It is a black-tie affair, and the combination of tuxedos and the constant feed of alcohol frequently results in the women teachers pawing at his chest as though they were kittens making biscuits. They say things like, “Can I tell you a secret?” and “You know, I once dated someone like you,” and “Do you think she’s pretty? What about that one, do you think she’s pretty?” And every now and then they will get an abstracted look to them, gazing into the flicker of the candles in the table centerpiece and pursing their lips. At which point they will shake their heads and say, barely audibly, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” That’s the moment when he offers a comforting hand (his palm flat against the warm skin of the back between the shoulder blades, feeling the heart beating beneath the strapless evening gown—god! women, there’s so much to them, so many crevices!), prompting the woman in question to smile that inviting smile and place her head on his shoulder, using one of the linen napkins to blot her eyes. “Am I drunk? You’d tell me if I was drunk, right?”
He wouldn’t miss that for anything. And he has a feeling that Ted Hughes might be equally if not more talented in the confidence and comfort department, so Binhammer has to show up just to box his own corner.
A week before the event, Ted Hughes confronts Binhammer in the mail room, a small closetlike niche off the administrative office with a honeycomb of boxes on one wall.
“So am I finally going to meet Mrs. Binhammer?” he asks.
There is a xeroxed reminder about the annual dinner in each slot, and he holds one up to show Binhammer.
Fortunately there’s no one like Walter around to interject, “Mrs. Binhammer? You mean Dr. Lewis. Binhammer married up, ha ha.” Then it would be out. That would be the end of it. That would be the whole show.
“Unfortunately,” Binhammer says, “she’s going to be out of town. Her sister’s birthday.”
“So when am I going to meet this woman?”
“Soon enough. She’s excited to meet you.”
Ted Hughes comes forward and puts his arm around Binhammer’s shoulders. “You know,” he says, lowering his voice to a confidential whisper, “I can be less charming, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Binhammer elbows the other man playfully in the stomach and wriggles out from under his arm. “No, Hughes—I don’t think you could be any less charming.”
They smile at each other, their eyes shining.
“But seriously,” Ted Hughes says. “We should have dinner some time. Just the three of us. We’ll lavish her with attention. Every woman’s fantasy.”
“All right,” Binhammer says. “That would be nice.” And some part of him really means it.
Then Sibyl comes into the little mail room and looks back and forth quickly between the two men before determining her opening gambit and addressing Ted Hughes.
“So, Mr. Hughes, are you going to be my date for the annual dinner? I’m wearing something strappy.”
Binhammer wants to drop her a devastating look, a look that could level cities and rip the leaves off trees, but she refuses to meet his eyes.
“Well, Ms. Lockhart,” Ted Hughes says, “that sounds like an invitation I’d be crazy to pass up. But somehow I’ve gotten roped into taking this girl, a friend of a friend, I don’t know how it happened. She doesn’t hold a candle to you, of course—but, well, she’s fond of these upscale things. So she’s my Cinderella for the night. But let’s say right here and now that it’s you and me for next year. What do you say? Pick you up in a year?”
“Sure,” she says, disappointed but trying hard to hide it. The scene is certainly not playing itself out as she has planned it. She goes to her box and takes out a stack of papers and pretends to become absorbed in the process of turning them all right side up. She might be defusing a bomb for all the concerned attention she gives these papers.
Then, as she’s about to leave, Ted Hughes comes up with an idea:
“Wait, how about this: our boy Binhammer here is going to be a bachelor that night. His wife, lady of mystery, has other things to do. I’m sure he’d love to be your date.”
She doesn’t even wait for the shock wave of awkwardness to strike her. She sees the first hint of red coming into Binhammer’s cheeks and simply laughs on her way out the door, as though it were the funniest joke in the world.
The last thing she can hear as she walks down the hall is Ted Hughes’s confused voice, saying, “But I was serious.”
Sibyl does a little calculation in her head. Lonnie will bring her husband George. Pepper will bring, as she usually does, one or another of the perplexed bearded men she seems to like—who always try, unsuccessfully, to seed a conversation about politics or Hunter S. Thompson. Even Mrs. Mayhew will bring Mr. Mayhew, the small Chihuahua-like man who just sits at the table all night, hands in his lap, gazing demurely into his water glass.
Sibyl will be the only woman there without a date. She doesn’t like the looks of that. Maybe she can give it a twist—give it a touch of the femme fatale. But no, she still doesn’t like those numbers. She considers not going at all, but now she wants to know who this friend of a friend is, the one who’s going to be on Ted Hughes’s arm.
She wants to see this woman. Then again, she doesn’t want to see this woman.
And of course there’s Binhammer. She doesn’t understand how things got so complicated so quickly.
When it finally arrives, the night of the annual dinner brings with it the season’s first snow in the city. It begins early in the morning as the girls of Carmine-Casey wake up to hear the stippling of flakes on their windows; pulling up their blinds and leaning their elbows on the sill, they press their noses to the pane and feel the coldness seeping in, as coldness does. Their breath, still warm from sleep, leaves a cloud on the window, and they have to decide whether or not to draw a face in the cloud with the tips of their fingers. This decision seems like an important one—but by now the girls have gone, stumbling into the bathroom, where they brush their teeth and put clips in their hair to keep it out of their eyes while they eat cereal.
Some of them are going to the dinner, those girls who are on the Service Squad and are tasked to help seat guests, those girls in the chamber chorus who are giving a special performance during dinner, and those girls who simply like to be involved in everything and have managed to procure some job or another for the evening. Liz Warren and Dixie Doyle, if nothing else, have this in common: they both shun participation in such events—the former because there would be too many eyes on her, the latter because there would be too few. And whether she calls the dinner “asinine” or “très gauche,” each of the girls feels superior to the event in her own unique way. Neither of them will be in attendance.
The dinner is held in a fancy hotel downtown, and the girls who are present tend to dress either as bridesmaids, in big architectural gowns, or as wealthy divorcées out on the town, in slinky black and maroon numbers with velvet sleeves and teardrop pearl necklaces that you can barely see against their pale, bony chests. Early in the evening, two of these girls greet Lonnie and George Abramson, the first among the English department faculty to arrive. The young duo stand with their hands folded behind their backs, their chins pushed forward, and they point with open hands toward the coat check and the ballroom where the guests can find their table numbers. They are miniature adults, these girls, little worldly-wise sophisticates. After the Abramsons are gone, they debate whether George is going to get lucky tonight.
“Do you think they’ve ever done it in the kitchen?” asks one.
“Why not?” says the other, whose stepfather is a marriage counselor. “It’s good to keep relations fresh.”
“I bet she wore special underpants just for tonight.”
Mr. and Mrs. Mayhew are the next to show up, looking chastened and severe, respectively. Then Pepper Carmichael with a red-bearded man who seems entirely benign and even a little afraid to touch her. Sibyl Lockhart arrives so quickly that no one has a chance to register it—
rushing past the girls, who only catch a glimpse of her behind the parents who are brushing the snow off their coats. She makes her way quickly into the bathroom, where she positions herself in front of the mirror to collect herself and make adjustments to her sleeveless black dress.
Meanwhile, the girls of Carmine-Casey are doing their best to glide like starlets across the open spaces of the hotel. They are scattered all over the couches in the lobby, putting makeup on each other and puckering at reflections of themselves in pocket mirrors. There is no difference, each girl imagines, between me and women.
When Binhammer arrives, it’s from the wrong direction. He comes in from a side street, by accident, and has to make his way through a crowded bar—a rather masculine woman stepping on his foot with the heel of her pump—before he finds the lobby. He is very grateful to the two girls who tell him where to go from there, and they blush and look away from each other after he has gone.
It is another half hour, however, before Ted Hughes shows up with a woman on his arm. She’s pretty in a degenerate sort of way, with a wide red mouth and a pile of hair on her head, and her name is Paulette.
Sibyl is the first one to see her. Paulette is wearing a bright red dress, the same color and even the same satiny texture as her lips. Sibyl, who has been worried that her exposed shoulders and fitted bodice will draw too much attention, now worries that no one will notice her at all. She actually deflates a little—you can see it—and that’s when everybody else, Binhammer, the Abramsons, Pepper and her red-bearded boyfriend, all turn around to gaze upon the woman who’s just walked in with Ted Hughes.
“Oh my god.”
To Sibyl, the woman gives the impression of having been roughed up by life. She is still young, maybe twenty-nine, but it is a youth that has been damaged—a cracked kind of girlishness that might sell for ten dollars at a flea market. And her smile, when you see it, seems degraded—a smile that might have long ago known something about innocence, purity, and clean-sheeted childhood. She keeps digging cigarettes out of her small purse and placing them between her lips before remembering that she’s not allowed to smoke inside the hotel. Men, Sibyl supposes, cannot help being attracted to her because she seems to invite depravity—and they find themselves wanting to stick their tongues between those thick red lips of hers, wanting to sink themselves into that crooked, smeared chasm smelling of wine dregs and cigarette butts.
About Paulette, women think, “I could be dirty like that, too, if I wanted to.” But: “That’s not really what men want. They only think they want it. It’s rather sad, actually.” And then they look haughtily in the other direction.
“Can you get me some zinfandel, Teddy?” Paulette says as they come through the doors of the ballroom. “I’m in a zinfandel mood.”
Sibyl wonders where Ted Hughes found this woman, and she conjures up a history for Paulette: cocktail waitress—now retired, after her uncle, who had made some semblance of a fortune investing in questionable Florida real estate, died and left her buckets of money. She spends her time reading magazines about posh living and trying to picture herself in those rooms decorated to look like seaside resort hotels, in those clothes that seem superior to sex, that seem to roll their eyes at sex.
Ted Hughes spots his colleagues and brings her over. He does not seem at all embarrassed to be introducing her—perhaps because he is not paying much attention to her at all. As soon as the introductions are made, he runs his hand through his hair and tells everyone to sit tight, he’s going to get a drink from the bar.
“Don’t forget my zinfandel, Teddy,” Paulette calls after him, then turns back to the others. “Hey, this is some swank party.”
“Yes, it’s nice, isn’t it?” Lonnie says, as someone else who can appreciate the finer things in life.
“You said it. We never had anything like this when I went to school. All I remember is fish sticks.” She grimaces with great authenticity, as though she has just eaten a steaming platter full of subpar fish sticks. But then she brushes it off with a sound like a cat clearing its throat and pivots on her heel to take everyone in. “So you’re all English teachers, huh?”
“That’s right,” Binhammer says smilingly to her. He leans in close and adds, confidentially, “The soul of the school.”
Sibyl can see he is already enamored of her. The cute trashy little thing. So predictable. For the first time in many months, she feels like she wants to be alone with the other women, Lonnie and Pepper, to talk about this grubby little interloper. She assures herself that it will only be a matter of minutes before Binhammer gets bored of her. And Ted Hughes—well, Ted Hughes must be performing some philanthropic act.
“Teddy and I only met three months ago,” Paulette is saying. “It was at an art gallery. I like to invest in art, you know?” She winks at Binhammer. “The colors. Anyway, there was this professor there giving a lecture that seemed like it was going on for—”
“You know,” Sibyl interrupts, unable to help herself, “Binhammer’s wife is a professor. You should meet her. She would adore you.”
But, Sibyl should have known, Paulette is not the type to be immobilized by wives.
“Is she really?” Paulette says, giving Binhammer, who is now looking nervously toward the bar, a playful slap on the arm. “I bet she’s smart as a firecracker, isn’t she?”
Dinner is about to be served, so they all go to sit down at a big round table, the English department table in the middle of the room. Sibyl can’t bear sitting down with these people yet and excuses herself. She walks over to the small bar set up in the corner of the ballroom, where the boy serving drinks gives her a wink and she blushes like an idiot. She leaves before he has a chance to call her “ma’am.” When she returns to the table Ted Hughes is back, Paulette has two glasses of zinfandel in front of her, and there is a conversation in motion—though she can’t figure out what it’s about, so she just looks from face to face for a while.
When she sees her opportunity, she leans over and whispers to Ted Hughes, who is sitting next to her:
“Are you trying to make a point?”
“What do you mean?”
“The girl.” She juts her chin in the direction of Paulette.
Ted Hughes looks at Paulette and then back at Sibyl.
“I don’t get it,” he says, puzzled. “A point?”
Then she gets up again and wanders out to the lobby, which is mostly empty by now. She goes back into the ballroom, where she stands with her back against the wall for a few minutes, watching little satellites of girls circling the table where Binhammer and Ted Hughes are sitting, oblivious. The girls make quick fly-bys, looking at the men out of the corners of their eyes, pretending to be on important missions while making their way to the other side of the room.
While she’s watching, two of these girls decide to talk to Sibyl.
“Ms. Lockhart, what do you think of Mr. Binhammer in a tuxedo?” one of them asks.
“Very nice.”
“What about Mr. Hughes?” the other girl says. “I can’t decide if I like the white tie or the black tie better.”
“They both look nice.”
The two girls look at each other and giggle. Then one of them, smiling furtively at Sibyl as though the teacher were just another student sharing gossip, says, “Ms. Lockhart, do you know who that woman is sitting next to Mr. Hughes?”
“Is that his date?” the other asks.
“She’s pretty.”
“Do you like her dress?”
Sibyl takes all of these questions in and answers them as a set:
“Her name is Paulette. Yes, I do. Why don’t you go talk to her?”
But the girls indicate that this would be impossible and go back to their stealthy rounds of reconnaissance.
Sibyl heads back to the table, where Paulette is dipping her fingertips in her wine and sucking on them as she talks. Fifteen minutes later, she’s drunk.
“So what do you think of Hughes’s girl?” Binhammer says t
o Sibyl when nobody else is listening. There is a hint of cruelty in his voice.
“I like her,” Sibyl says, making her face as blank as she can.
“You do?”
She nods. “Very pretty, don’t you think?”
Binhammer looks at her suspiciously. “I guess so.”
Meanwhile, on the other side of the table, Paulette is laughing raucously at Ted Hughes and exclaiming to Lonnie Abramson: “Isn’t he just a riot? It’s like he doesn’t even know how to be a man! You know what I mean—in a good way.” She snorts a little when she laughs, and waves her napkin around as though it were a flag of surrender.
“Still…it’s kind of sad, isn’t it?” Sibyl continues to Binhammer.
“What is?”
“Well, she’s a little needy, isn’t she?”
“Needy? Is she?” This seems to astonish him. He looks at Sibyl and then at Paulette, who now seems to be flirting with the busboy. “She doesn’t look needy.”
“Yes, she puts on a good show, doesn’t she? But you can see right through it.” She dislikes herself for saying these things, but she can’t seem to find the middle ground between victim and attacker. “She thinks it’ll fool you and Hughes—but you two are woman savvy.”
“Well…”
“Still, it’s nice of you both to pay attention to her. It seems to make her feel good. I just feel sorry for her—it’s going to be hard when Hughes gets bored of her.”
Binhammer considers this. She watches his face as he gazes across the table at Paulette, who is now talking about bras with Pepper, pushing her breasts around as though they were tokens in a board game. Finally, he begins to nod slowly. A look of concerned pity sweeps across his brow, and he says, “Yes. It is sad.”
The rest of the evening unravels in much the same way. Paulette is a big hit. Sibyl is not surprised. Everyone wants to be around the woman—driven by the same impulse, no doubt, that causes one to write one’s name on a grimy car window. The desire to be around something that was once clean but is now a little spoiled. They disengage themselves from anxious conversations with parents, administration, other faculty members—conversations that make them feel like actors who have failed to be convincing in their roles—and they encounter Paulette with great billowing sighs of relief. “Paulette, are you having fun?” “Paulette, can I bring you a drink?” “So, Paulette, what do you think about all this ridiculousness?” It is not necessary to put on any performances around Paulette. She has the integrity of coarseness—an empathetic candor derived from the belief that every person in the world, on some level, is just as vulgar as she is.
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