Hummingbirds (9 page)

“Ah! Wait, I think I remember. The one based on the
Oresteia
, right?”

“Not based on.
Patterned
after.” She wants him to understand the difference. She can feel it in her chest, the importance of his comprehending the significant difference.

He squints his eyes and nods. “Patterned after the
Oresteia.
Yes.”

She waits for him to say more, but when he doesn’t, she thinks she should say something.

“Why are you still here? I mean—do you have meetings?”

He looks around the lobby, frowning. He seems not to have heard her.

Then he says, “You know, when I was in college I had a thing for Ezra Pound. All I did was read
The Cantos
over and over. It’s all I did. Then one night I fell asleep reading them and I woke up the next morning and discovered that I had rolled over on the book in my sleep. And the pages were all bent and creased.” He looks pained. “And then when I tried to read
The Cantos
again, they sounded different to me. Not as good. Even now.”

He looks at her. Something coils up in her stomach.

“Silly,” he says. “Isn’t it?”

Except she doesn’t think it’s silly at all. She thinks about it later when she’s trying to do her homework under the dim light of the desk lamp in her room. It seems like one of those stories whose meaning is always just around the next corner in your head. But she never really gets settled down to dealing with it—and by the next day it is mostly gone, having left that illusory trace of worry behind.

“I
t’s not that they shouldn’t go out together,” Liz Warren says to Monica Vargas as they sit at the long lunch table picking at plates of baked ziti with plastic utensils. “I just don’t understand why they have to be so
demonstrative.”

“I know what you mean. The other night I was coming out of the building and I saw her blowing him a kiss. Can you believe it? I mean, actually blowing him a kiss.”

“Oh my god.”

“With her whole arm. She almost clobbered a pedestrian.”

It is true that Dixie Doyle and Jeremy Notion have been seen together in the neighborhood by a number of credible witnesses. Though what is less clear is how authentic their interactions are to be judged. There are some girls who say that the two are obviously practicing their roles for the play—with a kind of method-acting diligence. There are others who claim that Dixie drags him around the city like a poodle on a leash, doing all the talking while he bites his fingernails and gazes wearily at her chest, waiting for the next time she’ll let him do things to her. Still others believe that the boy is just one of Dixie’s hobbies—that there is nothing going on apart from Dixie’s using him as a portable audience for the flaunting of her self-admitted electrifying personality.

“Admittedly,” Dixie has been overheard saying, “I have an electrifying personality.”

Liz wonders if Dixie knows what the word
admittedly
means.

“And he is just annoying,” Liz continues. “I’m constantly telling him how to read all his lines. I mean, he puts the same exact emphasis on every single syllable. There’s no discrimination. I’ve never heard anyone stress an ‘and’ so much before. ‘I’m getting a whiskey
and
soda.’ I had to explain to him that the soda wasn’t what was at stake.”

“Ugh. I don’t know how you do it, Liz.”

Monica Vargas is a pointy-looking girl—sharp eyes, black hair, a striking smile with teeth that are slightly crooked so that you can see the edges of them. At the moment, her long fingers have plucked a burned ziti noodle that she knocks against the table for audible proof that the thing is not meant to be eaten. Like Liz, Monica is an excellent student—the kind of student who, according to the teachers, makes a classroom. Your history class may be filthy with dopey, tight-skirted twits, but Monica’s presence will cut through the muck. She has a low tolerance for the ridiculous and will stab through the flabby excess of any of her peers who happen to be standing between her and her intellectual ends.

The two girls, Monica and Liz, are as close as their own swelling intellects allow them to be. Wary about proclamations of friendship, they find in each other at the very least a cohort in derision.

Liz, however, likes to think that she is the more sympathetic of the two—possessing, as she does, a humanistic, artistic bent that is complementary to and conveniently not in competition with Monica’s flair for cold science.

“Well,” Liz says now. “There’s still time. The play isn’t for another couple months. I think something can be done.”

“Ugh,” Monica says again, holding up a stringy ball of greasy cheese with a plastic fork. “Can you believe this? This isn’t right.” She flops it down on her tray. “Why didn’t I just have a hardboiled egg? I’m always happy with a hardboiled egg. No surprises.”

After school, the two girls walk to Monica’s apartment, where they drink orange juice and sit on the kitchen counter eating miniature carrots out of a bag. Then, in Monica’s bed
room, which is a chaos of cultural production—books, CDs, photos cut from magazines—they lie on the floor making themselves sick with stories about the moral and aesthetic outrages of the common man. When they discover they have wasted over an hour of their lives gossiping about their peers, they switch to more worthwhile topics and make outlines of upcoming essays for history and English.

Then Monica reads the script revisions Liz has made to accommodate the talents of her actors. Liz watches her read, Monica leaning over her desk, her black hair hanging straight down, her forehead in her hand—the focused concentration of a coiled rattler.

“I like this line you added,” she says finally. “You broke my heart and my tibia.’ Is that for Jeremy?”

“Yeah,” Liz says. “I thought I’d give him an ‘and’ he could emphasize all he wants.”

Monica gives her an evil, complicit smile. Then she goes back to the script.

When she’s finished, she says, “It’s good. But do you think the social criticism is explicit enough? You don’t want to turn it up a little?” Monica, Liz knows, is fonder of strength than subtlety. Her mother is a divorce lawyer, and her father is a self-absorbed, misogynistic jackass. At least that’s what Mrs. Vargas tells the girls. But to Monica, who only spends a weekend with him a few times a year, he is just a balding man with nice suits.

In the hall outside Monica’s bedroom, Paulo the cleaning man vacuums the carpet and gazes at them with weighty man stares—and with a contempt that both girls feel they deserve as privileged members of upper-class Manhattan.

“Maybe I’ll bring Paulo to the prom,” Monica whispers after he’s passed. “What would Dixie Doyle say then?”

“Come on,” Liz says, getting down to business. “You have to help me think about this play. The rehearsals are atrocious. What am I going to do about that Jeremy Notion?”

Monica looks out the window thoughtfully. “At least he looks the part. He’s kind of attractive, don’t you think?”

Liz begins doodling nervously in the margin of her script. “I guess. I don’t know. I never really thought about it.”

The two girls are silent for a moment. Then Liz adds:

“That’s Dixie’s bailiwick anyway.”

“Did you just say bailiwick? Tell me you didn’t just say bailiwick.”

“What? Why? It’s a perfectly legitimate word.”

After the sun sets, Liz walks home, feeling illuminated and refreshed by the mazy headlights of the passing taxicabs. She eats dinner with her parents, two people who do not feel nearly as embarrassed in the world as Liz believes they should.

While she cuts through a bumblebee-striped slab of grilled eggplant, Liz’s father delights in posing philosophical questions to his daughter. Meanwhile, her mother shakes her head, mystified at such seriousness over dinner, and tries to change the topic to something more befitting teenage girlhood.

“Lizzie, do you think art is a form of religion?” her father says.

“Honey, don’t you want to come shopping with me tomorrow?” her mother says. “I could get you out of school.”

“Lizzie,” her father says, “I can’t wait to see what you come up with for your Hemingway paper.”

“I worry about you, honey,” her mother says, “always with your nose in a book.”

Liz’s days go on like this, week after week, with a comfortable sameness. As she navigates herself quietly past all the people who populate her world, there are times, it is true, when Liz suspects herself of being superior to those around her. But these moments are tempered by an equal number in which she fears that something is truly wrong with her—something fundamental and abstract. Or that, perhaps worse, she is simply
average.
Her great fear is that someone she is close to, a parent or a teacher, will one day let it slip that the myth of her excellence has been created simply to make her feel good. After all, she wonders, isn’t one of the most despicable crimes of commonness the foolish belief that one is
uncommon?

And then, one day, she comes home to hear her mother crying softly through the door of her parents’ bedroom and her father standing at the counter in the kitchen, staring blankly into the sink.

It takes her a while to figure out what to do. The little girl part of her, which she can feel in her fingers and toes, wants simply to say, “Daddy?” But she knows, maybe for the first time, that she is beyond that age. And, so realizing, the fear transforms itself into self-hatred and anger. It is unjust of anyone to force that awakening on her so suddenly when she was having such a nice day.

“What did you do to her?” she says finally. She can feel her body refusing to move, drilling itself to the spot in the kitchen.

Her father looks up and tries to smile but then seems embarrassed by the artificiality of it. He is a good man—a beautiful, good man. “Oh, Lizzie. You know how things are. Nobody did anything to anybody. Your mother…”

She can hear the click and whir of the refrigerator as it comes on.

“Why is she the one crying?” She is surprised at her own protectiveness with respect to her mother. Normally she considers herself her father’s daughter.

She waits for the answer, but her father simply shakes his head at this impossible question.

Folding her arms across her chest, she asks provokingly, “Are you getting a divorce?”

“A divorce? Who mentioned divorce? Really, Lizzie. You know better than that. These things are complicated. More complicated than divorce.” He chooses his next words deliberately. “You know, your mother and I are very different people. But we knew that going in.”

His voice is like warm sand on the beach. You want to dig yourself into it. You wouldn’t mind being buried to your neck in it.

“Let me ask you a question,” he goes on—though she knows that this is his rhetorical preamble to a philosophical question
and not an actual invitation for an answer. “Don’t you think that sometimes we are attracted to other people because of all the ways in which they are
not
like us?”

So her parents are not getting a divorce. And later that evening her mother appears in the doorway looking as though nothing has happened. She comes in and sits on the edge of Liz’s bed, beamingly coy.

“See,” she says, pointing to her own beaming smile. “This is something you still have to learn about cosmetics. They just cover everything up. A little fresh mascara, some blush, and you’re a new woman. Why don’t you ever let me try it on you? Well, but you’re already so beautiful, aren’t you?”

Liz has looked up from her textbook, but she doesn’t know how to talk to her mother—who, she suspects, always wanted a different kind of daughter. Someone who can talk about fingernails and hemlines, about hair products and wrinkle creams. Her mother is tragic in the way that exquisite childhood things are always tragic: in the profusion of her personality there is always the discordant note of the exhausted and the lost.

“Really though, Lizzie,” her mother continues, “there are some lipsticks that are almost invisible. No one even notices you’re wearing them.”

She picks at her fingernails for a moment and then looks up to the ceiling, sighing dramatically.

“Oh, life is full of a lot of silly things, Lizzie. Silly, silly things.”

F
or the Carmine-Casey girls, the curiously electrified interactions between Mr. Binhammer and Mr. Hughes are something they continue to be fascinated by even as they feel increasingly excluded from them. Everyone in the hallway stops to listen when Binhammer roars at Hughes, “Can you try to focus for two minutes? Can you?” And then everybody laughs because the two men are smiling at each other with that canny, belligerent male affection the girls recognize from their brothers, their fathers, their uncles. The girls know, on some level, that for boys a punch in the eye is as good as a hug—that the animals they have seen ripping into each other’s flesh on nature documentaries are actually just playing, vying for territorial dominion and reassuring themselves of their own maleness. But the girls also believe, with the kind of faith that surpasses understanding, that these boy animals know how silly it all is—and that this is just their way of having fun.

What bothers the girls is that there sometimes seems to be no place for them in this dynamic. When Lydia Crane is talking with Mr. Hughes in the hallway, for example, Mr. Binhammer, who is waiting for the elevator, interrupts and says to him, “You teach Lydia?”

“I do.”

“She’s great.”

“I know it. You don’t have to—”

“She wrote a great paper for me last year. On Hawthorne and Melville, wasn’t it?” Binhammer looks briefly at Lydia but
doesn’t wait for her response. “Just a beautiful paper. It took her forever to write it. You remember how many times we went over it, Lydia?”

“You know what?” Lydia begins, “I was just thinking about that paper yester—”

“Well,” Hughes interrupts. “You should see what she’s working on now. It’ll knock you over. Kathy Acker and the surrealists.”

“Kathy Acker? What are you teaching Kathy Acker for?”

“Hey, let me ask you a question. On another topic. How many of these girls do you think—”

That’s when Hughes realizes that Lydia is still standing between them, her gaze springing back and forth.

He shakes his head. “It’s not important,” he says to Binhammer. “I’ll ask you later.”

The whole interaction leaves Lydia Crane feeling funny. Later, in telling the other girls, she tries to come up with an approximation of her feelings, and the closest she can come is jealousy. But she doesn’t know how to say it without sounding like she has a crush on both teachers, so she finally stops trying.

But each of the girls who hears the story has at one point or another felt the same thing. The girls daydream, while moving creamed corn around on their plates at dinner, about ways to insert themselves between the two men—about what they might say to get their attention and participate in the conversations that seem so sophisticated, thrilling, and just the slightest bit inappropriate.

And in this way the days of October shuffle themselves into November like a deck of playing cards, each day bearing only an accidental relationship to the one before or after it.

For Binhammer, Ted Hughes becomes a spanner in the works, gumming up the progress of his day. A speed bump in the road. He finds himself having to slow down when Hughes is in sight, having to take stock, having to be more careful of his words. He sometimes catches himself buttoning his coat or straightening his collar, as though he were going in for an interview.

For the first few weeks, he simply hates the man with an uncomplicated fury. He avoids him in the halls. He fantasizes about all the ways in which Ted Hughes might fail at the school, might be humiliated, might be all the more disappointing for the promise everyone seems to believe he possesses. He wants to expose him as an impostor, someone who doesn’t belong as Binhammer himself does. Ted Hughes cannot be one of the great intellectual knights-errant of the Carmine-Casey School for Girls. Can he?

But as the days go on, Binhammer’s fury gets overgrown with other emotions—like a seed giving rise to some complicated plant.

In short, now he’s not sure how he feels about Ted Hughes. He knows that anger should be a larger part of the equation, but he just can’t seem to muster it any longer. In fact, he has difficulty picturing this man sleeping with his wife. And yet he knows it happened. Sometimes, sure—sometimes an image will flare up, a bright, overexposed picture of the two of them together like a marquee all over the inside of his skull. Not sex, though. The sex seems secondary. In these bright-as-daylight cases, it’s little details he imagines. The intimacy of fingers. Sarah, his wife, combing back his hair with her hand. The two of them furtively touching fingertips in the bar, knowing they might get caught. His fingers tracing the architecture of her face.

These images are painful. They are. But the pain peters out after a while because there is no fear to drive it. Sarah loves him. Feels attached to him by an almost biological bond. She doesn’t want to leave him. This he knows. And so it’s difficult to feel the sort of things he knows he should feel—the grab bag of jealousies, insecurities, vengeances.

In addition to this, there are moments, gorgeously contorted moments of human fickleness, when he can look at Ted Hughes from across the room and see what his wife must have seen in him. Yes, there is a reason the girls like him. There is a reason his wife was drawn to him. Watching him in the teachers’ lounge one day, Binhammer thinks, Yes, it’s true, the man has something.

“I’m going home,” he announces. In addition to Ted Hughes, three other teachers are reclining in various poses around the room, one of whom is Walter, making notes in the margin of a book about World War II.

“Good night,” Walter says, without looking up. The older teacher, Binhammer thinks, is religious about his tragedy: he sees moments of calmness as simply hiatuses before the next coup d’état, the next holocaust.

A few moments later, outside in the hall, Ted Hughes catches up with Binhammer before the elevator.

“There are some girls in my class,” Hughes says, “who have started an anti-marriage campaign. They say that marriage is just a way for people who have failed at real love to make themselves feel better.”

Ted Hughes smiles widely. His smile is like a roulette wheel. It spins in a crazy blur—but when it slows down and falls on you, you feel as though you’ve won something.

“This is the best part. They want to call themselves the Nuns of Matrimony.”

“Does that mean—”

“They don’t have anything against sex,” Hughes explains. “In fact, there’s a pro-sex statement in their bylaws.”

“No kidding.”

“They’re beautiful, aren’t they? Such adorable little bundles of outrage.”

Binhammer nods his head. He has been surrounded by women for so long that he is not used to these male exchanges, and they give him a small thrill. Because, yes, the girls are beautiful in their outrage—and until this moment he didn’t know that was something he could articulate.

He wonders if some gesture of farewell at the end of the day will be required of him. Is this the time when two men shake hands? Clap their palms on each others’ shoulders? Hug? He has discovered that male beginnings are accidental, arbitrary—yet he still does not know how men end things. But it looks like Ted Hughes has more to say anyway.

“Listen,” he says, inching so close that Binhammer can smell something stiff and leathery, like aftershave or starched collars or maybe just the man’s skin. “What do you know about Sibyl?”

“Sibyl? What about her?” Binhammer feels suddenly hot and presses the down button on the elevator panel.

“What I mean is—I know she’s been separated from her husband for a while. Not that that means…She’s just said some things to me that—”

A student walks by behind them, and the two men gaze around the hall until she passes. Binhammer jabs his finger at the elevator button again.

“Is it possible,” Ted Hughes continues, “that she’s flirting with me?”

The elevator doors open, and Binhammer steps inside. He turns to face his companion, who remains standing in the hallway.

“She’s upset about her divorce,” Binhammer says. “I don’t think—I mean, from what people have told me—I don’t think she wants to start anything.”

Ted Hughes looks relieved. Binhammer realizes he was trying to avoid an entanglement, not seek one out. “Probably just looking for some male attention,” Ted Hughes speculates as the doors begin to close between them.

Binhammer nods. “Probably just looking for some male attention,” he confirms—but the elevator has already started down.

Out on the street he walks quickly, trying to avoid the eyes of the packs of Carmine-Casey girls left over from the day of school. They roam in small giggling herds around the block for as much as an hour or two after the final bell. Sometimes he will find them crouching in alleys, smoking. In these cases, he pretends not to recognize them. And after he has passed, he can hear them erupting in shrieks.

Once he reaches the corner, he looks around and then wedges himself under the gunmetal umbrella of a pay phone.
He dials a number, and when his wife picks up the phone, he tells her that he has a faculty meeting and will be home an hour later than usual.

Then he hails a cab and gives the driver an address.

He likes being in the backseat of a taxicab—it makes him feel sleepy and meditative. In the intimacy of the little vinyl coffin, his thoughts become large, abstract. He recalls Dixie Doyle becoming agitated in his class that morning—rubbing her fingers up and down her calf and complaining that she missed a spot shaving. Then she took her friend Caroline’s hand and put it on her leg. “Doesn’t it feel gross? Like a mouse or something?”

He thinks about that—those tiny glistening hairs.

He also thinks of Sarah. The woman whose love is an easy assumption. Even now. Especially now. If the marriage were going to end, it would have ended two years ago. It doesn’t even require speculation.

Then there’s Ted Hughes. He is like a boy, Binhammer thinks. No one else sees that. That face being closed off by the elevator doors. That smile. The tinny music box of his voice.

Sometimes Binhammer finds him in the hall between classes looking around confusedly. And when asked what’s going on, Ted Hughes gets shaken out of his reverie and responds, “Oh, I was just thinking of something.” And then he wanders off.

The hand through his hair. The click in the back of his throat that sounds like fragility.

When the cab pulls up at the curb, Binhammer is jolted as though waking up from an afternoon nap. He gives the driver some bills and enters one of the five-story buildings that are lined up like dominoes down the block. At the top of four flights of steps, which he takes two at a time—suddenly feeling like a vigorous child—he has to think hard to remember which apartment door is the one he’s looking for. He has only been here twice before.

“Hughes thinks you’re flirting with him,” he says, brushing by her when she opens the door.

“Binhammer?” she says, touching her hair. “What are you doing here? And why would Hughes think that?”

The thing about Sibyl is she never knows how to hide anything.

“I told him you just wanted some male attention.”

She frowns, trying to look hurt.

Binhammer looks around at the apartment. “Did you change something in here? It looks different.”

“The couch is new. I needed something classier for all my gentlemen callers. By the way, you can’t just come up here anytime you want.”

Her refusal is exciting because it wants to be countermanded. Desperation, too, is a kind of desire—and hers compels him. The first time he was in her apartment he was invited for cocktails along with a number of other Carmine-Casey faculty. The second time it was just the two of them. They had taken a walk after school and found themselves on the stoop of her building. Upstairs, he kissed her—twice—before stopping himself and fleeing.

This is the apartment that she could afford on her salary after the separation. The main area is just big enough for a couch and a television she has wedged into a hole in the wall that looks like it might once have been a fireplace. On the other side of a thin wall is the kitchen with its cracked tiles and peeling shelf paper. Beyond that you would find a grimy little bathroom and a bedroom that has her oversize marriage bed—taken like a hostage from her husband, wedding linens and all. He likes the color of her solitude. This is a place where femininity is not buffed and powdered perfect—no, here it’s smeared on mirrors and gets stuck in dresser drawers.

What Binhammer can’t understand is her obsession with plants. There are plants everywhere. On all the windowsills, in pots on top of the television, in ceramic planters on the coffee table and bedside table, hanging in the bathroom. And all different types of greenery: things that have rubbery leaves, or thorns, flowers and buds. Spidery, tendrilly hanging plants
with little organic explosions at the end of each stem. And some strange bamboo-looking stalks with a visceral tangle of white roots growing in a nest in the bottom of a clear vase. Binhammer doesn’t like to look at this last plant, which reminds him of embalmed corpses, scientific experiments, and pasty genitalia.

“Aren’t you his mentor?” he says to her, looking out the window to the street.

“What?”

“Hughes. Didn’t Mrs. Mayhew make you his mentor?”

“So?”

“So, are you mentoring him? Showing him the ropes? Explaining how girls work?”

“We’ve talked. We’ve had some conversations.” She sits on the couch and tugs at the hem of her shirt, examining it.

“And what—” Binhammer realizes he is stacking one biting remark on top of another, so he checks his tone. The next question is sincere. “And what do you think of him?”

“I don’t know,” she says slowly. “There’s something about him. A quality. The students adore him. And he knows his stuff. He spent an hour explaining post-structuralism to me. And for once in my life it actually began to make sense.”

Just like her, he thinks. She’s got it all wrong. Just like her to confuse showmanship with intellect. Hughes doesn’t care about post-structuralism. He was just acting. Trying to dazzle. A lot of explosions, like fireworks. It’s all spectacle. A beautiful spectacle.