“Is she?”
“She could be.”
“Well, good for them. Does that mean she’s done flirting with you?”
“She’s not interested in me,” he says. “Not really. I just represent something to her.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Breakability.”
The kettle starts to scream behind her, and she looks at him a moment longer before she turns to take it off the heat.
He doesn’t know why he takes these chances, why he is so eager to bring these three people—Sarah, Sibyl, Ted Hughes—into such precarious proximity. Why dangle them together on a cardboard stage? His wife would say that it’s because he wants to get caught. She believes that every act of immorality is a cry for correction. She believes in Freud, and in fathers with powerful voices. But that’s not it.
“See,” he would explain to his girls if he were in class, “We’re not talking about The Scarlet Letter. We’re not even talking about Dr. Zhivago. Vengeance? You might as well be reading the Old Testament. Jealousy? That’s what prime-time television is for. Look at him—our hero—he’s more than just a wronged husband. He’s more than just a raging cuckold. Don’t make him a stock character. Please, he’s complicated.”
He could imagine their girlheads leaning forward, their imaginations taking flight.
Yes, to play a role in their secret lives, to be the intersection of their most personal vectors, the destination of so many journeys. For all of them: Sarah, Hughes, Sibyl, the girls.
Not drowned by circumstance. Not suffocated like the common dupe. Just so complicated that he becomes the very center of it all, pushing and pulling people like chessmen, tugging them this way and that.
Later, close to midnight, he goes into the room where she is working.
“I’m going to bed,” he says.
“I’ll be in in a little while. I have to finish this.”
“You work too hard.”
“Give me a kiss.”
He kisses her.
It is after 1:00 a.m. when Sarah finally finishes her work and feels her way into the dark bedroom where her husband is already asleep. She lies down carefully to avoid waking him. He stirs, turns over, but remains asleep.
She can sometimes be difficult, she knows that. Coming to bed late, disrupting his dreamful sleep. Lying in the dark, she thinks about their marriage. They met in graduate school, that intellectual hotbed where she learned to siphon her insecurities into a rhetoric of power and didacticism. She surprised herself at the number of people she knocked down with the simple force of her forensic language. They would tumble off their pedestals and leave her standing, and she would think, How did this happen? Are they simply being nice to me? How can they not see that I am unsure of everything?
And then there was Binhammer, who complimented her on her fingernail polish and poked and prodded at her academic ego.
“You’re reading French feminism?” he would condescend. “That’s cute.”
Which infuriated her, of course. And also excited her.
They would argue for hours about Foucault or Kristeva or Alexander Pope. Pope of all people. He had a thing for Pope, which she found inexplicable. He was arrogant and outrageous and frequently downright mistaken—but he wouldn’t be knocked down by her. She couldn’t tumble him. And that was the thing.
Now, eight years into their marriage, she looks over at the silhouette of his face while he sleeps beside her. She will never leave him. That is one thing she knows.
But sometimes she wonders if she has finally tumbled him.
chapter 14
“I think I want to kiss your brother,” Dixie Doyle says conclusively to her friend Beth as they sit in the front of the classroom awaiting Binhammer’s arrival.
“Dixie!” Beth scolds. “That’s gross.”
“She’s right, Beth,” Caroline says. Then she holds up her palm as though she were cupping a small, trembling animal. “He’s so cute.”
“He’s just a little kid,” Beth says.
“Does he have a girlfriend?” Dixie continues. “Does he want me to be his girlfriend?”
“Dixie just likes the way he looks,” Andie interjects lethargically, leaning forward over her desk. “Pocket-sized, hairless. And from what I hear, he can even multiply fractions.”
Earlier that morning Beth’s mother dropped her off at school with her younger brother Charlie—sixth grade, Bardolph Boys’ Academy, voice unbroken—in tow. The presence of the puppyish boy right outside Carmine-Casey caused such a commotion among the students that it took an administrator and a janitor to round them all up and herd them into the building. The crowd was so dense, though, that for a while they misplaced the boy—and eventually found him, blushing, in the middle of three concentric rings of girls who were touching his hair, pinching his cheeks, holding his hands, and asking him about his position on girls vis-à-vis cooties.
To Dixie, he is the most adorable thing she has ever seen. He is little for his age and has long eyelashes, soft round cheeks, and glistening red lips in the shape of a bow. His skin is so smooth that she now hates her own in comparison, and he has the sweetest, softest voice—like something downy and blossomy that you would want to feel against your face. Beth has told them that because of his size he is sometimes picked on in school, and Dixie swears with witnesses present that she will personally castrate any boy who picks on little Charlie.
“Snip, snip,” she says. “I’ll do it, too.”
“Can we not talk about my brother anymore,” Beth pleads.
“Come on,” Dixie says. “Let me kiss him at least. He doesn’t have to be my boyfriend, but at least let me kiss him, d’accord?”
Madame Millet-Johnson, the French teacher, complimented Dixie on her accent last week, so Dixie has been peppering her conversation with French phrases ever since.
“Don’t be gross.”
“I need to practice for the play.”
“No.”
“Why don’t you practice with your costar?” Andie asks. She is now slumped over her entire desk, looking like she wants to fall asleep.
Dixie makes the line of her mouth flat. “Jeremy and I have already practiced. We’ve practiced enough. I’m tired of practicing with him.”
“Really?” says Caroline.
“Already?” Andie mumbles.
“I mean, he can still be my boyfriend. But it’s just that—he’s everywhere. You know? I think he has four tongues. I swear, at certain points he’s had a tongue in my mouth, on my neck, and in both my ears at the same time. It makes me want to throw up. And then I have to go into the bathroom and towel myself down. Quel dommage!”
“Too many tongues.” Caroline shakes her head as if in experienced commiseration.
“Does he seem to be enjoying himself?” Beth asks.
Dixie considers this and then says, “I guess so. He usually looks pretty satisfied with himself. He pats his stomach, like he’s just eaten a big meal.”
“Is that all you’ve done with him? I mean, you haven’t done anything else, right?”
Dixie grimaces. “With him? Come on.”
When Binhammer comes into the room, Dixie turns to face front and all the girls arrange themselves in their seats. Dixie folds her hands on the desk in front of her in what she imagines to be the posture of eager studenthood.
But before her teacher has a chance to start the class, Dixie states, “Mr. Binhammer, Beth won’t let me kiss her brother.”
The class laughs. Dixie, the consummate performer, stares straight ahead and ignores her audience.
“Huh,” Binhammer says, nodding his head. “Did you ask nicely?”
“Mais oui. I did. I’m being a perfect lady about the whole thing.”
“He’s twelve, Mr. Binhammer,” Beth says.
“But,” Dixie says, “he’s wise for his age.”
“Twelve, huh?” Binhammer puts on his best Solomon face. “Have you tried candy?”
The class enjoy
s the exchange. That is, all of them except for Liz Warren, who, like a beacon of sour grievance flashing from the back row, sits there rolling her eyes. Binhammer wonders what’s wrong with her—why she has to be so serious all the time. He likes smart girls, but sometimes they’re hard to entertain. All she is is correct answers and disapproving looks. Her arms crossed, her face a stony crag, she’s like the silent voice of his moral conscience—always telling him that it’s time to get down to business. Enough nonsense. Enough playing around.
He wonders, if she’s so dissatisfied with the way things work in his class, why she continues to come at all. She’s a senior, after all. Most of the senior girls have already earned or bought their way into college and do what they want. But no, that’s the other problem with smart girls. They just keep coming to class—long past when they have to—just out of spite.
In the teachers’ lounge after class Binhammer finds Ted Hughes bent over a stack of papers and chewing on the end of a ballpoint pen.
“What’s wrong?” Ted Hughes asks by way of a greeting. Binhammer has noticed that the man has this uncanny ability to read his emotional state with a single glance. Like some kind of empath. Maybe that’s what makes him so attractive to women. There is something appealing about being interpreted by him, your mind a manuscript under his eyes.
“It’s nothing. It’s this girl in my class. Liz Warren. She—”
“Oh, Liz. She’s in my class too. She’s wonderful, isn’t she?”
She has never mentioned to Binhammer—in the few brief conversations they have had—that she was taking another English class.
“She’s smart, I suppose. But don’t you find her a bit humorless?”
Ted Hughes thinks about that. “Maybe at first,” he concedes. “But she was laughing at something the other day in class—what was it? Oh, sure, it was Chaucer. She was hysterical about it.”
“Chaucer? The Canterbury Tales?”
“Not The Canterbury Tales. She was doing a presentation on one of the minor poems. ‘The Book of the Duchess.’ She thought it was hilarious.”
“Really.”
“Sidesplitting.” Ted Hughes shakes his head as if sympathizing with Binhammer, but Binhammer doesn’t feel like he’s being sympathized with. “And then she came up to me afterward and gave me this twenty-minute lecture on how Chaucer was the prefiguration—that’s even the word she used—the prefiguration of the TV sitcom.”
“Uh-huh. But don’t you get tired of the eye-rolling?”
“The eye-rolling?”
“Never mind.”
Yes, Binhammer thinks now, it’s true. That Liz Warren is a great kid. He has been thinking of her as superior, self-righteous and joyless. But now it seems obvious to him that she is just the opposite. She is a great diviner of joy—dowsing for it among the dead, arid plains of commonness and vulgarity. She is a leader, an aggressive intellect, a bright orbiting light of clarity and reason—for anyone who would bother to look up—and now she is the prize student of the dashing and obviously more insightful Ted Hughes.
Liz Warren. He should have cultivated that seed long ago. Now it’s too late. He cannot recover her. She is too used to scowling at him from the back row. And besides, she is now a Hughes girl.
What more can the man take from him? It would be easier if Binhammer could simply hate him. But when he looks at Hughes, he knows why Liz Warren likes him. He understands why his own wife would be attracted to him. The man burns like an ember.
Then he thinks of his own prize student, Dixie Doyle, glowing tepidly from the front row of the class like a low-wattage bulb gathering moths. She and the rest of her alliterative friends: Caroline Cox, Beth Barber, Andie Abramson. Why does he have to have the students with names like cartoon characters? Talking about shaving their legs and kissing each other’s brothers. Admiring each other’s scented highlighters. Sharing lipstick. Chewing gum.
Instead of laughing at Chaucer, they treat him with misplaced seriousness. Dixie Doyle looks at the woodcut illustration on the cover of the Penguin edition of her Canterbury Tales and asks with tremendous gravity, “Was Chaucer fat? He looks fat, n’est pas?” And then, “Why is he wearing a dress? Was that the style in Old English?”
“Old English is a language, Dixie. And this isn’t it anyway. This is Middle English.”
“Bien sur,” she says happily, drawing a picture of a sunflower in her notebook.
Now it occurs to him that even this room-temperature quartet of girls may only like him because he lets them get away with things. He doesn’t say anything if they come into class late, and he silently tolerates the eating of rice cakes. And the putting on of mascara. He has even been talked into giving them extensions on papers because of the sicknesses of family pets. “Mr. Strawberry was throwing up all night. He’s got worms.” And he imagines that, if he were ever actually to say no, his little cadre of faithful followers would dissipate in a cloud of outraged harrumphs. There is no loyalty there. There is no permanence.
He spends the rest of the morning in a funk, and later he sits down at a table with Lonnie Abramson, Andie’s mother, during lunch.
“Let me ask you a question, Lonnie,” he says.
“Someday I’m going to eat real food again,” she says, holding up a forkful of dry greens. “This is no way to live.” Then she pokes her fork in the direction of his stomach. “You’re lucky. Always looking so svelte.”
“So—”
“You could even stand to eat more. I’m concerned about your diet.”
He looks at his hands in near defeat.
“I’m sorry, honey. What did you want to ask me?”
“About the girls. The students. They talk about other teachers, you’ve heard them talk.”
“Sure.”
“What do they say about me?”
She puts down her fork as if astonished. “Are you kidding me? Honestly, are you kidding me? They adore you. I swear, my Andie won’t listen to a word her father says, but you—you’re like a rock star. And the same with her friends. Everyone knows that that Dixie Doyle is in love with you. Where’s this coming from anyway?”
“Well. They’re nice girls.”
She guffaws. “Nice girls, hell! Listen, I’m the mother of a teenage girl. And I was a teenage girl once myself. In the bygone days. I mean, if I had a teacher like you when I was in school, well!” She raises her eyebrows and nods meaningfully. “In fact, I’m always telling George, that most dull of straight arrows, I’m always telling him, ‘There’s nothing wrong with a little sex appeal, George.’”
“Anyway, I—”
“I tell him, ‘Look at your daughter, George. How do you think she’s doing so well in English? She’s feeling inspired, if you know what I mean.’ That’s what I tell him, inspired.”
“That’s nice of you, but I think I have to—”
“In fact, I was going to ask you something. I wanted your advice on this young man Andie has drudged up from the mire of a performing arts school downtown.”
“Well, I—”
“The thing is, I think she’s…going a little too far. You follow me? And even though I’ve told her she can talk to me about it, she doesn’t confide in me the way she confides in you. And what I was wondering—”
The rest of her sentence, much to Binhammer’s relief, is cut off by the sound of the period bell. He bolts up from his seat while she’s still talking.
“Oh, yes,” she continues, “I suppose we’d better get back to it. We’ll talk about this some more later. But don’t tell Andie I talked to you. She would kill me. This is for your ears only.”
And she actually reaches out to pinch the lobe of his left ear.
For the rest of the day, Binhammer moves quickly through the halls trying to avoid entanglements. Some girls call out to him, but he pretends not to hear them and eventually ducks into the teachers’ lounge. Walter is in there, but Walter is a fixed quantity. He knows that Walter dislikes him. He understands that. Their rapport has
that percentage of dislike built in, a solid bulwark against the possibility of intimacy.
After the last bell of the day rings, he gathers himself into his coat and pushes his way through the swirling mass of girls in the lobby to the sidewalk outside. He is almost to the corner and beginning to feel certain of his escape when he spots Dixie Doyle coming toward him with a huge paper cup from the corner coffee shop.
“Ou est-ce que vous going, Mr. Binhammer?”
“Home, Dixie.” He tries to keep moving, but she has stationed her silly little body directly in front of him.
“What are you going to have for dinner? Is your wife a good cook? Do you ever cook her dinner? Women like that, you know.”
“Thanks for the advice. I’ll see you—”
“Where does your wife shop, Mr. Binhammer? For clothes, I mean.”
He gives her a look. “Dixie, did you finish reading the Doris Lessing stories?”
“The what?”
“For class.”
“Oh, sure. I mean, mostly. Some.”
“Dixie, why can’t you try to do some work for a change? It’s education that we’re concerned with here.”
“Geez! What’s wrong? Was some student giving you a hard time? Because I can take care of it, you know. They listen to me around here.”
“Forget it. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
And he leaves her standing there, reaching down to adjust the strap on her shoe, holding her steaming cup high as a torch that heralds something awful, and crying, “Bon soir, Mr. Binhammer! Bon soir!”
chapter 15
Of all his responsibilities as a teacher of English—the report cards and the faculty meetings, the roll-taking and the conferences with irate parents—there is no duty more objectionable to Binhammer than the grading of papers. The thing about papers is that they accumulate in the most tyrannical of ways. They stack up in unruly piles with torn corners and awkwardly stapled edges hanging out everywhere. They are always too many to carry around as a single quantity, and so it is necessary to break them into smaller piles—knowing as you finish grading each pile that this is only one small part of the whole. And most of them, in Binhammer’s experience, offer little more than plagiaristic sentiments by the paragraphful. All in neat little trains of black letters on endless leaves of white.
Hummingbirds Page 11