Kept: A Comedy of Sex and Manners

by Y. Euny Hong

  “But don’t you think that’s an important thing I have in common with her?”

  “What, that you’re slumming by being with me?”

  “No, idiot, that I’m considering converting to Judaism.”

  “Trust me; she won’t be impressed.”

  I SUPPOSE it’s because of watching too much television that I am ceaselessly astonished to discover that children and their parents often look alike. I had rather assumed that Joshua’s features came from his father, but when Mrs. Spinoza entered the restaurant, I saw that I was wrong. She even shared her son’s habit of wearing an all-brown outfit, though on her it looked good. She was tall, like her son, but she bore her height regally, whereas Joshua slouched. The primary dissimilarity lay in the eyes; Joshua’s were paranoid, hers were hard and confident.

  The only thing marring her otherwise muted appearance was a large antique pendant, a round cut of amber that had grown cloudy over the years. It gave me the shivers. It looked like a cataract, like the blind eye of a Stygian witch.

  “Judith!” she said, pulling me toward her into a proper two-cheek kiss, which surprised me; her son, once upon a time, did not even know how to help me into my coat. We took our seats, Mrs. Spinoza and I silently surveying each other.

  “My goodness, napkin rings?” she said, pulling out the napkin and placing it on her lap. “Don’t people know anything? Proper restaurants aren’t supposed to use napkin rings, you know.”

  I said, “Because a napkin ring is meant to signal that the napkin has been used previously and has not been washed.” I smiled demurely.

  She raised her eyebrows admiringly. “Yes, quite right. Your friend knows her etiquette, Joshua. Too bad you don’t.” Unlike her stuttering son, she had a steady, cultivated voice.

  “Yes,” said Joshua. “I’m a philistine sitting in an Ascot box.”

  Mrs. Spinoza and I laughed, united by Joshua’s implied flattery. This was going far better than I had previously suspected. Why had Joshua jettisoned this genteel side of his upbringing?

  She said, “Judith, Joshua tells me you read a great deal.”

  “Sometimes,” I said, prepared to be intimidated by the prospect of discussing literature with this great scholar’s mother.

  She asked, “Have you read Tuesdays with Morrie?”

  I chortled appreciatively.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked.

  “I thought you were being ironic. Aren’t you?” I laughed again.

  Mrs. Spinoza said, “Why would you assume such a thing?”

  Losing nerve, I said, “Just…it’s just incongruous. I mean, you look so much like your son that I was taken aback at the difference in your tastes. Oh, please just ignore me.” I laughed a third time, though now it was out of nervousness.

  Mrs. Spinoza stared at me and said, “Why do you keep laughing, dear? Do you need some water?”

  I looked to Joshua for succor. He was busy removing the hydrangea centerpiece from our table and placing it on a neighboring table.

  “He’s afraid of plants,” Mrs. Spinoza said in a false whisper that was audible to all. “Ever since he was little. Whenever my husband and I had a big fight, one of our plants would die, so Joshua became convinced they were sentient.” My jaw dropped in delight and disbelief.

  “So that’s why he never gives me flowers,” I said. Mrs. Spinoza and I had a little chuckle. Joshua wouldn’t look at either of us. Mrs. Spinoza smiled widely, weirdly. Her lipstick feathered, exposing every wrinkle in her lips that her makeup couldn’t reach. That smile, that picket-fence alternation of painted and nude flesh around her mouth, would stay plastered on her face for the duration of the luncheon.

  Speaking in a slow, steady voice, she said, “Never given you flowers? How odd. He’s given flowers to girls before. In fact, guess who I spoke to on the phone the other day, Josh.”

  “Huh? What?” said Joshua, who was tearing his paper napkin into bits and twisting the pieces into little strings.

  “Sandy Snell. That little bundle of energy you introduced me to when I visited you up at school last year. Remember we went to her sculpture exhibit, Josh? I signed up to be on her mailing list and we’ve been keeping in touch.” She was ostensibly talking to her son but she was looking at me. I sat serenely, something you learn to do very well when Madame Tartakov raps you on your knuckles every time you slouch.

  But Mrs. Spinoza wouldn’t let me just ignore her. “Such a dynamo. So talented. Judith, have you ever met Sandy?”

  I responded no at the same time that Joshua responded yes. I looked at him quizzically.

  “You met her, Jude. At the Hungarian coffee shop near Columbia,” he said. “Brown ponytail, overalls. You referred to her as a Bolshevik.”

  “Really?” said Mrs. Spinoza, deep creases forming at the sides of her mouth as she put on her biggest grin. “Joshua’s great-grandfather, on his father’s side, was an actual Bolshevik.”

  I was caught off guard by this disclosure. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Spinoza. Of course I didn’t quite mean…”

  “Of course you didn’t. I can see why someone like you might find Sandy a bit silly, because she’s so passionate. Don’t you find her passionate, Joshua?”

  Joshua interrupted, dropping the napkin he was mangling. “Since when are you talking to Sandy, Mother? She never mentioned anything to me.”

  “Just the past few months,” said Mrs. Spinoza. “We’re friends. A woman can be friends with her son’s lady friends, can’t she?” She turned toward me, grin transfixed. “Don’t you agree, Judith?”

  I should have counted to ten. Instead, I said, “The way I was raised, one doesn’t use the term ‘friend’ so casually. A friend is strictly someone you know well, and not a work colleague, not an acquaintance, not someone whose mailing list you’re on, and definitely not someone from a different generation. It would be disrespectful for someone my age to refer to someone your age as a ‘friend.’ And vice versa.”

  Joshua covered his eyes with his hands and moaned.

  Mrs. Spinoza was a good deal cooler than her son. She took a long drink of water, leaving a lipstick stain on the rim of her glass. She said, “There’s a Korean greengrocer near my house. The display is gorgeous; it looks like a garden. Tell me — I read this thing in The New Yorker, I think it was — is there any truth to the rumor that the Korean immigrants get up and running so quickly because they’re funded by the Korean mafia?”

  “JUDE, stop screaming,” said Joshua. “Those people in the elevator are probably calling the cops.”

  We had just entered Joshua’s apartment, having returned from a most disastrous lunch with his mother. I swung around my handbag and hit him on the head with it.

  I said, “If you were never romantically involved with that Communist, then why would you attend her art exhibit with your mother?”

  Before Joshua could muster a response, the phone rang. Joshua picked up the receiver with entirely too much alacrity. “Hello-o-o…Well, maybe because you just dug in your claws the moment we sat down…. I don’t want to talk about it right now…. She is here, but that’s not the reason…. She is, but that’s not why…. What children? Rejected in what way?…That’s really original, Mother…. Well, that won’t be necessary, as no one’s getting married. Mom, I have to pee. Good-bye.”

  I stood there, narrowing my eyes at him. “Your mom insults me and the way you defend me is by saying ‘I have to pee?’ That’s not very gallant.”

  “Jude, Jude, please. I had to say something to shut her up. What precipitated that statement is that she had said that if I married you, she would sit shivah. That means she would mourn for me as if I were dead. Oh, and she threatened to commit suicide.”

  “Am I meritorious of all that? Sitting shivah and committing suicide? I hope she realizes she has to accomplish those two tasks in a particular order. That ignorant, racist, tacky, racist, immigrant, racist cow.”

  “She is not a racist; stop saying that.”

  �
��That’s the problem with a liberal education,” I said. “The accusation that she might be racist is ten times more offensive to you than her saying racist things.”

  Joshua said, “It’s not just what she said. Was it really necessary to bring up the Irish potato famine when her pommes soufflées appetizer arrived?”

  “Just making conversation,” I said. “Same as she.”

  “Let me just ask you one thing, Jude. Would you have had it in for her so bad if she hadn’t assumed you were connected with the Korean greengrocer trade?”

  “With any trade. I know I’ve said this before, Joshua, but this time I mean it. Good-bye. I doubt very much that we will meet again.”

  “We may have to meet again, if you’re still in my closet the next time I try to get out my coat.”

  I had opened the wrong door.

  22

  Sitting Shivah

  NOT A WEEK after I had stormed dramatically into Joshua’s closet, I received a phone call from Rabbi Lipman.

  “Uh, Judith, I think you’d better come see me.”

  A familiar feeling overtook me, that of getting called into the principal’s office at school. I was certain someone had complained to him that I was smoking outside the synagogue on Shabbat. Probably that lady with the weird patchwork-quilted hat who claimed she was the synagogue’s “chairwoman of ritual” and kept harassing me about what I was doing wrong.

  I arrived at Rabbi Lipman’s office; as usual, he was eating. This time it was soup out of a plastic tub, which he was dripping all over his desk.

  “Uh, Judith. Mind if I eat? Something rather worrisome has come up.”

  “I know what it is and I’m very sorry. But don’t you think it’s a far worse violation of Shabbat to meddle and peach…er, snitch on me to the rabbi?”

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” he said, looking very concerned. “I have to say nothing quite like this has happened before.”

  “Not true,” I said. “At least two other people routinely sneak out during the Prayer for the Dead to smoke.”

  The rabbi knitted his eyebrows. “Now who’s snitching?” he said. “But I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing at all. I received a strange phone call from the mother of your boyfriend, Joshua.”

  I felt genuine terror. “You can’t be serious. What did she want?”

  “Well, it took me a long time to get that out of her myself. At first she asked about our fund-raising, our membership, that kind of thing. Then she mentioned you. She asked what I thought of your conversion process.”

  “How did she even find out what synagogue I was going to?”

  “Her son, no doubt.”

  “I can’t believe he would tell her something like that.”

  “Judging from the way she talks, I doubt Joshua knew he was revealing anything. She probably ferreted it out of him without really knowing what she was looking for.”

  I nodded. “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her the truth, that you were bright and everyone likes you, for the most part; everyone who matters, anyway. That you made a very good impression on me and on the congregation. That I wish some of the others would take a page from your book. That we hardly have any members under thirty anymore, converts or otherwise, and I felt privileged you chose our synagogue.”

  I was too stunned to be moved by the rabbi’s words.

  “It gets worse, I’m sorry to say. Mrs. Spinoza tells me, ‘I am thinking of sitting shivah for my son. What do you think of that, Rabbi?’ She asked very plainly, as if she were genuinely seeking my advice on halacha, on Jewish law. But of course she was trying to get at you through someone you respected as an authority figure, namely, myself.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said, ‘Well, Mrs. Spinoza, as rabbi I cannot condone anyone sitting shivah for someone who isn’t actually dead. But if you do choose to sit shivah for your son, I’m sure he’ll be fine.’”

  “I appreciate your telling me this, Rabbi.” I began to put on my coat.

  “I’m not quite done yet. Now here’s where I become Mr. Buttinsky. I don’t know this boy, and I know I am being very selfish in saying this, but I don’t think the Jewish community should have to lose you just because of this nut-job lady. How are things now between you and this boy? Is it serious? Why hasn’t he been coming around to synagogue with you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We’re sort of on the outs at the moment.”

  “I’ll take that to mean that it’s not too serious, so maybe for the moment you want to keep it that way. I have seen this many times, and the mother usually wins in the end. That stuff you see with the son defying his parents and running off with the girl, and not talking to his parents for years? Like in Love Story? That’s goyishe stuff. Doesn’t happen with our people. Have you read Sholem Aleichem’s short stories Tevye and His Daughters? They became the basis for Fiddler on the Roof. I put it on your recommended reading list.”

  “I didn’t get to it,” I said sheepishly.

  “In one of the stories, Tevye’s daughter Chava marries a Russian, leading Tevye to disown her. In the Hollywood version, Havilah chooses true love over family. In the original story, Havilah leaves the Russian and comes back to her family with her tail between her legs, begging forgiveness. That’s how we do things.”

  “I think you may be underestimating Joshua,” I said.

  “Oh, I’m sure he will come to your defense, and tell his mother what she can do with her threats. But over time, he will become like someone who’s had their liver removed, and an arm and a leg, to boot. He will become like the living dead. He will live only half a life.”

  I said, “Are you trying to protect me from Joshua’s mother, or Joshua from me?”

  “How can you say that after all I’ve just told you?”

  “Because all of this chazerei would go away if I just stepped out of the picture. If I had never met Joshua.”

  “No, she is who she is, this mother of his. It all comes out in the end. The truth about people always comes out.”

  23

  Why Bastard? Wherefore Base?

  Why bastard? Wherefore base?

  — WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, King Lear, act I, scene 2

  JUNG WOULD KNOW what to do about Joshua’s mother. She may be a total degenerate, but she’s never steered me wrong with boyfriend advice.

  She had invited me to come over one evening for supper. I wanted to talk to her alone, before Key arrived, so I got there early and made a dash for the elevator. The doorman said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, young lady.”

  “Don’t you recognize me?” I said. “Got another drug delivery for my uncle?”

  The doorman looked down at his ledger and waved me in silently. When Jung let me into the apartment, I saw that her look was agitated. Key sat on the sofa in a foul mood, so much so that Jung suggested he do a line or two of coke. When he refused, Jung and I knew we had something to worry about.

  Jung sat with her arms folded stiffly, cradling an elbow in each hand. She said, “Jude, I do think Joshua’s very nice to you, and my initial impression of him has improved. But you can’t date him anymore.”

  “Snob,” I said. “I was wondering when the other shoe would fall, when I would get this long harangue from you.”

  “Forget all of that. His mother rang up me, Key, Thor, and Zadie today.”

  I blanched. Key muttered something under his breath that sounded contemptuous.

  Jung said, “She could find Thor easily because their families are now connected through marriage. As for the rest of us, she apparently culled bits of information Joshua mentioned to her in conversation. She’s got that immigrant resourcefulness, that one. She found me at my place of work, and Zadie through a gallery that last displayed her work over three years ago. Then the Spinoza woman called the Harvard alumni office to find Key. When the office wouldn’t release his contact information, she called the undergraduate photography journal for which Key used to write
, and got the current editor — some idiot sophomore — to look up my brother on the alumni mailing list. She’s very charming, Judith, singing your praises but clearly trying to get some kind of dirt out of us, or at least an ally.”

  I felt nauseated.

  “I think she’s just a telephone compulsive,” said Key disgustedly.

  Jung said, “You were too vulnerable with Joshua, anyway. Converting to Judaism just for a boy; honestly.”

  “I haven’t decided about that yet, and it isn’t for Joshua’s sake anyway,” I said.

  Key burst out, “Who are you to comment on people’s choice of mate, Jung?” I thought Key might be coming to my defense, but I was soon disabused of this illusion. He muttered, “I cannot even begin to express my disgust with Emerson.”

  Jung asked her brother, “How could you object to someone you’ve never met?”

  “He’s not one of us,” Key said. “He’s a pasty, smelly white guy.”

  I chortled loudly and said, “This conversation is ridiculous. Emerson may be pasty and smelly, but he is most assuredly not wh —” Jung silenced me with a look.

  Jung replied, “Civilization advances by cross-breeding. Otherwise the species dies out.” She was susceptible to platitudes in times of stress.

  “I have always found that difficult to believe,” said Key. “Ever notice that half-black, half-white children are often mottled? Do you consider that an improvement on either race?”

  “No one here is African-American,” she corrected. Over time, she was becoming less and less like her brother. But she was still, apparently, a compulsive liar. What could she have to gain from the concealment of Emerson’s ethnicity?

  Jung added, “You’re the one who married the underage French girl.”

  “Yes, and I learned my lesson. Why do you think I left her?”