Hummingbirds (26 page)

T
he 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 miser
able 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.

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.

T
he 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 account
able—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.