“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.
I would do the same thing, Binhammer thinks.
“He’s not your type,” he says to her as he takes a stem of green leaves in his hand. Plants everywhere.
“What do you have against him anyway?”
Not him, he thinks, crushing a waxy leaf between his fingers. Not him.
Then he goes over to the couch where she is sitting and stands in front of her. For a few seconds their eyes are locked, their gaze becoming a steel rod between them. It seems impossible that they should ever be able to move closer or farther apart than they are now. He can imagine them just orbiting each other, at this precise distance, their gazes never breaking, for the rest of their lives.
But then she reaches her hand out, tentatively, and lays her palm flat on his stomach. It’s a curious touch, visceral, shivery, and intimate. It reminds him of her viny plants. So he takes her wrist and draws her up to him.
The kiss is full of discordant things—shrieking babies, plastic intimacies, arthritic old women holding themselves up at the edges of tables, unrecognized silences.
Then he pulls away, angry at himself—either for kissing her or for ceasing to kiss her, he cannot tell. He doesn’t want to look at her.
“I have to go,” he says.
She doesn’t say anything.
“I have to go,” he says again.
“So go.” She sits back down on the couch and picks up a magazine from the coffee table, flipping the pages violently.
When he turns to leave, he can hear her coming up behind him. She catches up with him at the front door.
“What did you come here for anyway?” she says. “What do you—what is it you want? Are you going to start doing this all the time now?”
“We’re friends,” he says, cringing inside. He doesn’t even recogni
ze himself at the moment.
“We are not friends,” she says. “Friends don’t keep almost falling into bed together. Is this funny to you? Do you like doing this to me?”
“I’m not doing—”
“Just because your wife goes out and has an—”
She brings herself up short just then, shaking her head and grinning to herself with embarrassment. When she speaks again her voice is different altogether.
“Listen,” she says, “forget it. Don’t listen to me. I’m all knotted up. You’re right. We’re friends.”
“If I’ve made things difficult, I can stay away from you—”
“No, really. Don’t do that. Don’t punish me. We’re all right.”
There is a silence.
“My divorce,” she says. She shrugs as if the whole thing isn’t worth talking about. “My divorce is finalized next week.”
She looks down and starts playing with her own fingers.
“Look,” he says, as gently as he can. “I’m married, and—”
“I know, I know.” She folds her arms over her breasts. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I just thought we might celebrate. A girl’s first divorce. That’s got to count for something.”
He smiles and thinks about leaning over to kiss her cheek. Her hair is a mess and he wants to put his hands in it, his fingers up against her scalp. But what he also wants is to be outside away from all these plants.
Part of him would like to be in love with her, just to make sense of his presence here. But love just doesn’t work here. It topples over when he tries to build it too high.
“Sure,” he says. “We’ll celebrate. We’ll have streamers.”
After the door closes, Sibyl stands in front of it for a while, leaning against the wall. Then she goes into the bedroom and stands in front of the mirror, pulling her skin in various places to see how she would look if she were thinner, less wrinkled.
When she’s had enough of that, she undresses and puts on an oversize T-shirt so she won’t have to see herself and goes to the kitchen to open the refrigerator. It’s always empty. She retrieves a handful of takeout menus from a drawer and begins to leaf through them while thinking about all the men she’s known, a lineage descending straight down from her father—their hands on her back, enfolding her, shrinking her, allowing her to drop away all the superfluous pretense and simply be a little gem in their palms. A beautiful little gem.
chapter 13
For Binhammer, the arrival home has the quality of a high mass—a ceremony conducted in a chamber of echoes, a place where words continue to burn like offertory candles long after the supplicant has gone. Speeches hold here; the echoes of conversations bounce from wall to wall without ever really dying. It sometimes surprises him to come upon the remains of an old argument still quibbling with itself in some undusted corner. But this is also a holy place. A beautiful place.
When he opens the door, he can hear the tap-tap-tap of the computer keyboard coming from the back of the apartment. She is in there. The place is dark save for the low-wattage glow emanating with witchy serenity from that back room.
He stops and listens. Does he like that sound, the bony clatter of keys in an empty apartment? He doesn’t know. This too seems religious—like tinkling little sins floating up to the ear of God from a confessional.
When he has listened long enough, he shuts the front door loudly and calls out a hello.
“Hi,” Sarah calls back from her sanctum. “How was your meeting?”
“Fine.”
There is a pause in the tapping, but no more than a hesitation before it starts again in earnest.
He takes off his coat and hangs it on the hook by the door. Then he goes into the bedroom and sits down on the edge of the bed. He thinks about taking his shoes off, but decides against it. Instead, he just sits for a few minutes inside the rattling sound of his wife’s fingers on the keyboard and thinks about dry, weightless things—dead leaves, insect legs, empty aluminum cans rolling down street gutters in hot desert winds.
Then he goes into the living room and sits on the couch where he can see her through the doorway, her back to him, the white screen of the monitor framing her head with an electric halo.
“I just want to finish this thought,” she says, still looking at the screen. “Do you mind?”
“No,” he says. “Take your time.”
That’s when she turns her head and gives him a look, her face soft-eyed and delicate, her smile suddenly intimate.
It’s the face of an angel, the face of an infant, the face of a cartoon dog, the face of a total stranger, the face of a carnivorous cat, the face of laughing Buddha. He knows that face. He recognizes it because he sees it everywhere. It fixes in his mind like a signal lamp flashing him messages, telling him what she will think about this or what she will say about that.
Like last week when Walter pulled him close in the teachers’ lounge and told that joke about the rabbi’s wife. There was her face, behind the shoulder of Walter’s dusty old coat, a disapproving smirk. That’s when he noticed Walter’s grimy yellow teeth, and the dried white spittle in the corner of his mouth. And he wanted to escape Walter, wanted to satisfy Sarah’s gaze that was on him always—even in the classroom and hallways, sometimes even the eyes of the girls themselves.
Sarah’s face—a face like clarity, like decency, like home fronts.
So he doesn’t mind sitting and looking at her, hunched over the keyboard and producing line after line of text, her little body collapsing itself boxlike into its own wrenching endeavors.
He leans back and puts his feet up on the coffee table. As he watches, she stops typing and hugs herself a little. She must be cold. Then she extends her hands again to the keyboard and rests them there a moment, poised, before she continues.
He thinks about Sibyl. The fecund, filthy quality of the air in her apartment just half an hour before. And now this scene before him—the dryness of sticks.
Finally Sarah finishes and, with a sigh, comes over to the couch where he’s sitting and collapses on top of him, her head in his lap. She curls up and nestles her face in his belly, and his hand goes in habitual response to her hair.
“Listen,” she says. “I’m tired. Why don’t you tell me something.”
“What do you want me to tell you?”
“It doesn’t matter. Tell me anything.”
“What goes on with you?” He moves a strand of hair behind her ear. There are a whole lot of nice things about that ear.
“I’m shot for words. I’ve been at it all day. Just tell me something so my own voice isn’t the only one in my head.”
He chuckles. “You need a break,” he says. “We should go away somewhere.”
“That’s good,” she says. “Tell me more. Where?”
He thinks. “Cancun.”
“Come on.”
“Switzerland.”
“No.”
“Spain.”
She considers. “That’s okay,” she decides. “What’s there?”
“Um. Wide, dry plains. Plains with white buildings on them.”
“What else?”
“Dark-faced men.”
“And?”
“Um. Bent, narrow streets. Shops with canopies. Little bars where you can order beer. And when they bring it they set it on nailed aluminum tabletops.” She turns his face up to his and closes her eyes. He likes that. And he thinks about Sibyl again, wondering why he continues to see her—trying to feel his way around the dark corners of his own heart for something that might be guilt. Or vengeance. But there’s nothing there. The two women don’t fit together in any rational way. He tries to picture them side by side, and his mind jams—like looking at an optical illusion that can be a duck or a rabbit but never both at the same time.
“What else?” Sarah asks.
“Bead curtains. Electric fans with rusty blades.”
She opens her eyes and squints at him. “You’ve never been to Spain.”
<
br /> “But I’ve read books about it. And the books are nice.”
She laughs, the tip of her tongue showing pink between her teeth.
He could not hurt her. He is incapable of hurting her. He thinks about Sibyl again, beginning to see her as a tendrilly, organic woman—and he wonders how much of a hazard she could possibly be. He thinks, What could that limp fern do to us?
“Spain,” she says. “We’ll go there someday. What do you say?”
“Of course. There and lots of places.”
“Where else?”
Later, after dinner, he is leaning against the kitchen cabinets and watching as she spoons heaps of instant coffee into a mug and puts some water on to boil. She has a little more work to get done before she can relax.
“You know what Theo said today?” he asks.
Theo. Theodore. Ted. Hughes. When she knew him, she probably assumed his name was Edward. Anyone would. That’s what she probably assumed. When she knew him. So Binhammer uses the name Theo instead. It’s not a lie, not quite.
The first time he told her about him, he watched her face closely—it seemed an impossibly frail deception he was constructing.
“So there’s a new English teacher,” he said.
“Oh? To replace Maureen? What’s her name?”
“His name—”
“His? Uh-oh.” She smiled with a teasing self-satisfaction.
“His name is Theo.”
“Theo.” She scrunched up her face. “Sounds like a children’s book character. A mouse with big round glasses.”
“He’s not. The girls are already in love with him.”
“Competition,” she said, playfully.
“Competition.” He thought about that. Then he shook his head and said, “Actually, he’s kind of an asshole. They just can’t see it yet.”
And now, when she says, “I thought you didn’t like him,” he shrugs and says, “He’s okay. It turns out he’s not so bad.”
Steam begins to escape in little wisps from the kettle on the stovetop.
“In any case,” he goes on, “today he told me that Sibyl is flirting with him.”
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