Free Hummingbirds by Joshua Gaylor Page A

else.”
    Up and down the hall swam a hundred different breeds of academics, as though the two of them were standing in the shallows on the edge of some great intellectual abyss—self-congratulatory minds like colorful fish floating in eddies around their ankles. He put a hand through his hair, seeming not to care what it looked like after he had done it.
    He wondered if she would have a drink with him in the hotel bar.
    “I’m meeting my husband,” she said as a warning.
    “When?”
    “Not yet, I guess.”
    They sat at the bar, where the light from the outside didn’t get far enough through the windows to reach them. And she liked the way his hands moved, as though orchestrating something large and invisible just behind her. When he covered her wrist with one of those hands to make a point, there was a delicious guilt in her chest, and she could no longer hear what he was saying.
    The conversation was intermittently academic, and when she told him about a Nathalie Sarraute book that had just been reissued in English, he took a miniature notebook out of his back pocket and flipped through the pages until he found what he was looking for. It was a list of book titles, some of which had lines drawn through them.
    “So I always have something to read next,” he explained, adding the Nathalie Sarraute book to the bottom.
    She caught a glimpse of the page.
     
    Melville, Pierre
    Samuel Pepys, Diary
    Little Women
    Henry Miller, Rosy Crucifixion or Charles Bukowski
    Vesma Grinfelds, Right Dwn Yr Alley: The Comp. Bk of Bowling
    Anne Edwards, Shirley Temple: Am. Princess
    Dance to the Music of Time (3 rd movement?)
    Uzzi Reiss, How to Make a Pregnant Woman Happy (for Lola)
    John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
    Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit
    He smiled. “I never know what I should be reading.”
    “Martin Chuzzlewit?”
    “I just finished it. I have a copy with marginal notes by Elliot Gould.”
    “The actor?”
    “The man loved Dickens.”
    “You’re joking.”
    “I have it upstairs, I’ll show you.”
    Because she had never thought of herself as someone vulnerable to temptation, she had never built any defenses to keep herself from it—and so when he asked if she wanted to come up to his room, she assented with the passive acquiescence of a girl who, in the eagerness of the moment, believes that she is simply going along for the ride.
    In the elevator she thought of her husband, and thought of him again while she waited for the young man to unlock the door of his room. But as much as she tried to conjure him in concrete form—as much as she tried to imagine the palpable pain she might cause him—she could only think about him inabstract terms, as though her own actions were simply a fiction, a cinematic illusion thrown up on a screen, and he an audience member delightfully enthralled at the drama. She had always suspected her husband of sharing equally in the longings of her childish heart, and now she could not imagine him being upset at such a tiny thing as this. He would laugh, she thought. A young man luring her to his room with Martin Chuzzlewit. He would laugh.
    What a joke! He would never stop laughing.
    It was impossible to tell how she felt. When she tried to look inside of herself, all she saw were tangled things shifting in and out of focus.
    Once inside his room, he offered her a glass of water, and she accepted. To grab hold of something might keep her hands steady. She was aware of her own swallowing—suddenly all throat and stinging breath.
    He sat next to her on the edge of the bed and leafed through some of the pages of the Dickens book. It struck her at that moment that it was possible, even likely, that his interest in her was purely academic—and so, suddenly embarrassed by her own girlish fancies, she stood up abruptly and dropped the water glass on the edge of the bureau, where it shattered.
    “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said.
    “No problem. Hold still,” he said, taking her by the