Hummingbirds (15 page)

The evening has numbed her. She is not in love with Binhammer; her attraction to him is jumpy and ill-fitting. She is unhappy these days, what with her divorce, and sometimes her unhappiness coincides with his. And that coincidence leads to physical flutterings that are stopped almost as soon as they are started. She understands that. At times like these, gazing into mirrors in women’s restrooms, the whole thing looks silly and harmless.

And Ted Hughes is fascinating—but Ted Hughes is a shiny thing, passed around from one person to another. Anyone could see that.

Behind her, one of the stall doors opens and Paulette emerges. Her eyes are bloodshot, and her face is streaked with lines of mascara that make her look either clownish or tribal. She has been crying.

“Oh, hi,” Paulette says. “Are you still here?”

“I was just getting ready to go.”

“Us too,” Paulette says, approaching the mirror. “Oh god, look at me. I’m a mess.”

She begins wiping the mascara off her face with a wet paper towel, but it smears into a greasy gray stain. So she scrubs harder until her cheeks are pink. She says:

“I embarrassed him. These fucking men, huh? How are you supposed to know what they want all the time?”

The two women gaze at each other in the mirror. Bathroom intimacy. To turn their heads more and look at each other directly—that would be too much.

“I can’t keep up. I guess you smart girls know how to deal with it better,” Paulette says.

Smart girls. Sibyl the smart girl. She thinks of the hallway of her apartment, Binhammer edging toward the door, her own little-girl desire to keep him. And those men, Binhammer, Hughes, all of them, feasting on Paulette, feasting on Sibyl herself, having no idea what goes on in the blighted tile bathrooms of fancy hotels.

She can’t think about it anymore.

She suddenly feels nauseated.

Paulette goes on: “I’m not such a smart girl.”

Even though she feels like she’s going to throw up, Sibyl rushes out of the bathroom, through the diminishing crowd in the lobby and out the revolving doors to the street. She wants to be among strangers; she wants to be lost in a crowd somewhere. She wants to be in a place where no one expects her to say anything and where no one can tell her apart from anybody else. Anonymity—perfect, pure blankness. She thinks about suicide—not about doing it herself, but she thinks this is what people must be looking for who kill themselves. Like Sylvia Plath. The chaste white oblivion following that electric jolt. Emptiness and quiet. No name. No character. No expectations. Just a place to sit down and be exhausted in private for a while, and maybe forever.

It has stopped snowing.

She decides to walk home, even though it’s late and the walk will take almost an hour. What she’s looking for is the foreignness of the city after dark—the beautiful estrangement of swarms of city dwellers brushing past each other with civil indifference.

She decides to walk home, because right now she hates everyone she knows.

E
very time Mrs. Mayhew wants to see Binhammer in her office, he anxiously revisits all the events of the previous week to determine if there’s anything he’s done wrong. He thinks about the papers he hasn’t returned to students and classes he has shown up late for. He thinks about students he has yelled at and low grades he has given. He thinks about the things he’s said to other faculty members and whether those things might have been overheard. He thinks about things he’s said in class that might be considered inappropriate for a girls’ prep school. Then—walking down the crowded halls toward the office and ignoring all the girl voices calling out to him, “Mr. Binhammer! Mr. Binhammer!”—he strategizes his response. “I never said that,” he mutters to himself. “Besides, it’s nothing worse than what they would hear on prime-time TV.” Or: “The only reason I was talking about women masturbating in the first place is because they brought it up. One girl asked what Janey was doing beneath the pear tree in
Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Was I supposed to lie?”

So when Binhammer gets a note in his mailbox the day after the annual dinner that reads simply, “See me. Mayhew,” the process begins again, and he promises himself that he will be more careful in the future.

But Mrs. Mayhew does not scold him. Instead, when she sees him deferentially edging his way into her office, she barks out:

“Absecon Day.”

“What?”

“It’s a day school in New Jersey. Outside of Atlantic City.”

“Oh.”

“They have just split into two separate campuses, one for boys and one for girls—and they’re hiring new liberal arts faculty for the girls’ school. They have asked for our help, and we’re going to give it to them.”

The administration of Absecon Day, she explains, is modeling their girls’ division on Carmine-Casey, one of the oldest and most successful girls’ schools on the East Coast. So Carmine-Casey wants to send two faculty members to help the administrators look through their applicant pool and educate them about constructing an effective faculty.

“I was thinking about you and Sibyl.” Mrs. Mayhew looks sideways out of her eyes. She always gives the impression of being able to see into your soul. Binhammer wonders how much she could possibly know about his relationship with Sibyl. Nothing. Really, nothing. Still, he dries up under her gaze. He swallows. Twice.

“Well—”

But he can’t think of anything to say next.

Then, eventually: “I think Sibyl…I think she might not be up to it.”

Mrs. Mayhew squints at him. She is made of brass. He feels her stare like a collar around his neck.

“You mean the divorce,” she says.

“Yes, the divorce. And everything.”

Finally, the woman relents. “Maybe you’re right.” She taps her pen on her desk blotter. “Then how about Hughes? Show off our latest acquisition. Show support for the new man. What do you say?” Another hard look. “How do you two get along?”

Oh, god. Well…

He imagines it: the Atlantic City boardwalk, he and Hughes like characters out of a black-and-white movie in seersucker suits, a screwball heroine wearing a hat with a broken feather in it, fistfights with cigar-chewing pit bosses, ducking underneath punches, narrow escapes.

The whole thing is absurd and embarrassing, and it makes him grin.

When he tells his wife about the trip later that night, she gives him a mocking laugh.

“So it’s going to be the boys out on the town, is it? Are you going to get drunk and flirt with strippers?”

One of the things Sarah knows about her husband is that he holds an automatic grudge against all men for not being women. The idea of spending time with other men rankles him. He dislikes football. And beer. And fraternal high spirits. He mistrusts men and is embarrassed around them. It is, she thinks, one of his most charming qualities.

Women, on the other hand, are all right. He likes women. He’s not just attracted to them—he
likes
them. Which is, in her estimation, rarer in most men than she would like to say.

Carmine-Casey, of course, is the perfect place for him. Women to the left of him, women to the right of him. Like Alfred, Lord Tennyson in a sorority house. That is, until the new teacher came along.

“I think it’s sweet,” she says, teasing him.

“Stop it.”

“Aw, come on. It’s nice that you have a buddy.”

“You think it’s funny? We
could
go see some strippers. You think we can’t?”

“I’ll give you fifty dollars if you do. All in singles.”

She laughs, and he turns pink with embarrassment.

So, a week later, it’s Binhammer and Hughes on the town in Atlantic City. There is an absurd quality to the whole thing, a madcap boondoggle. Except this one is full of sweat and deception—full of foul and secret things. There is some part of Binhammer that relishes it, the vertiginous masochism of getting as close as possible to the edge of the precipice, the romance of an intimacy with your enemy. He feels as though he is doing something, dangerous or not—as though suffocating on life were the same thing as living fully.

The ride down to Atlantic City is mostly a quiet one. Bin
hammer drives the rental car. Ted Hughes stares out the window. They stop once because Binhammer has to go to the bathroom. Ted Hughes doesn’t go to the bathroom. Binhammer has never seen him go to the bathroom.

They are not sure how to fill up two and a half hours in the tight confines of the car.

“I’ve never been to Atlantic City,” says Ted Hughes at one point.

“Never? How can you have never been to Atlantic City?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been.”

Then they settle back into the silence, as though it were the very upholstery of the car. Binhammer wishes they were smoking men. He likes to think of Ted Hughes offering him a cigarette from a pack, him plucking it out and perching it between his lips, the smoke being sucked out the cracked windows in long ribbonlike streams, the two of them flicking the butts out the window and seeing them hit the pavement in the rearview mirror—just a momentary rain of red ash. That would be all right. If they were smoking men, then Binhammer would know what to do.

When they finally get to the hotel, Binhammer says, “Here we are.”

“Here we are,” says Ted Hughes.

They are staying in Atlantic City itself, on the boardwalk, a move engineered by Binhammer, who explained to Mrs. Mayhew that the rates would be cheaper than in Absecon, and only twenty minutes from the school itself. They share a room with two double beds and a view that looks out over the ocean. From the window, Binhammer spots two people walking hand in hand on the beach despite the cold. The sky is filled with a murky soup of clouds, and there are no shadows anywhere on the ground.

They don’t have to be in Absecon until the next morning.

“I’m going down to the tables,” Binhammer says. “Do you want to do some gambling?”

“I’m not much of a gambler,” Ted Hughes says. “I have
trouble paying attention to the cards. I think I’ll just stroll the boards.”

“Suit yourself.”

Binhammer, relieved to be alone for the moment, takes the elevator to the casino floor, and the doors open on a panic of lights. It seems to him that there is never any place to focus your eyes in a casino. There are no dimensions—just one flat surface of sound and color. Walking between the rows of slot machines feels like walking across the painted canvas of some modern artist.

He finds a blackjack table and sits down between two old women. He takes out ten twenties and lays them on the table and watches the dealer count them out and set a stack of chips before him. While he plays, Binhammer is silent. The other people at the table are more amicable—joking with the dealer, congratulating each other on winning hands, jovially cursing their luck. But Binhammer looks either bored or uncomfortable—like he’s killing time waiting for somebody who is already an hour late. He barely moves his arm, either tapping on the table to hit or making a slight horizontal gesture with his fingers to stay. When the shoe is finished and the dealer shuffles, Binhammer uses the interim to lean back and look down the aisle of tables. There’s nothing he’s looking for.

For a while he is up fifty dollars, then he loses a hundred and decides to switch to a different table, where he loses a hundred more. He’s down to his last two twenty-five-dollar chips when Ted Hughes shows up.

“How are you doing?” asks Ted Hughes.

“I’m losing.”

“Really?” His response seems compulsory. “Listen, you should see this Old West casino down the boardwalk. They have a talking buzzard and everything. It’s awful and beautiful. It’s incredible.”

“I’ve seen it.”

“Do you like funnel cake? I found the best place to get funnel cake.”

Binhammer tosses a chip in and waits for the dealer to bust, but instead the dealer gets a five and a jack and takes his chip.

Ted Hughes looks around, as though he is eager to move on to the next thing. Then he looks down at the table.

“Is that your last chip?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Oh.” Then, “Here, wait, play a hand for me,” and he pulls two twenties and a ten from his pocket and hands them to Binhammer.

“You might lose it,” Binhammer warns.

“If I lose it I lose it.”

Binhammer gives the dealer the cash and gets two chips and puts them both in. When the dealer sweeps the cards across the table, Binhammer gets an eight and a queen and the dealer has a six showing. He hits and looks at Ted Hughes to see if the man can tell that you shouldn’t hit on an eighteen—not ever, and especially not if the dealer has a six showing. But Ted Hughes is looking at the table with only the most abstracted curiosity, like a child watching a processional of ants.

Binhammer realizes then that he wants to see Ted Hughes lose. He would gamble away all of Ted Hughes’s money if he let him.

But the card he gets is a three.

“What happened?” Ted Hughes asks when Binhammer hands him the chips.

“You won.”

“How much?”

“Fifty.”

He stuffs the chips carelessly into his pocket and says, “Great, I’ll buy you dinner. Listen, I hear they have this building down the shore that’s shaped like an elephant. It’s called Lucy the Elephant. We have
got
to see that.”

They exit the casino together and pause at the entrance. Ted Hughes wants to walk down to the water, but Binhammer tells him the beach closed at ten.

“How can you close a beach?”

Binhammer follows behind the man as they walk down the boardwalk, looking at him look at things. Ted Hughes romanticizes the city in a curious way, and Binhammer wonders what he sees in these plastic and neon facades. He would like to feel what Ted Hughes is feeling—he tries to see the splendor where Ted Hughes points it out, but all he can see is decay. And the tired masks that are hung loosely over that decay.

Later, as they’re walking back to their hotel, Ted Hughes starts talking in a broadly gestured way about a woman he once met in Las Vegas. Her name was Carolina, like the states, and she was a showgirl, and he met her in a bar where she said she liked his glasses. He bought her a drink, and she told him about what it was like to be a showgirl and how when she first came to Vegas she couldn’t imagine showing her boobs to everyone every night but that it really wasn’t so bad, and if you thought about it you might as well show your boobs to people while they still want to see them because one day they won’t and wouldn’t that be a sad day. And Ted Hughes supposes he fell in love with her a little because there was something wonderfully childish about her, like a little girl pretending to be a woman, and how that was what he liked about Las Vegas itself and now Atlantic City too. He pictures them—the cities—as little girls who put on their mothers’ makeup and sequined dresses that drag along the floor behind them as they strut back and forth in front of the full-length closet mirror, wobbling precariously in high heels that hang off the backs of their feet like slippers. Oh god that Carolina with her coarse little smile and her bad teeth! And her saying that if he wanted to see her boobs he would have to come to the show—but then giving a corruptly seductive giggle and saying he could see them before if he wanted to—and the whole time him trying to figure out what he’s going to do with her, but after a while it’s all moot because she seems to lose interest and drift into the arm of the next guy who buys her a drink. And Ted Hughes is left behind there at the bar, watching her go, still a little in love with her and wondering what to do with that miniature dollhouse love—maybe just put it in the corner where
you put other things you can’t bear to throw out. And then dust it off when you find yourself on a boardwalk in a town of dissolute virginities—

Finally Binhammer stops him. He has to stand in front of Ted Hughes and take him by both shoulders before the man even notices him. But then their eyes meet.

“What are you talking about?” Binhammer says.

Ted Hughes is still lost somewhere. Gone, moving forward on the impetus of his own imagination. Like an attack. Like epilepsy.

“Take it easy,” Binhammer says calmingly. “Take it easy. These things don’t mean anything.”

“No,” Ted Hughes says, looking embarrassed. “They don’t mean anything.”

They continue to walk back to the hotel. When they get to their room, Ted Hughes takes everything from his pockets, including the four twenty-five-dollar chips from the blackjack game, and tosses it all carelessly on the bedside table. One of the chips nearly rolls off the table but remains teetered on the edge.

In the morning Binhammer counts the chips while Ted Hughes is in the shower, to make sure none of them have fallen between the table and the bed. But all four are there, and he stacks them in a neat little column. He doesn’t think Ted Hughes will notice, and Ted Hughes doesn’t.

“Look,” Binhammer says when Ted Hughes comes out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped around his waist, “I’m going to take you back to the tables tonight. We’re going to parlay your winnings.”

“I don’t think so,” Ted Hughes says.

“Come on, you’re ripe with beginner’s luck. Now’s the time. What else are you going to do with those chips?”