Hummingbirds (27 page)

A
dulthood 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?”

“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.”

“They’re out of town,” she said. In fact, they were at a dinner party on the West Side, but the lie was an easy one. She pointed to the shelf next to the television set. “You have a lot of movies.”

“Do you want to watch one?”

So he ordered Chinese food and they watched
The Third Man,
and she didn’t tell him she’d already seen it because he seemed excited to introduce her to it.

Afterward, he said, “What do you want to do now?” and she shrugged.

In the other room his phone rang and he went to answer it. For a few minutes, she listened to his half of the conversation. The words were light and meaningless and she didn’t like how they excluded her. So she walked down the hall and found him sitting on the edge of the bed, the phone to his ear. She stopped in the doorway, leaning against the jamb. They looked at each other through the thin veil of his conversation. He smiled at her. Then she went and sat by him on the bed and leaned back, supporting herself on her palms. When he hung up the phone, she looked at him, and she made her eyes tell him it was okay. He could. It was okay. She lay back for him. And now her mind was going like mad, and she wondered if her breath smelled like General Tso’s chicken, and she wondered if she should go to the bathroom first, and she wondered if she would bleed like Sylvia Plath did in
The Bell Jar,
though she also knew not to be disappointed because many girls didn’t bleed at all, she heard. She wondered if he would do everything, or if there were things she would be expected to do, like unbutton his shirt for him or put her hands on his back. She didn’t want to be a little girl about any of it, and she was proud that she didn’t feel like crying at all, not even a little, because that was such a cliché. And then her clothes were off and his were off, and he moved her around on the bed, which was good because she didn’t want to figure out where to go, and then she felt something against her thigh and
she thought, Something is happening, yes, something is really and truly happening, and this moment can run on and on and wrap itself in thinking all it likes because this is a physical thing, an organic thing, a thing of carbon and blood and physics, and there’s nothing that will stop it now, not even my calamitous brain. And she waited for it in the dark, and then she felt it, like a pressure between her thighs—it was inside her,
inside her,
and it was happening, and she was thinking of a million things, of ambulances below on the street, of James Joyce and John Donne, of Orson Welles and that whistling tune from
The Third Man,
of her fingernails and how she should stop biting them, of cartoon characters and world wars and calculus exams and music that made her chest heavy. And then there was something that replaced the thinking, like a drain had opened in her head and all the million words and images swirled away, because she was aware of her stomach and her legs and her toes, and the way her hands gripped the shoulders of this man, this man, and the way her nipples felt when his chest brushed against them, and everything else went away except her ankles and her spine and her belly and her teeth and—

Afterward, she went to the bathroom and turned on the light and looked at herself in the mirror. There was no hurry in her gut now. Just a peacefulness.

“Not a virgin,” she whispered.

She wondered why she couldn’t think of a word that meant “not a virgin,” and then she thought maybe being a virgin was like being French: there was no word for not being French. And she breathed in deep and breathed out and examined her eyes very carefully in the mirror and was pleased to find that she was still the same except for the parts of her mind and body that weren’t.