wire it to her or something.”

  “Done,” he said, pulling an eye-popping stack of bills out of his wallet, which made me realize two things: that he had come to Maurice Hall specifically seeking to make this transaction with me, and that I could have held out for a good deal more money. Bargaining wasn’t part of my upbringing.

  IN EARLY JULY, I found myself sitting in the smoking room of John F. Kennedy Airport, where I was awaiting Joshua’s flight back from a fellowship interview in Germany. The assembly of people were decidedly not like me: middle-aged Japanese businessmen, craggy David Carradine types, big-haired Texas broads. No glamour girls; indeed, no girls even close to my age who didn’t have goth makeup and eyebrow piercings. “Can I bum one of those?” I asked a man holding Dunhill Lights.

  The Dunhill smoker was a corpulent, rusty-haired man with ear-locks and a skullcap. He nodded and slid the box across the armrest with his chubby fingers.

  “Are you flying to Seoul?” he asked.

  “No, I’m picking someone up who’s on the Munich flight,” I said.

  “But you’re Korean?” he asked. “Thought so. I go to Korea four, five times a year.” He smiled proudly. “That’s where I’m headed now. I’m actually the rabbinical inspector for several food-manufacturing plants in Korea. One of them makes the aspartame for a famous diet soft drink. I make sure that process and ingredients are in compliance with the laws of kashruth. I do beef inspections also.” His eyes crinkled into a smile. “Are you perplexed?” He gestured at the Maimonides book I was reading, Guide for the Perplexed.

  I blushed. “Oh. I suppose I am.”

  “I see this,” he said. “Have you considered converting to Judaism?”

  “Should I?” I asked.

  He said, “I can’t answer that. But think about what Rambam — that’s Maimonides — says. In Christianity, man got the gift of reason only after he sinned and was expelled from the Garden of Eden. In Judaism, man has always had reason, from the moment he was created, and that’s why God saw fit to punish him in the first place. In other words, the fact that you have reason makes you responsible for your own decisions. You don’t have to sin first in order to have knowledge.”

  I was taken aback by the man’s frankness. “Can I have another cigarette?” I asked, reaching for his pack.

  “Ach, no!” he said, lurching back. “Sorry, I’m not allowed to touch you. I’ll slide the box over, and then, when you’ve taken a cigarette, slide it back.”

  THAT EVENING, back at Joshua’s, he graded student papers from his least favorite class, Philosophy and Literature. He was commenting bewilderedly as he read his students’ work, saying things like, “This is so bad that I wish more people would plagiarize.”

  Meanwhile, I knitted and watched Little House on the Prairie reruns on television. I am completely fascinated by this show. In this particular episode, Pa Ingalls was asking his daughters to stay home from school to help out on the farm.

  Joshua lifted his head from a student paper entitled “Paradise by the Dashboard Light: Blindness As Metaphor in Milton’s Later Works.”

  He said, “Michael Landon, né Eugene Orowitz, was not born a goy; he was made a goy, or perhaps had it thrust upon him. He had an Irish mother and Jewish father, like me.”

  The rabbi’s words had been turning in my head all day. I mean, you have to be deeply impressed by someone whose convictions are so strong that he’s willing to walk around a place like Seoul with ear-locks.

  I hesitated a long time before sitting up and asking Joshua, “Do you think I would be happier if I were Jewish?”

  Joshua was expressionless. “Happier? Do I seem particularly happy to you?”

  “Yes…no.”

  “Please don’t tell me you’re considering converting to Kabbalah?” he said.

  “No, just common-garden Judaism.” I was squirming in my seat.

  “I don’t see why you thought that would impress me, since, as you know, I’m not really into the whole Jewish thing.”

  “I need an experience that will transform me completely.”

  “Try Catholicism first. It’s bloody; you’d like that.”

  “I want something more secular,” I said, realizing a minor flaw in my plan.

  “I don’t think you can convert to secular Judaism. Why not become Buddhist?”

  “Why, because I’m Asian?” At the mere suggestion that the conversation was going to take this turn, I was poised like a cobra to strike.

  “No, of course not. A lot of Jews become Buddhist anyway; JuBus, they’re called, or maybe it’s BuJus. So really, it’s almost like converting to secular Judaism.”

  “Korean aristocrats don’t become Buddhist,” I said testily. “That’s a peasant’s religion. Your suggestion offends my sensibilities.”

  “If it’s not okay to be Buddhist, then why is it okay to become Jewish?”

  I scrambled for an answer. “A Korean Jew is a noncategory. And therefore not wrong, particularly.”

  “You’re not fooling anyone,” he said, moving the stack of student papers from his lap to the coffee table so he would have more bodily freedom to express his consternation. “You can’t hide. In this country, you’ll never really be off the charts. You’re perceived as Asian, first and foremost.”

  “I know; it’s one of the many drawbacks to the absence of a traditional class system.”

  “Now, maybe this is an unfair assumption,” said Joshua in a condescending tone that signaled an unpleasant escalation, “but it has occurred to me that you use elitism to cushion yourself against having to deal with race. And that now you intend to use religion to do the same thing.”

  I patted his hand with ironic tenderness. “I don’t ‘use’ elitism, dearest. I am elite. Toward what do these accusations tend?”

  “You’re always rooting for the wrong minority,” he said. “You’re going to be upset with me for saying this, but don’t your own people need you more? Why do you continually want to glom onto someone else’s problems?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean by ‘my own people.’”

  Joshua sighed and said, “I just want to know what you are hoping to achieve by converting to Judaism. I know all about this. You should hear the stories my mother tells about her conversion, and it’d be even more horrendous for you. Jews aren’t really interested in converts unless they’re blond, in which case they can feel like they’ve exacted revenge against the goyim. It’s like that H. G. Wells story The Time Machine. The world of the future is ruled by these beautiful, fair-haired, vapid people called the Eloi, while the ugly Morlocks, who are the engine behind their civilization, live underground. But once in a while, the Morlocks kidnap an Eloi. The Jews are like the Morlocks. They like the idea of enslaving blonds.”

  I said, “I think even Thor would be offended by that.”

  Joshua said, “ ‘Everyone hates the Jews,’ as the Tom Lehrer song goes. Why should I be an exception? And Tom Lehrer went to Harvard, so he must be right.”

  “I don’t think that’s funny,” I said.

  “I would expect you to know the difference between funny and ironic. Why would you want to be a member of a group whose identity is based on exclusion? Who would never accept you as their own unless you carry the gene for Tay-Sachs disease?”

  “You’re quite wrong,” I said. “If I actually go through the conversion, my race won’t matter to them. It’s like how the
French feel about people who speak French. They feel we’re all brethren.”

  “You Francophiles are so susceptible to brainwashing. The Francophone solidarity is one of the biggest myths about France; remind me to lend you a book I have on the subject.”

  I rolled my eyes to indicate my level of interest in his suggested reading list.

  Joshua had on that arrogant “debate face” I did not like. He stood up and paced like the university lecturer that he aspired to be. “Let’s see if I understand this. You think the Jewish identity is so-o-o-o powerful that it will subsume your Asianness.”

  I said, “And why is that inaccurate? You are living proof, Spinoza, of the consuming power of the Jewish identity. You yourself are only half-Jewish by birth, not religiously observant, and a self-hating Jew to boot, and yet you are wholly Jewish in your self-identification, all of which confirms that you can be more Jewish in the breach than in the observance.”

  “Our situations are not the same, Judith.”

  “You’re the one who says that a man’s name is his destiny,” I said. “And Judith means ‘Jewess.’ So it’s in the cards.”

  “Let me ask you something, Jude: is this about trying to be white?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s about not being a goy.”

  “And how do you define goy?”

  “Everyone who’s not exactly like me.”

  IT’S TIME-CONSUMING to change one’s life. By the ides of July, I was not only working several evenings a week at Maurice Hall, I was also exclusively dating Joshua, which strangely took up more time than dating two men at once; and I had commenced tutorials with Rabbi Lipman.

  I met with the rabbi in his offices at Temple Ohavei Shalom, a Conservative synagogue on the Upper West Side. Joshua, who was unsupportive of my conversion, had nonetheless given me one piece of advice: try a Conservative congregation, because Orthodox was too hot and Reform was too cold, and “Conservative Judaism is the one that Goldilocks liked.”

  The rabbi wore glasses held together with a Band-Aid around the temple and frame, and had a long, hoary beard that held dozens of bread crumbs as its prisoners. He said, “You mind if I eat while we talk? Want some? No? You sure? So, who’s the boy?”

  “The boy?”

  “Most times people convert because of a loved one. Is there a young man?”

  “Um, what’s the right answer?”

  “There isn’t one, really, to be perfectly honest,” he said. ‘No’ is a problem; ‘yes’ is also a problem. You know, I’m supposed to turn away a prospective convert three times before accepting him. Or her. So for the moment, all answers are wrong. All wrong.”

  He balled up the aluminum foil from his sandwich. “All right. Today I’ll give you a list of books and other items I want you to buy. If you’re still interested, come again and we’ll talk.”

  I went to Park Side Judaica and picked up the moron’s guides to Judaism on the rabbi’s list, as well as a mezuzah, a Shabbat candle set, a kiddush cup, a prayer shawl (not required for women, but recommended nonetheless), a menorah, and cupboard tags labeled “milchig” and “fleishig” (dairy and meat).

  I took the items to the register. “Oh, a convert kit,” said the salesman. “Would be easier if they just sold it as a set.”

  THE FOLLOWING Saturday morning, I went to Shabbat services at Ohavei Shalom. After it concluded, an elderly woman put her prayer book in my lap, then the others in her pew followed suit as they left the room, until I was weighed down with dozens of books. One of these women would later confide to me that they had all thought I was a Shabbas goy, one of the gentiles whom some synagogues hire to switch off lights and perform other tasks forbidden to Jews on the Sabbath. At the time, I put the books away on the shelf — what else could I do? — and joined the others downstairs for kiddush.

  Following the blessing of the wine, there was some sort of social hour. A jovial-looking man approached me, slurping whiskey out of a paper cup. “Wanna hear a joke? Okay. So this Jewish couple is touring through China, and it’s their dream to meet some of these legendary Chinese Jews, the lost tribe. So finally they visit this village where the Chinese Jews supposedly live, and there they are, in the flesh, wearing yarmulkes and everything! So the couple is ecstatic and they introduce themselves as American Jews, and say how happy they are to meet their Asian counterparts, yada yada yada. When the couple leaves, two of the Chinese Jews scratch their heads, and one of them says to the other, ‘That’s funny, those two didn’t look Jewish.’”

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “What’s not to get?” he said, walking away in exasperation.

  The following Saturday at kiddush, a youngish, serious-looking man bearing a vague resemblance to Joshua came up to me. “I hear you’re considering converting,” he said. “I’m generally not opposed to such things, but people in your situation often lack a real understanding of what the Jewish identity is. A person can convert, but it doesn’t mean that they have a personal stake in the perils and persecution facing Jewry. And that’s part and parcel of being Jewish. I don’t care what other people say. You can’t just dehistoricize the Jewish experience and take Hitler out of the picture. Although” — he bit his lip contemplatively — “although, I guess Hitler would have killed you, too.”

  I recalled that Natalie, Zadie’s companion, had once told me the same thing. Strange bedfellows. I said, “Oh, believe me, I’d have been among the first to be put on the train. You have no idea. In fact, I’d have been there way before you, hogging up all the good hay.”

  “That’s not amusing in the slightest,” he said. “You should be ashamed.”

  I later mentioned this conversation to Joshua. He covered his eyes with his hands. “I told you this was a bad idea.”

  A MONTH after our initial visit, I met again with Rabbi Lipman in his office to give a progress report of sorts. I told him about the Hitler remark, and he apologized profusely. “A troubled lad, that one. Jews are no better than anyone else in that regard; I’ll be the first to tell you that. Many people make the mistake of thinking they can escape stupidity in a house of worship. But we’re not worse than anyone else either, I hope. So please don’t stop coming to synagogue. Going to synagogue is like lifting weights. You can’t really reap any benefit unless you do it regularly.”

  Then I told him about my other reservations about Judaism.

  “Per your suggestion, Rabbi, I tried to keep kosher experimentally, to see whether it was a life I could tolerate, and I have to say, I’m not so sure how I’m doing giving up pork. I mean, it’s not something I ever ate very much of, but just a few days after starting to keep kosher, I had a deprivation dream, that I was at a deli in Bologna and there were these giant Italian sausages hanging from the rafters.”

  The rabbi lowered his eyes and said, “Forgive me, but I don’t think this was a food dream you were having, young lady. I did not just say that, by the way.”

  I giggled and then continued. “That actually brings me to my biggest reservation of all. I’m also a little bit concerned about the laws concerning the, uh, uncleanliness of women…once a month. I mean, not only can they not have, uh, relations during that time, but they’re considered untouchable; they can’t even enter the synagogue. That seems very…retrograde.”

  The rabbi shrugged exaggeratedly, raising his upturned palms in the air. “That’s sort of something we’re not really emphasizing these days. You have to understand, though, this is Moses talking, and they were very important to him, these family purity laws.”

  “But Moses had several wives,” I said, “so it was no skin off his ass. Sorry, Rabbi, I mean, off his nose. He could rotate between them. While one of the wives was having her, uh, menses, Moses could just be with another one.”

  The rabbi scratched his beard thoughtfully. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I mean, women living together, their periods tend to synchronize, right? So they’d all be menstruating at the same time.” He shook his finger at me. “I
did not just say that, by the way.”

  21

  Joshua’s Mother

  I WAS NOT looking forward to meeting Joshua’s mother. Though Joshua had assured me she was a lovely and big-hearted woman, I had heard him talk on the phone with her several times, and his end of the conversation usually didn’t sound too promising to me. While on the phone with her, he would always maul bits of paper that happened to be lying around, and writhe as if he had to go to the bathroom.

  Before you meet your boyfriend’s mother, you can glean information about her by taking inventory of the items around the boy’s house. This tells you not only what the mother deemed fit to give him but also what her son felt obligated to keep. Joshua had a cupboard full of chipped china, a VCR whose rewind function was broken, and a makeup mirror framed with fifty lightbulbs.

  “Spinoza, why does your mother think you want a makeup mirror?”

  “She gave it to me, that’s all. I don’t use it, obviously. But if she comes here and notices it’s gone, she’ll be offended.”

  “Why, does she aspire for you to become a drag queen?”

  “I don’t think she’d mind.”

  “And what about the chipped plates? Aren’t you insulted that she just dumps her shittiest stuff on you?”

  “Lay off it, okay? You don’t even talk to your mother.”

  “Well, that’s because in my family, when people insult us, we correspond through august epistles. We don’t come back for more abuse. I think my way is more normal.”

  Mrs. Spinoza had been born into a reasonably affluent, patrician Irish Catholic family from Newport, the kind of family that had worshipped Kennedy in previous generations but was on the cusp of turning Republican. She had been cut off from her family when she converted from Catholicism to Judaism to marry Joshua’s father. Just to be on the safe side, however, she attended synagogue on Friday night and Mass on Sunday morning; she observed both Lent and Passover. I grudgingly admitted this showed some strength of character on her part, but Joshua assured me that it signified no such thing. “She does it out of condescension,” he had said. “To remind my father that she was marrying downward.”