Hummingbirds

by Joshua Gaylor

  He always thinks about the plural quantity of papers as a “brick of papers,” and uses it in the same way that you might talk about a brace of fowl or a herd of buffalo.

  “What have you got there?” Walter asks this morning, leaning over the table in the teachers’ lounge where Binhammer is holding a ballpoint pen—in frozen potentiality—over one such brick of papers. He has read the same line five times. He has memorized the words, but he can’t seem to make them stick together or make sense in any way—and down they plummet through the gutter of his consciousness.

  “Papers,” he replies.

  “Papers, sure.” Then, after a pause: “That’s a lot of papers you’ve got there.”

  Walter takes a unique pleasure in Binhammer’s suffering. If he were an old soldier, he would be the kind to want new recruits hammered and humiliated into shape just as he once was.

  Binhammer reads the line again. He underlines it to help him focus. But now he has to write something beside it to justify the underline.

  “Are they good?” Walter asks as he sits down in a chair across the table and leans back.

  Binhammer looks up. “Not particularly.”

  “That’s a shame.” Walter is glowing.

  The other thing about this odious task is that it feels like work being dropped down a well. The comments are made, the grade is given—and the student’s next paper might as well be a photocopy of the previous assignment with the title of one book whited out and another scrawled in. It seems to make no difference what he writes—whether it is thoughtful, articulated criticism or half-conscious nonsense. Everything, he sometimes thinks, sounds like nonsense to teenage girls. The whole world is nonsense.

  He kicks himself awake and, even though his eyes have been concentrating on it for a long time now, looks at the paper before him with renewed vigor. He has managed to get that line lodged securely in his head, now that he has underlined and starred it. The next few lines he reads at a breakneck speed to the end of the paragraph, where he lets out a sigh of relief. Nothing. The girl is saying nothing. Nonsense piled on top of nonsense. He circles a misplaced comma and moves on.

  “When were they turned in?” Walter asks pointedly, still quite proud of himself.

  “Couple weeks. Three weeks. Four.” Binhammer doesn’t look up—he’s running his fingers through his hair, trying not to express the desperation that the other man obviously wants to evoke.

  “Four weeks. Hm.”

  Walter is about to say something else when, thankfully, the door opens and Ted Hughes comes in. From outside in the hall, Binhammer can hear the girlvoices, like little chirping birds, calling out “Mr. Hughes! Mr. Hughes!”—but Ted Hughes doesn’t seem to hear and lets the door close on them.

  He stops in the middle of the room and puts his fingers to his chin, then turns and seems surprised to find Binhammer and Walter sitting there.

  “Oh, hi,” he says. “There was a girl—I don’t know her—painting her nails. Sitting on the ground in the hall painting her nails. She would do one finger and stop and blow on it and then do another.”

  Ted Hughes has a tendency toward the reverie that Binhammer admires. The absorption into an image, into a moment. The way in which he can seem knotted up in the tendrils of things. Binhammer knows he’s the opposite—sufficiently lucky if he can keep his mind on one thing for more than a minute or two.

  “And all these other girls were walking by her in the hall, and I kept thinking sooner or later someone’s going to trip over her and that nail polish is going to go everywhere. But it never happened. You should have seen it. Like a dance—the way these girls move around each other without looking, as if they were blind. Some of them were even walking backward, but when they came to this girl painting her nails, they knew to step over her. How do they know that? It’s like a flock of birds—how the scientists can’t figure out why they all know to turn in the air at exactly the same time and avoid colliding with one another.”

  Finally Ted Hughes looks at Binhammer and Walter. Walter has a deadpan sneer on his face. No one can shut Walter up like Ted Hughes, whose inadvertent poeticism seems to steamroll over Walter’s niggling meanness.

  Then Ted Hughes shrugs. “Is that a new shirt?” he says to Binhammer.

  Binhammer feels suddenly self-conscious. “No,” he says, his hand smoothing out the front of it. “I just haven’t worn it yet this year.”

  ‘It’s nice.’

  “Thanks.”

  Then Ted Hughes lets fall onto a chair what looks like a very heavy bag from his shoulder and draws out of it a brick of papers even larger than Binhammer’s. He brings them over and drops them with a heavy, corpselike thud on the table.

  “They got you too, huh?” Binhammer asks.

  “What? Oh, the papers. Yeah.” He brings out a second brick, the same size as the first. “It made for a rather dull weekend.”

  Binhammer’s stomach sinks. “You already graded all of them?”

  Ted Hughes nods. “It took me hours.”

  “When did you get them? Friday?”

  He nods again. “It’s the worst thing in the world, isn’t it? I can’t bear having them around staring at me.”

  It’s another instance when Ted Hughes mistakenly believes he’s commiserating with Binhammer. So the man can grade the hell out of a stack of papers. It’s a skill, a skill like any other. But it’s a skill that Binhammer doesn’t have.

  “How,” he asks with great sincerity, nodding at the stacks of papers in front of Ted Hughes, “how do you do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Ted Hughes responds. “You just start doing it. And when you want to stop, you don’t. And then, after a while, you’re finished and you feel pure. Think of it like religious penance. I sure like that shirt.”

  Binhammer shakes his head at the stacks one last time and then looks down at his shirt. “You want it?” he asks. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  And the two men laugh. Walter, they now realize, is gone, but neither of them can recall when he got up from the table and left the lounge.

  But when Ted Hughes has to go to a class the next period, Binhammer is left alone with those two stacks of Hughes papers weighing down the opposite side of the table with the density of supernovas, and he finds himself getting angry. How is he supposed to grade his own papers now—particularly the one he has been trying to focus on for the past hour—with that pile of success across the table?

  He gets up and goes to the stacks and begins to thumb through the papers. Sure enough, there are little red marks on each of them. They’re authentic. He slows down to read some of the comments. In one margin there’s a note that says, “You should try Lacan—let’s talk.” On another paper: “You know this could be better.” On a third, there is a paragraph circled with a single word written in the margin next to it: “Metempsychosis?” This last paper is Liz Warren’s. He flips to the last page to see the grade. A-minus.

  It takes some nerve to give Liz Warren an A-minus. It’s almost admirable. What really gets him: she’ll probably respect Hughes even more for it.

  He feels spiteful and takes a handful of the neatly ordered papers from each stack and shuffles them into the opposite stack. Then he goes to the window and stares out of it for a while. On the street below a car pulls up and lets out a Carmine-Casey girl, maybe coming late from a dentist appointment. He watches as she adjusts her skirt and her shirt before entering the building.

  There’s no way he’s going back to grading. Not yet at least.

  Instead he takes a book of Adrienne Rich poems and walks down the hall to the copy room, where Sam the copy man is bent over his desk with headphones on, doing a crossword puzzle. The copy room is empty, so Binhammer takes the machine in the farthest back corner and opens the book of poems facedown on the glass.

  He shuts his eyes as the vertical line of pure bright light sweeps underneath the glass. He can feel the light on his face. Then he turns the page and presses the copy button again.<
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  He’d like to see that Ted Hughes get the wind knocked out of him some time. Ted Hughes and his grotesquely large stacks of corrected papers. It would be nice, just nice, to be there when he stumbled. It would be gratifying to see Mrs. Mayhew thumb through the stacks and say, “Is this what we’re calling teaching these days, Mr. Hughes?”

  He turns to the next Adrienne Rich poem and slaps the copy button savagely.

  The problem is that it seems when Ted Hughes stumbles, he does so into the open arms of adoring fans. Binhammer has never seen someone so accidental in his accomplishments.

  To hell with him and his lost-looking eyes, his piles of achievement, his gestures of passion and grief. To hell with his sudden camaraderie, his strange moods of intimacy that corner you in silent places, his performances of delicacy. To hell with his seductions. Of the students, of the faculty, of his wife. He is a man who cannot be trusted. A man who will betray you.

  When Binhammer slams his palm down on the copy button again the machine gives a quick ratcheting sound and screeches to a halt. On the digital screen flash the words PAPER JAM and a diagram with arrows pointing to the possible location of the problem. Damn.

  He looks up briefly at Sam the copy man, but to get Sam involved means a bantering conversation that Binhammer is not in the mood for. Getting down on his knees, he reckons he can fix the problem himself.

  Opening the front panel of the machine reveals a complex and disturbingly organic tangle of dials, plates, wheels, cables, and cylinders. He can see the white edge of a page choked up in what he thinks of as the throat of the machine—and he sees that he needs to turn a green plastic dial in order to release the page, but when he grabs hold of the thing it won’t turn. He tries again, but his hand slips and his knuckles are driven into the sharp metal edge of the paper drawer.

  He is not in the mood for this. Ted Hughes gives meaningful criticism to piles and piles of paper, and Binhammer cannot even produce pages with the help of a machine.

  That green plastic knob is going to turn.

  Gritting his teeth, he grabs hold of the thing and bears down on it until it snaps off, sending him sprawling on the floor. It’s not until he looks down at the knob in his hand that he sees an arrow on the face of it—indicating that the knob was only meant to be turned in one direction.

  He peeks around the machine at Sam the copy man, but he is still hunched over his crossword puzzle, the earphones emitting a tinny, repetitive music that can be heard even from back here.

  So he stands up and brushes off the front of his pants, closes the front panel of the machine, notices that the digital readout now reports that it NEEDS SERVICE, and pockets the green knob surreptitiously.

  Everything is coming apart. This is what he thinks as he gathers his Adrienne Rich poems and any other evidence that might implicate him in the malfunction. Everything is coming apart in my hands, he thinks. What do they expect of me now? My pockets are full of pieces of other things.

  As he leaves the copy room, he does not look at Sam the copy man, who has squinted his eyes trying to think of a five-letter word for “ordered.” He glares at Binhammer’s back and chews on the end of his pen.

  Sam has never liked Binhammer, who does just as much sulking from place to place as all the little twit girls he teaches. The whole place is going to hell, Sam thinks. If this is what kind of women we’re creating, forget it. The snotty rich girls with their doily socks and their arrogant little ponytails.

  They think they own the world. And the teachers don’t help, like they should. Why don’t any of them give these little brats a kick in the ass? They’re just as self-involved as the students—like that Binhammer. These girls think they own everything. They think they can have whatever they want. They think everyone is looking at them.

  Wait till they find out different.

  chapter 16

  When the romance between Dixie Doyle and Jeremy Notion peters out before Thanksgiving, no one is really surprised. By the end of November, they seem to have run out of things to say to each other. When he comes to Carmine-Casey for rehearsals, he has been seen to give her a quick, awkward hug and say something inane like, “How’s things going?”

  To which her only response is, “Mais oui,” followed by a shrug.

  It has been rumored that the beginning of the end came when Jeremy, visiting the Doyle household to practice his lines with Dixie, refused to admire the little bell tied with a red ribbon around the neck of her Lhasa apso, Mr. Strawberry.

  “That dog needs a haircut,” he said instead.

  Which is just about the worst thing he could have said, as anyone could tell you since Dixie’s love-me-love-my-Strawberry policy is well documented.

  But when it comes to the school play, Dixie prides herself on her professionalism and her ability to commit herself to the greater good of the production.

  “Listen, Ivan,” she says onstage during one rehearsal. “Forget that war. I should be enough Uncle Sam for you.”

  “It’s not that, Clarissa. You know I have to go.”

  “I wish you understood me.”

  “I understand more than you think, baby.”

  “No, you understand less than you think.”

  “Actually,” Liz Warren interrupts, “the word you want to stress there is you. ‘You understand less than you think.’ See, that’s what makes it parallel.” She stares at her two actors for a second, who look back at her blankly. “But good job in general,” she adds. “Try it again.”

  “I wish you understood me.”

  “I understand more than you think, baby.”

  “No, you understand less than you think.”

  “Wrong again, Clarissa. You think more than you understand.”

  “Ugh,” Dixie says, breaking character. “I’m tired of all this thinking and understanding. Can we take a break?”

  “Okay,” Liz sighs. “But just five minutes.”

  “Goody,” Dixie squeals and leaps off the stage.

  Liz has never been so exhausted. It feels like she’s towing a school bus with a rope and her bare hands, but it’s true that she’s got the big lumbering production moving. Not that it’s good—she secretly suspects that the whole thing is garbage. She’s worried that people will think the dialogue is corny rather than ironic, because, though she will not admit it, she herself has trouble telling the difference sometimes. But it’s under way, the wheels are turning, and even if the play crashes into a brick wall, at least she got the thing rolling.

  And she has even experienced some moments of affection for her stars—the precociously obnoxious Dixie Doyle who has no embarrassment about acting it all the way up, the slightly dopey Jeremy Notion who lumbers around like a gentle bear. She finds them both to have a wonderfully malleable quality, so eager to impress that they will happily suppress every ounce of their own identities to do so. She thinks it must be just a myth, the idea that actors have big egos. To Liz it seems as though you could measure their authentic selves with teaspoons.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  Jeremy’s voice startles her. He’s standing there with his hands in his pockets, a big blank expression on his face. He has trouble looking her in the eyes and looks at her knees instead.

  “Nothing,” she says.

  “Really?” He looks honestly surprised.

  “Why?”

  “I just didn’t think you would say that. From what I’ve seen you always seem to be thinking something.”

  “Well…” He’s a strange boy, this Jeremy Notion.

  “Hey, listen,” he says. “Can I ask you something? How come this Ivan guy always gets beat up so bad?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean…I mean, everything he says, that Clarissa girl has something else to say that beats him down. Makes him look stupid.”

  “Oh.” She is surprised at this. She feels suddenly flustered, put on the spot. For the rest of the rehearsal she thinks about Jeremy’s question and wond
ers why it makes her so uncomfortable. For a while she has difficulty separating the question from the asker. Is he trying to tell her something? Did someone put him up to this? Is Dixie using him as a tool to get back at her? Then the larger implications: Is Jeremy saying that the play is bad? And if even Jeremy thinks the play is bad…oh, god.

  Sitting in the dark, watching her actors on the stage, she feels her face getting red. Suddenly it’s as though everyone watching the action play out on the stage is actually looking into some unswept corner of her own head. Without realizing it, she has cracked open the shell of her own neurosis and is bringing it to school for show-and-tell. How did this happen? And, maybe the bigger question, how is it that Jeremy Notion is the one to tell her about it?

  “Actually,” she says to him after the rehearsal is over. She has waited until he is by himself, sitting on the edge of the stage and rubbing his eyes tiredly. Trying not to look gawky or ridiculous, she strides up to him as though on official play business. “Actually,” she says, “I don’t think Ivan is stupid.”

  “You don’t?” He looks pleased.

  “No. Think of it like this. Think about Clarissa. I mean, all those comments. Those condescending comments. She’s not really happy, is she?”

  “Isn’t she?”

  “Think about—I mean, it’s like you said. Who would want to get close to her, right? Don’t you think she’s making herself…lonely?”

  His face brightens suddenly as though he has just made a discovery. And for the first time in her recollection he actually looks her in the eyes.

  As she’s walking away, he calls out to her.

  “Hey, listen.”

  She turns. He hops off the stage, but seems undecided about whether to approach her or just stand there. He puts his hands in his pockets again.

  “I really like your play.”

  She feels herself getting embarrassed again. “You don’t have to say that.”