Kept: A Comedy of Sex and Manners

by Y. Euny Hong

  My mother was silent, got a bit shifty-eyed, and said, “Jung will be coming over, of course, with the body.”

  I was now deeply confused. “Why would she need to do that?” I asked.

  My mother said, “Well, it wouldn’t be traveling in the cabin, of course. The coffin would come in the cargo hold.”

  “How can Jung and Min-Joon be in the same plane at the same time? Min-Joon’s…body is here, whereas Jung is in New York.”

  “I didn’t mean Min-Joon,” said my mother, speaking rapidly and stumbling over her words. “I meant Key. Your uncle Keyoung is dead.”

  KEY, IT SEEMS, was doing laughing-gas shots with Thor two nights earlier. They had bought whipped-cream canisters and released the nitrous into balloons, and inhaled the gas from the balloons. Key got a sudden embolism; Thor called an ambulance, but Key was dead on arrival at the hospital. This boy who had snorted untold lethal substances with nary a scratch died with a balloon stuck in his mouth.

  Jung’s parents were handling the tragedy with typical Lee sangfroid. They were traveling, and rang me up from Bali to ask whether I would meet Jung at the airport and help out with the grisly logistics — helping to clear the coffin for entry, if necessary, and arranging for its transport.

  I waited anxiously at the Incheon Airport arrivals terminal, downing coffee, biting my nails to the quick. I barely recognized Jung as she emerged — she was stripped bare of her gaudy jewelry and wore a tatty Wellesley sweatshirt and glasses. She smiled at me tentatively, with pain and fatigue behind her eyes. I ran to her; we embraced for a long time. For the first time I could remember, she did not smell of perfume.

  My eyes welled up with tears. Jung waved her hand dismissively and said, “I took care of the coffin transport; it’s going directly to the funeral. Oh, wait a second, he might have been held up in customs.”

  “We have to pay customs on a cadaver?” I choked. Bad choice of words. I immediately clamped my hand over my mouth lest some other idiocy leak out.

  “No, no, dummy,” said Jung, trying to be jovial through her puffy, bloodshot eyes. “I didn’t come alone. Thor was going to come, but he chickened out, thinking that my parents wouldn’t be able to stand the sight of him. He was probably right about their reaction, even though you and I both know how…reckless Key was.” She cleared her throat nervously. “So Thor paid for a proxy to go instead.”

  “Judith?” called a familiar baritone voice.

  I was dumbstruck. It was Joshua. He was standing behind the cordon inside the arrivals gate, blocking the other passengers from exiting. I stood dumbly, then ran toward him, then stopped cold in my tracks. Just because he was here didn’t mean he was delighted to see me. Besides which, it would have seemed indulgent to focus on anyone other than Jung at the moment. Joshua collected himself and walked toward me and Jung.

  “Hi,” Joshua and I said to each other meekly.

  “Je vais m’évanouir,”* I whispered to Jung.

  “French is not a code,” said Joshua, looking at the ground. He looked up at me and cleared his throat, looking as though he was about to say something.

  Jung pissed all over the moment. She said, “Who’s here to collect us, Jude, my pissant chauffeur or yours?”

  Flustered, I led the two of them to Jung’s family chauffeur.

  I fervently hoped Joshua and I would be seated together in the back, but he said, “You two have a lot to discuss,” and took the shotgun seat with cold, unreadable gallantry.

  We rode in silence. Joshua looked out the right-side window for the entire ride. I stared at his sloping yet masculine shoulder, at the back of his neck. I reached over to tuck in a Gap shirt tag that was sticking out. As my finger touched the base of his neck, I felt a warmth rush through my body. Joshua lurched forward at my touch.

  “Sorry,” I said, devastated. I tried to catch a glimpse of his face in the side-view mirror, but was unable to.

  It was just as I had feared. I was irretrievable, too filthy to clap eyes on.

  Our first stop was at the Seoul Intercontinental Hotel. “My mother’s family put Joshua up here,” said Jung. I bristled; their hospitality seemed inappropriate somehow, as though they were claiming him. Jung said, “I’ll help him check in. You can stay in the car.” I opened my mouth to protest that I should be the one seeing Joshua off, but I remained still, waiting in the car with the driver, who kept giving me inquisitive looks.

  Jung returned to the car with too much bounce and bravado for my taste, considering that she had just lost her brother. I knew her better than I did anyone else in the world, yet I could never tell when she was miserable; no matter what happened, she continued her flirtation with the cosmos at large.

  She dropped me off at my apartment and squeezed my hand. “Thank you for coming, Judith. I appreciate it.” We waved good night and I entered my parents’ unlit apartment. My parents had already gone to bed.

  KEY HAD at one point expressed a wish to be buried with my side of the family. No one objected.

  My family drove up in silence to the Lee family cemetery, which holds the remains of seven generations of Lees. Joshua was to ride up in Jung’s family car. No one but Jung knew of my history with Joshua, and everyone was under the assumption that Joshua was a close friend of Thor’s and that he therefore was the sole responsibility of Jung’s family. I was thinking about how strange it was that Joshua’s first introduction to Korea would be a funeral.

  It was the first cool day after the summer. My family was dealing with death in their usual heartless way. “Where’s that nincompoop caretaker?” one of my uncles tut-tutted. “There’s a foxhole or something over here; he should have smoked out the animals and covered up the hole. Not to mention that the grounds are overrun with weeds.”

  “He’s drunk again, I’ll bet,” said my father. “Can somebody go collect him, please? Judith, will you go get him? And bring this American friend of Jung’s; he seems at a loss as to what to do with himself here. The caretaker lives in that hovel down the rocky side of the hill, close to the highway.”

  I walked over to Joshua, who was wringing his hands. Without making eye contact, I said, “Make yourself useful,” and tilted my head in the direction of the caretaker’s house. We climbed down the hill. Joshua went ahead of me to hold back branches as I walked down. I slipped anyway.

  Joshua said, “I would have thought that you’d have something up your sleeve a bit subtler than this damsel-in-distress thing.” He took my hand to steady my footing.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked. He abruptly released my hand. “It was very good of you to come,” I said awkwardly. “So are we friends now?”

  “Of course we’re friends,” he said. I was crushed.

  We came to the hovel, where the caretaker’s wife squatted in the yard as if she were taking a dump. Upon closer inspection, it seemed she was just scooping water into a vat. When she spotted Joshua and me, she bowed quickly and ran to the house in terror, screaming for her husband.

  The caretaker emerged in a sweaty undershirt. I told him, “I’m Chairman Lee’s daughter.”

  He bowed furiously and said, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry that I don’t know what to do with myself.”

  “Collect the necessary items,” I said. He bowed again and went into the house. Joshua seemed impressed. I explained that the man’s obeisance arose from the fact that our family allowed his family to be buried on our land.

  The caretaker emerged with three teacups. “Sorry, my wife is locating the funerary items. It’ll be just a minute. Please, have some tea. I’ll need some myself, at any rate. It’s a long walk over that hill.”

  I explained to Josh what was happening. It was strange to be speaking to Joshua solely in my capacity as a translator; we had barely spoken since his arrival in Seoul.

  Joshua took my lead in accepting the caretaker’s tea, which was actually some stewed persimmon juice with pine nuts floating in it.

  The caretaker said, “I do a lot mo
re work here than you realize, I’ll have you know. When one of the Lees dies, I measure out and dig the grave, and I ensure delivery of the enormous obelisk of a headstone. Your cousin’s headstone had a misprint; did you know that? I had to lug it back to the stonecutter.”

  “We are of course very grateful,” I said.

  The caretaker slurped his tea noisily. He said, “What’s his name, the sick one, Min-Joon? Is he close to the end? I need to plan.”

  “Perhaps,” I said, impatiently. “Can we go, though?”

  The three of us — Joshua, the caretaker, and I — headed back up toward the family cemetery, with several rests in between. “I’m not in such fabulous health, you know,” the caretaker kept repeating. I translated the preceding conversation for the bewildered Josh.

  Joshua put his hand tentatively on my upper arm; it might as well have been down my pants, such a tingling did I feel. “I may not get a chance to speak to you again today,” he said. “I think it would be most appropriate if I remained invisible. But I need to talk to you: can you come by my hotel tomorrow? I mean, if you think your parents wouldn’t be offended by your leaving the house.”

  “I’ll be there,” I said, my heart leaping like a gazelle. Even if he were just to reject me all over again, I didn’t care. I just needed to be with him.

  We arrived at the top of the hill. My relatives looked vain and insouciant and were dressed very smartly; they could just as easily have been attending a wedding as a funeral.

  The rituals for funerals are similar to those for ancestor worship. One of my uncles read a prepared statement, incense was lit, wine was poured. The men bowed twice, the women four times. Each family member performed this ritual in succession, in descending order of seniority.

  I had been avoiding Jung for the duration of the funeral; now it was our turn to bow. We drew close together and she leaned against me. The force of her being had departed, and she was unrecognizable: soft, frail, limp. I held her body to mine, puppeteering her movements.

  As we bowed, her lip quivered, and she screamed so loudly that the birds overhead in the trees flew away.

  She pried my hand away from her waist and dropped to a crouching position on the ground. She used her hands to scoop handfuls of dirt and shove them into her mouth. I couldn’t stop her; she swallowed three handfuls before finally lurching forward and vomiting muddy liquid. I stood her up; her face and eyes were red from the exertion of expelling, and her teeth were blackened with mud. I wiped her face with my coat sleeve.

  She released herself from me once more and knelt on the ground. Before anyone could figure out what she was doing, she picked up a sharp rock from the earth and dug it hard into her wrist, dragging it forcefully down the length of her inner arm, along her vein. Not the way the girls in my college dorm room used to it, which was to make tiny ineffectual gashes across the wrist. As I have said, Jung never does things by halves.

  I screamed. Joshua reacted before anyone else did, quickly taking off his tie and making a tourniquet for Jung’s arm. Some elderly relative of mine, some second cousin whose name I never knew, politely pressed his hand on Joshua’s shoulder, signaling that this was a family matter. Joshua obediently rose and retreated.

  “It wasn’t sharp enough, wasn’t sharp enough,” said my second cousin in a booming voice, trying to feign calmness. “It broke the skin, but not the vein. It’s as if she did it with a fingernail. And she doesn’t need this.” He untied Joshua’s necktie from Jung’s upper arm and held it out to Joshua, who took the tie and then retreated once more, this time standing by my side. He was scared.

  “But she’s really bleeding a lot,” I said, indignant tears streaming down my face. Why had he removed the tourniquet, except to punish his niece for creating a scene?

  “She’ll scar, that’s for sure,” my second cousin said. “But really, nothing happened.”

  *“I’m dizzy.”

  29

  Sorry

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING I went to Joshua’s room at the Seoul Intercontinental. I knocked at the door; he opened it, and I caught my breath. I leaned over to embrace him, but he stepped backward, almost hiding behind the door.

  “At least show some gravitas,” he said. “We were just at a funeral.” He wouldn’t look at me. And indeed, what else could I expect from someone who has based his entire academic career on moral inflexibility?

  I sat on the bed, then leaped up abruptly, realizing that Joshua might perceive any such gesture as a tawdry overture worthy of a strumpet. I awkwardly pulled out the desk chair and sat there instead. His back to me, Joshua opened the hotel minibar and mixed me a strange cocktail; he couldn’t mix drinks to save his life, another difference between him and Yevgeny, one that seemed to matter very little now. I took it from him and sipped it. It tasted of apple juice, Midori, Absolut Citron, Jim Beam…

  I said awkwardly, “How did you arrange things with your students?”

  He said, “I got another grad student to take over my classes. I told the department head I had a family emergency. And Thor, of course, covered my expenses.”

  “That was very kind of you,” I said. “You didn’t have to go through all the trouble.”

  “You’ve been through a lot,” he said. “I’m so sorry. For your woes.”

  “It’s worse than you think,” I said. I had such a bad conscience about concealing so many things from him that I now told him everything about Jung and Key’s intimate relationship. He already had such a low opinion of me, I reasoned, that he couldn’t possibly be perturbed by further lunacy from my family.

  He was silent and solemn. Then he said, “I like to take a rational approach to these things.”

  I laughed reflexively at his familiar opening. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m just nervous.”

  Joshua frowned at my levity and continued, “Maybe incest is just narcissism, and anyone who has loved is guilty of narcissism. Like in the Mozart opera The Magic Flute. Papageno can only love Papagena because she is the mirror image of himself.”

  “That’s my favorite metaphor. Did I tell you that?”

  “No, I came up with it all by myself,” Joshua mocked. “It’s not as if the opera was in your secret possession all this time. Now who’s being narcissistic?”

  I said, “We both are, though; isn’t that your point? That you think I’m the female copy of you?”

  “No,” he said firmly. “You are not the female copy of me.”

  I had anticipated some resistance, but nonetheless his words knocked the wind out of me. “Of course not, how presumptuous of me,” I said bitterly. I looked down at the writing desk, staring abjectly at the room-service menu, eyes welling up with tears before I even realized how sad I was.

  Crying, done properly, requires concentration and solitude. I was getting so wrapped up in the act that when Joshua finally spoke, it was an unwelcome interruption. “You have looked into the abyss,” he said.

  “I never understand a word you’re saying,” I said.

  “Understanding is not that important,” the philosopher said.

  He held my head to him, stroking my hair, and we clutched at each other, he standing, I sitting.

  I said, “I’m sorry, Spinoza.”

  He leaned toward me and gently pawed the tears from my face. For as long as I have known him, he has had to tidy me up.

  We talked all day and into part of the night, nestling on the bed. “That was some letter you sent,” Joshua said, entwining his fingers with mine. “Very literary. All you needed was a reference to the ‘rosy-fingered dawn’ and you’d have the entire Western canon.”

  I moaned with embarrassment. “I wish I had never sent that,” I said. “Please burn it.”

  Joshua said, “I certainly will not; it’s going into the scrapbook. Though I hope you will burn mine, the one I had Thor bring you. It was pretty sanctimonious. And, on the subject of contrition…I know my mother called your rabbi and the twins and your friends. That’s beneath contempt. I can’t ev
en apologize.”

  I shrugged.

  “Can I ask what Rabbi Lipman’s response was?” he said.

  “He told her that no rabbi would condone the mourning of a child who isn’t dead.”

  “Very sensible.”

  “He told her that if she still decided to sit shivah for you, that you’d probably get over it.”

  “I certainly would.”

  “He also said that I should get out of this while I still have the chance.”

  He paused to reflect. “You probably should.”

  “Are all Kantians so tenaciously rational? So heartless?”

  “Sorry. It’s serious, I know. I have always taken the path of least resistance in my dealings with people like my mother, caving when I should be firm.”

  “I could never hold anything against you again, not after what I’ve done,” I said.

  “We don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to,” said Joshua nervously.

  I shook my head. “Too late for that.” I bowed my head in shame.

  Joshua sighed and said, “I don’t want you to feel for the rest of your life that you’re in moral debt to me. But can you just…help me to understand why?”

  I proceeded to tell him about my debt to Madame Tartakov.

  “But there was more, I assume? Something appealing you found in this life?”

  I nodded.

  Joshua said, “The truth is, I will probably never want to know everything. For the moment, we have to try to figure out how to get you out of this. I’ve reached my debt maximum already, helping you with the…surgery.”

  “I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you then. I wanted to.”

  Joshua sighed. “I know, Judith. You probably tried to tell me dozens of times in your own way, like the time you invited me to have dinner at your Upper East Side bordello. Later, after I found out what was really going on, I retroactively pieced all the evidence together. Madame Tartakov had Fabergé eggs and Steuben glass; yet they were surrounded by ratty furniture and peeling wallpaper. What else could that disparity mean, except that most of those trinkets were gifts from men.”