Horizontal Woman (5 page)

The closest she had ever come to being involved with someone, well, maybe it wasn’t being involved at all, it was only that she talked to this one more than the others, was with Calvin Hunter, a Dartmouth graduate who had worked briefly in Unit ? at the welfare center before quitting two months ago and going to California where, he said, he would pick oranges if necessary and go on relief himself rather than stay as a social investigator in New York. “Let me tell you,” he said to her during one of the four or five intense dates they had before he phoned in his resignation one Monday morning and said he would never come in again, “let me tell you, there is a time limit to this job. With some people it is a month, with others it is three or four but with no person is it really more than a year and if you don’t get out of here in a year you’ll never be the same person again. You see, in order to survive, you’ve got to seal off all your feeling. You’ve got to convince yourself that all the clients are cheats and frauds and don’t need the money anyway because if you don’t you’ll go crazy trying to get clothing grants through or worrying about Mrs. Rodriguez getting evicted. Now the fact is that most of them
are
cheats and frauds because that’s the way the system works and ninety-five percent of them have some kind of income which they aren’t declaring but that isn’t the point. The point is that you’ve got to convince yourself that all of these people are down-and-out bastards and loathsome sons of bitches or you won’t be able to function at all. But if you convince yourself of that — and if you stay for more than a year you believe it deep down — you’ll never be a compassionate human being again, toward anyone. You’ll lose something of yourself which may be useless but is kind of nice to have, at least until it’s gone. So that’s why I’m getting out. Why don’t you come with me, Elizabeth? You aren’t like most of the girls here; you really care about this job and it’s going to wreck you. Come out to the coast with me. We don’t have to get married or even shack up together; just travel out together and go our own ways. It will be better. Believe me it will be better.”

“No,” she said, turning in the bed to run her breasts over his stomach, gently touching his genitals (most of their conversations were in bed, it turned out, and anyway she had to admit it, she was genuinely attracted to him, she liked to fuck him; if she could put her Mission out of her mind there was a very serious possibility that she might have taken him up on the offer), “I don’t believe that. I believe that you can be sensitive and compassionate and caring all the time and that you can make some kind of a difference as well. I
care
about these people and it isn’t hurting me at all. And I’ll keep on caring.”

“No,” Calvin said, small groans interrupting his conversation as he responded to the pressure of her fingers, slid around so that he could bite her shoulder as he murmured the rest of this directly into her ear, “no, that isn’t so, Elizabeth. You don’t care about these people at all; you just care about something in yourself which finds it attractive to get involved but that won’t last forever and anyway it’s hopeless. Really hopeless. I came here because I needed to raise a few dollars between graduation and getting to the coast but I’d rather die than say I’d be here a year from now and that’s because I care. Oh do that, do that,” he said, abandoning all conversation whatsoever as she opened against him, slid her breasts into his mouth, enveloped him with her hands to drag him down and in a long, nerveless moment he entered her, moving more quickly until all thoughts of public assistance were blasted from her mind (and probably his as well) and when he fell away from her, gasping, he said nothing for a long time, while he played in the surfaces of her vagina and then delicately wiped his hand dry on her hip.

“Okay,” he said, “okay, have it your way, but you’ll find out what it gets you,” and she had cared for him so much at that moment that she almost wanted to tell him the truth of what was going on, the mechanics of her insight: but Calvin would have been shocked. He would not have believed that she was actually laying the male clients and if he did he would have been appalled, might have been righteous enough to report her for what he would feel to be her “own good” and in the interests of binding her into a relationship. She couldn’t have that. There was no way, with his middle-class background and talk of compassion, that he could even understand.

So she let it go, let the moment pass, and eventually Calvin Hunter went out of her bed and out of her life. It has been two months now since he has gone; occasionally she thinks of him, wandering the coastal spaces of California, moving through orange groves or used car lots, doing odd jobs with which he would pass through his life until he “found out what I want to do because frantically I don’t have any idea and don’t even feel guilty about it. I went through eight years of public school and four years of high school and four years of the best men’s college in the country, most of them with straight A’s and wonderful reports until it occurred to me last March that I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to
do
with all this crap and I had walked through sixteen years doing well mostly because I didn’t want anybody to bother me and I didn’t want to make any waves. That’s going to stop right now; I don’t know if I’ll know what I want to do for years but I can tell you one thing,” he had said, poising again, quite ready to enter her as he almost always was, “I don’t want to investigate cases for the New York Department of Welfare and I don’t think I ever want to see New York City again because at the rate things are going, in fifteen years everybody in here is either going to be on relief or working for the department, so the hell with that.” She thinks of him; it would be interesting to know what he is doing, it would be even more interesting in a way to tell him what
she
has been doing but it is just an opportunity which will have to be considered lost. She was then, is now, dedicated to her purpose and there is no way that she could work Calvin Hunter into her fabric.

Nevertheless he had told her, “as far as I can see, that supervisor of yours isn’t crazy. You’ll miss a lot of bets if you think of him as being out of his mind; as near as I can judge he is a fairly typical long-term employee of the Department of Welfare and unless you want to wind up that way, dear Elizabeth, you had better be making some plans now, whether or not they have anything to do with me.”

He had not understood that whatever happened to her, she would never be a James Oved. She
cared
. Calvin had qualities but no perception. If he
had
been told, in a bad moment, what she was doing, he would have called
her
crazy, and their relationship, so delicate and fine in its unfinished way, would have collapsed without dignity.

“You’d better see a psychiatrist, Elizabeth,” he surely would have said, “before you get yourself into some real trouble,” and there is no way, no way whatsoever, that she would have been able to leave work on Boerum Street and go to California with someone who would say
that
.

George Jones turns out to be even more decompensated than Willie Buckingham III; he is a thin, intense youth perhaps three or four years older (she is sure that Willie lied about their going to the same high school) with nervous tics and a fractured self-image and sexually he is barely able to function in a credible way. With Willie watching intently from her bed as she lies back on the blanket on the floor which George had insisted upon (“can’t do no fucking in a bed,” George had said, “bed gives me all kinds of bad vibrations”) the boy moves above her, enters at once and instantly comes, a deflating groan pouring out of him as he realizes his failure and furiously twists her breasts. Elizabeth lies passive-submissive above him, allowing him to act out his fantasies, a flush of humiliation — and she will accept this; she is willing to come to grips with her own dysfunctional emotions — overtaking her.

“Get off her, George,” Willie says, slapping the bed. “You are done, man. You just playing around now.”

“I’m not finished,” George says, continuing to work on her breasts. “Not until I say I am. She is really built, you were right. She is some built chick.”

“You can talk to me, George,” Elizabeth says, trying not to wince at a flare of pain from her right nipple. “You can have a relationship with me. Your friend has nothing to do with what happens between us.”

“Sure I do,” Willie says. “I introduced the two of you and I set you up and I was watching and I am your client, Miss Moore. What you do, you do for me.” He winks, slaps the bed again. She must admit that he is a rather repulsive youth; it is difficult for her to love Willie Buckingham and yet of all her caseload with whom she has fornicated he is the one with whom she has come closest to a breakthrough. The time before last he had said, without irony, that he loved her and only wanted to please her and from then they had moved into an interesting motivational discussion during which he had definitely promised to stay with school and make good so that he could be worthy someday of a woman like her. But now his mood has changed; he has become arrogant and insulting. She has counseled herself time and again to expect setbacks, revisions in their functioning, sudden deadspots when all will have seemed futile — generations of decompensation, after all, are not to be solved in an afternoon by Elizabeth Moore — but it is painful to see how he is posturing now in an attempt to build up his ego as well as enact a subconscious homosexual attachment to his friend. “Off, Jones,” Willie says, “I want her now.”

“I don’t care about you, Willie. You take your piece and shove off.”

“I’ll take my piece,” Willie says. He has undressed and now settles himself between Elizabeth’s thighs. “I don’t need none of your jive to help me take thai nor none of your looks either. Go into the other room.”

“
Ain’t
no other room,” George says, settling on the bed. “Got to stay here. Come on, Willie; time’s a-wasting; we got people to see.”

“All right,” Willie says. He leans close to Elizabeth, puts his cheek against hers. “You don’t mind George watching us, do you?”

“No,” she says, biting her lip, closing her eyes. “If it’s something you really want, your friend — ”

“Because I can chase him if you want but he feel better if he see there ain’t nothing to it.”

“I don’t mind,” she says. Willie will have to work out his repressed homosexuality, his unconscious need to enter his friend and this is as credible a way as any, she supposes. Nevertheless, she finds it difficult to maintain her professional detachment and Willie must see this in her face.

“What’s wrong?” he says, in mid-thrust, taking his hand off her breast for a moment, “I hurt you?”

“Not you. No, you didn’t hurt me. I’m still a little sore down there,” she says motioning, “from something before.” She considers mentioning Schnitzler to him and then realizes that this would be madness. “It’s nothing really.”

“Old George hurt you?”

“Not George.”

“I didn’t hurt her,” Jones says. “I wasn’t in long enough to hurt her. Don’t make trouble for me now, man. I got enough as it is.”

“He didn’t,” Elizabeth whispers, “he really didn’t,” and Willie relaxes. Even in these circumstances she can see the old easeful peace of fornication descend around him: fucking literally takes him out of his world and this she can understand and appreciate. She wills George Jones out of her mind, wills herself to an intense one-to-one relationship with Willie Buckingham who is, after all, her client and her concern and as she puts her arms around him she feels him relax, begin to whine with pleasure. “Ah,” Willie says, “ah, this is wonderful,” and bends her toward him so that he can suckle her breasts: remarkable how he has survived his socioeconomic strata to engage in buccal play. He works over her breasts singlemindedly and with passion; she feels him trembling with maternal yearning and she reciprocates this, feels some of it herself. Behind them she hears George Jones cackling, making obscene comments which she knows only come from his profound envy and she turns him off, throws him utterly out of her consciousness to immerse herself with Willie. She hopes that George will not suddenly join them on the floor. She has read about multiple intercourse, knows that it exists but she knows she cannot confront the issue at this time.

“Ah!” Willie says emphatically moving his head up from her breasts, “ah, ah!” and discharges; the third time today that a man has come into her and this, despite Schnitzler, is the most intense and copious of all. She almost feels a reciprocal wave of passion, almost yields herself to it before she reminds herself of her role and then she is cold, cold, as Willie finishes. He leaps off her quickly, shrugging, nodding, shaking his head, working his tongue over his lips.

“You see?” he says to George who has not moved from his position on the bed. “Did you see? Did I tell you true?”

“You told me true,” George says. “You really did.”

“Maybe now you keep your mouth shut when I tell you something and you believe.”

“And maybe I open my mouth and you learn something,” George says without anger. He sounds good-humored, so for that matter does Willie as he always is in the aftermath of intercourse and now, chuckling, they move toward their clothes and dress themselves quickly. Elizabeth lies back on the blanket, thinking of getting up but deciding that she will remain out of the situation in their own interest.

“We have to be going, Miss Moore,” Willie says. “We have another appointment. We like to stay, we really do, but we got business downtown which can’t wait.”

“Important business,” George says, adjusting his collar, finding the hideous hat in which he entered. “Very indispensable business.”

“I hope it’s nothing bad, Willie,” Elizabeth says, sitting and reaching for a sheet to cover herself. Willie is her client; her concern is for him. “Nothing that you’d want to keep secret from me.”

“Oh no,” Willie says, his eyes dilating, “no such thing, Miss Moore. I ain’t involved in nothing but the good things from now on.”

“Because I’d be very disappointed,” Elizabeth says, adjusting the sheet around her, trying to look as aseptic as possible so that she can augment the session with an insight, “after all we’ve done I’d be very hurt if — ”

“No chance,” George Jones says. He twirls his hat, walks to the door in an uneven, posturing stride. Possibly he has aphasia or then again it may be more ominous cerebral damage. “C’mon now, Willie, we got business to transact.”

“Goodbye now, Miss Moore,” Willie says and he follows George (who has, obviously, the basic power position of the relationship) and they go out the door, nodding at her, turn at the threshold to give identical waves and then, closing the door with a clatter they are gone. She thinks she may hear giggling on the steps but then again this could well be her imagination.

And in any event: if it is giggling, so what? If they compensate for an excess of feeling, a breakdown of the authoritarian structure through nervous laughter, what does she care? Their laughter only shows how deeply she has touched them; what dislocation she has accomplished in the otherwise unending cycle of greed and pain in their lives.

No, Elizabeth decides, standing wearily (there is so much to do, now; the apartment is in disarray) it does not matter what they think. What she accomplishes is important; this is the measure by which she will have to live. At the moment he came she had seen tenderness in Willie’s eyes and this for the moment is enough: more may happen later and in any case she does not have to deal with the elusive and tormenting George … unless he or his family is transferred onto her caseload.