Changing the Past (20 page)

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

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
1
7th 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 could 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.

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 Fores
t
, 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.