by Y. Euny Hong
I smiled crookedly. “Since when are you so knowledgeable about the demimonde?”
“After my…discovery of what you did for a living, I read up on courtesan literature.”
I said, “This whole time I suspected that you were an ivory tower, a high-handed moralist. But I must have been wrong, because you have forgiven something most people wouldn’t.”
Joshua smiled modestly. “Philosophy isn’t just for mental m-masturbation, you know; I wouldn’t do it if I weren’t wholly convinced of its practical value in helping us lead richer lives. Philosophy, I’m referring to, not masturbation.”
30
Debt Repayment Schemes
JOSHUA AND I discussed ways to get me out of debt.
He said with his usual levelheadedness, “Call Heike to get a sense of the limits of Madame Tartakov’s patience. Once we know how much time you have to stall, we’ll take it from there.”
So I called Heike from Joshua’s hotel room. “You’d better come back in a week, I’d say,” she said.
“Yevgeny agreed to continue to pay her fees through the end of the month; can’t she sit tight until then?”
“I wouldn’t count on it. Madame is on a rampage. She’s threatening to sell off your clothes.”
“To whom, the Salvation Army?”
“No, Encore.”
“I said, ‘To whom, the Salvation — ’”
“Nein, Blödchen.* Encore is the name of the store,” said Heike. “A high-end secondhand shop. It’s one of the stores that buy up clothing from the Park Avenue society types, from the Paris and Nicky Hiltons of the world, who constantly wear fabulous gowns in which they can only be seen once. These women send their dresses, in near-mint condition, to these specialty shops that buy them for a quarter of the original prices. Don’t worry, though, Madame wasn’t serious about selling your clothes. She can’t have you coming back to work with an empty wardrobe.”
“A quarter of the price? That’s actually…a lot. I could get seven hundred dollars for one of my Chanel suits.”
“No, it has to be really looking like new to fetch that kind of price. You always have weird stains on your garments. Something you and Joshua have in common, now that I think of it. Too bad you didn’t do more shopping. If it is clothes from the current season, they give you even more, sometimes a third of the retail price.”
“Thank you, Heike, you have saved me from perdition.”
“If you say so. Listen, hurry back, okay?”
When I got off the phone with Heike, I said to Josh, “I’m going to need to make some more phone calls. Can you give me a little privacy?”
“This is my hotel room.”
“So go to the gym. Please. Love of my heart.” He sighed, put on a coat, and walked out the door.
I called Zadie.
“Juuude!” she said, her voice full of liquor. “Where are you? Are you in New York?”
“Uh, no, Zadie, I’m in Korea. So is Jung,” I said very slowly and loudly. “You know that Key is dead, Zadie?”
“Oh, shit! Thor told me. Sorry, I forgot.”
I sighed. “Never mind about that. Zadie, how do you feel about doing some shopping with Thor? I’m going to FedEx you some store credit cards. I want you to go on a big splurge, and take Thor with you to pass as Yevgeny Slivovitz. If a well-dressed, swaggering man like Thor presents them with a card, they won’t have the audacity to do a signature check. Buy as much as you can, but be inconspicuous at the same time. I mean, don’t buy five wedding dresses, for example. Try to be consistent in the sizes that you buy to make it seem like you’re legitimately shopping for yourselves. Zadie, are you getting all this?”
“Huh? You wanna talk to Thor?” said Zadie.
“Not really,” I said.
Zadie said, “He’s here. Thor, it’s Jude.”
“Uh, hello, Jude,” said Thor, considerably more sober than Zadie. “I’m really more sorry than I can say. About Key.”
“I believe you, Thor, but let’s have this conversation when you don’t have Depeche Mode blasting in the background, okay?” I repeated my shopping instructions to him.
“Sounds like a good plan, Judith, but can you give me a notion of how much you’ve put on these cards for the last six months or so? I can’t go outside the standard deviation from your normal spending habits, or it will raise red flags and they’ll block the purchase automatically and call him.”
“How do you know so much about credit-card fraud?” I asked.
Thor said, “That’s what happens when you cross an investment banker with a former juvenile delinquent. Bet you never thought I’d be of use to anyone, huh?” His unwavering bravado was heartening.
TWO DAYS AFTER the funeral, my parents felt they had mourned enough for a bastard and they asked me to invite Joshua over for lunch; it was the very first time they had made such an offer. I didn’t explain to them my relationship with Joshua; I never explicitly admitted to having boyfriends. It was not a deception; it was one of the unspoken rules of the house.
My parents largely ignored Joshua, and we all sat uncomfortably through the lulls until my father asked Joshua whether he was a Spaniard. I glared at my father, who was impervious to such subtle signals.
“No, I’m Jewish,” said Joshua. “Half-Jewish.”
My parents’ eyes widened; Joshua had suddenly become fascinating to them. “You are? Why didn’t you tell us, Judith? No, I would definitely have remembered if you had told us. What tribe are you?” My parents, despite their long séjour in the West, held the older Koreans’ attitude toward Jews: that they were an ancient and almost mythological race, a race that Homer might have invented, and were endowed with supernatural protection from extinction. “How did they survive when the Phoenicians didn’t?” they asked.
“I’m going to show Joshua around the building, okay?” I said, taking him out the door. We went down the elevator and I sucked heavily on a cigarette.
“Sorry about that,” I said. “My parents, I mean. Sorry.”
“Hmm. I can’t be upset by comments that are so totally from outer space. No one’s ever compared me to a Phoenician before. Your parents seem totally normal to me. You had me prepared for two m-monsters.”
“I am grateful to your mother for lowering the standard for what you consider to be normal parental behavior.”
He said thoughtfully, “You know what your father reminds me of? A lion with a thorn in its paw. You should talk to him more.”
I harrumphed.
He said, “Don’t you think your parents know you smoke?”
“Those two thickies up there? No, of course not. Well, I almost got caught once in high school. One time when Jung was over, my mother pulled her aside and showed her a mug she had found in my room, which I had been using as an ashtray. My mother asked whether Jung knew anything about it, and Jung said, ‘Judith’s keeping them for a friend.’”
“Why would you be keeping extinguished cigarette butts for a friend?” Joshua asked. “I doubt your mother bought that story.”
“Jung and I used to look out for each other like that,” I said sadly.
“Jude, I’m cold. Can we go inside?”
“I’m not done with the cigarette. Tell you what, we’ll go into the basement. It’s haunted. When I was twelve, a boy hanged himself down there. He had failed the entrance exam to enter Seoul National University.”
“No, thanks,” said Joshua. “Why did he do that?”
“His life was really over, from his point of view. I guess that’s why the current president wants to get rid of the university.”
“Well, that’s not a proper solution,” Joshua said, which surprised me. “You know, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’ve come around to this classism thing of yours. That will never happen. But I do understand why your family wants to protect its way of life. They have a dignity about them. It would be a great loss if there were no more people like that left in the world.”
“Thanks,” I said,
rather moved.
AFTER JOSHUA LEFT, I expected some kind of parental interrogation about Joshua, but my father’s only comment was, “He’s not very secular.”
I said, “He’s definitely not religious.”
“I meant, he’s not very tied to the mundane. He is monastic. Rather like our own ancestors. He will suffer.”
I nodded. When my father’s not trying too hard to demonstrate how insightful he is, his observations are usually spot-on.
*“No, stupid” (diminutive).
31
The Cut-Rate Oracle
OWING TO various distractions, some much more serious than others, I had not yet succeeded in visiting the family archives.
I called Joshua at his hotel. “Listen, I know I promised I’d take you sightseeing, my love, but can we put it off till tomorrow? I have to go to the archives.”
“The vaunted Lee family archives?” said Joshua, with only the slightest tinge of condescension. “Can I come?”
“No.”
“Please?”
“No, I’m sorry, Joshua.”
“Why, are you worried about what you might find?” he asked.
“I’ll call you later,” I said crossly.
I TOOK A TAXI to the archives. The journey took much longer than it should have, because house numbers in Seoul are nonsequential, reflecting the overlapping gerrymandering systems throughout the ages.
I arrived at an astonishingly ugly yellow brick building. The archives were on the third floor, stacked between a barber shop and a billiard parlor. The hallway bathroom door was ajar, exposing a squatting toilet covered with dirty wet shoeprints. The French call this a Turkish toilet, but I had always assumed these were invented in Korea. The stairwell smelled of mothballs, that trusty Third World air freshener. Such a dilapidated building was a rarity in Seoul these days.
I came to a door with stick-on lettering that read, FAMILY ARCHIVES, CHUN-JU LEE. Chun-ju Lee is the name of my particular clan, which hails from the western region of Chun-Ju.
I pressed the buzzer, which was cracked down the middle and blackened with fingerprints. A slight, elderly man answered the door, his hair slicked back into greasy silvery strings; he sported a circular Band-Aid between his eyes that made him look like a cut-rate oracle.
Yellowing doilies covered every surface throughout the office. A small potted ivy grew in the corner, whose vines had been Scotch-taped to the wall in a swirly pattern.
“Welcome,” the archivist mumbled. “Why are you here?”
I asked, “Can you tell me how I can start looking at the ancestral charts that contain my immediate family?”
He disappeared and returned an eternity later, shuffling toward me with two file boxes. Nothing was computerized. The curator said, “This particular set only goes back to the 1700s. If you need to go further than that, please let me know.” He creaked slowly into an armchair to watch a Korean variety show on television, in which two men were beating each other senseless with Styrofoam clubs.
I opened the boxes and was somewhat disappointed to find that instead of rice paper scrolls or parchment, all the documents had been photocopied onto normal sheets of paper.
The papers were parts of my family tree. It took me an hour to assemble just a dozen sheets. I surveyed my dynasty.
When I came upon my great-grandfather Chul-Soo’s name, I noticed a strange notation accompanied by a seal, dated 1889.
“Sir,” I asked the man nodding off before the television set, “can you please tell me what this seal by my great-grandfather’s name means?”
He shuffled over. “Here, see?” I said, pointing at the seal. My stomach was churning — why?
“I’m looking, I’m looking.” He examined the papers for a while, then smiled cryptically and said, “Did you know or not?”
“Did I know what?”
“Your great-grandfather wasn’t a Lee. He was adopted.”
Feeling dizzy, I sat down and said, “Do you have any documentation of this?”
He walked off, opened and shut several drawers, groaning vociferously at the pain of having to bend over, then brought over another file box and flipped through it.
“A letter,” he said. “It looks as though there’s a letter. Can you read Chinese?”
“Not very well. No. Can you translate it for me?”
He sighed. “I’d really rather not. I’ll make you a copy, though.”
“You’re not going to make a note of this finding of yours in the archives, are you? I mean, I certainly don’t give a toss, but I wouldn’t want to upset other members of my family.”
The man started peeling a clementine orange. “No, I’m not going to record that your ancestor’s a fraud. The silence of history is part of what he paid for, as I said, so I’m ethically bound to comply. On the other hand, I’m certainly not going to destroy the evidence. Don’t put those papers away; people always file them in the wrong order and then they can never be found again. Let me do it.” He handed me a copy of the letter.
I thanked the archivist and left. On my way out of the building I got a big, hearty whiff of the Turkish toilet, enough to nauseate me for the whole ride home.
WHEN I ARRIVED at my parents’ house, they were watching an incredibly loud, violent television movie. My mother said tiredly, “Your friend Zadie called. She left her number.”
I walked over to the bar and pulled out my parents’ ancient curdy Chivas Regal. “I’m getting rid of this,” I said to my parents.
They grunted, eyes glued to the television set.
After drinking several gloopy whiskey shots, I rang up Zadie, mis-dialing several times. “Hi, Zadie? You rang? You better have good news because I’m having a shitty day. You sell the clothes? How much did you get?”
Zadie said weakly, “We really tried, Jude. We went to the stores for which you had credit cards, and up to that point there was no problem, actually. We didn’t raise any eyebrows; I guess those kinds of stores really do see customers haul off that much stuff regularly. And we kept to a respectable spending limit that Thor calculated so the stores wouldn’t get a computer alert to call the credit department, though Yevgeny will hit the roof when he gets the monthly statement. We spent, all told, over seventy-four thousand dollars.”
I sighed. “For which you got…anything close to half that amount? My debt, last I checked with Madame, is seventy-five thousand dollars, maybe more.”
“We took the clothes to those secondhand stores on your list. Your friend was right; some of their stuff was really nice, Jude. You and I should shop there sometime. The shopkeepers were delighted to take the items off our hands, but you didn’t warn us that they will only pay for a certain amount on the spot. The rest we left behind to be sold on consignment — I mean, you only get paid when the garment gets sold. Thirty days after, actually.”
I froze. “Not cash on the barrel?”
“No. Apparently they only did that for Jackie O, because it was the only way she could raise large amounts of cash when she was with Aristotle Onassis. He wouldn’t give her any money, just credit cards. Did you know that about Jackie O?”
“No, I didn’t,” I said. “Can we focus, please? How much ready cash do you have right at this moment?” I covered my eyes with my hands.
“Only nine thousand dollars.”
I cursed for five minutes straight. “This whole thing was for nothing. I just wasted your time.”
“Sorry!” said Zadie. “But some good did come out of it. Speaking of which, I didn’t actually sell everything. We’re keeping this ring we got. Is that okay?”
“A ring?”
“An engagement ring. It’s just a little one. It’s very tasteful, even if the manner of its acquisition was not.”
“Whose engagement ring?”
Zadie sighed. “You really are depressed, aren’t you? Think! Think!” Over the phone, I could hear her snapping her fingers rapidly in a “look lively” fashion.
“No,” I said. “You an
d Thor? Just like that?”
“Just like that,” she said buoyantly. “Spur of the moment. When we were on the command shopping spree, Thor saw a little sapphire ring at Bendel and said, ‘Look, Zadie, we could get engaged for free and exact revenge on this Yevgeny person at the same time.’ And I agreed. So? Aren’t you going to say anything?”
“You could do worse, Zadie,” I said. “You could do worse.”
“UN-FUCKING BELIEVABLE,” Joshua said later that day, when I told him Thor and Zadie’s dubiously good news. “I knew nothing about it, I swear. They must have been bonking on the sly for ages. What a match. It’s practically incest.” At the mention of that word, his face looked pinched. “Sorry, I didn’t mean…”
“No, no, you’re right,” I said, almost insulted that Joshua felt he had to tiptoe around me. “Our little group all paired off, I guess is what you meant. That’s the kind of thing that happens when you don’t vary your social circle. A misogynist homophobe who refers to Arabs as towel heads ends up with a feminist lesbian Lebanese.”
Joshua said, “Let’s remember to make them godparents to our children. That would really get Thor’s goat. To have to be godparent to a Jewish child.” He blushed as he realized he was talking about our mutual children. I pretended to ignore it, but my heart sang. Would our children be Kantians, I wondered.
Suddenly Joshua squinted at me and said, “Are you wearing purple eye shadow?”
I explained to him the bit about the aborted ethnicity reassignment surgery.
“What a fucking present,” said Joshua. “That’s like when my cousin got a nose job for her sixteenth birthday. Only a Jewish or Korean mother would think that plastic surgery is an appropriate gift for her daughter.”
32