Hummingbirds

by Joshua Gaylor

  It was the way he looked at her sometimes in those years before. His gaze would fall on her with sudden intensity like a private wink that made it the two of them against everyone else. He was the kind of man—she knew them—who put on a show for anyone who might be watching. His performance for the world, and sometimes his world was only her. All of this in a little room with dingy walls, just the two of them, he talking his magic talk and she holding her feet and rocking back with delight.

  He would be sitting up on the bed, leaning his back against the wall, and he would say, “Tell me a joke.”

  And she, “I don’t know any.”

  “Come on. Everybody knows at least one joke.”

  “I don’t. Besides, I’m a bad joke teller.”

  “Why are you holding out on me? I know you’ve got one.”

  “Okay, but it’s really not funny.”

  “That’s all right. I laugh at everything. It’s a policy.”

  Then she would tell her only joke. He would watch her hands as she did it. He always said that her hands got to places twenty minutes before the rest of her.

  Then his stare. “You’re right,” he would say. “That’s a terrible joke.”

  “I told you.”

  “You shouldn’t tell jokes.”

  “I told you.”

  “Really. I’m being serious now. Don’t let me talk you into it again.”

  And then she would clobber him and he would laugh, deflecting her blows the way he would shoo away gnats. There was nothing that could take that smile off his face.

  When he got the job at Carmine-Casey, he was nervous. He couldn’t sleep the night before school started, and she remembers having never seen him that way before. But she knew he would do well. He was a man who adored women, and those girls would feel that, feel it in their armpits and behind their knees the way she herself had, feeling it in the very levers of her body. It was the perfect job for him. She liked to think of him—still does like to think of him—surrounded by all those little girls with their glistening eyes and their fluttering voices, dashing in circles around him, their hearts like tiny engines keeping them moving in quick blurs lighter than air. There they are, when she occasionally meets up with him after school, a blushing chaos of feathery girlhood around him.

  “Is that your wife, Mr. Binhammer? Is that your wife?”

  Like hummingbirds, he once said. Well, then, she thought, so am I a hummingbird—older and slower and more skeptical, but my little engine of a heart the same as a girl’s, uncontrollable, easily won by men with funny names and magic speeches who touch my fingers or smile in just that way that separates me from everyone else in the world.

  That’s what she remembers.

  And now, as she folds her clothes into neat squares and layers them into her suitcase, she thinks, This is what it would look like if I were leaving for good. These same gestures, the same clothes, the same suitcase, the same sound of the refrigerator humming from the kitchen. But she’s not leaving for good. She’s only packing for another weekend conference, this one in Milwaukee.

  And yet she would almost rather be leaving one last time than have to endure another of those awkward farewells, the two of them standing in the hallway, she with her coat on, her scarf wrapped tight around her neck like a noose, both of them saying things and meaning something else.

  “Be careful,” he says, but what he means is, Promise me you’ll be good.

  “Don’t worry, I will,” she says, meaning, I promise. I promise.

  Because he’s too good to say anything. Too generous to say it in words. And she wants desperately to hear him talk about it, to hear his opinions, to hear his incantatory words cut through the situation like sudden sunlight—but she also understands that her desire is selfish. She is not in a position to ask for things.

  Because what is even worse—what is almost too unbearable to think about—is that maybe he means something else entirely. He says, “Be careful, huh? Take care of yourself,” and she suspects sometimes that what he means is, Find what you want. Even if it’s not me. Find what you want, because I don’t like to see you unhappy.

  And that possibility, the weight of it hanging like chains around her lungs, is too much to think about. She will never leave him. She will stay with him no matter what. He is a lovely cracked thing. She cannot leave him.

  It surprises her, when she thinks about it, just how binding a thing damage is. Bones mending rough and calcified—or scarred skin, thick and knotted. Yes, they are sewn up together in the scars of their marriage.

  She takes a deep breath and looks around her as if surprised by her surroundings. She realizes she’s been standing in front of the suitcase for many minutes now, clutching a black sweater against her chest. She shakes her head and makes a mental list of all the things she needs to take with her to Milwaukee.

  Later, after the good-bye in the hallway, when he seems different—distracted and even a little sweet—she’s in line at airport security and watching a young couple say good-bye to each other. She has become a great connoisseur of good-byes. An expert witness available for depositions on the flavor and bouquet of good-byes.

  The young man adores the woman, that much is clear. But she is holding back a little—a tinge of playfulness masking distance. He believes it’s because she’s embarrassed by the public display of affection, but he’s wrong. She is thinking about something else, waiting to be alone finally so that she can shut her eyes and shift things around in her head to where they make sense again. That’s what the young woman wants. Quiet and darkness. For once.

  After the plane takes off and she feels herself pressed into the seat like a flower in a book, she thinks about the young woman and decides to close her eyes herself and look at what shapes might form on the inside of her brain. But she can’t get the shapes to hold and gazes instead out the window, where the city lights are beginning to be obscured by clouds. Pretty soon there is nothing to see because the deep black of the night becomes reflective as obsidian. She squints her eyes and tries to see stars, but no matter how she moves her head or how close she brings her nose to the pane, all she can see is herself.

  chapter 25

  It is a bitter cold Friday night the second week in December, right before the Carmine-Casey School for Girls lets out for Christmas, when Ted Hughes and Sibyl Lockhart can be found (if, in fact, anyone were looking for them) ducking into a small dark restaurant fifteen blocks south of the school. The restaurant is long and narrow with an exposed brick wall on one side and large murals on the other depicting the canals and row houses of some small Eastern European village. They have come directly from school, and because they are the only patrons so early in the evening—it is just dark outside—their waiter spends most of his time gazing at them from the back of the restaurant.

  “I was a waitress once,” Sibyl says. “I wasn’t any good at it. I have no balance.”

  This is the fourth time they have seen each other outside of school like this, Ted Hughes leaning across the table toward her, she wondering if this is what it is like to be the object of his distraction rather than the passive audience of it. Is this what it is like to be looked at by the eyes that go everywhere?

  They talk about things from the past to create a surrogate history to anchor themselves in this place, in this restaurant, with that waiter standing in the back, watching them. She tells him about Bruce, her ex-husband, about how nice he seemed at first when she was still a waitress and he would be waiting for her outside when she finished her shift because he was too poor to eat at the restaurant where she worked.

  “And then I married him,” she says.

  Ted Hughes nods.

  “Don’t you want to know why?” she asks.

  “Why you married him?”

  “Most people ask. If you’re separated and you talk about your ex, most people ask why you got together in the first place. Like it was obviously destined to fail from the beginning.”

  “Oh.” />
  “Anyway, I’m going to tell you why I married him. Do you want to know why? It’s because he told me I wasn’t a very good waitress. Nobody else told me that. He just said it like it was a fact, the same way he would say that this tablecloth needs ironing. And I knew it was true, and I liked that he said it because it made me think I could trust him. I thought it meant that he was honest.”

  “And was he?”

  “Mostly. It wasn’t dishonesty that split us up.”

  “What was it?”

  “Other things.”

  Ted Hughes nods and waits. Instead of continuing, she grabs her purse from under the table and begins to dig through it. She brings up handfuls of things—little jeweled pill cases, plastic tubes with writing on the sides, slips of paper that look like receipts, single earrings that have lost their mates—until she finds what she is looking for, a pink cylinder of lipstick and a pocket mirror that she unfolds in front of him. She twists up the lipstick and uses her pinkie to pick off a bit of lint stuck to the end, then dashes it in quick strokes across her lips. She glances up from the mirror and says, “You don’t mind, do you?”

  He seems enthralled by the process, just the hint of a smile on his lips. “You know what’s good about you?” he responds. “You know those backstage musicals they used to make? The ones where you see everything happening behind the scenes and you never see the performance itself? That’s what you’re like. You’re all behind the scenes. Between the acts.”

  “Is that good?”

  “Of course it’s good. Couldn’t be better. Every man wants to know what goes on backstage. The best thing about the show is thinking about what’s going on in the wings. It’s magic.”

  She drops her lipstick and mirror back in her bag along with the other items and lets it fall to the floor with a glassy thud. “Sure,” she says, wryly. “But then, once you see it, the magic’s gone. You want to know a secret? Women aren’t supposed to run out of surprises too quickly.”

  He laughs. “Then I’ll tell you another secret. Men aren’t too smart. They’re easy to surprise, even if they’ve seen the same trick a hundred times.”

  The two sit there, looking at each other out of the corners of their eyes—as though tugging playfully at opposite ends of an invisible cat’s cradle strung between them.

  “So why,” he says, “did you and your husband split up?”

  “Oh, that.” She shoos away the topic. “It’s not even tragic. It’s just dull. You know those men who live their whole lives as though they think someone is making a documentary about them? Those men, when they realize it’s not a movie anyone would pay good money to see…well…”

  When it becomes clear that she doesn’t want to talk about her ex-husband anymore, he begins to tell her about how in his college days he once met a man on a train between New York and Chicago, a man who seemed to take an almost paternal interest in him and asked him all about the classes he was taking, the literature he was reading.

  “T. S. Eliot!” the man commented reverently. “Ha!” Whenever Ted Hughes mentioned an author he recognized, the man would say “Ha!” as though it were an old friend and he was pleased by the sudden reacquaintance.

  “John Donne. Ha!”

  He was a salesman—sold industrial planers—but he remembered his school days, how reading was his favorite subject and how he had a picture in his head of how each of the authors looked. In his mind Jonathan Swift was tall and thin and nimble, and Tennyson was a big round man like Santa Claus. Jane Austen was a proper lady, like the old southern woman who lived down the street from him when he was growing up.

  And then he talked about how he always hoped his two sons would go to college and read books and get together with other people to talk about those books. But they didn’t seem to take to literature and didn’t make very good marks in high school, so college wasn’t really in the cards for them. But they were good boys, and they knew to do the right things in life. And he was just happy he had done well enough in the selling game to help them out with buying their houses and having their kids—and that maybe he could use his money to send some of his grandchildren to college some day.

  “Let me ask you a question,” he said then to Ted Hughes. “Your father. Was he a—was he an educated man?”

  No. In fact, Ted Hughes’s father had dropped out of high school to work as a grocery clerk.

  “And you did it anyway!” the man said, laughing warmly to himself and shaking his head. “You went to college anyway. You made good, kid. You made good.”

  Then the man was quiet for a while, looking at the window, smiling and shaking his head every now and then. When they were five minutes from Chicago he turned to Ted Hughes and explained that he was a betting man and that he would bet him a hundred dollars, cash on the nail, that he, Ted Hughes, couldn’t name ten Shakespeare plays.

  A hundred dollars was a lot of money, but Ted Hughes knew that he could easily win and began to recite the names.

  “King Lear. Macbeth. Romeo and Juliet. Hamlet. Julius Caesar…”

  After the name of each play, the man would nod and his eyes would glisten fondly as though he were a child listening to his favorite bedtime story for the hundredth time.

  “The Merchant of Venice. Titus Andronicus. A Winter’s Tale…”

  Until he had named ten.

  “And I bet you could keep going, too, couldn’t you?” the man said, seeming pleased. Then he took his wallet from his jacket pocket and counted five twenties into Ted Hughes’s hand. “Well earned, my boy.”

  When they got off the train, they got separated in the crowd, and when Ted Hughes saw the man again he was twenty yards down the platform. The man nodded his head and waved, and that was the last he ever saw of him.

  “He wanted you to have that money,” Sibyl says, looking into the candle between them. “He wanted to give you the money.”

  Ted Hughes nods. More people have come into the restaurant by now, and there is a lot of movement around them. Outside the streets are lit up by the dingy glow of streetlights reflecting off the dirty snow in the gutters.

  “Tell me another story,” Sibyl says. “I just like the way you talk.”

  After dinner, they walk a winding route through the streets of the city until they end up at Sibyl’s apartment.

  “I’m a mess,” she says, standing one step above him on the stoop so that their eyes are at the same level. “I’m a divorcée with a penchant for men who dislike women. Just to warn you.”

  “You know,” he says, drawing her hair out of her eyes with a finger, as if pulling aside a curtain, “you’re the second woman this month to tell me I don’t like women.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “I know what you didn’t mean.”

  And then, upstairs, she flutters nervously about the apartment plucking dead leaves from her plants. She’s not sure what to do, how to behave. She excuses herself and goes into the bathroom and looks at herself in the mirror, reapplying her lipstick and fixing her hair. “A mess,” she says in a whisper to herself. “I’m a mess.” When she comes out of the bathroom, there he is sitting on the couch, smiling thoughtfully at her as though she were a semi-interesting piece of art hanging on the wall of a museum. Not a masterpiece, mind you—just something to fill out an exhibition.

  “I like your apartment,” he says. “I like the plants.”

  She can’t help it, she begins walking around nervously again. She moves back and forth from kitchen to living room to bedroom, back and forth, until he stops her—putting an arm out in front of her as she passes by and taking her, hands on her hips, and shifting her body to face him where he’s sitting at the edge of the couch. He looks up at her for a second, not saying anything. And he draws her down to him….

  Then they are lying together in the dark of the bedroom—a city kind of dark, which is never really that dark. There is incandescence everywhere in the streets. It seeps in through the cracks—it creeps in under the door and between t
he blinds.

  She is lying on her side, looking at his face in profile. He is lying on his back with his arms crossed behind his head. He’s concentrating on the ceiling, as though he were trying to read it. The secret language of ceilings, the messages they give. If anyone could comprehend their fractured poetry, he could.

  “I’m thirsty,” she says. “Do you want a glass of water?”

  “Sure.”

  She gets out of the bed and crosses the room—conscious of her body, pale and ghostly in the shadows of the dim, stale apartment. She returns, and he hasn’t moved. Putting a glass next to him on the bedside table, she goes around to the other side and climbs back into the bed—sitting up and leaning her back against the wall. Then she looks down and is unhappy with the way her breasts and stomach look, so she draws the sheet up over herself.

  Next to her, Ted Hughes turns over and raises himself onto his elbows.

  “What do you think Leo would say if he knew?” she says.

  “Binhammer?” He smiles into the darkness as though picturing the scene. “You know what one of my students told me yesterday? She said that he has an unofficial fan club—this group of girls who go around calling each other Mrs. Binhammer.”

  “No!”

  “Can you picture it? For some reason I imagine them having tea. ‘Pass the sugar, would you, Mrs. Binhammer?’ ‘Of course, Mrs. Binhammer.’ ‘Lovely day, isn’t it, Mrs. Binhammer?’ ‘No doubt about it, Mrs. Binhammer.’”

  “Did you tell him?” She giggles. “He would be in raptures.”

  “Not yet. I’m going to.”

  “They adore him.”

  “They sure do.”

  “Those girls just adore him.”

  He nods. He rubs his face in his hands. Then they look at each other, and their smiles fade—the talk of Binhammer having made them feel suddenly self-conscious, as though he were the ghost in the machine of their interaction.