Horizontal Woman (4 page)

Elizabeth shakes her head, picks up her fieldbook, takes a look around the apartment. For the first time she feels some regret: regret not for her behavior-pattern (for, confronted by all this need and longing how could she have done otherwise?) but for cajoling Schnitzler into an act which obviously he cannot rationalize. He would need heavy support-therapy to accept the lustful side of his own nature; she does not have the time or experience for this kind of counseling. Then too, there are intricacies to the chassidic subculture which, somewhere along the line, must have evaded her: she did not think that Schnitzler was capable of moral complexities. Tired: she feels tired, that is the basic thing. She has been trying too much. She has been pushing too hard. Overwhelmed by her inadequacy and the needs which it must, almost by itself, satisfy she has failed to take herself into consideration and this has been the prime failing.

She puts her fieldbook under her arm, adjusts her pocketbook over her shoulder with the other hand. Tonight she will allow herself to rest. She will for the moment forget her burdens and put the job behind her. Oved himself had told her when she began in the case-unit, only two weeks at the training institute behind her, “You can’t take this thing home with you. You have to leave it here and forget it. Otherwise it will tear you to pieces. Look at me: I haven’t missed a night’s sleep in five years because I learned. But a young girl like you, right out of college, sometimes has to learn the hard way. Don’t learn the hard way. How would you like to go out for dinner tonight?” and so on, some of it good, some of it bad, but all of it to be considered.

The Oveds have their purposes too, their reasons, their motives. Because he is her supervisor and she does not like him is no reason to totally disregard everything he is saying. “Yes,” Elizabeth mutters, adjusting a shelf of prayer books which, seemingly responsively, fall luminously over one another, sifting aisles of dust into the room, “yes, I will rest. I will relax, I will put all of this away from me,” and slightly comforted walks out of the apartment, leaving the door open behind her, into the midday streets of Williamsburgh and this one time home … on voluntary sick-leave.

In the early evening Oved calls her to check on her condition and she says she is fine, fine, feeling much better and he says that he is glad to hear this because she sounded a little upset, calling in from the field. The point is that if she feels better perhaps she would go out to dinner with him or at least he could come over to her apartment with some food and keep her company. When she says no, this is impossible; she has already told him what their situation must be and in any case she needs rest, Oved’s tone again changes and his conversation becomes slightly incoherent.

“You just think I’m some kind of a fool, Miss Moore,” he says, “always coming in and barking around and getting turned off by you and coming in again. Well, maybe I have my reasons. Maybe you ought to have more respect for James Oved than you do, maybe you ought to take me a little more seriously.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” she says, “I just think that we should — ”

“Maybe you don’t want to hurt me but you are hurting yourself, Miss Moore. Now, as long as I’m your supervisor and whatever you make of James Oved, you are going to do a job. You are going to meet the policies and procedures of this department and you are going to show some self-discipline. Now, you coming up for permanent status, Miss Moore, soon. I check over my workers’ records because that’s my responsibility. When you come up for certification you going to need your supervisor’s approval, are you aware of that?”

“Well, yes — ”

“And you aren’t going to
get
my approval if you don’t show a more professional attitude. Now this has nothing to do with your not going out with me; far as James Oved is concerned you can drop dead if that’s the way it has to be, on the social level. But on the business level you will remain one of my workers and will be handled in a professional way and I am not pleased with your performance.”

“All right,” Elizabeth says, switching sides on the bed, trying to push the phone away from her although this is immature thinking. Trying to relax alone at home might have been the wrong idea, “I’m trying to do a job. I take my work very seriously.”

“You may take it seriously,” Oved says in a high bleat, “but that seriousness don’t manifest itself in your case records and your performance. Your dictation is very weak, very skimpy and you letting those cats take you over the coals with a lot of lies and old bullshit. You be in the office tomorrow? I hope you be in the office tomorrow and we take a fresh start, look at this thing all over again. I am not happy, Miss Moore. This has nothing to do with sex. I am just not happy,” Oved says and before she can say anything, point out, perhaps, that he is projecting his own frustration upon her in an unwarranted way, Oved hangs up with a clash which sends small reverberations through her head, momentarily making her dizzy. It is not fair. It is not fair that she should have a supervisor like this. Most of the supervisors at the welfare center are women in their fifties who are overweight and need heavy glasses to read the case records but it would be her luck — and with all the responsibilities she has — that she would come up with an Oved. Still, there is nothing to be done. It is part of the burden of the job; she knew, at the beginning, that nothing would be easy.

She replaces the phone, falls back on the bed and begins absently to read the
Saturday Review of Literature
again but it is difficult, with all the tragedy she has seen, to take any of its empty liberalism seriously and so after a time she drops it across her lap, looks up at the ceiling, begins idly to inspect her apartment. It is not a very nice apartment, only a studio on a bad block off Atlantic Avenue, but then she arrived in Brooklyn to take the job at the department with very little money and highly disorganized and possibly this is the best she could have gotten; she has no fair complaint. The rent is only eighty-three dollars including the utilities which means that she has sixty-two dollars of her weekly salary to carry herself on and even with the twenty a week which she is sending back to her parents in Chicago (her father has quit his job as a bookbinder to look for a “more meaningful set of opportunities in the interpersonal structure” and in the meantime has run out his unemployment benefits) she has enough to live adequately, certainly far more than she would have if she were paying some of the rents she hears about. Even the welfare clients, most of them, are paying more than eighty-three dollars a month and that for living in dreadful, rotting tenements in the heart of the subculture; she should be grateful. She should, in fact, be grateful for everything: she has enough money, she has her health and she has a job through which she can make her life meaningful. How many others have that at twenty-three? Sometimes she thinks of some of the girls with whom she went to Beloit University and shudders for their deprivation, their ignorance, their lost possibilities, trapped into pointless marriages and irrelevant pregnancies … while she, Elizabeth Moore, is in the center of the urban dilemma, free to deal, if she will, with the world.

“I’m grateful,” Elizabeth says quietly, as she has often said before; the habit of talking to oneself is a harmless piece of projection which she knows in her own case to be not at all schizoid, “I’m fortunate. I have a chance. I can
do
something,” although what she has to do seems, as always, a little beyond her. Nevertheless, she succumbs to a moment of euphoria: things are not all that bad and if nothing else she has shown Schnitzler that ritual in itself is not the sufficient compensation for guilt. The phone rings. She knows it is Oved again. She will be firm and reasonable, quiet and contained. Above all, she will deal with him.

“Hello?” she says and then decides to be professional. “This is Elizabeth Moore.”

“Hello there, Miss Moore,” a voice drawls, “I did get your number you see? How you doing?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Who is this?” although she knows already; it must be one of her clients. Sooner or later they would break through the cycle of resistance, attempt to call her at home. She is establishing a relationship. “Who did you say this was?” she continues when there is momentarily no answer.

“Well I thought you would knew. Would know, I mean. This is Willie Wallace Buckingham.”

“Oh,” she says, “Willie. How are you?”

“Well, I’m pretty fine, Miss Moore. I am pretty good, all things considered. I was just sitting in this old telephone booth down the corner because relief families you know ain’t permitted no phones and we certainly do not
have
a phone, and I was thinking about you and I decided, I was going to call Miss Moore at home and find out how she was. And I called information and they gave me the number just like that and it was you. How are you, Miss Moore? You still ain’t told me.”

“I’m fine, Willie,” Elizabeth says. She finds that she has drawn the sheet up above her waist, is clutching at her pubis: symbolic referent indeed! “What can I do for you?”

“Well,” Willie says after a pause, “the thing is this and I don’t quite know how to put it. You know, I been having a lot of trouble at the school. You know?”

“I know that. But I thought that we were helping you make an adjustment.”

“Well, I’m making a fine adjustment but I’m still having trouble. Like they call me a truant and things like that just for missing a roll check. And I want to tell you, it’s been making me very depressing Miss Moore. Because school is mighty important to me; I want to be a physician as you know and finish up my studies. I take that stuff seriously. Otherwise I would surely quit now at eighteen and get a job and help get my family off relief because I am
ashamed
that they are on relief but then so is everybody in the neighborhood. What can you do? Anyway, I’ve been sitting in this phone booth in this grocery store very depressing and I said to myself, maybe I’ll call up Miss Moore. She cares about me; she knows what my problems are and how to fix them. I was thinking,” Willie says in a different tone, his voice dropping an octave and assuming sudden alertness, “I was thinking that I could drop over to your place tonight. To talk to you a bit.”

“I’m not feeling very well, Willie,” Elizabeth says and realizes that this is the wrong tack; a social worker can never show personal weakness nor allow her own personality to extrude in a client relationship, “well, I’m feeling fine, but that’s not it. I just don’t know if you should come over. It would be better if we kept our relationship — ”

“Now our relationship,” the voice says, “our relationship Miss Moore is already a
very close one
, you know? You very important to me and I’d feel terrible, just terrible, if Miss Moore didn’t want to see me. Because, you know, it would be like the whole world, the only person I could trust, turned away from me and what would happen then? Anyway, I thought I could come over and talk over my troubles with you. Of course if you don’t want that — ”

It is not as if they have not established a relationship. Three times already she has had intercourse with Willie Buckingham III, breaking through various levels of resistance, sullenness, hostility and fear and in a way the fact that he has reached out to call her at home is one of the most moving things which has yet happened to her; it proves that she is coming through. And she cannot pretend that she doesn’t feel well because the fact is that ever since she left Schnitzler she has been feeling better and better; it was only the momentary upheaval, looking at the scrolls, which must have unsettled her. “All right, Willie,” she says, “if you want to come over.”

“I don’t know your address, Miss Moore. They gave me the number at information but they don’t give no addresses.”

“I’m on Henry Street,” Elizabeth says. “Can you remember that? 270 Henry Street, on the third floor. It’s a walkup and you’ll have to ring but the bell is broken so the best thing to do is just to wait around until someone comes in with a key and just follow them. There’s a lot of traffic in the building so you shouldn’t have any trouble.”

“Well, fine,” Willie says. “That’s just fine. You don’t worry about me getting in; I get in and out at various places. I be along there in about forty minutes, I don’t think you’re too far at all. I’m going to bring a friend.”

“What?”

“A friend of mine, my best friend; he standing right outside this booth right this minute looking at me except that it’s soundproof in here and George can’t read no lips. George Jones, he is my oldest and closest friend. We go to the high school together even though he live four blocks away. We take all the same classes. I been telling him about you, what a wonderful person you are and he very anxious to meet you. He being depressed too about a lot of things.”

“Now I don’t know,” Elizabeth says, distracted, “I just don’t know about that. He’s not on my caseload — ”

“That relief talk. I know exactly what you saying, Miss Moore; you saying that you ain’t his social worker so you don’t know if you should see him. But you’re
my
social worker and he’s my friend so it’s like the same thing, right? By treating him, you treating me. Anyway, this cat and I run together and anything you say to him goes right to me and vice versa. We see you in about forty minutes, Miss Moore. I looking forward,” Willie Buckingham says and puts down the phone so abruptly that Elizabeth leaps in the bed, tilts the
Saturday Review
and knocks it with a rasp to the floor.

For an instant, then (and it is only an instant but subjectively, like all stress reactions, it seems to go on for a very long time) Elizabeth has an impulse: the impulse is to phone information for the number of a James Oved and call him, “Listen, Mr. Oved,” she will say, “maybe what you are saying was right; maybe I am not being professional, maybe I am getting too involved with the clients but it’s all getting a little out of hand now. What should I do? What could I have done? I know that I’m right in the way I wanted to do this job but I seem to be having a little trouble now and you’ll have to get me out of it,” and go on to tell him what has been happening … but it is an impulse, that is all it is, a panicky reaction, conversion-hysteria probably and she puts it out of her mind. What would Oved do? Aside from bringing her up on charges — for she knows that no socialization is permitted with clients after working hours, much less at the investigator’s own home — he would only become embittered because Willie Buckingham and not he was the recipient of her personal life.

No, it would not work. She is deeply in this; her course has been engaged, there is no alternative. Slowly, determinedly, Elizabeth pulls herself from her bed and prepares to dress, to order the apartment for the imminent arrival of her client, Willie Buckingham III and his good friend, George Jones.