Free Hummingbirds by Joshua Gaylor

say on many topics sat silently in the lobby of a Spanish-style hotel, waiting for her husband. If she had been looking for attention from anonymous men she might have been immensely gratified at the moment, because she was smartly dressed, nervous, and, judging from the submissive smile on her face, eager to please—which is a combination of qualities that men frequently find alluring, and which in this case, drew the immodest gaze of almost every man who passed through the lobby that afternoon.
    But she was not looking for attention. In fact, she might as well have been the only person in the lobby, for she divided her own gaze between the large set of doors leading onto the street and her own hands that tied themselves into knots in her lap, the rest of the world existing behind a scrim—just shadowed shapes passing in slow motion. The reason for her smart attire was that she had told her husband she was going to attend some of the panel discussions scheduled that afternoon as part of the “Twentieth-Century Literary Theory” conference being held at the hotel. The reason for her nervousness was that she had not attended any panels and instead had spent the afternoon in a room on the sixteenth floor having an affair with a man who was five years younger than she and who possessed the most beautiful hands she had ever seen. Finally, the reason for her submissive smile was that she was expecting her husband to come through the lobby doors at any second, and all she couldthink about was how good he had been to her—how sincerely and honestly and purely good.
    The woman, whose name was Sarah Lewis, had kept her name when she married Leo Binhammer six years before. And Lewis was the name he used now as he came in on a rush of dry air through the doors.
    “Well, Ms. Lewis, how was your afternoon among the erudite?”
    And she dissembled and smiled and wanted to say a hundred different things but could only bring herself to say, “Fine. Boring, the usual.” If they weren’t in the lobby of a hotel, she would have thrown her arms around him and clung like a barnacle for dear life.
    “Well, I had a great time,” he said. “There’s a used bookstore down the street—we should go there after dinner. Speaking of which, what are you hungry for?”
    “Listen,” she said. “Why don’t you come with me tomorrow. After I give my paper, I mean. We could go to some panels. I know there are a couple you would—”
    “No way. Huh-uh. I’ve said my farewells to higher education. I take my education lower to middling now.”
    She looked at him desperately.
    “But you have fun,” he continued. “Don’t worry about me—I can entertain myself.”
    They were attending the four-day conference because she had been chosen to moderate a panel on the first day, and she was delivering her own paper at a morning session on the last day—and four days in San Diego in early October seemed like a pleasant way to begin the academic year. Her husband’s only condition—he having settled into teaching at a prestigious girls’ school—was that he not be required to attend any of the sessions, which he was convinced were designed to make him feel small and unworthy.
    So she was alone at her session on the first day, and it was then that she noticed the younger man looking at her. She sat between the four members of the panel, and as each one delivered a paper on French feminist theory she saw that his gaze kept stumbling back to her—as though she were an obstacle over which his glance tripped in its anxious pacing.
    After the session he was waiting for her outside the conference room.
    “I read an article you wrote,” he said, by way of greeting.
    “An article? Maybe you mean the article.” At that point she had had only one article published. It was on Nathalie Sarraute, and it had appeared in a tiny quarterly published out of Wisconsin.
    “Didn’t you write something on Colette too? No? Maybe I’m thinking of someone