Hummingbirds

by Joshua Gaylor

  “Well—”

  “But wait. That’s only ten minutes. After ten minutes of that we stop. Because we are young and viable—and ten minutes of work talk is enough. After that, do you know what we talk about then, Sibyl?”

  “What?”

  “That’s when we talk about the other topics.”

  “Other topics?”

  “The other topics.” He says it slowly and with gravity. “Do you know what they are?”

  “No.”

  “No. Neither do I. But you know what? They’re there. They’re there just waiting to be talked about. It’s like Christmas morning, and you and I are little kids sitting on the couch and someone’s just come along and plopped down a present between us. Don’t you want to open that present? I know I do.”

  He is becoming more animated by the moment, caught up in his own emerging fantasy.

  “But listen,” he continues, looking suddenly grave. “It’s risky.”

  “Risky?”

  “Sure. You can’t tell with the other topics. Might be whole new flashy worlds. Might also be nothing at all. Might be an empty box. Risky.”

  She looks at him. He is a silly kind of a man. There’s something that makes her nervous about the way he climbs the ecstatic precipices of his own craggy words. But he also makes a beautiful picture. His voice is like a rapidly flowing river—white waters of turbid forgetfulness.

  “What do you say?” he asks. “Come on. What do you say?”

  A man of sheer and breathless heights. She smiles.

  And around her the building stirs—girlbodies like a tide of toy motors dictating the ebb and flow before and after class, at the beginning and ending of each day, week after week.

  The autumn grows cold at Carmine-Casey, and the radiators clank on in the classrooms. Leaves fall from the trees in the courtyard and are raked away, just as the days pass by imperceptible degrees from tomorrow to yesterday, diminishing the school year period by period and accumulating something else, something with the appearance of weight. Something that the girls like to think of as history. They pick at their forearms and gaze idly out the windows—pretending to get excited, as they did when they were little, at the sight of an ice-cream truck. But the performance is a weak one, filled with holes and shot through with awkward moments of spontaneous adulthood. And it is during these moments that some of the older girls look at each other and wonder which ones will get married right out of college, which ones will lead the life of the lonely urban sophisticate, and which ones will just disappear.

  What will happen to me? they wonder, lagging behind their friends and trying to peek into the windows of the apartment buildings they pass. They say, I am not yet anything. They say, I am becoming something. What am I becoming? I’m tired of becoming. I don’t know what clothes to wear. I feel smaller each day. One day I will wake up, and I won’t even be there.

  Night comes to the city in the same way—spectral and disquieting.

  chapter 18

  Mr. Pratt, the drama teacher, doesn’t understand girls, so he likes to tell them that he has faith in their superior interpersonal sensibilities. The younger girls wear this compliment as a badge of pride—they announce to their parents that they have superior interpersonal sensibilities—until they realize that it’s something he says to everyone, sometimes whole classes at a time.

  But what he doesn’t understand about girls, Dixie Doyle thinks, is that they do not in fact have superior interpersonal sensibilities. Instead, they emerge from every single social situation feeling at least a little bit bad—and most of the time not knowing why. What girls know is that everything good, honest, or true has a price, the payment of which—whether actual or anticipated—takes all pleasure away from goodness, honesty, and truth.

  Boys do not function in this way. She has observed them interacting with each other. They shrug and grunt and seem pleased to talk in a vulgar way about vulgar things. She admires how organic it all is, and simple. They talk to each other as though there is nothing in the world to figure out. She assumes they must be quite content.

  She wants to explain this to Mr. Binhammer, who has recently been paying a lot of attention—for reasons she can’t imagine—to Liz Warren.

  “Really, Dixie,” he says to her now, pleadingly, “I have to go. The day’s over. Don’t you have somewhere to be?”

  “But Mr. Binhammer,” she says, giving a convincing waver to her voice—she’ll cry if she has to—“It’s not fair.”

  These are the words that always work with Binhammer. He cannot resist the squeaks of injustice from the leashed throats of little girls. Perhaps he has some sense that any claim on the scales of justice is a valid one. Perhaps he does not want to appear blind to the victims of unknown crimes. Perhaps he simply cannot abide a girl in high-pitched distress.

  “What’s not fair?”

  The room is empty. Dixie has remained in her seat. Through the windows, they can see the light growing weaker. First he looks at it, then she looks at it. In the hall outside, they can hear the sound of the janitor wheeling his mop bucket, starting his evening rounds.

  She turns to him again, but seems to change her mind about something.

  “Have you ever been to Paris?”

  He sighs. “I haven’t.”

  “C’est belle. You should go.”

  “Okay.”

  “No, I mean it. You should go. You would like it.”

  “Okay, I’ll go.”

  “My parents took me there last summer. One night I walked all over the Rive Gauche. All night. All by myself. Rive Gauche—that’s the Left Bank.”

  “I know what the Rive Gauche is.”

  “It’s very pretty. There are a lot of artists. And little cafés. Did you know French boys walk around in groups, like girls do here? And they touch each other more. Like hugging each other and stuff like that.”

  He looks at her.

  “It’s not that they’re gay or anything. The men there are just more comfortable showing affection to each other. I think it’s sweet.”

  The door opens, and the janitor comes in. He nods to Binhammer, and Binhammer nods back. Taking the small wastepaper basket from the corner of the room, the janitor turns it upside down over the larger trash can he’s carting around. Then he looks as though he might start straightening desks—but he glances again at Binhammer and shrugs. When he leaves, the door shuts behind him with a weak shiver.

  “I mean,” Dixie continues, “the thing about Paris is—”

  “Dixie,” Binhammer interrupts, leaning forward and folding his hands across the desk. He’s now staring at the girl eye to eye, their gazes locked and curiously confidential. Her leg, which has been nervously pistoning up and down under the desk, stops altogether. For the moment, she looks like a painting done by a cruel artist. “Dixie, let me ask you a question, okay?”

  “Sure, Mr.—”

  “Dixie, what are your plans?”

  “You mean for college? I’m going to Europe for the summer, and then—”

  “I don’t mean just for college. I mean for after. Your life. What do you picture yourself doing?”

  It isn’t a rhetorical question. And not one of those pointed questions that adults ask to get teenagers to think about the important things in life. There is a sincerity in his voice—as though he really wants to know. As though this issue has been bothering him for a while, and he wants to get to the bottom of it.

  “Well,” she begins. “For a while I thought I might be a fashion designer. But Andie’s the one who knows how to draw. Whenever I try to draw anything, the legs come out too long and crooked. Like they’re mangled or something.”

  “That’s not what I—”

  “I guess I know what you meant.” She glares at him for a moment, pouting. She folds her arms and juts out her chin. “What do you want to know for? Why does everyone always want to think about these things?”

  “Okay,” he says. “Never mind.”

  They sit t
here for a solid minute looking out the window. Then she says:

  “I suppose…I mean, I guess if I had to think about it…I guess I picture myself like my mom.” She shrugs and shakes her head.

  Then: “I guess every girl does. You know.”

  She shakes her head again and humphs—as though she has been forced into confessing something. She is a witness on a stand, talked into testifying against herself.

  “It’s not what they want to be,” she explains further. “Not what they dream about being. That’s something different. But what we’re talking about—what they really think they’ll be like. Everyone figures that’s how they’ll be. Like their mom.”

  “And what’s that like?”

  “You mean my mom?”

  “Yes. Your mom.”

  “I don’t know.” She sits up straight in the chair, pulls the hem of her skirt down, and folds her hands in her lap. She looks like she’s posing for a portrait. “She’s always looking somewhere else, you know? Like when she’s talking to my dad, she’s always looking at the salad she’s eating. Or she’s looking at the signs going by if we’re in the car. And it’s funny, because if she’s on the phone, she’ll look at her nails—but if she’s getting her nails done, she’ll look at a magazine.”

  She hugs herself.

  “My dad used to make a joke about it. He would make faces at her when they were talking, but she would never notice because she wasn’t looking, and I would laugh and she would wonder what I was laughing at. But when she asked me, she would be looking up at the sky.” She laughs a little now—an aborted little chuckle that stumbles over itself and falls askew across a landscape of sudden silence. “Anyway. It seemed funny then.”

  He smiles. This girl sitting across from him is a banged-up brass vase—dented and discolored but still holding its form.

  “I wonder,” he says, “what she’s looking at, your mother.”

  She shakes herself, snaps the usual coy little smirk back on her face. “Je ne sais pas,” she says. “Who cares? The woman’s crazy.”

  Then Dixie stands up and stretches. The talk is over. She has other things to do. She runs a hand through her hair and twirls one strand around her forefinger. The look on her face says that she hates her hair right now.

  Binhammer follows her to the door of the classroom, but before she opens it, she spins around so that he’s almost on top of her. He takes a step back and runs a palm over his eyes. He sighs.

  “You know what I hate?” she says.

  “What do you hate, Dixie?”

  “I hate people who think they’re smart just because they go around not saying things. Me, I can’t stop talking. But anyone can not say things and sound smart.”

  There is something surprisingly lovely about this girl—the kind of sincere beauty that sneaks up on you from behind the pigtails, the strawberry lipstick, the ridiculously crooked expression she gets on her face when she doesn’t understand something. Every now and then you could look at her and see her as some boy’s girlfriend, hiding her face in his chest and saying nothing for a long time.

  “I mean,” she continues, “just because you found a new way to be unhappy, that doesn’t mean anything. Big deal.”

  Binhammer wonders if he is attracted to her. He wants to think about it objectively. He has, of course, pictured her naked—just as he has pictured all of his students naked at one time or another, usually from the back of the room while they are giving a presentation in the front, droning on and on about some self-evident aspect of the book (usually to receive an A-minus anyway, since more often than not he doesn’t hear a word of it and cannot critique it if pressed). This is the great secret of all the teachers at Carmine-Casey and, Binhammer is sure, all the other high schools, public or private, in the world: there is a massive naked cocktail party going on in the head of every high school teacher. Everyone thinks that teachers are like doctors, immune to the sexual charms of their clientele. But teachers are not like doctors. No one is like doctors. In fact, Binhammer would be willing to bet that doctors are not like doctors.

  So, yes, he has pictured her naked. But what’s happening right now is different. It’s the desire to take her home and feed her soup, to sit down sententiously on the edge of her bed and have a talk, to defend her against something. His stomach realizes it first, dropping away like the floor of an elevator, and then it comes to him: Oh god, he feels, for the moment at least, paternal.

  No good can come of this. He has to get out of there.

  “Listen, Dixie—”

  “And you know what else I hate?” She’s standing in front of the door, her breasts pointing at him like aggressive udders. All he wants to do is rock her like a baby in his arms. “I hate Liz Warren.”

  “I know you do, Dixie,” he says, trying to hammer out all the fatherly affection in his voice but obviously failing because she looks at him strangely. “I know you do.”

  chapter 19

  After his conversation with Dixie Doyle, Binhammer begins to suspect something awful about himself. How long has he been entirely blind to the fact that he has no control whatsoever over the women in his life? Has he, in fact, ever had any control? At what point in his charmingly precocious, Frank Sinatra, disarmingly bold, hopelessly male life had the women snuck around the back and settled in at the rusty knobs and levers that dictated all his movements? He can feel their long fingers, nails either bitten cute-short or painted the colors of gumballs, plunged into a hidden hole in his back—like a ventriloquist’s dummy—and tinkering around with the clockwork of his organs.

  How long has this been going on?

  He has memories—real memories, surely, true and accurate ones—of himself in the center of circles of women, playing them like Christmas bells, tapping each one with his winning smile and harmonizing their particular feminine tones. Their voices were like one long medley of “Carol of the Bells,” played furiously with the panicked delight of a shopping mall during the holidays. That was him. Wasn’t it? Now he’s not so sure.

  He realizes, then, that he’s been trying to regain control of things by coveting his secrecy. That’s one thing he has: secrets. How many things does he know that no one else knows? If knowledge is power, how full, how positively brimming, is his arsenal of information! From his wife, the Lady Sarah Lewis, he keeps the secret of his camaraderie with Ted Hughes. From Ted Hughes, rising star of Carmine-Casey, he keeps the secret of his wife. From both he keeps the secret of Sibyl, her greenhouse of an apartment, those afternoons of coming dangerously close to something. From Sibyl he keeps everything except a generous contempt. From Dixie Doyle he keeps his own childish heart, pitifully and achingly akin to her own.

  So there. If he tries, he can imagine himself as a kind of puppeteer himself, pulling strings and making everyone around him dance. Until, of course, the strings get tangled and the whole damn show collapses around its cardboard proscenium. But not yet. Not yet.

  The first real occasion on which he needs to exercise his powers of concealment has to do with the Carmine-Casey annual dinner—a fund-raiser for parents who feel that their tens of thousands spent each year in tuition is so paltry that they seek opportunities to give the school even more cash. The teachers are not only invited but paraded around—guest on arm, whether spouse, lover, or relative—so that everyone can congratulate themselves on what a fine faculty they have assembled. Normally he would go with his wife, but that’s out of the question now that Ted Hughes is going to be there.

  “We can go if you really want to,” Binhammer says to her one evening. He is pretending to read the paper. He casually thumbs through a few pages as though looking for something.

  It is one of those moments. He is always a dizzy inch away from telling Sarah everything—about Ted Hughes, about Sibyl—because he does not know what to do with the world unless he parades it before her every day. He supposes this is what is meant by love—the compulsive need to entangle someone else into every knotted, thorny mess you manage t
o produce in any given day.

  Look at what I’ve done, he thinks, wanting to show her. Can you believe what I’ve done now?

  “You don’t want to go?” she asks.

  “Not really. Aren’t you tired of it? The same every year. You might get stuck next to Walter’s wife again.”

  “You don’t have to convince me. I was only going because I thought you liked to go.”

  “Me? Ha.” It’s outrageous, his tone of voice claims. What an outrageous thought.

  “So we won’t go.”

  “Great.” He pretends to become engrossed in an article, ticking down the seconds in his head. The timing has to be perfect. The silence has to be fully cultivated but not overripe. He watches it grow like one of those time-lapse movies of a budding plant they show in science class.

  She gets up and goes into the kitchen. He can hear her rinsing off the small plate on which she has just eaten an English muffin. Behind the sound of the water running in the sink, he hears the occasional chord of a tune she’s humming. That’s good. That works.

  He folds the paper and slaps it down on the coffee table. Then he follows her into the kitchen and walks behind her to the refrigerator. Opening the door, he leans down and peers at the shelves of food.

  “Of course,” he says, squinting his eyes and moving the carton of milk aside, “I may still have to go.”

  She shuts off the sink and looks at him.

  “Mrs. Mayhew likes to put me on a leash like a pet dog and walk me around all the tables.”

  She’s drying her hands on a dish towel.

  “But you,” he continues, “you don’t have to go.”

  Click, click, click—snap. Like a cat burglar picking a lock. All the pins fall into place and the lock pops loose.

  “Are you sure it’s okay if I don’t go?” she says.

  So that’s that. Of course, the easier way would have been not to go at all. But he doesn’t relish the idea of Ted Hughes being there and soaking up all the attention himself.