Horizontal Woman (2 page)

“Oh we’ll get into this,” she says, “we’ll get right into it at the time of my next visit. I have to be out here for a statutory home visit next month. We visit once every three months, you know. You’re due in May, August, November and February. Those months. This July visit was just an extra. Not a statutory but what we call in the department a proprietary. We’ll talk all this over when I come by on my regular visit in a couple of weeks and try to systematize your needs.”

“This wasn’t a regular visit? This was a extra? Well that may be all right for me but my wife isn’t going to like this. The
ropa —
”

Post-coital
tristesse
seems to have turned Morales stupid as well. “You mean you come out to see me special?”

“I wanted to service your needs,” she says and risks a quiet wink. There are disadvantages in explicitness: still, at this socio-economic level, how subtle can she be? She would like Mr. Morales to know that she desired him. It can only help his self-image.

“Needs,” he says “but I have such needs. You could not understand these, Miss Moore, the needs of this family. I mean you a social worker but — ”

“I know, Mr. Morales,” she says, “I know that, I really do, but we can’t solve all of this at first; we have to go at it piece by piece. By piece. Did anyone ever tell you by the way that you are an attractive man? You are, you know. I want you now to keep all of your appointments at the division of employment and rehabilitation.”

“Employment? Rehabilitation?”

“That division”

“Oh. Division. Attractive? What do you mean by this attractive? Have you saying — ”

“Oh we can’t go into that now,” she says, “just believe me; in your own way you are. You certainly are and you must report to the division every week and try to let them help you. Next month now we’ll have a long talk. Mr. Morales.”

Their new relationship is still unfixed. She cannot call him by his first name, she knows, until at least the next time because their relationship must be kept on a level of relative impersonality. Besides, although it is right in her fieldbook, penciled in by the previous worker, she is not sure that she
knows
his name. Felipe? Perhaps that was it: Felipe Morales.
Felipe
, she may mutter to him the next or third time.
My señor, Felipe
.

“I’ll see you next month, Mr. Morales,” she says now, keeping it within the professional context but tossing him a careful smile just in case and, tucking the fieldbook under her arm, feeling the restoration of their more formal relationship as she does so (above all she owes him a firmly structured situation, a central and authoritarian figure) she goes to the door and, opening it, finds herself in the lightless hallway. She pulls the door behind her to face the familiar investigatorial dark. With old skill (she has learned a few things in her time; one is the essential construction of these oldline tenements) she manages a flight of stairs in the more congenial hallway and then, increasing her pace, springs past the mailboxes (all of them broken) and comes onto the street. Boerum Street.

It is a splendid summer day on Boerum Street: the July heat not yet congealed toward madness, the disadvantaged still on their stoops or, from the very depths of the alienation effect, playing an educationally-disadvantaged poker at tables set up for them by the buildings department on the sidewalk. They nod at her. At Elizabeth Moore.

She nods back. There is no problem. It all comes down to the question of handling these people; she learned the secret early on. Professionalism is one kind of protection and there is always the Hidden Part. Only the despair remains, despair that she can move through painfully bit by bit and that long before she had even touched the surface of loss the spawn of Felipe Morales will have come to another generation. Dislocation and need multiplied past Malthusian proportions. And tumble at last into the Fire.

But she, Elizabeth Moore, is no apocalyptician. Not at this moment. Her tasks are simple, her own needs focused, her devices in connection. Chip away. One little bit at a time. Mountains from tiny kernels, great oaks from sprinkles of fallen rock. She can try to beat it. Piece by piece. By piece.

Walking briskly to Fulton Street, Elizabeth enjoys the momentary open space of Nostrand Avenue, feels the wind of the tenements blow against her face and her depression wafts away: she feels released, fulfilled, although there will certainly be some pain in her thighs for the next day or so, part of the price of effort. She has good thighs, good breasts, a striking if somewhat affected face — she knows all of this because she has been told so by clients and dates many times — but she knows what they can never tell her: that her best feature is her compassion and she wears it like armor through all the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant, listening with amusement to some of the remarks which she hears drifting toward her from men muttering in storefronts, peddlers working under huge umbrellas near the bus stops.
Hey baby
, they are saying out of their ignorance and desire,
do you want to fuck? Dios, would I like to fuck that
and so on and so forth; so highly limited and they will never understand her compassion. From compassion she could reach out to them, from compassion she could gather them, even the ugliest to her and say, “If only fucking could solve your problems; if only I could fuck you right here and now to prove to you that the basic structure of your life is untenable and this cheap lust of yours merely an excuse against coming to grips with any of it,” but she cannot; she knows that she cannot do this because she must save what she has for her caseload and so she only passes all of them down two blocks of Nostrand Avenue, a chastened, quiet smile on her face, a swing to her hips, a faint buoyancy to her behind which, she knows, must desperately inflame the poor things but there is nothing that she can do about it … and in daylight, carrying her fieldbook, rape is impossible.

She waits for the bus and goes back to the welfare center. She is due for two more statutory visits these days and a pending application from an old Chinese woman … but they will have to wait. She has nothing more to give; she no less than anyone is entitled to respite. Back to the welfare center she will go and there perform paperwork, the least diverting but most necessary part of her job.

At the center, in mid-afternoon, her supervisor, James Oved, tries once again to put the make on her. Elizabeth has no interest in the man or in anyone at the center; her sexual energies, such as they are, are totally dedicated to her caseload … but Oved will have none of this. He has gotten into his mind the perverse idea that Elizabeth will not date him because he is a Negro and short of giving him facts, documentation, background on the many Negro clients she has laid (and she is too sensible to divulge any of this to anyone) she must put up with his advances and insults in the interests of her higher mission. She is still only a provisional worker; she will not have her full civil service status for another three months at which time she will apply to transfer to another case unit. For the moment, however, she must listen to Oved, accept what he has to say, come to terms with her own subtle revulsion which is not easy. “Listen here,” Oved says in a high whine, motioning her over to his desk at three-thirty, pointing to the Morales case record which she has put through his incoming box along with a small grant for school clothing, “you can’t do this kind of thing. It’s not time for school clothing until September; this is months too early. And besides that, I already checked through this son of a bitch’s case record. They had two hundred dollars for clothing last November; they’re way above my level of approval.”

“I’m sorry,” Elizabeth says, putting her hands flatly, palms down on Oved’s desk and trying to look away from him, down the vast, smoky surfaces of the loft over which, even at this late hour, several dozen people are scuttling from file drawers to doors or back again, “the needs are really evident — ”

“What needs?” Oved says. “Now this man won’t work. He simply won’t work at all; he’s been claiming a heart condition for fifteen years and the doctors can find nothing wrong with him, nothing
is
wrong with him except that he’s a bum but he’s got a nice, sweet new lady caseworker and he’s going to take you through the mill. Now listen — ”

“I don’t think you understand, Mr. Oved,” Elizabeth says quietly. “Mr. Morales is severely decompensated. He has no self-esteem whatsoever; his asking for clothing is merely his way of asking for love. If we can
show
him — ”

“Don’t talk to me about love,” Mr. Oved says. “I make one hundred and thirty dollars gross a week, take home about half of that and no one loves me.” His face seems to slant, his eyes dilate. “Least of all you,” he says. “Could I take you out to dinner tonight?”

“I’m busy.”

“That’s what I mean. You’re always busy. How about tomorrow night?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Oved,” Elizabeth says, “I’m going steady with someone. And besides that, I would never go out with anyone in the office; I’ve told you that. I don’t think it’s fair; too many problems come into a relationship.”

“I know about your relationship,” Oved says sullenly. His face seems to inflate, his black cheeks glow, of a sudden he looks three or four shades darker, reminding Elizabeth of the intensity which Martin Luther King seemed to possess when he was speaking on television, “reason you won’t go out with me is that you’re one prejudiced chick. Afraid to lay it on the line and tell me the truth. Well, I don’t care; I’m going to supervise you and make an investigator out of you no matter what tricks you pull.”

“I’m not prejudiced. Mr. Oved, it isn’t that at all,” Elizabeth says. They have been this way before but there seems no end to the man’s insistences. “You have no right to even
say
that. When the NAACP lunch was here two months ago I was on the serving line for two
hours
and besides that — ” She stops, in some confusion. Despite her resolve, Elizabeth had been about to tell her supervisor that not three days ago she had copulated violently with William Buckingham III, the 18-year-old and home relief receiving son of Mille Perkins, a lifelong recipient of Aid to Dependent Children. “Oh God,” Willie Buckingham III had said to her during and after intercourse, “we gone through hundreds of social workers but never one like you lady,” and it had been good, she had been able to bring the young man to resolve to continue toward his high school diploma so that he would be able to socialize with people like Elizabeth. But she cannot tell this to James Oved; he is of a different circumstance altogether and in addition to reporting her instantly to his Case Supervisor for dismissal charges, he would somehow manage to take her action with Willie Buckingham personally, a slur on Oved’s own sexuality. So she shakes her head, mumbles, says nothing at all and lets Oved continue.

“I don’t care,” he is saying, “don’t care what kind of bullshit this Morales cat has been giving you, bullshit not being a very nice word but then I only went to a Southern Baptist college, I don’t care what you say about his self-esteem. We are not social workers here. We are
investigators
. Our job is to protect the City of New York and taxpayer’s funds and reduce the public assistance roles. Morales is a fraud. Three-quarters of your caseload are frauds. And besides that, you haven’t made an entry on Morales’ resource situation. This is the third time I’ve warned you that you have to update the folder every time and explain that you asked whether or not the client has found any new resources. You take this whole thing back, Miss Moore and you do it right and if you want to put through school clothing I want a complete memo for the case supervisor.” He turns, looks heavily at the desk, rubs his hands over the frayed blotter. “The other stuff we’ll just forget,” he says. “I don’t want to hear any more about that again.”

“Yes,” Elizabeth says, “yes,” taking the huge Morales folder, spilling little halos and streamers of its contents behind her as she staggers back to her desk in the otherwise empty case unit, managing to keep tears from her eyes. It is so hard. It is so hard to be a social worker here and to try to do rehabilitative work. So hard to be able to take the job seriously. She wishes that she was with a good service agency like Catholic Charities or the Jewish Family Group where she could do serious counseling and devote herself wholly to her clients’ needs but what can she do? … she has only a BA degree. Sitting at her desk, picking up pieces from the Morales folder, trying to put James Oved from her mind Elizabeth succumbs momentarily to the feeling that she would like to quit, put all of this behind her and give up the quest … but it is an old impulse, she discards it easily, she bites her lip and returns to work. Nothing was easy. Nothing was ever easy. Felipe Morales waits for her and behind him a thousand others and they need, need so greatly that if it were not for her, what would they do against all the Oveds?

Elizabeth, alone, attends a college graduates & medical personnel mixer at the Hotel New Yorker. She feels that it is important to retain some connection to the social rituals of the outer society or so she has told herself but as she stands in a huge room, backed against a wall with a watered drink in her hand, watching the medical students & college graduates descend upon her like a group of slumlords … she realizes yet again that her dedication and interests must most truly lie in the area of social dislocation. “Come on up to my pad, you’ll love it,” a heavy, sweating medical student tells her, rubbing his palms together, “and anyway we’re in a time of the complete destruction of the double standard, am I right? Am I right? am I right?” he says and puts his hands on her back. She feels their pressure like shells against her spine and tries to put down a flare of revulsion. “No,” she says, “I’m just waiting to meet a girlfriend here, we have to go somewhere together,” but that is no good for the medical student; he is insistent, he is desperate, his name, he says, is Harry and he is as much entitled to consideration as anyone in the room. Elizabeth considers all of this, then at some level gravely agrees: Harry too is one of the socially decompensated although at his socioeconomic level he could never admit this and she agrees to go to his pad. He takes her there on the IRT local, up to the 96th Street stop on the west side and by the time they have gotten there he has managed a hand on her thigh and a confession that he is not a medical student at all, not even a college graduate, but the committee at the door does not check credentials and anyway he is a creative writer which is more important. Elizabeth follows him out the subway doors, she follows him to his dismal one-room furnished apartment which reminds her of the Buckingham quarters in their dishevelment and high, hard smell, but it is not Willie Buckingham III who puts urgent hands on her in the dark and begs for intercourse.

“Please,” Harry the creative writer says, “Please, I need you so much,” and tries to part her dress. Willie Buckingham, even though just eighteen had worked her over with purpose and assurance; this one does not but the way to the door is too wearying and Elizabeth decides that she will let Harry have his way … she is more than passably attractive, she is the best girl he will ever have in his entire life, twenty years from now, lying in the dark, he may still be reconstructing her for masturbatory fantasies which would be (Elizabeth decides) a kind of immortality. He talks to her of his unpublished novels as he gets her clothes off, talks to her of his schemes and plans as he himself undresses, talks to her of his literary intentions as, stumbling through piles of books and clothing, they make their way to the studio couch. Moaning, he throws himself upon her and ejaculates immediately all over her thighs and waist, panting with disgust as he upends himself and Elizabeth decides, not for the first time, that she must save herself for her clients. Any other way is pointless. It is not as if even the men enjoyed it. At this socioeconomic level, sex must be the grubbiest and dirtiest relationship going on in all of New York City. “Let’s get together again,” Harry says as she puts on her clothes in silence, whisks her way out of the apartment and is gone.