Hummingbirds

by Joshua Gaylor

She smiles.

  Then she begins to suspect that she’s not actually smiling when she thinks she’s smiling—that what feels like a smile on her face just looks like a thin-lipped nonexpression to everyone else. When they get to the restaurant, she’ll go into the bathroom and check in the mirror.

  While she’s thinking about the concordance of her smiles, Jeremy begins talking about the weekend he spent swimming in the lake at his uncle’s house upstate. By the time they reach the restaurant she discovers that she only has to listen to about ten percent of what he says to respond appropriately.

  After they’re seated, he asks if they should try to get a bottle of wine. “I look pretty old. Sometimes I can get away with it.”

  But she shakes her head.

  They order, and the waiter brings their food, and while Jeremy Notion is twirling his fettuccini around his fork, he becomes philosophical and says, “Yeah. I don’t know what happened with Dixie. I’m not sure why I was going out with her in the first place.”

  “Well, she’s very sophisticated, n’est pas?”

  “I guess she was sophisticated—oh, I get it. You were joking.”

  She’s embarrassed. How did she get so petty? So mean? She gives herself a brutal pinch on the thigh as punishment, hard enough to make her eyes water.

  “I guess it was just nice to think she wanted to go out with me. You know. The way she is.”

  The way she is.

  Throughout the evening Liz has the feeling of being watched, the uncomfortable sense that her actions are being monitored by a note-taking critic. She has frequently felt this in circumstances that require social grace, but tonight she can actually name the critic gazing at her from the wings: Dixie Doyle. That’s right. No matter how much she tries to lose herself in the soft, blue, innocuous puddles of Jeremy’s eyes, she cannot get past the feeling that she is actually on a date with Dixie herself. Dixie Doyle by proxy—the inane, grinning, pigtail-wearing, lollipop-licking incarnation of plastic-doll girlhood. Sure, on some level she feels an obligation to impress Jeremy—the boy in the matter (she thinks of romantic espionage, of Graham Greene)—but overriding that feeling is the obligation to impress Dixie.

  Dixie, she realizes with a sickening twist of her stomach, would have wanted her to wear the green skirt.

  Liz drops her fork onto her plate with a clatter and leans back. She can’t eat anything else.

  “What’s the matter?” Jeremy asks worriedly.

  “Nothing. Nothing’s the matter. I’m just full.”

  “Oh. Okay. I just thought…I mean, that’s okay. You don’t have to eat any more…. You know, I really like your play. The play you wrote. It’s really good.”

  After dinner he walks her home, and when they get to the corner of her building he stops and stands in front of her and looks at her deeply for a second, like a party magician trying to hypnotize someone. They are standing in front of a newsstand, and the fat oily man behind the counter is smoking a cigar and staring at them. She notices that one of his ears looks like it’s been chewed away, and she wonders what it would be like to be attacked by a dog.

  Then Jeremy leans down and kisses her. First once, tentatively, and when she doesn’t do anything he readjusts his whole body and sinks himself into her face again, for longer this time.

  She thinks she should put a hand somewhere on him, on his shoulder or his hip or something, but she can’t quite focus on what’s happening.

  The newspaperman with the chewed ear watches them solemnly and scratches himself.

  At any minute she expects Dixie Doyle to pop out from behind the newsstand, laughing and pointing, pointing and laughing—shrieking in that preposterous bubblegum voice of hers, that voice that seems to trick people into melting over it, the voice that rings out clearer through the halls than any bell at Carmine-Casey.

  chapter 23

  During the winter, the courtyard of Carmine-Casey is barren and miserable and inspires thoughts of death in the minds of the students who sit staring out the windows, deaf to their history lectures and their French recitations. Gazing at the leafless branches of the sugar maple (they look like the pictures of ganglia in their biology textbooks—exactly like frozen ganglia) and the rutted, hardened mud, each girl imagines that she knows the best way to die—the most dramatic, the most meaningful. And each can picture the parades of mourners weeping loudly, regretting the things they had done or not done to her.

  Ganglia, they whisper to themselves, as though the word were magic—and a little sinister smile creeps onto their lips.

  But the winter also brings the semester’s drama performance, which is without question the faculty’s favorite school function. The teachers, standing proudly at the back of the auditorium, like to smile and comment upon the marvelous individual talent there is to be found among their girls. They even go so far as to snicker modestly to each other, “Don’t you wish you could take credit for that brilliance up there?”—when, in fact, they do privately take credit for it, each teacher swallowing warmly the thick, molasses-sweet belief that he or she is the secret inspiration behind the performance onstage.

  As the sun begins to go down sooner and sooner each day, this semester’s dramatic offering, Salmonburger, written and directed by Liz Warren, patterned after the Oresteia, starring Dixie Doyle in the role of Clarissa, is in final rehearsals that go so late into the evenings that some of the girls who live outside the city have to sleep over at the homes of other girls who live closer to the school. Arrangements are made over the phone with parents who are beginning to recognize that their protective function has become, somewhere along the line, a casual formality—and the girls order sandwiches, without mayonnaise, from the deli around the corner.

  And one evening, even after all the other performers and stage crew have gone home, there are three figures left in the cavernous auditorium, their voices echoing off each other against the tangle of lighting overhead. Two of these figures are standing together onstage, and one of them sits far back, almost against the rear wall, watching the action.

  “I can’t hear you,” calls the figure at the back. “Remember, we’re not using mics. Be louder. But still intimate. Don’t lose the intimacy.”

  This is Liz Warren. She wears jeans and sneakers and a T-shirt that advertises some product that hasn’t existed in thirty years. Her hair is pulled up away from her face and held with a simple silver clip, and she wears round tortoise-framed glasses that, if you look closely, reveal fingerprints resulting from her habit of removing them and using them to point at things.

  Everything about Liz Warren is designed to call attention to the absurdity of everything around her. The impression one gets when speaking to her is that of constant embarrassment—not for herself, or not always for herself, but more for the inane circumstances into which we have managed to stumble. Look around you, she seems to say with her eyes. Can you believe this? Don’t think I had anything to do with it.

  Her teachers respond to this in one of two ways. They either shrink from her, calling her arrogant and lamenting the fact that she is among the top students at the school (“And she certainly knows it!”), or they find her self-consciousness intriguing, believing that embarrassment is a sign of intelligence, since only fools are honestly comfortable with themselves. The latter reaction can be found more frequently in her male teachers, who like to believe that their conversations with her are enriched by the subtext of her crush on them—a subtext that they further believe she is playing like a coy game of chess. Clever thing!

  But the fact is that, with the exception of Mr. Hughes, who sometimes looks at her hard and makes her chest feel warm, Liz Warren rarely thinks about her teachers in intimate terms. Even when Mr. Binhammer approached her in the hall earlier that day with a rather personal remark, she thought that he must be criticizing her work.

  “I met—Mr. Hughes and I met someone in Atlantic City who reminded me of you.”

  He was reticent—more like a high school boy than
a grown man—and almost apologetic, as though he were waving a white flag in truce. But she could not figure out what battle he could possibly be conceding, so she determined that he must be feeling guilty and trying to criticize her without hurting her feelings.

  “Was she a bad writer?”

  “No, no. She was a photographer.”

  “A bad photographer?”

  This is Liz Warren. And now she sits hunched over on a chair with a script on her knees, biting her nails and watching her two actors sweat under the stage lights. It’s only two days after her date with Jeremy Notion, and now he is up there with Dixie Doyle licking his lips nervously because he knows what’s coming next.

  “There’s the whistle,” Dixie says. “Get on the train, Ivan.”

  “Come with me, Clarissa.”

  “No.”

  “Will you be here when I come back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We got along. For a while.”

  “Did we?”

  “You couldn’t stand to be without me.”

  “And now you’re the last person in the world I want to be with.”

  “Look around you, you pretty little fool. I am the last person in the world.”

  Dixie stops and unrolls the script to examine it.

  “Now what?” she says, looking into the back of the auditorium and shading her eyes with one saluting hand.

  “Read the script,” Liz says from the darkness. “Now you kiss him.”

  “We don’t have to rehearse that,” Dixie says with a superior glance at Jeremy. “We know how to kiss.”

  “This is a certain kind of kiss,” Liz asserts.

  “All kisses are the same,” Dixie says knowingly. “But whatever you say. You’re the boss. If you want me to kiss your—” She cuts herself short and waves it off.

  Liz is thankful for her discretion—her whole body would have cringed, shrunk up like a tightened fist, if Dixie had used the word “boyfriend.” In truth, she is unbothered by the idea of Dixie kissing the boy that she herself has kissed. Instead of jealousy, she feels something like malevolent curiosity. The two of them forced to kiss each other at her command—the idea is almost delightful to her.

  So they reread the scene. Jeremy says, “I am the last person in the world,” and Dixie leans over and kisses him sardonically.

  “No,” Liz says. “You like him, but you don’t like him. That kind of kiss. Try it again.”

  They reread the scene.

  “I am the last person in the world.”

  She kisses him, sneeringly.

  “Try not to sneer. And don’t roll your eyes. You’re not just irritated by him. You hate him—and you love him.”

  They do the scene again and again. Sometimes, during the kiss, they can hear the groaning of some machinery behind the walls of the school.

  “I am the last person in the world.”

  She kisses him, aggressively this time, like she’s trying to beat him up with her mouth. He touches his lips after, as though they are tender and bruised.

  “No. Too rough. The hate is good, but you lost the love. Think about this—think about being exhausted. You love him and you hate him, but you’re too exhausted to tell the difference. Exhausted.”

  She herself feels exhausted and taut as she says this, perched on the edge of her seat. Now she stands and begins to walk slowly toward the stage.

  By this point Dixie has lost all her humor and simply looks embarrassed and ravaged. She and Jeremy don’t look at each other at all, and she chews on her lower lip when they’re not acting.

  They do it again and again. They do it until Liz is standing at the edge of the stage, leaning over it—until there is no acting left in the two actors.

  Once more: “I am the last person in the world.” They are the last people in the world. And this time the kiss is different. It has a quality. There is something in it that makes all three stop dead. For a few seconds the only sound is fatigued breathing and the low rumbling in the school walls.

  “That’s it,” Liz says finally, and all at once everything hits her—a lead ball dropping in her chest. What she sees in Dixie Doyle is everything she has put there, the authenticity, the exhaustion, the girlishness; the simple, unaffected loneliness; the honest, brutal truth of everything, the blinding horrible truth—everything that she herself has collected in a little tin box inside her own aching chest. “That’s it.”

  She feels like crying, but she won’t let herself. Instead she says:

  “Do it again.”

  “Again?”

  “Again. Just the kiss.”

  They kiss.

  “Do it again.”

  They kiss again.

  “Again!”

  At this moment, opposite the auditorium where Dixie Doyle and Jeremy Notion are kissing by order of Liz Warren, Mr. Doran, the chemistry teacher, opens the heavy wooden doors and enters the quiet marbled lobby of the Carmine-Casey School for Girls.

  Everyone knows Mr. Doran, the chemistry teacher who speaks very quietly like a mouse and has front teeth like a mouse and wears round glasses that make his eyes look like a mouse’s eyes. He scuttles around the chemistry lab and is associated in the girls’ minds with the tap-tapping of a rack of test tubes being carried about. Also known to the girls is the fact that Mr. Doran’s wife spends many weekends away on business trips, which they firmly believe are really an alibi for an affair she is having with another man. This makes the girls feel protective of Mr. Doran because they like him, even though you can’t really talk to him about anything but the way sodium will explode if you add water to it.

  As it turns out, his wife is currently out of town for four days, and tonight Mr. Doran, who lives in Westchester, has stayed in the city after school to see a foreign movie that he once saw long ago in college. Coming out of the theater, he remembers the first time he saw it, the vibrant tautness of his life back then—the thundering forward motion of things, like a train on a track that can go as fast as it wants because there’s only one direction to go: the inevitable and always receding horizon. He thinks about this and wrinkles his mousy little nose. It is only then that he realizes he has left his briefcase at school and, looking at his watch and thinking about the empty house awaiting him, determines that it’s not too late to go fetch it.

  Back at Carmine-Casey, he greets the security guard in the lobby and takes the elevator to the lonely lab on the third floor. The girls tell him it smells like chemicals, but he must be used to it because the room doesn’t smell any particular way to him.

  It is on his way out that he hears the voices coming from the auditorium around the corner. He looks around and readjusts his round spectacles, and then opens the door a crack to discover Liz Warren, a student of his from last year, standing at the foot of the stage and calling out loudly to Dixie Doyle and some boy who are kissing each other repeatedly.

  “Again! Again! Kiss her again! Again!”

  Mr. Doran lets the door shut quietly and stands looking at the wood grain, thinking about what he’s just seen. He thinks about it while sitting in the back of the taxi that takes him to the train station, and he thinks about it during his forty-five-minute train ride. And he thinks about it some more as he gets into his car, parked in the commuter lot, and makes the slow but short drive, coming to a full stop at all the stop signs, back to his home, where he has to grope down the hallway to find the light switch and where he stands at one end of the living room listening to the sound of the ticking clock with its big brassy chime—the only thing to listen to in the empty house.

  He gets a glass of water from the kitchen sink and notices that it’s leaking again. The house leaks. It leaks water from the taps, air from the windows, sound from the walls. He wishes he knew how to stop them.

  Unlocking the kitchen back door, he takes his water out to the little worn deck and looks at the suburban rooftops over the fence that circles his backyard. Sweeping some of the snow off the edge of the deck with his foot
, he shivers—but he likes the look of his breath against the crisp dark night.

  He and his wife have lived in this house for seventeen years. She is not having an affair with another man. She is a very successful financial consultant.

  He thinks about youth and its rhapsodic tenacity—like an animal with a locking jaw that winds its way around your heart and squeezes. A persistent and beautiful parasite. Those girls he saw tonight, they come from a different place. They remind him of something, and he wants to try to nail it down in memory.

  Fairy-tale little girls in blue puffy dresses…young streetwise girls with eyes like hard rubber beads. Biting their nails and rubbing their palms on the knees of their jeans. The teenage boys who bumble around and knock things over and push each other into walls. The noise of the young—the great lost roaring ardor of the young.

  They burn. He thinks about them burning like embers in the still houses around him, behind the masonry walls within their own hot little wildernesses of plastic confusion—their posters and their poetry and all their hidden things.

  chapter 24

  She remembers him the way he used to be, the way he is still sometimes when the mood takes him, when the wind blows just right and his eyes begin to dance like the curtains that blow inward weightlessly. Those bright amazing moments. She can remember them.

  The crush of fabric against her skin when they were leaning over the edge of a ferry railing and he took her arm. Sitting on the hard bench in the airport and finding him in the crowd coming through the gate, the way he actually picked her up and she thought for a second that his being gone might have been worth it—might have been worth it for this moment. The sounds of his waking in the morning, an hour after she had gotten up to work in her office, the bedroom door opening and the creak of the wood floor beneath his feet, the yawn and the sniffle and the sleepy grunt when she called out good morning.

  And not just before they were married. For a long time afterward too. Until the conference, her indiscretion with the man who had the impossible name. That changed things. Just a little, like a picture hung crooked—the skew unnoticeable at first glance but now she can’t stop looking at it, dismayed by her inability to tap everything back into alignment.