“I was supposed to meet up with this other girl,” Dora says. “She never showed.”
“Now what?” Binhammer says. “You’ll have to get another room.”
“Sure, whatever,” she says and walks toward the exit.
“What is she doing?” Binhammer asks.
“I don’t know.”
“Hey, what are you doing?”
She stops and turns toward them. “I don’t have any money. It’s okay. I’ll just hang out in the casino. The night’s halfway finished anyway.” She sways a little as she talks.
“Forget it,” Binhammer says, taking her by the elbow. “You’re staying with us.”
She rolls her eyes, and they take her back to their room and lay her out on the bed, mostly asleep already. Ted Hughes takes off her shoes, and Binhammer folds the bedspread over her. “I think our girl’s out for the night.” Then they sit in two chairs in front of the large window and look out over the lights to the immense darkness of the Atlantic. Binhammer twirls the glass ashtray on the table between them, wishing again that he knew how to smoke.
Only once does Dora stir, sitting up and rubbing her eyes. They look at her, and she looks at them.
“I guess I should be worried,” she mumbles. Then she shoos it all away with a wave of her hand. “Eh. You two don’t even like girls anyway.” And with that she readjusts her pillow and falls asleep again.
“What was that?” Binhammer says. “What did she say?”
“Did she say we don’t like girls?”
“I like girls.”
“So do I.”
“What did she mean?”
“Is that what she said?”
“I think so.”
“What did she mean?”
“I don’t know. Wake her up and ask her.”
Ted Hughes goes over to the bed and shakes her by the shoulder.
“Hey,” he says. “Hey, Dora. What did you just say?”
But her body just curls itself away from his hand, and her breathing becomes wheezy with the sleep of the immobile.
“Well, forget it,” Ted Hughes says, sitting back down.
“I guess. She didn’t even believe we were teachers.”
Neither of them knows how to discuss the logistics of going to sleep with a witty artist girl in one of their beds, and so neither of them does. Instead, they talk about other things, leaning back in their chairs and glancing at the sleeping girl every now and then. When they get thirsty, Binhammer goes down the hall to the vending machine and buys cans of soda and bags of chips.
“She’s cute,” Ted Hughes says.
“Yeah, she’s cute.” Binhammer nods. Then he says, “I never went out with anyone like her.”
“No?”
“I never knew how to talk to girls like that. And now that I’ve figured it out, they’re all twenty years younger than I am.”
“But they love you. Fifteen-year-olds love you.”
“No, they love you.”
Later Ted Hughes says, “What do you think of Sibyl?”
Binhammer shrugs noncommittally. Then later Ted Hughes says it again:
“So what do you think of Sibyl?”
“Compared to what?”
“I don’t know compared to what. What do you mean?”
They both turn and look at the girl sleeping behind them, as though she were Sibyl herself. What Binhammer wants is for Ted Hughes to talk about Sibyl, because he knows the man must see something in her that he himself doesn’t. What he wants is to catch a glimpse of the Ted Hughes version of Sibyl, that jittery figment of language and bright eyes like a receding dream. He would like to take a look at that Sibyl. That’s a Sibyl he might be able to fall in love with. They could weave that Sibyl here between them, like the two fates, forever—with no one around to cut the thread.
Instead, Ted Hughes says, “Did you ever read Lawrence Durrell? He says something in one of his books. What was it?” He leans forward and looks out the window, as though Lawrence Durrell himself were floating out there in the night sky. “It was something like, ‘She was no longer a woman. Now she had become a situation.’”
Binhammer watches the man’s hands, which seem to build something invisible and impossibly complex. He feels like he wants to know what that thing is—the thing that Ted Hughes holds square between his artisan fingers.
“That’s what I feel like,” Ted Hughes continues. “I don’t know any women. I only know situations.”
He is quiet again for a long time. Then he starts talking about a woman he once knew—a woman who wasn’t anything like Sibyl. He describes the way she sat, the way she crossed her legs and looked at him as though there were nothing in the world that he could get away with. He describes a windowsill, like this one here, where they sat and looked out and saw a group of children playing hopscotch outside on the sidewalk—except they were playing it wrong and she wanted to go outside and explain to them how to do it, and he wanted to see her do it too but she didn’t.
Then he laughs and brushes it off, but he’s still looking down at his hands, shaping the clay of memory, when he nods and says, “She was a situation. She was a whole gorgeous situation.” The way he says it makes Binhammer think that the woman he is describing is probably his wife.
And Ted Hughes, too, Binhammer realizes, has become a situation. Where Binhammer should feel jealous, he only feels sympathy. Where he should be angry, he only feels grateful. Ted Hughes, the center of so much feminine attention. Binhammer realizes, embarrassed, that what he wants most is to beat those women and girls at their own game, to be dynamic enough to hold the gaze of Ted Hughes. To be the center of attention of the center of attention. That would be something.
Good lord, he thinks. What now? Where do you go from here? Perverse, the idea of wanting to befriend your wife’s lover behind her back. It would be so much easier if he could hate the man—and hasn’t he tried?
Binhammer gets up from the chair, suddenly awake. Outside, finally, the darkness coming out from over the sea is tinged with color. On the boardwalk below two men emerge drunkenly from the doors of a casino to greet the sunrise. They support each other for a while, loping from side to side and declaiming to the sky in big gestures like ancient Greek stage actors. Then something happens and they become belligerent, pushing each other until one of them loses his balance and sits down on the boardwalk with a heavy thud. The other begins to walk away, but turns around before he’s gotten twenty feet and says something to the sitting man, who is now holding his head in his hands. The sitting man nods and the other one nods and they say some more things and then they both nod. After which the one offers the other a hand and raises him up, and they punch each other playfully on the shoulders and walk toward the beach again, laughing heartily.
“Should we wake up our girl?” Binhammer asks.
“Let’s go get something to eat first.”
“Okay. We’ll bring her back something.”
“Sure. And then we’ll kick her out.”
“Do you have your door key?”
“Yes.”
“So I don’t need mine?”
“No.”
“Listen,” Binhammer says as they shut the door behind them and wait for the elevator in the hall. He feels generous, magnanimous. “You and Sibyl. It’s not such a bad idea.”
“You think so?”
“I think she could use someone like you.”
Ted Hughes nods, as if considering an algebraic proof—and then, as they step into the elevator, something seems to occur to him and he smiles boyishly at Binhammer, as though the two of them have reached some kind of final accord after hours of debate. The elevator doors close and the two of them ride down to the lobby, watching the floor numbers tick by.
chapter 22
During the days that Binhammer is out of town, Liz Warren finds herself sitting in the back of the class staring at the substitute with a face as close to porcelain still as she can get it—trying not to react in any way
to the inane exchanges between Dixie Doyle and her ridiculous cadre of confidantes. She considered not going to class at all, but she’s getting something out of this exercise: a study in military stillness. She gazes at the lumpy shape of the substitute, who has not even made an attempt to teach but instead sits at the front desk, casually turning the pages of her magazine and looking up once in a while to make sure that nothing untoward is occurring.
Can she even see me? Liz Warren wonders. I am invisible. I have willed myself invisible. The invisible girl. I will find out what people really think of me.
She remains still as death even as she overhears Dixie Doyle relating the ridiculous story of her weekend.
“So my mother made me go talk to this girl in the hospital. Her leg got run over by a truck. Can you believe it? A truck! It was so awkward. What am I supposed to say? ‘Hi, I’m Dixie, how’s your leg?’ ‘Crushed, thanks. How’s yours?’”
“How did her leg get run over, Dixie?”
“She was crossing the street against the light. Someone tried to pull her back, but they didn’t in time and her leg still got crushed. Can you believe it? I mean, what do you say to someone like that?”
“How come you had to go see her, Dixie?”
“Well, apparently she’s my cousin.”
“Your cousin?”
“I know. That’s what I said.”
Despite her extraordinary control up to this point Liz Warren flinches, and, just as she thought, with that slightest movement her invisibility pops off. Now Dixie is looking at her from four rows ahead.
“So, Liz,” she calls. “I hear tonight’s the big night. You better be careful—Jeremy’s a little pushy, if you know what I mean. At least he was with me. He might be more gentlemanly with you.”
“Shut up, Dixie,” Liz says, swinging her book bag over her shoulder and heading toward the door. The bell starts ringing by the time she gets there, and she’s the first one out of the room.
Earlier in the week, when Jeremy Notion asked her out, she said yes without thinking—that autonomic function of girlhood that makes her embarrassed now. Does she really want to go out with him? There is a part of her that wishes she could simply be asked out by boys, accept, and have it recorded in her journal without ever having to go on the dates themselves. The worst part about the date, it seems, is the date. Would she feel differently if it were someone else? She tries to imagine different boys, but she soon feels ridiculous—like one of those girls in frilly socks pining over pictures of movie stars in magazines.
Let’s be practical about this.
How does Dixie do it? The performance—how does she pull it off? How is she able to say the things she says?
During a Bardolph/Carmine-Casey canned food drive last year, one of the boys started talking to Liz while boxing up the cans. At first she was flattered by the attention. But then she began to suspect that there was something behind it. In her head, a scenario played itself out in which: he liked her from a distance; but when he started talking to her, he lost interest because all she could talk about was how much homework she had, and nobody wanted to hear about that; and then he wanted to be rid of her but couldn’t because he felt sorry for her and was a pretty decent guy and so went out of his way to continue talking to her even though he didn’t really want to.
She felt in her bones that this was the case. She wanted to let him off the hook since he was at least nice enough to talk to her in the first place, so she kept telling him, “You know, you don’t have to talk to me if you don’t feel like it,” and “You don’t have to walk me home. I have some work to do anyway,” and, regarding their one date, “You can go see the movie with someone else if you want to. I know you said we would go, but you shouldn’t feel obligated.”
And she was right, because eventually he took her up on her offer and stopped walking her home and stopped talking to her altogether. So far, that is the closest Liz Warren has come to having a boyfriend, and she supposes that it’s rather pathetic if you look at it for too long.
It doesn’t help her mood that when she gets home that evening her mother stands in the doorway of her room, wanting to help her get dressed.
“What are you going to wear, Lizzie?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.” She says it as though it would be the very summit of absurdity to even consider the question. She can hear the way she talks to her mother, but she doesn’t know how to stop herself.
“You haven’t thought about it? But, honey, isn’t he going to be here in an hour?”
“He’s not coming here. I’m meeting him.”
“Oh.” Mrs. Warren frowns and picks a thread from the front of her blouse.
“I have to finish reading this chapter, Mom.”
“I think you should wear—”
“It’s Tolstoy, in case you were interested. The Death of Ivan Ilyich.”
“I think you should wear your green skirt. Green always makes you look so sophisticated. Against the color of your hair. A lot of women wish they had your hair.”
“They can have it. I’m not wearing a skirt.”
“Oh, I really wish you would consider it. You don’t have to wear those jeans all the time. Sometimes it’s nice to dress up. What if he gets dressed up? You don’t want him to think you don’t care. Boys like skirts.”
“Can we just—” says Liz, who has been flinching throughout her mother’s speech. “I’m not going to wear a skirt.”
“I don’t know why you have to be so difficult about it.”
“Mother—”
“Uh-oh. I know I’m in trouble when you start calling me Mother. Okay, okay. I’m going.”
When her mother has gone, Liz calls her friend Monica Vargas to complain that her mother won’t leave her alone about Jeremy Notion. Monica Vargas explains, with the preternatural wisdom of a child of divorce, that mothers are the broken reflections of their daughters, deeply flawed and shimmering at you full-length from the closet door. “They’re just like anyone else,” Monica says. “They like to look forward to things. But really they just don’t know what to do.”
Talking with Monica about mothers and fathers is like seeking the counsel of a Tibetan monk. While all the other girls are whining about how unfairly they have been treated at the hands of their parents, Monica sits cross-legged on her bed and utters koans that bend your mind back upon itself. And suddenly, before you know it, you feel like you want to make your parents breakfast in bed.
Then Monica asks, “So what are you going to do on this date of yours?” She does not approve of Jeremy Notion, and neither, to be honest, does Liz. So whenever they talk about it, it’s as if they’re discussing a scientific experiment.
“I don’t know. I think he’s taking me to dinner.”
“Where? I’ll put twenty bucks on Italian.”
Italian food is the only way teenage boys know how to be romantic.
After she hangs up with Monica Vargas, Liz looks up to find her mother pretending to walk nonchalantly by her door.
“Oh,” she says, as though it has just occurred to her in passing, “by the way, you can borrow these earrings if you want.” She holds out two green teardrops in her palm. “But they’re emerald—you may want to wear something that goes with them. Just an idea.”
“Okay,” Liz says, trying to be sympathetic. “But I think I’ll just wear the ones I have on.”
Her mother takes this as an invitation to come into the room and examine Liz’s ears—whereupon Liz makes a face and uses her thumbnail to scratch the side of her nose. She pulls herself away from her mother’s groping hands and sits with her back against the pillows of her bed.
“You know,” her mother says, “I was really hoping to meet him. Will you bring him around next time?”
“We’ll see.”
“Tell me,” her mother says, brightening suddenly, “what does he look like? Is he cute?”
“Oh my god.”
“Do you want to know abou
t a boy I dated when I was your age? He had a big mop of curly hair. It was adorable.”
Liz cringes and pulls her knees up to her chest. “Listen,” she says, trying to be nice, “I have to go pretty soon. Can we talk about this later?”
“You know, Lizzie, this is a big time in a mother’s life, too. I mean, I’ve loved going to all your award dinners and everything. I couldn’t be more proud. But this…You know, for a mother, her daughter’s first real date—”
“Can we just please stop talking about this? Please?”
“Okay, okay,” her mother says, holding up her palms in retreat as she exits the room.
Before leaving to meet Jeremy, Liz closes her door and tries on the green skirt that her mother wants her to wear. Standing before the mirror, she thinks it makes her look okay. But then she thinks about him thinking about why she would wear the green skirt. So uncharacteristic of her. He’ll see it as a pathetic attempt to impress him. So she takes the thing off and tosses it aside and puts her jeans back on.
She doesn’t want him thinking that she takes this whole thing too seriously.
They meet at the fountain in Central Park—his idea. When she gets there, he hasn’t arrived yet, so she walks in a wide circle along the winding paths, and by the time she comes back there he is, leaning against the concrete edge of the fountain with his ankles crossed like some kind of larval James Dean.
“Hey,” he says and reaches to hug her—but she’s not prepared and doesn’t get her arms uncrossed in time, and so he ends up embracing her awkwardly with her arms pressed between their chests.
“Okay,” she says, whatever that means.
“You smell nice,” he says. “What is it?”
“I don’t know,” because she really doesn’t. “Just my shampoo, I guess.”
She wonders if she smiles too much—or not enough. The thought bothers her, and she decides to keep a tally. On the left side of her brain she’ll count the number of times she smiles, and on the right side she’ll count the number of times Jeremy does.
“Are you ready to go?” He smiles.
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