Horizontal Woman
Authors: Barry Malzberg
WOMAN
by
BARRY MALZBERG
a division of F+W Media, Inc.
1964. Bedford-Stuyvesant. Bedford-Stuyvesant, no less! She knows she will never forget this, even when she finds her destiny in Mamaroneck or Scarsdale; she will hold it to herself forever. In Massapequa. Perhaps New Rochelle. Oh my! oh my! Lying on the Morales floor, limbs open and locked at last to his necessity (how driven he), eyes fixated on the ceiling which glows with sensually disadvantaged fire, Elizabeth Moore groans, closes her eyes, feels the Morales dong wedge into her with terrific force. Finally! Incredible! What an urge to breed still exists within this simple Home Relief case: she had never been able to judge, until this joyously unsprung moment, the pain, the greed, the sheer
social dislocation
of the man … but now, as she feels him working on the last enjambment, crooning to her in his exotic native tongue, a flicker of real feeling, even compassion (the compassion was the point) invades her along with his member and she puts her arms around his neck, drags him to her secluded breast muttering, “oh baby, baby, it’s all right, just come into me!” … and Mr. Morales, whimpering, kicks in response, grunts, reaches down and through the cloth of her sensible investigator’s dress and takes her left breast in his hand. He squeezes it absently, one large Puerto Rican eye inclined upwards to regard her, a slow, socially decompensated glare seems to infuse the pupil and she feels his elongated genital, fired by longing and the generous allotment of Home Relief surge into her. His mouth falls from her breast in this extremity. She remembers from her reading that buccal play is negligible in the lower and working classes and does not force the issue. His history has taught him that playing at the breast is childish; Kinsey cleared this up as early as 1948.
“Ai,” Mr. Morales mutters, “si, si, si.” The pressure against her is suddenly hard, almost taxing, and she tries in that instant to slide apart from him, gain some small space in which she can recover respiration and insure her caseworker’s detachment but two generations’ worth of moral debasement; alienation, that is to say, on the rolls of social welfare have made Mr. Morales suspicious and insistent and so he only holds her the more tightly, shaking his head, a fine, lunatic glare now obscuring the deprived glaze of his pupils.
In the adjoining room children shout. They seem to be engaged in moving furniture from one wall to the next and Elizabeth shakes with discovered excitement: she is helping Mr. Morales perform the act of creation almost in the presence of those who have come from such actions although in no way does she think she bears resemblance to the absent Mrs. Morales who, she knows, is far away, at some sub-level of the project, participating in the food surplus program. (At all costs Elizabeth wants to protect her from the pain of displacement: it will surely do no one any good if Mrs. Morales begins to project upon Elizabeth her feelings of inadequacy.)
“Please,” she says, nevertheless, all of this conceptualization not quite emptying her of pain, “please not so fast, not so fast, take your time,” afraid that she will go dry around him and increase his frustration and shame, raise her own resistance above tolerance level. But then she remembers, fortunately, that in his particular subculture, swift and earnest copulation is linked with the very idea of manhood. Only three or four generations removed from his barbaric natural state, Morales and his peers put the highest premium on those men able to copulate swiftly and effectively (because otherwise in no way at all) and her cries shift to submissive whimpers.
The thing is to comfort him, he has suffered so much, he has deserved so much better. She links her fingers into the Morales shoulder and urges him on, grunting, to higher, even excess speed. “Oh I know,” she says, “I know how you feel, I really do: the confusion, the pain, the loss, do it then, do it, get it all out of you, every last bit, do it to me,” wondering if any of these words, not to say the import of her sudden shift of emotional resistance (lability is inevitable under stress) can be understood by him. English is only his second language, after all, and although he has been on the mainland for ten years, he has steadfastly refused to attend courses for the foreign-born because he feels it to be, at least Elizabeth
suspects
that he feels it to be, a slur upon his intelligence and adequacy. Also, it would render even more questionable his failure to find a job.
“Mira,”
the damaged Mr. Morales mutters. His motions increase, although staying within a small compass, his tiny mustaches twitch ferally in some aspect of light that bounces off the sheen of his face, his nostrils flare into a powerful if somewhat displeasing thrust and he heaves himself fully over her crying
mira, mira, I’m coming, madre dios
… and at this focus of ambivalence, dead-centered, the tortured thing between need and shame, he pours into Elizabeth the largest, fullest flower of sperm which she has yet contained. None of them have emitted the quantities produced by this five-foot four-inch Morales. She can feel herself pulsing with it, trembling to take the full impost of the Morales burden and as she jerks reflexively, moans, squeezes her eyes against the light, runs a forefinger across the unemployable’s forehead, she feels his thrusts subside to whimpers and then to full-fledged ethnic moans which, meant as they are, only for her, assault her with a kind of premature nostalgia. She knows she will not forget Mr. Morales. Close with her now, there is no future so impenetrable that he will not be close with her yet. It is one of the real satisfactions of her job although, to be sure, not the central issue.
My pesos
he murmurs and slides his genitals from her. Disengaged, he clambers to his feet, murmuring private Island insights, tucks his shirt into his open pants and then, arranging himself deftly behind her, goes to the water faucet and brings Elizabeth a small glassful of opalescent Bedford-Stuyvesant water.
Public assistance water
, she thinks, sipping, and the taste to her, although cardboard, has an aspect of sacrament. Her limbs feel like glass as she slowly arranges them underneath. Now that she has been possessed, she feels shy against him and this can only be beneficial to his shattered self-image. She lets the shyness overtake her; feels her face turn rosy in the soft light. A part of this for him must have religious overtones.
She is shy before him. There is no way that it could be otherwise because her pattern with clients is invariably withdrawal after copulation and there is still no way that she can tell, looking at his impassive, culturally-deprived cheeks, the closed slit of his dependent parent’s mouth, what he is truly thinking of her; whether she has been satisfactory to him or not; whether he has interpreted this sudden commitment to him as a gift or merely as an insane caseworker’s reaction. Caseworkers, Mr. Morales would surely think, are able to do almost anything. There is too much ambiguity in her role. This is something, however, that is correctable.
“Good,” she says, “I think you were very good,” putting the glass down with a lurch and looking for her fieldbook and panties; the fieldbook still in her hand of all things (she must have gripped it convulsively) the panties, tossed by Mr. Morales somewhere in the distance at the first shock of contact. “I just want you to know that in terms of manhood you have nothing to be ashamed of,” she says, trying to approach the client on his level, trying to build a sufficiently masculine self-image for Mr. Morales that he will be able, almost single-handed, to combat generations of neglect and despair. (She can see a revived Morales, at some time of apotheosis, tangling fiercely and with serious expression, with legions of exploiters, blown past his limitations at last and toward some high place of destiny.)
He scrambles to his knees when he sees what she is looking for, hobbles, staggers, mumbles, finds it and hands over the object. She curls them to deposit in the book’s inner flap, noting the fine blush now coating the abused Morales cheeks. “Much pleased, terrific, well, thank you very much,” he says. “Appreciate everything a lot, oh boy, really terrific.” He is trying to talk her idiom. “Terrific,” he says. “Terrific.”
“Sure,” Elizabeth agrees, “you were wonderful.” She sees that her self-doubt — and this is an old problem, a
personal
problem, not to be so easily alleviated although she is certainly coming to grips with it — was far out of proportion and that in his own context, Mr. Morales cares for her enormously. He would have to, to be so moved. She has reached him. He appreciates — truly now — what she has brought to his need.
And gratified, she could kiss him for this (but no passion this time in the kiss, only a kind of searching-and-bestowal), kiss him for the knowledge that his feeling too can overrun articulation — but at the instant of impulse she retracts, shakes her head, comes back into herself and scrambles, not at all awkwardly, to her feet. There is no point, after all, in overstepping the bounds of a relationship which, barely initiated as it is, must remain clearly structured in order to aid him.
“Beautiful señorita,” Morales mutters and supports her elbow. She totters, her eyes watering to a sudden glaze from the steaming pots on the burning stove in this cluttered welfare kitchen. She thinks of sociopathy.
Meanwhile, the door opens. Three of the Morales children (wards of the state and themselves locked deep into the grinding cycle of disuse and brutality, pity them, pity them) come in one by one and stand against the wall, regarding her sullenly from the depths of their anomie and alienation. These, she knows, would be the three
middle
children and a simple glance at her fieldbook would give their names and ages but to put up a barrier at this time against the children of this man with whom she has just performed the act of procreation, might well shame him and destroy some of the real, if tenative, good that she has done. So she only wipes a hand across her forehead, feeling the gentle Morales damp sift against her palm and stands there with a smile, waiting the moment out. How she handles it will be crucial in determining the long-range effects of the relationship. The children look at their father intently, turn and leave the room with shrugs.
“Fuck, fuck,”
one of them says and giggles. “Perhaps,” says another, somewhat older. Elizabeth feels a flick of sympathy for a lifestyle, a culture so despised that the act of love can be reduced to simple scatology.
Morales closes the door again, turns an inconspicuous key and, coming back to her, puts a proprietary hand on her neck, runs it down the back, soothing, gives her an absent tap on the buttock (she feels the attack of possession; now she will be part of him) then moves the hand up again and rubs his face against her cheek. She has brought him, she sees, to some awareness of tenderness. Very possibly this is for the first time.
“The clothing,” he says. “I must talk to you now about the clothing.”
“The clothing?”
“Clothing, clothing. The
ropa. Ropa
for the kids, you understand, Miss Moore? I ask you about this ten times, twenty times even already how the kids are needing for going back to school. Clothing. They really have nothing to wear. We need, you understand, all kinds of things. My wife now for instance; she — ”
“The grants can’t be administered until September,” she says with some confusion, “not until just before the opening of the school. Now it’s still July, Mr. Morales, you’ve got to realize that there are, well, almost two whole months — ”
“But my wife,” the welfare client says, reflexive defensiveness easing toward projective hostility, “she needs time to investigate the shops, the sales, there are plenty of bargains and anyway,” he says, putting his other hand on her shoulder and pressing her, not too gently, against the wall, “anyway if I could work I wouldn’t put myself through all of this, my pride, she is so hurt, the welfare is no good but Miss Moore, my
heart —
”
It is hopeless. Really now (she reproves herself) she should have known this; it is quite hopeless. She has heard about the Morales heart from her initial home visit when she took over the caseload some seven months ago; other caseworkers have heard about the heart as well, twenty-five years of Morales history as recorded in the casebooks of the department contain the heart or at least some foreshadowing; it has flickered on the edges of discussions for decades but never, at least, never has it stopped going. Not quite. Then again, it has never gotten much better. And now, no more than on any given day, is the damaged Morales capable of understanding that his hypochondriacal symptoms are merely neurasthenic justification for the psychic lack. Of course they are. It is that evident. But he is not ready for this insight; simply not ready for it by a long margin. She had hoped that this planned infusion of sexuality into their relationship would pave the way toward insight … but it is still too soon.
Too soon
. A massive weariness overtakes Elizabeth; it is a weariness that she has felt before to be composed of nothing so much as despair at her insignificance and the dimensions of what she must combat. Alone. She is only one person but these needs are so manifest, the background chaotic. She can only take one step at a time in a limited way and it will never be enough; there is nothing that she can do to bring even a fiftieth of the Morales’ of this world to their senses, blown past decompensation.
Still: how sure they are of themselves! How locked into their madness! He stands before her, stricken perhaps by some aspect of her own insight, his hands twitching slightly, the planes of his face falling into a kind of dismay. He is really (looking at this objectively now) quite a small and pitiful individual and the very ease and swiftness of his sexual functioning must be part of the problem since his actions in that area are so compulsive that he cannot yet be unblocked. Cannot open himself up to the full possibilities of the sexual spectrum. And as she allows herself to understand this, Elizabeth feels a slow relaxation beginning within her, one of the more blissful of the sensations she knows she will gain from him and his come still moving limpidly within her, the come seems to have congealed into a series of strings which pull her responsively across the room. It was not her fault after all. She has done what she can. She slaps her fieldbook on a chair with a sense of command, using her free hand to wave clouds of the Morales steam from her face.