Changing the Past (19 page)

“Listen,” Cissy said, buttoning the coat over her exquisite bosom, “something's come up. I have to go see my grandma, who's in the hospital in the city.”

“I'm really sorry,” said John. “Anything I can do?”

“I'm getting a ride,” Cissy told him. She had not seen the flowers, and it would have been bad taste for him to point them out now.

But he had to make some impression, even if she was understandably distracted. “I realize the money I gave you won't go far: you'll need a place to live and so on. I'll get more, I promise.”

She frowned. “We'll talk about that next time. You take care.”

As they were descending the stairs, John offered to wait with her till her ride showed up.

“That wouldn't look good,” said Cissy. “You know?”

Momentarily he had forgotten she was married. “Sure,” he agreed. “I'll make myself scarce. I hope your grandmother recovers soon.”

“Oh, yeah, that's right. Now, you take care.”

Not even the main library of a large state university takes in a fortune in fines, and John had direct access only to those paid by the students who returned late books while he was on duty: the entire take of one shift in those days might not amount to a dollar. Clearly this was no source of serious money. Selling books might be a better means. On Saturday he hitchhiked to the city and found a used-book store. The man behind the littered desk had a cast in one eye and the knot of his tie was darker than the shaft. He and his shop were of a like squalor, but even so his hypothetical offer was much lower than John had expected.

“Britannica?”
the man asked, sneering with only one side of his face. “Depending on condition,
maybe
twenty cents per volume, but only if it's a whole set.”

“Costs more than a hundred now, doesn't it?”

“But we're talkin' used. Anyway, what you got in mind is selling somebody else's property, am I right? Probably belongs to your father. You wouldn't be so dumb as to peddle one you swiped from a school, I hope. It would be stamped with the name of the place, or maybe even perforated.”

John was obsessed with the intention of furnishing Cissy with enough money so that she could escape from her imprisonment. Though he had, to this point in life, been of an exemplary honesty (once even, as a child of eleven, having found in the street a wallet containing almost fifty dollars in cash, he went to some pains to track down its owner and return it to him), he had now, through love, become utterly amoral and might have robbed a bank if he had had the requisite armament.

As the situation stood, when assessed with reason, his sole hope for funds in significant quantity remained Daphne Kleemeyer. Nor did he have to beg. In consequence, he knew little guilt and less responsibility.

He had only to look lugubrious.

“Why so melancholy?” Daphne was returning some of the many books she found time to read in addition to what was required in her courses: today they were
The Bohemian Life
, by Henri Murger; Xenophon's
Memorabilia;
and a bilingual edition of Petrarch. John respected the great writers of the past, but considered an inordinate questing after them as probably phony.

He sighed and stamped the books in. Daphne was not the sort ever to pay a fine.

She leaned forward across the counter, even though he was momentarily alone at the big desk. “If you need more help of a financial nature, just say the word.”

“Only if I thought you were some rich man's daughter.” He placed the books in a rolling bin, which another employee would push away and lower into the stacks on a dumbwaiter.

“I told you I've saved some.”

“You have time for all the course work and all this reading too?”

Daphne smiled. She had unusually small teeth behind her pale lips. She would never have been a beauty, God knew, but could have done more with herself than she did. “I just make efficient use of the time at my disposal. Also I don't sleep a whole lot.” She grew sober. “I'm embarrassed at having to read some things not in their original languages, but it's either that or go without it, sometimes. I have a fair reading knowledge of French, for example, but it would have taken me too long to read Murger in the original if I were to do it carefully. And I got a late start on Greek, so tackling a classic text at the moment would be foolhardy.”

“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 of 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.