Hummingbirds (4 page)

T
ed Hughes. That’s the name. Ted Hughes. As in Ted Hughes, the husband of tragic suicidal poetess Sylvia Plath. As in Ted Hughes, husband of not just one but
two
women who took their own lives. Shockingly handsome Ted Hughes—the face to die over. Ted Hughes, the poet laureate of England. Ted Hughes, who is buried in Westminster Abbey and once wrote about the “maggoty deaths which poison our lives.” That Ted Hughes. Except for one thing: Ted Hughes the poet is really named Edward, and
this
Ted Hughes is a Theodore.

So who is this person who would use the nickname Ted, knowing, as he must, what literary baggage it carries?

A week after the department meeting, Binhammer still has visions of Ted Hughes reincarnated, strong jaw and dark hair, wandering the halls of Carmine-Casey and teaching the poetry of e. e. cummings to his girls.
His
girls. He imagines Ted Hughes, a scarf draped around his neck and a pipe in the corner of his mouth, standing wistfully in front of the classroom—smugly unselfconscious about his own masculine beauty. Ted Hughes is the smart girl’s dream—the vaguely snobbish nonchalance, the inspirational intellect, the hint of despair behind the eyes of clear, electric blue. He will leave a trail of Carmine-Casey girls in his wake—girls writing morbid poetry in their journals at night and feeling suddenly uncomfortable in their starched clothes.

He imagines what will happen.

The place will become a literary powerhouse. The girls’
poems will be published in the
New Yorker
and
Granta,
and people will start talking about the Carmine-Casey phenomenon. How is it that so many vast poetic talents have emerged from a small prep school on the Upper East Side? Interviewers will come to the school and find the girls in the courtyard, practicing their expressions of disdain—one eyebrow raised, but not too much, because there’s pain and experience in that eyebrow as well. They will take a picture of the girls, twenty-seven of them, grouped together in grainy black and white, all with deadpan expressions and many of them not even looking at the camera.

None of them will say anything about Ted Hughes, because each one will believe in her heart that her own relationship with the man is secret and supreme. The critics will be mystified. The Carmine-Casey girls will become the cultural renaissance of a literary form thought dead—other girls around the country will start wearing their hair like the CC girls do.

And that’s when the suicides will start. Because no girl loves Ted Hughes for long before she has to kill herself from an overdose of passion. And their suicides will be equally literary. They will stick their heads into ovens. They will load their pockets with rocks and walk into the ocean. They will throw themselves beneath trains or have the local pharmacist mix up a suspension of arsenic so they can quaff it.

They will be beautiful and tragic and wasted. And Binhammer won’t be a part of it.

Sitting now in front of his classroom, he looks up at the ceiling to continue the scenario and sees tiny cracks emerging in the paint. People at dinner parties will say, “Oh, you teach at Carmine-Casey? Did you know any of those girls who killed themselves? I heard they were all in love with the same teacher. Did you know him?” The cracks in the ceiling. He thinks, This place is falling apart. What do they want from me now?

The students staring at him believe that he is considering a point just made by a girl in the front row. She claimed that Edna Pontellier, heroine of
The Awakening
, is like the mockingbird in the first scene—all she does is parrot back the things she’s
told by others. The girl looks pleased with herself, but after a few moments it’s clear that Binhammer has gotten distracted by something.

“Mr. Binhammer?” Dixie Doyle says.

He looks down from the cracks in the ceiling. Before him is a class full of girls with eyes variously wide and tired.

“Yes, definitely,” he responds suddenly. “No, that was a good point. A good point about Edna…”

Then he sits and runs his eyes up and down the rows of girls, noticing something.

“Wait,” he says. “What’s with all the straight hair?”

Today, for some reason, all the girls are wearing their hair in absolutely dead straight locks. They look like swamp vines. An everglade of teenage girls. There is something alien and unnerving about it—twenty straight-haired teenage girls looking at you with silent expressions.

“It’s for our yearbook pictures,” Dixie explains. “They’re being taken today during lunch.”

“Yearbook? But it’s only the second week of school.”

“I know, but when you’re a senior…” She trails off as though it were self-explanatory.

“Yes?” Binhammer says. “What about seniors?”

“You know,” Dixie continues, rolling her eyes. “The senior pictures are in color. And they’re bigger. You have to look really good. It’s our
senior year,
Mr. Binhammer. Some girls have to have their picture retaken
four times
before it comes out right.”

“Oh,” Binhammer says, nodding. Then, “But why straight hair? I mean—”

But the bell rings before he can finish his thought, and the girls pop up from their seats as though they were on some mechanical trigger. He watches them march out, Liz Warren sullen as ever and refusing to even glance in his direction, Dixie giving him a wide, toothy smile. At the last minute Dixie seems to remember something and comes back to his desk.

“By the way, Mr. Binhammer, do you think you have time to meet with me some time? About my paper, I mean?”

“What paper?” he says. “There’s not a paper due for three weeks.”

“I know,” she says, “but I had some ideas I was thinking about, and I don’t know if they’re any good or not.”

He stares at her. He wonders how long her hair can stay straight like that. He always liked her hair before: big curls that seemed to hold together like winding ivy on a wall. He could always pick her out of a crowded hallway, even from behind. He could call her name—“Dixie!”—and when she turned around, there would be her face, all lit up and puckered with the redness of girlhood.

“And also,” Dixie continues, her voice heavy with implication, “there are some other things I wanted to talk to you about.”

He stares at her. He liked her hair the way it was.

“Sure,” he says. “Sure. No problem. Why don’t you remind me tomorrow in class, and we’ll set up a time.”

Dixie thanks him and suddenly realizes she’s the last student left in the room. It’s quiet in here, just the two of them, and she thinks that this is what it must be like in his living room in the evening when he’s reading the paper with his wife—he has one, she knows he does, even though he doesn’t talk about her much. She pictures him reaching down and scratching the head of a dog that’s sitting next to his chair. The dog wags its tail like crazy. That’s what she’s thinking about as she leaves and heads to her next class. Physics. She wonders what kind of physics are involved in the crazy wagging of a happy dog’s tail.

As she moves through the hall, caught up in the thick coursing of student bodies, she passes the door to the teachers’ lounge, which opens suddenly to let out Mr. Tanner, the music teacher with bad teeth. He does not smile often, and never at students, perhaps because of his teeth. But when Ms. Carmichael comes around the corner and heads for the teachers’ lounge, he smiles politely—though closemouthed—and holds the door open for her as Dixie continues on down the hall.

Pepper Carmichael, having just come from one of those
impossible classes on grammatical clauses, returns Mr. Tanner’s smile and gives a respectful nod as she goes through the doorway. She never knows what to say to that man—he always seems angry. But she gives him little thought as soon as she’s inside the teachers’ lounge with the door closed behind her. She collapses onto the couch and leans back, closing her eyes.

A moment later the din of the hallway rises again as the door opens and someone else comes in.

“Pepper, good morning.” It’s Walter.

“Good morning, Walter.” She doesn’t open her eyes. Walter has trouble talking to women, though this doesn’t keep him from trying. Around Pepper, he inevitably adopts formal and old-fashioned gestures, the gentleman’s code.

“And how are you today?” he asks.

She opens her eye a crack and sees him standing there with his hands behind his back. He looks like a butler.

“I’m great, Walter. How are you?” She likes to imagine what he’s like when he’s not around women. She pictures him in the men’s bathroom, farting and spitting and talking about how these filthy dames are ruining everything. It makes her chuckle.

“I couldn’t be better,” he says. Every exchange with Walter has to be played out to the very end. He then goes on to hope that she had a pleasant weekend. She did. Then he wonders if the sky, which is darkening, will open up with showers by the afternoon. She hopes not.

Pepper has begun to sit up and rub her eyes when Lonnie Abramson bursts into the room and points to the two computers set up against the wall.

“I
have
to get on that computer. Is anyone on that computer? I just
have
to get on it.”

“I don’t think—” Walter begins.

“Is there any coffee made?”

Both Pepper and Walter look simultaneously from the empty seats in front of the computers to the full pot of coffee hissing away on the coffeemaker. Lonnie specializes in questions that she could answer herself by simply looking.

Between classes, the teachers’ lounge fills up quickly. Sibyl and Binhammer come into the room one right after the other.

Walter looks deflated at the entrance of Binhammer. His gentlemanly performance withers up when another man comes into the picture. He gives the women a quick smile and then sits down at the round table in the corner to work on his lesson plans.

Binhammer goes to the window and glances out over the trees of the park. He taps at the glass as though trying to communicate with something out there.

“So,” Sibyl says, leaning her hip against the edge of the table where Walter is working. She looks mischievous. “Has anyone seen the new guy?”

Binhammer looks at her for a second and then goes back to looking out the window.

“I caught a glimpse of him in the hallway this morning,” Lonnie says. She seems to have forgotten her immediate need for a computer. “At least, I think it was him. Tall guy? Nice hair? Wide jaw?”

“That’s him,” Sibyl says. “He’s got a nice look. Did you see him, Pepper?”

Pepper is a single mom, and she has accepted the fact that any single man who makes an appearance on the grounds of the school is immediately tested for potential pairing with her.

“Very nice,” Pepper admits. She has a fondness for Sibyl—the woman is a bit calculating, but Pepper likes the fact that she doesn’t always seem to know why she’s doing what she’s doing. Pepper frequently has the fleeting desire to put her arm around Sibyl, like an older sister with a sibling who is about to get into trouble. “Is he single?”

Sibyl holds up her hand and wiggles her fingers. “No ring. I checked.”

Binhammer gazes out the window with narrowed eyes.

The door opens again and two other teachers come in, so everyone has to shift their positions and recalculate their vectors of conversation.

Outside the sky continues to darken, and the leaves on the ground get panicky in the gusting wind. From some of the classrooms the girls looking out the windows can see the sugar maple in the courtyard bending over and the gray light coming through its branches. The girls closest to the windows can actually lean over and look up into the sky to where the shadows are forming—and these are the girls who first suspect that something is coming.

L
ater that afternoon, when the clouds come down hard with rain and the gutters in the street begin to fill, the people on the sidewalks hunch themselves beneath umbrellas and look down at their own feet. Everything now is destination: What is the shortest way to get where I have to go? What corners can I cut? What is the quickest way for me to be inside and out of this wetness that gets into my cuffs?

There are no voices in the rain—just footsteps and car horns, and the sounds of the downpour off building ledges and store awnings and aluminum gutters, the slippery squeak of rubber soles on subway grates. The water gets underneath your clothes, like ants in your collar or crawling up your legs. The moisture like insects on your skin. If this is what guilt felt like, Binhammer thinks, the constant awareness of your own itching skin, then ours would be a sinless society.

The store windows along Madison Avenue are lit, dull yellow candles running the length of the street, stubborn little sanctuaries against the harshness outside. In one of these windows three mannequin women stand in postures of haughty defiance, leaning back with their loins pushed forward aggressively, their heads turned lazily to the side so that even if those eyes had pupils they would still be empty, their hands at their hips or, in one case, raised in a careless shrug, as though she were turned to stone at the very moment she was shooing away the fawning kindness of a man infinitely inferior to her. She makes men shrivel up with that white skin, with those white eyes, and those white lips that never smile.

Binhammer stands underneath the awning of the store, staring through the glass at the three women as though they were weaving, measuring, and cutting the paltry string of his fate. He has forgotten to bring an umbrella, and now, about five minutes into his walk home, he’s trapped in this tiny shelter while the rain comes down in ferocious sidelong bursts. He jams his hands deeper into the pockets of his coat and, because it will be impossible to catch a cab now, decides to wait it out.

He stares at the pale gorgons in the window. They are women of machinelike beauty and deadly precision. When he was a boy, shopping in the department stores with his mother, he would fantasize about taking one of the mannequins home with him and setting her up in the corner of his room. She would come to life and tell him what to do, stiff-armed and barking orders with military efficiency. She would do this without any clothes on. And now, even as a grown man, he finds himself spellbound by these three snow-pale women with their smart outfits of brown and cream.

These women. These goddamn women. There is always something else behind those blank white non-eyes—another fiber of weakness like a golden thread you will carry for them in your pocket. And when you are carrying it all, all these bushels and bushels of weakness, it’s then you discover that it was your weakness all along. That what you’re carrying is only the unraveled heap of your own clothing.

Didn’t you know? they say, as you stand there naked. I thought you knew. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

Repeated three times. Like a curse. Or an incantation.

They are women of chalk, these mannequin women. They are like the chalk that gets all over your fingers at school. The chalk that gets into your fingerprints.

Earlier that day he went looking for Ted Hughes.

These women. These girls and their bodies—all buttons and snaps. And their minds, all zippers and hidden pockets.

He went looking for Ted Hughes after the conversation in the teachers’ lounge among the women who had seen the new
teacher’s wide jaw and his nice hair and his ringless finger. He went from room to room, peeking in through the windowed doors and glancing at his colleagues who variously sat or stood or paced at the front of their classrooms, preaching with dictatorial passion or droning on and on with what they believed to be patience. He hated to see these things. Normally he would avert his gaze, avoid feeling that voyeuristic intrusion into the intimate dynamic between teacher and students, especially with the male faculty. It is the same policy he has in the bathroom. Look straight ahead. What happens between a man and a porcelain bowl is none of his business.

So each time he glanced into a room, he cringed.

But he loved to see the girls, see them all lined up, their faces lit with choreographed grins. These girls, these women white as marble. What will they ask of him now?

And it was at the end of the hall on the fourth floor that he finally found Ted Hughes. There he was, standing at the front of the class. There he—

Now in the window there is a fourth woman, a window dresser, and she begins taking the clothes off one of the mannequins. She’s middle-aged, this window dresser—her hands wrinkled, her knuckles like wooden beads. As he watches her, she handles the garments with the efficiency of a doctor, tossing the old ones over the back of a chair and pulling on the new ones over the inhumanly smooth skin. Skin like an eggshell.

Finally she notices him standing there and gives him a compassionate look. She seems to be saying something to him through the glass, but he can’t hear her. She tries one more time to communicate and then gives up and settles for a gesture, empathetically rubbing her arms and shivering. Her fingernails are painted red, and her hands are all bone and tendon.

She has the foreign quality that he finds in all women—a violent landscape of warm flesh. And he suddenly feels the impulse to celebrate her as you would the discovery of a new world, to march his fingers in extravagant parades across her stomach.

There he was, Binhammer recalls, Ted Hughes, standing at the front of his class. And he was no scarf-clad, pipe-smoking poet laureate, and he did not ripple the air with his complex aura—and there were no girls already slitting their wrists in the front row. But there was something about this Ted Hughes, and for a moment Binhammer did not know what it was. Something familiar moved in him—a shifting in his guts that he had felt before. A daylight sickness that lingers in the head and the throat and the hands and twists itself into a ball.

Now, on the street behind him, there is the shattering honk of a car horn and then voices—shrill, laughing voices. “Mr. Binhammer! Mr. Binhammer!”

It’s Dixie Doyle and her friends—Andie, Beth…he doesn’t know all of them. Their faces are framed in the windows of a black town car belonging to one of the girls’ families. Binhammer can see the driver—a man of stolid patience, like a Great Dane enduring the paws of a litter of playful kittens.

“Mr. Binhammer, do you want a ride?”

“I’m fine,” he calls to them. A taxi behind the girls’ car begins honking.

“Are you sure? You’ll get wet.”

“Really,” he says, and the taxi issues another loud, angry honk. “I’m fine. Thanks anyway….” But the car full of girls is already pulling away from the curb.

When he turns back the window dresser is gone, and one of the three eyeless witches is dressed in an entirely different outfit.

Before, when he was standing outside the classroom door, there he was, Ted Hughes. And it was a while before Binhammer recognized him—it wasn’t until the man smiled, a peculiar kind of half smile that communicated mild amusement but also tremendous distance, the smile of someone watching the unfolding of events from afar. It wasn’t until the man smiled at something one of the girls said that Binhammer recognized him—he knew that face, he’d seen the man before—and that was when things began to unravel.

He’d felt it in the past—that feeling that his insides were melting into his toes, his bottom half filling up with the liquefied remains of his heart, his stomach, his lungs. He braced himself against the wall. Then he tried to move, but there was nowhere he could think to go. So he sat down on the floor outside the door of Ted Hughes’s classroom and waited until his breath came back.

These women…These women with their…their eggshell skin.

He has no idea how long he has been standing there under the awning, but the next time he turns around he realizes that the rain has tapered off to a faint drizzle. So he pulls his coat tighter and tucks his hands underneath his arms and walks the rest of the way home sticking close to the sides of buildings. When at last he climbs the stairs of his apartment on East Ninety-fifth Street and comes through the front door, he can hear her typing away in the small room off the kitchen that they use as an office. He does not want to call out to her, but he shuts the front door with enough force that she will hear.

Sarah, I’ve gotten wet.

When the door slams shut, the typing stops and she comes out of the back room.

The first thing she says is, “You’re all wet.”

“I know.”

She comes over and strips the coat off his shivering body. Then she puts her palm on his wet cheek and puts her lips to his forehead.

“God, you look like a little stray dog. What happened? Why didn’t you take a cab?”

“Couldn’t get one.”

“What about an umbrella? You could have bought one anywhere.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t think of it.”

She looks at him, worried. “Are you okay?”

Sarah, there are things I don’t want to remember anymore.

“I’m fine,” he says. Then he constructs a little smile for her. “Just wet is all.”

“Well, let’s get you out of these clothes.”

Sarah, do you never wonder about us? Never lose faith? Are you really that good?

And he follows her into the bedroom.