Hummingbirds (8 page)

So that was it—a failsafe termination was the way she looked at it. Even if Ted Hughes were there at her panel, even if she felt tempted—she had made it impossible for herself to do anything about it.

And, in fact, Ted Hughes was there. The conference room was half full with unsmiling academics waiting for the panel discussion with the weary acknowledgment that they would most likely be disappointed. She said hello to the other members of her panel, keeping her eyes on the door. He came in late, after the session had already started, and sat at the back—his eyes alternating between looking at her and looking at nothing.

After the session he was waiting for her in the hall.

“My husband is meeting me,” she said.

“We just can’t—” she said.

“I’m not someone who—” she said.

“There’s no way this can—” she said.

She had worked out in advance a hundred different logical arguments about why they couldn’t see each other anymore. But he didn’t fight her. When she was done talking, he simply asked for her phone number in New York, and she gave it to him without thinking.

Before she left, she said, “I like what you said. About New York. That was…I liked it.”

And he reached out to her with one of those hands, but she was already turning away, and she kept on turning.

At the end of the hall she saw Binhammer walking toward her.

“Who was that?” he asked.

“Who?”

“That guy you were talking to.”

“He was just someone who liked my paper.”

“The way he was looking at you, I think he liked more than your paper.” He smiled. He liked it when other men found her attractive. It was one of their regular jokes. “Good-looking too. Did he ask for your number?”

“Uh-huh,” she said, looking up at him. He was such a good man.

“And did you give it to him?”

“Of course.”

She wanted to tell him everything, but she didn’t know where to start. She didn’t like to imagine what look he would give her—and the thought that whatever the look, it would be a part of every look he ever gave her again.

I have done something,
she thought.
Oh my god. I have done something.

“Can we go?” she asked.

“Sure. Does your stomach feel bad again?”

“No, I think I just need to eat.”

When they walked out into the San Diego sun, she felt faint and clung to his arm. But she soon recovered, and they walked three blocks to an outdoor café where she picked at her food and sipped iced tea through a straw. He made jokes, and she laughed at them. After lunch, they continued to walk, and he said he wanted to buy some sunglasses so that he could have a pair of sunglasses from San Diego. So they went into several shops until they found a pair he liked—and then they sat on a bench in a small park and watched everyone else walk by. They were impressed, as you are more likely to be when you are in a foreign place, by the masses of anonymity.

Two boys ran by, and one cried, “How come you did it, Marshall? How come?”

When the sun started to go down, they got up from the bench and walked back toward the hotel; they spoke to each other the whole time, never running out of things to say. And pretty soon they became part of the anonymous crowd, and you couldn’t tell them apart from anyone else.

T
wo weeks later, back in New York, Binhammer sat on the couch gazing at the back of his wife, who was in the other room typing—or trying to type—revisions on an article she hoped would be published the following year, and he knew, knew with the fearful instinct that in another place and another time might have driven a man to physical acts of violence or passion, that something was wrong.

It was just past eight o’clock in the morning, and he had opened the blinds so that every corner of the apartment was saturated with light. Outside, the air was infused with the stillness characteristic of weekend mornings in the city—the dormancy of a great machine being shut off for a mandatory period while all its gears are checked for wear.

He looked at his wife, through the doorway, hunched over in front of the computer with a mug of coffee on the desk beside her—and he looked out the window at the tops of trees and tops of buildings and tops of lampposts. And he looked back at his wife.

There she sat, still and cramped, as someone might who was trying to fold herself out of existence—her hands not even on the keyboard but holding her elbows. He could not see her eyes, but he knew that they were focused somewhere beyond the computer screen.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, trying to modulate the fear out of his voice. He did not like to see her like this.

“What do you mean?” she said, half turning. Her face was
now in profile, and she bit her lower lip—something she had a habit of doing when she was put on the spot.

He wasn’t sure what he meant, so he didn’t say anything more.

She, however, seemed to take his silence as more accusatory than perplexed. When he didn’t answer, she turned full around to look at him face-to-face. That was when he first saw the small flickers of desperation in her eyes. He recognized them as a plea, but he could not tell what they were a plea for. It was true: she still possessed a great deal of mystery, even after six years of marriage.

He wondered, briefly, how long men remained explorers in the terra incognita of their wives’ minds.

Then she turned toward the computer, and he was looking at her back again.

“I think I did something,” she said to her screen, her voice like a crystal bowl crazed with hairline fractures and ready to come apart. “I think I did something—”

He suddenly felt queasy. He wanted to go to her, but her breakability made him feel clumsy. In truth, he didn’t care about what she might have done—he just wanted that shivering quality in her to be gone.

The story came out in fragments, sharp little splinters:

“There was someone. He. I didn’t know what to do. It’s not about. I mean, there’s nothing. And I couldn’t stop thinking about. It was something that happened. I was afraid. And I didn’t know how to stop it. And then there was you. You are so good. So good to me. I didn’t know what to do—I didn’t know what to do.”

He looked out the window. Too bright. It felt like there was white everywhere.

“When?” he asked.

“San Diego,” she said.

There was white in his chest and in his head. There was cotton in his ears.

“Twice,” she said.

He stood, everything inside him bent double, all his clenched purple viscera, and went into the bedroom and shut the door behind him. “Goddamn it,” he said, voice rising. “Goddamn it, goddamn it.” On the bed was something, and he grabbed it and threw it against the wall. It fluttered to the ground—her copy of
The Woman in White,
and it must have struck at the very edge of the spine because it left behind a half-moon dent in the paint that he would cringe to look at over the years they were to live in that apartment.

Then he froze. The gesture—so mundane, so unworthy of a literary life. He suddenly thought of himself as a character in a book. He imagined discussing this scene in one of his classes, with his girls. “We expect him to be furious here—after all, his wife has just admitted infidelity. But look, look at his response: sympathy, understanding, goodness. See, anger is—it’s old-fashioned. It’s boring.”

He went back into the living room, where his wife had moved to the couch.

She wept openly now, her body shaken with spasms. She tried to look at him, in his direction, but she seemed unable to. He thought about that, about the fact that at this moment his wife was able to look at anything in the world but him.

He remembered being a child, coming into the kitchen where his mother was hunched over in front of the sink, her hands gripping the edge of the counter. When he had come around to the side of her, he could see she was crying. But when she noticed him, she turned her back and swept her palms across her eyes. Then she busied herself in the refrigerator, telling him she had to make dinner now and didn’t have time to play—not allowing herself to meet his gaze.

Now, to his wife, he said, “Listen. Stop crying. We’ll figure something out. I mean, there has to be something we can…Stop crying.”

For a while they sat there not talking.

There was anger, yes, a smoldering anger—but there was something else, too. A need to subdue the panic of the moment.
A need to be superior to this scene. An unsettling calm in the face of calamity.

He went to the corner to buy coffee for them. He also bought bagels, but neither of them ate. He kept looking out the window because it was the only action that seemed to let him think properly.

Then they decided to go for a walk in the park.

“Do you want to take a jacket?” she said as they left.

“No, I’m fine,” he replied. “Thank you.”

They walked a long time along the winding paths, and sometimes they stopped to sit at a bench.

“Just twice?” he asked. “Only twice?”

She bit her lower lip. “Once more. When we got back here. He lives here. Just once more. And that’s when I told him we couldn’t anymore.”

For a while he didn’t want to touch her, and then he couldn’t bear seeing her sitting there all folded up into herself. He put his hand on top of hers, and she looked grateful.

They walked some more and talked as they went—they could not seem to stop talking now—and when they came to the Metropolitan Museum at the eastern edge of the park, they went in. There was a special exhibition of a French expressionist painter, and they stood in front of one painting depicting a row of houses on the far bank of a river. There were only two human figures in the painting, and they were tiny in the distance. You would have missed them entirely if you hadn’t been looking for them.

She said, “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

“More beautiful than Matisse?”

She looked at him, trying to read his tone.

“More beautiful than Fitzgerald?” He smiled. “More beautiful than Fellini? More beautiful than Stravinsky?”

“Yes,” she said and smiled up at him playfully. “More beautiful than all of them.”

After the museum, they walked back home and talked about what they had to do the rest of the weekend, what tasks
they had to get done before Monday. They felt safe in the particularities of their day-to-day existence. When evening came, they decided to have Chinese food delivered, and they sat on the floor of the living room with their backs against the couch and watched television. He thought about opening up the fortune cookies but then decided not to.

Once, when they hadn’t spoken about it for a while, he said, “Who was he, anyway?”

“Just some guy,” she said. He wanted more, so she told him it was the one he had seen her talking to in the hallway outside the conference room.

He nodded. “He was good-looking.”

She tried to dismiss him with a wave of her hand.

“No, no,” he said, smiling, driving the moment back into something that looked like normalcy. “You did okay for yourself.”

She swatted him on the chest with the back of her hand.

By the time they went to bed that night, they were exhausted. There seemed to be nothing else left to talk about. They had fit an entire lifetime of talking into a single day. He wondered if he would be able to fall asleep, but when his head was on the pillow he could hear the sound of his own heartbeat, and it lulled him.

His last thought of the night was about the man’s name. He suddenly felt he wanted to know it, and he resolved to ask her in the morning. But by the time he woke up, she was already awake and in the shower—and when she came out she looked so happy to see him that he didn’t want to bring it up. He thought maybe it wasn’t so important after all.

O
ctober comes, and there are dry leaves everywhere. Like the girls of the Carmine-Casey school, the leaves collect in corners and chatter away with their brittle, leafy voices.

It should be said that while, prior to Ted Hughes’s arrival at the school, Binhammer enjoyed a great popularity among the girls, by no means did he corner the market on their affections. He was generally considered a favorite teacher, but there were some girls who found him off-putting because he did not pay as much attention to them as they would like, and there were others who found him inscrutable—the way he would forget meetings they had set up with him just the day before. And there were some girls, of course, who simply didn’t like him because it seemed that everyone else did.

But this year is different. This year when Mrs. Power goes off to have more babies (the girls pay close attention to whether or not she will lose the baby weight, particularly the puffiness under her chin—and she used to be such a skinny slip of a woman), the addition of a second male English teacher occasions no small amount of conversation. There are some girls, the traditionalists, who consider themselves diehard Binhammer girls, and there are others of more experimental stock who now count themselves Hughes girls. And there are some—still the majority perhaps—who are generally fond of both. As fond as they can be of teachers, of course.

As part of their informal course of study in how the interpersonal relationships of adults can mirror their own, the girls
are watchful when it comes to the interaction between the two men. In class, Binhammer is frequently asked:

“Mr. Binhammer, are you and Mr. Hughes
friends?”

One girl, a junior named Karen Randall, tells a story of when she was once using the faculty-only copy machine in the library. When Binhammer caught her in the act, he didn’t seem interested in punishing her. Instead, he asked her politely how her year was going as he waited for her to finish her copying. She thought she was off the hook until Hughes came around the corner and the two men locked eyes. For a few seconds, both men just looked back and forth between each other and Karen Randall and the sign over the copy machine that said
FACULTY ONLY!!

Then they both started talking to Karen Randall at the same time:

Binhammer: “I guess you shouldn’t be—”

Hughes: “I don’t think you ought—”

Binhammer: “The sign is right there, and—”

Hughes: “No, certainly not—”

Binhammer: “I suppose you should come to the office—”

Hughes: “Yes, let’s let the office handle this—”

And the two men escorted her to the elevator while her gaze went helplessly back and forth between them. Neither of them had been known for being strict adherents to the edicts of the school, so this moment was unprecedented.

But once they were in the elevator, after some awkward silence and the shifting of many feet, Binhammer started talking to Hughes about the author Henry James.

“Have you started
The Americans
yet?”

Hughes made a dramatic gesture of exhaustion. It looked like he was deflating. “Ugh—they hate it.”

“Can you believe it’s still on the curriculum?” Binhammer commiserated.

“Intolerable!”

“Five years now we’ve been trying to teach that book!”

“Outrageous!”

By the time they had reached the top floor, the two teachers were so locked into conversation that they seemed to have forgotten entirely about Karen Randall and actually left her standing there in the hall wondering if she should go to the office by herself.

This story is a great favorite among the girls because they still like to imagine that absentmindedness is a reflection of great genius. To them the story is a glorification of both men. Like two handsome Socrateses.

When the story is told to Dixie Doyle, however, she does not like it. The Socrates part. She doesn’t like to imagine Binhammer in a toga—it’s silly. And Binhammer is not silly.

But now that October is here and the play rehearsals are under way, she has other things to think about. She has the starring role, after all: Clarissa, who is, according to the script, “a tough young woman of twenty-five with a temper and a pet parrot.”

“I’m leaving,” Dixie reads from the script in her best dramatic voice. “There’s nothing more to say. I’ll send you a postcard from Prague.”

“But Clarissa,” says Caroline, who is helping her rehearse. For her, acting is all about sticking your hand out in front of you as though you were Hamlet holding the skull of Yorick. “But Clarissa, I don’t understand.”

“There are a lot of things you don’t understand, Ivan. I’m just one of them.”

“Then it says I’m supposed to kiss you helplessly.” Caroline flips through the next couple pages of the script. “I don’t know what’s going on. They don’t seem to like each other very much.”

Dixie bites her lip. “I know what you mean. But it’s nice that she wants to send him a postcard, right?”

Then Beth, who is sitting on the edge of the stage holding her bare foot, says, “Look at this blister.” Everyone gathers around. “Did you ever see a blister like that?” Everyone agrees that it’s some blister.

Fifteen minutes later, the auditorium undergoes a dramatic change in atmosphere with the arrival of the Bardolph boys. The Bardolph Boys’ Academy is the all-boy school five blocks south of Carmine-Casey. The two schools operate in tandem when it comes to dances, plays, and other extracurriculars. There are five boys in Liz Warren’s
Salmonburger
script, and when they come through the doors of the auditorium there is a generalized flurry of self-consciousness and girlhood playfulness.

For the most part, Dixie finds the Bardolph boys to be juvenile—they seem so
small,
like kids you would babysit. Sometimes their cheeks are ruddy, white and red, and look as though a grandmother has been pinching them. And sometimes they are even giggly, which is the worst thing a boy can be. So in general Dixie never understands the dizzying excitement that seems to electrify the school when the Bardolph boys come for a visit.

But Jeremy Notion, the boy who was chosen to play Ivan, the other lead, is something different. He seems bored a lot of the time, especially around the girls who try to impress him. He doesn’t have any reaction, for example, when Susie Mayer does her thing—the thing where she fixes her barrettes while talking to him about spending the weekend sunbathing on her father’s boat. He gazes down at her as though he’s only just tolerating her presence. That’s what Dixie likes about him.

“Do you think Binhammer will come to the play this time?” she asks the other girls as the boys settle in.

“Maybe,” Caroline says. “I bet you can convince him to come, Dix.”

“I don’t know,” Beth says. “I don’t think he likes school plays. He says they’re not very good.”

Dixie considers this. “Is your father coming, Beth?”

“Sure, Dix, I guess.”

She likes the idea of performing in front of an audience of men. She finds them, in general, to be more generous toward her. While her friends’ mothers are sometimes wary in her presence, their fathers always greet her with a frothy kind of affection. They always want to know how she’s doing in school, what
kinds of “scrapes” she’s getting herself into. The way they talk seems antique in a barbershop kind of way—a bunch of men with lather on their faces talking about horse races. For a minute or two she entertains a daydream of an audience of men throwing roses at her feet and crying out, “Bravo, bravissimo!”

“Well,” she says, “I’m getting bored. Are we going to rehearse or what? Where’s the
director?”

Finally Liz Warren shows up and gathers the cast around to begin rehearsal. It’s more of a read-through today, actually, and Dixie wants to remain professional in front of Jeremy Notion, so she resists the temptation to make snide remarks about Liz’s shirt, which anybody can see is too big for her and looks like a sack. She makes sure, however, that she’s sitting next to her leading man so that she can lean over and point to the script when he loses his place. For a while their shoulders are even touching—but she remains casual.

She puts on her most dramatic vocal performance, even at this early stage of the rehearsals, and afterward Beth and Andie and Caroline surround her to tell her what a fabulous job she’s done. They’ve been sitting in the corner watching the entire thing. Andie even drew a picture of it, like a courtroom artist’s rendering.

“But you know,” Beth says, “you’re going to have to kiss that Jeremy boy. He’s got funny lips.”

“Yeah,” Caroline agrees. “He’s not a very good Ivan.”

“As far as Ivans go,” Andie concludes. The thing about Andie is you never know whether she’s agreeing with you or making fun of you. The other girls feel suddenly chastened and disregard her comment.

“Well, I like him,” Dixie says, holding her chin up. “Did you see how he didn’t pay any attention to Pauline when she was practically flashing her boobs at him? He doesn’t like trashy things. He possesses
quality.”

“Yeah,” Caroline agrees, “I guess he’s kind of cute.”

The four girls gaze at Jeremy Notion, who is across the auditorium looking on as two other Bardolph boys punch each other in the arm.

Dixie watches for a moment and then says, “Do you think his ears are funny? I think he could be my boyfriend. Watch this.”

She pulls herself up to her most dramatic height and walks across the auditorium to where the three boys are. Then she asks Jeremy if she can talk to him for a second.

“I have an idea,” she says as he follows her to a gap near the edge of the stage where unused floodlights are stacked. He seems confused but willing. “We’re going to practice our lines together.”

“Didn’t we just do that?”

“I don’t mean here. Anyone can rehearse here. We’re the
leads.
We have a greater obligation to the play.”

“Oh,” he says, nodding. “Okay.”

“We can do it at my house. Tuesdays. You should meet me here after school. If I’m not here, wait for me—sometimes I’m a little late.”

He looks at her blankly. Then a little grin begins to grow on his face.

“Now don’t be silly,” she says admonishingly. “This is my last play here. I want it to be good. That means you have to be good, too.”

“Are your parents going to be there? I mean in the afternoons?”

Dixie rolls her eyes for an answer. “And one more thing. From now on when we talk, I’m going to call you Ivan, and you should call me Clarissa. That’s the way they do it.”

“Who?”

“Actors. It’s called
method.”

“Okay, Dixie. Whatever you say.”

She gives him a playful slap on the arm. “Be good, Ivan. There’s a lot of things you don’t understand. I’m just one of them.”

“What? Huh?” He is nonplussed.

“It’s from the play, Ivan. The play. You know, the one we just read?”

“Oh. Sure, I remember that.” And then he smiles broadly, proud of himself, and Dixie leaves him standing there.

Liz Warren, who is sitting against the wall just around the corner making emendations to the script, overhears the entire conversation and cringes. Closing her eyes as though in deep concentration, she gnaws on the end of her pen.

What distresses her most is that Dixie Doyle is a more effective actress off the stage than on. Second in descending order of distressing things: Dixie seems to get most of her acting cues from bad television. To Liz there is nothing worse than participating without conscious irony in the clichés of teenage girlhood. She is sure that if cornered she could admit to the existence of worse crimes, but some sins are all the more egregious because of their prevalence.

And it exasperates her that Dixie is invariably successful in her tactics with boys. Everything that comes out of Dixie’s mouth should, in the moral universe that Liz inhabits, derail any further engagement. By all reason, boys should find Dixie to be a short ride on a broken track. Liz doesn’t understand how, after the mundane exchange she just witnessed, a relationship could ever get to the kissing stage. Much less the holding hands in public, the social partnership, the sex. How could Jeremy, in all seriousness, forget about Dixie’s hackneyed performance of girlishness long enough to take off her clothes?

She shakes it out of her head. Jeremy Notion doesn’t really concern her—not in terms of the play at least. He may be lacking the common sense to stay away from Dixie Doyle, but he certainly does have that quality of organic masculinity that is perfect for the role of Ivan. She pictures the character as a tight lump of flesh, the unnatural extreme of a natural force: a tumor of manhood balled up in the body somewhere and demanding some kind of response, some kind of action. Like the walls of scuffed flesh she observes walking to and from school, the men and boys who, unknowingly, force her to walk in the street to avoid them—or stand in blind doorways until they pass—with their brute strength.

Liz wonders how Dixie does it, willingly putting herself in the way of that moving wall of masculinity. She wonders if this is, in fact, something to be admired.

When she looks at her watch, she realizes how late it’s gotten. She hops up and rushes to the lobby of the school, where, as she wraps herself in her coat, she sees Mr. Hughes walking past distractedly.

“Oh,” he says, though she knows he doesn’t have any interest in talking to her. “Hello, um—”

“Liz,” she says. “Liz Warren. I’m in your class.” In fact, she is taking two English classes this year, his and Binhammer’s. English is her subject.

“Liz, of course. I knew that.”

“Well…” She has stopped buttoning her coat. She does not want to appear rude. On the other hand, she doesn’t know what else to say to him.

“And how come,” he says finally, “you’re here so late?”

“The play. The school play. It’s nothing. I wrote it. It’s nothing.”

“The play—let me see….” He puts his hand to his forehead as if trying to coax out the memory he needs. “What is the name of it again?”

“It’s stupid, really. I don’t even like it. It’s called
Salmonburger.”