Hummingbirds

by Joshua Gaylor

  The word most associated with Paulette this evening, spilling from the lips of sagely nodding faculty members, is refreshing.

  At one point, nearing the dying fall of the evening, Binhammer finds Ted Hughes looking silent and pensive, turning an empty wineglass around and around by its stem. Paulette is next to him, talking to the husband of one of the math teachers. Everyone else at the table has either gone home or is mingling elsewhere.

  Binhammer goes over and takes the empty seat next to Ted Hughes. The two men look at each other for a while without saying anything. Instead, they just smile and nod—as though in tacit agreement on the condition of the universe.

  “I like her,” Binhammer says quietly.

  “Hmm?”

  Binhammer gestures toward Paulette, who is talking animatedly on the other side of Hughes.

  “Oh, her. Sure. She’s my cousin’s friend. She doesn’t really fit here. But I like her.”

  “She’s nice.”

  Hughes shrugs and nods. Then he says:

  “I was just thinking about women. In general, I mean.”

  “What about them?”

  “Everything.” He waves his hand as though it is impossible to encapsulate his thoughts. Binhammer smiles and nods again. There is something sad about Ted Hughes, and, at this moment, he wishes there were a way to reach out and clasp the man’s shoulder. If there were a way, he would.

  Instead, they just go on talking quietly, enclosed by the lilting white noise around them, like two boys strategizing in a fort made of packed snow or couch cushions. They lean in toward each other until their knees are almost touching. They are trying to figure out something—nothing concrete or of great importance, but rather just an impression, the shadow of a puzzle. Whatever it is, they turn it over in their hands, they hand it back and forth, they set it on the table and take turns tapping at it. They hold it up between them and gaze at it together—and that’s what they are looking at when it seems like they are looking at each other.

  Then, some time later, they look around and realize that Paulette is missing.

  “Oh no.”

  When they find her, she’s sitting at a table with three girls from the junior class—all Ted Hughes’s students. It was originally a parent table, but all these parents have gone home, and Paulette is picking at a pile of mashed potatoes on one of their abandoned plates. As she talks, she scoops a finger into the potatoes and punctuates her sentences by putting her finger in her mouth and making a popping sound with her lips as she swallows. Through all this, she does a little swaying dance in her chair.

  What she’s saying is:

  “Come on now—let’s be serious. You must all have crushes on him.”

  The girls smile and nod. This seems to be the place where it’s okay to admit you have a crush on your teacher. One of the girls finds on the table a quarter glass of red wine that has somebody else’s lipstick on it and drains it furtively while Paulette is between thoughts.

  “I tell you,” Paulette continues, “if I had him as a teacher when I was in school…” She rolls her eyes as if the rest goes without saying. “Well, let’s just say I’d never uncross my legs, if you know what I mean.”

  She cackles, sucks some more potatoes from the end of her fingertip—and realizes that, no, the girls don’t know what she means.

  “Aw, fuck,” she says. “I guess I shouldn’t be saying these things to you. Boundary issues, that’s what I’ve got. Hey, don’t listen to me. I don’t know what the hell I’m saying. What do I know about teenagers? Just—I don’t know—just don’t get into trouble, I guess.”

  That’s when Ted Hughes and Binhammer find her and take her by the arms back to their own table, where they cajole her into drinking some coffee.

  She rubs her eyes and says, “I’m not embarrassing you, am I? Am I an embarrassment?”

  “No,” Ted Hughes says. “You’re beautiful. You’re Paulette.”

  The two men take turns complimenting her while she smiles abstractedly into the bouquet of flowers at the center of the table. Some of the flowers already look dead.

  “My teeth are crooked,” she says. “I should get them fixed.”

  Half an hour later, the annual dinner has just about run its course, and Sibyl walks across the almost empty ballroom to say good-bye to the Abramsons and Pepper Carmichael. She embraces them. It is easy to be warm to people at the end of a party—the solidarity of the last ones still standing. Then she goes into the big restroom in the lobby outside and stands in front of the mirror, thinking about what will happen next. She will go home. She will undress, hanging up her clothes with delicacy. She will turn off the light and make her way in the pitch-black to her bed. She has done it many, many times now.

  The evening has numbed her. She is not in love with Binhammer; her attraction to him is jumpy and ill-fitting. She is unhappy these days, what with her divorce, and sometimes her unhappiness coincides with his. And that coincidence leads to physical flutterings that are stopped almost as soon as they are started. She understands that. At times like these, gazing into mirrors in women’s restrooms, the whole thing looks silly and harmless.

  And Ted Hughes is fascinating—but Ted Hughes is a shiny thing, passed around from one person to another. Anyone could see that.

  Behind her, one of the stall doors opens and Paulette emerges. Her eyes are bloodshot, and her face is streaked with lines of mascara that make her look either clownish or tribal. She has been crying.

  “Oh, hi,” Paulette says. “Are you still here?”

  “I was just getting ready to go.”

  “Us too,” Paulette says, approaching the mirror. “Oh god, look at me. I’m a mess.”

  She begins wiping the mascara off her face with a wet paper towel, but it smears into a greasy gray stain. So she scrubs harder until her cheeks are pink. She says:

  “I embarrassed him. These fucking men, huh? How are you supposed to know what they want all the time?”

  The two women gaze at each other in the mirror. Bathroom intimacy. To turn their heads more and look at each other directly—that would be too much.

  “I can’t keep up. I guess you smart girls know how to deal with it better,” Paulette says.

  Smart girls. Sibyl the smart girl. She thinks of the hallway of her apartment, Binhammer edging toward the door, her own little-girl desire to keep him. And those men, Binhammer, Hughes, all of them, feasting on Paulette, feasting on Sibyl herself, having no idea what goes on in the blighted tile bathrooms of fancy hotels.

  She can’t think about it anymore.

  She suddenly feels nauseated.

  Paulette goes on: “I’m not such a smart girl.”

  Even though she feels like she’s going to throw up, Sibyl rushes out of the bathroom, through the diminishing crowd in the lobby and out the revolving doors to the street. She wants to be among strangers; she wants to be lost in a crowd somewhere. She wants to be in a place where no one expects her to say anything and where no one can tell her apart from anybody else. Anonymity—perfect, pure blankness. She thinks about suicide—not about doing it herself, but she thinks this is what people must be looking for who kill themselves. Like Sylvia Plath. The chaste white oblivion following that electric jolt. Emptiness and quiet. No name. No character. No expectations. Just a place to sit down and be exhausted in private for a while, and maybe forever.

  It has stopped snowing.

  She decides to walk home, even though it’s late and the walk will take almost an hour. What she’s looking for is the foreignness of the city after dark—the beautiful estrangement of swarms of city dwellers brushing past each other with civil indifference.

  She decides to walk home, because right now she hates everyone she knows.

  chapter 20

  Every time Mrs. Mayhew wants to see Binhammer in her office, he anxiously revisits all the events of the previous week to determine if there’s anything he’s done wrong. He thinks about the papers he hasn’t returned to student
s and classes he has shown up late for. He thinks about students he has yelled at and low grades he has given. He thinks about the things he’s said to other faculty members and whether those things might have been overheard. He thinks about things he’s said in class that might be considered inappropriate for a girls’ prep school. Then—walking down the crowded halls toward the office and ignoring all the girl voices calling out to him, “Mr. Binhammer! Mr. Binhammer!”—he strategizes his response. “I never said that,” he mutters to himself. “Besides, it’s nothing worse than what they would hear on prime-time TV.” Or: “The only reason I was talking about women masturbating in the first place is because they brought it up. One girl asked what Janey was doing beneath the pear tree in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Was I supposed to lie?”

  So when Binhammer gets a note in his mailbox the day after the annual dinner that reads simply, “See me. Mayhew,” the process begins again, and he promises himself that he will be more careful in the future.

  But Mrs. Mayhew does not scold him. Instead, when she sees him deferentially edging his way into her office, she barks out:

  “Absecon Day.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a day school in New Jersey. Outside of Atlantic City.”

  “Oh.”

  “They have just split into two separate campuses, one for boys and one for girls—and they’re hiring new liberal arts faculty for the girls’ school. They have asked for our help, and we’re going to give it to them.”

  The administration of Absecon Day, she explains, is modeling their girls’ division on Carmine-Casey, one of the oldest and most successful girls’ schools on the East Coast. So Carmine-Casey wants to send two faculty members to help the administrators look through their applicant pool and educate them about constructing an effective faculty.

  “I was thinking about you and Sibyl.” Mrs. Mayhew looks sideways out of her eyes. She always gives the impression of being able to see into your soul. Binhammer wonders how much she could possibly know about his relationship with Sibyl. Nothing. Really, nothing. Still, he dries up under her gaze. He swallows. Twice.

  “Well—”

  But he can’t think of anything to say next.

  Then, eventually: “I think Sibyl…I think she might not be up to it.”

  Mrs. Mayhew squints at him. She is made of brass. He feels her stare like a collar around his neck.

  “You mean the divorce,” she says.

  “Yes, the divorce. And everything.”

  Finally, the woman relents. “Maybe you’re right.” She taps her pen on her desk blotter. “Then how about Hughes? Show off our latest acquisition. Show support for the new man. What do you say?” Another hard look. “How do you two get along?”

  Oh, god. Well…

  He imagines it: the Atlantic City boardwalk, he and Hughes like characters out of a black-and-white movie in seersucker suits, a screwball heroine wearing a hat with a broken feather in it, fistfights with cigar-chewing pit bosses, ducking underneath punches, narrow escapes.

  The whole thing is absurd and embarrassing, and it makes him grin.

  When he tells his wife about the trip later that night, she gives him a mocking laugh.

  “So it’s going to be the boys out on the town, is it? Are you going to get drunk and flirt with strippers?”

  One of the things Sarah knows about her husband is that he holds an automatic grudge against all men for not being women. The idea of spending time with other men rankles him. He dislikes football. And beer. And fraternal high spirits. He mistrusts men and is embarrassed around them. It is, she thinks, one of his most charming qualities.

  Women, on the other hand, are all right. He likes women. He’s not just attracted to them—he likes them. Which is, in her estimation, rarer in most men than she would like to say.

  Carmine-Casey, of course, is the perfect place for him. Women to the left of him, women to the right of him. Like Alfred, Lord Tennyson in a sorority house. That is, until the new teacher came along.

  “I think it’s sweet,” she says, teasing him.

  “Stop it.”

  “Aw, come on. It’s nice that you have a buddy.”

  “You think it’s funny? We could go see some strippers. You think we can’t?”

  “I’ll give you fifty dollars if you do. All in singles.”

  She laughs, and he turns pink with embarrassment.

  So, a week later, it’s Binhammer and Hughes on the town in Atlantic City. There is an absurd quality to the whole thing, a madcap boondoggle. Except this one is full of sweat and deception—full of foul and secret things. There is some part of Binhammer that relishes it, the vertiginous masochism of getting as close as possible to the edge of the precipice, the romance of an intimacy with your enemy. He feels as though he is doing something, dangerous or not—as though suffocating on life were the same thing as living fully.

  The ride down to Atlantic City is mostly a quiet one. Binhammer drives the rental car. Ted Hughes stares out the window. They stop once because Binhammer has to go to the bathroom. Ted Hughes doesn’t go to the bathroom. Binhammer has never seen him go to the bathroom.

  They are not sure how to fill up two and a half hours in the tight confines of the car.

  “I’ve never been to Atlantic City,” says Ted Hughes at one point.

  “Never? How can you have never been to Atlantic City?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been.”

  Then they settle back into the silence, as though it were the very upholstery of the car. Binhammer wishes they were smoking men. He likes to think of Ted Hughes offering him a cigarette from a pack, him plucking it out and perching it between his lips, the smoke being sucked out the cracked windows in long ribbonlike streams, the two of them flicking the butts out the window and seeing them hit the pavement in the rearview mirror—just a momentary rain of red ash. That would be all right. If they were smoking men, then Binhammer would know what to do.

  When they finally get to the hotel, Binhammer says, “Here we are.”

  “Here we are,” says Ted Hughes.

  They are staying in Atlantic City itself, on the boardwalk, a move engineered by Binhammer, who explained to Mrs. Mayhew that the rates would be cheaper than in Absecon, and only twenty minutes from the school itself. They share a room with two double beds and a view that looks out over the ocean. From the window, Binhammer spots two people walking hand in hand on the beach despite the cold. The sky is filled with a murky soup of clouds, and there are no shadows anywhere on the ground.

  They don’t have to be in Absecon until the next morning.

  “I’m going down to the tables,” Binhammer says. “Do you want to do some gambling?”

  “I’m not much of a gambler,” Ted Hughes says. “I have trouble paying attention to the cards. I think I’ll just stroll the boards.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  Binhammer, relieved to be alone for the moment, takes the elevator to the casino floor, and the doors open on a panic of lights. It seems to him that there is never any place to focus your eyes in a casino. There are no dimensions—just one flat surface of sound and color. Walking between the rows of slot machines feels like walking across the painted canvas of some modern artist.

  He finds a blackjack table and sits down between two old women. He takes out ten twenties and lays them on the table and watches the dealer count them out and set a stack of chips before him. While he plays, Binhammer is silent. The other people at the table are more amicable—joking with the dealer, congratulating each other on winning hands, jovially cursing their luck. But Binhammer looks either bored or uncomfortable—like he’s killing time waiting for somebody who is already an hour late. He barely moves his arm, either tapping on the table to hit or making a slight horizontal gesture with his fingers to stay. When the shoe is finished and the dealer shuffles, Binhammer uses the interim to lean back and look down the aisle of tables. There’s nothing he’s looking for.

  For a while
he is up fifty dollars, then he loses a hundred and decides to switch to a different table, where he loses a hundred more. He’s down to his last two twenty-five-dollar chips when Ted Hughes shows up.

  “How are you doing?” asks Ted Hughes.

  “I’m losing.”

  “Really?” His response seems compulsory. “Listen, you should see this Old West casino down the boardwalk. They have a talking buzzard and everything. It’s awful and beautiful. It’s incredible.”

  “I’ve seen it.”

  “Do you like funnel cake? I found the best place to get funnel cake.”

  Binhammer tosses a chip in and waits for the dealer to bust, but instead the dealer gets a five and a jack and takes his chip.

  Ted Hughes looks around, as though he is eager to move on to the next thing. Then he looks down at the table.

  “Is that your last chip?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.” Then, “Here, wait, play a hand for me,” and he pulls two twenties and a ten from his pocket and hands them to Binhammer.

  “You might lose it,” Binhammer warns.

  “If I lose it I lose it.”

  Binhammer gives the dealer the cash and gets two chips and puts them both in. When the dealer sweeps the cards across the table, Binhammer gets an eight and a queen and the dealer has a six showing. He hits and looks at Ted Hughes to see if the man can tell that you shouldn’t hit on an eighteen—not ever, and especially not if the dealer has a six showing. But Ted Hughes is looking at the table with only the most abstracted curiosity, like a child watching a processional of ants.