Apparition & Late Fictions: A Novella and Stories (11 page)

IN THE
fourth week of her stay on Mackinac, Professor Aisling Black made certain observations about the world around her. The panic in the press, local and national, was growing more fraught with every day. There were rumors of banks on the brink of collapsing, an insurance carrier and a well-known investment house had bellied up, the candidates for the com
ing elections were full of dire predictions and promises. “Toxic assets” and “derivatives” had entered the talk among townspeople and merchants. The manicurist in the hotel salon told Aisling that last week a family of guests had been asked to leave when the fees for their stay far exceeded the limit on the credit card they’d provided at check-in. A yacht in the harbor had been repossessed: everywhere were signs of what the woman called “a contagion” among the moneyed set. And while Aisling’s own interests had never included money or concerns over solvency, her instincts as a scholar triggered an appetite for researchable data. She spent a day on the Internet examining the financial press and their websites, emailing her own accountant, checking her online bank accounts. She would have called her father but they’d grown distant over the years since her mother’s death and she could not imagine a conversation that would allow either one of them to reengage.

What was worse was the knowledge of Bintalou’s coming departure. Aisling tried to imagine her life after the girl was gone. She had come to see herself almost entirely as an acolyte to the incarnate beauty.

By now she had figured out the predictable elements of Bintalou’s routines. She knew, for example, that Sunday mornings would find her at worship in the Little Stone Congregational Church on the edge of the golf course between her dormitory lodge and the hotel. And though Aisling had given up any practice of religion, she attended the services, sang the old hymns along with the faithful, was generous when the basket was passed, and watched closely as the light through the stained glass illumined the angelic visage of her beloved. The pastor of the church was a man with a trained preaching voice, a toupee, and a precision about his clerical dress which, like the rest of
the island, labored to seem from ages past. He preached about the gifts of the body and the spirit—good health and contentedness, fitness and fidelity—“things beyond the purchase of any treasure!” Then he led the congregation in song, their voices rising to “Softly and Tenderly Jesus Is Calling,” which Aisling sang with real conviction and during which Bintalou, singing along with the rest of the church, turned and looked Aisling deep in her eyes, which had gone blurry with tears at the penultimate verse of the hymn:

That is when she knew that the long weeks of her pursuit of beauty might soon be coming to an end.

Thereafter, like any lover preparing to please her lover, Aisling took more time with her selection of costume, accessories, jewelry, and fragrance. She spent abundantly in the hotel shops and spa, in the latter of which she gave herself over to a full day of ministrations, from the Age Defying Purification Facial to the Herbal Stimulating Body Wrap and Hot Stone Massage. Considering herself in the full-length mirror, wrapped in a terrycloth and satin towel, the sight of her graying hair made her grimace.

When she returned to her room, coiffure and cosmetics perfectly done, she seemed a much-restored version of herself, from years before, in the weeks and months of her courtship with Nigel, readied and willing and eager to love. A version of the future that continued to take shape in Aisling’s imagination
was the one that involved an approach to Henry Goodison and the offer to take his daughter on as her personal assistant. The girl could come to live with her in Ann Arbor. The house in Burns Park was surely sufficient. Aisling would enroll the girl in Greenhills School, one of the best preparatory academies in the country, and eventually, of course, at the university. She would further agree to winter holidays in Jamaica and summers on Mackinac, but Bintalou would get the best of educations, eventual citizenship, a generous stipendium, and better prospects for the future. She could assist Aisling with the household duties, cooking and correspondence, shopping and social obligations. She would travel with Aisling on the widening circuit of literary duties, seeing the country and the world. It would be a remarkable tuition for a young woman and increase her own chances measurably; surely Henry would see the wisdom in all of this. Surely he’d want what was best for his daughter. They could share mealtimes, intellectual pursuits, even clothing—Aisling was sure all her things would fit—daily hopes and little heartbreaks. She could become the sister, daughter, mother, and partner, now that she thought of it, she never had. It was hereabouts that the revelation of this plan would begin to obscure itself in Aisling’s contemplations.

It was mid-September—long past the time she should have returned to school—when the professor rented one of the hotel’s bicycles and followed at a distance while Bintalou and her young coachman rode ponies out to the north side of the island. All the August crowds were gone. The senior citizen tours remained in town, taking in the blacksmith’s shop and Beaumont Museum, browsing for bargains in the stores, rummaging among the kitsch and knockoffs, the replicas of former treasures, the knickknacks and copied curios.

By the time they turned northwestward around Mission Point, out past the Arch Rock and Voyageur’s Bay, there was no one on the road but the pair on horseback and Aisling on her bike in pursuit. The late morning was warm and windless and bright blue, the lake water glistening and smooth. Aisling felt like a girl again on the Schwinn coaster pedaling along Lake Shore Road, further and further from the town. It was four miles to Point aux Pins—the tail of the turtle the island was shaped like—and as Aisling turned south she found the ponies tied to a picnic table off the road. This end of the island was heavily forested with white cedars and silver birches and the land pushed out overlooking the lake. Aisling settled her bike in the woods and walked through the trees toward the water past the remnants of an abandoned log cottage, coming to a high promontory out of which trees grew at angles and the land beneath gave way to a high bank going down to the lake. She could hear their voices rising up from below. There was no sign of the footpath they must have taken and Aisling was about to double back to the old cottage to see if she could find a way when she considered the base of a cedar tree growing out at an angle of forty-five degrees and another one next to it, their dense branches interlacing forming something of a natural observatory. Crawling out astraddle the trunk of the one tree, first balancing off the other tree, then bending forward to embrace the first, she found herself hidden in the leaning trees fifty feet overhead a patch of sandy beach the couple below her had found on an otherwise rocky shoreline. The outgrowth of arborvitae, its flat filigree spray of leaves, provided perfect cover. She could see them and could not be seen.

Bintalou had brought a little lunch of fruit and cheeses from the Grand’s buffet and from the same backpack produced
some bottled water and a pair of towels. After eating they both stood, as if on signal, removed their shorts and T-shirts, their white undergarments, folded them carefully in the towels, and together, quite naked, ran into the lake wearing only their shoes because the bottom was rocky. Their shouts rose upward from the shock of water.

“It’s cold!” cried Bintalou.

“Dive in,” he called back, “you’ll get used to it!”

Aisling’s limbs tightened her embrace of the tree and edged a little forward for a better view, the bark of the white cedar scratching her knees.

They were so gorgeous in the water, her perfect blackness, his perfect white, his blondness, her dark brunette, their buttocks and genitalia, those lovely, unspeakably perfect breasts. She could hardly breathe now that she saw the girl standing ankle deep in the shallows, bent ever so slightly forward, her left hand on her right elbow, hugging herself, her right hand in between her knees trying to warm itself, or cover herself—she could not say—looking off in the distance at the Les Cheneaux. Aisling’s eyes were tearing up, her vision blurring; she was so grateful now for everything. Eventually the girl dove headlong into the deeper water and swam out to meet her companion, the two of them playing like children at the lake, trying to dunk one another, splashing each other, laughing, their bodies shining in the light and water.

Aisling considered climbing back to the land, finding her way down to the beach to join them, organizing excuses for how she had just “happened upon this place,” all very innocent and serendipitous. She would remove her own clothes as she approached them so as not to make them uncomfortable, so as not to make them cover themselves. She wanted to be naked
with them, to tell them everything, to hear their histories and to tell them hers, how the heart bears its unspeakable cargo to lay it down at the feet of beauty.

But she could not move, she could not speak, her eyes were closing with her own arousal. She hugged the tree more passionately, pressing herself against its thickened bark. She felt her pulse rising in every vessel, behind her eyes, in her temples, in her limbs.

Whether she saw them or dreamed them or prayed them to step from the water and lie on the beach beside one another in the midday sun, their heads on the pillows they had made of their clothes, first touching one another with such tenderness, then taking one another unto themselves; whether it happened as she saw it or did not see it, she could not know. Whether it was the lapping of lake water or the caught breath between them, their own entanglements or hers alone, she could not be certain. It hardly mattered. She lay in the soft embrace of the cedars, her arms and legs gone limp, her cheek turned softly against the tree. Whether ecstasy or aneurysm, apocalypse or broken heart, seizure, stroke, or
coup de chance;
whether every beauty echoes another—one’s innocence, all art—whether to live for it or die for it, no longer mattered. The vision before her seemed to beckon, though her own vision was doubled, blurred by the leafy shade and light, her tears, the body or bodies, or souls—she could not know. She could feel her embrace of the cedar loosening. Her body and her being letting go.

I

I
T WAS
Good Riddance
that put Adrian Littlefield on the lecture circuit. Before
Riddance
he’d self-published two pastel-covered self-help books with fashionably gerundive titles—
Learning to Love in the Present Tense
and
Making the Best of the Worst-Case Scenarios.
They were widely ignored and only sold to his family and folks at the church where he was the assistant pastor in those early years of marriage and parenthood. He’d done a workbook on dividing family duties between spouses and written a couple of articles for the ministerial press but otherwise was going nowhere and barely making ends meet until, after Clare left him, he wrote
Good Riddance—Divorcing for Keeps
and it changed his life.

It held that some divorces, like some marriages, are made in heaven. And we ought to be thankful for them. The key
to living in concert with God’s Will or the Natural Order or what the Fates had in mind for you was to learn to accept the direction your love life was taking you, even when it meant the end of love. Divorce was neither the result of too much of one thing nor too little of another, too many heartbreaks or too few. It was, like tsunamis and famines, hurricanes and genocides, God’s way of culling humanity’s herd of lovers, for reasons that were unknowable to mortals, but part, nonetheless, of a larger plan. Shit happens—Adrian Littlefield told his readers unambiguously—we must go with the flow. That’s life, get over it, get on with it.

It took him six months to write it, a month to get an agent, and another month to get a contract and a fat advance from a publisher in New York. It was an immediate hit. The first printing sold out in a week. The paperback rights went for half a million. There was talk of a documentary for one of the cable networks.

The invitations followed. He worked up a little forty-minute shtick for the keynotes and workshops. He could bend his presentation, peppered with tastefully suggestive humor, around the occupational curiosities of any professional association. He had an infomercial in postproduction—one of those hour-long specials where he wore baggy clothes and did a little chalk talk with a really attractive and earnest-looking studio audience. He traveled three months out of every four from his home office in Findlay, Ohio, where he housed, behind his sprawling redbrick Queen Anne mansion on the corner of South Main and Second Streets, in a carriage house he’d refurbished with money from his books and lectures, the Center for Post-Marital Studies—an elaborate tax shelter, along with the foundation that raised funds to advance the work of the CPMS, which
was primarily to pay its principal apostle—himself—to spread the word such as it was revealed to him. He’d kept pace with the rapidly expanding technologies of communications from bulk mail to blast fax, to email to website and blogosphere. Some nights, posting the latest news to the website, or linking a recent interview so his followers could listen in, he felt not a little like Paul writing epistles to the various churches. If, as that great circuit-rider wrote, it is better to marry than to burn, was it not much better still to divorce than to smolder? “Exes,” Adrian’s favorite slogan held, “you can’t live with ’em and you can’t shoot ’em. A little Good Riddance goes a long way.”

Walking in the moonlight across the gardened yard between his office in the coach house and his residence, he would often consider how far he’d come in Findlay, Ohio, after all, from the little clapboard manse on Cory Street behind the church to this three-story palace with its towers and turrets, bay windows and balconies, its dozen cut-brick chimneys, limestone lintels and sills, its stained-glass transoms and fish-scale slates and fluted copper downspouts, its twelve-foot ceilings, tile baths, and mammoth basement with caverns and wine cellar, coal bins and cisterns, its dumbwaiter and dentil molds and third-floor ballroom, its nine species of hardwood floors and cabinets and crown moldings. And he would meditate on the apocryphal book of Sirach, its wisdoms on comfort and pleasure in 14:14, chapter and verse, to wit: “Defraud not thyself of the good day, and let not the part of a good desire overpass thee.” He had come to admire about the Hebrews and Greeks their sense that this life might be as good as it gets, that whatever might be coming after this—Hades or Shades or heavenly mansions—mightn’t be something to bank much on. Maybe it’s much like the devil, he thought: the heaven you know is
better than the one you don’t. Adrian would look up into the moon’s face, whatever there was of it, and offer thanks for the progress he had made since he’d been left by his wife and quietly exiled from St. Mark’s Methodist, across the street and three blocks north, all those years ago. That local Methodists could not help but pass his place and might pause to wonder in their daily rounds if the mansions being prepared for them in heaven would ever be as sumptuous as the one their former associate pastor now occupied in Findlay was part of the good day of which Adrian would not defraud himself. Such sentiments he knew did not ennoble him but there they were and he could not deny them. The retinue of Mexican landscapers, housekeepers, and handymen required in every season, the steady traffic of visitors and conferees who would come for weeklong intensive residencies over which Adrian presided like a maharishi to the formerly married, the occasional news or documentary crew, the place’s reputation for haute cuisine, wine tastings, harp and flute recitals, a growing collection of private art, book launches—these were all the stuff of local rumor and gossip. He had become in Findlay a man of parts, none exactly known entirely. To Methodists and their united brethren, no less to the nonbelievers hereabouts, Adrian had become a local notable and celebrity. After pissing off the back porch into the thick beds of variegated hostas that bordered the place, he would enter the back door with a benediction, “God bless all here and bless this house,” pour himself a glass of something, and make his way upstairs to his private rooms.

In the years since
Riddance
was released, he’d written
The Good Riddance Workbook
and
Questions & Answers About Good Riddance
, thereby giving the trilogy his publisher said really would saturate the market. A coffee table book, provisionally
titled
Second Chances
and featuring the personal stories and posed photographs of successfully divorced people from all over the country, was in production. It showed them in their new habitats and fashions, smiling knowingly, or looking healthy and well and newly “centered,” preoccupied with lives of evident merit and higher purpose. One of Adrian’s devotees who did architectural photography was doing the images while Adrian was preparing some introductory text. The more that offers came into the Center for PMS, the more he raised his fees for speaking, which had the effect of making him seem worth that much more, which brought, of course, more offers. He counted it an irony, and a pleasant one, that he’d become, de facto, an itinerant preacher—the calling he’d felt early and often in his youth—albeit preaching a secularized gospel that was a hybrid of pop psyche, warm fuzzies, personal witness, and cultural study. That he homilized not from the pulpits of great cathedrals but from the lecterns of convention hotels struck him as part of the Creator’s plan for him. He’d stopped saying “Gawd” in the deeply reverential tone of his Methodist training and taken rather to the user-friendly, guilt-free parlance of nature and creation. It was, he told himself, more “inclusive.” That he traveled like a Wesleyan but was paid like a free-market capitalist filled him with a sense of this life’s mysteries. Likewise, he’d given up “the Reverend” for simply “Dr.” Adrian Littlefield for the scholarly, vaguely medicinal ring that it added to his brief. He had a D.D. mail order from one of the agencies that advertised in clergy magazines and an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Ohio Wesleyan, where he’d given the commencement speech the year after his book came out. He had done postgraduate work at the Methodist Theological Seminary in Delaware—a course of study he let lapse after the divorce. He
was certainly not the first to observe that the high priests of the current culture had secular rather than sacred credentials. Not lost on him either was the happy fact that divorcing, conventionally regarded as a failure, had been the essential key to his success. Though the scandal had cost him his job as the long-suffering and underpaid associate pastor at St. Mark’s, as soon as his wife left him, he became the tragically abandoned and heroically single father of two youngsters. Once the book came out, with excerpts published in
Redbook
and
Esquire
, interviews on public radio, profiles on prime-time network shows, he’d become a kind of local hero. He’d even gone to Chicago for a sit-down with Oprah, to chat and answer the audience questions, which appearance alone had accounted for a massive third printing of
Riddance
and an audio book.

When he found himself, as he often did, disembarking from some posh hotel, with the hefty stipend cooling in his briefcase, the livery sedan idling at curbside waiting to take him to the plane, the appreciation of conventioneers ringing in his ears, and, as luck would occasionally have it, a woman waking in the bed upstairs to find him gone but not, he could convince himself, entirely forgotten, Adrian Littlefield’s heart filled with thanksgiving for the failure of his marriage. All things, he told himself, work together toward some good. And the new life, such as he had come to know it, had restored to him some holy order, a sense of real purpose and calling and voice. If God was a practical joker, well then he would grin and bear it. He offered, in such moments, silent and abundant thanks and praise to Whoever Was In Charge Here, as he had come to call his Lord and Savior, the one he believed might still be out there, wherever, listening to his heart of hearts.

IT WAS
the National Association of Family Law Attorneys (NAFLA) annual meeting in Connecticut that brought him to the Foxwoods Casino—a high-stakes bingo parlor parlayed by the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation into one of the most profitable gaming emporiums in the country. It rose out of the hilly forests between Norwich and the coast, like something out of Kubla Khan, its lights blazing in the darkness, a pleasure dome on the “rez.”

“More than a hundred thousand an hour, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days, et cetera, et cetera,” the limo driver who met his flight in Hartford said, drawing out the syllables of the
et ceteras
for emphasis; “that’s net-net in profit. Every day. Pretty good revenge, eh? We gave them firewater and reservations, they give us Keno and the dollar slots. They don’t call it wampum for nothing, eh!”

The shops and restaurants and conference center and hotel all played into the tribe’s master plan—to disabuse as many of their former oppressors of as much money as possible in the most mindless way. It seemed a suitable locale for the divorce attorneys to hold their annual meeting. Dr. Littlefield was the keynote speaker. His fee was fifteen thousand, first-class travel, ground transport, premium lodging and meals. His books and videos sold briskly after his lectures. He signed them
Best Wishes—A.L.
, and if the purchaser was a woman of a certain age and style he’d add,
every available benevolence
. He thought this sounded a literary chord, and while what he wrote was far from literary, he thought the pretence would do no harm. Also, it gave him time to ask some chatty questions.

“And what do you do?” he’d ask her flatly.

“Whatever it takes,” or “Well, that depends,” some would flirt, whereas others would offer only “mediation and depositions.”

In most cases he would fly into a venue the night before, check in, order a chicken salad from room service, watch a movie, and go to bed. He would be up early the next morning to walk, then ready himself for his standard forty-five-minute speech, fifteen minutes of Q&A and whatever it took to sign all the books. Then he’d collect the balance of his fee and make for the airport and the next venue.

But the NAFLA conference was in late July, in a resort casino near the sea in New England. He’d been going nonstop for most of the year and the pictures in the preregistration packet looked inviting. Along with the predictable workshops on “Custody Issues” and “Grandparents’ Rights” and “Pre-and-Post-Marital Agreements,” there was a “Traditional Yankee Clambake” scheduled at Mystic Seaport, a golf outing, and “A Day on Beautiful Block Island.” He’d never been to Block Island but he had kept a picture of the place in his imagination for years. The brochure photo of handsome couples assembled around fruity drinks, smiling from the wide porch of an elegant nineteenth-century hotel, caught his eye. He told the organizers he’d be staying for the entire conference, and while he wouldn’t golf with the attendees, he’d be happy to eat with them and wanted to take the trip to the island. They were happy to book him two more nights in the suite, knowing that their members would be pleased at the chance to visit with their keynote speaker.

T
HE TOUR
bus from Foxwoods to Point Judith took an hour. The boat from Point Judith to Block Island took another—thirteen miles across Block Island Sound from Galilee, Rhode Island, to the town of New Shoreham at the Old Harbor. Stepping aboard the car ferry
Anna C.
, Dr. Adrian Littlefield tried to imagine what crossing water must have added to the romance his former spouse must have felt en route to the first of her infidelities. He took a seat on the middle deck of the ferry among the conferees from NAFLA, who sat in a block in the first few rows of benches, careful to get an aisle seat for the escape he planned once the boat was on its way. They waited for cars and day-trippers to board, admiring the small fleet of fishing vessels in Point Judith. The
Enterprise
and
Lady Helen
and
Stormy Elizabeth
—it was not so much the names of vessels as the black riggings and booms and spools of netting that put him in mind of life’s entanglements. He thought he might begin another series of books entitled
Life’s Entanglements
. He took a notebook from his shirt pocket and wrote in it,
Life’s Entanglements?
and underlined the entry.