by Kate Manning
The 1981 White House picture was taken just before Reagan was shot and just after Milo’s knee was injured at Sarajevo, and just before we met up again in New York. I saw it on the front page of the New York Times. “President Greets America’s Athletes.” Milo appeared to be the same guy I remembered: smiling, upbeat. In other pictures, in his various ads, he always seemed to be giving some kind of okay sign, thumb and forefinger circled, or a V for victory. He telegraphed winning and happy messages, so that even with the sound off you could see that life was grand for Milo Robicheaux.
And it seemed life was grand for me, too. Perhaps we two were, at the time we met up again, the most well-known faces ever to have passed through Cabot College, not that that was any big deal. I’m not trying to brag. I’m talking about being well known, known well, how it is that you know somebody.
I knew everything about him. What he or anybody else knew about me, I couldn’t say, but by 1977, when I was twenty-one, my face was on the fronts of magazines, on the sides of buses and buildings, in the windows of stores. Not that anybody knew my name. Strangers looked hard at me in the street, stopped me and said, “Do I know you?” they said. “I thought I knew you.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, and smiled at them politely.
But it was a good question. “Do I know you?” Sometimes I wondered if there was anybody to whom I could say Sure you do, you know me well, I’m Charlotte, your Charlotte.
Even my parents. God knows I did not contact them for two years after I moved to New York, but I don’t think that’s the reason they didn’t recognize my voice when I did call.
“Hello, it’s me.”
A long silence.
“I’m in New York, and I’m fine.”
“May I help you?”
“It’s me. It’s Charlotte.”
“Arthur,” I heard my mom whisper. “It’s her.”
She cried a long time (twenty-two minutes and forty-five seconds, I found out later from my phone bill). I said how sorry I was to have made her worry.
“Did you get the pictures? Did you get the magazine?”
“Yes.” She was sobbing. “Yes we did.”
I had sent her the first Vogue cover. This was late 1976, after two years of fending for myself in the wild. I had sent the magazine to show I had survived, that I had harvested nuts and berries and licked leaves for rainwater, that I had come through the wilderness just like Jesus, so maybe I could now get back in their good graces.
“We’re very proud of you, darling.”
My father got on the phone, briefly. “We’ve prayed for you, honey” was all he could manage to say.
“Thanks.”
“Let us pray now.”
My mother cleared her throat. They began praying across the phone lines: Dear Lord, Our Father, help Your little lamb Charlotte who has strayed so far from Your flock to return to the embrace of Jesus Christ… I had a picture in my head of them as they whispered: the squint-wrinkles at the points of my father’s eyes, my mother’s hardcap of blond hair, her perfect mouth tight with worry, surrounded by pucker lines, like the mark of a bullet through glass. I knew them, what they wanted and how they loved me. I did not know how I could be their child, though, how I had turned into me, coming from them.
Hanging up, I was sad, despite the fact of being reunited, sort of, with my parents. They were proud of me. I was a fashion model. My face was on the cover of magazines. I was using God’s gift, which is what I thought they wanted me to do, to earn money, raking it in, actually. So, while I dutifully visited, and took my mother to Paris each spring for the collections, and called them faithfully in the years after that, it was out of guilt. As I dialed their number there was always a hope that somebody else would answer, my real parents, or my same parents’ newly revealed true selves, the ones who had made me.
I still prayed, but in my own way. I had a practical attitude.
Dear God, please let me get a taxi, please don’t make me throw up at the shoot, please don’t let me eat anything before I go, please let the clothes fit me, let these circles under my eyes be concealed under this concealer. And also if it’s not too much trouble for you, could I just fall in love? to see what it’s like? just to feel it? sanctified or pure or not, I don’t really care about that part.
The pastor used to tell us at our teen meetings to always go on dates with Jesus Christ. “No other man satisfies like Jesus. You will behave yourself to save yourself for Him. Think of Jesus as your date!”
I was having a lot of dates all those years in New York, but not with Christ, who would surely have been mortified by many aspects of my life then, but especially the dates. For example, when I was twenty-one, twenty-two, for roughly two years I went out with one of the more famous photographers. This is the boyfriend who would later sell to tabloid newspapers the intimate nude pictures of me that he took. The ones whose negatives he said he destroyed, and all the prints.
After the photographer, with a few brief mistakes in between, I gratefully moved on to this much older guy who had made a fortune in the record business. He was more than forty and boyish with a long gray ponytail. His name was Simon. He was English and said “bathing costume,” not bathing suit. He called rich people “toffee noses.” I went out with him for a year just to listen to the way he spoke, the way he called me sweet with the t hard at the end. “Oh, Charlotte,” he said, with his eyes closed, “do that again,” like Eau, Shaaaa-lot, dyew that a-gaine. It was gorgeous, that accent, so that even ordinary words were gilded with it. Simon was getting fat at the tops of his hips. He liked cocaine very much. He was constantly speedy, like an ant picked off its trail and put down somewhere else, going! off! frantically! but with purpose! He was an important man and had a lot of money that he made by his wits. He knew many people I needed to know: the French designer, the Italian photographer, and especially the American Couture King. Simon knew countless things I didn’t know, had read thousands of books, many of which he gave me: novels, Hemingway and Steinbeck, The Executioner’s Song. The Bluest Eye, a biography of Bob Marley, one of Elvis Presley, a lot of music ones, about Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and Mick Jagger, whom I met because he was a friend of Simon’s. Other books he recommended were beyond me: Tolstoy, Pope and Milton and Byron and poets in general. You and your blond education, he said. Don’t they teach you anything in American schools? He played me jazz and took me to museums. How’s my sweet nothing today? he said sometimes. My dizzy blond. He made me feel stupid as a baby, but also that it didn’t matter, he would take care of me.
“This is Charlotte,” Simon liked to say. “She’s a model. She’s very hot right now. She’s a rising star. She’s done Vogue. She’s had the cover. Surely you know Charlotte?”
People always looked at me very carefully when he said this, searching my face for hints like doctors search for signs of jaundice or melanoma. None of them knew me but they said they did. “I thought you looked familiar!” they said, and grasped my hands warmly or kissed me on both cheeks. “Charlotte, of course! I thought I recognized you.”
Don’t I know you? Milo said that.
This was in the spring of ’81. I was twenty-five and so was Milo. There was a party for somebody’s new restaurant. It was a grand affair. Simon knew the owner, who wanted a lot of models there for the press to write about. The girls had to sit around like exotic plants. I told the agency and they sent the ones who were just starting out, the beautiful new ones who thought parties like this one were exciting. I was bored, though, and trying out the table closest to the kitchen, closest to the back by the rest rooms, not our usual table in places like this.
“Don’t I know you?”
I was looking down, playing with the ash at the end of my cigarette, rolling it in the ashtray. It was dark at this party and I hadn’t seen him in the room, wasn’t looking.
He touched my arm. “I know you.”
Funny how I felt that he did know me. Right then. Or I wished he did. I remember tha
t wish, how he said the word know.
“Milo Robicheaux,” I said. “My God.”
Oh, he was so startling. He knelt so he was below the level of my eyes. I smiled down at him and blew the smoke in my mouth up to the side. I just looked at him. His green eyes, smiling face. I felt odd, light in the head and sort of sick, as if the nicotine was making me high, but I was used to smoke so it wasn’t that. I stubbed the cigarette out.
“I thought you looked familiar,” he said. “It’s you.”
I was smiling without any kind of guard up. We stood and I reached across the little cocktail table and hugged him, awkwardly, so my chin hit the lapel of his jacket and the ashtray fell on the floor.
Sorry, sorry, oh Jesus. I was apologizing already.
I was saying compulsory things. Well, well, well. I’ve been hearing about you. Long time no see. Looking good. So, you’re a famous face now. Yes, but not as famous as you. What’s next for you? Are you living here in New York?
He didn’t say much, nodding at me, looking happy. Yeah, guess so, yeah, we’ll see. But our conversation, the party around us and the introduction to these two white guys in suits he was apparently with were not what was really going on. What was really going on was a simmer of memory, of five years ago and Jack and the Red Hat and how we’d been acquainted, how once we had danced at a different party and what had happened to us since then. You feel all that past lurking as you nod and say pleasantries. I felt it while I was looking at Milo, at his eyes, watching his lips move while he talked. The past. I could see how he was the same but not the same. He was twenty-five. Not a boy. His face had more flesh on it. His hair was shorter. He seemed like a man. A sharp dresser. Punky black jeans and a narrow tie. Pointy shoes. He was smooth. He was startling. Handsome.
“Jed Moscowitz, Mark Raleigh: Charlotte Halsey,” Milo said. He remembered my name.
The men were agents. They were from ICM. Are you secret agents? I asked, smiling at them. Charm floated off me. I don’t know how you stand working with this guy, I said to them, wink, wink, tilt of the head at Milo. Robicheaux’s been a wildman since he was a kid. Oh, yeah, sure. We go way back. A wildman. Smilin’ Milo they used to call you, right? I was right back to being one of the girls, Lynnie or Katrina, little sisters, ski team babes.
“I’ll catch up with you,” he said to Mark and Jed, practically like: Dismissed! They went, and Milo said, “Let’s go out for a drink or something.”
“Okay, sure,” I said. “Maybe sometime next week?”
“I’m talking about this minute,” he said. He whispered in my ear. “Right now.”
I smiled at him. I asked what about Jed and Mark.
“Fuck Jed and Mark,” he said. “I am in charge of Jed and Mark.” He took my elbow. “Come on.”
I loved it when he did that. I loved the feeling of being steered by him, with his hand on the skin of my elbow. I could feel the warmth of it, there in the cold air-conditioned party. He led me through the crowd, handsome and important.
“Are you here with anybody?” he said.
I was. Simon.
“No,” I said. I was giggling. I didn’t care. People I knew looked up from their dancing, from their drinks and saw me go. I turned my head toward Milo and looked at him like he was the only person in the room. Who knows where Simon was at that moment? Having a spot of tea. Putting powders up his toffee nose, I didn’t care. Even people I didn’t know were looking as we left. They pretended they weren’t watching but I read the lips of somebody who said: Milo Robicheaux, the skier.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Eighth Avenue,” said Milo, as if the street were a destination in itself.
We went outside and walked down Eighth. We saw beer neons in the window of a bar and went in. He steered me to a table, pulled a chair out for me, and sat himself across.
“My God,” he said. “Look at you.”
“Look at you,” I said back.
We just stayed for a while without saying anything else, looking and grinning. I felt stopped from thinking. The waitress came and Milo asked for beer so I did, too.
When she brought the mugs, there was a moment where both of us were deciding whether we were going to smash them together, the way it was done back at the Red Hat. All this past was pushing at us, weighted like water, so that by some simultaneous unspoken agreement, we smashed the mugs together and said, “Owgh, owgh owgh,” but sort of sarcastically, without the pig-snorting noise. It was as if we were quoting those others, the Cabot ski gang, not really doing it ourselves, which made us both laugh, and beer foam went up my nose so I started coughing and he had to come around the other side of the table to thump me on the back. Or maybe he didn’t have to but he did.
“You’re out of practice,” Milo said.
“I haven’t been oinking much lately, no,” I said.
“And so do you miss it?”
I laughed at him. We both just cracked up and snorted the way they did back at the Red Hat. Neither of us could believe we’d been there, doing that.
“I’ve heard all about you,” I said, like a confession.
“What have you heard?”
“You know. You’re a champion, you’ve won all these golden trophies, medals, you walk on water, blah blah.”
“So, what happened to Jack?” he said.
“You tell me,” I said, “I don’t know.”
“He fell and got a head injury. He didn’t make it to Innsbruck.”
“He had a head injury before, if you ask me,” I said.
Milo laughed but there was something in his face I couldn’t read, some flicker. “He said he was heading for New York,” Milo said. “He said he would be coming to stay with you.”
“Well, he didn’t,” I said blithely. “He didn’t come so he couldn’t stay.” I poured more beer. I didn’t want to talk about Jack. “How’s your knee?” I said.
“You know that, too?” He said it with his eyebrows raised. His eyelashes were long, almost feminine. “I’m on my second surgery,” he said.
Milo had wrecked his knee a few months after he won in ’80, his fourth Gold. The sports shows replayed him falling over and over, tumbling down a twisted course in the mountains of Yugoslavia during some postseason race that didn’t count for anything. They stopped the tape to show him with a Gumby knee bending unnaturally back and up. They had a close-up of his face all twisted up in pain. He’d have to retire from the circuit. He was moving to New York to be a sportscaster. It was in the papers.
“So you’re moving to New York?” I said. “You already live here?”
“How do you know?”
“Everybody knows.”
“What other salient facts do you have on me?”
“Your whole life story!” I said. “I know everything! All about you!”
“You think so?” He was smiling but only out of one side of his face. “You think so.”
It was if he was saying: You couldn’t possibly know. What could you even begin to know?
It frightened me a little bit and jerked me suddenly into feeling like a White Person sitting across the table from a Black Person, instead of just me, Charlotte, sitting across from Milo, an acquaintance from college. So I drank quickly and a lot, and was afraid that whatever I said would be the wrong thing, that I would just reveal the bottomless pit of what I didn’t know. My blond education.
He asked me about myself. He said he’d seen me in some ads. He said he was never sure if it was me, that I could look so different. “Sometimes you look like you, and sometimes you look … I don’t know,” he said, “like someone else.”
I put my teeth over my bottom lip like a beaver’s teeth and crossed my eyes. “What do I look like when I look like me?”
He laughed at that. “You’re funny,” he said. “I always harbored suspicions that you might be funny.”
“I’m not,” I said. “I’m a very serious and boring uptight priggish kind of person.” I brought my elbows to the tab
letop and rested my chin on my laced fingers like I was the queen.
“I heard you had made it big in New York,” he said. “La de da. La haute couture.”
“Not like you, though,” I said. “Everybody all over the world knows you.”
We talked a long time, it seemed to me, although it was probably not more than an hour. We talked about safe subjects, about Milo’s new job at Network Sports. About modeling and New York and apartments and restaurants we liked. We talked about traveling in Europe, where he’d been and where I had. During which time I wondered what it would be like to kiss him. To be kissed by him. I sometimes did this while talking to someone handsome, just idly. I looked at Milo’s lips while he was talking and thought about my lips touching them but suspended the thought because it seemed … suddenly not so idle, somehow. His lips were ample and fleshy and it struck me how it would be to kiss them.
And I thought, Don’t think they’re ample, you can’t think they’re ample or large because you’re not supposed to and his nostrils are elegant wide brown nostrils but no, you don’t notice that. Why not? Because it’s a racial characteristic, because it means you see the race of the person when we are all color-blind and if you are not color-blind you are a racist and evil. His teeth are white when he smiles. His smile is nice, like ripples on sunny water. Don’t think about the lips. Why? Why not?
I drank more and more. I wondered what it would be like.
After a while he looked at his watch and said, “Better get going, I’m afraid. It’s late.” He pushed his chair back.
“Yes,” I said, standing up, but I fell, spilling beer. “Whoa!” I said. “I’m completely useless.”
“No,” he said, catching me so that I was against him, lingering for a second. “No, I don’t think completely.”
And I wondered what did he mean by that. Not completely useless. Did he mean I was good for a screw? Did he mean it like Simon meant it? You’re good, you know, love, what? This is Charlotte, she’s a terrorist in the bag, wink, wink, wink; or like all the other ones at so many of the parties, who said, Let’s go home. Come home with me?