Free Changing the Past by Thomas Berger Page A

Now he had to pretend he really did have some important business elsewhere. He might go to the drugstore and buy some zinc oxide to put on his pimples (it was of little effect but you had to do something), but in recent weeks his acne had been clearing up, and the reason could not have been that he was beating his meat any less nowadays. Yet here he was, talking with a girl in the flesh, and sex was the last thing on his mind. Thick ankle-socks above dirty saddle oxfords and below a skirt of plaid wool was not a costume that evoked lust. His taste was for black lace underwear with long garters and high heels; tits upthrust and compressed to form a deep cleavage not far below the chin, in a brassiere strained to the breaking point; glistening scarlet lips; and a smoldering cigarette in a long holder of black onyx.
    â€œI’m going to drink Canada Dry,” said he, “starting in Toronto.”
    Betty Jane laughed dutifully at this, but she had been claimed by a new solemnity. She came closer to him and said, sotto voce though no one else was near enough to hear, “I don’t approve of drinking myself, but my father’s got some wine down cellar and there aren’t any of them home right now.”
    â€œThere’s your chance, then,” said he, “and next time anybody asks if you’re drinking any more, tell ‘em you’re not drinking any less.”
    She failed even to smile at this, saying in a very small voice, “Come on, if you want.”
    So having really nothing else to do, he persisted awhile longer in her company. She lived behind a green lawn in a two-story house with a wide porch full of wicker furniture in good condition and not unraveling like his grandma’s. This was one of the better streets in town. Kellog had not previously been aware that her family had more money than his, and learning this now, he felt he had still another reason to feel superior to her. He needed all the self-assurance he could muster, for if he had not even walked a girl home from school, he had assuredly never entered an unoccupied house with one. Nor, as he tried to keep from reminding himself, was he experienced at “drinking,” though the word was so frequently to be heard in his jokes. He had had a sip of homemade grape wine from his father’s glass before recent Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. He loathed the filthy, sour smell of beer and had yet to taste any kind of spirits except blackberry cordial, which was not all bad but would have been better without the acrid alcohol content.
    There they were in the Hopper basement, a very neat place as contrasted with the Kellog cellar, newspapers in tied stacks, no stink of damp, and a very modern, clean-looking furnace equipped with an automatic stoking device that fed coal into the fire when required. Jack noticed only the things that reminded him of his own chores at home, but it was spring now and no heat was on.
    Betty Jane led him to a corner cupboard and opened the doors, saying, “There you go.”
    Inside were to be seen some pickles in Mason jars, strawberry jam with a disc of paraffin between the maroon contents and the metal lid, and a bottle of dark-brown glass bearing a label on which was printed: “Sherry.”
    His hostess snatched up the bottle and thrust it at him. “C’mon,” said she, “we’ll pick up the corkscrew in the kitchen and go up to my room.”
    Kellog had to speak fast. He had never held a corkscrew in his hands, let alone used one to extract a cork, a process he had never paid much notice to when depicted in the movies except for the time that some comedian had pulled from a bottle a cork that kept coming and coming and when all the way out was magically longer than the bottle from which it had issued. To do that kind of stuff you had to have a lot more resources than were available to a high-school kid in a little hick town.
    â€œNaw,” he said now,