Hummingbirds

by Joshua Gaylor

  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 conference 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.
<
br />   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 Binhammer. Like a hammer.”

  “Binhammer? 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.

  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.

  chapter 8

  Two 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 delivered 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 (3rd 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.