by Thomas Lynch
She could have flown as easily in the front as in the back. Money was never the issue with her. She was—though few of her colleagues or students knew it—the daughter of one of Detroit’s first families. Her father had made a fortune in auto parts and owned a share of one of the professional sports teams. He’d established a trust fund in Aisling’s name before she’d started grade school. She’d had access to it since she was twenty-one. She could have drawn on those resources, or on the not-inconsiderable accounts of her late husband. She’d recently sold some of his papers to the university archivist for enough to remodel their bungalow in Burns Park—one of Ann Arbor’s respectable neighborhoods. It had more advanced degrees per capita than even the wealthier exurbs. And she was as well paid as anyone on the English faculty. Still, both the front of the bus and the back had their special privileges and the idea that she traveled for free was more appealing than the idea that she traveled in style.
She watched as other passengers boarded the plane and for a moment wondered if these might be the people she’d be dying with. Might some malfunction or shoe bomber or flock of seabirds bring the plane down over the Atlantic? Or some small outpost in Scotland—everyone blown to bits in the carnage? The whiff of disaster and mortality was agitating and she searched in her purse for her medication and something a colleague had given her for airsickness. She pressed on the point of the pain in her temple, rubbed her eyes. She wondered if she could get a drink.
She smiled at the cabin steward, a young Indian or Pakistani, passing out pamphlets. He was so pretty. Olive-skinned, dark-eyed, twenty-something, slightly built but muscular. His crisp white short-sleeved shirt with the epaulets, the blue tie. He must be gay, she thought. “The best ones always are. Then she scolded herself for thinking such thoughts—right out of a sitcom or chick flick. But they are! she thought, and scolded herself again. She could see that he paid attention to his body hair and the press of his trousers. But if he weren’t, she wondered, which of her parts would his hands first go to—breasts or cheekbone, buttocks or genitalia? Or might he, as Nigel had, trace the slow curve of her eyebrow with his index finger? She did not scold herself for such thoughts, but regretted nonetheless the absence of answers. She sighed, resigned to the prospect that that part of her life was over.
Aisling read the Menu and Destination Guide he’d given her. How very helpful, such a nice touch. Like flying in a café instead of a bus. Dinner would be a choice of “Southwestern-Style Chicken Breast with Sweet Corn Salsa and Rice” or “Prosciutto and Ricotta Cheese Lasagna on a Bed of Spinach.” There would be wines and cheeses and a sweet. Detroit’s average July/August temperature was 24 degrees centigrade, the booklet helpfully informed. There was a quick conversion guide: C × 2 + 30 = F. Hotter than either Ireland or England had been and nearly twice as much summer rainfall as the British Isles. The packet included a map of Michigan and the city of Detroit and its environs. Familiarity indeed breeds contempt, she thought. She remembered the packet on the flight coming over, six weeks before. How she had savored the shape of the names: Marylebone, Bloomsbury, Holborn, Strand, Soho, The City, and Mayfair—she loved the contorted streetscape and the wide slice of the Thames through the middle and she had squinted to look at the names of the bridges: Lambeth, Westminster, Waterloo. She’d looked at the space between Theobalds Road and Guilford Street, bordered on the west by Southampton Row and, on the east, by Gray’s Inn Road, in Holborn, where her friend Vanessa lived in Orde Hall Street and where she’d stayed while in London before she and Vanessa took the train from Paddington to Exeter for their duties in Devon. It was Vanessa who had put her name in for the Arvon Foundation course, as someone who would make an excellent co-tutor.
Vanessa had been to Ann Arbor the year before to do a reading and to lecture on Modern British Poets. Aisling had liked her immediately, her poems, her no-nonsense style in workshops and lectures, and her rich midlife sexuality. “Why is it,” she had asked Aisling at the reception following her triumphant reading in the Rackham Amphitheater, “visiting male poets get offers of sex from the graduate students, and visiting women get unsolicited manuscripts?” There’d been a little scandalous buzz about Vanessa and one of the first-year M.F.A. fictionists with whom she had left the reception, arm in arm.
Aisling had invited her to lunch the next day. They had traded books, email addresses, gossip about other poets. They had stayed in touch.
Once the Arvon Foundation had invited Aisling to England, it was easy enough to find other programs willing to host her. She’d read and presented a paper at the Yeats Summer School, lectured at Queens and Cheltenham.
Her colleagues at the university, stuck with their lackluster summer stints at literary summer camps and writers’ colonies, could not fail to be impressed by Aisling’s summer duties in the British Isles. She had sent them postcards of Totleigh Barton—a two-story manse from the twelfth century covered with thatch, surrounded by outbuildings and the green Devon countryside or of Yeats’s grave at Drumcliff, or of Pre-Raphaelites from the Tate Gallery.
In Aisling’s department at the university, most of the men angled for Bread Loaf in Vermont, famous for its flings, or maybe a stint at Yaddo or MacDowell Colony or Sewanee, or a summer term at a nicely situated private college. Only the elders in her department expected to cross the Atlantic on the strength of their work. Some, of course, had been to European conferences in their specialties—Renaissance Writers or Women’s Studies or Translations of Modern Russian Writers. But they were scholars on scholarly business—may as well, thought Aisling, have been bankers or ophthalmologists. Aisling traveled as artist and academic, poet and scholar, maker of beauty and witness to it.
Whatever claims to fame her colleagues had, they would have to admit that she had developed an international standing, however modest. Two slim volumes from a respectable university press in America and now the promise of a book on the shelves in Britain and Ireland. She would add it all to the personal page on the faculty website the university maintained.
She had been flown and housed and fed and paid and publicly feted for her time and talents. She had slipped the dull gravity of the everyday schedule and ordinary geography and been borne aloft, by the power of words she had written in private, published in fetching if fairly limited editions, and she was now being returned home from the ancient outposts of the English-speaking world.
“Please fasten your seat belt, madam.”
The pretty Indian or Pakistani was leaning across her, bringing her seat back and tray table to their full upright position. He had one hand on the button on the armrest at her side, the other behind her, moving the headrest forward. She could smell his soap and talcum powder. Something from Harrods or Jermyn Street.
“May I get a drink?”
“We’re about to take off.”
“All the more reason,” she smiled at him.
“Once we’re airborne, I’ll be back around, madam.”
Eye candy, Aisling thought to herself, and scolded herself for thinking it. He must be gay. She scolded herself again.
The plane was speeding down the runway. Aisling closed her eyes and wondered if the pills were working. Though she wasn’t sure of God anymore, she was praying for safety and deliverance. She did not want to die with these people. The whining children two rows ahead of her, the school soccer team at the head of her section, the redheaded woman applying awful lipstick beside her—what if these were her neighbors in death? She had much more living to do.
Suddenly the thought of returning to university in a couple of weeks, the return to the dull routines of the classroom and committee work, the needs of students and colleagues, the pressures of performance—it was all more than disturbing to her. She was sure it was the source of what was now a splitting headache, the stiffness in her shoulders, a panic taking shape. Whether it was this or the sudden press of mortality that air travel always stirred in her—as the jet raced down the runway toward its takeoff—she resolved to extend her su
mmer travels. She was not yet ready to go home to Burns Park to wait out the remainder of August sweltering in town, preparing syllabuses and lecture notes. No, she would make for someplace without duties or details, social or literary obligations; someplace where she could let herself be pampered and excessive, waited on and catered to, where she could read for pleasure, sleep at all hours, bask in the absence of obligations; where she might restore herself after long travel and hard labor in distant places, before returning to the daily grind of the fall semester. A fortnight of utter self-indulgence, ease, and tranquillity, she thought, just what she needed. This craving for freedom, release, forgetfulness, she would indulge it. She could not only afford it, she thought, she could not afford not to do it—the better for her students in the long run, to restore herself before pouring herself out in service of their needs. Better to return to her office in Angell Hall, to the eventual committee meetings and faculty teas, looking as well rested as she was well traveled. The headaches and insomnia that seemed now her ever-present scourges might be mended by two weeks of ease.
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.
