Hummingbirds (25 page)

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.

I
n 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 the 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 entirety 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.

I
t 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.

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:

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 mea
sure 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.”