Horizontal Woman by Barry Malzberg

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.
    Because you could do something with the caseload. Very definitely, you could do something with them and what was done mattered. For one thing sex with her seemed to affect them and they were different when, shaking, they came off her. And in the second place, Elizabeth decided, bounding into the subway in an almost unladylike way, in the second place and she was now willing to admit this, she enjoyed what she was doing, found