Hummingbirds (19 page)

I
t is a bitter cold Friday night the second week in December, right before the Carmine-Casey School for Girls lets out for Christmas, when Ted Hughes and Sibyl Lockhart can be found (if, in fact, anyone were looking for them) ducking into a small dark restaurant fifteen blocks south of the school. The restaurant is long and narrow with an exposed brick wall on one side and large murals on the other depicting the canals and row houses of some small Eastern European village. They have come directly from school, and because they are the only patrons so early in the evening—it is just dark outside—their waiter spends most of his time gazing at them from the back of the restaurant.

“I was a waitress once,” Sibyl says. “I wasn’t any good at it. I have no balance.”

This is the fourth time they have seen each other outside of school like this, Ted Hughes leaning across the table toward her, she wondering if this is what it is like to be the object of his distraction rather than the passive audience of it. Is this what it is like to be looked at by the eyes that go everywhere?

They talk about things from the past to create a surrogate history to anchor themselves in this place, in this restaurant, with that waiter standing in the back, watching them. She tells him about Bruce, her ex-husband, about how nice he seemed at first when she was still a waitress and he would be waiting for her outside when she finished her shift because he was too poor to eat at the restaurant where she worked.

“And then I married him,” she says.

Ted Hughes nods.

“Don’t you want to know why?” she asks.

“Why you married him?”

“Most people ask. If you’re separated and you talk about your ex, most people ask why you got together in the first place. Like it was obviously destined to fail from the beginning.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway, I’m going to tell you why I married him. Do you want to know why? It’s because he told me I wasn’t a very good waitress. Nobody else told me that. He just said it like it was a fact, the same way he would say that this tablecloth needs ironing. And I knew it was true, and I liked that he said it because it made me think I could trust him. I thought it meant that he was honest.”

“And was he?”

“Mostly. It wasn’t dishonesty that split us up.”

“What was it?”

“Other things.”

Ted Hughes nods and waits. Instead of continuing, she grabs her purse from under the table and begins to dig through it. She brings up handfuls of things—little jeweled pill cases, plastic tubes with writing on the sides, slips of paper that look like receipts, single earrings that have lost their mates—until she finds what she is looking for, a pink cylinder of lipstick and a pocket mirror that she unfolds in front of him. She twists up the lipstick and uses her pinkie to pick off a bit of lint stuck to the end, then dashes it in quick strokes across her lips. She glances up from the mirror and says, “You don’t mind, do you?”

He seems enthralled by the process, just the hint of a smile on his lips. “You know what’s good about you?” he responds. “You know those backstage musicals they used to make? The ones where you see everything happening behind the scenes and you never see the performance itself? That’s what you’re like. You’re all behind the scenes. Between the acts.”

“Is that good?”

“Of course it’s good. Couldn’t be better. Every man wants to know what goes on backstage. The best thing about the show is thinking about what’s going on in the wings. It’s magic.”

She drops her lipstick and mirror back in her bag along with the other items and lets it fall to the floor with a glassy thud. “Sure,” she says, wryly. “But then, once you see it, the magic’s gone. You want to know a secret? Women aren’t supposed to run out of surprises too quickly.”

He laughs. “Then I’ll tell you another secret. Men aren’t too smart. They’re easy to surprise, even if they’ve seen the same trick a hundred times.”

The two sit there, looking at each other out of the corners of their eyes—as though tugging playfully at opposite ends of an invisible cat’s cradle strung between them.

“So why,” he says, “did you and your husband split up?”

“Oh,
that.”
She shoos away the topic. “It’s not even tragic. It’s just dull. You know those men who live their whole lives as though they think someone is making a documentary about them? Those men, when they realize it’s not a movie anyone would pay good money to see…well…”

When it becomes clear that she doesn’t want to talk about her ex-husband anymore, he begins to tell her about how in his college days he once met a man on a train between New York and Chicago, a man who seemed to take an almost paternal interest in him and asked him all about the classes he was taking, the literature he was reading.

“T. S. Eliot!” the man commented reverently. “Ha!” Whenever Ted Hughes mentioned an author he recognized, the man would say “Ha!” as though it were an old friend and he was pleased by the sudden reacquaintance.

“John Donne. Ha!”

He was a salesman—sold industrial planers—but he remembered his school days, how reading was his favorite subject and how he had a picture in his head of how each of the authors looked. In his mind Jonathan Swift was tall and thin and nimble, and Tennyson was a big round man like Santa Claus. Jane Aus
ten was a proper lady, like the old southern woman who lived down the street from him when he was growing up.

And then he talked about how he always hoped his two sons would go to college and read books and get together with other people to talk about those books. But they didn’t seem to take to literature and didn’t make very good marks in high school, so college wasn’t really in the cards for them. But they were good boys, and they knew to do the right things in life. And he was just happy he had done well enough in the selling game to help them out with buying their houses and having their kids—and that maybe he could use his money to send some of his grandchildren to college some day.

“Let me ask you a question,” he said then to Ted Hughes. “Your father. Was he a—was he an educated man?”

No. In fact, Ted Hughes’s father had dropped out of high school to work as a grocery clerk.

“And you did it anyway!” the man said, laughing warmly to himself and shaking his head. “You went to college anyway. You made good, kid. You made good.”

Then the man was quiet for a while, looking at the window, smiling and shaking his head every now and then. When they were five minutes from Chicago he turned to Ted Hughes and explained that he was a betting man and that he would bet him a hundred dollars, cash on the nail, that he, Ted Hughes, couldn’t name ten Shakespeare plays.

A hundred dollars was a lot of money, but Ted Hughes knew that he could easily win and began to recite the names.

“King Lear. Macbeth. Romeo and Juliet. Hamlet. Julius Caesar…”

After the name of each play, the man would nod and his eyes would glisten fondly as though he were a child listening to his favorite bedtime story for the hundredth time.

“The Merchant of Venice. Titus Andronicus. A Winter’s Tale…”

Until he had named ten.

“And I bet you could keep going, too, couldn’t you?” the
man said, seeming pleased. Then he took his wallet from his jacket pocket and counted five twenties into Ted Hughes’s hand. “Well earned, my boy.”

When they got off the train, they got separated in the crowd, and when Ted Hughes saw the man again he was twenty yards down the platform. The man nodded his head and waved, and that was the last he ever saw of him.

“He wanted you to have that money,” Sibyl says, looking into the candle between them. “He wanted to give you the money.”

Ted Hughes nods. More people have come into the restaurant by now, and there is a lot of movement around them. Outside the streets are lit up by the dingy glow of streetlights reflecting off the dirty snow in the gutters.

“Tell me another story,” Sibyl says. “I just like the way you talk.”

After dinner, they walk a winding route through the streets of the city until they end up at Sibyl’s apartment.

“I’m a mess,” she says, standing one step above him on the stoop so that their eyes are at the same level. “I’m a divorcée with a penchant for men who dislike women. Just to warn you.”

“You know,” he says, drawing her hair out of her eyes with a finger, as if pulling aside a curtain, “you’re the second woman this month to tell me I don’t like women.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“I know what you didn’t mean.”

And then, upstairs, she flutters nervously about the apartment plucking dead leaves from her plants. She’s not sure what to do, how to behave. She excuses herself and goes into the bathroom and looks at herself in the mirror, reapplying her lipstick and fixing her hair. “A mess,” she says in a whisper to herself. “I’m a mess.” When she comes out of the bathroom, there he is sitting on the couch, smiling thoughtfully at her as though she were a semi-interesting piece of art hanging on the wall of a museum. Not a masterpiece, mind you—just something to fill out an exhibition.

“I like your apartment,” he says. “I like the plants.”

She can’t help it, she begins walking around nervously again. She moves back and forth from kitchen to living room to bedroom, back and forth, until he stops her—putting an arm out in front of her as she passes by and taking her, hands on her hips, and shifting her body to face him where he’s sitting at the edge of the couch. He looks up at her for a second, not saying anything. And he draws her down to him….

Then they are lying together in the dark of the bedroom—a city kind of dark, which is never really that dark. There is incandescence everywhere in the streets. It seeps in through the cracks—it creeps in under the door and between the blinds.

She is lying on her side, looking at his face in profile. He is lying on his back with his arms crossed behind his head. He’s concentrating on the ceiling, as though he were trying to read it. The secret language of ceilings, the messages they give. If anyone could comprehend their fractured poetry, he could.

“I’m thirsty,” she says. “Do you want a glass of water?”

“Sure.”

She gets out of the bed and crosses the room—conscious of her body, pale and ghostly in the shadows of the dim, stale apartment. She returns, and he hasn’t moved. Putting a glass next to him on the bedside table, she goes around to the other side and climbs back into the bed—sitting up and leaning her back against the wall. Then she looks down and is unhappy with the way her breasts and stomach look, so she draws the sheet up over herself.

Next to her, Ted Hughes turns over and raises himself onto his elbows.

“What do you think Leo would say if he knew?” she says.

“Binhammer?” He smiles into the darkness as though picturing the scene. “You know what one of my students told me yesterday? She said that he has an unofficial fan club—this group of girls who go around calling each other Mrs. Binhammer.”

“No!”

“Can you picture it? For some reason I imagine them having
tea. ‘Pass the sugar, would you, Mrs. Binhammer?’ ‘Of course, Mrs. Binhammer.’ ‘Lovely day, isn’t it, Mrs. Binhammer?’ ‘No doubt about it, Mrs. Binhammer.’”

“Did you tell him?” She giggles. “He would be in raptures.”

“Not yet. I’m going to.”

“They adore him.”

“They sure do.”

“Those girls just adore him.”

He nods. He rubs his face in his hands. Then they look at each other, and their smiles fade—the talk of Binhammer having made them feel suddenly self-conscious, as though he were the ghost in the machine of their interaction.

“I have to go,” he says. “Unless you think—”

“No,” she says, nodding her head. “It’s okay.”

She watches him dress, and then she gets up and puts on a shirt. When she flips the light switch, they both close their eyes against the sudden light. The mundanities of the bright world come tumbling back. They are now like two colleagues again, and she wants to ask him if he’s finished writing his semester final yet, but she reconsiders.

“Oh god,” she says, looking at herself in the mirror above her dresser. I’m a mess, she thinks, but she doesn’t say it because she’s already said it out loud too many times tonight.

In the hallway, as he’s putting on his scarf by the door while she leans against the wall, he chuckles and says, “You know something? For a while I got the impression that Binhammer didn’t like me. The first few weeks I was here. He would give me these looks like I was trespassing on his territory.”

She smiles. “You were. You are.”

“But I’m no threat at all. Those girls—you’ve seen them—they would die for him. They’re loyal as Nazis. Little love Nazis.”

She shrugs. “Well, maybe it’s just that you’re a man. He always says he doesn’t know how to get along with other men.”

He nods thoughtfully. “Yeah,” he says. “I can see that. I’m like that too.”

And that’s when she finds herself laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing. I just like the way you talk. Nothing you say ever seems quite true—but I believe it anyway.”

O
nce Ted Hughes is gone, Sibyl turns to face her empty apartment. Nothing moves in the place unless she moves it. She imagines it sitting silent as a grave while she’s gone all day at school. Still leaning against the wall, she closes her eyes and listens to the rumble of the refrigerator, the hissing of the radiator, the muffled voice of a television coming through the wall from next door. Down the hall she hears a door open and then close again. Two voices descend the stairwell, laughing. She imagines the apartment those two voices have left behind. It would look like her apartment, except without her in it.

She looks at the clock. It’s just after midnight. Suddenly decisive, she gets dressed again and reapplies her makeup in the bathroom.

Shutting off all the lights, she locks the apartment door behind her and takes the stairs down to the street, where she hails a cab and gives the driver an address. Ten minutes later, she’s knocking at the door of an apartment.

“Who is it?”

“It’s me, open the door.”

The door opens, and Binhammer is standing there in his underwear.

“What are you—”

“I know Sarah’s out of town. I wouldn’t have come otherwise.” She pushes her way past him into the apartment, and he closes the door behind her.

He puts a hand through his hair. “But that doesn’t mean—”

“We have to talk.”

“Listen, I don’t think…I don’t know if it’s a good idea for you to—”

They are standing in the dimly lit hallway. The only light in the apartment is coming from the bedroom.

“Were you sleeping?” she says, as though that were the only indiscretion of note.

“Not yet.”

“It’s stuffy. You need to open a window.”

“What?”

“A window. Aren’t you choking in here?”

“No, I don’t know what you’re—”

She goes across the living room to the window and pulls it up a few inches. She takes a deep breath of the icy city night outside and turns to face him again. He turns on some lights, and the glass of the window becomes a mirror.

“It’s like this whenever she goes out of town,” she says. “You don’t know how to take care of yourself.”

“I was in bed. I—”

She shakes her head. “Oh, listen, I don’t care about any of this. I just came to tell you something.”

“What is it?”

At first she doesn’t say anything. Then she says:

“I’m getting to like your friend Ted Hughes. I’m getting to like him a lot.”

Binhammer takes a few steps back until he hits the couch, and then he sits down hard.

“That bothers you, I know it does. But you’re not the hero of every story, you know. Sometimes you’re just a minor character in someone else’s story. Jesus, you men are like dandelions. One puff of air, and you’re blown all to pieces. Anyway, I just thought I should tell you.”

He takes a deep breath and looks straight ahead—right past her to something in the dark beyond.

“Hey, listen.” She goes over to him, more sympathetic now, and stands before him. She takes his head between her hands and
makes him look at her. “It has nothing to do with you. I mean, it’s not something you should feel bad about.”

He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t look angry. He just looks gone.

Her previous strength is diminishing. She feels herself shriveling up.

“Look,” she says. “I don’t know what to do. What do you want me to do? Continue my campaign to make you unfaithful to your wife? It’s over. You won. I’m vanquished.”

“It’s your choice,” he says finally. Even his voice isn’t angry. Is it that she does not possess the power to affect him?

“What do you mean? What’s my choice? What choice?”

“I mean—” He squeezes his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “I just mean do what you want. It’s up to you.”

She sits down, not on the couch but on the floor in front of him. Now she is looking up at him and he seems powerless, which makes her feel powerless too for some reason.

“It’s up to you,” he says again.

“What if I don’t want it to be up to me? What then?”

“But it is. It’s up to you.”

“Wait, wait. Just a second. Just stop for a second. I don’t know—the thing is…”

She gets up on her knees in front of where he’s sitting, now looking levelly at him. But his face is like a deep black well—there’s no expression, and it’s hard to focus on. Her first impulse, in a panic now, is to kiss away the remoteness, and she leans forward to do it, but his lips are immobile and his eyes have all the paralysis of a face on a coin.

After she pulls away, he says, “Goddamnit.” He says it low and quiet, somewhere between helpless and cruel. “Goddamnit. He gets everything he wants. He got you too.”

She stands up again, folding her arms. Her fist clenches inadvertently. She would like to knock something out of him.

“For Christ’s sake, Binhammer. Do you even notice when there’s someone else in the room? I hope you’re not like this with your wife.”

“What does that mean?”

“I mean, do I have to spend all my time listening to him talk about you and then come over here and listen to you talking about him?”

He looks at her, mystified. She has made him see her, at least. For the moment. Then, not wanting to look backward for fear of seeing them clearly, she wonders what lines she has crossed.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to…What do you want me to do?” she says.

“Nothing,” he says. “I don’t want you to do anything.”

The hall light is on, and one small lamp by the couch. The brutality of the moment strains like the glare of the sun when you come outside for the first time. It is two thirty in the morning.

“To hell with you then,” she says, moving toward the door. “To hell with you.”

“You were the one who did this. You were the one who came here.”

“I didn’t start anything. I don’t know how to start things. It was your wife. Your picture-perfect wife with her picture-perfect affair. I’m taking up smoking again.”

He doesn’t say anything. He looks at her, silently raging. She is trying to unlock the door, but she doesn’t know which deadbolts are engaged or which way to turn them.

“Your wife—the tragic heroine in a fucking Russian novel.”

“Get out,” his voice quivers. “Get out now. I don’t want you here.”

“Your wife with her outré affairs and her tragic martyrdom. I need a cigarette.”

“Go.” His face is pinched and red, and he puts the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Please.”

“Your wife.” She turns the deadbolt knobs and pulls at the door, but it won’t budge. “What the hell is the combination to this thing?”

The door finally comes open, throwing her a little off balance. She braces herself against a table in the hall, toppling a stack of books to the floor. Now she’s on the threshold of something, even if it’s just the space outside the apartment, quiet carpeted halls with their humming fluorescents, the lines of doorways just like this one—indistinguishable stacked cubicles of hope and lethargy. Each one its own little inferno of sleeplessness. Things brimming over the tops of other things. Bubbling up.

“Don’t talk about her,” he says. Measured now—he has regained himself. Though his arms are held out in a pose of paralysis, itching to move, to act, but without vector or purpose. “You don’t talk about her. What has she got to do with this?”

“No, of course. I wouldn’t want to sully her. Let’s not bring her down into the dirt with the rest of us. And how about this—whenever you feel pissed off at her, why don’t you just be pissed off with me instead.”

“You don’t—” He flinches.

“If we work together on this, I think we can keep her out of the muck. What do you say?”

She waits for him to say something, but he refuses to look at her. The way he’s standing there, poised—the whole scene looks like a drama in a cheap hotel.

“Jesus,” she says finally. “You’re just looking for someone to be mad at.”

She turns and walks through the door. Out in the hall, she is three paces toward the steps when he appears in the doorway behind her.

“And what are you looking for, huh?” This is what he says. “What is it exactly that you are looking for?” She can still hear him as she walks away. “What are you looking for?”

Out in the street the cold air feels nice against her skin. She looks at her watch; it’s almost three in the morning. The city lies dormant—a cab rattles by and slows down to see if she wants a ride. She shakes her head and it moves away, its taillights making the hardened drifts of snow on the sidewalks glow red. These are the insomniac hours of night. If she were in the backseat of
that cab, she would hear the rattling of the car, the groan of the artificial leather seat under her, the driver sucking his teeth, and nothing else. An oasis of sound in a desert of wintry billowing steam from under the streets.

She turns a corner and goes into a twenty-four-hour bodega. A man behind the counter is watching a small black-and-white television showing a sitcom that was canceled ten years ago.

“Yes,” he says. “What does the lady want?”

“Cigarettes,” she says, pulling some bills from her coat pocket. “Marlboro 100s, Ultra-Light.”

“Yes. Cigarettes for the lady.” He pushes a box of cigarettes across the counter. “Matches?”

“Yes, matches.”

Outside there is no wind, so she stands on the sidewalk and lights her cigarette and watches the match burn down almost to her fingers before she shakes it out and walks to the corner to put it in a trash bin.

The smoke curls into her lungs along with a bracing jolt of raw icy air. It has been seven years since she gave up smoking. She smokes that one down to nothing where she stands and presses it out against the rim of the trash bin. Then she lights another one and begins to walk west along the deserted streets. She walks until she gets to the edge of Central Park and then keeps on going.

The park isn’t a place she should be at night—the sprawling emptiness of shadows and corners and echoes. People are mugged in the park all the time. People are killed. Reckless people, like the ones who have just taken up smoking again after seven years.

She follows the winding paths in no particular direction. She has gotten lost in the park before—getting turned around and trying to use the tips of the buildings above the trees as a compass. Now she just walks.

She passes a young couple, walking arm in arm, looking as they would if it were the middle of the day and children were
running and playing all around them. A few minutes later she sees a group of teenagers at a distance. Boys and girls, the age of her students. Their voices, crude and unselfconscious, make her feel voyeuristic. They hoot shrilly and laugh, the timbre of their cries modulating from the guttural and animalistic to the poetic and almost musical. Like infants discovering the power of their own throats. Always loud. Always loud. They disappear in the opposite direction.

She wonders if she can walk until dawn, until the faint glow of morning rises in the city. And now she pictures the city as a hot coal, an ember on an empty beach, its burning glow tinting the night around it with a smoky orange.

“Shit,” a voice says, startling her. “Look at this.” The path is narrow, and three young men suddenly appear before her, presenting a wall of oversize coats and yellow eyes. The one who spoke has a toothpick dangling from his lip. He shakes his head at the other two. They are looking up and down her body.

This is it, she thinks. This is it for me. Everything is over. The end of the whole show.

She’s watching this as though it were a play being acted out on a stage before her, as if the only thing she has to do is just wait for the curtain to drop so she can stop thinking about it all.

“Woman, what do you think you’re doing?”

She doesn’t know whether he wants her to answer or not.

“Do you know what time it is? This is a bad fucking place to be at this time of night.”

“Bad,” one of the others says.

“A lot of mean motherfuckers around here. Rip you up.”

He shakes his head, as if to say it’s a shame. And he looks truly regretful.

“You know some girl got herself killed last week? Is that what you’re trying to do? You trying to get yourself killed? Huh? How come? You unhappy?”

“Yeah,” she says quietly, looking down at her feet and the frozen path under them. “I’m unhappy.”

When she looks back up, he is staring at her in a differ
ent way. He seems embarrassed and rolls the toothpick with his tongue to the other corner of his mouth.

“Well, you’re lucky is all I’m saying.” His voice is softer now. “Lucky that we aren’t the bad guys. Isn’t she lucky?” He turns again to his friends, whose eyes are still focused on her breasts, her legs. “Okay, motherfuckers, cut it out. The woman don’t need you feeling her up in your nasty porn-brains.”

He laughs apologetically. “See?” he says to her. “This is what I’m talking about.”

She stands there. Nothing is going to happen.

“Why don’t you go home now.”

Nothing is going to happen.

And here she is, still in her body, unmurdered. Another day unmurdered. It’s a funny thing to think. She wants to laugh, but it’s cold and she shivers instead.

“Go on home now,” he says again. “You know where you’re going? You want us to walk you? I promise I can keep these motherfuckers in line.”

“No,” she says. “No thank you.”

“Okay, lady. You take it easy now, all right? Don’t be doing this anymore. You just stay at home if you feel bad. Okay?”

Nothing is going to happen. There is no danger in the world except from the brightly lit bedrooms of charming men.