Hummingbirds

by Joshua Gaylor

  Binhammer realizes then that he wants to see Ted Hughes lose. He would gamble away all of Ted Hughes’s money if he let him.

  But the card he gets is a three.

  “What happened?” Ted Hughes asks when Binhammer hands him the chips.

  “You won.”

  “How much?”

  “Fifty.”

  He stuffs the chips carelessly into his pocket and says, “Great, I’ll buy you dinner. Listen, I hear they have this building down the shore that’s shaped like an elephant. It’s called Lucy the Elephant. We have got to see that.”

  They exit the casino together and pause at the entrance. Ted Hughes wants to walk down to the water, but Binhammer tells him the beach closed at ten.

  “How can you close a beach?”

  Binhammer follows behind the man as they walk down the boardwalk, looking at him look at things. Ted Hughes romanticizes the city in a curious way, and Binhammer wonders what he sees in these plastic and neon facades. He would like to feel what Ted Hughes is feeling—he tries to see the splendor where Ted Hughes points it out, but all he can see is decay. And the tired masks that are hung loosely over that decay.

  Later, as they’re walking back to their hotel, Ted Hughes starts talking in a broadly gestured way about a woman he once met in Las Vegas. Her name was Carolina, like the states, and she was a showgirl, and he met her in a bar where she said she liked his glasses. He bought her a drink, and she told him about what it was like to be a showgirl and how when she first came to Vegas she couldn’t imagine showing her boobs to everyone every night but that it really wasn’t so bad, and if you thought about it you might as well show your boobs to people while they still want to see them because one day they won’t and wouldn’t that be a sad day. And Ted Hughes supposes he fell in love with her a little because there was something wonderfully childish about her, like a little girl pretending to be a woman, and how that was what he liked about Las Vegas itself and now Atlantic City too. He pictures them—the cities—as little girls who put on their mothers’ makeup and sequined dresses that drag along the floor behind them as they strut back and forth in front of the full-length closet mirror, wobbling precariously in high heels that hang off the backs of their feet like slippers. Oh god that Carolina with her coarse little smile and her bad teeth! And her saying that if he wanted to see her boobs he would have to come to the show—but then giving a corruptly seductive giggle and saying he could see them before if he wanted to—and the whole time him trying to figure out what he’s going to do with her, but after a while it’s all moot because she seems to lose interest and drift into the arm of the next guy who buys her a drink. And Ted Hughes is left behind there at the bar, watching her go, still a little in love with her and wondering what to do with that miniature dollhouse love—maybe just put it in the corner where you put other things you can’t bear to throw out. And then dust it off when you find yourself on a boardwalk in a town of dissolute virginities—

  Finally Binhammer stops him. He has to stand in front of Ted Hughes and take him by both shoulders before the man even notices him. But then their eyes meet.

  “What are you talking about?” Binhammer says.

  Ted Hughes is still lost somewhere. Gone, moving forward on the impetus of his own imagination. Like an attack. Like epilepsy.

  “Take it easy,” Binhammer says calmingly. “Take it easy. These things don’t mean anything.”

  “No,” Ted Hughes says, looking embarrassed. “They don’t mean anything.”

  They continue to walk back to the hotel. When they get to their room, Ted Hughes takes everything from his pockets, including the four twenty-five-dollar chips from the blackjack game, and tosses it all carelessly on the bedside table. One of the chips nearly rolls off the table but remains teetered on the edge.

  In the morning Binhammer counts the chips while Ted Hughes is in the shower, to make sure none of them have fallen between the table and the bed. But all four are there, and he stacks them in a neat little column. He doesn’t think Ted Hughes will notice, and Ted Hughes doesn’t.

  “Look,” Binhammer says when Ted Hughes comes out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped around his waist, “I’m going to take you back to the tables tonight. We’re going to parlay your winnings.”

  “I don’t think so,” Ted Hughes says.

  “Come on, you’re ripe with beginner’s luck. Now’s the time. What else are you going to do with those chips?”

  “Cash them in.”

  “That’s no fun. Where’s your sense of peril? You could win big.”

  Ted Hughes shrugs and begins going through his luggage, looking for something to wear.

  It’s then that Binhammer notices something: for him it has become essential to their time here that Ted Hughes gamble away those four green chips.

  “You’re doing it,” he says. He is surprised at the angry insistence in his voice. Slightly embarrassed, he walks to the window and looks out over the shore. He says it again but in a different voice, to try to modulate the moment. “You’re doing it.”

  “What’s the matter with you? I’m not interested.”

  “You shouldn’t have won that hand.”

  “What?”

  “Last night,” Binhammer says. “You shouldn’t have won that hand. Nobody hits on an eighteen.”

  “I didn’t do that, you did it.”

  “You’re playing those chips.”

  “You play them if you want to so bad,” Hughes says. “Go ahead.”

  “No, they’re yours—you’re playing them.”

  “Forget it. I don’t want to play them.”

  “You afraid you might lose? You can’t win all the time, you know. You can’t win everything.”

  “What?”

  Binhammer can feel the hysteria pulsing in his voice, but he can’t seem to control it.

  “You’re gonna lose those goddamn chips. You’re gonna play them, and you’re gonna lose them.”

  “You want me to lose them? Fine, I’ll lose them.” Hughes raises his voice to meet the fever of Binhammer’s own. He takes the little stack of chips and opens the door and pitches them out into the hallway, letting the door slam shut behind them. “There, are you happy now? They’re lost. What the hell is the matter with you?”

  “Jesus,” Binhammer says. “Forget it. Just forget it.”

  He tells Ted Hughes to meet him at the car when he’s ready to go. He waits in the parking structure, listening to the echo of strangers’ footsteps until Ted Hughes shows up.

  On the drive to the school, they say nothing to each other at first. But the tension between them is so strange and baseless that it cannot hold. It shivers away like a mirage, leaving them with common humor.

  “I saw a bunch of jellyfish yesterday,” Ted Hughes says, “while you were in the casino.”

  “Did you?”

  “They were washed up on the beach. At first I didn’t know what they were. They looked like round sacks of clear jelly. Like silicone breast implants.”

  “Is that right?”

  “It was a whole beachful of counterfeit breasts.”

  They both look thoughtfully out the windshield of the car, skewered by the image.

  They get to Absecon Day by eight thirty, and they are finished by four. On the way back to the hotel, they stop to see Lucy, the building shaped like an elephant. They stand at the base of it and gaze up. It looks like an elephant, except it has windows.

  “It’s great, isn’t it?” Binhammer says to Ted Hughes, by way of apology for his outburst that morning.

  But also because it is great, authentically great, that gray pachyderm with its toenails painted red.

  chapter 21

  “You know what your problem is?” Binhammer says. “You don’t know how to indulge. Nobody ever taught you how to indulge.”

  “Is that my problem?” Ted Hughes responds.

  “Yeah. That’s your problem.” Binhammer has to admit he’s beginning to enjoy the man’s company.
The anger of the morning has transformed itself into something else—a staticky frisson.

  It’s the evening of their second day in Atlantic City, and the two men sit across from each other at a wide table positioned around the perimeter of the massive frescoed hall that is Caesar’s Palace Buffet. The place is made up to look like the patio of an Italian villa: whitewashed arbors with plastic grapevines climbing in arches overhead, the faux finish on the walls giving the studied impression of age and dust and even painted in areas to look like the plaster has fallen away to reveal the ancient brick beneath. It is a masterpiece of trompe l’oeil, and Binhammer has to resist the urge to gaze up at the pinprick stars in the ceiling above and look for constellations.

  Places like this always make him feel a bit foolish because, in moments of genuine honesty, he suspects himself of being susceptible to their seductions.

  “Take a look at this, for example,” Binhammer continues, pointing to the plate in front of Ted Hughes. “A little salad, a few baby potatoes, two green beans. Two green beans. Are you serious about that? Because from where I’m sitting it doesn’t look like you’re serious about those green beans. And look—you’ve got everything in separate little piles.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Everybody’s hungry.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Look around you. This is a buffet. You have to think in terms of shovels and troughs, not teaspoons and salad forks.” He points to the Vesuvius of food on his own plate. “Look!”

  “Ugh,” Ted Hughes says. “You’re going to make yourself sick.”

  “The throes of love,” says Binhammer. “Sometimes they’re painful, Hughes. When will you look it in the face?”

  Ted Hughes picks up one of his two green beans and throws it at Binhammer’s chest, where it leaves a small oily snail mark on his shirt.

  “Now you’re getting into the spirit of things,” Binhammer says, casually scrubbing his shirt with his napkin.

  The two men smile at each other. A shared smile full of boyish clamor.

  Ted Hughes toys delicately with the few items of food before him while Binhammer wonders if there is something wrong with him because he is so hungry.

  After a while Binhammer pushes his plate back and lets out a low moan. “I’m going to get a bucket of cheesecake. And when I come back, we’re going to get to the bottom of this need you have to compartmentalize everything.”

  “Not everything.”

  “So you say.”

  Binhammer gets up and makes his way through the middle-aged patrons of the restaurant, trying to read the words on all the T-shirts, which seem to be particularly declarative this evening.

  “Take a bowlful of this cheesecake,” Binhammer says when he returns. Ted Hughes moves to comply. “That’s my boy.”

  “Oh my god,” says a voice behind them. The two men turn around to see a young black-haired woman, maybe twenty years old, in a green military jacket, a camera slung around her neck. She’s pointing to the table—and with good reason. The waitress seems to have lost track of them on her rotation, and all of their plates—mostly Binhammer’s—are stacked in precarious, bloated piles everywhere. It looks like the detritus of a bar mitzvah compacted onto a single table between two speechless men looking suddenly bewildered.

  Before they can say anything, she’s taking pictures of them and the mess over which they are sitting like two dull-witted players of chess.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” she asks, not waiting for a response. “It’s for my Atlantic City Garbage series.”

  “Your what?”

  Her name, it turns out, is Dora, and she is going to be a photographer some day. Right now she’s building her portfolio with pictures of authentic Atlantic City trash. The two men see something in her that reminds them of the girls who sit in the corners of their classrooms, a certain ironic toughness—the old jean, dirty hair kind of self-dispossession of smart girls who have given over to the embarrassment of everything. Something in her voice gives the impression that she’s sick of herself.

  “Join us, Dora,” Binhammer says. He is happy to be talking to her.

  “Yes,” Ted Hughes adds. “We know our trash. Wait while we finish our coffee, and we’ll all go nosing around for garbage together. We’ve been looking for an adventure, haven’t we, Binhammer?”

  “Dora’s a nice name,” Binhammer says as she sits down at the table.

  “Sure.” She rolls her eyes. “Get this, my parents named me after one of Sigmund Freud’s patients. They think it’s hilarious. You should hear them cackle about it. I think it’s gross.”

  She changes the film in her camera as they watch, telling them how she spent most of the afternoon crawling around under the boardwalk. She is fearless, but they are used to dealing with fearless girls.

  “You two aren’t coming with me, though,” she says in warning.

  “Suit yourself.” Binhammer sips his coffee.

  “But you should know,” Ted Hughes says, “that my friend here produces garbage by the pound. He leaves trails of it wherever he goes.”

  “Look!” Binhammer says, pointing again to the table.

  Dora smirks. It’s the smart girl’s smile, and they know they’ve got her.

  So the two men go with her, one on either side, out to the boardwalk. They like this turn of events. They realize that this is what they’ve been missing on the trip so far—someone to watch them. An audience. When she’s not looking, they smile at each other with big, excitable backstage smiles.

  “So what do you guys do for a living anyway?”

  “We’re teachers,” Binhammer says with the conviction of someone who believes that people will be impressed by that.

  “Come on.”

  “Binhammer, I don’t think she believes us.”

  “Why wouldn’t she believe us?”

  “Maybe she finds us threatening.”

  “We are sinister,” Binhammer concedes with fake regret.

  “Okay, okay,” Dora says. “If you want to be teachers, be teachers. So what is it you teach.”

  “Girls,” Binhammer says. “A lot of girls. And we teach them English.”

  Dora laughs. “Both of you? You’re both supposed to be English teachers? At a girls’ school? I don’t get it. What’s the joke?”

  “Look,” Ted Hughes says, “Binhammer here’ll say something to prove it.”

  “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness—close bosom-friend of the maturing sun, conspiring with him how to load and bless with fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run.”

  “See?” Hughes says.

  “Big deal,” Dora says. “My boyfriend picked me up in a bar with Wordsworth. Anyone can memorize a few lines of poetry.”

  She refuses to believe that they are what they say they are, perhaps because they say it with the glee of schoolboys telling made-up stories about their summer vacations. She rolls her eyes at them. She does this numerous times, and they begin to understand it as a gesture of affectionate intimacy—as though she needs to defuse her own sparking vulnerability. Soon, whenever she rolls her eyes, the two men look at each other and smile.

  The night grows colder, and they walk back and forth on the boardwalk, from New Jersey Avenue to Montpelier, looking for trash that she can photograph. They find a sleepy young boy sitting on a wrought iron chair outside the doors of a casino. His parents are nowhere in sight, and he is holding a rainbow lollipop the size of his head, which he has apparently dropped on the beach because one side of it is caked with sand. While Dora photographs him, he sits there looking dour and drawing his tongue in long, canine lapping motions up the clean side.

  At another point, soon after midnight, Dora becomes gloomy, staring out in the direction of the ocean, even though it’s too dark to see.

  “This is such a waste of time. Atlantic City Garbage. Jesus. I can’t believe I thought this was a good idea.” She looks like she would like to get up and walk out on herself. “It�
��s so pretentious. I mean, seriously. All of this—it’s just trash.”

  “Oh, now.” The two men console her.

  “Trash is trash,” she says. “There’s nothing clever about it.”

  She falls quiet, and they take turns offering suggestions.

  “You just need a break,” Binhammer says.

  “That’s right,” Ted Hughes agrees. “Nothing looks good if you look at it for too long.”

  “Or just give it up entirely.”

  “That might work too.”

  “What else are you good at?”

  “Can you crochet?”

  “Well, maybe not crochet.”

  “Maybe not. The industry is dead.”

  “How about painting?”

  “Painting might work. Then again…”

  “What?”

  “Painting may be too close to photography.”

  “Oh, right. And she’s not very good at that.”

  “No.”

  “Well, there’s always dog-walking.”

  “Ha ha,” she says, interrupting the banter sourly and rolling her eyes. “Yeah. You guys are teachers. Sure.”

  They stop at a pub just off the boardwalk and order three Cosmopolitans, and that’s when they find out she’s actually twenty-three. Sometimes while they’re talking, she’ll playfully slap one of them on the arm or shake a little belligerent fist at the other. When the bill comes, they declare that they are paying—and she simply shrugs and lets them.

  “Thanks,” she says and puts on her coat.

  For the next hour and a half, they continue walking the boardwalk and stopping for drinks in casino bars. Dora no longer seems like she’s in the mood to take pictures, so the camera dangles forgotten from her thin wrist. When she goes to the bathroom, Binhammer and Ted Hughes wait for her, standing with their backs to the casino wall like two escorts of a debutante.

  Around two in the morning, they walk her back to her hotel to discover that her room has been given to someone else because she had only made the reservation for one night. The three stand in the lobby of the big casino, all of them a little drunk and looking back and forth at each other.

  “What did you think you were doing?” Ted Hughes asks, paternal with drink and weariness.