Hummingbirds
Page 32
“For good?”
“I said good-bye to him today.”
“Did he say anything about the girl?”
“Not much.”
He watches closely for her reaction, but she either doesn’t have one or is hiding it too well. She simply nods and squints her eyes into the distance.
“So what are you going to do now?” she asks.
“What do you mean?”
“Will you miss him?”
“This isn’t about me.”
She laughs. “Sure.” She is infuriating. She is the most beautiful person he knows. “Then who is it about, darling?”
They go to the market, which is crowded with people in suits on their way home from work. The men’s ties are crooked and undone, as though at some point their necks had expanded to hulkish size, burst the collar, and then shrunk back down again.
He follows her down the fruit and vegetable aisle while she prods at the produce, puts it to her nose, and places it carefully in the basket he’s carrying.
“Do you want melon?” she asks.
“Sure.”
“Or strawberries?”
“Sure. Either one. I don’t care.”
“I don’t care either.”
“Melon.”
“Really? I would have thought you would have said strawberries.”
“So get strawberries.”
“No, I don’t care. I just thought…” She shrugs and puts a cantaloupe into the basket.
“Are you angry at me?” he says.
“Angry at you? Why would I be?”
“I don’t know. You just seem a little mad. Not a lot mad, just a little mad.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“Okay.”
“Should I be?”
“No…. I just thought—we never talked about—since I never told you I knew about you and him, I mean…”
She shakes her head. Leans up and kisses him on the cheek. “Forget it.”
They stop in front of the herbs, and she looks carefully to pick out the cilantro from the parsley and the mint.
“You know,” she says, “I really wanted to be mad at you. For keeping it a secret. I wanted to be mad.”
“But?”
“Well, I’m not in the best position to make judgments.”
“That wouldn’t stop some people.”
“It stopped me.”
“The consummate rationalist.”
“Besides, it’s not like you were the one who compromised the fidelity of the marriage.”
“That’s true.” And he means it. His desire for Sibyl never compromised anything, and now she—and that—feels a long way away.
“Anyway,” she continues, “I’m glad you did it. Now there are two reprobates in this marriage instead of just one.”
“That’s why I did it. It was all for you, sweetheart.”
Then she says, “You know what?”
“What?”
“I think we’ve spent too much time on him. It’s almost like he’s our son.”
He nods. “So we’re finished with him, huh?”
“Maybe not forever. But just for the time being. Do you want to be?”
“Okay, let’s be finished.”
And they are for a few weeks. Then one day an airmail envelope arrives with a postmark from Madrid. It’s addressed to Binhammer and has the initials T. H. in the corner where the return address should be. He finds it on the coffee table when he comes home from school.
“Your boyfriend wrote you a letter,” Sarah calls out from the other room. “I left it there for you.”
He opens it. A single sheet of thin paper, the kind they used to use for typing. It reads:
I never made it to Egypt. Got to Spain and found plenty to keep me entertained here. No pyramids, but did you know they have the most incredible ruins up in the mountains? Ancient monasteries with collapsed roofs. And if you stay the night you can see the ghosts of monks floating in and out of the doorways. It’s the truth. I met an old man who lives by a railroad and he says he’s going to be my guide and take me to a little village where the ghosts have come down from the mountains and live side by side with the living. They have mortgages and everything.
That’s just the thing about being dead, isn’t it? You never really are.
Here’s something else. Just before I left I got a letter taped to my mailbox (she came to where I lived!) from that diabolical Lolita in spectacles. You know, the one responsible for my ruin. Anyway, I’ve been carrying the letter around in my suitcase and I take it out every now and then and reread it over an Orujo at the bar. You’d never guess it was written by a teenage girl. It’s about what you would expect of a middle-aged woman who flaunts the conventions of romance and goes to see foreign films by herself. It breaks my heart how perfect they are, these girls, sometimes. But she included a piece of a poem by my namesake, and it occurs to me that you might be able to make some sense of it.
There is no better way to know us
Than as two wolves, come separately to a wood.
Now neither’s able to sleep—even at a distance
Distracted by the soft competing pulse
Of the other….
I’m off. There are ghosts to discover. I’m telling you, they are beautiful—they seem to be lit by fireflies.
Good luck, my lupine brother. Keep that wilderness alive while I’m gone. Don’t let those little scurrying foxes outpace you!
T. H.
Six weeks after Ted Hughes leaves Carmine-Casey, the administration brings in his replacement. She’s a quiet, deferential young woman who has just finished a degree in education and seems to cower like a mouse whenever she’s around students. Her name is Ms. Prentiss, and she wears clips in her short hair that make her look even younger than she is, so some of the girls take pity on her and protect her, forming an almost maternal shield among them.
Binhammer is assigned to be her mentor and get her settled, and on her second day of teaching she comes into the teachers’ lounge looking pale and rent.
“I think the students miss their old teacher,” she says to Binhammer.
It seems some of the girls have gotten through the shield and have been testing her tenderness with their teeth.
“Maybe, but they’ll forget about him. They have short memories.”
Ms. Prentiss nods. “He must have been some teacher.”
Binhammer smiles. “His name was Ted Hughes.”
He leans forward and waits for her reaction, but there is none.
“Like the poet,” he continues. “You know, Sylvia Plath’s husband?”
“Oh, I guess I should have known that. I have a lot of catching up to do in my reading.”
Binhammer shrugs and leans back again. “It’s not important.”
“Was he a really good teacher?” She looks at the clock anxiously in anticipation of her next class. “I bet he was.”
“Actually,” Binhammer replies, “I never really saw him teach.” Just that one time. Through the window. His eyes lit up as though by fireflies. “But, yes, the girls really liked him. They were…upset when he left. Heartbroken, even. They really were.”
acknowledgments
I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Josh Getzler for his faith, persistence, savvy, and sincerity; and to Sally Kim for making this—every single page—a better book. I also want to thank Simon Lipskar for his incisive reading of the manuscript and his support throughout the entire process. And, most of all, thanks to Megan Abbott, who taught me everything I know about teenage girls and grown men.
About the Author
JOSHUA GAYLORD received his master’s and Ph.D. from New York University, specializing in twentieth-century American and British literature. For the past nine years, he has taught English at an elite Upper East Side prep school. He also teaches literature and cultural studies as an adjunct professor at the New School. He lives in New York with his wife, the Edgar Award–winning novelist Megan Abbott.
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Credits
Jacket design by Jarrod Taylor
Copyright
Excerpt from “A Modest Proposal” from Collected Poems by Ted Hughes. Copyright © 2003 by The Estate of Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, and Faber and Faber Ltd.
HUMMINGBIRDS. Copyright © 2009 by Joshua Gaylord. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition August 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-194175-7
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