Hummingbirds

by Joshua Gaylor

  “You have to stop doing this to yourself,” he says. “There’s no competition between the two of you. You don’t even belong in the same sentence.”

  “Whatever that means.”

  “Look,” he says lightly, hoping to bring this to an end, “how could I like anyone more than I like you?”

  This seems to satisfy her. She unfolds her arms and leans forward. “Okay. You’re just joking, but okay.”

  She shifts in her seat, and he thinks she might be getting up, but really she’s just shifting. She has more she wants to say.

  “How come you never had kids?”

  “Kids? I don’t know. I guess I don’t really like them.”

  “Yeah, that makes sense. I don’t either.”

  She waits. Then:

  “You know what my father does?”

  “What?”

  “He makes floss. You know, dental floss. Isn’t that stupid? He got rich on dental floss. He has a factory where all you see are huge spools of floss. Which he sells to companies. They all get their floss from the same place. Did you know that? No matter what the brand is, they all get their floss from my father.”

  “Hmm.”

  “But I guess it worked out okay for me.” She flashes him a wide smile to show off her teeth. They are perfectly straight and white. “We floss twice a day. Most people only floss once.”

  “Interesting.”

  “No, it’s not. You don’t have to say it is.”

  “I’m one of those people who only flosses once a day,” he says apologetically.

  She rolls her eyes. “Anyway,” she goes on. “My father always talks about his tenth-grade history teacher. My mother hates it when he does, because all he says is how beautiful this teacher was and how she really knew how to teach about the French Revolution. She would make fists and everything while she was lecturing. My father imitates her. And then he says how he fell in love with her and she was all he could think about for his tenth-grade year and part of his eleventh.”

  “Uh-huh.” He doesn’t like the direction this is going. It feels like they are on the precipice of a declaration. Yet there’s no way he can stop this. How can you stop a girl from telling you she loves you? It’s an inhuman proposition. Ted Hughes would understand.

  “And he always said that if he had it to do all over again, he would have told her. He says, ‘That kiss is the only one I regret not getting.’”

  “Is that right?”

  “That’s what he says.” She waits. “So what do you think about that?”

  He leans forward across the top of his desk and folds his hands together as though he has something difficult to say. “Dixie—”

  “I know, I know. You don’t have to say it. But the truth is that I’m getting pretty tired of everyone around here, and you’re one of the only people I still don’t hate. Doesn’t that sound stupid?”

  “It’s not stupid.” Suddenly he feels like he wants to save her. He thinks about the messes he has made elsewhere. About the damage he has done while believing he was acting noble and true and modern. Maybe a little childish romanticism is the key after all. This Dixie Doyle—maybe she is one he can save.

  He would like to offer her something. She deserves to have something.

  “You know what?” he says, and his words are a gift wrapped in curling ribbons. “If things were a little different. If I weren’t married. Then there’s nothing that could hold me back.”

  And the second after he says this, he regrets it. She lights up from the inside like a brand-new jack-o’-lantern.

  “Really?” she says.

  “Oh, Jesus. I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry. That was inappropriate.”

  “Yeah, it was, kind of. But I don’t mind. I think you really meant it too.”

  “Dixie, can you not tell anyone about this?”

  “Come on, who would I tell?”

  “Oh god.” It all plays out in his head. The call over the loudspeaker from Mrs. Mayhew. No, not Mrs. Mayhew. The other one. (Poor Mrs. Mayhew!) The conversation in hushed, acerbic tones. The sneer of disgust. How could you? Sibyl and her brutal, smoky laugh. Ted Hughes shaking his head at him in the hall. Really, Binhammer? Little girls? I thought you were the one with self-control. The other girls, steering themselves away from him in the halls—out of reach of the pervert who molested Dixie Doyle. His wife driven into a panicked evaluation of her own complicity in his degenerate decadences—tearful calls to her mother, a woman on her own third marriage. You never know what kind of monster you’re going to get.

  It’s all right there, just behind his eyes like a movie run at high speed.

  Dixie is now up, reenergized, and heading toward the door.

  “I think I’m going to walk home. It’s not too cold—it’s perfect walking weather. Have a great night, okay, Mr. Binhammer? I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  And when he looks up again, all he can see is the little flip of her pleated skirt as she bounces through the doorway and off to the land of teenage girlhood where secrets are currency and Dixie has just become a very wealthy girl.

  chapter 34

  In the works of Thomas Hart Benton, Liz Warren always sees distorted grandeur—that is, things distorted into grandeur and not the other way around. Here is one such painting. In the corner a group of musicians, their legs wavy with reverberation like the strings they are strumming, the background a wheat field that is serving them up as though on the end of a giant tongue. In the center a farmer with a scythe looking rugged and noble but with eyes that have nothing in them. He is captured in mid-swing. Here, every little action looks like ecstasy. Cartoonish. The sublime and the ridiculous brought together. All our noble deeds, all our silly little gestures…

  That just about sums things up, Liz imagines.

  She is surrounded by Thomas Hart Benton. The whole room is Thomas Hart Benton, part of an exhibit called America: The Epic of Diminishment. She came by herself, this Saturday morning, her mother calling out after her as she closed the door behind her, “Are you going to meet your friend there?” Her mother is under the impression that she and Jeremy Notion are still dating. She doesn’t know how to tell her otherwise, and she resents having to think about it.

  Meanwhile Dixie Doyle is telling her to fuck a bank president—by which she means, presumably, someone as dull, crusty, and barnacled as Liz herself. Silly Dixie and her lapdog Jeremy Notion leaning against the gate. That’s all the boy ever does—lean against things.

  So maybe she should fuck a banker. She looks around at the men in the room—many of them gray-haired, some of them wearing sport jackets. As long as he didn’t smell like her grandfather, the tinge of the grave always on his breath. One man, standing next to her, is wearing a bow tie. Dixie would approve.

  Yes, maybe she should fuck a banker. There are worse ways to lose your virginity. And suddenly her virginity seems to her like a painting by Thomas Hart Benton—colorful and absurd, a stormy sky and a landscape that recedes forever, something blown up out of proportion by the buckled mirror of a fish-eye lens. Spectacular and ridiculous.

  You only think about your virginity until you lose it. And then it’s like a child getting a shot at the doctor’s office, the pain forgotten by dinnertime. That’s where she would like to be, sitting at dinner, unvirgined, not even thinking about it enough to quaintly reminisce. Just like a child with a little soreness in the behind that’s gone by morning.

  She looks around again. The crowds of people, like birds, standing in little chirping flocks in front of the paintings.

  Then she spots someone she recognizes. It’s Mr. Hughes, her English teacher, standing in a corner pointing to a painting. He is talking to two slender women about her mother’s age—except they’re different somehow. These women seem dressed too nicely for looking at art in a museum. They keep touching their hair and laughing gaily at everything Mr. Hughes says. At first, she wonders if he’s giving them a tour—something about the way he points to sections of th
e painting and then folds his hands in front of him when the women ask questions. But then she sees him trying to edge away and realizes the two women have him trapped there in the corner.

  She wonders if he likes to be around those women. She wonders, if he were given a choice of looking at Thomas Hart Benton with two full-grown women or one teenage girl, which he would pick.

  He is not a banker, but maybe this is what Dixie Doyle meant after all. The two of them, Mr. Hughes and Liz, are above convention, aren’t they? He is not married. (She wonders why.) She is not a beautiful girl, she knows, but her skin is smooth where the skin of these women is wrinkled.

  How do single men decide what girls to seduce? Do they think about it for a long time first, turning it over and over in their heads as they sit in their spartan apartments buttering their toast and gazing out the window? Or does it all happen on the spur of the moment, a light switch going on in their heads and suddenly they’re trying to kiss you?

  She approaches the trio of adults slowly, pretending to look at the pictures and watching him out of the corner of her eye. She is almost right next to them before Mr. Hughes notices her.

  “Liz?”

  “Oh, Mr. Hughes. I didn’t see you. What are you doing here?”

  “I’m here to see the exhibit.”

  “Sure, right. That makes sense. I mean, why else would you be here?” She can hear the words tumbling out of her mouth. She can’t stop them.

  “Oh,” one of the women says, “is this one of your students, Ted? She’s adorable!”

  The two women lean back and smile at her as though they are admiring a baby in a bassinet.

  While they gape, Mr. Hughes presses between them, moving closer to Liz and looking relieved.

  “Adorable? She’s more than that. This is Liz Warren. The legend of Carmine-Casey Academy for Sagacious Young Women. She has the merit badge for precociousness.”

  Liz doesn’t know whether she likes that or not. Precocious is what they call smart people before they are old enough to be taken seriously. She is embarrassed.

  He moves closer beside her so that it’s the two of them facing the women.

  “Liz,” he says, “Bessie was just saying…I’m sorry, Bessie, was it?”

  “Betty,” reminds the one with the gray streak. “And this is Violet.”

  “Right. Betty and Violet were just telling me that they find Benton’s work to be indulgent. What do you think, Liz? Do you think Thomas Hart Benton is indulgent?”

  “Well,” Betty says, “of course we’re not connoisseurs. We’re just a couple of girls who like to look at pictures.” They nod at each other and dissemble. Their opinions, they suggest, are modest.

  Liz stands still, glad no one is expecting her to answer the question posed. But she comes up with an answer anyway in case she should have to deliver one later.

  While the two women are giggling to each other, reaching out to squeeze Mr. Hughes’s forearm, he leans down and whispers to her, “Stay close. These two are scorpions.”

  And it’s true. They keep trying to sidle up to Mr. Hughes, pushing Liz out of the way. The one called Betty gives her dirty looks when Mr. Hughes isn’t looking. And once, when she has Liz to herself in a corner, she says, “I bet you have a crush on your teacher. Well, I think that’s sweet. But he’s a grown-up, you know.”

  Finally, Mr. Hughes and Liz leave the two women behind at the top of the front steps, waving and calling, “It was so nice to meet you, Ted, and your lovely student too!”

  Liz cringes, as she has every time they referred to her as his student.

  “Where are you headed?” Mr. Hughes asks as they make their escape.

  “Across the park.”

  “Me too. I’ll walk with you a little ways.”

  “Okay.” She shrugs. His coat is unzipped because the sun is shining, and he is wearing a plain brown sweater underneath. And jeans and tennis shoes. She is not used to seeing him this way. He looks younger dressed like this. If she fixes her face, if she tries to appear casual and experienced, then the two of them might look no more than ten years apart, walking together through the park.

  “Were those your friends?” she asks.

  “Betty and Veronica?”

  “Violet.”

  “No. They weren’t my friends. They’re urban predators. They prowl museums, ballets, and poetry readings.”

  “They didn’t seem so bad.” She feels obligated to say it. But she likes the description, likes being next to him while he excludes others—as though she has passed a test. As though if they sat down on one of these park benches, he could exclude the whole world, one by one, until it’s just the two of them remaining.

  “Not to you. But single men are like guppies to them. They have nets, and they take men home and put them into glass bowls.”

  She laughs at this, and he looks at her, appearing to enjoy her laughter. She wants to be careful. It’s like she’s walking across a floor of glass. Any thoughtless step could send her crashing down.

  “So,” he resumes, “what about you? Do you always go to the museum by yourself? Couldn’t get any of your friends interested in Thomas Hart Benton?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Monica—you know Monica Vargas?—she’s with her father this weekend. But I don’t really like to go to museums with other people. I hate waiting for them to catch up—or for them to wait for me. It never seems like I’m moving at the right speed.”

  He nods and looks into the distance. Then she wonders if she has made a faux pas.

  “I mean,” she corrects herself, “it wasn’t like that with you.”

  He still doesn’t say anything.

  “I like Thomas Hart Benton a lot,” she continues. “I read a book about him. Did you know he designed movie sets? Wouldn’t you love to see those movies? I tried to rent some, but I couldn’t find them.”

  This makes him smile. He says, “Can you picture him as a set designer? Him wheeling in this massive tortured landscape and the director shaking his head and saying, ‘All we needed was a simple cornfield.’”

  They walk some more, and when they come to the edge of a lake they realize they have gotten distracted and lost track of their destination. They turn around and follow a winding trail leading back through some thick undergrowth.

  When they are sure they are walking west again, she decides to ask him a question.

  “Can I ask you something? You don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to. I mean, it’s really none of my business. But I was just wondering…why you never got married.”

  He gives her some perfunctory answer, one that she might have written for him if he were a minor character in a play—the kind of character that beautifies the background scenery of a heroine. And the answer might have made her feel elided, snipped off at the base, if it weren’t for the fact that right before he says it, he gives her a look—a look that keeps coming back as he speaks, first about why he never got married and then about the number of dogs and strollers in the park.

  She even sees that same curious, knitted expression when he doesn’t think she can see him looking at her, when she stops at a bench to tie her shoe.

  I am aware of you. I think I know what you are doing. Do I know what you are doing? That’s what the expression says. Just the edge of a question. Enough hesitation to make her feel impressive somehow.

  But then she is embarrassed again and folds her arms across her chest. It is possible that he sees her as cute and harmless—that he recognizes her words for the trembling, pathetic offerings that they are and that he is only humoring her. If that’s true, then she is prepared to hate him. She will go home and write about how much she despises him.

  Her stomach begins to hurt at this and, standing at the crest of a footbridge, she stops and stretches. She pictures her nerves as little parasites, all mouth, eating away at her insides.

  He stops a few paces ahead of her and turns to wait. “You know what?” he says, evaluating the brief entire
ty of her short life with his eyes, “I’m glad you like Thomas Hart Benton.”

  He nods his head as if deciding something. “Yes,” he continues, “that seems perfect to me. Let’s say that Thomas Hart Benton is yours and nobody else’s.”

  He can see into her. He knows of the wild turbulences that pass like weather systems through her mind. He can see the people who reside inside her heart, the tangles of men and women dancing, their limbs sweat-locked and organic, like vines trellising up around her lungs, squeezing her so hard she can feel it whenever something beautiful happens. Little girl. Her father’s voice, always echoing in her bones, that low deep-down rumbling. Oh that she could move the earth in such a way! Little girl, come and look at this. Squatting next to her father in her sunflower dress, looking at what he has in his hand. A crawling thing in his cupped palm. Like her. Writhing like the musicians in the painting. Thomas Hart Benton and his westward expansion beating like a tribal blood in her ears. Those feral Americans! Those grounded angels, twisting upward as though they knew what religion was—the machines of their bodies, the oily gears of their toil. And Ted Hughes can see it all. He can see right through her. She, a walking vivisection. All skin. All skin.

  They walk a little farther, neither saying anything for a few minutes. When he sees her looking at her watch, he says, “You should get home.”

  “I know, it’s okay. Look, there’s the street.”

  “I should be going too.”

  They have almost reached the other side of the park. But to get to it they have to walk down a slope to an underpass that is shadowed from the sun. Sometimes violinists play here because the sound is cavernous and rises up through the park like the music of the tarmac itself.

  There are no musicians playing here now, however, and as they walk through it toward the bright half circle at the other end, their footfalls are gravelly and resonant, as though they have discovered each other in the warm wet gullet of a beast.

  chapter 35

  It is a widely acknowledged fact that the girls who live farther away and whose commutes depend upon the schedules of hourly trains generally arrive at school earlier than girls who live around the corner and feel no great fear about oversleeping. Indeed, some of the Carmine-Casey girls travel from as far away as Connecticut. Each morning, they land in front of the building having traveled on commuter trains and then in taxicabs from Grand Central, weary and serious as gray-eyed investment bankers, nodding hello to the security guard and to the maintenance men sweeping the lobby. They arrive before the teachers and before the administrators. Theirs are the first echoing footfalls down the halls between the darkened doorways of the classrooms. Sometimes they nap before the others arrive, curled on top of their own jackets, their hands prayer-wise between their knees, their book bags acting as pillows.