Horizontal Woman (10 page)

At home she finds a letter from her father and after eating and showering and taking her phone off the hook (she will not, she will
not
have Willie Buckingham intruding in her life this night) she feels that she is ready to face it. The letter, as is the case with all by her father, is long and somewhat convoluted, filled with strikeovers, erasures, and strange paragraphing on the typewriter which as he has often said is his attempt to find a definite and unique style in which he can break out of formal expression and into some apprehension of reality. Much of the letter seems to be the same old stuff: his unemployment has run out but he still does not feel an urgency to find a job, he believes that after fifty-one years he is just beginning to find himself, he has been doing a lot of reading in the Impressionist school over the past few months and does not agree by a longshot that Dadaism is dead but believes that it is merely waiting, albeit somewhat incoherently for a revival … but toward the end of the letter is something interesting, something relatively new to his correspondence and to the best of her ability she pays attention to it while letting the other parts run out and filter past her mind.

She puts the letter away, quietly hangs up the phone, thinks of the letter as she lies back on the bed, opening her body up for the first time that day to the fatigue she must truly feel. She has given so much, cared so much, paid so much and what has she gotten? How far has it taken her? What is — and she must face this now — the
justice
of all of this?

Nevertheless, she has a life to live. She has a caseload to service. She has things to do. She will be on her desk through the end of the week and in that time there is so incredibly much to do that she is appalled.

She must somehow explain her transfer to her clients. (For she knows she must accept the transfer, at least for the moment: her father’s suggestion bears much thought and she may even do it soon but for the instant she needs time to think and she also needs the money.) She must, in the case of those with whom she has fornicated, bring their insights and epiphanies to fruition within a matter of minutes rather than weeks and months. She must tie up loose ends, try to be in touch with each and every one of her clients to explain what has happened to her and help them find the strength to lose her. Even the disgusting old men in the Homeway Residence deserve to be told. She will have to work sixteen hours a day in and out of the field to even come close.

So she comes in at 8:30, by 9:00 is already finished with her paperwork for the day and ready to go to the field. Oved looks through and around her, restored to the cheerfulness which seems to be his new mood, the outburst of the evening far away from him. “Going to the field, Miss Moore?” he says. “Yes, I’m going to the field.”

“Going to say goodbye to all of your caseload, is that it? Go ahead Miss Moore; go ahead. Let them know that you’re leaving. They may break down and all kill themselves. That would be nice.”

“I don’t like your sarcasm.” She will be cold with Oved: cold and deliberate. She will show him that he is no longer worthy of the respect given by emotion. This is the only way that a man like this can be treated; she will refuse to acknowledge his humanity. “Not at all,” she says. “And I don’t appreciate your liberties.”

“Liberties, liberties,” Oved says, “I don’t take no liberties at all; I make six thousand and fifty dollars a year breaking my ass while worthless bastards like the one you’re so worried about knock down twice that in free money and off the books bartending and mail-order screwing. As far as I can see I lost my liberty when I applied for a job here instead of getting on the line down at the other end of the center.”

“You’re a bitter man, Mr. Oved,” she says, “a very bitter, hurt man. I think you need psychotherapy.”

“Well I’ll be damned,” Oved says smiling broadly, “I don’t think I need psycho
therapy
. Of course a little relief might be good and then if I could get a little of that social worker therapy you’re giving out I might do better. But you go on your way, Miss Moore. Don’t you worry about me. You got clients to see, needs to service. You got to say goodbye to all your whores and pimps.”

“That’s right,” she says, without emotion. “I do.” She will no longer give the Oveds of this world the satisfaction of lapsed control. With dignity she takes her fieldbook, puts it under her arm and walks down the steps of the center to the timeclock, punches out and waits on the corner for the Fulton Street bus. She will be in the field until ten o’clock tonight tidying up, she knows. Already she is exhausted and why shouldn’t she be?

The first one she will see, she decides, is Felipe Morales. Their relationship is hardly begun and now it is ended; perhaps she can hasten things along, give him something which will carry him through all of the alienation and pain to come. After Felipe she will have to see Willie of course; even though Willie has hurt her a great deal in the last couple of days he is still her most promising case and she must see what can be done there. And there are others to see as well, of course, many others, and somewhere toward the end of the day (or at the very latest by the end of the week) she will have to see Schnitzler. It is impossible to imagine what may have gone on in the Lubavitcher congregation. What shame and dislocation the man must feel! Maybe she will be able to yield him a little supportive therapy, grant him some measure of accomplishment and dignity to carry forth. In order to do this she will probably have to go to bed with him again but Schnitzler, she decides, will be the only one. The rest she must cut off immediately. Otherwise, they would find it too painful.

Musing, humming, looking through her fieldbook she takes the bus, sits in it, going through the entries by family and family member. Already she feels a premonitory nostalgia; she knows how she felt when she looked at these pages for the first time — Salant’s fieldbook, all in his tight, repressed hand — and how impossible it seemed to her that she would even be able to sort these people out much less do anything for them. And now she knows all of them, knows all of them well: even to the grubbiest and dingiest alcoholic in the Homeway these are her people and she has done for them all that she can. She knows that she will miss them. She will miss them terribly; in a very real sense they have given her as much as she has tried to give them and any social worker can make this admission without shame. She loves them. Yes. Even the worst of them she loves. They are all little bits and pieces of her, scattered through the nightmare of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Although she will never see any of them again (her professionalism dictates the complete severing of all such relationships when the worker leaves the case) she will think of them always.

At Nostrand Avenue she exits, walks toward Boerum Street, abstracted and for the first time in several days optimistic. What has happened to her, the outcome of Oved’s bitterness and jealousy, is unfortunate but she knows that she has a legacy and the legacy will live. Five of the Morales children are playing by the garbage cans outside and they nod to her, call her
Miss Moore ficci
as she smiles and bounds into the building. They know who she is. Even to the children she has managed a meaningful relationship. They care.

She walks upstairs and knocks on the Morales door, then enters without waiting for it to open. Once again she is assaulted by steam; little Mrs. Morales sits in the corner, smashing roaches into the floor with a newspaper and beaming at her with idiotic, mono-lingual good cheer as she passes by, seeing Felipe sitting in the bedroom, putting on his shoes. “Felipe,” she says, risking it, “Felipe, how are you? I have something to tell you.”

“Ah, Miss Moore,” Morales says. He beams up at her, his face glowing with cheer and happiness. “I see you again. So soon. It is wonderful. I have been thinking about you so much.” He stands, moves behind her to the door, kicks it closed with a bare foot and winks. “My wife know nothing,” he says. “She very stupid and this just an interview between us, she thinks. I’m so glad to see you.” He reaches toward her, grasps her breasts. She feels her breasts twist in his hand and with a yelp of pain drops the fieldbook. Embarrassed, blushing, he retrieves it and tosses it against a wall.

“We make love,” Morales says. “Right now.
Magnifico
. Wonderful what we make in this room.”

“Felipe,” Elizabeth says, “Felipe, you don’t understand; I came here to tell you something” — but she is unable to finish the sentence; she is in the Morales grasp, twirled in his grip, falling to the bed. She lands in the filthy sheets with a smash, feeling herself bouncing and colliding off children’s toys seemingly buried within. Morales appears above her, already in a sexual position, his palms at the side of her head, smiling. He prods her panties with an enormous erection, smiling. “See,” he says, “this is how I am for you. This is how I am for you now always. You are my lover. My
amor
. No?”

“Felipe,” Elizabeth says, “I’m glad, glad to see that you believe yourself worthy now. It’s a big step, an important step, Felipe, but I did come here to tell you — ”

“Ah,” Morales says, “you have to tell me nothing; it is only a feeling. Like you told me, a feeling.” His mustaches flare, his little eyes glint. “Let me show you,” he says, reaching down, pulling his pants free with a yank, exposing and holding himself. “This,” he says, “this is — ”

“No,” she says, “you don’t understand. We’ve got to talk, Felipe. Your wife — ”

“My wife know nothing. What she know is the best for her. Ah,” Morales says, and puts his organ against the sheen of her panties, reaches inside to stroke her thigh and fumble for her pubis, “this is beautiful. This is what I want.”

“Felipe,” she says, “Felipe,” and then, dreadfully, she realizes that he is already poised for entrance, his fingers now digging into her crotch, her panties coming apart seamlessly in his palm, his prick now ready to slide in and she cannot take this, nothing is working out at all; this is not the way she imagined it. She begins to struggle and thrash on the bed.
“Felipe!”
she screams,
“Mr. Morales!”
and finally then he stops, stops in mid-stroke, his little face looking at her angrily and somehow in this light as well (can she believe this?) whimsically.

“You no hold out on me,” he says. “You tell me you make love; then we make love. Now you come the second time and you tell me making love no good, you bitch? You tell me that.” His mustaches move ferally; something within him, she sees, has been broken but she is more afraid of his rage, at the moment, than a new psychic block. “You must listen to me,” she says. “I’m leaving, Felipe. Mr. Morales. Leaving.”

“Leaving? Leaving who? For what?”

“I’ve been transferred. Out of the welfare center.”

“I don’t understand,” he says, hunching above her. He reaches once again toward her pubis, then thinks better of it and drops a hand down along her leg. “What is transfers? What do you want? You come to close my case, you bitch?”

His rage is merely the hopeless cover for fear; she is not frightened. “Out of the center, Felipe,” she says patiently, hauling herself up on her elbows. “I mean, I’m no longer going to be your investigator next week. You’ll have a new investigator.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“Mr. Salant again?”

“I don’t think so. He’s a parole officer now.”

“He always say he send me to jail,” Morales says, musing. He looks down at her with regret. “You really not want to make love?” he says. Emotional liability is present; now he swings toward pathos. “That what you come to tell me?”

“I came to tell you that I won’t be your investigator anymore. I came to say goodbye.”

“Son of a bitch,” Morales says. He clambers off her, cursing in Spanish. “Bitches, capons. They send you from the special investigations section I know. They send you to get Morales off relief. Now you say Morales raped you and you go.”

“It isn’t that way,” she says, “it isn’t that way at all.” She reaches up to touch his cheek, then thinks better of it as his breath immediately quickens and he seems to poise to leap again, and she withdraws her hand. “Nobody’s going to report you. Nobody’s from special investigations. These things happen. I’m going to a new welfare center.”

“You no be my investigator?”

“No. Not as of next week.”

“I never had an investigator like you. There never been an investigator like you.”

“I’m pleased. I’m pleased, Felipe.”

“Salant was no investigator like you. That bitch, Miss Ames, before him long time ago, she not like you. You like no one else we ever had, Miss Moore. Why you leaving?”

“Procedures,” she says and then realizing that the word will be meaningless to him. “Because that’s the way it has to be,” she says instead. “Things move on. People change. The department has its reasons.”

“There never any investigator like you in the whole history. I no believe it.”

“It’s true, Felipe,” she says. She must restore his confidence now, build him up piece by piece so that he will be able to accept this but then she has no time. She has already wasted too much time converting from the sexual reaction. “But I’ll miss you very much. You are my most important client. I will miss you a great deal.”

“Then why you go?”

“It isn’t in my hands, Felipe. The department makes these decisions. I would like to stay.”

“So you tell them you want to stay. You tell them you want to stay with Felipe Morales.”

“They wouldn’t listen.”

“It’s sad,” Morales says, nodding. He seems to have accepted now the fact of her leaving. “Sad that you are leaving, Miss Moore.” His eyes brighten. “Still, there is something. You will come back and see me?”

“No, Felipe.”

“No? Why no?”

“Because I won’t be your social worker any more and it wouldn’t be fair to either of us to continue the relationship. You’ll have someone else to be your investigator and I’ll have other — clients.”

“I don’t want no other investigator.”

“I don’t want any other clients,” Elizabeth says. “But that’s the way it is. That’s the way the department works. Also the world. You must accept this, Felipe. You must accept these facts.”

“Accept what facts?”

Perhaps she has gone too fast. “That the world doesn’t work for either of us, Felipe. That we have to make our own way and carry our own responsibilities. This can be a great lesson to you. But haven’t we learned something from each other? Don’t we mean something to each other?”

“I don’t understand nothing,” Morales says sullenly. He backs into a corner, kicks off his pants, shows her his erection which is still enormous. “I think it’s all bullshit. I think you from special investigations section and now you cry rape. You say Morales, he fucks girl workers.”

“I am
not
.”

“Then why you leaving?”

Maddening. It is maddening. “I already explained that, Felipe,” she says, patiently. “I explained it twice. Because that’s the way it has to be.”

“I don’t want any more explain. You know what I want?” Morales says, tearing off his shirt and moving in one mad gesture atop her on the bed, “you know what? I want to fuck, that’s what I want. You no hold out on me you bitch. I been waiting for this. You lead me on and then you tell me no more. Morales is a man. Morales not a pig or a chicken, he a man. He no laughing at. He no fool.” Groaning he inserts himself into her, frantically begins to pump. “I show you, bitch,” he says. “You scream, you get my wife and I slam your mouth.”

She closes her eyes. The pain is intense. She knows that she should not permit this, yet short of total decompensation or violence she cannot get out of it. “All right,” she says, gathering his head to her, “all right, all right.” He eases all the way into her, she feels his width.