Hummingbirds

by Joshua Gaylor

  “How are you feeling?” she asked in the morning.

  “It’s important, Ms. Lewis, that one forges ahead in spite of complications that may arise along the way.” And he reached over and put a hand on her breast.

  They had sex, being careful of his ankle, until their bodies were slippery with sweat. She remembers that, years later, the way their bodies were so oiled with perspiration that they would not adhere to each other. She remembers that on the winter nights in the city when her skin is rough and goose-pimpled.

  She held him up all the way around Mexico, the weight of his body new and strange to her. She could not anticipate his movements. She wondered, Who is this man I’ve married? and she was not afraid of the answer. Their lives were supposed to be different, and now it was their mission to lock themselves together, to discover or invent all the possible nodes of complementarity.

  Now, eight years later, sitting by herself at a table in the farthest back corner of a small café, she wonders if maybe they’ve done their intertwining too well—if maybe the knots are too taut.

  She looks at her watch. It is five minutes to two o’clock.

  Why did he do it? Why did he keep the secret of Ted Hughes? The answer, obviously, has something to do with her own indiscretion—her own affair with Ted Hughes that she did not keep a secret. It has something to do with the fact that by telling him the truth about the affair two years ago, she had set it down between them as something to share. They had gone through it together. Like his sprained ankle in Mexico. She had taken a thing of contention and turned it into a thing of confederation.

  Still, she can’t quite bring into focus his intentions, and she doesn’t dare ask him. Now there is a stately quiet around the apartment shot through with angles and ends and crooked things. She is not sure if he is angry at her or if she is angry at him. Or even if simple anger enters into it at all.

  The fact is that eight years ago, this all would have seemed different—the swollen and aching adjustment of two people pointing in different directions, trying to reconcile their proximities. Now it’s something else. Larger or smaller, she cannot tell. But the chamber of their lives is wider now, and so the deed echoes of both past and future. It never exists simply in the moment.

  She looks at her watch again. Two o’clock.

  I’m tired, she thinks. There must be a way to purge the history of things, to squeeze down memory into a thimble and put it away so that it’s possible to look at things with fresh eyes.

  “Those eyes gone distant,” says a voice above her. It’s Ted Hughes. “I remember you looking like that. I have a picture of it in my head.”

  She says hello, stands to greet him. But she’s not sure what kind of greeting is called for, so they just gaze at each other for a moment—poised in suspended nonreaction. Then they sit. She wants to thank him for meeting her, but that would sound too businesslike. Instead, she says:

  “You manage to cause a stir everywhere you go, don’t you?”

  He smiles at this. “Well, who would have thought that I would end up teaching at the same school as your husband?”

  “It’s definitely a coincidence.”

  “Downright Dickensian is what it is.”

  She remembers him, two years ago in San Diego, leaning in toward her, as though he didn’t want to miss a single utterance from her mouth.

  “It’s good to see you,” she says.

  “Is it?”

  “I don’t know. I think so, yes.”

  “I kept thinking I would run into you,” he says. “Here in New York. On the street somewhere. I pictured how it might happen. What kind of poses I might strike. Silly. But that’s the best part of the brief affair, isn’t it? The flustered encounter afterward. All your senses lit up with static. But it never happened.”

  “Until now.”

  “Right. Until now.”

  There is a pause—all lit up with static.

  “So,” she continues, “I hear you’re a very good teacher.”

  “Some of the girls like me. But I’m no Binhammer. That man inspires loyalty.”

  The comment hangs there a moment before either recognizes the irony of it. Then it drops and settles for another moment before either recognizes the deep truth of it.

  “God,” she says. “This is ridiculous. I don’t know why I wanted to meet with you. It just seemed like something to do. After everything.”

  “How are things? Between you two?”

  She shrugs. “Elliptical. How about the two of you?”

  “Adumbrated.”

  “It’s not a simple thing, is it?”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  They talk more, speculating, briefly, about what her husband might have intended in keeping the secret for so long. They wonder about what went on in his head. She is surprised to see that Ted Hughes has gotten to know him very well over the past few months. And she suspects, as she has on more than a few occasions in her life, that men must have a language of their own by which to link their thick muscled hearts.

  What she wants from him, she supposes, is some foundation on which to build her response to the whole thing—someone to point in the direction of what she should be feeling, whether anger or guilt or frustration. But she doesn’t get this today. Instead, sitting in front of her is a charming man who two years ago traced his fingers along her spine and made her shiver down to her toes.

  “What about the big question?” he says at one point. “Do you regret it? Do you regret what we did?”

  “No,” she says demonstratively, and her response surprises her.

  “Would you do it again?”

  He smiles, leaning forward. Those hands. The two of them are on the cusp of something together. That’s what it felt like before, too. Teetering precariously, gorgeously. The wind buffets you up there at those heights. It gets in your hair.

  “Do you mean if I had to do it over again? Or do you mean…”

  The vertigo of the moment. The seizure in the legs, to be hoisted up in the air, and, for a terrific second, to feel as though you are flying.

  And then they back away. Both of them. Back onto solid ground, laughing nervously. Something has been decided.

  “So what do we do now?” she asks.

  “Well, I don’t know about you,” he says, “but I could go for a milkshake.”

  “That sounds good.”

  “And then, I suppose,” he adds, smiling, arch, “we go back to marching along in life’s wicked parade.”

  “That sounds good too.”

  “Oh, one more thing, and then we’ll never talk about it again.”

  “All right.” She girds herself. The man is a constant revelation. He announces rather than suggests. The heroic declarative. “What is it?”

  “I still think you’re wrong about Nathalie Sarraute.”

  chapter 31

  Over the two weeks of Christmas vacation, the Carmine-Casey School for Girls is a hollow, silent edifice watched over, on shortened hours, by Mr. Cuthbert the maintenance man. When Mrs. Mayhew comes through the doors the Tuesday after Christmas to get some work done in the peace and quiet of her office, she finds him leaning back in an old desk chair in the lobby, his feet propped up, with an old plastic radio, bent wire hanger winding upward like a vine for increased reception, perched on the radiator beside him.

  “Happy holidays, Mr. Cuthbert.”

  “Happy holidays to you, Mrs. Mayhew.”

  On the radio the sounds of a football game in progress.

  “Everything under control?”

  “Quiet as a tomb, Mrs. Mayhew. Just the way I like it.”

  She nods approvingly and takes the elevator to the top floor. She has her key in the lock of the administrative offices when she stops and looks behind her down the long vacant corridor. The overhead phosphorescents are shut off, but the daylight bleeds in through the frost-crusted windows far enough to give the entire place a look of dusky abandonment. The mote-filled air reminds her of the su
mmerhouses of her childhood, her mother covering all the furniture with sheets, those irregular white forms like a parade of lost, blind ghosts.

  She leaves her key ring dangling from the door and walks slowly down the corridor, her hands folded behind her back as though she were making her regular morning rounds, nodding to the girls and saying “Good morning” in the short, clipped tones appropriate to her role in the school. One of the classroom doors is ajar, and she pushes it wide and walks in. The desks have all been lined up neatly, one of the final duties of the maintenance crew before the holiday, along with the wiping down of the chalkboards, the polishing of the floor, the cleaning of the bathrooms. Walking between them, she finds one desk at almost the exact center of the configuration and sits down at it.

  Somewhere in the building a window rattles in its frame. There is a distant sound of water rushing through the pipes as the radiators click into function and begin knocking, hissing, spitting.

  The chairs are now all cold, their plastic rigid where it is normally humid and pliant under the ruddy organic bodies of the students. If you step into a room while there is a lesson in progress, you can feel the pulse of the class—the accumulated rhythm of all those little hearts beating in time with the timpani of the teacher’s voice. The musicality of the glances between teacher and student, student and student, the itching throats of girls on the verge of contributing something to the conversation, staking their claims in the common corpus of sticky intellect.

  It has been a long time since Mrs. Mayhew has been simply a teacher, a long time since her days were filled with the easy, riotous pleasure of students. In those days, things in her life tumbled into position rather than being scheduled hour by hour.

  On the desk before her is written, in ballpoint pen, the motto:

  My heart is an engine—

  My sex is a gaudy circus.

  Her eyes narrow a bit, but you would not be able to read any other reaction on her face. You might just assume she has simply felt a shift in the breeze, or a fly buzzing past her ear.

  She seems to be waiting for something—waiting for the class to begin. Settling back in the seat, she sets her head on a tilt and focuses her attention on the blackboard, where to all appearances she is reading the invisible palimpsest of all the classes ever taught in this room.

  Then she closes her eyes and seems to be listening to something—and for the first time in quite a while the slight pursed edgings of a smile can be seen to soften the features of her face.

  The radiators clack on like the lungs of valve-operated bovines through the halls of the school, and when they settle down again, their thermostats satisfied for the time being, there is nothing to upset the thick hush that suffocates the rooms.

  It is two hours later that Mr. Cuthbert, who buys his lunch from the deli on the corner, takes the elevator to the top floor to ask Mrs. Mayhew if he can treat her to anything (she has always been kind to him, despite what people say about her) and finds her keys hanging like a stopped pendulum from the door of the office. He nods sadly and utters aloud the words “Oh lordy” and turns down the corridor toward the door at the end that stands open in mid-yawn.

  “A good woman,” he says, standing in the doorway. “Oh lordy, a good woman.”

  When school is under way again the following week, the mood of the classes is buzzing yet somber—as though death itself were suddenly made part of the curriculum. Some of the girls burst into spontaneous sobbing during class and have to be sent to the nurse to lie down. Others seem uncomfortable—as though attending a party where they don’t know the guest of honor—and these are the ones who want to get straight back into the work of the day. Mrs. Landry and Dr. Harrison, the two other headmistresses, lead an assembly in honor of Mrs. Mayhew and ask for volunteers among the student body to write short memories of the matriarch to be bound together and given to the Mayhew family.

  At the beginning of the following week, however, the school settles back into its accustomed rounds. The school play, Salmonburger by Liz Warren, having been in production for many months, finally has its premiere. The culmination of many late nights at the school for its writer/director and its stars, all leading to this, three day performances for the students and two night performances for parents. It receives a generally positive response. Dixie Doyle is lauded for the way her voice resonates to every corner of the auditorium. The round of applause for Liz Warren is all the more enthusiastic for the fumbling embarrassment with which she takes her bow. On the other hand, some of the viewers come away mystified. “Liz Warren is so smart,” one girl says, “that I don’t really understand what they’re talking about.” Some of the fathers fall asleep, and Liz’s mother compliments her daughter profusely and asks with a wink if her next play is going to feature a leading man as cute as Jeremy Notion.

  Ultimately, though, the cast and crew of the production go home feeling a keen sense of anticlimax—as though they have invested hours of time and energy in the service of what has turned out to be just another day, nearly indistinguishable from the rest. Nothing has changed, nothing is different in their lives. The world, they realize, does not hold its breath for such trifles.

  After Christmas an unseasonal warm front pushes through the city, melting all the ice collected in gray mounds in the gutters. For three days the sidewalks are striated by veined cross-cuttings of melted ice—rivulets that darken the pavement and fill the cracks.

  In the teachers’ lounge of Carmine-Casey, the teachers stand at the window and gaze out contemplatively through the curtain of dripping water from the once-frozen eaves above. Each asks politely what the others have done over the holiday. The Abramsons had a lovely Christmas at home for once in their lives. Pepper Carmichael spent the holiday upstate in a cabin with some friends. She learned how to build a fire. Binhammer and his wife flew to Florida to see her cousin, who took them sailing up and down the coastline in his boat.

  Things are quieter than usual in the teachers’ lounge. For a while Mrs. Mayhew’s death overshadows everything in the building. Nobody wants to be the first to resume lightness. But then there are hints of other discord unrelated to Mrs. Mayhew. Binhammer and Ted Hughes, for example, are normally to be found sitting on opposite couches in the lounge, sparring at each other playfully and boisterously and engaging anyone who passes in whatever absurdity they might be discussing. But since Christmas some teachers have noticed that when Binhammer comes into the room, Ted Hughes leaves. Once, Lonnie Abramson observes from a distance a strange interaction between them. Ted Hughes saying something to Binhammer, using gestures that have some pleading in them. But, as she continues watching from down the hall, Binhammer just shaking his head in response, looking pained by what the other man is saying, and walking away.

  “Uh-oh,” Lonnie says to herself. “The boys are fighting.”

  But when she tries to ask Binhammer about it, he smiles brightly, says there is nothing wrong at all, and derails her by asking about her daughter and her husband.

  “Well,” she finds herself saying, “you wouldn’t believe what George said to me the other day. I do wish you could talk some sense into that man.”

  The month of January passes by with the thudding regularity of a funeral march. Mrs. Mayhew’s death gives way to a sense of death abstract. There is a creeping feeling of lowering things into the ground and covering them over with mats of grass turf that have been carefully removed the hour before. Lowering them down into holes cut specifically for them. The neat walls of earth and clay, the cold mealy soil. The dizziness of standing at the edge and imagining yourself within.

  When February comes, everyone is tired of the cold. The girls sit stubbornly in overheated rooms sweating with their winter coats wrapped around them in some backward protest—not against the administration that makes them dress in scanty uniforms all through the frigid winter, but rather against Mother Nature herself, who seems unfair and inflexible about this whole cold thing. Does it have to be cold every day? Quel bori
ng.

  So there they sit, bulky in their jackets, wiping sweat from their foreheads with their palms and looking aggressive, as though daring the teacher to teach them something. Not thinking too hard about the nature of their resentment. Waiting with little clenched fists for whatever might be coming next.

  chapter 32

  For Dixie Doyle, death is a flavorless topic of conversation. It is one of those subjects she has never managed to navigate correctly, frequently earning disapproving looks and tsk-tsks from her audience. It seems that Dixie Doyle cannot be Dixie Doyle when the dead are in question, and as a result, she has banned Mrs. Mayhew from the discussion amongst the group of girls who stand in a small huddled circle out in front after school.

  “Did I tell you who we had staying in our house for Christmas?” Dixie opens today. Her hair is in pigtails for the first time since she was cast in the school play, during which time she wore her hair down for the sake of drama.

  “Who, Dix?” Caroline asks.

  But Caroline’s attention alone is not sufficient, so Dixie says again, “Did I tell you?”

  When the other two girls, Andie and Beth, shake their heads, Dixie consents to continue.

  “Uncle Peter the drunk,” she says. “He flew in from Houston.”

  “Oh no,” Beth says, her face already curled into a sympathetic sneer. Though it is not difficult to get Beth to sneer.

  “Quel dommage!” Caroline says.

  “Ugh,” says Dixie. “French. Madame Millet-Johnson gave me a D on my last quiz. I’m never speaking French again. I don’t even like cheese anyway.”

  Caroline looks chastened. But only for a moment, and then she discovers a scab on her knee that requires attention. She lifts her leg to set her foot on the concrete pediment and in doing so exposes her underwear to the street.

  Andie quickly shoves Caroline’s leg down and scolds her for being so indiscreet.