Horizontal Woman by Barry Malzberg Read Free Book Online Page A

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
.

VIII
    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