Apparition & Late Fictions: A Novella and Stories (7 page)

So ran her thoughts as the plane climbed upward and outward from its earthbound gravity and the signal sounded that allowed them to unlock their seat belts and move about the cabin. Aisling decided to study the maps in the back of her in-flight magazines and to use the hours of her return flight to decide on a further destination. She was determined to land
in Detroit with a location in mind to escape it all again, to spend the last two weeks of August in pursuit of bliss and rejuvenation.

AISLING BLACK
was born in Birmingham, an upmarket northern suburb of Detroit, in the year Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were killed and Nixon was elected president. She was the only daughter of a man who made a respectable fortune selling safety glass to Detroit’s automakers. Her mother taught elementary school, read Plath and Sexton, and died young of subarachnoid hemorrhage. Her father never remarried, rather threw himself more deeply into work, finding ways to embed antennae and defrosting elements in the glass, amassing thereby a quite substantial fortune. A dead mother and often absent father produced a brainy, sometimes brooding girl who edited her grade school newspaper, won all the academic prizes in high school, tested well enough to get scholarships to all the better Eastern universities. After an undergraduate degree in Vermont she got her M.F.A. and Ph.D. in California, where she had studied with the famous poet. If she hadn’t yet created much in the way of beauty, she nonetheless knew beauty when she saw it. And she had seen in Nigel’s long, brutish poems, full of the blood and bone of his father’s butcher shop in Seattle, something raw and sensual. He was one of Roethke’s last students, had taught with Berryman at Minnesota, quoted Lowell and Bishop and Robert Frost, and was fairly manic, famously bingey, and, Aisling thought, a brilliant teacher. And he was handsome in the way men are who know how to wear the proper jacket and tie, a hat in winter, a cashmere coat; men who could be counted on for
good directions and clean handkerchiefs, even if they sometimes seemed to look too long in the wrong direction or drank too much or said outrageous things. He could speak in metaphors, assigning depth to the everyday, connecting elements of the tedious and mundane to the stuff of art and literature. He had praised her poems in his workshop and attended her reading in the student union. When he invited her to travel with him, the year between her master’s and doctoral studies, on a cross-country tour to mark the publication of his selected poems, she accepted. It was out of character for her to do so. But he made it sound more like a job than an assignation and an important part of her education. And it was. He was twice her age and worldly in ways she wanted to learn from. She started as his companion and personal assistant, someone whose discipline about travel arrangements and scheduling allowed him freedom from such drudgeries. He would show up, the crazy genius, wow the audience with his performance, sign the books, and say outlandish things that would guarantee coverage in the local press. She would get him to the next stop in one piece, make all the arrangements for lodging and meals and local transport. She worked with his publisher to do press releases, managed the book signings, the radio and print interviews. Eventually they became lovers. Sex with a man past his prime was more tuned to the timing of her own body than the more urgent or furtive lovers she’d been with before. If his performance was flagging, his desire was intense and it aroused her. Everything took longer with Nigel. Talk was an essential part of the seduction. So was food. His patience was consummate, his gratitude endearing, his amazement at her little body, its parts and zones and regions and responses, a constant blushing. “Classic beauty on a peasant’s form,” he said, lathering her
body in the shower. He genuflected and kissed her. She came to love him. They moved in together. She proposed marriage. He agreed.

Theirs had been the perfectly bargained marriage. Each got something in the deal. He wanted her youth and beauty and trust-fund security, no less her scholarly instincts and disciplines—the better to burnish his postmortems. She wanted his age and experience and manic freedom. She wanted access to his generation of writers and poets. He loved her young friends always asking him questions about poets now dead whom he remembered. Both assumed it would not last forever—“Such habits are not suited to the long haul,” he’d said—which made any awkwardness the more bearable.

When she finished her doctorate—her dissertation on the Maud Gonne poems of W. B. Yeats was published by a reputable university press—he gladly agreed to follow her back to Michigan, where she could be nearer her widowed father. The department had made them a “package” deal to get them to move from California. He was given an endowed chair with the graduate writing program. He had minimal teaching duties, charge over the visiting writers program, and funds allotted for an annual conference. She was given a fellowship and the promise of a tenure-track position. They bought a house on Granger Avenue in Burns Park with a big backyard and front porch and good kitchen. Their soirees for visiting writers were sources of great gossip among faculty and graduate students and were sometimes reviewed in the
Ann Arbor News
. Nigel knew everyone still alive and assisted the university in attracting the best writers to Ann Arbor. He knew the requirements of visiting poets, the foibles of writers on the road; he was great at introductions and literary intrigues. And he made Aisling
his ever-present “partner in crime,” a woman half his own age whose manifest intelligence made her choice to be with him all the more a prize—he loved being seen with her and made no secret of his dependence on her.

His tenderness when her only pregnancy ended after eight months in the stillbirth of a tiny son made her love him unequivocally. He had a stone cut with the infant’s name, his own name, and the only date of record on it, and would take Aisling to the little grave in Maplewood, near the Arboretum, Sunday mornings in those first months of their bereavement. It was those Sunday visits to his dead son’s grave that became the basis for the folio of poems, provisionally titled
Nativity
, which formed the core of a memoir she wrote the year following Nigel’s death that was shortlisted for the Pulitzer and fast-tracked Aisling’s tenure with the university. In the few years since, she had published another book of her own poems and a critical study of Nigel’s work; she had read and lectured all over the country, from the Library of Congress to Huntington Library, and been featured in profiles on National Public Radio and PBS. Much as she tried to avoid the role of poetry’s heartsore young widow, there was no doubt that her years with Nigel, her well-documented bereavements, and her relative youth and beauty made her something of an item on the literary circuit. She drew a crowd where others mostly drew a few. Her classes filled early at the university, with more young men than young women in them. Her poems, reviews, scholarly papers were all solicited by the better journals and magazines. Her fees for lectures and readings kept rising and rising. The invitations required the retention of a speaker’s agent. She was even considering hiring a personal assistant—someone to help with the correspondence and calendar and travel details—but
so far the right person hadn’t materialized. Besides, she often thought, the daughter of a chief executive officer has sufficient management and discipline bred in the bone to handle a literary and academic career. Her celebrity, such as it was, had provided a secure income, the choice about how much work she would do, plenty of exciting opportunities, and all within her range of expertise. She had exceeded her own expectations of herself, becoming not only a witness to artists but an artist herself. She was at forty both teacher and the subject taught, poet and critic and woman of substance.

She kept herself fit with the usual regimens. She gathered her long black and graying hair into a variety of buns and braids, updos and ponytails. She dressed in vintage ensembles mostly bought secondhand at the Salvation Army and she spent with abandon on designer shoes. She kept her distance from doctors, gardened in three seasons, took pills for insomnia and mild depression, smoked in private on occasion, and had a tattoo on her right buttock that matched the one on her late husband’s left. They’d had them done in Spokane the April before moving to Ann Arbor with money they made from reading together. In the years since Nigel’s death she had not had sex and seldom missed it. Sometimes she would take a long bath with scented candles and Chinese soaps and bring herself to orgasm. The knowledge that there were men who would still be eager and willing to have sex with her was, in some ways to Aisling, better than sex with any of them might eventually be, requiring as it would a degree of intimacy and theater she was not so certain she was even capable of. She had abandoned all prospects of parenthood, spoke to her aging father infrequently, and lived now at some little distance from her body and soul. If not entirely happy, she was content.

IT WAS
the ad in the in-flight magazine for the Grand Hotel that guided Aisling Black to Mackinac—the tiny island in Lake Huron and the Straits of Mackinaw between Michigan’s upper and lower peninsulas. She’d been there with her father as a child and remembered her enchantment with the place, the enforced absence of automobiles, the busy docks and harbor, the horses and buggies and Victoriana, the easy opulence of the hotel, the dress code for dinner, the afternoon teas and string quartets.
Timeless
…read the banner over the photo of the hotel. There was a website and phone number. She could see herself doing nothing for a long time on the broad porch of the great hotel, watching the inland sea sparkling in the distance, restoring herself, renewing her stamina, readying for the school term that would begin in September. After she cleared customs in Detroit, she phoned the Grand, reserved a lake-view room until the end of the month, drew cash from an ATM in the terminal, got a seat on the five o’clock flight to Pellston Airport, a cab twelve miles north to Mackinaw City, where she was deposited along with her much-traveled bags at the Arnold Line Docks, and after the brief ferryboat ride across the Straits, she found herself on the island.

“Professor Black?” said a young man in footman’s dress, top-hatted and gloved, and when she nodded, he took her bag, took her gently by the elbow, and led her to the shiny red-wine-colored coach with
The Grand Hotel
stenciled in gilt italics on the door. He looked like one of her undergrads, dressed for the prom or student musical—
Great Expectations
, she thought, Mr. Darby himself! He helped her into the coach, climbed up to take the reins, and brought her by turns up through the town
to a wide thoroughfare which led uphill to the huge white clapboard edifice on the southwestern-facing bluff which was truly, now that she saw it aglow in the night, a grand hotel. The creak of the wooden coach, the strain of the draft horses up the hill past a stone church and wooden townhouses, the absence of anything automotive in the air—the racket of horns or emissions of motors—all of it conspired to slow her approach, after the furious day of taxis and airlines and ferries. It was, she knew, a kind of Disney, a theme park of sorts, a pretense of a place beyond the reach of real time. All the same, she could feel it almost metabolically—the pace of things slowing to the footfall of horses, of couples strolling the gaslit sidewalks or stretched out on the greensward listening to distant music—everything could wait, nothing was urgent, time could be taken, the moment held up for examination. She could feel herself getting sleepy. He took her immediately to her room, where a basket of fruits and cheeses and a bottle of wine had been left with a welcome note from the hotel’s manager. He turned the light on in the bathroom, drew the curtains shut, placed her bags in the closet, and gave her the key to the room and honor bar. He said she could call the front desk in the morning about her registration. She could tell he could tell she was very tired.

“What time is it?” she asked him.

“Going ten. Where have you come to us from, Professor?”

“London, Detroit, well, Ann Arbor, by way of London today.”

“A long journey. You’ll want a good night’s sleep.”

“Yes, sleep’s the thing.” She proffered a twenty-dollar bill.

“Oh no, Professor, I really couldn’t. There’s no tipping expected or permitted at the Grand. If there’s anything at all, anything, just call…Enjoy your stay.”

He was out the door and she was left standing in the middle of a large corner room that looked out over the grounds of the hotel, the lakeshore and the Straits of Mackinaw, and in the distance, the lights of the Mackinaw Bridge, which connected the two peninsulas of her native state. She stripped and showered briefly, wrapped herself in the hotel robe, hugging herself in the plush terrycloth, savored a berry, left the wine untouched, then crawled under the down comforter, assembled the pillows according to custom, and considered the distance she’d come that day. Then Aisling Black fell into a sleep the details of which she would not remember. Whether she dreamed of her dead husband or baby, or new phantasms of love and desire, or random remnants from her travels; the pulsing in her temple, the usual insomnia, the cares of the day, all of it gave way to the blank oblivion of comfort and keen fatigue.

She woke briefly before dawn and did not know if she was fully awake or only between deeper slumbers. She rolled from one shoulder to the other, sat up in bed, and with gathering consciousness wondered if she oughtn’t to make some notes toward an opening lecture for her senior seminar—a reading and writing course she taught to undergraduates in which she tried to get them to use the work of masters as predicates for their own creative efforts.
The Sincerest Form
was the title of a book one of her colleagues had written on the uses of imitation for young writers. She took it as the title of her course in the catalogue. Part of her lecture, indeed part of the paper she had recently delivered at the Yeats International Summer School, focused on the formulation, attributed to T. S. Eliot, that “all poets borrow, great poets steal.” As evidence of this dictum she had produced W. B. Yeats’s late nineteenth-century transcription of a late sixteenth-century sonnet by Pierre de Ronsard, “pour Hélène.”