Hummingbirds (29 page)

At which point Liz asks her mother if she can please shut up, and they ride the rest of the way home in silence.

That night, when Liz pulls her bedcovers up to her chin in a tight fist, sleep comes before she can even recognize it. As though her dreams and her waking life are only a blurred transition apart, the absurd and the sensible merely two different
languages in which to express the same thing. At one point she wakes suddenly and thinks she sees Mr. Hughes lying in the bed next to her. Except that he is shrunken to the size of a child, and by the way his hands are folded over his chest she infers that he is dead. She feels sorry for him, this puny dead child with purpled eye sockets. To know how little she can do for him. It makes her want to cry.

She turns away and feels her body convulse in something like a sob, but she’s already floating away from her own sadness. And in the morning when her alarm goes off she rises eagerly and without hesitation—feeling as though she has been drained of everything in the night, emptied, restored to nothing, and now must go out to find something else to fill herself up with.

“B
inhammer!” Ted Hughes says happily on the other end of the line. “I didn’t think you would call. The last time I saw you, you were clobbering me in the hallowed halls of education. My shoulder hasn’t been right since.”

“I spoke with Liz Warren,” Binhammer says. He is on the phone in the teachers’ lounge. It is the early afternoon, and the room is empty at the moment.

The voice on the other end grows serious. “I was never cut out for teaching, Binhammer. You need apathy. I never had the apathy. Liz—how is she these days?”

He says this as if asking about an old acquaintance.

“Actually she’s fine.”

“God, I’ve never seen a mind like hers. You can’t plot it on a map.”

“I want to talk to you. In person.”

“Sure thing. Hey, listen, I’ll meet you on the roof of the building in an hour.”

“You can’t come back here.”

“They’ll never see me. I can make myself invisible. Besides, I want to see the place one last time.”

An hour later, Binhammer makes his way through the hallway and up the stairwell to the roof. There he finds two girls who spin around guiltily when they are discovered. He thinks: There are girls everywhere.

“Mr. Johansen told us to come up here,” one of the girls says. “He wants us to draw the horizon.”

But they don’t seem to have any implements for drawing. And even though it’s the middle of winter, they aren’t even wearing their regulation blazers. One of the girls shivers, and Binhammer notices that her nipples are evident through the taut ribbed fabric of her turtleneck. Goddamnit. Pink puckered flesh under the fabric of everything. He’s tired of it. Made sick by his own weakness.

He looks at them, disgusted. “Is that your cigarette?” He points to a burning butt at the feet of the two girls.

“No,” says the one.

“No,” says the other.

He gives a casting-off gesture with his head—barely noticeable, the situation isn’t worth more—and the two of them scurry back down the stairs.

A few minutes later the door opens again and Ted Hughes bounds through, looking happy and unshackled.

“Here I am, Binhammer. Ready to pay the piper. But be careful, I’m reckless. Haven’t you heard? I’m a loose cannon. I would just as soon teach a sonnet as kiss your daughter behind the barn.”

“Or my wife.”

The smiling mask melts away. Binhammer suddenly thinks of his father. A man of dire strength. A man with a voice like burning when he was angry, when he was tested. And oh how Binhammer liked to test him. He would climb up on the kitchen counters or neglect to wipe off the soles of his shoes before he came in from the rain, just so he could feel that warm, lashing strength of his father’s voice. That heat, that fury wrapped around him like a blanket. And then, when he was a teenager, the day that his father broke. Binhammer’s coming home at two in the morning, his father slumped in his chair in the dim living room lit ghostly by the screen of the television.
I’ve been out. That’s all, just out. What are you going to do about it?
And his father leaning forward slowly to rise, a great creaking brass colossus—then seeming to change his mind, something heavy pressing him back down, defeating him.
Do what you want. You’ll
do it anyway.
His strength sapped, tested in too many ways. Like Superman asked to leap a tall building one too many times. And Binhammer’s self-loathing. He had made weak that which he thought would always be strong.

This is what he knows: sometimes you battle against things hoping never to be victorious.

And now he sees his father’s face in Ted Hughes. The mention of his wife. It was too much.

“I’m sorry,” Ted Hughes says, folding up as though he were made of tin. “The truth is, I don’t know how to do things right.”

“Forget about it,” Binhammer says, conciliatory.

“No, really. I never thought I was this kind of man. You picture yourself as something—and then it turns out—”

Then they talk of other things. Of the cigarette butts accumulated up here on the roof. Of the trees in the park, which from this height look like bony monuments of the dead. Of the winter and how long it is.

“So what are you going to do now?” Binhammer asks.

“I’ll find something. It won’t be hard. I got a glowing recommendation from Mrs. Landry. They want to keep it quiet. It would be bad for business if it got out.” He pauses. “Maybe I’ll take the rest of the year off. I’d like to go to Egypt. Have you ever been to Egypt? I wouldn’t mind seeing those pyramids. Big. Unassailable. What do you think?”

“Sure. Why not.”

“Those Nubian—” He stops short and looks at Binhammer sideways. “You know, it seemed okay. The girl, I mean. I don’t know what they’re saying—”

“I know. You don’t have to—”

“It really felt—I don’t know. It felt like everything was contained in that moment. As though whatever was going to happen was just going to be sealed up in a jar and put on a shelf in the basement. And that was going to be it. Sealed off. And things would just go on.”

“I understand.” And he does. His own moment with Dixie Doyle. The impossible, ephemeral perfection of it.

“I guess it couldn’t have been that way. Just another delusion, I suppose. If you’re going to build a pyramid, people are going to come visit it.”

“You’ve built other things too.”

“Do you think so?” He looks hopeful.

“She liked you. The girl. She never liked me. I could never get through to her.”

“Well, you have your own fans.”

Ted Hughes stretches and leans back against the low parapet overlooking the street. He shuffles his feet against the pebbly tarmac of the roof.

“So do you think you can handle this place without me?”

“I’ll do all right, I think,” Binhammer smiles. “I never really liked you anyway.”

“Likewise. You were a pain in the ass from the beginning.”

The two look out over the rooftops into some common distance. It is impossible to tell what they are looking at because what they are looking at converges at the horizon like railroad tracks, and then it doubles back around and winds between them, tying them up in clumsy knots and making them feel embarrassed.

“Well,” Ted Hughes says finally, “I better get out of here before they call the FBI. Will you walk behind me and make sure I don’t kiss any of the girls on my way out?” He chuckles humbly and heads toward the stairs.

“I guess I forgive you,” Binhammer says quickly.

“What?”

“I said I guess I forgive you. About Sarah.”

“Oh.”

“She’s gone. She left.”

“Oh my god.”

“No, it’s okay. She says she’ll be back. I think she wants to be done with me for a while. And with you.”

Ted Hughes nods. “She’ll come back,” he reassures Binhammer.

“She’ll come back,” Binhammer reassures back. “But I think you were right. I wasn’t punishing her.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know.” The wind comes hard for a moment, and he finds himself shivering. He imagines Ted Hughes walking down those stairs, pictures him going out large rather than sneaking away, getting lost among all that girlflesh, waving farewell as he’s carried away by those feminine currents, and then through the lobby and out the front door, finding, somewhere in the city, some other outlet for his curious distractible energy, some other person to act as receptacle for his wildly inspired and quickly perishing glances. Romantic. This idea of him. Carried like a muse on the winds of mythology to the next paralytic.

Yes, romantic.

“I wasn’t punishing her,” Binhammer says.

“Then what?”

“I don’t know. See what she saw? Be part of it?”

“But you didn’t do anything. You could have had an affair of your own.”

“No. That’s not what I mean.”

“Oh,” he says. “Right. Men are funny, aren’t they?”

“A riot.”

He follows Ted Hughes down the back stairs, through the room where the recycling bins are stacked on top of each other, to the side door leading out onto the sidewalk. There he stops and watches the man continue through the door.

“I’ll see you later, Binhammer.”

“Yeah. See you later.”

The door closes, and Binhammer stands still for a moment. He turns, then stops and turns again toward the door and stops once more. It’s true, there are such things as permanencies. Making up his mind, he climbs back up the steps and walks through the corridors flush with students.

In the teachers’ lounge he goes directly to the window and gazes down at the street. Ted Hughes still stands in front the building. He hesitates on the sidewalk, looking back and forth—
as though unsure about which direction to go, as though it matters very little which direction he goes. Then he makes up his mind and walks away.

“What are you looking at?”

Walter is the only other person in the lounge. He looks up from his stack of quizzes on the American Revolution and watches Binhammer suspiciously. His grizzled features are emphasized by gray wiry hairs that seem to sprout in unlikely places. He coughs loudly and wipes his mouth with a handkerchief.

“Nothing,” Binhammer says. He goes over to his book bag and shuffles through it. He must look busy. He doesn’t want to talk to Walter. He flips casually through one pocket and opens another, pretending to look for something. In the next zippered section of his bag he finds a collection of objects that he recognizes. This is where he puts the things he has picked up around the school, like a child’s cache of treasures kept in an old cigar box. There are the obscene pink dice he confiscated at the beginning of the year. And the green dial he broke off the copy machine. And a love note from one anonymous girl to another that he found under a desk. These things, charged like the batteries that run the school.

“No, really,” Walter says. “You were looking at something. What was it?”

“Ted Hughes,” Binhammer retaliates. “He just left.”

“Hughes? What the hell is he doing here? I thought they got rid of that pervert.” He puts down his stack of papers in preparation for one of his lectures. “I could tell that guy was trouble from the beginning.”

“Walter—”

“It’s the direction of education nowadays. The sensitive teacher. The teacher who lets students call him by his first name. Your grown-up pal at the front of the class. It’s the same with the subject matter. It used to be you could
teach
history. You could tell them what actually happened. You had history in one class and fiction in another. Now it’s all
interpretation.”
An expression of distaste, as though he has just sipped an inadequate wine.
“No, when I started teaching, teachers were teachers and students were students. And you could tell the difference. Now you go out for a walk, and you find them strolling together. Next thing you know they’ll be going steady.”

Binhammer doesn’t stay to hear any more. He throws open the door and hurries out into the hall. He presses the button for the elevator, but when it doesn’t come immediately he decides to take the stairs instead. In the lobby he cries out “Excuse me!” to break up a group of girls standing in front of the doors. Then he’s on the street heading quickly in the direction he saw Ted Hughes go.

The world is a Ted Hughes world. Those kids playing on the stoop there. They are Ted Hughes kids. Filled with a filigreed art nouveau beauty, intricate and dense. That bus passing, the shampoo ad pasted on its side. There are layers of meaning to be found there. Onionskin you can flake off with your inquisitive fingertips. The cracked, dirty ice on the sidewalk frozen around leaves of garbage. How can you have the patience to look at everything? How could you not be distracted? To maintain focus, to look straight ahead, is to limit yourself—to feel safe within the ignorance of your own chosen territory. Those women—women everywhere, each one a tropical island with hidden estuaries. How
not
to be a pirate in this extravagance?

He finds Ted Hughes three blocks away, balancing on his toes on the curb—waiting for the light to change.

“Binhammer! What are you doing—”

“You’re a great teacher,” Binhammer says, catching his breath.

It’s something to say, and he says it. It’s not exactly what he wants to say—but then, he doesn’t know exactly what he wants to say. And when he hears the words come out of his mouth, they sound like a bag of groceries set down wrong on a counter and left to topple over.

It’s not exactly right. But it will have to do.

“I just wanted to tell you,” he repeats, leaning against the lamppost and smiling at this man—his brother, his usurper, his dark double. “You’re the greatest teacher I know.”

W
hen Binhammer leaves school at the end of the day, he is one of the first out the lobby doors after the final bell rings. He doesn’t want to get caught up in the clumpy mire of girls who will inevitably be milling around outside, looking into the eyes of every teacher who walks by in order to divine, like craggy witches, the contours of the privacy into which he now heads.

He is already down the street when he hears the first high-pitched girlvoices emerging from the doors behind him.

Once around the corner he is safe. He slows his pace and lifts his head.

“Hey, mister.”

It’s his wife, Sarah, standing before a newsstand, her hands in her pockets. She knows the route he takes home. He’s so startled he doesn’t know what to say at first. He waits for some clue about what she wants to hear—worried that if he says the wrong thing, she will disappear again into the crowds.

But she says nothing. Eventually he speaks:

“You’re back.”

“I’m walking home with you,” she says, taking his arm with great deliberateness. “And we’re stopping at the market. We need some groceries for dinner.”

Since the Christmas party at Carmine-Casey over a month ago, neither of them has mentioned what happened. For a while their marriage looked much as it did before. That fraternal affection that comes with endurance over time. The
laughter. Sometimes he would reach out and touch her face, and she would tilt her head into his hand. Not unhappy. Supremely not unhappy.

He had wondered how long they could go on this way. Could it be possible to go on indefinitely without talking about things? How long before the silence became a corrosive virus like in some kind of Edward Albee play? But maybe they were superior to the travails of other couples. Maybe they would just keep on going, steamrolling over all convention—invulnerable to the thousand unsettling tremors that upset the foundations of more provincial homes.

Maybe discussion is a medium for the poorer of spirit.

“Ted Hughes is gone,” he says, looking straight ahead as they walk.

“For good?”

“I said good-bye to him today.”

“Did he say anything about the girl?”

“Not much.”

He watches closely for her reaction, but she either doesn’t have one or is hiding it too well. She simply nods and squints her eyes into the distance.

“So what are you going to do now?” she asks.

“What do you mean?”

“Will you miss him?”

“This isn’t about me.”

She laughs. “Sure.” She is infuriating. She is the most beautiful person he knows. “Then who is it about, darling?”

They go to the market, which is crowded with people in suits on their way home from work. The men’s ties are crooked and undone, as though at some point their necks had expanded to hulkish size, burst the collar, and then shrunk back down again.

He follows her down the fruit and vegetable aisle while she prods at the produce, puts it to her nose, and places it carefully in the basket he’s carrying.

“Do you want melon?” she asks.

“Sure.”

“Or strawberries?”

“Sure. Either one. I don’t care.”

“I don’t care either.”

“Melon.”

“Really? I would have thought you would have said strawberries.”

“So get strawberries.”

“No, I don’t care. I just thought…” She shrugs and puts a cantaloupe into the basket.

“Are you angry at me?” he says.

“Angry at you? Why would I be?”

“I don’t know. You just seem a little mad. Not a lot mad, just a little mad.”

“Well, I’m not.”

“Okay.”

“Should I be?”

“No…. I just thought—we never talked about—since I never told you I knew about you and him, I mean…”

She shakes her head. Leans up and kisses him on the cheek. “Forget it.”

They stop in front of the herbs, and she looks carefully to pick out the cilantro from the parsley and the mint.

“You know,” she says, “I really
wanted
to be mad at you. For keeping it a secret. I wanted to be mad.”

“But?”

“Well, I’m not in the best position to make judgments.”

“That wouldn’t stop some people.”

“It stopped me.”

“The consummate rationalist.”

“Besides, it’s not like you were the one who compromised the fidelity of the marriage.”

“That’s true.” And he means it. His desire for Sibyl never compromised anything, and now she—and that—feels a long way away.

“Anyway,” she continues, “I’m glad you did it. Now there are two reprobates in this marriage instead of just one.”

“That’s why I did it. It was all for you, sweetheart.”

Then she says, “You know what?”

“What?”

“I think we’ve spent too much time on him. It’s almost like he’s our son.”

He nods. “So we’re finished with him, huh?”

“Maybe not forever. But just for the time being. Do you want to be?”

“Okay, let’s be finished.”

And they are for a few weeks. Then one day an airmail envelope arrives with a postmark from Madrid. It’s addressed to Binhammer and has the initials T. H. in the corner where the return address should be. He finds it on the coffee table when he comes home from school.

“Your boyfriend wrote you a letter,” Sarah calls out from the other room. “I left it there for you.”

He opens it. A single sheet of thin paper, the kind they used to use for typing. It reads:

Six weeks after Ted Hughes leaves Carmine-Casey, the administration brings in his replacement. She’s a quiet, deferential young woman who has just finished a degree in education and seems to cower like a mouse whenever she’s around students. Her name is Ms. Prentiss, and she wears clips in her short hair that make her look even younger than she is, so some of the girls take pity on her and protect her, forming an almost maternal shield among them.

Binhammer is assigned to be her mentor and get her settled, and on her second day of teaching she comes into the teachers’ lounge looking pale and rent.

“I think the students miss their old teacher,” she says to Binhammer.

It seems some of the girls have gotten through the shield and have been testing her tenderness with their teeth.

“Maybe, but they’ll forget about him. They have short memories.”

Ms. Prentiss nods. “He must have been some teacher.”

Binhammer smiles. “His name was Ted Hughes.”

He leans forward and waits for her reaction, but there is none.

“Like the poet,” he continues. “You know, Sylvia Plath’s husband?”

“Oh, I guess I should have known that. I have a lot of catching up to do in my reading.”

Binhammer shrugs and leans back again. “It’s not important.”

“Was he a really good teacher?” She looks at the clock anxiously in anticipation of her next class. “I bet he was.”

“Actually,” Binhammer replies, “I never really saw him teach.” Just that one time. Through the window. His eyes lit up as though by fireflies. “But, yes, the girls really liked him. They were…upset when he left. Heartbroken, even. They really were.”