Changing the Past

by Thomas Berger

  John loathed Daphne for getting him into this mess, and he despised himself. Her writing was pretentious twaddle. His hatred of Forrester was now long-standing—and as if these feelings were not enough, he was absolutely in love with Mrs. Forrester.

  But it was here that he discovered that violent and clashing feelings may awaken, or create from scratch, a kind of eloquence.

  “That’s right!” He laughed recklessly. “When you’ve got comedy. Read humorlessly, of course it doesn’t have any sense. That’s what’s so good about it: it separates the sheep from the goats. The joke’s on the readers without a sense of humor.”

  Forrester narrowed his eyes. No doubt he was considering which way to go with the least damage to his amour propre. He quickly decided. “All right, that’s one of the possible interpretations—one, I might add, that was my own on seeing the very first example of Miss Kleemeyer’s work last fall, but I’ve been reluctant to mention it because beginning writers are sometimes terribly thin-skinned about being called funny. Sometimes people are, as Hemingway says, solemn as bloody owls.”

  “Golly, you know you might have hit it, you just might,” the glorious Mrs. Forrester said to John, and she along with the rest of the class turned to stare expectantly at Daphne Kleemeyer.

  But John now began to lose his nerve. It was a foolish thing to say: there was not a shred of wit in Daphne, who was all intensity and no doubt now preparing to embarrass him for an egregious misrepresentation.

  But when she spoke, it was to commend him for critical acumen. “How gratifying,” said she, gazing worshipfully at him, “to be understood for once! I can go it alone if I have to, but how much more comfortable it is to be heard.”

  Forrester was huffy. It was beneath his dignity to insist, against all the evidence, that he had genuinely from the first assessed Daphne’s work as comic, and therefore he took another tack. “All right, all right,” he said with a superior smile, “now that we’ve got that settled, let’s consider some of the less than successful features. Mr. Styles?”

  Styles was young enough still to be suffering from facial skin problems. He rarely spoke in class, and being publicly identified now caused a blush to flood his already discolored, swollen cheeks. “Uh, I don’t have any criticism,” said he.

  Nor did anyone else. Eventually Forrester had to supply his own. He said the piece was too long and too self-conscious; if that sort of writing was to be effective it should be brief and, of course, reveal as little as possible of its author’s self-satisfaction.

  Kellog’s emotions were complex at this point, but he was able to understand that what Forrester said was right—as Daphne had seen the sense in the teacher’s criticism of John’s own story. Unfortunately she was not sufficiently large of soul to see the justice in these comments. Her white face became even paler within its frame of dark hair, and when the period was over she clasped her books to her skinny chest and marched indignantly from the room. John was greatly relieved by her prompt departure, for he wished to linger and take advantage of Forrester’s distraction by talking to his wife, who remained in her seat, looking at some papers, while her husband dealt with the clustered students.

  John went to her and said, to the thick strand of gold which swept, on that side, behind the pink shell of an ear, “I want to thank you for giving me moral support.”

  She looked up. “It wasn’t anything.”

  “Oh, it was to me,” said John. He added, pathetically, “I’m new here and don’t know anybody.”

  Mrs. Forrester was that rare person who could look delectable when frowning. “Listen,” she said after a moment, “Brock and I just got married. We haven’t had time yet to have anyone over, but I just decided to give a little party Friday night. Can you come? Bring somebody if you want.”

  “Okay if I come alone? I don’t really know anybody.”

  “Sure,” said she. “Seven P.M., after supper. We live in an apartment over Knowland’s Shoes, next to the bakery, you know?” Her giggle was a wondrous thing. “It was Brock’s. I had been living at the Chi O house. Gee, I guess I’m a faculty wife now.”

  He was brought back to stark reality when Daphne seized him as he emerged from the building. “God,” said she. “Until I met you I was ready to leave school. There’s nobody else around here with any capacity whatever for understanding my work. Did you hear that simpleminded jerk Forrester?”

  John wished to put some moral distance between them. He sensed that the best way would be to make negative implications with respect to her writing. “Well,” said he, “didn’t you just tell me the other day that he was right about my own story?”

  She clutched at his arm. “I was wrong! Sorry about that.” She swung to face him, which of course impeded him in his plan to escape. “Will you forgive me?”

  “Maybe he was right in both cases,” John ruthlessly suggested. “He is a professional, after all.”

  “He’s a cheap hack.” Daphne sneered with her narrow nose and thin lips. She was more unappealing than ever now that he had actually spoken to and even got an invitation from Mrs. Forrester, whose own nose was retroussé and whose lips, especially the lower one, were full.

  “I wonder what kind of husband he is?”

  “Just the kind that stupid chippie deserves,” Daphne replied venomously. But her expression quickly became amiable, and she asked, “Listen, what should we do on the weekend? Here’s my vote for Friday night: the French Club’s arranged a screening of La Femme du Boulanger, with Raimu. It’s got English subtitles if you need them.”

  John was revolted by her proprietary tone. If he had earlier been in her debt for the lukewarm defense she made of his story, he had more than balanced the account by the desperately concocted rubbish he had produced on the subject of her own story, than which he could think of nothing less humorous.

  He said coldly, “I’m busy on Friday.”

  She was undeterred by the announcement. “I hope you’ll save Saturday and Sunday for us, anyway. I want you to read more of my novel and tell me what you think. That excerpt was only a small portion of it.”

  For God’s sake. “Look, Daphne, we’d better get something straight. I can’t see you outside of class, because my girlfriend is a jealous type. Sorry, but that’s just the way it is.” He left before she could react.

  On Friday evening he made his way to the business district of the college town. For an author of published magazine stories, Forrester lived in a very modest place. Perhaps he had another, permanent home somewhere, maybe New York City, where it was assumed the domiciles of most writers were, though they might be temporarily in Hollywood, selling out, or even on such a campus as this.

  The door to the second story was to the left of the shoe store. Inside, it turned out that the Forresters’ apartment did not even have exclusive use of their floor: another button was alongside theirs and labeled “2-B/Miraglia.” John pushed the one for 2-A. From the fact that it gave his finger no resistance he suspected it was inoperative, but the inner, glass door was anyway unlocked, and he pushed through and ascended a stairway several degrees steeper than any but cellar steps. It was lighted with one bulb of weak wattage, in the ceiling of the remote landing above.

  Having completed the climb, he searched the jamb of the door to 2-A but could find no bell-push. He knocked. No party sounds came from within; he must be an early arrival.

  The door opened at last and an impatient Forrester, dressed in a plaid shirt with the tails out, asked, ‘Yes?”

  “Mr. Forrester?”

  “What are you doing here, Kellog?”

  “I came for the party.”

  “Party?” asked Forrester. “It’s news to me.” Without moving off the threshold, he turned his head and shouted. “Hey!” A frumpy-looking Mrs. Forrester came into view. She was wearing a sweatshirt with the name and seal of the university printed on it. The garment was of a size to fit the largest tackle on the football team. On her it hung almost to the knees. Aside from a pa
ir of puffball slippers, badly run over, she apparently wore nothing else, but was decently attired as to sexual modesty, displaying no figure whatever.

  Her husband asked her, “Do you know of any party?”

  He was blocking most of John, so she could not identify her contemporary. “Naw,” she muttered sullenly.

  Waving, John did a bit of footwork to be seen. “Hi! Did I get the wrong night?”

  “Oh.” The arms of the sweatshirt hung slack; her own were inside, against her body, and not inserted into the sleeves. She seemed to be hugging herself as she came forward. Forrester stubbornly maintained his position, so she had to look around him. “Oh, hi. Gee, I think I did say Friday, but to tell you the truth I forgot all about it.”

  “Oh, sure,” John said. “That’s all right.”

  “But it isn’t really,” said she. “Why don’t you come in anyhow?” She wiggled violently inside the sweatshirt and brought her hands out of the cuffs.

  As Forrester showed no intention of permitting him to make entry, John believed the graceful thing was to decline.

  But then the writer did something unexpected. “No, Kellog, come in,” said Forrester, stepping out of his way. “If you were invited, then you were invited. There’s to be no turning away of a guest”—he turned to glare at his wife—“even if the host was not aware there was to be a guest.”

  “My fault, my fault,” said she with a wailing inflection, raising her shoulders as high as her ears, which brought the hem of the sweatshirt to midthigh, disclosing half of her lush thighs.

  Forrester led John into the nearest room, which proved to be the entire apartment except for the sanitary facilities, which were presumably kept private behind the only door that was shut, for that which was wide open held too much clothing to allow its door to be closed. An unmade bed extended from the middle of a wall in which two flanking windows looked down on the street. Mrs. Forrester loped to it, caught a purchase under the front of the mattress, and with one vigorous motion caused the whole works to fold up on itself and sink into a base that became, with the addition of two pillows from the floor, a couch.

  At the rear of the room, wide-flung latticework doors framed a kind of abstract kitchen.: perfunctory two-burner stove above quarter-sized refrigerator; doll’s house sink; open shelves holding a can of soup, condiments, and a saltine box with a crushed end. Mrs. Forrester skipped there with her flawless bare calves and brought the folding doors together, but the catch wouldn’t hold, and the two halves slowly yawned apart during the succeeding five minutes.

  “Take a pew,” said Forrester, throwing an elbow at a shabbily upholstered chair.

  His wife continued around the premises, collecting what looked like discarded underwear and dirty towels and stockings from the furniture, floor, and doorknobs. A hangered man’s shirt, which looked clean enough, hung from a lighting sconce on the wall. A little desk, its top concealed beneath a portable typewriter and reams of disorderly papers that rose on either side of the machine, stood in the far front corner of the room, its accompanying camp chair a scant foot from the arm of the couch.

  “I was just taking a nap,” said Mrs. Forrester, stretching and yawning felinely to support her assertion. “Brock was working on the Great American—”

  “Don’t ever use that vulgar expression, please!” cried Forrester.

  “Why not?” whined the girl. “It’s not dirty.”

  “‘Vulgar’ doesn’t mean ‘dirty.’ How many times must I tell you that?”

  She grinned at Kellog and shrugged again, the sweatshirt rising even higher this time. John had never before seen her in such squalid attire, and it was even more exciting than her routine campus costume. But he was embarrassed by it and hoped she did not sit down directly across from him and with arrangements of thigh give him glimpses of the underpants she had to be wearing under the sweatshirt.

  He was therefore much relieved when she chose an end of the sofa that was nearest him and therefore almost at a right angle.

  Forrester remained standing. “That’s right,” said he. “I was working. But as it happens I don’t mind being interrupted. I’m not one of those prima donnas.”

  “When Brock gets cooking,” Mrs. Forrester said, with a smile that was as snowy as ever though she was otherwise in a somewhat soiled condition, “he types through hell and high water.”

  Forrester closed his eyes and shuddered. He opened them and said to Kellog, “Now, if you’ll forgive me, I’ll get back to work. You’re not my guest, after all.”

  John got up. But his teacher waved him down imperiously, then took a seat at the littered desk, inserted a sheet of paper into the little machine, and began furiously to type, making sufficient noise so that his wife had to shout at the guest.

  “So what have you been doing since I last saw you?”

  John grimaced and tried to remember. “Oh, just classes, I guess.”

  “Are you married?”

  He thought this just might be a joke, but apparently it was not, given her solemn mien.

  Forrester suddenly stopped typing and ripped the paper from a screaming platen, crumpled it into a ball, and hurled it into the kitchenette, the doors to which had by now opened themselves all the way.

  It would seem some crisis was at hand, and John wished he were elsewhere but feared that any attempt to exit would offend Forrester with its negative implications.

  Mrs. F. chose this moment to raise her heels to the edge of the couch, which put her knees under her chin. He tried to keep his eyes up, but got the definite impression that she was not wearing lower underwear.

  Forrester stood up. He stared at the wall facing his desk, which was unadorned except for a lone pushpin. “Substance,” said he to the wall, “seeking a form.”

  John was wondering whether he should make some polite response when Mrs. Forrester lowered her thighs violently, slapped their top surfaces, and said, chortling, “Did you see ‘L’il Abner’ today?” She simpered at her husband. “Brock thinks I’m just like Daisy Mae. That’s what brought us together, you know: that strip.”

  Forrester made an incoherent cry and lowered his face into his hands.

  John stared at the girl in alarm and bent forward to ask, sotto voce, “Is he all right?”

  She too bent, bringing her face almost to touch his. Her skin looked somewhat oily but it was flawless of texture. She whispered, “He’s creating. Don’t pay any attention: he’ll just think you’re making fun of him.” In a normal voice she said, “You know Doyle’s? They stopped including cole slaw on the cheeseburger platter. If you want it, you’ve got to pay extra.”

  One of the college hangouts was in reference. John seldom went there because he had little money with which to snack and lived exclusively on the prepaid meals at the dormitory dining room. But he said, “That’s too bad.”

  She shrugged. “That’s the way it goes.”

  Forrester turned around, chin high. He spoke as if to himself. “I simply must come to grips with this thing.” He went to the closet and put on a capacious coat and a slouch hat with a very wide brim turned down all the way around. He found a pipe in the pocket of the coat, filled it with tobacco from an accompanying pouch, and strode to the kitchenette, where he claimed and ignited a wooden match and fired up the pipe.

  He buttoned the outermost fastening of the coat collar, a crescent-shaped strap, and saying, “Carry on” to the young people, swept himself with a flourish into the hallway.

  When the door was closed Mrs. Forrester scowled at Kellog and said, “He supposedly takes long walks to meditate.”

  John nodded.

  “He hasn’t written anything since we got married,” she continued. “I suppose I’ll get blamed for that.”

  John was suddenly afraid to be alone with her. He rose. “I’ve had a nice time, but I have to go now.”

  She stared up at him with her pale blue eyes and pouted. “Don’t you leave too! What do I have, B.O. or something?” Of course he sat down.
“I want somebody to tell my troubles to,” said she, leaning towards him. “I don’t trust other females.”

  “I wasn’t leaving because of you,” said John.

  Mrs. Forrester sighed. “It seems like years since I was single and playing the field. But it’s only a couple weeks. We didn’t have any honeymoon or anything! We just went to a courthouse in the city. I haven’t got up the nerve to tell the news to my folks yet. My mother’s heart will break when she hears she won’t be coming to a wedding. I was with the finalists last year for Homecoming Queen. I had my poetry published in my hometown paper on several occasions. I took his course because he’s supposedly got a name as a writer. I guess you could say he just turned my head. I didn’t realize he hasn’t got any money at all and he can’t seem to write anything more than those little short stories and lives in this crummy dump.” She wriggled her arms out of the sleeves and returned to the perhaps naked self-embrace under the huge sweatshirt. “I’m always cold here. The landlord is some stingy Wop who keeps the heat turned as low as possible.”

  Kellog felt no desire for her in her current condition, but his love for her was enriched by the information that, despite her beauty, she was a victim, an underaged waif kept in bondage by a wretched old man. But there was little he could do about it other than say, “That’s just awful.”

  She scowled. “I guess everybody’s talking about me, aren’t they?”

  He shrugged. “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “Okay, so be it, then. I don’t have anything to be ashamed of. I guess it was stupid, but could have happened to anybody.” She jumped up. “I’m starving. We didn’t have any supper.”

  John was shocked. “He doesn’t even feed you?”

  “I just didn’t feel like opening cans,” said she. “Hey, you want to go to Doyle’s and get something to eat?”

  It was a degrading thing to have to do, but he had no, choice. “I’m sorry. I don’t have a cent. My salary, working at the library, isn’t due till tomorrow, and my parents haven’t been able to send me any money for a long time.”