Changing the Past

by Thomas Berger

  When she told him she would have to check with her relatives on these matters, the super made a bitter exit and had since not so much as responded to her nod in the hallway. She just had to pray that nothing broke down in the apartment during her term there, for it seemed obvious that Mainboch would not help.

  John was relieved that Daphne apparently did not expect anything of him. He was of little practical use in a household, perhaps because his father had been so handy, and he was depressed to hear about the disagreeable janitor. Too much of the life he had yet known in New York consisted exclusively of the squalid. It seemed as though he was farther from the grand and glittering than when at a provincial college, and going to midtown to watch the limousines pull up at luxury hotels and restaurants made it worse. But worst of all was to enter a bookstore and inspect the novels that were being published currently—looking at the jacket-portraits of authors was usually enough to turn the stomach: brushy mustaches with pipes, the occasional pale pansy, the smug females with heavy eyebrows and pursed lips. John was especially crushed by discovering that most of the war novels had been written by those who had actually served in the wartime armed forces, and he cursed the fate that had made him too young for that great adventure.

  When he finally confessed to Daphne not that he had yet to write a word, but rather that he was having trouble with his work owing to a lack of experience, she said, “But that’s not insuperable. Remember Stephen Crane, who wrote The Red Badge of Courage before he had ever been anywhere near a battle. Fiction isn’t history. What’s important in it is what’s invented, because even if you write about something you’ve actually done, the telling about it is different, isn’t it?, because it’s in words.”

  She loved to talk in this theoretical way, citing examples from her preposterously wide range of reading, which he suspected of being superficial, whereas he read and reread the same works and believed he knew them in depth: Of Human Bondage, A Farewell to Arms, Of Mice and Men, and a play entitled The Petrified Forest, in which one of the characters was a poet who didn’t care whether he died or not: he seemed to speak peculiarly for John, when the latter was in a state of melancholy, which was most of the time since the matter of Cissy Forrester, which had very likely ruined his life.

  Daphne not only brought home the food but cooked it as well, and did such housecleaning as was required, along with taking the laundry to the Chinese and other chores. The little pleasure John had these days was in reflecting, masochistically, on how thoroughly worthless he was, even to the degree of overeating, claiming, with Daphne’s maternal encouragement, most of each meal she prepared, three-quarters of the meatballs in the can of spaghetti sauce, most of the melted Velveeta from the top of the tuna casserole. Without thinking, he might easily put away the entire contents of a newly opened box of those things in which raisins were squashed between two tasteless strips of unsalted soda-cracker dough or whatever, which he hated, and told Daphne as much, for she did the shopping as well.

  No doubt it was her fear of loneliness in the big city that made her put up with him for so long and without complaint. In his current state he could not bear to entertain the thought that she might genuinely believe him capable of writing something of merit. As to any physical interest on her part, that subject was too repugnant to consider. In the morning he stayed in bed behind a closed door until she had completed the preparation of his breakfast; if he continued to sleep, she left the scrambled eggs or French toast covered, in an oven turned to minimum heat and with its door partially opened—until he complained that it made the kitchen too warm on a summer morning and also pointed out the possible danger if the flame went out. At night he was seldom there when she retired at the early hour of eleven and thus never saw her dressed for bed. He was usually himself out till midnight, walking the city streets. It was something to do that cost nothing, and not too dangerous in those days. The muggings that did occur usually happened to those who were dressed in clothes more prosperous-looking than the old work shirt and chinos worn by him.

  A merciless heat wave claimed the city in late July. Air-conditioning was unknown to private domiciles of the non-wealthy in that era, and very unlikely in smaller offices. Of course Daphne’s had none, nor was her boss quick to repair the ailing wall-hung electric fan high above her desk. In the apartment John lay on a cotton blanket on the floor, clad only in his underdrawers, which were none too clean, for he was sensitive about including them with the laundry Daphne took to the Chinaman, and he usually forgot to wash them for himself. One of these days when he got some funds he would simply buy new ones. He would also get his own apartment on a more fashionable street, perhaps a duplex in the Sixties just off Fifth Avenue, and keep a convertible in a nearby garage, and on Friday drive in it, with a nonsluttish Cissy Forrester, to a weekend at his charming country place in Connecticut, there to canoe on the pond, drink Pimm’s Cup Number Whichever (the one stirred with a raw cucumber stick), and have a picnic using an English-made wicker basket from Abercrombie & Fitch, fitted with china plates, silverware, and even salt and pepper shakers, a corkscrew, and a little board for the cutting of cheese. In the evening there’d be a dinner party at the nearby estate of rich and grand people, worshipful admirers of John Kellog’s novels, fellow guests to include prominent painters, ballerinas, celebrated actors from the Broadway stage, philanthropic bankers with Harvard accents, and perhaps a tabloid columnist with inside knowledge of mob crime.

  At such moments, there on the floor, staring towards the cracked ceiling and seeing instead images of a glamorous future, the pity was that to acquire it anything more was needed: that his extraordinary powers of fantasy were not enough in themselves to bring about their own realization; they were quite as vivid as the movies he took them from….

  The truth was, he had no usable imagination nowadays and could entertain nothing in his head except the most simpleminded wish-fulfillment and even that was plagiarized. The cure for this, had he possessed the stomach for it, was probably to pore over some author renowned for his gloomy profundity, Herman Melville perhaps, or maybe Dostoevski, of whom Daphne was wont to babble and whom she found time to read amidst her other activities, along with the many other classic writers John had thus far not got around to, if he had heard of them at all, for some were poets, and he had never his life long looked at a poem unless it was assigned in class. There were two authors to whom Daphne referred so often that John made them into one: Henry James Joyce, but lacked the energy to read him/them, or indeed the courage to try. “Ulysses isn’t even written in English, is it?” “You’re thinking of Finnegans Wake,” Daphne explained in her an-noyingly patient way. “Ulysses is really pretty comprehensible, if you don’t get all anxious and just read it calmly. It’s very funny, too. You’d really enjoy it, John, with your sense of humor.”

  She had the oddest idea of him: of course he wasn’t humorless, but if he had ever displayed any wit to her, of all people, he was unaware of it. He had been consistently melancholy since meeting her, and though of course she could hardly be blamed, still it was inevitable that he should make at least a subliminal connection between her and being in a state of depression.

  When it was time for Daphne to return from work on this suffocating summer day, John resentfully put on his clothes and prepared to share the electric fan. He had long since been aware that doing something for the sake of simple justice was no guarantee that it would make you feel at all better, but undoubtedly it was rotten that she had to work all day in this weather, she who, he could admit in such a mood, was smarter than he and more gifted: faint praise, for anyone’s talent exceeded his; and as to intelligence, such as he had had to start with had dwindled to the point that, choosing a sentence at random in Daphne’s copy of The Golden Bowl, another work by that compound author, he could not make head nor tail of it (“He found it convenient, oddly, for his relation with himself—though not unmindful that there might not still, as time went on, be others, including a more intimate de
gree of that one that would seek, possibly with violence, the larger of the finer issue—which was it?—of the vernacular.”)

  He really ought to leave. New York had done nothing for him. If he went home now, he could still get in a month’s work at the factory and pick up a few dollars towards the expenses of what, with some extra effort to make up the missing credits, would be his last year of college. Then, with a B.A. in English from a provincial university, he could…get a permanent job at the factory, but rather in the office than the plant. Or return to New York, find employment even less attractive than Daphne’s, for he would not be equipped with touch-typing and shorthand, unless of course one of the big magazines or major publishing houses demanded that he take over their operation as editor-in-chief. He said as much, bitterly, to Daphne that evening as they sat in the living-dining room, eating the Chinese food she had brought home in several paper cartons.

  “I know,” she said in her unfailingly sympathetic way, “it can seem discouraging, but I’m convinced that there’s no answer but ‘in the destructive element, immerse.’ Speaking for myself, if I were to take the kind of job that requires the exercise of a certain kind of intellectual energy, say editing books, I’d never have enough left for my own writing.”

  “But how much do you write now?” John asked indignantly, perhaps unkindly.

  She winced and speared a few squiggly vegetable things with her fork. “I will, though. I’m reading a lot, and at least in my mind I’m looking for a new style. It would be pointless to do any more of that naïve, derivative stuff I did in Forrester’s class. That’s what is so impressive about your work, John: it doesn’t read like juvenilia.”

  He hated Chinese food, at least this kind, in which only by chance could you ever locate a fragment of protein, and in the extended intervals during which the slow-oscillating fan did not play upon him, he was unbearably hot.

  “My work?” he asked angrily. “Where is it? It doesn’t exist! Do you hear me, Daphne? Don’t keep talking as if I’m a writer. I haven’t written a word since coming to New York. Not a word. I’ve been living off you, and / haven’t written a single word in all this time.”

  This to him most dramatic statement had no visible effect on her. She drank some of the weak iced tea of her making, which was further diluted with ice cubes. She carefully dried her lips with the paper napkin, a gesture that irritated him in the best of times if indeed there had ever been any with her.

  “But you will,” said she. “You will.”

  She was so infuriatinely smue about this that he found it simple to blame her for not only the wasting of his summer but the withering of his dream. Without her, he would never have had to recognize his utter lack of capacity to be a writer. He might have endured in the sticks forever on the never to be realized intention of moving to New York.

  “Where do you get your arrogant certainty?” he asked now. “How do you know better about me than I do?” In addition to all else, he was ravenously hungry, the oriental fake food having only served to increase his appetite for genuine nourishment, but to get any he would have to ask her for money, continue to be a disgusting beggar, whereas if she had let him alone he would be peacefully working in the canning factory (probably again this summer on the machines in the labeling department), putting some money aside but spending some too on beer and hamburgers and inexpensive dates with the factory girls, whom as a college boy he could easily impress. This summer he might even have got into someone’s pants, given his experience with Cissy; he knew the ropes now. Whereas in New York he had been utterly sexless. Unaccompanied girls never came to the lunch counter when he could afford to eat there, and he had no idea of where to go to meet them. You probably had to be born locally, to Jewish or Italian parents.

  Daphne’s answer to his angry question was first merely to stare at him for a long time, and for good reason: it was unanswerable. He was sorry if he had hurt her feelings, but no doubt it was to everybody’s advantage for the truth to be so aired. Hitherto he had avoided coming to such a focus.

  But finally she said, “I knew you hadn’t written anything—” She caught herself. “I mean, I suspected that you hadn’t probably been able to write yet, but I know you will. I believe in you. I’ll continue to believe in you if it takes all year.”

  “Look, Daphne, the only thing I’ve ever written that had any substance was that war story The Owl published last win ter. That’s how I got into Forrester’s class, where I really never did anything but little unfinished sketches. And the other day I reread, or tried to, my story. It’s all corny sentimentality, and it’s not even original: I wasn’t thinking consciously at the time, but remembered when rereading it that the big scene had pretty obviously been lifted from the end of a movie about World War One in which James Cagney falls on a hand grenade to save his comrades.”

  She laughed. “What’s good enough for Shakespeare should not be denied you. He never invented the plot of a single one of his plays.”

  That kind of thing made John feel worse. “The point is, I really haven’t demonstrated any talent at all, so far as I’m concerned. I always liked to read as a young kid. I’d stay indoors and immerse myself in make-believe when the others were outside with baseballs and fishing poles. So later on when having to think of what I wanted to do in life, nothing appealed to me. I’m a lazy guy, and so many things bore me. The studying necessary to become a doctor or lawyer doesn’t even bear thinking about. That’s why I majored in English, after all. One day I got the bright idea that maybe I could make a living, maybe even a pretty big one, staying home and writing stuff I made up in my imagination—journalism is too hard work! But I have now discovered that my imagination just doesn’t work on demand. I have to live more, experience more, so as to have something to write about, but I can’t do much of that without any money.”

  Daphne said, “All right. Then wait awhile. Just don’t give up the idea, get tired of thinking about it, and quit altogether. Don’t let the pilot light go out, in other words. Because whatever you say about that story of yours, it displayed the real thing, believe me.”

  For the first time, sitting there staring into the detritus of the chow mein, he began to take her seriously, or rather take seriously her interest in him. Until that moment he had tried to think about her as little as possible, for she had always been a potential embarrassment to him. He had found her neither attractive nor interesting, yet somehow had become closely associated with and even dependent on her. But the situation was not absurd if there was a point to it. Now one had been identified: she believed in him, and this was of crucial significance, for he did not believe in himself. Therefore, if he were to achieve anything, she was a necessity to him.

  Transformed by this recognition, and in an odd physical state owing to the heat of the day, which grew even warmer as the evening came and such little breeze as there had been was as it were stilled by the waning of the light—being excessively warmed both enervated and aroused him—he began to look at Daphne in a new way. Where she had previously seemed bony, she now could be seen as sculptured. Her dark hair and almost black eyes might be more exotic than run-of-the-mill. Her lips were rather fine than thin. On this hot night she was wearing a lighter blouse than usual, and it looked as though she might have some breasts after all. When she rose to clear the table, her skirt adhered to a certain roundness of posterior. It was possible that in form-fitting garb she might be both elegant and sexually desirable, a combination that hitherto he had assumed was peculiar to figures on the silver screen of an earlier era, or in advertisements in magazines for the well-to-do.

  “If I ever make some money,” said he, “I’m going to buy you a silver lamé evening gown, and we’ll dine at the Rainbow Room.”

  Daphne dropped the empty carton into the pedal can. “Just write good prose.”

  “I’ll try,” John said. “But I want to do something in return for what you’ve done for me.”

  “Don’t worry. You will.” She was bei
ng conspicuously matter-of-fact, scraping the plates and then washing them, one by one, in running water, mounting them in the rack to drain. Bits of dried food might well be found on them tomorrow; she was not his mother’s match as a housekeeper.

  When she had finished with the cleanup, she made instant iced coffee for them both. She brought him his glass. “Dessert’s ice cream, but I’m afraid it began to melt on the way home and that old refrigerator doesn’t get cold enough to re freeze it. Sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” John said. “You take good care of me.” It was the most affectionate thing he had ever said to her, and she was moved by it. As in fact was he, learning as he did for the first time that in life one occasionally comes across certain matters that seem consistent with the textbook theories: in this case, that words sometimes create emotions, rather than vice versa, so that speaking of anger might make one angry: he remembered that from a course in Psych. But he had no intention of betraying a firm fidelity to his doomed love for Cissy Forrester, which had changed in character but remained as passionate as ever and by now had little to do with the real Cissy.

  Years later, when he had become weary of reflecting generally on the relations between the sexes and decided that there was no sexual truth that was not particular, he believed that what he had felt that night was simply lust: any other female who was not physically repulsive could have been substituted for Daphne—a sad realization, but then what was not?

  After living under the same roof for a month without touching each other, he and she went to bed together on that hot night not long after finishing their melted ice cream. Despite her vast knowledge of literary love, Daphne was a virgin in life, which thrust the role of expert on John, who had had but the one encounter with Cissy, which Cissy had directed, with perhaps too much authority. But now that he was obliged to be master, he was notably successful, and in a much more sensitive situation.