Horizontal Woman (8 page)

One of the things Calvin Hunter had complained about most in New York was the social alienation, the “fragmentation of the personal function into institutions” was the way he put it, the dating services, singles parties, moonlight matches and so on arranged through newspapers or box numbers that “took everything away from people and just made it part of the machinery; it is impossible to find any state of connection in this city” but despite everything that he said and despite all his good advice (and the fact that in her own way she supposed she had had some real feeling for him) Elizabeth had persisted in using dating matches, singles parties and so on even after he had left for the coast.

It was not that she had any interest whatsoever in meeting men — with Calvin gone she was now totally wrapped up with her caseload and her emotions and sexual energies would be devoted totally to them — but she realized that to a certain extent she would have to live by forms and rote and it would be better to play by the rules of the single girl in New York than not. It would really be in her clients’ interests to do so because she could juxtapose her middle-class experiences against their alienation and, anyway, every time there was a failure of feeling in those middle-class experiences it would be a justification of the essential rightness of what she was doing. She could, in short, by contrasting the bankruptcy of the young single middle-class with the richness of her own professional experiences, reaffirm them. Reaffirmation. That was the important thing, that and helping her clients to get better so that they could recover their self esteem and get off relief and assume a higher socio-economic level and begin to lead normal middle-class lives.

So she had gone to a singles party advertised in one of the weekly newspapers; the party taking place in what was supposed to be a luxurious townhouse on the East Side but turned out to be a small, painful walkup in the mid-fifties off Second Avenue. There she had paid one dollar at the door (“ladies free until eight, one dollar thereafter; men fifteen dollars at the door at all times;” the surest indication of her relative worth, she knew) and had gone into a crowded room in which thirty to forty men were pursuing three or four rather ugly girls with painful indecision, casting occasional bewildered glances upward at the monstrous chandelier or over to the bar, which was closed. The men seemed to be puzzled more than angry; most of them looked as if they had been in situations like this so often that they were merely part of the expected fabric of their lives and the girls, only barely responsive to the men seemed obsessed more than anything else with their appearances: they touched their hair, readjusted their makeup at every opportunity and, one by one, made whole series of expeditions to the bathroom in which, presumably, they put themselves back together again for another series of advances by the men. Elizabeth had found it quite depressing, of course — in its staticity and posturing it was so far from the rich, free life of the relief subculture; there people were in contact with their impulses all the time and able to act on them without guilt; here people could only deny their impulses and circle around them in a way which would make them seem infinitely poisonous — but it had been interesting as well, all of the reaffirmation she could have asked and as the only remotely attractive girl in the room she had, of course, immediately been advanced upon by the men, most of whom, however, stood on the outskirts, wiping their faces and adjusting their glasses, looking with longing while three or four of the least decompensated types attempted to talk her straight out of the apartment and into their homes. It was depressing to think that a man would pay fifteen dollars to enter an apartment precisely so that he could leave it as quickly as possible but she guessed that this was the system. It seemed to be perfectly all right with the host and hostess, middle aged people who backed against the wall with expressions of fear, constantly counting their receipts and muttering to one another about unimaginable things while they kept their eyes on the food trays to make sure that too much was not taken by any of the men at any given time. It never was.

Elizabeth found herself in intense conversation with a thirtyish overweight man who said that he was a copywriter for the fourth or fifth largest advertising agency in the city and had personally been responsible for major campaigns for a ballpoint pen and a vaginal deodorant, both of which, due to his copywriting, had escalated some forty to fifty percent in sales in less than six months although there was no way that he could keep his group head from getting all the credit. “And the thing about writing copy on a vaginal deodorant,” the heavy man whose name was Milton said, “the thing about it is that it isn’t sexy, it isn’t dirty, it isn’t anything at all; people make a lot of jokes about you when you get into a business like that but it’s all just words, just work and it comes out the same way. No matter what you’re writing about or who you’re supposed to sell it to it’s exactly the same thing that you’ve always been doing. So I don’t even think about it too much any more. I wonder if people who write novels feel the same way; someday I’d like to write a novel and really blow the roof off the advertising business. It’s never been done you know and it would be sensational but somehow I can’t seem to get the handle on it. What I want to do is to get a writing fellowship and go up to one of those places with log cabins and really let the whole thing roll out. I know that if I could only get out of this city everything would be fine. I was engaged until recently to a beautiful girl but we just couldn’t make it which is why I’m at one of these things. I’ve never gone to one before in my whole life and let me tell you I never will again: it’s pitiful, it’s disgusting. Just a bunch of losers. Shall we get out of here?” Milton said, “shall we go and have a drink and go over to my place, maybe?” and actually Elizabeth had no desire at all to get out of there; it was interesting, very interesting and her insights were being confirmed rapidly; the longer she sat there the better she felt about what she was doing in her own life but Milton was sweating, putting the issue hard to her now, leaning forward with insistence chasing fear across his face and in the interest of salvaging his feelings — because he too was important, as important a person as any of her clients for the moment — she said she would.

“That’s great,” Milton said with a sigh, “that’s really great,” and under the loathing glances of all the men in the room the two of them left together, scuttling for their coats and passing by the host and hostess who gave them limp waves of farewell. “Hope you’ve enjoyed this,” the hostess said, “and that you’ll come back to see us often.”

“That’s right,” said the host. “It’s an important and healthy thing to do in New York, to meet new people,” and they went into the hall, Milton murmuring to himself and took the elevator down. “Never,” Milton said, “I’ll never go again: why these things are terrible, it’s just so exploitative and naked up there and so full of sadness. Those men must live sad lives; I just had to drop by once to see the way it was but never again. I never, incidentally, go to any of these things, I was engaged to a beautiful girl. What do you do for work?” he said to her but this was somewhat later, when they were leaving the bar, in fact, where he had put two Gibsons into her, talking intensely all the time of the power-relations within the agency and how, some way, he was going to be able to cut through it to produce good work, sensible work, because advertising too
mattered
, it was just a question of getting people into the field who had more respect for it and weren’t all of them failed poets or bookkeepers on the make.

“I work for the welfare department,” Elizabeth said, on the way to the subway, heading up to his apartment. “At the Lower Greenpoint welfare center but actually my cases are in Bedford Stuyvesant and Williamsburgh.”

“That’s interesting,” Milton said, taking her arm briskly, leading her around a backed-up sewer, “but what is it really like? They’re all cheats and frauds, aren’t they? It’s just disgraceful. Of course it’s interesting experience, sometimes I envy the experience you can get there but the money is so bad. All civil service pays so badly. And it must be a very depressing job, don’t you think? To come in contact with all that poverty and misery every day and know that there’s nothing you can do to combat it and that most of them are laughing at you anyway. And isn’t it dangerous? I don’t know if a young girl should be walking through those sections. I was reading some very bad things about Bedford-Stuyvesant in the New York
Times
last week as a matter of fact; they had an interesting article about it. What is it like there? Is it really filthy and dangerous? A few friends of mine have worked for the welfare department but that’s been in the projects in New York City and they don’t have much to say about it. All of them get out fast. Are you going to be leaving soon? I hear the average term of an investigator there is about six months but most of them leave in three and only the old hacks hang on for fifty years to bring up the average. It must be a bad place to work. I’m really curious to know what it’s like to work for the department, why don’t you fill me in? According to this article in the
Times
over fifty percent of Bedord-Stuyvesant is on relief already. What would happen to the place if they took all the relief out, that’s what I ask myself. Think about that! All of the profiteering, why it must be incredible, relentless. Do you know any of the landlords? The landlords must be the worst but then consider what they have to contend with, dealing with animals. I think that the real truth of the matter is that most of these people are animals. You can use all the social work terms like relevant or urban structure but what it comes down to is that they just aren’t like you and me. Are they? The thing is that I’d really like to know something about the department if you’d tell me. Most people who work there just won’t talk about it. According to this
Times
article eighty percent of the people in Bedford-Stuyvesant weren’t born in New York City and came in in the last five years. That’s frightening, don’t you think? Just frightening. I was thinking — ”

“Oh, I don’t know. I guess it’s not too bad,” Elizabeth said but this was much later, considerably later, after they had gotten off the subway as a matter of fact and had walked the three crosstown and two uptown blocks to Milton’s “pad” which was somewhere in the vicinity of Columbia University. “I mean it has its points,” she added much later when they were in his apartment, having taken the old, dangerous elevator up sixteen deadly flights and gone into his three and a half room, two rooms of which Milton said were “indescribably filthy” and which he could not “show a respectable girl under any circumstances at all.”

“I guess,” she said as they were undressing, “I guess that it all depends,” and then said and thought no more about welfare for the moment. She had made the decision at the bar that she would go to bed with him: she wondered exactly how bad he would be. This was perhaps not the right reason to go to bed with a man, there was, as a matter of fact, practically no justification for it but that was the way it had to be. With the possible exception of Calvin Hunter no man had ever attracted her until she became involved with welfare clients; now, she figured, the worse that Milton turned out to be the better she would feel, the more justified in the series of difficult decisions which she had made about her life.

“Oh my God,” he said when they were naked and they had placed themselves against one another almost solemnly, silence descending for just a moment in the spaces surrounding Milton, “my God, it’s beautiful, I’ve never seen anything like it,” and then he had gone to work; his copywriting experience with the vaginal deodorant had apparently affected him (despite his disclaimers) he had, in fact, a seeming obsession and dove immediately between her legs where with ferocity and singlemindedness he had proceeded to work his tongue, his lips and then, it seemed, his entire head up her cunt, moaning and babbling all the time, his hands grasping her thighs like a dead man. She felt pain, slow pulses of desire which devoured the pain, mixed with it to produce an absent feeling of need and began to work against him slowly, he rose, seeming enormous in the darkness and groaning came to mount her. “Oh it’s wonderful, wonderful,” he said, “it was worth everything,” and she wondered vaguely what he was talking about; what could possibly be worth this? but no time to think, Milton began to sing, babble deeply in his throat and entered her quickly. She thought that he would come like a rabbit (most of the clients did, why should he be any different?) but surprisingly he did not; he held out for an impossibly long time, pumping and squeezing her buttocks until she felt all desire drain from her and was overcome only by the need for him to finish and at that instant when she was most convinced that it would never happen, that she would be locked on this bed forever fucking this copywriter who seemed to have a case of
ejaculata delayed
(she is not sure of her Latin) he did come, so silently and with so little semen that she could barely believe it. He rolled away from her silently, silently rubbed his forehead into the sheets, silently caressed her arm and then he began again, as he leapt from the bed, to inexhaustibly talk.

“Wonderful,” he said, “that was wonderful; you’re really good, I don’t know if this is the right way to put it or the exact time that I should but what the heck? I’ve never been graceful with words except in the professional context so let me ask you something; would you live with me? Would you like to move in? You can’t be very happy living alone, I assume you live alone, and we’re very convenient to the University here and the subway to the welfare center would be easy. Or you could even, I understand, get a transfer of welfare centers, what do you say? We could really make something come of this. I mean I don’t want to force things and things should just be allowed to grow and develop on their own but who knows? we might even get married, well, we can think about that but you must tell me about your work now, I’d be very interested in hearing, you know what else the
Times
said about Bedford-Stuyvesant?” and so on and so forth, rubbing his genitals as if in congratulation, winking in delight, putting on his clothes, flicking on lights, making coffee or something else in the kitchen as he talked. Milton went on and on, went on as Elizabeth put on her own clothes and took her handbag, went on even as she decided to forego coffee and slip out for the night. Through the door she went and into the elevator and as it slowly creaked all the way down she thought that she could still hear him and out into the lobby, onto the dangerous streets near Riverside Drive and it had been terrible, absolutely terrible, the whole thing had been awful! and the best thing, therefore, that could have possibly happened to her. Elizabeth walked to the subway almost jauntily, repressing a witch’s impulse to sing. It had been a wonderful evening. It proved. It just proved and to go and show you that she was right. Because Milton had been terrible and everything about him was awful and if this was what the single life in New York offered then she wanted nothing more than to stay with her caseload and rehabilitate them one by one carefully, bring them to a full acceptance of their condition and need.