Free Apparition & Late Fictions: A Novella and Stories by Thomas Lynch Page B

cushy quarters.
    Bigger seats for bigger asses, is what she thought, a little startled by her sudden hostility but pleased to think that they had to pay so much more for the same time in the air, the same travel, more or less the same amenities. Oh, they might get better movies, real silverware, more legroom, and, of course, first on, first off boarding and deplaning privileges. But at the end of the day they would still be asses—big, fat, balding asses whose wives only traveled with them for the shopping ops, the change of scenery, and the chance of meeting someone really interesting. She rubbed her right temple where a headache was forming. Aisling could identify in herself more sudden shifts in temper lately and a low-grade, ever-present contempt for white males past a certain age—older men with money and position, confidence and self possession. Was it age or the early onset of something? Perhaps a product of her education—postfeminist, postmodern. That she had been briefly married to a man of this description; that she was the daughter of just such a man—these were among the exceptions that proved the rule. No need for the perfect to upbraid the good, she told herself. Even if asses, men could be of use.
    Aisling was privately pleased with the size of her own ass, its shape and contour, tiny really for a woman at forty and still very firm. An occasionally vegetarian youth, a whole-foods adulthood, the eschewing of red meats in favor of fish, the odd bit of free-range chicken, no sugars or breads or potatoes, plenty of greens and roughage, brown rice, and regular exercise—joggingas a girl, long walks as a woman—neither the sedentary habits of an academic life, the shape-shifting perils of pregnancy, nor the occasional binges of chocolate and cheeses or some finer wine; and yes, she would have to confess, every now and then a Big Mac and fries, just for the decadence of it. No conspiracy of age or maternity or indulgence had added more than a dozen pounds in two dozen years to the body she had as a girl of sixteen. “A small package,” is what Nigel had called her during their courtship, when he couldn’t get enough of her. “A small package in a large world,” he would whisper in the voice he had wooed her in. There had been a lovely imbalance to their lovemaking. He was always so grateful, so full of praise, naming her specific parts and his reverence for them. It was his age. They’d married when she wasn’t yet thirty and he was just gone sixty. She’d been his student, then his assistant, then his lover, then his wife, then his widow. Now she was his bibliographer and minder of his reputation. She had his letters and notebooks, his unpublished poems and variorums. And, though her thick black hair was graying, though her dark brown eyes appeared too often tired, and she read with bifocals now, she remained a woman with good skin, a girlish figure in which she took, seeing so many women of her age gone bulky, a secret pride and quiet pleasure. Age was irreversible. But if she was not voluptuous as a girl, she neither sagged as a woman. If her breasts were small—“fried eggs,” her father called them, inappropriately, in her teens—they defied now the pendulous gravity of larger, fleshier, fatter bodies. She had, despite the baby and her age, the bosom of a woman half her age. She looked good in no bra or a Wonderbra, pantsuits or little black dresses, vintage lingerie or plaid pajamas. And she knew men noticed her, and that her figure quickened in them, if not desire, then admiration, even appreciation.
    She sat up straight in 51H, tucked the pillow and the blanket on one side of her, the canvas bag with her American publisher’s logo on it, full of magazines, hand cream, bottled water, and travel essentials on the other side of her. She still had plenty of room for comfort—a small package, flying steerage from London to Detroit on British Airways Flight 202 on the last leg of six weeks of