Changing the Past (24 page)

“Sorry,” said he, leaving the bar stool. “I really don't see much point in continuing this discussion.”

Quill seized his wrist, and for a moment John believed he must once again fight for his freedom. But he was soon released.

“All right,” Jamie said, showing a wide though somewhat asymetrical smile. “I thought I'd try. I know I'm right, but a deal's a deal. I'll print your story as written, every jot and tittle of it.” He finished off his current glass of water. “Now, if you'll pay the tab here, we'll go and eat.”

The bartender went to work with a pencil. “Okay,” said he, “that's one Pernod and three double vodkas…”

It was now John who seized the retreating Quill. “I don't have the money for anything but my own drink,” said he. But he was really more bitter about the hoax. “You told me you were drinking water!” He slammed his only remaining dollar onto the bartop and left the establishment: if it wasn't enough to cover his own part of the bill, let them call the police.

Quill overtook him several blocks later, and then only by having sprinted so strenuously that he could speak only in interstices between gasps.

“Please…I forgot…wallet…in other pants.” He was sweating, and one dirty-blond lock of hair hung across his right eye. “So I left my Patek Philippe. Ross gave it to me for my last birthday…. Please don't be angry with me. I've had the most atrocious morning. At the moment I'm playing hooky from my analyst. I really need someone to talk to. Please come and break bread with me.”

“Neither of us has any money.”

“Home, I mean. The fridge is loaded with food. Really! It's right around the corner.”

“All right,” John said with conspicuous reluctance, “but I don't—”

“Oh,
please!”
Quill lifted his long-wristed hands towards the sky and started off at his usual rapid pace.

By this time John was so starved he had no alternative but to follow. At the apartment Jamie invited him into the kitchen, which was very generously proportioned when compared with the niches of both the places John and Daphne had called home in Manhattan, and handsomely furnished with a table the top of which looked like one large chopping block. Copper vessels hung from an overhead rack of ornamental ironwork. A honeycombed arrangement held countless bottles of wine, all properly on their sides, as John had once read fine vintages should be maintained.

Quill took a frosted bottle from the refrigerator and poured them each a glass. It was delicious stuff. John decided that it would be gauche for him to examine the label, so he did not do so. Jamie opened an unusually shaped tin, a kind of long wedge, of what he called just
foie gras
, without the “pâté”: John was taking careful mental notes of everything new to him, should he need material for his future stories, even though by now he was feeling the effects of the alcohol.

Quill delivered a basketful of chunks of French bread. “Excuse me while I make the omelettes, which will be
fines herbes
, if that's okay with you. We're out of cheese, et cetera.”

Of omelettes John had had experience only of “Spanish,” so-called, covered with an acid tomato sauce, and the Western, containing diced ingredients difficult to identify, both dry and brown as leather, as prepared at New York lunch counters. Jamie Quill's product was lemon yellow, light and moist, and exotically though subtly flavored.

That was about it for the menu. No dessert was forthcoming, unless the array of brandies and liqueurs offered by Quill was intended to serve that function. Nor was coffee mentioned. Still, it had been one of the most interesting meals John had ever eaten.

And Quill was behaving impeccably, though by now he had drunk a great deal more than John, who was himself woozy. It was Jamie who brought up the matter of the previous visit.

“You deserve an explanation,” said he, swirling cognac in one of those balloon glasses seen in the movies. “Obviously, from your story, I am aware that you are sophisticated in psychopathology. Well then! I am that type of heterosexual who has a need, under certain special conditions, to shock and disgust myself by entertaining fantasies of deviate activity.”

What an extraordinary confession for a man to make! John had no idea of how to respond. He could hardly take offense: Quill wasn't making a pass at him. He shook his head and sipped some of the Grand Marnier he had requested purely because of its name. “That sounds like a real problem.”

“I think it's probably due to my unusual powers of empathy,” Quill said. “I'm quite a lecher, you know.” He winked roguishly. “I do so enjoy mounting a wench and having at her with vigor. But no doubt all the while in some cranny of my consciousness I am putting myself in
her
situation.” He made a startled, wide-eyed grin.

John found the grin somewhat disquieting, but as they were still seated at the kitchen table, he could hardly be in danger. He nodded and said, “Uh-huh…. Do you suppose I'll ever get the chance to meet Ross Philbin?”

Jamie Quill's smile turned ugly. “You would be sorry if you did! He's as queer as a three-dollar bill. He's not
our
kind of man. Don't think he'll want to talk about literature: he'll just see you as somebody to go down on.”

“I thought you were friends.”

“Actually,” said Quill in a solemn voice, “we're enemies. I don't know why I still talk to him—yes I do: it's because he's got the money, whereas like you I have never been given anything. We're fighters, you and I.” His stare was now fixed on John's nose. “Oh,
please
. I
must
have you!”

As the appeal was accompanied by no physical movement, John stayed seated. “I thought you just insisted you were not—”

Quill looked desperate. “I can't believe that came out of me! I must have a demon dwelling inside my head.” He leaped to his feet. “I swear that men disgust me. Now be fair. Let me prove that conclusively.” He loped out of the kitchen at high speed.

John sat there for a long time, though his internal clock was somewhat out of order owing to the alcohol he had ingested, and it may have been only a few moments. But Quill persisted in not returning, and at last John struggled to his feet and went to look for his host, if only to bid him a mannerly good-bye.

He tracked him to a bedroom. Quill had stripped. He was scrawny and seemed even taller when naked.

“Get your clothes off,” he said levelly to John, “and I'll prove that the sight of your nude body will revolt me. I'm so confident that I'll make you a guarantee: if I become the least bit excited, I'll pay you a forfeit. Say that fifty dollars right now, instead of on publication of the story.”

John suddenly received a magical insight, perhaps simply through having become unbearably bored with his own naïveté. “The fact is,” he told Quill,
“you
are Ross Philbin, aren't you?…Thanks for lunch. Let's drop the idea of publishing my story, if you ever had any serious intention of doing it.”

“Just a moment.” Philbin (if it was he) seized a dingy pair of underpants from the chair where he had hurled them. He snorted. “I might have said don't go off half-cocked, had I not feared that you would misinterpret
that
too! You love to think the worst of me. Well so be it!” He dressed as swiftly as he had doffed his clothes, but then there were only three items of such. He went up the hall and into the front room, sat down at the glossy black table that only now John identified as a desk, and withdrew from a shallow drawer a checkbook the size of a magazine.

He wrote a check and gave it to John. The amount was twenty-five dollars, and the signature was “Ross Philbin.”

“In a word,” said Philbin, “I've bought the story. Now please leave. And kindly don't go about town saying I'm queer, because I'm anything but, as I think I've proved conclusively.”

In the succeeding months Kellog wrote more stories but, having had enough of Philbin, sent them all elsewhere and sold none. Daphne began to swell and had to leave her employment, for in those days women whose pregnancies were showing did not work at jobs dealing with the public. In consequence, the Kellogs were running low on money. At length Daphne made a decision, though it was heartrending, to go home and live with her parents in upstate New York while she had the baby, and of course be prepared to return as soon as John was successful, for she insisted that he stay where most books and magazines were published. Though she could not help him as much as she had formerly done, she hoped to persuade her father to advance her a few dollars, of which she would send what she could to John. Her father had given her sister and brother-in-law the down payment on a house, but he was not a rich man; nor did he, she admitted, like what he had heard of John, whom he had not met.

Kellog had begun to regret that he ever became intimate with Daphne. And he simply could not entertain the idea of being a father. Yet he felt sorry for himself when he was left alone in a New York that had yet to grant him recognition. Getting a job was unthinkable: he could never write again if he had to squander the best hours of the day on earning a salary.

Then Philbin sent him the issue of
Budding
in which his story was printed. Though the worst of the assaults upon it contemplated by “Jamie Quill” had not been carried out, the text had been considerably altered: e.g., the first two paragraphs of the original were gone and rewriting had taken place throughout, usually for no discernible reason, “little” might well be changed in favor of “small,” or vice versa, and “raised” to “elevated,” and here and there John found the gratuitous use of words which were not part of his vocabulary, such as “sapient,” “droll,” “glabrous,” and “canescent.”

He was at work on a furious letter to Philbin when the phone rang. Speak of the devil.

Philbin said, “I've got sensational news. Someone very influential is crazy about your story and wants to meet you. We're booked for lunch tomorrow at Soulange. Twelve-thirty. Jacket and tie.” He rang off.

John had seen the façade of the restaurant on his nighttime walks: it was a fancy place of which simply the name had aroused his hate and envy, but immediately his feelings changed. He belonged there, if invited. And he was ready to suspend judgment on Philbin's editing of his story.

Philbin, well dressed in suit and clean shirt and tie, was already at the table when John arrived. His companion was a slender, angular, dark-haired woman who looked well into her thirties.

“Meet Elaine
Kissell,”
Philbin said.

“Hi, John,” said Elaine, giving him a sinewy handshake and, owing to her elongated jaw, a somewhat vulpine smile. She took one more deep drag of the cigarette currently in play, extinguished it in the ashtray, and lighted another with a nervous match.

“Elaine,” Philbin said, “happens to be the best literary agent in town. She's very impressed by your story.”

Elaine's hair was pulled tightly into a bun at her nape, so tight it made John feel even more uncomfortable than he would have been made by her face alone: to him a bony countenance, especially on a woman, signified severity, and when one was encountered on a character of his creation, its possessor tended to lack warmth, reflecting his bias in life. Despite what Philbin had said, he was wary of this person and suspected she would be critical of his work.

How astonished he was when after exhaling a great deal of smoke she said solemnly, “I want to see everything you've written to date. If it is anywhere near as good as this story, mister, you've got yourself an agent”—she brought her thick eyebrows together—“that is, if you want one.”

He did.

Elaine urged him to be more ambitious and abandon those little ten-page stories, really sketches, that came so fluently from his typewriter: none went beyond the piece published by Philbin. It was time now for longer and more complex narratives, of which the subject would be not the lone sensibility but rather the social interplay of several and varied characters. When John confessed that at twenty-one he had not yet known enough real people on whom to base fictional characters, Elaine pointed out that he obviously came from a family made up of persons, he had gone to school at several successive levels, and he had surely had some experience with the opposite sex (she was not aware he was married, that being a state too unsophisticated to reveal at this point, if ever).

Without her encouragement he might have remained too squeamish to use intimates, relatives, and close associates as sources for his work. His father's little appliance-repair business had failed during the Depression, the poor guy had gone bankrupt and had never recovered emotionally or financially. An uncle was the town drunk, and his daughter was commonly known as the local bad girl with whom most young males had had their sexual initiation. His mother had a way of babbling foolishly and was notoriously stingy; he knew people laughed behind her back. But it was precisely that sort of dirty linen that Elaine urged him to wash in public. When he protested against what he assumed, given her commercial role, was vulgar sensationalism designed solely to make a buck, she asked him to reflect on the work of the masters of fiction, the Balzacs, Dostoevskis, and Stendhals, whose candid portraitures must have drawn on their families and friends.

He would have preferred Elaine not to be so cultured lit-erarily (having had too much of that with Daphne) and to have been instead a procuress for mercenary hacks, for money was what he needed now, not mere assessments of his promise, but he had no other option, and anyway when she learned of his want, she was willing to extend him a series of loans that were modest each by each but in the aggregate reached about four hundred dollars before his next sale: to one of the better literary quarterlies, published at a university with a recognizable name and printed on thick, book-paper stock. The fee was less than a quarter of what he owed Elaine, but she was good enough to take only the agent's ten percent and let the loan ride for the moment, believing in his future as she did. And not only that. She took him to an expensive dinner to celebrate and then back to her apartment for Irish coffee.