Changing the Past Read online

  “You’re taking Greek?” He was not really interested, the idea of a scholarly female being only slightly less dreary than that of a girl-athlete, when one’s criterion was Cissy Forrester.

  “Dumb me,” she exclaimed. “I took a lot of Latin and only then got to Greek.”

  He leaned across the counter. “I don’t like to do this, but since it was you yourself who mentioned it, I—”

  She put against his lips a finger encased in a woolen glove. It was an unpleasant sensation. “Please,” said she. “What’s mine is yours.”

  That evening he took a walk with her in the snow that had been falling all day. It was her idea. John hated winter in all its manifestations. Daphne loved the clean crisp air. He was there only because she brought him another hundred dollars.

  She stomped along in floppy galoshes. The campus walks had been shoveled more than once by maintenance workers, but the snow continued to descend, and John, whose distaste for cold weather inhibited him from taking serious measures against it, was shod in thin-soled oxfords and the cheap lisle socks given him at Christmas by the aunt and uncle who were supposed to have more money than the rest of the family and perhaps proved it by spending so little.

  The money had already been surrendered to him, and therefore his preoccupation was how to separate himself from Daphne by the quickest means that would not be conspicuously rude. He tarried under one of the globed lamps along the walk between the Natural Sciences building and the campanile and stamped his feet, wondering how long he must stay out to a make a reasonable claim of incipient frostbite.

  Daphne had been bumping against him as they walked, and now she gingerly asserted her claim on him with a hand between his arm and chest, though she had as yet not closed her fingers.

  “I suppose this is our first date,” said she, “in the sense of arranging a time and place and meeting there.”

  Such a definition made him as morally uneasy as he was physically uncomfortable in the cold.

  He said quickly, “Listen, if I sell a short story one of these days, I’m not going to forget what I owe you.” This promise was not intentionally hypocritical. Brooding about Forrester, John had desperately decided that the story of his printed in the college magazine was of professional quality and had mailed it only that afternoon to Collier’s, a well-known periodical of the day, to which Forrester might well himself have contributed. If its editors bought his story, he would remember his promise to Daphne, if only after turning over the entire fee to Cissy. He was not a cruel or unfeeling person; he had made no overtures to Daphne Kleemeyer and thus was conscious of no great obligation to her. And he was in the grip of a passion for another woman, furthermore the first such he had ever experienced.

  He finally got away from Daphne now, using the authentic plea of being chilled to the marrow.

  On the strength of another sum of money, John took the courage to call the Forrester apartment, and was rewarded by fate for his unprecedented boldness: it was Cissy who answered.

  He spoke rapidly. “I know you can’t talk now, but if you could come to the library tomorrow, main desk, I can give you some more help.”

  “Who is this?” Cissy asked, in a happy squeal.

  “John Kellog. Can you talk?”

  “I don’t know why not,” said she, though it seemed as if her voice had lost some of its verve. “How’s your grandmother?”

  “Fine, I guess.”

  “She’s still in the hospital?”

  “Oh, that. Uh, no…she’s out. False alarm. Hey, look, I know I owe you—”

  “No!” he cried. “No, you don’t!”

  “You’re a funny guy,” said Cissy. “You’re certainly different. But nobody ever can call me a crook. I come through! If you wanna drop over here now, I’m available.”

  John had a test next day on the Civil War, in an American history course he had elected to take for its promise of examples of hopeless gallantry such as Pickett’s Charge, flamboyant personalities like Jeb Stuart and Custer the boy-general, and the glistening brown faces of liberated slaves. Instead a bulbous professor with dandruff on his shoulders lectured monotonously on economics. Also he was already one period late with the paper assigned by the white-haired woman who taught the course in Victorian poetry, another regrettable choice of John’s at registration time (for Browning was often impenetrable even with so-called elucidation, while Tennyson was either too sentimental or simply a stuffed shirt).

  But in his current madness he would have betrayed much greater causes than those, and of course he responded to Cissy’s summons with all haste.

  Once again she was wearing the oversized sweatshirt. Her legs were encased in thick knee-socks of bright green throughout but red at the heel and across the toes. She wore no shoes.

  As soon as the door was closed behind him, John gave her the latest envelope.

  She poked at it with a red-nailed forefinger. “What is it with you?” she asked, with a quizzical little nose.

  “It’s little enough,” John said, gazing at her in adoration.

  She proceeded to ask him the same question he had put to Daphne: was his father rich?

  “I’ve got a job.”

  “You don’t make this kind of money at the library. I can’t take this from you. You’re just a college kid.”

  “No,” said he, desperately pushing the extended envelope back towards her breasts. “You’ve got to get out of this hell.”

  “Oh, come on, it’s not as bad as that. It’s all we could afford until just lately, but we’re doing better now, and we’re going to move soon.”

  “You’re not getting a divorce?”

  She smiled easily. “Not so’s you could notice. Why do you ask that?”

  …He had made a fool of himself. “Oh,” he said at last.

  “Oh. I guess I got it wrong. I’m sorry.”

  “Everybody has their ups and downs,” Cissy said. “It’s generally about money when we’ve had our troubles, but I’ve got enough now, really. You take this back. You already gave me that other last week.”

  “No,” John cried. “To take it back now would make it worse for me. I’m in love with you! I’ll continue to love you with all my heart even if you stay married. I can’t help it. Please keep the money. I have to do something, you see. I just can’t stand by. And maybe this isn’t the place to say it, but can this old guy be right for you? He’s not even a very successful writer, is he? If so, why is he teaching in this hick college?”

  “Johnny,” Cissy said, taking both his hands. “You don’t know what you’re saying. You’re all worked up.”

  He did not quite burst into tears, but he made more of a spectacle of himself than he could bear to remember in detail throughout the remainder of his life. The similar scene in his first novel, The Life and Death of Jerry Claggett, probably put more fiction into the mix than fact: e.g., “Jerry” does weep and is joined by “Cindy,” who embraces him and, weeping, leads him to the sofa, which in a graceful gesture she converts to a bed. In a transition of the sort that marked Kellog’s early procedures, next they are in bed and nude, without any squalid business of undressing, and they make love for the first and last time before parting forever: indeed Jerry believes it will be the last time he will make it with anybody.

  Of the reality as he recalled it (though it was eventually much less believable than the fantasy) the essentials were that to console him Cissy pulled him to the sofa bed, already open and rather sordidly unmade, lifted but did not take off the sweatshirt—at last it was definite: she was not wearing any underwear—got his trousers down but not off, and screwed him or anyway would have, had he been able to perform which he however could not, even though, shocking him into greater enervation, she made strenuous efforts with two strong hands.

  But the meaningful differences between the novel and life were moral: “Cindy” stays with her husband, “Stephen,” for motives of compassion and has become a whore through a combination of need (while on one o
f his nighttime walks, distracted by his writer’s block, Stephen is run down by a car operated by an uninsured driver and is confined thereafter to a wheelchair) and the evil machinations of “Teddy Boyle,” restaurateur and pimp. In the version that actually took place, Cissy was no doubt simply greedy: the obese Ed Doyle first paid for her favors and then conceived the idea that other older unattractive men might do the same for the unique opportunity to taste the flesh of a curvaceous blonde coed. Doyle’s error was in offering Cissy’s services to one J. Donald Hillerman, the local druggist, who he correctly supposed to be lascivious, but when Hillerman came to Doyle’s eatery it was rather to eye the young men who accompanied the girls, and therefore he was self-righteously outraged at the proposal and notified the authorities.

  When apprised, the president of the university persuaded the chief of police (most of whose force, had it not been for the state-supported institution that dominated the little town, would be back behind the plow) to do nothing that would result in negative publicity, and as a result Doyle was permitted to sell the college hangout to Hillerman and leave town uncharged with lawbreaking. The matter of Cissy was concluded to all local intents and purposes when she left Forrester and was never seen again on campus or in town. Forrester’s contract was not renewed the following year.

  John had been due to become a senior by the end of the term, but having dropped both the writing course and that on the Civil War had insufficient credits and should have done summer school if he wished to graduate the following year. Daphne Kleemeyer, though of his own age a year ahead of him in college, graduated with high honors in June and went to New York City, where she house-sat the apartment of a traveling relative and paid no rent.

  “I hope it doesn’t shock you,” she wrote, four days after her arrival in the big town,

  but I’m going to suggest that you come to the city for the summer. It should be decorous enough: there’s an extra bedroom here, and it’s equipped with a desk and even an upright typewriter, which I don’t myself require, having brought along my portable Remington-Rand. As I’m not paying rent, you would pay none. We could split the costs of food and whatever else we share, and you could certainly put your part on credit, for I have some savings and my plan is to apply immediately for secretarial work: obviously I type, but I can also do Gregg shorthand (which I learned in high school against such an eventuality as this). I don’t have to point out to you the advantages of being here if you wish to publish what you write, not to mention the special services I may well be able to provide, such as typing manuscripts in a professional style.

  Certainly the invitation did have its shocking aspect, which however, given the circumstances, was superficial. John had not yet so much as kissed Daphne. If he accepted, he would most assuredly not be doing so for carnal purposes. He had now had one sexual encounter, and the experience had discouraged him from anxiously awaiting the next, even if one were likely with a girl more to his physical taste than Daphne could ever be.

  Not to mention that he still owed Daphne two hundred dollars, which she had thus far been good enough never to refer to, not even by indirection, but nobody was likely to forget a sum of such magnitude in a time when it might have been a month’s salary. Though he had had little previous experience with indebtedness, he instinctively began to understand that unless a loan is canceled by simply repaying what is owed, the next best emotional strategy is to borrow more, as the worst is to do nothing and thus in effect deny the creditor’s existence.

  John went to New York and moved into the extra room in the apartment on East 17th Street. It was much shabbier than he had supposed, though after he had lived in the city for a while and learned the ropes, his standards were necessarily lowered and he understood that the flat was locally considered not only handsome but generously proportioned and, having as it did, a fireplace, could even qualify as luxurious, even if no fire could be made in the grate, the flue having long since been cemented shut.

  He immediately assured Daphne he would get a summer job and not only begin to repay the loan but also provide what he could towards the cost of such food as they ate in common, but when she begged him not to worry about that, he as quickly put the obligation out of his mind, and while she was out during the day, looking, as promised, for work as a secretary, John sat at the typewriter for perhaps a quarter hour in the aggregate, in increments of two or three minutes during which first the chair was too low for the desk, then too hard, next the machine’s keys required a distracting amount of energy to strike home, and the supply of paper, only a few sheets, was soon exhausted and he hated to use the little money he had for such a thing when he was always ravenously hungry and needed funds to pay for snacks at the lunch counter at the Third Avenue corner, visiting which was also research, for many of his fellow customers were exotic, e.g., the Chinaman from the nearby hand laundry, who could be seen through the window, working the steam iron no matter how late at night one passed, or how early in the morning, but habitually breakfasted, lunched, and dined on the same diet, viz., a fried-egg sandwich on untoasted white bread (the cheapest item on the menu-board) and a mug of tea. A conspicuously effeminate white man was another regular customer and made animated conversation with the short-order cooks and countermen about events of the day and prissily used his paper napkin overfrequently. Everybody snickered on his departure.

  Once a Negro entered and ordered a hamburger, but when it was not served as promptly as he wished, he loudly denounced the establishment as being prejudiced against his color and forthwith departed. John initially believed this to be probably an unfair charge, for his own order had seemingly taken quite as long to come, but when Lou, the bald-headed guy who manned the far right end of the counter at midday winked at him and said, “Smells better in here now,” he wondered whether the colored man might not have had a point. He had previously believed the city flawless in these matters, perhaps because in his hometown, as at college, Negroes were rareties and thus none was normally seen in a restaurant or movie theater, whereas in New York they were commonplace everywhere, a state of affairs that pleased him, and he would have liked to assure some dark-skinned person that he thought this was as it should be, but when he tried to meet a Negro’s eye he was usually ignored, though once, on the subway, a perhaps drunken colored man interpreted his smile as being derisive and threatened him. The only occasion on which he was the recipient of a friendly approach was on lower Third Avenue once, at night, and then it was a black prostitute who made it.

  He wandered around the city almost every evening after dinner, partly because he was fascinated by Manhattan after dark and partly because he liked to avoid Daphne as much as possible. He took little pleasure in her company in the best of times, but now, when she was really supporting him, buying all the food, while he stayed home during daylight, listening to radio soap operas, sleeping for hours, and having waking dreams of sex with fanciful Negresses, he dreaded the sight of her. He had ceased even to sit at the desk. And then when she came back every evening from her job as secretary in an apartment-rental agency, what she wanted to talk about was his writing: how it had gone that day and when she might read some of it. The sole current nonsexual use of his imagination was in inventing plausible progress reports and being firm about withholding his manuscripts until the work had taken on a shape that would sustain it against disintegration when exposed to the eyes of others.

  “Well,” Daphne would say, in affectionate reproach, “I’m not exactly the outside world, I hope.” But she never displayed the slightest doubt of him nor issued the least challenge. He wished she would have made demands; then he might have had the courage to admit he was making a fool of her and squandering his summer. He could have gone home then and made a few dollars filling in for those on vacation at the local canning factory, perhaps even have repaid Daphne some of the outstanding loan, which she persisted in never mentioning, which persistence made him resent her all the more. He had never before been aware that benevolence co
uld be so obnoxious to its recipient. New York was the appropriate place in which to learn such disagreeable truths, for quotidian life there was made up of such.

  Deflected from the subject of his writing, Daphne would tell of the daily swindles perpetrated by her boss on the de fenseless seekers of apartments, of which there had apparently been a grievous shortage since the time of Peter Stuyvesant. Not only did he take a commission of two months’ rent, but he often demanded the purchase of furniture supposedly the possessions of the last tenant but actually stuff bought by the landlords from used-furniture stores at a fraction of what was now being asked for them. Most of the man’s income came from such schemes, in which he represented the owners’ interests, never that of the unfortunates who sought dwellingplaces. Stern laws forbade such practices, but he simply shmeered those who were supposed to enforce them. That was the New York way.

  In their own borrowed apartment house, the janitor, called locally “duh soopuh,” an embittered, potbellied, middle-aged man named Stan Mainboch, according to the only other tenant with whom they had an acquaintance, a genteel sort of widow named Mrs. Feltring, had a habit of doing meaningless favors, such as promptly delivering to one’s door junk mail from the lobby (first grinning, then glaring until a tip was surrendered, then sneering if he considered it insufficient), but delaying cruelly with plumbing problems. Daphne said that scarcely had she arrived when Mainboch, after a perfunctory, almost inaudible knock, let himself in with his master key and told her it was a violation of her cousins’ lease to sublet, but that for a consideration the landlord would not be notified. When she informed him that the apartment was simply on loan to her, Mainboch said that was even worse, for the insurance would not cover the premises under such conditions, but that, again, the absentee owner, a big impersonal company, need never know, and after looking her over, elucidated that by “consideration” he did not necessarily mean money: he was aware that cash might be in short supply for a young kid.