Read Horizontal Woman for Free Online Page B

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.

VII
    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