by Thomas Lynch
The girl’s connection to the maître d’ was a curiosity. He paid her a great deal of attention, seeming to instruct her at every opportunity. The obvious deference paid by the other servers was, Aisling reckoned, connected to this.
Aisling nursed the second tumbler of scotch slowly, and picked indifferently at the choices the waiter had made, a spinach salad with pecans and goat cheese and dried cherries and an entrée of wild mushroom ravioli. She kept hoping the girl would come to fill her water glass or clear the plates from her table, but as the dining room filled, it was clear the Jamaicans worked in teams, working separate sections of the dining room, and that Bintalou was assigned to one nearer the main entrance. Aisling ordered a dessert, the better to extend her silent audience. And after dessert, she chose a brandy, Calvados Coquerel, to tarry all the longer.
She had watched the light go out of the day, replaced by a full moon that lit the surface of the Straits below. And because the evening was fine and warm, she decided to walk the long porch after dinner while other guests lazed in the wicker rockers that lined the porch on one side, with the planters of red geraniums on the other. Even from the outside, with the lights of the bridge and the village below and the moonlight on the water all around, Aisling was focused on the interior as she walked, looking through windows for the girl moving among the last of the evening’s dinner guests.
Aisling’s sleep that night was vexed by dreams of her dead husband and son. She had not taken a pill to sleep because she’d been drinking. The night was fitful and she woke full of longing—though she could not say exactly for what. She wondered if she’d be able to make two weeks. She took a long shower and dressed for a day of walking. Downstairs she made her way into the dining room, not so much for breakfast as to read the papers and to see if the girl was working the breakfast shift. She recognized the waitstaff from the night before but there was no sign of Bintalou. Better to take her beauty sleep, Aisling thought, and ordered orange juice and toast and coffee.
The papers were full of the coming elections, worries over the local and national economy, the crisis in home mortgages and foreclosures, the falling values in the automotive stocks. A large portion of her own trust fund was held in General Motors stock since they were the largest purchaser of her father’s safety glass. In the first nine months of the year the stock had lost half its value. The prospect loomed that the company would be bankrupt before the year was out and that her little fortune would be seriously diminished. The stock of her father’s company, the other large portion of her trust fund, had also lost considerable value.
Aisling had always adopted a style between the struggling artist and the sensibly situated academic, but she was comforted by the knowledge that wealth, inherited from her father, but wealth all the same, spared her the common worries over livelihood and future and freed her from daily interest in the marketplace. She was raised in privilege and was accustomed to ignoring the politics and economics of the larger world in deference to her intellectual and artistic pursuits. She wondered if the “one-state recession” that the papers claimed Michigan was in, because of the “failing domestic automotive industry,” would actually have an effect on her. She had seen it in Europe—the comparative devaluation of the dollar, the higher costs of everything, the fears among retailers and hoteliers. The ongoing wars, the distrust of American leadership, the global markets in disarray, the price of oil—there had even been a surcharge on the ferryboat over to the island, blamed on the cost per gallon of gasoline. And now that she looked about the room, she could see that here in high season, the middle of August, in the finest hotel in Michigan, many of the tables were empty at breakfast, much as the seats on the ferry over had been. Even the hotel’s “Modern Baroque” décor, reconsidered in the morning light, with its striped wallpapers and floral print chintz, by Dorothy Draper’s celebrated protégé, seemed now a little dated and overwrought—the old century’s effort to update the century before. The table settings of Syracuse china, “since 1871–USA,” now that she looked closely, were faded and dull, and the Irish linen tablecloths frayed and somewhat overlaundered. As she looked around the room half filled with elderly visitors wearing the name badges of conventioneers and senior tours, eating their omelets and oatmeal and fruits, the grandeur of the Grand Hotel seemed to Aisling perhaps a little past its prime. Perhaps the economy really was in serious peril, Aisling thought, and marveled that she should live to be forty before such a thought ever occurred to her. The first needle of a headache stabbed her right temple. She sipped her water, closed her eyes, inhaled deeply.
The merchants she gossiped with in town that morning all ranged between commiseration and denial. Oh sure, the season’s traffic was a little off, nothing to panic over, the crowds would return once the price of gasoline went down. The local fudge shops still made big slabs of the local specialty on marble altars in the shopwindows. The liveries renting riding horses and carriages or offering guided tours of the island still kept the downtown sounding like an old western with hoofbeats on the pavement. The auto industry had been failing for years—laboring under its pension and health care costs, executive salaries, poor decisions about consumer preferences. Mackinac relied on its six hundred horses—hackneys and drafts and even-tempered riding stock—for taxi and tours and haulage. The rich smell of fried food and horse manure was a welcome change from the diesel smell of London and Belfast, and the soft breeze off the big water made it all bearable under the August sun. Aisling wore a smart panama and sunglasses, walking shorts and a blue denim shirt, and browsed among the souvenir shops with nothing in mind. She listened to a trio—guitar and fiddle and hammered dulcimer—playing bluegrass music in front of one of the Main Street hotels. She walked the docks of the marina in the harbor where sailing boats tethered to their buoys and power yachts snug in their berths shone in the sparkling water. She bought sunscreen and applied it and walked up the town among the day-trippers.
At the end of the Main Street was a large village green overseen by a life-size bronze of Jacques Marquette, in soutane and cape, atop a tall granite base. He was among the first Europeans to see the Straits and wintered on the island in 1670, disabusing the native Huron and Ojibway of their heathenry. Aisling sat on a bench among the families and sunbathers sprawled on the green and read from a pocket history she bought at the bookstore:
Father Jacques Marquette, the great Jesuit missionary and explorer, died and was buried by two French companions somewhere along the Lake Michigan shore on May 18, 1675. He had been returning to his mission at St. Ignace, which he had left in 1673 to go exploring in the Mississippi country. The exact location of his death has long been a subject of controversy. A spot close to the southeast slope of a hill, near the ancient outlet of the Pere Marquette River, corresponds with the death site as located by early French accounts and maps and a constant tradition of the past. Marquette’s remains were reburied at St. Ignace in 1677, when Hurons disinterred his remains and bore his bones back in a cedar box.
She read about the ancient fishing tribes, remnants of which, dating to the tenth century, had been found, who thought of the island as the home of “Gitche Manitou”—the Great Spirit. And about the fur trade and John Jacob Astor’s export of beaver pelts from the island. She read about how it became the second national park, in 1875, after Yellowstone, and later was given to Michigan as its first state park.
Above the green on a bluff overlooking the harbor was Fort Mackinac, a limestone encampment built by the British in 1780 to control the Straits during the Revolutionary War. I’ll tour that another day, she told herself, avoiding her natural temptation to scholarship instead of rest and lazing. She repeated her resolve to do nothing of substance and blamed the sudden return of her headache on reading through sunglasses or too much sun. She decided to walk back to the Grand, maybe nap for an hour, and then maybe a swim.
It was coming out of a three-story green clapboard house—one of the dormitories for Grand Hotel staff—on Cadotte A
venue that Aisling saw Bintalou, dressed in traditional housekeeping attire and making her way with a young man, arm in arm towards the Grand. As lovely as she’d been the night before, in the late-morning light she was more beautiful still. Her blackness shone. Her stride was athletic and elegant and her pace lengthened the distance between her and Aisling as they walked uphill. Try as she might, Aisling could not catch up to the girl and her companion. She became aware of her windedness and fatigue, which combined with her now throbbing headache to become a little panic, plodding up the east side of the boulevard while the object of her deepest interest strode up the west. The young man she walked with wore the top hat and red frock coat of the Grand’s carriage drivers. In every other way unprepossessing, he was not tall, nor handsome, nor did he seem especially gifted, except that he was walking next to her. Aisling couldn’t say for certain if they were simply companions or actually lovers. They seemed impossibly young for the mysteries of it all. Still, Aisling had read enough undergraduate papers to know that few of her students came to university as virgins. Their compositions often included cheerful narratives of “hook-ups” and “fuck buddies,” “friends with benefits” and variations on the theme—sex-for-the-sake-of-sex encounters, unencumbered by deeper meanings, detached from feelings beyond a general fondness. This was at odds with Aisling’s upbringing and experience, which assigned to every touch or caress, kiss or entanglement a meaning and purpose and direction. That she could no longer make out the manifest cues of one body’s relations with another disturbed her greatly. Perhaps it owed to her own sexual circumstance, whereby, with the exception of the years with Nigel, she labored between spasms of ineptitude and decrepitude—conditions that rhymed too perfectly to ever include in one of her poems.
By the time she reached the lobby of the Grand, Bintalou already had assumed her station in the Salle à Manger, tending to the endless luncheon buffet, and the young man, true to his uniform, was sitting atop one of the hotel coaches under the main entrance portico, much like the one that had transported her hither from the docks the night of her arrival. But for the piercing pain behind her eyes, she would have gone in for a long lunch and the chance to watch the beauty move among the fruits and soups, coldcuts and pastries. Instead she went up to her room, drew the drapes, and took a nap.
In what remained of her two weeks at the Grand, Aisling’s infatuation with the Jamaican girl only grew more fervid and consuming. She woke every morning with a plan to pursue chance encounters. She hid her quizzing of Michael Musser, ever the helpful host, about his hotel and waitstaff, in sufficiently innocuous banter so as to avoid concerns. She came early to the dinner service at night and almost always stayed until the end, lingering over desserts and coffees, then taking up her watch on the east end of the long porch, hoping to see Bintalou exit by the service door below, whereupon she would hasten to follow her to what she knew was her room in the front right corner of the third floor of the green house at the bottom of Cadotte Avenue. By turns she had come to know the girl’s routines and haunts, her variable schedule and her days off. She’d found out that Bintalou was, indeed, the daughter of the dining room’s majordomo. The distinguished-looking man in tails and vest—Henry Goodison—was in charge of seating and oversaw the gloved waiters and the lesser servers. He had been working summers in the Salle à Manger for forty years and was, to the Mussers, central to the smooth dispensation of service. Henry Goodison had been the ideal head man and factotum. Honest, loyal, proud in his bearing, and a natural leader. Not only had he a memory for the names of returning guests, but he would ask about their children and children’s children, all the while displaying the crisp efficiency and stewardship of his position. He’d become the natural liaison between the Mussers and the Jamaicans, settling disputes over wages and scheduling and monitoring the conduct of his countrymen in their off hours to prevent any scandal or disruptions. His only lapse in perfect conduct was a generation ago, when he had impregnated one of the housekeeping staff, the daughter of his neighbor in Kingston. Bintalou had been raised by her mother, alone, inasmuch as Mr. Goodison already had a wife and family. He had been supportive financially, but otherwise kept his distance. And only when Bintalou’s mother died had she come to stay with the Goodisons. Her father’s long history of coming and going between the Caribbean and Mackinac Island had made it possible for Bintalou to get a visa for the summer—a far more difficult thing, according to Michael Musser, since the attacks of September 11. Indeed, much of the summer help on Mackinac now was Polish or Mexican or Ukrainian. Only the dining room of the Grand remained the province of the West Indians. The Mussers had promised Henry Goodison a room and board for his daughter and part-time work and training—her age, fifteen, making a full-time position quite impossible. Besides, it gave her time to be with other young people from around the world and from Michigan, and provided her father the chance to reconnect with her and gave her plenty of time off to enjoy the new environs.
Aisling’s fascination with the girl was outside the range of all former experience and, she believed, at odds with her orientation and discipline. The two or three same-sex romances she had had as an undergraduate were, for the most part, exploratory, as much to satisfy curiosities for her partners as for herself. She was, if not recently, nonetheless a heterosexual. Her dreams conformed, her memories. She missed the sound of Nigel’s strong piss in the toilet in the morning, the scratch of his razor over his face, the smell of him—whiskey and tobacco. She missed his mannish foibles and self-certainties. She missed his love. His desire.
Her growing fantasies in which Bintalou figured so prominently owed, she reasoned, to a confluence of longings—for a child, for a lover, for a life of passion and meaning beyond the meager rehearsals of her own. The stunning young Jamaican, Aisling further reckoned, was the embodiment of all that she’d pursued as an artist and a scholar—a beauty beyond the idea of beauty, rather the living, breathing incarnation of beauty itself. This prospect frightened and excited her.
When she finally and with some regret asked Mr. Musser to prepare her final bill, on the evening before her scheduled departure, he said he’d be sad to see her go and hoped that she’d be a regular visitor in summers to come. He said he would organize a car to meet her at the dock in Mackinaw City and drive her to the airport in Pellston in plenty of time to make her flight to Detroit.
Aisling Black left the Grand in the early morning, a fog with the first chill hint of autumn in it hovering over the harbor. She got an early ferry, watched as the boat turned out of the harbor and the great white edifice of the Grand came into view. “Bintalou,” she whispered to herself, then turned her sights on the distant mainland.
The man holding the sign on the docks with her name on it threw her bags in the back of his rusting brown minivan, and said that there’d been a slight change of plans. He was sorry to report that her flight from Pellston was canceled.
“Mustn’t have been enough seats bought up. They always blame it on the weather or some ‘mechanicals.’ But it’s dollars and cents, simple as that, ma’am. No sense spending all that jet fuel on less than a full flight.”
“But I have a ticket, I have to get home. I have classes in Ann Arbor tomorrow.”
“Not to worry, ma’am, I’ve thought of that. I can have you back south in no time. Hell, Ann Arbor’s four hours. Door to door, faster than the jet, what with all the security and searches and waiting around and crap. And I’ll charge you less.” He was holding the door of the minivan, and beckoning with the other arm for her to sit in for the drive south.
“No…no, that’s not what I planned on. You don’t understand. I’ve a splitting headache; I can’t take four hours on the road. I have a ticket and reservation. I’m sorry, just take me to the airport.”
“No sense in going to the airport, ma’am, the flight has been canceled, you can check for yourself.” He held out his cell phone. “I have ’em on speed dial. I’m trying to be helpful here. I’ll charge you less than the
airlines, ma’am. A hundred and fifty, no need to tip. Hell, the gas will cost me nearly that.”
