Hummingbirds

by Joshua Gaylor

  It is one of these girls, Darcy Kimmel, a sophomore, who on Tuesday morning finds the words spray-painted across the third-floor lockers. Portrait-sized and red, the letters span fifteen lockers, hers one of them. She stands before them with the quiet satisfaction of a discoverer, taking in the whole meanness of the scrawled message:

  DIXIE DOYLE S COCK

  Her mouth shapes the words in silence. She sniffs and scratches her nose. She knows she should tell someone, but she doesn’t want to leave her post lest someone else get credit for the discovery. Instead, she touches her fingertips to the K, and they come back red. Later she will be found in the office, holding her two red fingers up and offering herself to the administration as evidence in the investigation. “It was still wet,” she will say. “I must’ve just crossed paths with the perpetrator.”

  Before second period is over, Carl the maintenance man has already scrubbed the words away with a chemical solvent that leaves behind an odor so acrid that he has to open the windows to let the cold winter air purify the space once again.

  But by that time, everyone has already seen the message. The girls themselves are stirred into a frenzy of delight and speculation. Who might have committed such an act? The Bardolph boys have penises, and they are the first ones suspected of breaking into the building and spraying their boyishness all over the lockers. That would make sense, too, since Dixie Doyle has been known to flirt shamelessly with those boys and probably deserves whatever she gets. The boys are evoked in dramatic ways, pictured sneaking through the empty hallways with their khaki pants and their parted hair.

  Some of the girls, the kind who always look for clever reversals in life, suspect Dixie Doyle herself of writing the words as a way to get attention and sympathy—or perhaps because she really does love cock and can’t help herself from scrawling her desire on the walls of the school.

  Other girls don’t speculate at all. Many are discomposed by the grammar of the word cock: having only recently gotten used to the prospect of reckoning with a single cock, or maybe even a series of cocks over the course of their near future, they are arrested in contemplation of cock as an abstract quantity like tungsten or foliage. What is it that Dixie Doyle loves? Not a cock or many cocks, but rather the general quantity of cock as it exists in all the pants of the world.

  Chins resting on fists in their first-period classes, they measure their own reactions in secret: On the issue of cock, taken altogether, where do I stand?

  The faculty, for the most part, remain silent with regard to the vandalism. Ms. Carmichael merely shakes her head. Mrs. Landry is sullen and serious, and the girls know to stay out of her way when she is like that. “We’ll have to write a letter to the parent body,” she says to her assistant. Ms. Lockhart is overheard giving a sharp, cynical chuckle when she sees the graffiti, mumbling mysteriously to herself, “Men are magic, girls. They do cast spells.”

  Even Mr. Binhammer, normally so eager to discuss any and all controversy at the school, is unusually tight-lipped on the matter—even nervous, which leads some girls to speculate that he may have done it himself. But why? Well, say a few, it’s obvious, isn’t it? It’s a lover’s quarrel.

  Which is exactly what Binhammer himself is worried everyone thinks. The timing. It seems impossible to him that it could be simply a coincidence. Four days after his grotesque declaration to Dixie Doyle, and now this. He can picture the information traveling, becoming sullied and strained as it moves from ear to outraged ear. Until it gets to someone who has a grudge against Dixie and wants to see her abomination with the teacher writ large. Surely everyone knows. He tries to read it in their faces, the shadow of his sin. He feels sick.

  In the teachers’ lounge, too, the subject is bandied about enthusiastically. Except for Walter, who shakes his head sadly at the vulgarity of girls these days and recalls a time when a girl wouldn’t know a cock from a rooster, everyone seems pleased to have something to discuss apart from grading semester finals.

  “The real clue to the culprit,” Ted Hughes says to Lonnie Abramson and Pepper Carmichael, who sit side by side on the couch gazing up at him, “is the S.”

  “The S?”

  “Just consider it. Who would add the S after the heart? Think about our girls. You’ve read their papers. You’ve seen the things they scrawl in the margins of their notes. How many of them would take the care to conjugate a heart symbol?”

  Lonnie nods.

  “It’s true,” Pepper says. “They would take the S as implied.”

  “What do you think, Binhammer?” Ted Hughes asks.

  Binhammer shrugs, feeling his throat tightening. There are some things you cannot come back from, he thinks. There are such things as permanencies. He sees clearly his demise at the school, his humiliation and embarrassment, the end of his marriage, his inability to find a position teaching elsewhere, his relocation to one of those states in the middle of the country. Nebraska or Arkansas. A job at the post office, or as a short-order cook, a one-room apartment overlooking a parking lot. The life of a pariah. There are some doors that close and lock for good.

  How does he talk to these people, knowing that as soon as the story comes out they will refuse to speak to him? He anticipates their outrage, their disdain, and a little ball of wretchedness burns in his belly. He clutches the edge of the table and puts a hand to his stomach.

  “Are you all right?” Lonnie says.

  “I’m fine, fine,” he says. “Just a little nausea. It’ll pass, it’s nothing.”

  “I can cover your classes for you, if you need to go home.”

  “Thanks, but don’t worry about it. I’ll be fine.”

  He pictures her kindness melting away with the discovery of his crimes. How did it happen so quickly? Where was the moment—did he miss it?—the moment when he stepped foot outside society and became a monster? He has unleashed something. Not just the witchy, incantatory graffiti. Not just the moment with Dixie Doyle on Friday. Not just that. It happened before. Years ago. A seed was planted. He bore inside him the black organic blossom of a man who could say disgusting things to girls.

  He would give anything to return to Friday and redo it—to edit out just that one sentence, slice it away like a cancerous cell before it has a chance to infect everything. But for all the tangles in his life that slip easily around each other and refuse to catch or knot, there are such things as permanencies.

  All around him, the building contracts like a muscle spasm. Binhammer can feel it, everyone can feel it. Like nerves in the knees. Something has happened. Everything becomes a clue to a mystery not yet defined. Every little thing has significance. On the chrome spout of the water fountain on the fifth floor, Miranda Siebold discovers a smear of lipstick, the color of which she is sure is not worn by any of the girls in the school. Zoe Cathcart, no matter how hard she looks, cannot find her compact mirror in the shape of a cat’s head that she always keeps in the exact same zipper pocket of her bag. Freshman Lucy Polchak, whose locker was one of the vandalized, develops a rash on the inside of her thigh in exactly the same spot where—and she has never told anyone this—she let Lenore Spitzer kiss her when they were both in the third grade. Emmeline Davis and her best friend Emily Douglas get into a fight over a magnet in the shape of a chocolate bar, even though they had both agreed at the beginning of the year never to let their friendship be threatened by petty things.

  Soon it becomes too much to bear, all these signs and portents, and a small group of three girls takes refuge from the fuss outside in the courtyard, despite the cold, underneath the sugar maple. They sit atop the picnic table, and their breath condenses in clouds when they speak.

  After a while a fourth girl in pigtails joins them. She has just come from the fourth-floor office, where Mrs. Landry, the headmistress, has subjected her to a confusing series of questions, the purpose of which—to comfort or to accuse—the girl can’t figure out.

  “How are you doing, Dix?” Caroline asks.

  “I miss Mrs.
Mayhew,” Dixie Doyle says. “Mrs. Landry smells like chalk and paper and dust and splinters. Every time I’m in her office, I feel like I want to put lotion all over myself.”

  They talk for a while about dry old Mrs. Landry and assure each other that they will have all died terribly romantic deaths before their skin becomes like that.

  Then Dixie says, “I don’t think it’s fair. I don’t heart cock.”

  “We know, Dixie,” says Caroline.

  “I mean, I don’t have anything against it. But I don’t heart it. At least I don’t think I do. I’ve never even seen one up close.”

  “You haven’t?” Beth Barber asks.

  “Well, I’ve played around with them. Who hasn’t? But I never got around to studying one. It’s always dark, and they’re always moving.”

  Beth nods.

  “So I don’t think it’s fair to claim I heart them.”

  “Are we supposed to not heart them?” Andie Abramson says. She isn’t making a proclamation. This is a real question, and the girls ponder it silently.

  “That’s the other thing I don’t like about this,” Dixie says. “It’s one of those catch-33s.”

  “Twenty-twos,” Andie says.

  “I always heard it as thirty-three,” Dixie says. “I’m pretty sure you’re wrong. But anyway, it’s like one of those. If you say you do heart cock, people make fun of you. And if you say you don’t heart cock, people make fun of you.”

  “Who do you think wrote it, Dixie?” Caroline asks.

  Dixie shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says. “I have enemies everywhere. Anyway, I’m tired of the whole thing. I wish the school year was over. Maybe if we close our eyes together it’ll be June when we open them. Let’s try it. Keep them closed until I say.”

  All four girls close their eyes tight. But Dixie opens hers early and leans back on her hands, looking up through the branches of the sugar maple into the flat gray sky. She wishes she had wings like an angel to fly over the rooftops of the city—then people would admire her as she has admired so many people. She would make them feel longing, and then they would know what it was like on the inside of her mind.

  “Okay,” she says eventually. “You can open your eyes. I think it’s too cold out for magic.”

  chapter 36

  The following week, on Monday, the summons that Binhammer is expecting from Mrs. Landry finally comes, after ten days of the event burning in his stomach like a stubborn coal. If I weren’t married, nothing could hold me back. Those were his words. Put out there for everyone to hear, as though they were scrawled across a billboard. And why did he have to say “If I weren’t married”? Isn’t the more significant barrier the fact that he is her teacher? The fact that he is an educator entrusted by the parents of the community not to molest their children, even if those children ask to be molested? Why didn’t he say that instead: If I weren’t your teacher…Or, better yet, nothing at all.

  The summons, when it comes, comes over the loudspeaker. “Mr. Binhammer, please call extension 4762. Mr. Binhammer, extension 4762.” He leaps up from the couch in the teachers’ lounge, his fingers itching to get it over with. “Mrs. Landry wants to see you,” the secretary says when he dials. “She says it’s important. Can you come up now?”

  On his way up in the elevator he goes over the script in his head. The look of mild interest, as though nothing in the world could be wrong. Oh, really? What did she say I said? The laughter, waving his hand at the absurdity. Well, I think she may have misunderstood a little. If I weren’t married? No—why would I say that? She asked me why I never had kids, and I was talking about my wife. I can’t imagine how…I think at one point I said that if I weren’t married I would be so miserable I would spend all my time giving homework. How that got twisted around in her mind, I can’t imagine. She’s a great kid. I like her a lot. I hope you don’t have the wrong impression of her because of this. I think she’s just overwrought—the vandalism and all. She’s going to miss her friends when she goes off to college. I’ll be happy to talk with her about it if you think I should. Or just let it drop if you think that’s best.

  Walking into the office, he presses his palm against his gut where the coal burns white-hot. Mrs. Landry is a tough woman, cut from the same cloth—no, hammered in the same foundry as Mrs. Mayhew had been. She has a face like the skeleton of a skyscraper, all rivets and seams. And when Binhammer comes into her office, she barks out, “Shut the door behind you.”

  The inquisition begins.

  “I am sure you understand,” Mrs. Landry begins, punctuating certain words with pauses in which her eyes staple him to his chair, “that Carmine-Casey has always been deadly serious about keeping its girls safe. There is no use educating them if at the same time we are also exposing them to…negative influences. Mrs. Mayhew believed it. Dr. Harrison believes it. I believe it.”

  “Of course.” He is harrowed by this. He hoped that the talk would evolve along a different line—some questioning before getting to the bottom of things—but it seems to have jumped directly to the accusation. He must play dumb. He must stick to the script. “Absolutely.”

  “It used to be easier,” she laments. “You made sure a girl dressed modestly, you made sure she had the fear of god in her with regard to boys, you made sure she got on the bus at the end of the day, and if you did those things, you were doing your job. Now things are different. It’s the parents. The new status symbol is the degree of liberality with which you raise your children. Do you want to know something? I got a call from a parent just two weeks ago giving her ninth-grade daughter permission to leave school when her boyfriend, who is a freshman in college, came to pick her up in his car.”

  She shakes her head. He wants to say something—voice his sympathetic outrage—but he doesn’t know what exactly she knows.

  “In any case, that’s neither here nor there. I may not be able to keep my girls safe after they leave this school, but I consider it my duty to keep them safe while they are within these walls. And”—hinging her head around slowly to stare into his soul—“in the hands of any representative of this institution.”

  Oh god.

  She draws herself up again and takes a deep breath that sounds like the billows of a great steam engine. She folds her hands on her desk and leans forward, her bulky bosom dropping like a counterweight on the blotter.

  “We have a problem.”

  “What’s the, uh—what’s the problem?”

  “It has come to my attention that a serious faculty-student…indiscretion has taken place.”

  Just get it over with. He swallows hard. He begins thinking what his life will look like from now on. The fall, the humiliation. He feels dizzy. He wants to chew on his fingers.

  “It’s about Mr. Hughes. I may need you to take over some of his classes for a while.”

  “Mr. Hughes?” Like a dream in which you are running over a cliff but, miraculously, you don’t fall.

  She takes another deep breath. The mighty billows.

  “It seems he spent the night with a student.”

  Everything adrift. A weightless moment. Looking down on the earth from miles above—and not recognizing a thing. Ted Hughes, the exalted and merry…

  “But he wouldn’t—I don’t—”

  “I’m only telling you this because you’ll hear rumors. And I know you two have gotten close. The girl was seen coming out of his apartment building at two o’clock in the morning—the parents didn’t even know until we spoke to them. The student was Liz Warren. You might as well know. It’ll be no use trying to keep this from anyone.”

  Liz Warren. Ted Hughes and Liz Warren. Inconceivable. Binhammer could never even get her to unscowl.

  Mrs. Landry pauses. His hands unclench, and he looks at them—a pale pink translucence with white underneath. Ghostly and pathetic.

  “We talked to the girl, and she denied it. She obviously feels loyal to him. But when we spoke to him, he admitted to it. We asked for his resignation. He gave
it.”

  He has shaken the hand of Ted Hughes, and he remembers it being a strong hand, but also long and cool. The hand of an artist. A hand that in touching things pushes them into the perspective of distance rather than drawing them into unfocused nearness.

  “I see,” he says.

  “In any case, I have a list of his classes that don’t conflict with yours. I’ve gotten the others to cover the other sections. I hope you won’t mind helping out.”

  “Of course. Of course I don’t mind.”

  On his way out, she says, “Oh, and one more thing. You may see him around. He’s gathering his things. But I asked him to leave before the rumors take hold.”

  In the elevator back down to the teachers’ lounge, he thinks once more about his own indiscretion and holds it up to Ted Hughes’s. He feels not relief but instead a sense of being shown up again. Not that he would rather be in Ted Hughes’s shoes now, but he has to admit, in the smallest, meanest places of his heart, there is some measure of rankling envy when he thinks about the man spending the night with his student. Setting her down on the bed and unbuttoning her top, like some diminished Henry Miller with his miniature Anaïs Nin. Hughes has done it again. Whatever weak gesture Binhammer may make in the direction of life, Hughes has already made it, sooner and larger.