Changing the Past

by Thomas Berger

But by now Dr. Jonathan Kellog was an established feature of New York radio, and he had long since ceased to look for a replacement. He made the move to weekdays that had been planned for Dr. Pomerantz and tried various time slots, all of them successfully, before audience surveys indicated that the hour just before noon was likely to reach most listeners, for Kellog’s appeal was wide and came to include the self-employed, housewives, adolescents of either sex, the drivers of cars, retirees, persons of all races. He was exceptionally courteous to people with accents, but if they were too hard to understand, he spoke to them off the air, for the needs of the audience could not be forgotten. This was never less than a performance, though he liked to think it was sometimes a good deal more. In time, return calls from those who had taken his counsel and prospered were routine. “Doctor, you were so right! That mistake my husband made was less important than the continuation of the marriage.”…“Just as you predicted, my son soon came home, his tail between his legs. He’s settled down now. Thank God for your help.”

  Perhaps it did even more for his reputation as sage when someone praised him for providing correct advice which, through cowardice, vanity, or sloth, they had failed to act upon. “I’ll never forgive myself. I just couldn’t bring myself to apologize to her, and now she’s dead.”… “I didn’t have the nerve to turn him down. So I gave him the money and he poured it down another one of his rat-holes and went bankrupt anyway.”

  As the prevailing culture began to undergo what was soon called the sexual revolution, the problems presented to Dr. Kellog pertained more and more to the erotic. Old men, who had not had an erection since before impotence could be confessed to over the airwaves, now phoned to ask Dr. Kellog, in the hearing of the world, whether there was still hope. Mothers inquired whether it could lead to incest when toddler twins, one male, one female, caressed each other’s genitals. A teenager wanted to know if the unrequited oral gratification she gave her boyfriend would result in his despising her. A homosexual husband insisted that liberation had made things much worse for him: now his boyfriends wanted to identify themselves to the world, ruining him, whose old-fashioned principles of polite discretion were shared by his wife and straight associates.

  Kellog had got cold feet when he heard the first of the sexually explicit questions and killed the earliest calls, but by now he had acquired some local rivals in broadcast psychotherapy, and the nearest to him in popularity had made sex a specialty and was thereby gaining in the ratings. When the executives at WKEG urged him to be bolder, Kellog took the plunge. Thus began the era in which the program became almost exclusively devoted to Eros.

  “He puts on my bra stuffed full of socks and tucks his organ back between his legs so you can see only a triangle of pubic hair that looks like a woman’s. Would you say that’s homosexual?”

  “No, not at all, if that’s all he does. It wouldn’t be even if he dressed completely in female clothes and went out in public. He would be gay only if he had sexual relations with others of his own sex.”

  “He makes love to me okay. Maybe I’m worrying over nothing. Thanks, Doctor. You’ve set my mind at ease.”

  At the outset of his new profession Kellog considered himself reasonably sophisticated in sexual matters—over the course of the adult decades he had been to bed with a variety of women—but it soon appeared that he had had little preparation for many of the questions that were put to him.

  What could be said to the man who confessed to being his daughter’s lover since she had reached the age of seventeen?

  “I’m no child molester,” boasted the man. “I never touched her earlier though I’ve been a lonely widower for some years.”

  “Of course you are aware that that’s against the law,” was the best Kellog could produce on such short notice.

  “So was sitting in the front of the bus if you were black, not long ago! So was just living if you were a Jew in Nazi Germany.”

  Kellog rallied. “Be that as it may, what you’re doing is not right.”

  “Then why did Lot do it?”

  “Who?”

  “Lot, in the Bible, whose wife turned to a pillar of salt. He got both his daughters pregnant, and that was fine with God. Go read it and see.”

  “Sir, if I have to explain what’s wrong with incest…The morality aside, isn’t it genetically dangerous if a child is produced?”

  “We’re not thinking of having children. We’re just satisfying each other’s needs.”

  “It would be much better if you both got other lovers,” Kellog said wearily. The only meaningful response to certain propositions—e.g., that coldblooded murder of another human being could be justified, that torture was permissible, that having sexual relations with a blood relative could be sanctioned—was simply to call them wrong. Proof, as such, could not be furnished, and if it could be, it would only vitiate the clear and obvious truth. Unless a human being could see that, there was nothing to talk about. But this man could not simply be turned away. Whatever his defiance of the natural law, he had called for help.

  Kellog spoke gently. “The situation must not be as satisfactory as you make it sound. If you’re calling me, you must have some doubts.”

  “I have none at all,” said the man. “I’m calling to help others who may be in similar straits. You see, both my daughter and I were badly disfigured in the fire in which my wife died. We’re not attractive to anyone else.”

  Even in a society that had at one seemingly arbitrary point instantaneously exchanged the Puritanism that had been basic since its importers deboarded at Plymouth Rock for the licentiousness of the Roman baths (only yesterday the movies were so bluenosed that husband and wife could not be shown as occupying the same bed; now yesterday’s shameful parts were everywhere on obligatory display and polymorphous perversity was lauded, and often practiced, by clergymen), even in a place and time where in peep-show films one could watch a German shepherd copulating with a human female, a male in ardent erotic sport with an underaged girl represented as being of his own flesh and blood, there was amongst the callers to Dr. Kellog no paucity of those who disapproved of simple sex education in the schools, any manifestation of sexual inversion including that discreetly practiced in private, any heterosexual connection not sanctioned by marriage, and in fact, with some, any sex whatever including the solitary: there actually still were parents who tried to discourage their offspring from masturbating.

  But some complaints eventually revealed more than first met the eye.

  “Surely that’s harmless,” Dr. Kellog said. “Would you rather he impregnate a young girl or get a disease from a streetwalker?”

  “But isn’t he doing it too much? He stays in the bathroom for hours.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s normal enough, including the borrowed underwear. How old is the boy?”

  “Doctor,” said the woman, “I wasn’t telling the exact truth. He’s my husband.”

  Kellog recommended professional counseling.

  Another wife and mother said her thirty-year-old son had separated from his spouse and come back to live at home. “I think something’s going on between him and his stepsister. She’s only twelve: that’s the thing.”

  “Have you tried confronting him about the matter? Simply telling him of your concern. Discreetly, nonconfrontationally, of course.”

  “I don’t know,” said the mother. “He tends to fly off the handle at any hint of criticism. He was always like that as a young kid. And that’s why his marriage broke up. He says his wife was always needling him. He just couldn’t take it.”

  “It doesn’t sound like a healthy situation, Phyllis.”

  “It’s not his fault, see,” said Phyllis. “The girl is quite a tease. She’ll sometimes run around in scanty attire, and she’s already getting to be, uh, you know, developed. She’ll sit on his lap and scrootch around, or she’ll suddenly dig him in the ribs or grab something of his, like his pen while he’s trying to write a check, and run to some corner
of the house, and he’s supposed to chase her.”

  “Does he?”

  ‘Yeah, and they’re gone a long while, sometimes.”

  “You’ll really have to discuss the matter with him. And speak to the girl too, separately, privately. It may all still be relatively innocent, at least in deed, but it could go too far.” He saw a commercial was due. “Try that, Phyllis, and good luck. Now—”

  “Please, doctor,” said Phyllis. “I can’t get on any worse terms with my stepdaughter. She hates me already for marrying her father. And the fact is, I haven’t been getting along lately with my husband. If he finds out about this, I don’t know what he’ll do. He’s never liked my son.”

  Kellog put some severity into his voice. “I am sorry, Phyllis, but we are simply out of time—”

  “She’s just a little chippy, Doctor, is what she is. I made a bad mistake marrying this man. He’s run up all kinds of debts and last week he just went and sold my car. I’ll tell you what I think, awful as it is. I think he might even be instigating the girl to do this to my son, to get something to blackmail him with.”

  “Phyllis—”

  “Could I just please stay on the line until after the commercial?”

  Kellog never usually permitted this sort of thing, which could too easily be abused, for every caller’s predicament was desperate according to him- or herself, and it was unfair to those waiting in the telephonic queue to allow one person to monopolize the doctor’s attention—but, more important, the professional broadcaster’s assumption was that the audience, many of whom were, at any given hour, in cars, had necessary limits to its attention.

  But he now granted Phyllis’ wish, and when he returned to the air after recorded commercials had been played, he said, “Tell your husband candidly about the girl and your son, but don’t mention your suspicions about his own motives. I leave it up to you to decide whether you want to stay married to this man.”

  “I’m afraid I signed over most of my property to him, so I couldn’t afford a breakup now.”

  Phyllis’ problem was then essentially one of irresponsible naïveté. This must be apparent to all, and Kellog felt that to maintain the respect of his listeners he had to make note of it. “How did you let this man gain such power over you?”

  “Sex,” Phyllis said. “I never had been made love to by anybody else like that. I never even had an orgasm with my first husband. With this guy, every single time. I have a whole series with the clitoris and then there it comes, the big vaginal bang. I didn’t believe in that until the first time I had one.” She chuckled. “And you know, his penis isn’t all that big. It’s just a little bitty thing, in fact. It’s the way he uses it, and his fantastic hands, and also his incredible ability to stimulate me orally.”

  Kellog could well remember that not too many years earlier “damn” and “hell” were taboo on radio and that he himself had not known the proper name for the clitoris during his first marriage, and that wife returned the favor by never even, unless guided physically, touching him below the waist. And yet at the time he had thought they were satisfactorily compatible as to sex, and so apparently had she, whose complaint against him was that his business kept him too much on the road, whereas the choirmaster was always nearby. Now there were ordinary laypersons who not only were possessed of clinical information about sex and routinely practiced refinements and embellishments of an act that was basically so stark as practiced by all other mammals, but also boasted to an audience of countless invisible strangers. Certainly it was something that Kellog himself could not have considered doing, and no doubt it was his disdain for such callers that gave him sufficient authority to be respected by them.

  He now told Phyllis that the choices before her were simple: she had only to assemble the respective arguments, one, two, three, on either side, and then count up the points of each. Such enumeration was soon institutionalized by him as the Count, and it became a kind of Kellogian trademark. Before long the callers anticipated it and by the time they reached him already had made their counts and wanted them assessed.

  “Made two columns on a sheet of paper like you said, listed everything in either Column A or B. What I get from my girlfriend in A, as opposed to the disadvantages in B. Like she’s real pretty, A. But she’s unfaithful, B. B, her father hates me. A, I get along real well with her mom. She claims she’s really in love with me: that’s A. But so far I can’t get her to engage in any real sex, B. It’s not like she won’t ever do it, according to her: she’s just waiting for the right time. I guess that would be A, because it’s not turning me down. But suppose it’s just teasing: that would definitely be in Column B.”

  “All right, Tim. I get the point.”

  “Then what should I do?”

  “I can’t make your mind up for you. That’s what you’re supposed to do with the help of the Count.”

  “Trouble is,” Tim said, “I know she’s having some kind of sex with other guys, which isn’t good, but if it’s nothing more than she does with me, then it’s not all that bad. I guess I could live with it, if all she’s doing is hand jobs.”

  “That’s what she does for you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, it’s something, then, isn’t it? But maybe you should consider playing the field as she does. Try dating some other girls and see what happens.”

  “I knew you’d come up with the perfect solution,” Tim said fervently. “Thank you, Doctor.”

  Male homosexual callers tended to be more romantic and less coarse or clinical than many of the heterosexuals who applied to Dr. Kellog. Their sort of conjunction was invariably called “making love” and references to it were sans details—to Kellog’s great relief, for any show of distaste for any sexual variant could get one in trouble in contemporary New York, yet he still found certain images uncomfortable, e.g., any that featured the rectum of any living thing (of whichever sex) as an erotic part. And if they were almost never merry or even light of heart while calling themselves “gay” (a term he eventually identified as a kind of whistling in the dark, a self-courage builder), they were unfailingly civil in the purest sense of the word, commonly amongst the best citizens, unless of course some individual went too far, but that could happen with zealots of any persuasion.

  “My lover and I have gotten into a complex situation,” said a caller named David, “and I can’t talk directly to him about it. He’s—I’ll call him Martin—Martin’s a good deal older than I. He’s middle-aged, married, and with a family. His children, a boy and a girl, are of my generation. Now what happened was by accident, really. I got to know his son, who is absolutely straight. This son, I’ll call him Rob, and I in fact work together at the same firm. He hasn’t any idea I know his father, let alone have an affair going with him. Now, Rob keeps wanting to introduce me to his sister, in fact to double-date with him and his fiancée. I have kept putting him off, but unfortunately he knows that I don’t have a regular girl. He really cares for me as a friend, and I am touched, because I don’t think ever in my life I’ve had any male friends with whom I wasn’t also involved sexually, except maybe when I was just a little kid.”

  “Has he ever mentioned you by name to his father?”

  “He and his father have had nothing to do with one another for several years. What’s more, I don’t know but strongly suspect from little hints that their estrangement is due to Martin’s, the father’s, sexual orientation, which I think Rob may have his suspicions about. Rob is quite bigoted, very anti-gay. I don’t have the courage to reveal myself to him, let alone my relationship with his father. He keeps pressuring me about his sister. You might think I could go out with her once anyway to get him off my case, but she lives at home. Imagine calling for her and being greeted at the door by her father, my lover.”

  “Why don’t you try this?” said Kellog. “You say Rob knows you haven’t got a regular girl. But I’m sure you could get a date with one of your female friends. Take her out with Rob and
his fiancée. You don’t have to pretend you and she are that closely involved as yet, but you could let Rob think you’re sufficiently interested in her not to want to see anyone else romantically at this time. That would take care of the matter of the sister.”

  “I suppose I could do that,” said David. “I’m on good terms with the divorced lady in the next apartment, but then I’ve got all kinds of female friends.”

  “I wouldn’t advise much real lying, though, David,” Dr. Kellog said. “Asking your date to say she knows you better than she does and so on. Such misrepresentations can be embarrassing when you least expect it. Now, as to your lover, Martin. Why in the world couldn’t you tell him about your friendship with his son Rob? Tell him just as you’ve told me. There’s nothing shameful or dishonest about your friendship with his son, who is your colleague at work. By the way, isn’t he at least aware that you work at the same place as Rob?”

  “No,” David said quickly. “He doesn’t have any idea of even what kind of work I do. I happen to love Martin, but he’s terribly self-concerned. All he really wants me for is his own gratification. Despite his age, he’s sex-crazed. That’s all he cares about, not me really. Yet I love him. Isn’t it weird, with me the young and attractive one? Yes, it’s true. I would put my hand in the fire for him. In return, he’d just jump into bed with someone else. He’s cold, ruthless. Martin’s cruel. He—” David sounded ready to weep, and Kellog couldn’t let that happen.

  “All right, then. I think your best course of action would be to tell Martin about knowing Rob. If Martin’s interest in you, as you say, is mostly physical, then why would he care much about your friendship with his son, since it is furthermore nonerotic?”

  “Oh,” said David, gasping, “you don’t know how malicious he can be. He’ll immediately call up Rob and taunt him. ‘Your best friend is one of those faggots you so detest!’ He wouldn’t pass up a God-given opportunity of that sort.”

  “And Rob would be outraged with you…” Kellog really had nothing against the sexually inverted as long as their problems were routine, but when complexities appeared, one’s instinctive though unspoken reaction could too easily be, even in an oversophisticated era: Why in the name of God don’t you just go straight?