Hummingbirds (22 page)

Mrs. Mayhew finally seems to be winding down her sermon. Integrity. It’s the kind of speech Mrs. Mayhew excels at. She seems to be fluent in the secret language of universal values—and listening to her, you begin to wonder what it’s like in that foreign land where the language is native. Maybe you’ll visit there one day.

“As Christmas quickly approaches, do not forget what the holiday stands for. Whether you are Christian or not, whether you are religious or not, Christmas is a time for kindness, generosity, and the strength of character to forget about your own problems for a while. And with that, on behalf of the administration and faculty of the school, I want to wish you all a very merry Christmas.”

There is a light smattering of applause, which becomes louder as the faculty see that they need to fill in the empty spaces by clapping themselves. Some of the girls who have been sitting with their heads on their arms, leaning against the seat in front of them, now look up, squinting against the light.

“And now,” Mrs. Mayhew says, waiting a few moments for the sudden chatter to die down again. “And now it is my pleasure to present the Carmine-Casey Choir.”

The curtain behind her rises to reveal thirty-two girls standing in escalated rows and wearing gold robes. Mrs. Clarkson, the music teacher, stands before them and raises her hands.

This hymn. The first music ever broadcast over radio. Liz Warren heard that once. She imagines the hymn coming through all that static. It must have seemed miraculous. Like the gates of heaven opening up, the light coming down in sharp beams between the clouds the way it always does on the covers of those pamphlets advertising God. She herself does not believe in God—but she can appreciate the aesthetics of it all. Those huge, arching cathedrals. The candlelight and the chalices. The music of voices breaking through the grinding static of the very first radio.

It is her secret that she is susceptible to such clichéd forms of beauty. When she feels her throat clenching—“Fall on your knees, O hear the angel voices! O night divine…”—she swallows down her emotions with a sneer. It’s not that she’s embarrassed. It’s just that…it’s just that there are some things better enjoyed privately and not as part of some big, aching, weeping audience of stupid teenage girls.

Music like that is designed to grab you, designed to take you by the neck and throttle you until you see God. It’s times
like this when she begins to think about what she has instead of God—times like this when she could almost be convinced of a whole assortment of sentimentalities. Even from the back row, where the auditorium is nothing but a mass of jaunty hairstyles, she could almost look kindly on Dixie Doyle, Beth Barber, and the other members of the Carmine-Casey Kit-Kat Klub. Now that things with Jeremy Notion have been aborted (the universe clicking itself back into proper realignment, is how she thinks about it), she wouldn’t begrudge Dixie anything. After all, the girl knows how to do things Liz herself could never do. Dixie has, Liz is happy to admit, little firecrackers of wisdom popping off in her head every now and then.

The damn song. She wishes she could stop thinking of Christmases in the 1930s—children gathered around radios, hymns breaking through static, unlikely Depression-era joy and peace. Ugh. She has to stop before she feels the desire to braid friendship bracelets to distribute to everyone on graduation day.

Next to her, Monica Vargas seems to be doing calculations in her head. So instead she turns and focuses all her attention on Mr. Hughes, who is standing like a statue in the aisle, looking casually up at the ceiling as though God himself were sitting up in the rafters, dangling his sandaled feet. Mr. Hughes, so mildly bearing the fascination that all the girls have for him—entirely oblivious to the fact that he is so different from everything else in their lives. Like a paper-doll cutout stood in front of a painting, casting its shadow on the figures behind it and making it all look painfully two-dimensional.

It is true that he is something beautiful. She could stare at him and do nothing else and be quite content. She is aware—
how can she put this?—she is aware of how aware she is of him.

After the first week of school when Binhammer mentioned, with implicit criticism, that Mr. Hughes shared his name with a famous poet, she went to the library and read everything she could find by Ted Hughes and then by Sylvia Plath—hating how everything about them was perfectly dramatic and perfectly beautiful and perfectly artistic and perfectly impossible. What she wanted was to be able somehow to see her way into this chaos of artistic tragedy. But tragic heroines have sharp, steely names like Sylvia Plath—a scalpel of a name. Not slurring, muddy puddles like Liz Warren.

Still, what she did find, in a poem that Hughes wrote about Sylvia, and which Liz copied out in tiny script on a scrap of paper and folded up to keep inconspicuously on her desk in her bedroom, was this:

What Liz feels for Mr. Hughes isn’t anything so ordinary as love or lust. Instead, it’s the feeling of him standing behind her when she’s writing something, or his voice speaking the words as she’s reading the hypnotically long and filigreed lines of Virginia Woolf. Catching a glimpse of him at the other end of the school hallway and feeling her spine go taut, instant erasure of all those other bodies between her and him. She imagines she can hear him breathing even above the screeching voices of all her “peers.” Not love. And certainly not the diminished form of the word that people like to use when they’re talking about teenagers: the crush. Not love, but just awareness. His presence always in the back of her mind, thudding away like a headache.

She knows though, that he is not so aware of her. She suffers no such girlish delusions. Though on one occasion, after having turned in a story about an aristocratic southern gentleman and a prostitute in a hotel room in Georgia (she was proud of her title, “Our Year of Moving Slowly”), she caught him staring at her in the back row of the room, could feel his gaze as she straightened her hair with her fingers. And then, when he handed back the stories at the end of class, hers was at the bottom of the stack—which is where teachers put your paper if they want to talk to you about it—and he stopped her as she was slinging her bag over her shoulder to leave.

“Your story was phenomenal.”

“Thanks.” She could feel herself rolling her eyes. She has been told that she doesn’t know how to take compliments.

“I don’t know how you do it,” he said, his eyes, all that weight, crushing her—the increased gravity of intimacy that brings you to your knees. “You write like someone twice your age. A lot of moxie. Like an ex-stripper.”

So she writes like an ex-stripper. She has never received a better compliment. Honestly, she doesn’t think she would ever like to be a stripper, but she wouldn’t mind being an ex-stripper. The bells of tragedy ringing all around. The fallen honor. The smoky voice of experience. She covets that compliment, writes it down on the same piece of folded paper where she has inscribed the Ted Hughes poem.

And for a few days afterward, she thinks she can feel his awareness of her—two wolves come to a wood—him distracted by her pulse in the back row of the class.

The voices of the choir reverberate to a finish, and she is woken from her reverie. She straightens her hair and presses her palms into her eyes. She is supposed to have been learning about
integrity. Those human values lost and regained. But she hasn’t been listening very closely, and she feels bad because she doesn’t want to be just another one of those fidgeting girls who can’t sit through a twenty-minute speech.

She glances over to where Mr. Hughes was standing, but he’s already gone. And as the girls begin to file out of the auditorium, she thinks maybe next time she’ll write a story about an old radio and things you can hear on it beneath all the static.

I
t is the last day of school before Christmas vacation when things come undone.

The Carmine-Casey faculty holiday party is an annual event organized by the members of the faculty council and held in the auditorium at seven o’clock in the evening on a day when all after-school extracurricular activities have been canceled to make sure that every last student is expunged from the building before the teachers start drinking. This year the sky is clear and cold and someone has decided to wrap the leafless sugar maple in lights—even though you would only catch a glimpse of it through the windows on your way to the auditorium.

The halls of the school take on a whole different quality at night. The windows that normally give students endless things to gaze at are now only rectangles of reflective black. Everything is inverted upon itself—as though blankets have been pulled up over the whole building—and the fluorescent lights in the empty halls buzz steadily with their pale, diffuse glow.

At seven o’clock exactly the last of the girls are being escorted out of the building. They have made excuses—art projects that needed to be completed before vacation—but now, with faculty spouses arriving, the girls cannot be allowed to stay and fawn.

As one of the faculty council members moves them slowly but steadily in the direction of the front doors with outstretched arms, these last three girls spot Mr. Binhammer leaning against the far wall and call out to him.

“Mr. Binhammer, are you going to the party?”

“Mr. Binhammer, is your wife coming?”

“What is she going to wear?”

“Does she like coming to these parties?”

“Is she pretty?”

And, finally, “Okay, okay, we’re going,” as they are driven forward through the doors and out onto the street.

Binhammer is, in fact, waiting for his wife to arrive—this being the one faculty function since the beginning of the year that he has determined she can safely attend without disrupting the delicate balance of lies and elisions that he has constructed around himself.

Earlier in the week, sitting on opposite couches in the teachers’ lounge, Ted Hughes looked over the top of his newspaper at Binhammer. For someone just coming into the room, the two of them might have looked like Greek statues positioned in opposition across a long corridor. But this is one of the things the men have grown accustomed to with each other—the mutual speculative stare just prior to a quick, machine-gunning exchange, as though the air between them is being primed for their waltzing words.

So Ted Hughes gazed at Binhammer over the top of his newspaper, and Binhammer gazed back. Then Ted Hughes asked:

“Are you going to the Christmas party?”

“Probably. Why?”

“I’m not.”

“Because—?”

“I’m going away.”

“Where?”

“Connecticut.”

“What for?”

“My sister’s having a party.”

“I didn’t know you had a sister.”

“Everybody has a sister.”

“Fair enough.”

They shared a hint of a smile, as though, having wandered off in different directions, they had both arrived at the same place.

Then Binhammer, who was aware that his wife’s absence at these functions was becoming suspicious, had an idea.

“It’s too bad. Sarah’s going to be there.”

“Sarah your wife?”

“That’s right.”

“Oh, no,” he says, looking truly disappointed.

“And she was looking forward to meeting you.”

“She was?”

“All she’s been saying is, ‘So I finally get to meet this Ted Hughes character.’”

Perverse, the way he makes these situations flirt with each other—like too many kites in the air, daring them to collide. He wants to get to the bottom of it all. To figure it out. And while constantly risking the apocalyptic volatility of actual contact between Ted Hughes, Sibyl, and his wife, he believes that there is some secret, personal and profound, to be discovered somewhere in the permutations. If he gets the right combination, if he lines them up in exactly the right way—like the eerie symmetry of an eclipse—something will click into place, and the whole thing will make sense.

Ted Hughes was silent. Then he said, “Can we go out to dinner after Christmas? Just the three of us?”

“Sure. Absolutely. She would love it.”

“I’m serious. It’s getting embarrassing.”

“I’m serious too.”

So now Binhammer waits in the lobby for his wife, who will be able to appease both his colleagues (“We missed you at the annual dinner”) and his own miserly sense of insecurity with regard to Sibyl Lockhart, who will not dare to approach them.

When Sarah arrives, he can see her through the glass-paned doors of the lobby. Before she opens them, she puts her face up to the glass, shielding out the glare with two hands held across her brow. He is in love with her for doing that—the gesture that
he interprets as wanting to be assured of his presence even before she opens the door. It is a tiny thing that makes his skin crackle. If twenty-four hours a day he could be on the other side of glass panes that she had her beautiful nose pressed up against, then everything would be okay.

She is wearing a skirt and a blouse and has her hair tied up in some kind of complicated knot, and when they walk arm in arm into the auditorium the other teachers begin to crowd around them, telling him how beautiful a wife he has and joking that Binhammer must be secretly wealthy, otherwise why would she ever marry him.

He looks around for Sibyl, but she hasn’t arrived yet. He takes Sarah over to the stage where they have set up a makeshift bar, and he knows to order her a gin and tonic, which he likes to do because it makes him feel like he’s married a real sophisticate. For him, just a glass of red wine.

Then Pepper Carmichael and Lonnie Abramson sneak up on him from behind. He knows something is coming because he can read the expression in Sarah’s eyes as she gazes just past his shoulder. She looks bemused.

“Darling, it’s been ages since we saw you,” Lonnie says to Sarah, leaning into her for a kiss on the cheek. He can see Lonnie’s big bust pressing against his wife’s chest, and he wonders how Sarah feels about that. “You must be keeping yourself busy. You’ll have to tell me all about it.”

“Hi, Sarah,” Pepper puts in meekly.

“But I don’t want you to worry,” Lonnie continues. “We’re all keeping an eye on the boy here. Making sure he does his work and stays out of trouble and gets enough to eat.”

“Oh, Lonnie,” Pepper scolds, slightly embarrassed.

“Well, okay. Honestly, though, he’s such a sweetheart to have around. Such a lovely person. I can’t even tell you. All the times that I’ve wanted to bring my husband George to school with me, just to tell him, ‘Now you just follow this man around and watch what he does and take notes because there’s going to be a quiz afterward.’ Ha ha ha. Really, though, I’ve thought
about it. I really have. But George wouldn’t even come here with me tonight. He’s a stinker, isn’t he?”

Sarah smiles politely. Binhammer tries to change the subject because he knows his wife, and he knows that, for some complicated reason he has forgotten, she interprets compliments about him from other women as aggressive.

When Sibyl finally arrives, he catches a glimpse of her out of the corner of his eye. She stops just inside the auditorium to survey the situation. Spotting the four of them standing there, he with the three women, she pretends to make her way slowly and casually toward the bar. But then, halfway across the floor, her resolve seems to shift and she sets a dead-eye course in their direction.

But she will not do anything. She will not say anything. She is smart. She does not have a secure enough homeland retreat to scorch the earth behind her. Also, it gives her something to admire in herself—discretion beyond the call of duty. Being the better man.

“And here’s Sibyl,” Lonnie narrates.

“Merry Christmas,” Sibyl says.

“Merry Christmas,” Sarah replies with a business smile.

For the next hour Binhammer sits back in nodding approval of the situation in which he has found himself. He hasn’t felt this satisfied in a long time. He isn’t sure what he has created here—these delicate intricacies that pull themselves taut between the various people in his life—but for the time being it, whatever it is, seems to be holding itself stable.

He enjoys watching these women talk to each other. The way they sometimes reach out and touch each other’s forearms. The way they stand together in a circle as though stirring up some boiling brew in a cauldron between them. And then they bring him in, linking his arms in theirs, and he is suddenly privy to the secret lives of women—the floral gaudiness of it all, the grinning insecurity, the questions of clothes and what parts of the body are showing and what parts are hidden.

And he watches Sarah his wife, who, though she does not
like to participate in the traditional girl talk, always knows the right things to say. She always antes up in any social situation, even if she folds early and rarely bets.

He likes the way she looks tonight. Watching her interact with other people, she has a distance like a museum piece. The pointillistic painting that blurs into bright color when you stand with your nose to it but resolves into sharp focus as you take ten paces back. She looks good that way. The enchanting witchery of remoteness. Her face pressed up against the glass of the door, searching. Her small form enclosed in a covey of other women, lighting itself up for him like a little pale beacon. He studies her, the way she holds her drink with both hands, the way she forms her words with smiling surety, staking her claim firmly, sometimes like Fortinbras in
Hamlet
on a patch of land that nobody wants. There she waves her flag. And other people are convinced—they
are
—that they should have gotten there first. And she smiles on and on.

There is no question of his love for her. Times like these there is no question. It’s in his fingers wanting to graze her hand or the back of her neck.

He is happy. Calm. And the evening proceeds with his colleagues coming over to wish him happy holidays while he shakes hands and gazes at his wife over their shoulders.

“Have a great holiday, Binhammer! See you in the new year!”

It is not until almost ten o’clock, while Sarah is in the ladies’ room upstairs just prior to their good-byes, five minutes before they would have been gone, in a cab on their way back home, five minutes away from her leaning her head against his shoulder in the backseat of a taxi and the two of them making jokes about the people they’ve encountered, like spies pooling their data at the end of a mission—this is marriage, ultimately, the partnership of spies in a hostile world—not until almost ten o’clock that Binhammer looks over at the auditorium entrance and sees Ted Hughes stamping the snow from his shoes and saluting him broadly as though reuniting with an old, old friend.

Oh no.

“Binhammer!” he calls, coming over and taking him by the hand. “My kid sister’s had a baby. Eight pounds even. The party’s canceled. I’m an uncle. The traffic was terrible. Where’s your wife? What’s the matter with you, you don’t look so good.”

He can feel his pulse all over his body. There is something pressing against his chest. “I have to—”

But it’s no good. He can see her coming across the floor toward them. Both smiling, her from a distance, beautiful, perfect, coded with secret affection, and him up close, bold, mischievous, like a friendly, lonely Lucifer.

“You have to what? Come on, where’s this Sarah I’ve been hearing so much about? I’m dying to—”

When they see each other, there is an impetus in the situation that carries forward even though everything has stopped dead.

His wife’s face has for a moment that worried laughing expression of someone who suddenly realizes a joke is being played but is not sure what the joke is or who is the butt of it. Then she seems to register something, and her eyes drop with anger and humiliation. She looks frantic.

“What are you—” she stammers. “What’s going—what is this, Leo? Leo, answer me. I don’t understand.”

They look back and forth between each other and Binhammer. Ted Hughes cannot take his eyes off her. As though their reunion were accidental and as uncomplicated as a bouquet of flowers. Then there is the confusion of the little boy who is about to be told that it was all just a performance, a test he has failed.

“New teacher,” Binhammer mutters. “He works here.”

And then she must see something recognizable in his downturned face, because she starts saying, “You knew? I don’t understand. You knew?”

“What the hell…” Ted Hughes begins but falters.

Oh god. All the things we do without thinking. Everything tumbled down in a second. What did he expect? So precarious,
that house of cards. He feels sick in his gut, the wrongness of it all knotting up inside him.

“Why, Leo?” Sarah says, her eyes gone suddenly red and wet. He did this to her. Not Hughes. He, Binhammer. He hurt his wife. “I thought this was over.”

It is impossible for Binhammer to stay here, in the middle of this. They have to understand. It’s just impossible. He rushes out and down the hall through the lobby doors to the street and finally stops himself by holding on to the frozen wrought iron bars of the fence in front of the building.

What did I do? he thinks. And for a while, that’s all he can think over and over as though short-circuited on that single thought. What did I do? What did I do?

For a long time there he had the illusion that he could maintain the delicate balance forever. A master architect, constructing gorgeously intricate structures of human interaction. But now this is what it all comes to. A pathetic clunk. As much as he likes to imagine it sometimes, his story is no modern curative to the clichés of the past. He is no dramatic character to be discussed among girlvoices in classrooms. Instead he is inconsequential, like an aluminum chair being pushed over. That’s what he feels like, a little boy who, in the middle of a wedding, pushes a chair over—which makes a noise just loud enough for people to stop dancing and turn their heads to find him standing there, sullen. Why would the boy do such a thing? What is it that he wants?