Hummingbirds

by Joshua Gaylor

  “I have to go,” he says. “Unless you think—”

  “No,” she says, nodding her head. “It’s okay.”

  She watches him dress, and then she gets up and puts on a shirt. When she flips the light switch, they both close their eyes against the sudden light. The mundanities of the bright world come tumbling back. They are now like two colleagues again, and she wants to ask him if he’s finished writing his semester final yet, but she reconsiders.

  “Oh god,” she says, looking at herself in the mirror above her dresser. I’m a mess, she thinks, but she doesn’t say it because she’s already said it out loud too many times tonight.

  In the hallway, as he’s putting on his scarf by the door while she leans against the wall, he chuckles and says, “You know something? For a while I got the impression that Binhammer didn’t like me. The first few weeks I was here. He would give me these looks like I was trespassing on his territory.”

  She smiles. “You were. You are.”

  “But I’m no threat at all. Those girls—you’ve seen them—they would die for him. They’re loyal as Nazis. Little love Nazis.”

  She shrugs. “Well, maybe it’s just that you’re a man. He always says he doesn’t know how to get along with other men.”

  He nods thoughtfully. “Yeah,” he says. “I can see that. I’m like that too.”

  And that’s when she finds herself laughing.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing. I just like the way you talk. Nothing you say ever seems quite true—but I believe it anyway.”

  chapter 26

  Once Ted Hughes is gone, Sibyl turns to face her empty apartment. Nothing moves in the place unless she moves it. She imagines it sitting silent as a grave while she’s gone all day at school. Still leaning against the wall, she closes her eyes and listens to the rumble of the refrigerator, the hissing of the radiator, the muffled voice of a television coming through the wall from next door. Down the hall she hears a door open and then close again. Two voices descend the stairwell, laughing. She imagines the apartment those two voices have left behind. It would look like her apartment, except without her in it.

  She looks at the clock. It’s just after midnight. Suddenly decisive, she gets dressed again and reapplies her makeup in the bathroom.

  Shutting off all the lights, she locks the apartment door behind her and takes the stairs down to the street, where she hails a cab and gives the driver an address. Ten minutes later, she’s knocking at the door of an apartment.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s me, open the door.”

  The door opens, and Binhammer is standing there in his underwear.

  “What are you—”

  “I know Sarah’s out of town. I wouldn’t have come otherwise.” She pushes her way past him into the apartment, and he closes the door behind her.

  He puts a hand through his hair. “But that doesn’t mean—”

  “We have to talk.”

  “Listen, I don’t think…I don’t know if it’s a good idea for you to—”

  They are standing in the dimly lit hallway. The only light in the apartment is coming from the bedroom.

  “Were you sleeping?” she says, as though that were the only indiscretion of note.

  “Not yet.”

  “It’s stuffy. You need to open a window.”

  “What?”

  “A window. Aren’t you choking in here?”

  “No, I don’t know what you’re—”

  She goes across the living room to the window and pulls it up a few inches. She takes a deep breath of the icy city night outside and turns to face him again. He turns on some lights, and the glass of the window becomes a mirror.

  “It’s like this whenever she goes out of town,” she says. “You don’t know how to take care of yourself.”

  “I was in bed. I—”

  She shakes her head. “Oh, listen, I don’t care about any of this. I just came to tell you something.”

  “What is it?”

  At first she doesn’t say anything. Then she says:

  “I’m getting to like your friend Ted Hughes. I’m getting to like him a lot.”

  Binhammer takes a few steps back until he hits the couch, and then he sits down hard.

  “That bothers you, I know it does. But you’re not the hero of every story, you know. Sometimes you’re just a minor character in someone else’s story. Jesus, you men are like dandelions. One puff of air, and you’re blown all to pieces. Anyway, I just thought I should tell you.”

  He takes a deep breath and looks straight ahead—right past her to something in the dark beyond.

  “Hey, listen.” She goes over to him, more sympathetic now, and stands before him. She takes his head between her hands and makes him look at her. “It has nothing to do with you. I mean, it’s not something you should feel bad about.”

  He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t look angry. He just looks gone.

  Her previous strength is diminishing. She feels herself shriveling up.

  “Look,” she says. “I don’t know what to do. What do you want me to do? Continue my campaign to make you unfaithful to your wife? It’s over. You won. I’m vanquished.”

  “It’s your choice,” he says finally. Even his voice isn’t angry. Is it that she does not possess the power to affect him?

  “What do you mean? What’s my choice? What choice?”

  “I mean—” He squeezes his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “I just mean do what you want. It’s up to you.”

  She sits down, not on the couch but on the floor in front of him. Now she is looking up at him and he seems powerless, which makes her feel powerless too for some reason.

  “It’s up to you,” he says again.

  “What if I don’t want it to be up to me? What then?”

  “But it is. It’s up to you.”

  “Wait, wait. Just a second. Just stop for a second. I don’t know—the thing is…”

  She gets up on her knees in front of where he’s sitting, now looking levelly at him. But his face is like a deep black well—there’s no expression, and it’s hard to focus on. Her first impulse, in a panic now, is to kiss away the remoteness, and she leans forward to do it, but his lips are immobile and his eyes have all the paralysis of a face on a coin.

  After she pulls away, he says, “Goddamnit.” He says it low and quiet, somewhere between helpless and cruel. “Goddamnit. He gets everything he wants. He got you too.”

  She stands up again, folding her arms. Her fist clenches inadvertently. She would like to knock something out of him.

  “For Christ’s sake, Binhammer. Do you even notice when there’s someone else in the room? I hope you’re not like this with your wife.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I mean, do I have to spend all my time listening to him talk about you and then come over here and listen to you talking about him?”

  He looks at her, mystified. She has made him see her, at least. For the moment. Then, not wanting to look backward for fear of seeing them clearly, she wonders what lines she has crossed.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to…What do you want me to do?” she says.

  “Nothing,” he says. “I don’t want you to do anything.”

  The hall light is on, and one small lamp by the couch. The brutality of the moment strains like the glare of the sun when you come outside for the first time. It is two thirty in the morning.

  “To hell with you then,” she says, moving toward the door. “To hell with you.”

  “You were the one who did this. You were the one who came here.”

  “I didn’t start anything. I don’t know how to start things. It was your wife. Your picture-perfect wife with her picture-perfect affair. I’m taking up smoking again.”

  He doesn’t say anything. He looks at her, silently raging. She is trying to unlock the door, but she doesn’t know which deadbolts are engaged or which way to turn them.


  “Your wife—the tragic heroine in a fucking Russian novel.”

  “Get out,” his voice quivers. “Get out now. I don’t want you here.”

  “Your wife with her outré affairs and her tragic martyrdom. I need a cigarette.”

  “Go.” His face is pinched and red, and he puts the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Please.”

  “Your wife.” She turns the deadbolt knobs and pulls at the door, but it won’t budge. “What the hell is the combination to this thing?”

  The door finally comes open, throwing her a little off balance. She braces herself against a table in the hall, toppling a stack of books to the floor. Now she’s on the threshold of something, even if it’s just the space outside the apartment, quiet carpeted halls with their humming fluorescents, the lines of doorways just like this one—indistinguishable stacked cubicles of hope and lethargy. Each one its own little inferno of sleeplessness. Things brimming over the tops of other things. Bubbling up.

  “Don’t talk about her,” he says. Measured now—he has regained himself. Though his arms are held out in a pose of paralysis, itching to move, to act, but without vector or purpose. “You don’t talk about her. What has she got to do with this?”

  “No, of course. I wouldn’t want to sully her. Let’s not bring her down into the dirt with the rest of us. And how about this—whenever you feel pissed off at her, why don’t you just be pissed off with me instead.”

  “You don’t—” He flinches.

  “If we work together on this, I think we can keep her out of the muck. What do you say?”

  She waits for him to say something, but he refuses to look at her. The way he’s standing there, poised—the whole scene looks like a drama in a cheap hotel.

  “Jesus,” she says finally. “You’re just looking for someone to be mad at.”

  She turns and walks through the door. Out in the hall, she is three paces toward the steps when he appears in the doorway behind her.

  “And what are you looking for, huh?” This is what he says. “What is it exactly that you are looking for?” She can still hear him as she walks away. “What are you looking for?”

  Out in the street the cold air feels nice against her skin. She looks at her watch; it’s almost three in the morning. The city lies dormant—a cab rattles by and slows down to see if she wants a ride. She shakes her head and it moves away, its taillights making the hardened drifts of snow on the sidewalks glow red. These are the insomniac hours of night. If she were in the backseat of that cab, she would hear the rattling of the car, the groan of the artificial leather seat under her, the driver sucking his teeth, and nothing else. An oasis of sound in a desert of wintry billowing steam from under the streets.

  She turns a corner and goes into a twenty-four-hour bodega. A man behind the counter is watching a small black-and-white television showing a sitcom that was canceled ten years ago.

  “Yes,” he says. “What does the lady want?”

  “Cigarettes,” she says, pulling some bills from her coat pocket. “Marlboro 100s, Ultra-Light.”

  “Yes. Cigarettes for the lady.” He pushes a box of cigarettes across the counter. “Matches?”

  “Yes, matches.”

  Outside there is no wind, so she stands on the sidewalk and lights her cigarette and watches the match burn down almost to her fingers before she shakes it out and walks to the corner to put it in a trash bin.

  The smoke curls into her lungs along with a bracing jolt of raw icy air. It has been seven years since she gave up smoking. She smokes that one down to nothing where she stands and presses it out against the rim of the trash bin. Then she lights another one and begins to walk west along the deserted streets. She walks until she gets to the edge of Central Park and then keeps on going.

  The park isn’t a place she should be at night—the sprawling emptiness of shadows and corners and echoes. People are mugged in the park all the time. People are killed. Reckless people, like the ones who have just taken up smoking again after seven years.

  She follows the winding paths in no particular direction. She has gotten lost in the park before—getting turned around and trying to use the tips of the buildings above the trees as a compass. Now she just walks.

  She passes a young couple, walking arm in arm, looking as they would if it were the middle of the day and children were running and playing all around them. A few minutes later she sees a group of teenagers at a distance. Boys and girls, the age of her students. Their voices, crude and unselfconscious, make her feel voyeuristic. They hoot shrilly and laugh, the timbre of their cries modulating from the guttural and animalistic to the poetic and almost musical. Like infants discovering the power of their own throats. Always loud. Always loud. They disappear in the opposite direction.

  She wonders if she can walk until dawn, until the faint glow of morning rises in the city. And now she pictures the city as a hot coal, an ember on an empty beach, its burning glow tinting the night around it with a smoky orange.

  “Shit,” a voice says, startling her. “Look at this.” The path is narrow, and three young men suddenly appear before her, presenting a wall of oversize coats and yellow eyes. The one who spoke has a toothpick dangling from his lip. He shakes his head at the other two. They are looking up and down her body.

  This is it, she thinks. This is it for me. Everything is over. The end of the whole show.

  She’s watching this as though it were a play being acted out on a stage before her, as if the only thing she has to do is just wait for the curtain to drop so she can stop thinking about it all.

  “Woman, what do you think you’re doing?”

  She doesn’t know whether he wants her to answer or not.

  “Do you know what time it is? This is a bad fucking place to be at this time of night.”

  “Bad,” one of the others says.

  “A lot of mean motherfuckers around here. Rip you up.”

  He shakes his head, as if to say it’s a shame. And he looks truly regretful.

  “You know some girl got herself killed last week? Is that what you’re trying to do? You trying to get yourself killed? Huh? How come? You unhappy?”

  “Yeah,” she says quietly, looking down at her feet and the frozen path under them. “I’m unhappy.”

  When she looks back up, he is staring at her in a different way. He seems embarrassed and rolls the toothpick with his tongue to the other corner of his mouth.

  “Well, you’re lucky is all I’m saying.” His voice is softer now. “Lucky that we aren’t the bad guys. Isn’t she lucky?” He turns again to his friends, whose eyes are still focused on her breasts, her legs. “Okay, motherfuckers, cut it out. The woman don’t need you feeling her up in your nasty porn-brains.”

  He laughs apologetically. “See?” he says to her. “This is what I’m talking about.”

  She stands there. Nothing is going to happen.

  “Why don’t you go home now.”

  Nothing is going to happen.

  And here she is, still in her body, unmurdered. Another day unmurdered. It’s a funny thing to think. She wants to laugh, but it’s cold and she shivers instead.

  “Go on home now,” he says again. “You know where you’re going? You want us to walk you? I promise I can keep these motherfuckers in line.”

  “No,” she says. “No thank you.”

  “Okay, lady. You take it easy now, all right? Don’t be doing this anymore. You just stay at home if you feel bad. Okay?”

  Nothing is going to happen. There is no danger in the world except from the brightly lit bedrooms of charming men.

  chapter 27

  It is said now among the girls of Carmine-Casey that Ms. Lockhart, the English teacher who always seemed to resent her students for not being boys, is not long for this job. Her divorce has wrecked her, they say. She has turned into an unhappy old spinster. And strange. In the past few days she has been seen by the senior girls (the ones who have permission to leave the building du
ring their free periods) standing outside smoking cigarettes, one after another.

  And when one of the girls inquired about it, saying, “I didn’t know you smoked, Ms. Lockhart,” the woman’s response was taut and sneering: “Don’t you have anything better to do? Shoo.”

  She actually said “Shoo”—it has been confirmed.

  In addition to the sudden smoking, Ms. Lockhart has also taken to making snide and groundless remarks in class about other faculty members—mostly the men, which further supports the speculation that she is an embittered divorcée whose only option now may be to become a lesbian and live communally with other lesbian man-haters.

  On a recent day, when she overheard some of the girls talking in animated tones about Mr. Binhammer, she called across the classroom, “All I hear about is Mr. Binhammer. He must be some teacher. The great educator of his time. And when was the last time he handed back a paper to you?”

  On another occasion, the girls were reading The Great Gatsby and trying to decide, between Mr. Binhammer and Mr. Hughes, which was Jay Gatsby and which was Nick Carraway.

  “You know,” Ms. Lockhart interjected, “most critics see something deeply homoerotic in the relationship between Gatsby and Nick. Did you know that? You better reread that book.”

  She pretended not to have heard the context of the girls’ conversation, but the Higgins sisters, Sally and Patty, both of whom were there, agreed that there was something nasty in the way she said it. And after she said it there was no more fun in imagining their two teachers as Gatsby and Nick anymore—which the girls blamed and resented Ms. Lockhart for.

  “She’s become objectionable,” says Samantha Cowley, who is known for her Victorian way of speaking.

  And some of the girls now tell of a rumor that Ms. Lockhart was spotted walking by herself in the park at four in the morning. But, as a rumor, that one is quickly put aside by other buzzing inquiries that strike closer to home: What girls were in the park to see her? What were they doing there at that time of night? Were there boys involved?

  For her part, Liz Warren does not take any pleasure in the circulating gossip. She was taught by Ms. Lockhart only as a freshman and has always resented the woman’s drama-tinged personality as a subtle way to derail the class from actually learning anything. In fact, the problem seems to be common to the English teachers. If it weren’t for Mr. Hughes, Liz Warren may have left the school convinced that the entire department was narcissistic and dilettantish. But the girl’s dislike of this particular teacher goes beyond her general impatience for the department: the woman is a panderer. She panders to men. Liz has seen her in the halls flirting with the male faculty, using the same pathetic ploys that the girls use except with a shinier veneer of authenticity—and she suspects that Ms. Lockhart, who has so little patience for the girls in her class, would do anything in her power to gain the attention of a man.