Changing the Past (22 page)

The sum of these charges was very near the balance of Daph's lifetime savings, even when supplemented with a nice wedding-present check from her parents (John had postponed informing his parents of his new status; anyway, they had no extra money), and as modest ordinary living already consumed her entire income, how the expenses of having a baby could be met was an unanswerable question in the current arrangement. Not to mention that in time she would not be able to hold a job at all.

Despite John's belief that regular and frequent sexual intercourse would liberate his sensibility for writing, it had not done so. Perhaps if anything his literary imagination was less effective now than when he had been a virgin—though his sexual imaginings were much more vivid than of old, now that he knew what was possible. Unfortunately, marriage and the idea of a pregnant wife soon began to vitiate his appetite for Daphne. Though the doctor assured her it was far too soon to curtail her sexual activities, John could not disregard an uneasy sense that screwing so to speak in the presence of a third being, namely one's own growing offspring, was not only unsavory but, no matter what the authorities said, unhealthy for the tiny blob of protoplasm. He therefore began to lust for others.

First he trafficked with them only in fantasy (some of the most compelling examples of which came to him while he made love with Daph) but soon enough this trick of mind no longer sufficed. He became especially lascivious whenever he tried to write—another reason for avoiding the desk. But as soon as his organ of lust (which was nowhere near his genitals) reacted to a change of venue, as it quickly did, the same urge interfered with whatever he tried as distraction. Reading one of the novels recommended by Daphne, he could not restrain himself from plucking through the pages to the sex scenes, which in the classic sort of work were none too carnal in detail: there are few particulars when Julien Sorel at last invades the bedroom of Mme de Rênal and nothing but abstractions when Alec d'Urberville takes the sleeping Tess.

If he carried the garbage down to the communal cans in the subterranean areaway (his sole household chore) he would see, amongst the passing parade on the adjacent sidewalk, at least three female persons, per five minutes, whom he found desirable, from quite young but buxom teens to women of comparative middle age (which to him in those days would have been thirty). Not one stranger returned his gaze, but it was otherwise with certain fellow tenants: there were at least two he was sure he could have for the asking. Unfortunately so, for he absolutely would not commit adultery under the same roof shared by his faithful, impeccable wife.

Which meant he was constantly in a state of dissatisfaction, unable to think of anything but illicit sex. Surely that was not healthy for a man of his age. The fact was, he had married too young, and why? Merely to do the right thing. But it was Daph's fault she got pregnant; she should have known how to avoid it. It had been she who lured him to New York, she whose relatives had decided to stay in California and give up the lease on the Manhattan apartment, forcing the newlyweds to find this dump; she who did not earn enough to sustain them. But far worse than any of these malefactions was her major crime of insisting he could become a writer.

He owed her nothing. In truth, she had robbed him of the final years of his youth, had probably ruined his life beyond reclamation. When the baby came, he would have to take some wretched New York job, riding the subways every day and on weekends, wheeling a stroller over phlegm-spattered, dog-beshat pavements, past doorways from which sprawling winos shouted importunities while pissing their pants.

He began to quarrel with Daphne, using such pretexts as the encrusted cap on the ketchup bottle and going on to accuse her of sexual association with her loathsome boss. Eventually he became sufficiently exercised to question whether the embryo in her belly was his own. This was finally sufficient to overtax even Daphne's stamina, and in her counterattack she charged him with being more or less what he had for some time believed himself despite the reassurances she had previously provided: she wondered whether she might have been wrong in her assessment of his talent.

Now, the extraordinary thing was that though when she had encouraged and made sacrifices for him he could not write at all, now he was given formidable psychic energy by her contempt. He did not speak to her for two days following that row, and during this period was able to write effectively for the first time since arriving in New York—really since the shattering love affair with Cissy. On the third day Daphne apologized to
him
, and by the following morning the muse had vanished behind a barrier of guilt and shame, which were succeeded by the debilitating kind of resentment as opposed to the sort that generated power. He went so far in degradation as to take their one set of bed linen to the laundromat, a day before Daph was scheduled to do that chore, and sit waiting for the machines to finish, there amongst the collection of persons to be found in such a place: slatternly housewives, old men with spotted pates, young mothers with children in attendant vehicles—Daphne's situation by next summer: the repulsive image could not be endured.

When she came home that evening they quarreled again, and again she was driven finally to make the cruel charge. John slept on the sofa that night, and the next day did the best writing ever. In one sustained burst of force lasting six hours, with interruptions only to make more coffee and to urinate, he completed the story he had begun during the previous interval of creativity. That evening he showed it to Daph as a peace offering, and with tears of joy she pronounced it an extraordinary success, not unworthy of inclusion in a collection of her favorites such as D. H. Lawrence's “Rocking-Horse Winner,” Mérimée's “Vénus d'llle,” and Kafka's “In der Strafkolonie.”

John enjoyed her praise less than he detested her pretentions at such a time. What he needed at his moment of triumph was not the cloying touch of a submissive, pregnant wife but something coarser, even unsavory, so he helped himself to the wages she had only just brought home, scarcely sufficient in sum to cover the expenses of the next two weeks, went to a midtown bar and drank enough courage to follow a streetwalker to a hotbed hotel: she seemed to be a Puerto Rican, reeked of liquor herself and, most thrilling of all, displayed emaciated arms with conspicuous needle tracks. It was appalling, revolting, disgusting in the extreme, and all in all the most exciting sexual experience he had yet experienced except in fantasy.

While he was having a postcoital pee in the corner washbasin, the whore, having dressed speedily, took a hasty leave with his wallet and watch, which had been prudently deposited on the bedside table.

He despised Daphne even more for sympathetically accepting his story of having been robbed at knifepoint, but most of all, for he was still drunk, he hated himself for lacking the courage to make an outrageous full confession. He and his wife were always circumspect about sex in conversation. Even when they had gone at it hot and heavy, it was “making love,” and as to reaching a climax, the polite question, “Did you finish?” When John's organ had actually been overused in the course of one of their early weekends, he had confessed, “I'm sore,” and not mentioned the name of where. Daphne's menses were called by her “Les anglais,” the short form of “what the French say:
Les anglais sont débarqué
.
”
“Huh?” “‘The redcoats have landed'!” “Oh.”

Within three days the story had been mailed to that magazine to which all stories were sent first, presumably read by someone there, and returned in the stamped envelope he had provided, with a rejection note that had been printed in fixed type.

“Let's face it,” said Daphne that evening. “It's unreasonable to expect victory the first time out. We should probably prepare ourselves for more rejections.”

“Why do you say that?” he asked in fury.

“Remember
Moby-Dick's
bad reviews.” she said. “And Stendhal never sold more than a couple of thousand copies of anything.”

This defeatism caused John to storm out of the apartment, not this time to look for sex, for indeed he felt utterly sexless when meeting the resistance of the world, but to march vast distances of sidewalk in a military stride, head erect, chin projected, energetically alone in the passive urban mob. Walking proved to be as if winding up his motor, and he came back to sit down at the portable typewriter that nowadays permanently occupied the former dining table in the living room (they ate their meals from their laps, seated on the couch) and by morning had written most of another short story. He went to a warm bed just as Daphne was arising, she who had soon fallen asleep despite the sound of the typewriter.

That evening he had another manuscript for her to read. She admired this story even more than the previous one: its emotions were richer, its characterization more trenchant, its style—well, style was of course always so subtle a thing to assess, but his was becoming more of a fine-tooled instrument as he proceeded. As it happened, this was the most extraordinarily appropriate response she could have made at this moment, for he was especially pleased with his style, having given much conscious effort to it, alternating long sentences of many dependent clauses with those short and curt, which if read aloud might even sound staccato.

However, Daphne had to ruin it all by pointing out a solecism: “scarcely” was properly followed by “when,” not “than.” He was too exhausted to walk the streets that night, but he slept alone on the couch. Eventually he was able to admit to himself that she was right, but he simply could not confess it to her face, for the reason that while he recognized that Daphne was more learned than he, and of course generous and kind and admirable in so many ways, it galled him to be dependent on her for all forms of support, financial, moral, and sexual.

The second story quickly came back from the same publication that had so speedily rejected the first. The first, meanwhile, had been sent to another magazine, one that took a week longer to return it, the first few days of which John found so encouraging that he was already planning the celebratory dinner at a grand French restaurant that he had read, in
Life
magazine, was the most expensive in America, at which a full-course meal cost more than twenty dollars per person. But that manuscript too came back, accompanied only by a printed comment.

John produced seven such stories in rapid succession. Each took slightly longer to write, for each was a little longer than its predecessor though no more complex. Looking back from years later, he remembered them as having been mood pieces, their subject a sensitive young man a-wander across an urban terrain, tarrying now and again for superficially simple yet profoundly eloquent exchanges with dirty-faced urchins, spunky oldsters, Negroes with their dignified wisdom and vivid language. … It embarrassed the older Kellog to think of these pathetic efforts, all evidence of which he eventually burned.

He had hoped to skip over the “little” literary journals and begin at the top, where the fees were said to be as much as a thousand dollars for a short story. By contrast, the “little” magazines might pay as little as twenty-five. But in fact his first appearance was in a publication that paid nothing at all in money: a contributor's promised reward was but ten copies of the issue in which his work appeared. As it happened, John received only one. His importunate notes to the editor-in-chief, whose address was a P.O. box in Boston, went un answered. John felt that the copy he had might be the only one in the world, so forlorn-looking was it, not even printed in letterpress but rather typed and mimeographed and bound in a pink-colored paper not much heavier than that which carried the text. Sending the story to this wretched thing had been Daphne's idea. “Better to get in print somewhere than not at all”—one of her many fallacious theories. He was beginning to doubt that back of the façade of highbrow references there was much practical intelligence.

He had better initial luck with the story that was accepted (after eighteen rejections elsewhere) by a quarterly called
Budding
, a copy of which Daphne had found in the cultish bookshop she frequented, conveniently near her place of work, at the edge of the Village. This time John received a letter of acceptance within only a fortnight of the mailing of the story. Once again there was no immediate money, but a twenty-five-dollar fee was to be paid on publication. This would be the first money he had ever earned with his pen. Daphne was ecstatic. She went right out again after coming home to hear the news, and bought a steak, a package of frozen potato puffs, and a bottle of Liebfraumilch (their favorite wine, because of the name, along with Lacrima Christi). Now that this had happened John tried to maintain his composure, but it was impossible not to be gratified by hearing a stranger's promise to pay money for the right to make public the product of one's private imagination. Even though it wasn't much money, and deferred at that, and the magazine was awfully obscure.

In the letter of acceptance, the editor asked to meet John, a request easily complied with, for the quarterly was published locally, down in the Village. John as yet knew nobody literary, unless Daphne qualified, and while he liked to think that talent is recognized for its own sake, he agreed with his wife that it doesn't exactly hurt to have friends with influence. So he went to see this Ross Philbin.

After wandering for some time, he at last found the street and number for which he had been searching, but obviously one or both were wrong, for this was a stooped brownstone residential building and not the office sort of edifice that would have been appropriate, but perhaps simply to confirm and prolong his chagrin he mounted the steps and glanced over the rank of mailboxes in the entryway, finding no
Budding
, but there
was
a “Philbin” in the farthermost name-slot.