Whitegirl

by Kate Manning

  He smiled. The taxi stopped on the corner of Fifth Avenue just above Washington Square. Milo opened the door and got out, leaned in again, gave me fare money, put his hand on my arm.

  “Good night, Charlotte.”

  “Oh.” I swallowed. “Good night then.”

  He reached up, toward my hair, with his thumb and forefinger, and pinched at something small there, as if he were removing an insect or a speck of dirt. He opened his hand flat to show me: a crystal of sugar on his fingertip. He smiled and put it to his mouth. “Sweet,” he said then. “Come in with me.”

  I got out of the cab and Milo paid the guy. We didn’t speak. He put his hand on my back and steered me toward an old ornate building. Brass awning posts, flower urns brimming with petunias, doorman dozing on a bench, mirrored elevator. We had to watch each other’s reflections trying not to watch, pretending not to look.

  “I’ve only lived here a month,” he said, closing his apartment door behind us but not turning on the light. “Have a seat.”

  I sat on a couch, which was all the furniture he had, he said. The room was echoing and dim. Silver street light filtered in the windows. Milo was in the kitchen, humming something. He came in after a moment and handed me a glass of water, then opened a window so a breeze blew in. I watched him as he looked through some records stacked against the wall and had a feeling like vertigo, as if I knew everything that would happen and didn’t know at all. Milo put some music on, a man singing blues, but in another language. He stood up and crossed the room and sat down, not exactly next to me. He leaned back and closed his eyes.

  “Do you want anything?” he asked mildly.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I’m okay.”

  Long rectangles of light moved across the ceiling as the traffic passed on the street below. Milo hummed a little, barely, with just his breath. We didn’t talk. We stayed quietly, our heads back, watching the light wheel above us. It was peaceful, and tense as the skin of a balloon filling with water. “Here,” he said softly, and reached across so his hand was open beside me. I put my hand out, and he pulled me toward him, moved his arm around my shoulders. We sat there in his dim living room like that, my ear against his rib cage, right over his heartbeat. We could hear our own breathing. I closed my eyes. Milo was stroking my head now, just absently. “Charlotte,” he said quietly, as if he were trying my name out, practicing it.

  He sat forward to see me then and looked in my eyes, not blinking. He leaned in and I lifted up my mouth and he kissed me.

  “A long time waiting to kiss you,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “Since I saw you.”

  “Three days?”

  “Since Vermont.”

  “No. I don’t believe you,” I said.

  “Because you didn’t notice me then,” he said.

  “I did. I did.”

  “No you didn’t,” he said. “You notice me now, though,” with another kiss.

  “I do, yes, I notice you definitely, Milo.”

  “Along with everybody else and their grandmothers.”

  “Grandmothers don’t notice you like I do,” I said.

  And we teased back and forth like this, kissing with something hidden underneath, like a fish just below the surface of the water, circling, so that I was unsure and scared of what was happening, and wanting it to happen anyway.

  “Years,” he said.

  “You could try to make up for lost time,” I said.

  He picked me up and carried me then, just lifted me.

  Save me! I whispered.

  I’ll save you, he said.

  He put me down on the bed and held me. He was not in a hurry. I was not. He looked in my eyes while he undid the buttons and unhooked the hooks and his face was full of something I don’t know what to call, and my throat was so swollen with this same feeling I could barely swallow.

  “Are you all right?” he said.

  “Yes. Are you?”

  “Yes.”

  Everything happened wildly and desperately then. Charlotte, he said. God. There’s no way to remember what I said, whether they were actual words or just sounds. I could feel the bones in his cheeks and the bones in his jaw against the bones of my face. He pushed my hair back off my forehead and held it, gripped me there with his fingers laced hard through the strands to the roots. I had my hand up to cradle his cheek. He looked in my eyes, and I looked back, both of us fierce, as if the first one to turn away would lose.

  Thinking of it even now fills me up with longing. Oh my God, Milo and Charlotte, we had a good time, we had a beautiful time, I must say, so that tears were in our eyes, looking at each other, who knows why? Maybe it was relief, or awe, at how raw we were, our feelings, crying and saying things. Jesus. We were exposed as mussels dropped on the rocks by gulls.

  We lay there later, stretched out alongside each other, breathing hard. Light came in from the street and I could see that he was smiling, forks of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes.

  “Milo,” I said.

  “Hey,” he said.

  We fell asleep on our backs with our faces turned up, fingers woven in the dark gray dark. I loved him right away, so much, and he loved me, so help me God.

  10.

  In the morning, the sun poured in the window over us and we looked at each other, lying there like stripes. We did not talk. We didn’t dare. The air was fat with questions and the fact that we were mostly strangers. Around noontime, Milo said, “If we don’t get up, we’ll starve.” So we stood. My legs felt so wobbly I had to lie down again. Milo put a robe on, went in the shower. I looked around. There on the floor was my silver jumpsuit crumpled, my pointy silver heels. They looked wrong in the daylight. Like witch clothing.

  I rummaged around his dresser. Right away I saw it. Stuck in the mirror was a snapshot of a light brown-skinned woman with her hair in soft waves around her face. She was pretty. She was outside somewhere, with leaves in the background. Her brown eyes looked sunnily at the camera, looking out with love, I thought. She was his girlfriend, surely. Beautiful. Sitting on a lawn chair, wearing a yellow summer dress with thin straps, dangling brass earrings shaped like suns.

  I had to draw a deep breath. I had to blink. I had to lecture myself and jump back from conclusions. I wouldn’t be here if she was everything to him. I decided not to ask. I didn’t want to know yet. The picture watched me. I imagined him kissing her and then argued with myself. She’s some old flame. She dumped him. She’s his sister. She lives in France. She’s dead. Whoever she was made me cautious, suspicious. But I wouldn’t ask. I would find out but not by asking.

  I opened the drawers of his dresser. His socks were balled up and in rows, the shirts folded in a way that spoke of housekeepers. I saw knee braces and Ace bandages, a jockstrap, a black bow tie, a condom in foil! an old passport, a stopwatch, airline tickets. I don’t know what I was expecting but there was nothing I hadn’t seen in the drawers of other men. I put on a T-shirt of his and some of his boxer shorts, plaid ones. The shirt said Lake Placid, New York. XXXII Olympiad, with those Olympic rings interlocking.

  I went out into the empty living room. The moldings and mantelpiece were carved and intricate. One whole wall was windows, and the sun came through the arched glass in shafts, lighting up a soft glitter in the air, spangled motes hanging there in the Saturday morning. Unpacked brown cardboard boxes were neatly lined up around the room.

  He had tried to decorate a little, pathetically. It was touching. There was a poster tacked up, of the Montreal Jazz Festival, 1976, and another, framed, of Milo racing, his body shaped like an S of yellow spandex. Not much else. I looked for clues but he hadn’t unpacked them. I couldn’t very well start going through the boxes, although I thought of it. When he came out of the shower I was reading Ski magazine on the bed.

  “I am going to make you breakfast,” he said.

  “I thought I already was your breakfast,” I said, coy as all get-out. “And your lunch.”

 
“You think I’m some kind of cannibal?” he said.

  This made me lurch around and look at him. “I didn’t say that,” I said.

  “Just checking,” he said, grinning. Like: Gotcha.

  The whole time I was in the shower I was washing myself with the word cannibal. I worried that I had said something wrong. Oh boy, there seemed to be a miniature cannibal with a bone through his nose standing on the soap dish in a grass skirt and watching me through beads of water. I scrubbed my face too hard, till my skin was pink as bubble gum, and shiny.

  In the kitchen, Milo handed me coffee, and I nursed it gratefully. He watched me cradling the mug and said, “I remember you always had a hangover at breakfast.”

  “I did not!” I said.

  “That’s what I remember,” he said, pouring cereal.

  “Oh, and you didn’t?” I said.

  “You never saw me with a hangover,” Milo said. “But I used to see you. Hiding in the corner with three big coffee mugs and circles under your eyes.”

  “I like caffeine,” I said. “It’s a staple food.” I was trying to be funny but Milo was looking at me again as if he was trying to figure something out, which made me wary. “What else do you remember?”

  “Not much.” Then, as if it had been on his mind, he said, “Your friend Jack is in Japan. Did you know that?”

  “Well, he’s not my friend, you know?” I said. “We lost touch.”

  “So to speak,” Milo said.

  “So to speak,” I said. “Ha ha.”

  “He’s in Japan. That’s where he ended up.”

  “But, I don’t really care about Jack.”

  “He was hurt,” Milo said. “You know that story, right?”

  “No, I don’t,” I said. “I don’t particularly like Jack stories.”

  “Oh, well.” Milo smiled, backing off. “In that case I will not encumber you with this one.”

  “But you have so perked up my curiousness,” I said, “I mean, that I really would like to be enlightened—you know, find out.”

  “You mean I have inflamed your curiosity,” Milo said.

  “Right,” I said. “You have inflamed everything.” I was red, under his gaze.

  Milo took a breath and told how Jack hurt his head. The story was not about a ski injury. Not about Jack wiping out and slamming into a rock-pile or catapulting off an overhang. It was about a basketball game. A pickup basketball game in a gym at Lake Placid, winter, 1975, which was the year after we all left Cabot.

  There wasn’t a flake of natural snow. The skiers were hanging around waiting for machine-made snow so they could race. Meanwhile, in order not to become slothful and fat, they lifted weights and ran stairs and played basketball.

  “So there we are, stir-crazy out of our minds,”Milo said, “and you have to remember that every one of us is an asshole, every man jack of us. We’re all big motherfucking egomaniacs. We can’t play basketball to save our own asses because we’re skiers. But we don’t let that stop us. No. We decide we’re going to play hoops.”

  The teams were divided up: technical racers against the downhillers. Slalom racers versus schussbombers. I didn’t need Milo to remind me that made him and Jack on opposite teams.

  “And each guy is highly accustomed to winning,” Milo said. “Highly accustomed, okay? or he wouldn’t even be at Lake Placid. Each guy wants to be in el big time. Also: We hate each other’s guts. Now, no two guys hate each other more than me and Jack Sutherland.”

  “I used to notice that.”

  “Not from me you didn’t,” Milo said. “I was sweet as pie to that guy. From day one. We were buddy-buddy. Teammates on and off the field, as they liked to put it in the magazines. By the way, I am sweet as pie to everybody, in case you hadn’t noticed, which is a practice that was drilled into me by my parents.” Milo made his voice low and slow and very dignified, which is what he did when he quoted his father, and he said: “Son, never give anybody any extra reason to give you trouble.”

  So Milo liked everybody no matter how he really felt about it, and everybody liked Milo. But his neck got wiry with anger, and his voice flattened out as he told about how, in this pickup basketball game between the maniac mad-dog downhillers and the fancy-dance slalomites, Jack Sutherland called Milo Robicheaux a name.

  “He called me a gorilla, which is something he’d been circling around for a while, if you didn’t know,” Milo said. “He said, ‘Step aside, ya big gorilla.’ ”

  “Jack said that?”

  “He did,” Milo said. “And I looked right at him, right in his face, and I went like this.” Milo made a kiss with his lips and silently mouthed the words I love you.

  Sometime in the next part of the game, Jack was going up for a rebound and Milo was guarding him, and as Jack went up to park the ball in the hoop, Milo leaped and tipped it away, and there was some kind of collision between them, so that Jack went flying and cracked his head smack against the big metal pole supporting the backboard and landed on the sandbags, bleeding.

  “We rushed him to the hospital,” Milo said. Jack had a fractured skull. Double vision. Extreme headaches. Dizziness. “He never got better enough to race again,” Milo said. “Not that year, not on the team.”

  “I never knew that. I just thought he got cut, didn’t make the team.”

  “He left the country. He teaches skiing in Japan.”

  “But he always wanted to do that,” I said. “He speaks the language.”

  “Nobody heard from him.”

  “I heard from him. I mean, he called my family in California. He’s—”

  “You said you lost touch.” He interrupted me.

  “This was years ago,” I said. “But—”

  “I thought you lost touch,” Milo said. His voice was brittle and quiet. “Anyway, there’s more.”

  “More what?”

  “He said I pushed him. He blamed it on me.”

  “Did you push him?” I asked.

  “No,” he said tightly. “And you know damn well I didn’t push him.”

  Milo stood up and put his coffee mug in the sink. He closed all the cereal boxes and put them away. I tried to help, tried rinsing the dishes, but the water running was too loud. We were suddenly awkward and stiff with each other. “I’ll get you a cab,” Milo said.

  It was hot out, already afternoon, more like August than May. People wearing shorts and sandals were passing me in my shiny jumpsuit, sweat on my legs underneath, my feet pushed up in strappy heels. We walked past the doormen with their rubbernecking eyes, out to Fifth, up to Fourteenth Street. Milo walked alongside in his tasseled loafers with no socks. His steps were too long for me in my shoes. For every stride of his I took three shiny silver baby ones, mincing along. He was in a hurry, hustling toward the cab. His sunglasses were on but you could feel him staring straight ahead; you could feel a zone of tension around him. The faster we walked the more I wondered what I had said, what was the matter. Was it the people checking us out or the word cannibal? Was it being seen with me, my showoff silver clothing, or my question Did you push him? What? I didn’t know.

  He held the door of the cab. “I’ll see you,” he said.

  “Call me up,” I said.

  It’s like being swept under a rug before the police come.

  “Milo,” I said. “Hey.”

  He bent his head in the open door of the taxi, with his face arranged in a polite question, like May I help you?

  “Milo.” I just said his name, quietly, like calling him back from wherever he had been, to see what he would do. Reading his face I thought I saw a brief, soft feeling there, like the one I’d seen in the night.

  “See ya,” I said, and grinned at him.

  He laughed. “See ya.”

  So when the cab sped off across Fourteenth Street, I still had my face curled up in relief, in a smile. When it faded, I closed my eyes against the rush of wind coming in the window, leaned back against the hot blue vinyl seats and felt a cramp take hold in my
abdomen. I crossed my arms over my chest and felt dizzy. Sick.

  At home Claire did not have to ask. She knew. She looked at me when I came in the door, Saturday afternoon, a grin ready on her lips. I looked right back at her and made my eyes bug out to show her she was not wrong in her conclusions.

  “Whoa,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  I lay down on the couch, and Claire sat in the armchair.

  “Oh, boy,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “So, you like him.”

  “He’s nice.”

  “Well”—she sighed—“as you know, Carl and I took a while to figure out that we really had enough in common to get married.” Claire had had the ring for a year, planning the wedding forever, ad nauseam, though it wasn’t supposed to happen for another year still, when she finished law school.

  “What the fuck are you talking about, marriage?” I said. It was all I could do to keep my eyeballs from rolling back in my head. She was obsessed with weddings. To me the simple tragedy of Carl was that he had made Claire boring. She wouldn’t go out. Hardly ever and just with him. She wore sweater sets and flat shoes with her jeans. I gave her tube tops and stacked-heel shoes and vinyl hotpants—she was tiny, she could wear anything, but she wouldn’t. “It’s not me,” she’d say. Or, the truth: “Carl wouldn’t go for it.” For gifts, he gave her brooches. Brooches! Gold ones in circle patterns, with maybe a pearl. As if she was some dowager with a hump who ate tiny mayonnaise sandwiches without crusts. I would never say just what I thought of Carl. Or admit that part of me was jealous of Claire, the reports of her increasingly calm state. I was not calm. Just a few weeks before this I had lurched in from Rio de Janeiro at one o’clock in the morning with Simon and half the girls from a shoot and our whole entourage. We stayed up listening to music, smoking and eating all Claire’s food, messing up our whole gorgeous apartment that she mostly was responsible for, since I was hardly there. We were carrying on till dawn, and Claire just glared sarcastically at me in the morning and said, You’re a fucking lunatic, Charlotte, you strumpet. She gave me the finger as usual. There were never any hard feelings. But it was difficult for me to see how the new calm Claire or the old wild Claire would be much help to me in sorting out Milo.