Hummingbirds

by Joshua Gaylor

  The halls of the school take on a whole different quality at night. The windows that normally give students endless things to gaze at are now only rectangles of reflective black. Everything is inverted upon itself—as though blankets have been pulled up over the whole building—and the fluorescent lights in the empty halls buzz steadily with their pale, diffuse glow.

  At seven o’clock exactly the last of the girls are being escorted out of the building. They have made excuses—art projects that needed to be completed before vacation—but now, with faculty spouses arriving, the girls cannot be allowed to stay and fawn.

  As one of the faculty council members moves them slowly but steadily in the direction of the front doors with outstretched arms, these last three girls spot Mr. Binhammer leaning against the far wall and call out to him.

  “Mr. Binhammer, are you going to the party?”

  “Mr. Binhammer, is your wife coming?”

  “What is she going to wear?”

  “Does she like coming to these parties?”

  “Is she pretty?”

  And, finally, “Okay, okay, we’re going,” as they are driven forward through the doors and out onto the street.

  Binhammer is, in fact, waiting for his wife to arrive—this being the one faculty function since the beginning of the year that he has determined she can safely attend without disrupting the delicate balance of lies and elisions that he has constructed around himself.

  Earlier in the week, sitting on opposite couches in the teachers’ lounge, Ted Hughes looked over the top of his newspaper at Binhammer. For someone just coming into the room, the two of them might have looked like Greek statues positioned in opposition across a long corridor. But this is one of the things the men have grown accustomed to with each other—the mutual speculative stare just prior to a quick, machine-gunning exchange, as though the air between them is being primed for their waltzing words.

  So Ted Hughes gazed at Binhammer over the top of his newspaper, and Binhammer gazed back. Then Ted Hughes asked:

  “Are you going to the Christmas party?”

  “Probably. Why?”

  “I’m not.”

  “Because—?”

  “I’m going away.”

  “Where?”

  “Connecticut.”

  “What for?”

  “My sister’s having a party.”

  “I didn’t know you had a sister.”

  “Everybody has a sister.”

  “Fair enough.”

  They shared a hint of a smile, as though, having wandered off in different directions, they had both arrived at the same place.

  Then Binhammer, who was aware that his wife’s absence at these functions was becoming suspicious, had an idea.

  “It’s too bad. Sarah’s going to be there.”

  “Sarah your wife?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Oh, no,” he says, looking truly disappointed.

  “And she was looking forward to meeting you.”

  “She was?”

  “All she’s been saying is, ‘So I finally get to meet this Ted Hughes character.’”

  Perverse, the way he makes these situations flirt with each other—like too many kites in the air, daring them to collide. He wants to get to the bottom of it all. To figure it out. And while constantly risking the apocalyptic volatility of actual contact between Ted Hughes, Sibyl, and his wife, he believes that there is some secret, personal and profound, to be discovered somewhere in the permutations. If he gets the right combination, if he lines them up in exactly the right way—like the eerie symmetry of an eclipse—something will click into place, and the whole thing will make sense.

  Ted Hughes was silent. Then he said, “Can we go out to dinner after Christmas? Just the three of us?”

  “Sure. Absolutely. She would love it.”

  “I’m serious. It’s getting embarrassing.”

  “I’m serious too.”

  So now Binhammer waits in the lobby for his wife, who will be able to appease both his colleagues (“We missed you at the annual dinner”) and his own miserly sense of insecurity with regard to Sibyl Lockhart, who will not dare to approach them.

  When Sarah arrives, he can see her through the glass-paned doors of the lobby. Before she opens them, she puts her face up to the glass, shielding out the glare with two hands held across her brow. He is in love with her for doing that—the gesture that he interprets as wanting to be assured of his presence even before she opens the door. It is a tiny thing that makes his skin crackle. If twenty-four hours a day he could be on the other side of glass panes that she had her beautiful nose pressed up against, then everything would be okay.

  She is wearing a skirt and a blouse and has her hair tied up in some kind of complicated knot, and when they walk arm in arm into the auditorium the other teachers begin to crowd around them, telling him how beautiful a wife he has and joking that Binhammer must be secretly wealthy, otherwise why would she ever marry him.

  He looks around for Sibyl, but she hasn’t arrived yet. He takes Sarah over to the stage where they have set up a makeshift bar, and he knows to order her a gin and tonic, which he likes to do because it makes him feel like he’s married a real sophisticate. For him, just a glass of red wine.

  Then Pepper Carmichael and Lonnie Abramson sneak up on him from behind. He knows something is coming because he can read the expression in Sarah’s eyes as she gazes just past his shoulder. She looks bemused.

  “Darling, it’s been ages since we saw you,” Lonnie says to Sarah, leaning into her for a kiss on the cheek. He can see Lonnie’s big bust pressing against his wife’s chest, and he wonders how Sarah feels about that. “You must be keeping yourself busy. You’ll have to tell me all about it.”

  “Hi, Sarah,” Pepper puts in meekly.

  “But I don’t want you to worry,” Lonnie continues. “We’re all keeping an eye on the boy here. Making sure he does his work and stays out of trouble and gets enough to eat.”

  “Oh, Lonnie,” Pepper scolds, slightly embarrassed.

  “Well, okay. Honestly, though, he’s such a sweetheart to have around. Such a lovely person. I can’t even tell you. All the times that I’ve wanted to bring my husband George to school with me, just to tell him, ‘Now you just follow this man around and watch what he does and take notes because there’s going to be a quiz afterward.’ Ha ha ha. Really, though, I’ve thought about it. I really have. But George wouldn’t even come here with me tonight. He’s a stinker, isn’t he?”

  Sarah smiles politely. Binhammer tries to change the subject because he knows his wife, and he knows that, for some complicated reason he has forgotten, she interprets compliments about him from other women as aggressive.

  When Sibyl finally arrives, he catches a glimpse of her out of the corner of his eye. She stops just inside the auditorium to survey the situation. Spotting the four of them standing there, he with the three women, she pretends to make her way slowly and casually toward the bar. But then, halfway across the floor, her resolve seems to shift and she sets a dead-eye course in their direction.

  But she will not do anything. She will not say anything. She is smart. She does not have a secure enough homeland retreat to scorch the earth behind her. Also, it gives her something to admire in herself—discretion beyond the call of duty. Being the better man.

  “And here’s Sibyl,” Lonnie narrates.

  “Merry Christmas,” Sibyl says.

  “Merry Christmas,” Sarah replies with a business smile.

  For the next hour Binhammer sits back in nodding approval of the situation in which he has found himself. He hasn’t felt this satisfied in a long time. He isn’t sure what he has created here—these delicate intricacies that pull themselves taut between the various people in his life—but for the time being it, whatever it is, seems to be holding itself stable.

  He enjoys watching these women talk to each other. The way they sometimes reach out and touch each other’s forearms. The
way they stand together in a circle as though stirring up some boiling brew in a cauldron between them. And then they bring him in, linking his arms in theirs, and he is suddenly privy to the secret lives of women—the floral gaudiness of it all, the grinning insecurity, the questions of clothes and what parts of the body are showing and what parts are hidden.

  And he watches Sarah his wife, who, though she does not like to participate in the traditional girl talk, always knows the right things to say. She always antes up in any social situation, even if she folds early and rarely bets.

  He likes the way she looks tonight. Watching her interact with other people, she has a distance like a museum piece. The pointillistic painting that blurs into bright color when you stand with your nose to it but resolves into sharp focus as you take ten paces back. She looks good that way. The enchanting witchery of remoteness. Her face pressed up against the glass of the door, searching. Her small form enclosed in a covey of other women, lighting itself up for him like a little pale beacon. He studies her, the way she holds her drink with both hands, the way she forms her words with smiling surety, staking her claim firmly, sometimes like Fortinbras in Hamlet on a patch of land that nobody wants. There she waves her flag. And other people are convinced—they are—that they should have gotten there first. And she smiles on and on.

  There is no question of his love for her. Times like these there is no question. It’s in his fingers wanting to graze her hand or the back of her neck.

  He is happy. Calm. And the evening proceeds with his colleagues coming over to wish him happy holidays while he shakes hands and gazes at his wife over their shoulders.

  “Have a great holiday, Binhammer! See you in the new year!”

  It is not until almost ten o’clock, while Sarah is in the ladies’ room upstairs just prior to their good-byes, five minutes before they would have been gone, in a cab on their way back home, five minutes away from her leaning her head against his shoulder in the backseat of a taxi and the two of them making jokes about the people they’ve encountered, like spies pooling their data at the end of a mission—this is marriage, ultimately, the partnership of spies in a hostile world—not until almost ten o’clock that Binhammer looks over at the auditorium entrance and sees Ted Hughes stamping the snow from his shoes and saluting him broadly as though reuniting with an old, old friend.

  Oh no.

  “Binhammer!” he calls, coming over and taking him by the hand. “My kid sister’s had a baby. Eight pounds even. The party’s canceled. I’m an uncle. The traffic was terrible. Where’s your wife? What’s the matter with you, you don’t look so good.”

  He can feel his pulse all over his body. There is something pressing against his chest. “I have to—”

  But it’s no good. He can see her coming across the floor toward them. Both smiling, her from a distance, beautiful, perfect, coded with secret affection, and him up close, bold, mischievous, like a friendly, lonely Lucifer.

  “You have to what? Come on, where’s this Sarah I’ve been hearing so much about? I’m dying to—”

  When they see each other, there is an impetus in the situation that carries forward even though everything has stopped dead.

  His wife’s face has for a moment that worried laughing expression of someone who suddenly realizes a joke is being played but is not sure what the joke is or who is the butt of it. Then she seems to register something, and her eyes drop with anger and humiliation. She looks frantic.

  “What are you—” she stammers. “What’s going—what is this, Leo? Leo, answer me. I don’t understand.”

  They look back and forth between each other and Binhammer. Ted Hughes cannot take his eyes off her. As though their reunion were accidental and as uncomplicated as a bouquet of flowers. Then there is the confusion of the little boy who is about to be told that it was all just a performance, a test he has failed.

  “New teacher,” Binhammer mutters. “He works here.”

  And then she must see something recognizable in his downturned face, because she starts saying, “You knew? I don’t understand. You knew?”

  “What the hell…” Ted Hughes begins but falters.

  Oh god. All the things we do without thinking. Everything tumbled down in a second. What did he expect? So precarious, that house of cards. He feels sick in his gut, the wrongness of it all knotting up inside him.

  “Why, Leo?” Sarah says, her eyes gone suddenly red and wet. He did this to her. Not Hughes. He, Binhammer. He hurt his wife. “I thought this was over.”

  It is impossible for Binhammer to stay here, in the middle of this. They have to understand. It’s just impossible. He rushes out and down the hall through the lobby doors to the street and finally stops himself by holding on to the frozen wrought iron bars of the fence in front of the building.

  What did I do? he thinks. And for a while, that’s all he can think over and over as though short-circuited on that single thought. What did I do? What did I do?

  For a long time there he had the illusion that he could maintain the delicate balance forever. A master architect, constructing gorgeously intricate structures of human interaction. But now this is what it all comes to. A pathetic clunk. As much as he likes to imagine it sometimes, his story is no modern curative to the clichés of the past. He is no dramatic character to be discussed among girlvoices in classrooms. Instead he is inconsequential, like an aluminum chair being pushed over. That’s what he feels like, a little boy who, in the middle of a wedding, pushes a chair over—which makes a noise just loud enough for people to stop dancing and turn their heads to find him standing there, sullen. Why would the boy do such a thing? What is it that he wants?

  Yes, it’s true, on some level this is what he has been waiting for: his grand moment of perfect justice. And the moment is not dramatic at all—it’s just small and petty and childish. What has he accomplished? Nothing has changed. All he has done is hurt them.

  It is a quiet night. A cab rolls by and slows to see if he wants a ride, but when he doesn’t respond it continues on looking for a fare. Farther down the street there is a plastic bag caught on a low gate, billowing full with wind and then settling and then billowing full again. Like breathing. Sometimes, even in the middle of the city, there is no one around and everything is quite clear.

  After a while he goes back in but can’t find them anywhere in the auditorium. Then he discovers Ted Hughes sitting on the stairs outside in the hall. He doesn’t look angry, just confused.

  “Where did she go?” Binhammer asks.

  “Binhammer, why did you do it?”

  “I don’t know. There are things…I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. It’s not something to talk about.”

  Ted Hughes tries to look at him, but his eyes keep slipping away sideways.

  “Where is she?” Binhammer asks.

  “I think she went out back,” he says, pointing to the courtyard where the sugar maple is rearing up against the night with its strings of icy lights.

  He finds her out there, hugging herself against the cold, looking up into the leafless branches of the tree. The lights reflect back in her moist eyes.

  He would like to say something to her—would like to do something for her. Pull in the raw, exposed night, glistening like a fresh wound. Pull it in and fold it up like a blanket and set it down on the frozen grass for her to sit on. The breath coming from between her lips condenses in weak puffs that dissipate almost instantly. He would like to break all the windows and take the shards of glass and use them against the night to make mirrors to reflect her from a thousand different angles at once. Surround her with the shimmering mosaic of herself. Or rip through the fabric of the moment and join by force the past and the future, a muscleman linking together two hook-ended chains that hold the weight of memory and anticipation. And stand proud, arms akimbo, before the taut shackle for her to see. The rend in the night would look like the lights on the tree, radiance with torn edges.

  He would like to do these things. />
  And he would like to say other things. Say he’s sorry perhaps. Or that he didn’t mean it. And that what he really meant was…Or that the way he felt about things—and while he intended one thing at first except what happened was—

  But then, rather suddenly, he feels calm. There will be time to say these things. They do not need to be said right now. There will be time.

  What he says, finally, is this:

  “You shouldn’t be out here. I mean, without your coat.”

  “It’s okay,” she shivers, rubbing her upper arms. “It feels good.”

  And they stand there, side by side, not looking at each other, gazing up through the branches of the luminescent tree as though it were an altar and they meager supplicants.

  chapter 30

  When they were first married, she recalls, she had her own trajectory, and he had his. It wasn’t until later that they became so knotted up with each other.

  In their first year of marriage, they went to Mexico, the Yucatán. Those viny ruins at Kohunlich, the two of them lost to the foreignness of the place, bracing themselves against the screech of howler monkeys in the cohune palms. It was hot, their shirts soaked through with sweat.

  “Ms. Lewis, where have you taken us?”

  “It was your idea, Mr. Binhammer.”

  “We are out of our element.”

  They stood before five stone masks that represented the sun god Kinich Ahau. She looked at him looking at those masks. She liked the way he considered them with great seriousness, as though he were measuring them for his own wearing.

  And then he slipped and fell on the moss-covered stone steps and had to hop, wincing, on one foot back to the car.

  It was a sprained ankle, and the doctor wrapped it in a tight bandage and said he should not put pressure on it.

  “I’m crippled,” he said.

  “You’re a beautiful cripple,” she said.

  Their hotel room had a ceiling fan, and they slept underneath it on top of the sheets until the light crept in through the shutters.