Hummingbirds (6 page)

He finishes typing the list, prints it out, and then takes a thumbtack from the drawer of his desk.

“Are you staying here?” he asks.

“Is that okay?”

“Sure. I’ll be right back.” Of course, he knows she doesn’t want to face their eyes—the eyes of all the girls in the auditorium who are about to be disappointed. Or even the eyes of those who aren’t. He would pay good money to see Liz Warren and Dixie Doyle’s first interaction after the final cast list is revealed, but he supposes he will not be privy to that.

When he comes out of the office, he purposefully avoids looking at any of the girls. He marches over to the corkboard on the wall and tacks the list to it. Then he turns and offers a generous smile to everyone and marches back into his office.

“Now we wait,” he says to Liz. “We’re trapped in here until the screaming stops.”

Outside, Caroline rushes up to Dixie and says, “Dixie, look, there’s the list!”

Dixie takes the lollipop out of her mouth and glances over to see if Andie is finished drawing her profile. Then, through the open auditorium door, she sees Binhammer walk past. She wonders briefly if he will come to this show. He normally doesn’t attend the school plays, but maybe if she told him that it was important to her…

“Dixie,”
Caroline says again. “The list!”

“So go see what it says,” Dixie snaps back.

Caroline scurries off to the group of girls huddled around the list and scurries back.

“You did it, Dixie! You did it again!”

Dixie does not change her expression.

“Congratulations, Dix,” Beth says. “Do you want to get some coffee now? I’m
starving.”

“Yeah, congratulations,” Andie says. Then she hands Dixie her profile. The eyes in the picture are glistening.

T
he next day, on the back stairs, Binhammer comes across two girls throwing dice in the corner. As soon as they hear him they scramble to attention, all giggly and red, but not before he can see where those dice go. They are wrapped up tight in the palm of the one on the left, a tall senior with bright curls and, suddenly, a look of disenchanted experience. They stand there frozen as he approaches.

He normally doesn’t take these stairs, which are in a dingy corner of the building away from everything else. But he has been avoiding Ted Hughes all day. He is anticipating, reluctantly, the formal introductions that he knows must take place at the big department meeting this afternoon, and he’s in no mood to hasten the inevitable.

And now on these back stairs, he and the two girls with the dice stare at each other with expressions of obligatory glumness.

They are enthralling, these two glowing daughters of the social elite who have just been crouching like dockworkers at craps. He imagines them in their skirts and expensive shoes, tossing quarters on the sidewalk, rolling their own cigarettes, heckling the passersby.

“Give them to me,” he says to the tall one, indicating the dice in her sweaty little palm.

“But Mr. Binhammer—”

“Give them.”

He confiscates the dice—even though his impulse is to leave them be—and as soon as the tall girl puts the contraband in
his palm, they both go scurrying off with their hands over their mouths as though they are trying to outrun their own bodies.

He stands there for a few minutes, studying what he has sequestered. The dice are actually pink plastic, and they have letters instead of dots on them. On one are the words
KISS, LICK, SUCK, STROKE, SQUEEZE, BLOW,
and on the other,
FINGERS, TOES, GENITALS, CHEST, STOMACH, EAR.
He turns them over in his hand, making different combinations and smiling to himself. Then he puts the dice in his pocket and continues to his next class.

His ninth-grade class goes by quickly. It is filled with girls who squirm in their seats and always seem to be trying to get out of their clothes. They tug at their collars and roll up their cuffs, they slip off their shoes and scratch the ankle of one foot with the white-socked toe of the other. Sometimes they even rest their feet on the crossbars of their desks, unconsciously hiking up their skirts and exposing their polka-dotted underwear. Unlike the seniors on the stairs, these younger girls seem to have a mechanical physicality that chugs along without shame. To these girls he is an object, a piece of furniture, a nightstand or a commode that they are obliged to stare at for a certain amount of time every day—like forced meditation. For the freshman class, he is a splinter in the minds of girls who are all body. They pluck at their bras while they are talking to him in the same way that they do standing before their vanities in the morning.

And when they file out of the room today, they leave behind the mild perfume of girl sweat.

Just as the last of them has gone, the door opens again and Lonnie Abramson’s head appears.

“Department meeting, darling, after school. Don’t forget.”

She winks and is gone before he can respond.

Then the classroom is quiet, and it sounds like the inside of his own head.

Next up is his senior class, and he wonders what Dixie Doyle is so cheerful about. She says hello to him as though they were reunited lovers. During class, when Liz Warren is contributing an insight about Emerson and Kate Chopin, he finds him
self distracted by Dixie’s fingernails, which seem to be painted with purple glitter. When he realizes that Liz is finished talking, he tries to fake his way through an adequate response, but he must not be very convincing because she merely shrugs and turns her attention to the window.

He has lost Liz. Again. And he must fill the minutes until the end of class. As he gets up and stands before the room to read a passage from
The Awakening
that describes the protagonist’s suicide, he fingers the dice in his pocket and remembers his first year at the school—recalling how dynamic he was, how he would never sit down as long as class was in session, how the girls with their sharp, pointy voices would poke at him all day and he would hunger for their attention, like an addict in a cloud of fluttering hypodermics.

When the bell rings, he feels like he has made no progress. Forty-five minutes have elapsed, yet he and these girls have gone nowhere. They have all stood still together.

Something, he thinks, has sprung a leak.

Okay, he says to himself. Okay. And the day goes on.

Fifteen minutes after the last bell of the day has rung, glancing cursorily through a pile of papers to avoid the inevitable, he finally decides he should go to the department meeting and finds himself on those dingy back stairs for the second time today. The halls outside the conference room are uncomfortably quiet—like an awkward pause in a conversation—and he can hear Sibyl’s laugh even before he gets there. He can tell from the sound of it that she’s covering her mouth with her hand—something she does when she’s trying to maintain her decorum.

In fact, in the conference room at that moment, what Sibyl finds herself laughing at is something that Ted Hughes has just whispered to her, his voice sudden and confident, as though they were already intimate friends. Sibyl looks at the other women while leaning in closer to him. She is suddenly conscious of the territory her body proscribes.

But everyone is talking to Ted Hughes at once. Pepper Carmichael is giving him advice on the best Vietnamese restaurants
in Manhattan, Lonnie Abramson is telling him a story about her daughter, Andie, and Mrs. Mayhew is guiding him through a tax form that she neglected to give him before.

Sibyl has taken the seat facing the door, so she is the first one to see Binhammer enter the room. He comes in already halfway through his usual apology for being late but stops as soon as he realizes no one is listening.

“So I told her,” Lonnie’s voice dominates, revving up for the punch line, “I said, ‘Darling, if he notices that your barrettes don’t match your shoes, then you’ve got much bigger problems!’”

Sibyl feels Lonnie’s cackle at the base of her spine, and she stiffens all over. Ted Hughes glances up at Lonnie and smiles distractedly. Then Mrs. Mayhew points to another place on the form where he should put his signature.

“Oh,” Pepper says, “here’s Leo.” Binhammer cringes at the mention of his first name. “Leo Binhammer, this is Ted Hughes.”

Ted Hughes stands and shakes hands with Binhammer, who says, even though he promised himself he wouldn’t, “Ted Hughes. Like the poet?”

“No,” the man says simply and brings his finger up to his lips as though he’s trying to remember something. Everyone waits to see what it will be, but after a few seconds he just shrugs and sits back down before his tax form. Binhammer takes a seat at the far end of the table and leans back in his chair. Sibyl sees something in his response—something that looks like the reticence of a misbehaving child about to be exposed.

Ted Hughes is a slight, pretty young man—well groomed almost to the point of slickness, his starched collar coming to two perfect points on either side of the arch knot in his tie. His eyes have more meaning in their movement than their color, darting like a novelist’s pen from one thing to another. Sibyl has already noticed that he has a habit of seeming distracted, as though his true destination were just around the corner and current circumstances are preventing him from reaching it. And
when he speaks, he seems to want to say three things at once and is disappointed at having to settle for just one. For women like Lonnie Abramson, who believe that attention directed elsewhere is the most valuable attention there is, he represents a challenge, and she does everything possible to force her body into his line of sight. When he turns his eyes on Lonnie, Sibyl can see the pink flush in her cheeks, the squealing delight of having those eyes—those eyes that go everywhere—rest for a second on her.

As for Sibyl herself, she looks at Ted Hughes in the same way she looks at modern poetry: an accumulation of ecstatica that contains within it (she is sure) moments of beautiful and tragic silence.

“So,” Sibyl says, trying to catch his eye, “how have your first couple days been?”

“Rumpled,” he says, looking up suddenly at the ceiling.

“Rumpled?” Lonnie says. “How do you mean?”

“I was thinking of something,” he says, putting two fingers to his lips, “as I was walking through the halls today. Something someone said about girls liking to be rumpled sometimes. A beautiful line.”

“I think I know what line you mean,” Sibyl says.

“You do?” Binhammer says from the other end of the table, giving her a look.

“But,” she continues, ignoring him, “I don’t remember where it’s from.”

“Played with and rumpled,” Ted says.

“I don’t know,” Binhammer interjects, authoritative and doubtful. “I think you might have just—”

“Goldsmith,” Mrs. Mayhew declares, stone-faced. “Girls like to be played with, and rumpled a little too, sometimes.’ Oliver Goldsmith.”

“That’s it,” Ted says, smiling brightly. “A beautiful line, no?”

Sibyl does not want to look over at Binhammer. She can feel his eyes picking away at her—sharp, angry needles.

Indeed, as the curriculum meeting begins, Sibyl finds herself in the middle of a game of gazes. She can see Binhammer shooting vigilant glances at her from across the room—on guard against any attention she might give Ted Hughes. And Binhammer’s reaction only makes her want to look at Ted Hughes more, which she does in surreptitious sidelong glances when Binhammer isn’t looking. The only one she doesn’t have to worry about, it seems, is Ted Hughes himself. He never looks in her direction at all.

Ted Hughes respectfully demurs during most of the conversation. Only once does he make a comment—muttering, almost under his breath, that he’s not looking forward to teaching
The Great Gatsby.

“Why not?” Pepper cries, horrified. “Don’t you think it’s beautiful?”

“Like diamonds,” he says.

“Then…”

“It’s this school,” he says, apologetically. Then he continues, with increasing fervor, “It’s just that I don’t relish teaching it without boys in the room. Who’s going to be embarrassed? Who’s going to be sitting in the back of the class all red with boyish frailty? You know what I mean? You need masculinity, the more crumbled the better. Who are the girls going to feel sorry for? With only girls, the book is in danger of becoming all hurt fingers and billowing skirts.”

Everyone is quiet for a while, Pepper tilting her head thoughtfully. Then Lonnie pipes up to say that it’s funny because she has always wondered herself whether or not
Gatsby
needed some good old sexual tension in the room to work properly.

Sibyl wishes that Lonnie would just shut up. She wants to try to imagine Ted Hughes getting embarrassed as he reads
Gatsby.
She wants to hear him say more things about crumbled masculinity.

Lonnie beams proudly at everyone, and Mrs. Mayhew gives Ted Hughes an unreadable look before continuing with the meeting.

After it’s over Binhammer is the first one out of the confer
ence room. He dashes down the stairs to avoid any interactions. But he has to get his coat from the teachers’ lounge, and that’s where Sibyl catches up with him.

“So what do you think?” she says.

“About what?” he says, being purposefully obtuse.

“The new guy.”

“Oh, I think he’s great. I love him. How couldn’t I love him? All those clever things he says. So real—almost entirely unrehearsed.”

“You don’t think he’s clever? Or is it that you don’t
like
that he’s clever?”

“Sure,” he says, rubbing his face with his palm. “He was fine. Everything is fine.”

“Well, I think it’s cute that you’re jealous.”

He is moving books around on the bookshelf, pretending to be busy, but she comes closer and gets in front of his gaze. Their eyes connect for a second before he turns away.

“I’m not jealous,” he says. “This guy is small-time. I know him. I knew everything about him the minute I saw him.”

She doesn’t say anything. She is trying to figure out why she takes such pleasure in his discomfort.

“What do you want to know?” he continues, shaking open his coat. “You want to know why you and Lonnie and everybody are already so schoolgirl giddy over him? It’s because he makes everything he says sound like it’s the first time anybody’s said it. So he’s got nice delivery. Big deal.”

“Well, I think it’s cute. And besides—”

The door opens then and Ted Hughes comes in, looking distracted. Anyone else would feel the sudden awkwardness of intrusion—the leaden silence as big as a wrecking ball—but he does not seem to notice.

“Anyway,” Sibyl says. “I’ve got to get home. I’ve got a million things to do.” She gives Binhammer a hard stare with a cruel laugh behind it. “And I’m warming up a plate of loneliness for dinner.” She turns to Ted Hughes. “It was really nice to meet you, Ted.”

After she’s gone, Ted Hughes looks confusedly at Binhammer, as though he’s just registered something.

“Plate of loneliness?”

“She’s a funny lady,” Binhammer says, buttoning up his coat and trying not to provoke any further interaction.

But just as he gets to the door, Ted Hughes stops him.

“Listen, Binhammer—” He pronounces it as though it rhymes with
bomber.

“It’s Bin
hammer.
Like a hammer.”

“Bin
hammer?
Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

“That’s a funny name.”

“You think so, Ted Hughes?”

“Anyway, I just wanted to say…I’ve, um, heard great things about you.”

So that’s all—that’s what he has to say. Binhammer tightens his fist on the doorknob. He thinks about being outside in the hall—leaping down the stairwell and racing out into the street, into the anonymous dark. But he can feel the eyes of the other man on his back. The distracted eyes. The gypsy’s eyes. The eyes of the usurper.