Hummingbirds

by Joshua Gaylor

  He finds Ted Hughes in the classroom where he first saw him many months ago—when he went from room to room looking for him, peering at him through the narrow window in the door. Binhammer stood alone in the empty hall then, and he watched Ted Hughes speaking words like regurgitated nourishment to the upturned throats of nested featherless baby birds. Now everything has shifted, and Binhammer himself stands among the gawky bodies of students in the hall—and Ted Hughes sits alone at the front of an empty classroom. Ted Hughes, once so grandiose, now seems lonesome and small.

  When he opens the door, Ted Hughes lights up like an electrical appliance after replacing a fuse it has blown. That moment of relief when everything suddenly works again. Except relief isn’t what Binhammer feels.

  “Binhammer! I’ve been looking for you.”

  “Goddamn you,” Binhammer says. He can feel his own body, rigid, furiously aflame. His fingers could strangle, his feet could kick, his teeth could rip. “Goddamn you. You fucking disgusting pig—”

  “Take it easy. What are you so upset about?”

  “What am I—? Goddamn you. You fucked that girl. You fucked her.” Binhammer moves toward him, and Ted Hughes backs up between the rows of desks. “And it’s not cute and it’s not charming—it’s just perverse and vulgar. You’re garbage.”

  “Wait, hold on—you don’t get it.”

  “What don’t I get?” Binhammer stops, inches from Ted Hughes, his fists clenched at his sides, his heartbeat loud in his ears, almost deafening.

  “You don’t get it, but you of all people should.”

  Afterward, Binhammer remembers only a few things. The weight of his arm, feeling like a slug of concrete, a feeling of the wind being knocked out of him, as though he were the one being punched instead of doing the actual punching, the clatter of the desks as Ted Hughes is driven back against them, toppling over onto the floor. And this, too: the immediate sense of remorse, a sickliness in his legs, the desire to sit down right there on the floor and never move again. Except that he is already out the door, pushing aside a few girls who, drawn by the noise, rush in to aid their fallen teacher.

  chapter 37

  The look on her face when she hears: a million little calamities in her eyes and her whole life tipped sideways.

  “I can’t listen,” she says. “Don’t tell me, I can’t hear it.”

  “But—”

  “You don’t understand. Jesus, how could you understand? I feel…”

  “What? What do you feel?”

  “Diminished.”

  He says nothing.

  “The two of you,” she goes on. “You’re beginning to look the same to me.”

  He wants to tell her—he wants something from her, though he does not know what. Explanation, maybe. Approval. Comfort, like a child. But she seems broken, more upset than he is himself. And when he finds himself beginning to defend Ted Hughes, he stops short.

  They argue, she puts her face in her hands and does not allow him to come near her. He sits, seized by a curious paralysis. He can see things dissipating before his eyes. Everything turning to cloud and mote.

  Eventually they sleep, but in the morning she is packing for a trip. She has been planning to go to Philadelphia to do some research. She was going to go in the spring, but she’s decided to go now. She doesn’t know for how long. She is sorry. She is culpable. She is implicated in the ugliness, and she cannot be around it right now. Not Ted Hughes, not Binhammer, none of it. She’ll be all right. She’ll call.

  At school, he teaches by rote, letting most of his classes out early and not even bothering to show up to some. Cutting classes, like a sullen teenager. No one notices, as there are larger concerns.

  He keeps expecting to turn the corner and find Ted Hughes standing there smiling—expansive and jolly. But even if it were to happen, Binhammer doesn’t know what he would do. His hands ache, and it feels like all his guts and brains are in the joints of his knuckles. Lately all he seems to be able to do is wind his hands around each other.

  “Binhammer,” Pepper Carmichael says in the teachers’ lounge, “what’s the matter with you?”

  “He misses his little friend,” Sibyl says, her voice arrow-straight.

  I would kill you if I knew how, he thinks. I would kill you if my hands would let me.

  Liz Warren is out of school for a week. Later he hears she is not coming back, she is going to be graduated early. Mrs. Landry calls him to the office again to tell him. She thanks him again for covering Ted Hughes’s classes temporarily and tells him she’s interviewing for a replacement. But in the meantime, he should know about Liz Warren, and if there was any information he wanted to pass along to her, it should go through Mrs. Landry. In addition, would he mind letting his colleagues know about Liz’s early graduation?

  Outside the office, he is faced with a rushing fulmination of bodies—short and screeching, ruddy and soft. There are girls everywhere, and he is carried out into the current.

  The slick and the faithful, Ted Hughes once said, referring to the student population, the meek and the blighted.

  The rush of feather and claws around him, of nails and paint.

  And suddenly he realizes that he despises them with an infantile rage. These girls with their accidental sexuality. Luxuriating in their irresponsibility. They are not to be held accountable—they have risen above accountability. Did he kiss you? They are always talking about some boy or another. What else did he do? Do you think he’s going to do it again? As though they were speculating about an artist carving a piece of wood. Trying to figure out what shape this girl might take when he’s finished with her. Giving like balsa in his hands.

  Little fleshy protrusions so densely packed in the hallway that it’s impossible not to brush against them. Somewhere behind him he hears them talking.

  “I think this shirt makes my boobs look too big.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Why don’t you ask Mr. Binhammer about it? He’s right there.”

  “Stop it! Oh my god. I can’t believe you said that!”

  He, pretending not to hear. The voices retreating, giggling coarsely down the hall. These rafters are filled with femininity, like an infestation of bats crawling upside down inside his skull. Sometimes they drop sleeping to the ground with a pathetic plop, and then they struggle to right themselves. You reach out a hand to help and those teeth, like slivers of broken glass, sink into your skin.

  Everywhere he looks, the arrogant pinkness of womanhood. The hive is abuzz. Cicadas in the bushes. So many locusts that they blacken the sky. He can feel their eyes burning into his back.

  He had been wondering, upstairs, how to tell the others about Liz Warren—how to tell Sibyl and Lonnie and Pepper that the girl is gone for good. But when he opens the door to the teachers’ lounge and finds them standing there in a furtive whispering circle, when they look up at him and hush themselves and metamorphose their expressions with great practiced smoothness into disapproving half smiles (they were close, the two of them—he’s just as bad as the other), when he realizes that he can no longer tell the difference between their eyes and those of the vespine creatures in the hall—that’s when he realizes he doesn’t have to worry about how to tell them because they already know. They already know.

  chapter 38

  Adulthood feels like empty rooms with clocks ticking. It feels like being at home alone and suddenly becoming aware of the refrigerator when the motor shuts off. It feels like staring at the ceiling or straightening pictures or listening for the mailman.

  When Liz Warren has had enough of conjuring up metaphors for adulthood, she puts on her coat and goes out. She has not been outside for three days, and the cold is surprising to her. She feels the icy air in her lungs and on her skin like tiny frozen clips biting at her all over.

  Adulthood is like winter mosquitoes.

  Sometimes she is tired of herself. So sick of herself that she would be happy to
think of anything else in the world.

  She enters the park in the dimming light of the late afternoon and walks the paths past the joggers until she comes to one of the playgrounds. There she stops and puts her fingers through the chain-link fence and watches a mother pushing her yellow-bundled baby on a swing. The woman makes faces at the baby at first, but after a while her mind wanders to other things and her gaze goes blank.

  Walking in the direction of Carmine-Casey, Liz goes past the boat pond where a thin layer of ice grays the surface of the water, and then up to the concrete dais where the large bronze sculpture of Alice in Wonderland sits atop a mushroom—a kind of metal Dixie Doyle, surrounded by a company of men: the March Hare, the Mad Hatter, the Dormouse, the Cheshire Cat.

  And that’s when she sees Mr. Binhammer sitting on one of the benches, something gone wrong with his eyes, as though they have been emptied out and filled back up with sculpted mud.

  She is about to turn and leave when he sees her.

  “Liz?”

  “Hi, Mr. Binhammer.”

  “I was just…looking at the sculpture.”

  “Me too.”

  “Do you want to sit down?”

  “Okay.”

  She has never been able to talk to this man—even under the best of circumstances—and now it seems impossible. What do they have to talk about? She is gone from the school—and she is sure he has heard the reason. She should be embarrassed, she supposes, but recently her mortification has been so great that it has numbed her.

  She waits out the silence with him. They sit next to each other and say nothing, and they say nothing for such a long time that it becomes comfortable, sitting there and saying nothing with Mr. Binhammer.

  After a long time, Mr. Binhammer speaks, and it is as though they have been conversing all along.

  “Did you ever read Alice in Wonderland?”

  “Once. I didn’t like it.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t know. I guess because there were no rules. It seemed like anything could happen. When anything can happen, nothing that does happens means anything.”

  He nods.

  “I never read it myself,” he says. “Isn’t that funny? An English teacher who’s never read Alice in Wonderland.”

  She does not know the response to this, so she keeps quiet.

  “You want to know something else?” he asks. They are at the edge of the park, and he jerks his thumb in the direction of the school. “I have a class right now. I’m missing it.”

  “They’ll be okay,” she says, though she’s not sure he wants reassurance.

  “What about you, just wandering?”

  “I’m supposed to meet my parents at the school. Later, when nobody’s around. We have to have one more meeting with Mrs. Landry. But it’s not for another two hours.”

  “Oh.”

  Again they say nothing for a long time. Her ears fill up with wind and cold as she discovers something: she likes being silent with Mr. Binhammer much more than she ever liked speaking to him.

  Eventually, he says:

  “Liz, listen—I want you to know that I’m sorry for what happened to you.”

  “You don’t have to be sorry.”

  “I mean, I wish it hadn’t happened.”

  “You don’t have to wish that. It’s all right.”

  She wants to tell him something, to explain something, but she’s not sure what it is. It has something to do with her own lack of nervousness at this moment. And it has something to do with the way Mr. Hughes looked the last time she saw him. And it has something to do with a new feeling in her gut that she is someone other than simply Liz Warren, the sullen straight-A student.

  The way things happened was this:

  It was Sunday, the day of the Thomas Hart Benton exhibit. They walked on the paths in the park to the tunnel, and it was there that he kissed her. He took her and pushed her against the wall and the space between them was nothing—and she didn’t have to worry about what to do or how she might be doing it wrong because he kissed as he lectured, overwhelmingly, until your mind went bare with brilliance. She closed her eyes and felt the cold hard stone through the back of her jacket. He held her face, his hands warm and unyielding, as though giving her no option for awkwardness or fear. He would take her and position her like a puppet. He would pose her beautifully, powerfully, as he did with characters in literature. And she could look upon herself and see something she hadn’t seen before.

  Then he stopped and she waited for him to do it again, but instead he pulled away and apologized.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

  She wanted to tell him it was okay, but she thought the apology might just be an excuse for his disappointment in her. And besides, she didn’t know how to reassure someone like Mr. Hughes. So she said nothing.

  And then he was gone.

  Afterward she looked inside of herself to see how she felt, and what she discovered there was loathing. She hated herself for not being natural like other girls who could just kiss boys and not think about it and not have them run away afterward as though they had been bitten by a snake. She hated herself and she hated girls like Dixie Doyle who managed somehow to turn their silliness into seduction. She had watched Dixie flirt with Mr. Binhammer, for example, parading her ridiculousness before him like a peacock, and Liz invariably thought Mr. Binhammer would see through it, would see Dixie for the twee cartoon character that she was. But instead he always seemed charmed by her—and she hated him for being charmed by her and hated her for knowing he would be charmed.

  No doubt if Dixie were to be pushed up against a wall by Mr. Binhammer, she would know how to keep him from running away.

  That was Sunday. The Monday and Tuesday after that she spent her time hating all the other girls in the school. In her mind, Liz added up all the things in the world she wanted but couldn’t have. It was an impressive list, and she could feel each item in her stomach. Mired in embarrassment, she hid in the bathroom during Mr. Hughes’s class so she wouldn’t have to see him. She was afraid he would be kind to her—and the kindness would certainly be of an uninterpretable variety, laced with strands of pity and disappointment and fear of what she would do, who she would tell.

  But she would tell no one. Why couldn’t he understand that she would tell no one?

  On Wednesday he found her in the hall and asked her to follow him to one of the empty classrooms.

  When they were alone, he said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Okay.”

  “You haven’t been in class.”

  “I’ve been sick.”

  “No, you haven’t.”

  She shrugged and crossed her arms across her chest to keep him from seeing her trembling hands.

  “Listen,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Stop saying that. Why do you keep saying that?”

  He looked at her in a new way.

  “You don’t want me to be sorry?”

  “I get it,” she said. “You’re not attracted to me. I understand.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “You don’t have to worry. I’m not going to tell anyone.”

  He laughed, and she felt, as she did frequently, that she had misjudged something important.

  “All right, Madame Bovary,” he said.

  He was going to say something else, but then the bell rang and students started coming in. For the next two days, she went to his class and sat in her seat and watched him teach and thought, I have kissed that man, I have kissed him on the lips and felt him like a leaning timber pinning me to a stone wall. And when his glance landed on her it was not disappointment or fear that she felt coming from those eyes.

  On Friday she lingered in the lobby after school and pretended to be leaving just as he emerged from the elevator with his coat over his arm.

  Outside on the steps, he said in a low voice, “Do you want to talk?”

  “Okay. Where?”r />
  “It can’t be where someone could see us. Here.”

  He wrote something down on a torn half sheet of paper and handed it to her. It was an address.

  “I’ll meet you there,” he said, “in an hour.”

  Yes, she thought. Something is happening. Something is finally happening. And when she arrived at his apartment he showed her his books, lined up neatly on the shelves, and offered her a glass of orange juice and told her how sometimes he could hear the people in the apartment above arguing in a foreign language. Then he sat next to her on the couch and explained that he was sorry if he had made her uncomfortable that day in the park but that he was not sorry he had kissed her.

  “I’ve had boyfriends before,” she said, by way of explaining her credentials. The plural was a stretch, but before Jeremy Notion there had been a boy in the third grade who labeled her his girlfriend for the duration of a week—so it was true in the strictest sense.

  He smiled as if there were nothing she could say that would surprise him.

  “I’m not sorry either,” she said. “I mean about—about the park.”

  He smelled nice when he leaned in to kiss her again, different from the Bardolph boys who smelled mostly of sweat and acne cream. She closed her eyes and tried to mimic the motions of his mouth and tongue. She felt it was important to get things right, and she wondered whether her lips were too dry or whether she should take her glasses off or if that would ruin the moment. But then he put one hand around the back of her neck and tilted her face up to him so it was impossible to do anything but kiss him.

  He stopped, once, and looked at her.

  “We can’t be boyfriend and girlfriend,” he said. “You know that, right?”

  “I know.” She wasn’t at all sure what she knew, but she didn’t want to be someone who needed things explained to her.

  He kissed her again and then stopped and got up and went to the window and looked out.

  “It’s getting dark,” he said. “Your parents will wonder where you are.”