Hummingbirds (7 page)

Sibyl called it jealousy. But Sibyl doesn’t know.

He can feel the texture of the air between them in the room—a palpable presence, like a woman.

He turns around to see Ted Hughes scratching his head, saying, “From what I’ve heard you’re the teacher extraordinaire around here. The way they talk about you, you’re a prodigy.”

Binhammer takes a tentative step forward, wondering if this is some kind of trick—if the compliment will be followed by a challenge, a slap in the face with a clever white glove.

“Who?” he asks, trying to make his voice as dismissive as possible. “Who’s they?”

“It’s all I hear from the girls. From what I can tell, Mr. Binhammer looms large in their fevered imaginations. And the faculty talk about you too.”

“The faculty?”

“The ones who don’t adore you seem to envy you. Didn’t you know that?”

He finds, despite himself, that he wants to hear what the other man has to say. Hughes’s performative quality seems to have dissipated in the diminished quiet of the room. Like an actor backstage. As though he were turning himself inside out for Binhammer alone.

“I don’t know, Hughes,” he says, chuckling modestly. “I think you may have the wrong person.”

“Maybe. Maybe.” His smile is intimate and fraternal. “But I sure hope not. Because I’ll tell you something—I think I’m going to need your help. You see, I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing.”

Binhammer looks at him. Ted Hughes is someone behind whom every background goes gray. Binhammer feels something in his chest that is not quite pity and not quite hate—but thick and clenching nonetheless. I know you, he thinks. I know who you are.

Then he says it. “I know you…. I mean—what I mean is that I remember thinking the same thing. Like you. That I didn’t have a clue. When I started. Everyone thinks that.”

The other man looks at him gratefully, but he has already started to move around the room again—as though something else has just occurred to him. Collecting some books into his satchel, he says, “It goes away, that feeling?”

“Just remember,” Binhammer says, “no matter how little you actually know, they know less.”

Ted Hughes laughs, and Binhammer feels as though he has accomplished something significant—without knowing what exactly.

“You’ll do fine,” Binhammer says. “They’ll love you.”

At this very moment, three blocks east of the Carmine-Casey School, there are four senior girls walking home, and two of them are telling the story of how Mr. Binhammer caught them earlier on the back stairs with the sex dice. The other two
are horrified, claiming that they would have died—they would have just died. How could they ever look at him again?

Then one girl says, “What do you think he’s going to do with them?”

“Oh god.”

And their eyes go unfocused.

T
wo years before, in San Diego, California, a woman with much to say on many topics sat silently in the lobby of a Spanish-style hotel, waiting for her husband. If she had been looking for attention from anonymous men she might have been immensely gratified at the moment, because she was smartly dressed, nervous, and, judging from the submissive smile on her face, eager to please—which is a combination of qualities that men frequently find alluring, and which in this case, drew the immodest gaze of almost every man who passed through the lobby that afternoon.

But she was not looking for attention. In fact, she might as well have been the only person in the lobby, for she divided her own gaze between the large set of doors leading onto the street and her own hands that tied themselves into knots in her lap, the rest of the world existing behind a scrim—just shadowed shapes passing in slow motion. The reason for her smart attire was that she had told her husband she was going to attend some of the panel discussions scheduled that afternoon as part of the “Twentieth-Century Literary Theory” conference being held at the hotel. The reason for her nervousness was that she had not attended any panels and instead had spent the afternoon in a room on the sixteenth floor having an affair with a man who was five years younger than she and who possessed the most beautiful hands she had ever seen. Finally, the reason for her submissive smile was that she was expecting her husband to come through the lobby doors at any second, and all she could
think about was how good he had been to her—how sincerely and honestly and purely good.

The woman, whose name was Sarah Lewis, had kept her name when she married Leo Binhammer six years before. And Lewis was the name he used now as he came in on a rush of dry air through the doors.

“Well, Ms. Lewis, how was your afternoon among the erudite?”

And she dissembled and smiled and wanted to say a hundred different things but could only bring herself to say, “Fine. Boring, the usual.” If they weren’t in the lobby of a hotel, she would have thrown her arms around him and clung like a barnacle for dear life.

“Well, I had a great time,” he said. “There’s a used bookstore down the street—we should go there after dinner. Speaking of which, what are you hungry for?”

“Listen,” she said. “Why don’t you come with me tomorrow. After I give my paper, I mean. We could go to some panels. I know there are a couple you would—”

“No way. Huh-uh. I’ve said my farewells to higher education. I take my education lower to middling now.”

She looked at him desperately.

“But you have fun,” he continued. “Don’t worry about me—I can entertain myself.”

They were attending the four-day conference because she had been chosen to moderate a panel on the first day, and she was delivering her own paper at a morning session on the last day—and four days in San Diego in early October seemed like a pleasant way to begin the academic year. Her husband’s only condition—he having settled into teaching at a prestigious girls’ school—was that he not be required to attend any of the sessions, which he was convinced were designed to make him feel small and unworthy.

So she was alone at her session on the first day, and it was then that she noticed the younger man looking at her. She sat between the four members of the panel, and as each one deliv
ered a paper on French feminist theory she saw that his gaze kept stumbling back to her—as though she were an obstacle over which his glance tripped in its anxious pacing.

After the session he was waiting for her outside the conference room.

“I read an article you wrote,” he said, by way of greeting.

“An
article? Maybe you mean
the
article.” At that point she had had only one article published. It was on Nathalie Sarraute, and it had appeared in a tiny quarterly published out of Wisconsin.

“Didn’t you write something on Colette too? No? Maybe I’m thinking of someone else.”

Up and down the hall swam a hundred different breeds of academics, as though the two of them were standing in the shallows on the edge of some great intellectual abyss—self-congratulatory minds like colorful fish floating in eddies around their ankles. He put a hand through his hair, seeming not to care what it looked like after he had done it.

He wondered if she would have a drink with him in the hotel bar.

“I’m meeting my husband,” she said as a warning.

“When?”

“Not yet, I guess.”

They sat at the bar, where the light from the outside didn’t get far enough through the windows to reach them. And she liked the way his hands moved, as though orchestrating something large and invisible just behind her. When he covered her wrist with one of those hands to make a point, there was a delicious guilt in her chest, and she could no longer hear what he was saying.

The conversation was intermittently academic, and when she told him about a Nathalie Sarraute book that had just been reissued in English, he took a miniature notebook out of his back pocket and flipped through the pages until he found what he was looking for. It was a list of book titles, some of which had lines drawn through them.

“So I always have something to read next,” he explained, adding the Nathalie Sarraute book to the bottom.

She caught a glimpse of the page.

Melville, Pierre

Samuel Pepys, Diary

Little Women

Henry Miller, Rosy Crucifixion or
Charles Bukowski

Vesma Grinfelds, Right Dwn Yr Alley: The Comp. Bk of Bowling

Anne Edwards, Shirley Temple: Am. Princess

Dance to the Music of Time (3
^rd
movement?)

Uzzi Reiss, How to Make a Pregnant Woman Happy (for Lola)

John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

Dickens,
Martin Chuzzlewit

He smiled. “I never know what I should be reading.”

“Martin Chuzzlewit?”

“I just finished it. I have a copy with marginal notes by Elliot Gould.”

“The actor?”

“The man loved Dickens.”

“You’re joking.”

“I have it upstairs, I’ll show you.”

Because she had never thought of herself as someone vulnerable to temptation, she had never built any defenses to keep herself from it—and so when he asked if she wanted to come up to his room, she assented with the passive acquiescence of a girl who, in the eagerness of the moment, believes that she is simply going along for the ride.

In the elevator she thought of her husband, and thought of him again while she waited for the young man to unlock the door of his room. But as much as she tried to conjure him in concrete form—as much as she tried to imagine the palpable pain she might cause him—she could only think about him in
abstract terms, as though her own actions were simply a fiction, a cinematic illusion thrown up on a screen, and he an audience member delightfully enthralled at the drama. She had always suspected her husband of sharing equally in the longings of her childish heart, and now she could not imagine him being upset at such a tiny thing as this. He would laugh, she thought. A young man luring her to his room with
Martin Chuzzlewit.
He would laugh.

What a joke! He would never stop laughing.

It was impossible to tell how she felt. When she tried to look inside of herself, all she saw were tangled things shifting in and out of focus.

Once inside his room, he offered her a glass of water, and she accepted. To grab hold of something might keep her hands steady. She was aware of her own swallowing—suddenly all throat and stinging breath.

He sat next to her on the edge of the bed and leafed through some of the pages of the Dickens book. It struck her at that moment that it was possible, even likely, that his interest in her was purely academic—and so, suddenly embarrassed by her own girlish fancies, she stood up abruptly and dropped the water glass on the edge of the bureau, where it shattered.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said.

“No problem. Hold still,” he said, taking her by the hips and moving her away from the broken glass. Then he was down on his knees, delicately plucking the shards of glittering glass from the carpet and placing them in the upturned palm of his right hand.

An offering. Those fingers, priest-soft and steady. He could cup in his orchestral hand the broken and the treacherous.

When he stood up he was right in front of her—and everything stopped. The look in his eyes said that he had forgotten what he was just doing. Then he spoke.

“There’s one thing,” he said. “One thing I want to tell you.”

“What is it?”

He spoke slowly. “Your article on Nathalie Sarraute. I think you’re wrong about her. She’s a romantic.”

That’s when he kissed her. And he was right about her article. And he kissed her. And he was right.

The glass shards he must have put down somewhere, but she could not remember that part of it. It was only afterward that all the proper lenses suddenly clicked into place—and everything came into sharp focus.

“Oh my god,” she said. “I don’t even know your name.”

She was lying in the bed trying to make herself as small as possible under the sheets. He was leaning back in a chair at the foot of the bed, looking at her.

“It’s Ted.”

“Ted what?”

He told her.

“Oh Jesus. Fine. My name is Anne Sexton.”

He squinted his eyes at her. Then he sifted through the clothes that were on the floor and from the pocket of a pair of pants he brought out a conference badge with his name on it. He held it up as proof.

“Great,” she said, shaking her head. “That’s just great.”

He sat back down silently at the foot of the bed.

“Stop looking at me,” she said.

Then, later, riding down in the elevator, she said, “You don’t understand. I’m not someone who does illicit things.”

“Come back tomorrow.”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“It’s not about being illicit.”

“What is it about then?” But immediately upon saying it she realized that she didn’t want to know—and was grateful to him for not answering.

“Come back tomorrow.”

And he put his hands on her.

She wondered what it would be like to see her husband. She was sure he would be able to see it on her, like a haircut. She tried to think of things she would say in response, but she could
only keep saying
I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry
under her breath. Yes, he would know. He knew her better than anyone.

And then she tried to be angry with him. It was partially his fault. She wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t left her alone. Or, no, it was because they had argued on the plane ride out here. If they hadn’t argued, then…Eventually she was angry with herself for trying to blame him. It was a while before she realized her anger was just old-fashioned panic.

By the time her husband was there, right in front of her, she was tied up in miserable knots, and her stomach hurt.

He said, “What’s the matter?”

“My stomach hurts.”

He put his hand on her cheek. “Why don’t you go up to the room and lie down. I’ll get you something to take.”

“No,” she said. “I’ll be fine. Really, I’m okay. Let’s just go have dinner.”

The rest of the night he was concerned about her stomach. She hated how easy it was to lie to him.

So the next day she told him she was going to some sessions, and she met the young man again. Since she had already betrayed her husband once, she wanted to find out what it was exactly that she felt for this Ted Hughes—because she feared that it was
something
rather than
nothing.
And she knew that if she didn’t try to articulate that feeling, to expose it and name it, she would always think of it as lost treasure—something that her husband would never know he wasn’t offering her. It wasn’t fair to him. She would get to the bottom of this feeling. Held up to the light, it would look frail and small and common, she was sure of it.

But after her second day in the young man’s room, she was only less sure of everything. He was like a complex, ephemeral thing, a fleeting notion, that abstract quality of beauty marbled with ribbons of masculine menace and hunger.

Standing in his shower, she heard his voice coming from the bathroom doorway. She peeked out from behind the curtain and saw him leaning against the doorjamb with no shirt on, his hands in his pockets and his eyes cast down distractedly.

“So can I ask you,” he said, “where it is you’re going back to the day after tomorrow?”

“Why?” she asked. But he didn’t answer. She let the water pour over her body, and she tried to get inside it. She thought about being wrapped up in an envelope of warm water. “New York,” she said finally.

“That’s a coincidence.”

“Oh no.” Tucking herself into the water. “Don’t think…,” she started, but then she realized she didn’t know what she wanted him to think or not to think.

“You know what I like about New York?” he said. “Everywhere you go, it looks like someplace somebody has a memory of. If you think about all the street corners that mean something to you because you met someone there…” His voice faltered, as though he were considering something else for a moment. “Or all the stoops of buildings, or the restaurant windows, or the museum steps. And that’s just your experience, you’re just one of a million people. There are memories everywhere.”

She had stopped trying to put herself inside the water and was now leaning against the tiles, listening to his voice. But then he was quiet for a while, and when she pulled the shower curtain aside to see him again, he was no longer there in the doorway.

His voice, his hands—these things stayed with her.

And that was why, afterward, she waited in the lobby for her husband and paid no attention to all the men whose gazes lingered over her.

And when Binhammer came and said, “So, Ms. Lewis, did you enjoy your afternoon among the erudite?” she dissembled.

The next morning, she told her husband to come meet her immediately after her session. She told him that she was tired of listening to papers, that she would rather see San Diego while she could.