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 kind of income which they aren’t declaring but that isn’t the point. The point is that you’ve got to convince yourself that all of these people are down-and-out bastards and loathsome sons of bitches or you won’t be able to function at all. But if you convince yourself of that — and if you stay for more than a year you believe it deep down — you’ll never be a compassionate human being again, toward anyone. You’ll lose something of yourself which may be useless but is kind of nice to have, at least until it’s gone. So that’s why I’m getting out. Why don’t you come with me, Elizabeth? You aren’t like most of the girls here; you really care about this job and it’s going to wreck you. Come out to the coast with me. We don’t have to get married or even shack up together; just travel out together and go our own ways. It will be better. Believe me it will be better.”
“No,” she said, turning in the bed to run her breasts over his stomach, gently touching his genitals (most of their conversations were in bed, it turned out, and anyway she had to admit it, she was genuinely attracted to him, she liked to fuck him; if she could put her Mission out of her mind there was a very serious possibility that she might have taken him up on the offer), “I don’t believe that. I believe that you can be sensitive and compassionate and caring all the time and that you can make some kind of a difference as well. I care about these people and it isn’t hurting me at all. And I’ll keep on caring.”
“No,” Calvin said, small groans interrupting his conversation as he responded to the pressure of her fingers, slid around so that he could bite her shoulder as he murmured the rest of this directly into her ear, “no, that isn’t so, Elizabeth. You don’t care about these people at all; you just care about something in yourself which finds it attractive to get involved but that won’t last forever and anyway it’s hopeless. Really hopeless. I came here because I needed to raise a few dollars between graduation and getting to the coast but I’d rather die than say I’d be here a year from now and that’s because I care. Oh do that, do that,” he said, abandoning all conversation whatsoever as she opened against him, slid her breasts into his mouth, enveloped him with her hands to drag him down and in a long, nerveless moment he entered her, moving more quickly until all thoughts of public assistance were blasted from her mind (and probably his as well) and when he fell away from her, gasping, he said nothing for a long time, while he played in the surfaces of her vagina and then delicately wiped his hand dry on her hip.
“Okay,” he said, “okay, have it your way, but you’ll find out what it gets you,” and she had cared for him so much at that moment that she almost wanted to tell him the truth of what was going on, the mechanics of her insight: but Calvin would have been shocked. He would not have believed that she was actually laying the male clients and if he did he would have been appalled, might have been righteous enough to report her for what he would feel to be her “own good” and in the interests of binding her into a relationship. She couldn’t have that. There was no way, with his middle-class background and talk of compassion, that he could even understand.
So she let it go, let the moment pass, and eventually Calvin Hunter went out of her bed and out of her life. It has been two months now since he has gone; occasionally she thinks of him, wandering the coastal spaces of California, moving through orange groves or used car lots, doing odd jobs with which he would pass through his life until he “found out what I want to do because frantically I don’t have any idea and don’t even feel guilty about it. I went through eight years of public school and four years of high school and four years of the best men’s college in the country, most of them with straight A’s and 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.