Whitegirl

by Kate Manning

  “Anyway,” she said, smiling, “is it true?”

  “What?”

  “You know.” Her eyebrows went up and down. “What they say.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Fuck you back. Don’t be coy with me.”

  “Well, it’s not about that.”

  “Oh, right,” she said. “Where did you go?”

  “A party. A bar. His house.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “I don’t know. Beer. Skiing.”

  “Oh,” she said. “You kids have so much in common!”

  “We do,” I said, defensively. The way she sat, draped now on the chair, her mouth screwed skeptically over to one side, made me doubt myself. She won’t believe me, no matter what I say. The doubts and the questions started right there, the first morning.

  Then I told Claire about how Jack hurt his head, about the basketball game and the injury and what Milo said: You know damn well I didn’t push him.

  Claire listened and she was shocked. “I knew Jack was hurt,” she said. “But I didn’t know Milo had anything to do with it.”

  “He didn’t.”

  “You don’t know that,” she said. “Just because he says he didn’t.” She shook her head. “The two of them. They always had some kind of tribal thing going. Some rivalry.”

  “Claire,” I said, “tribal?”

  “All I’m saying,” she said, “is it’s not about that right now, at this point in your, shall we say, reacquaintance with Monsieur Robicheaux. But it will be. Mark my words.”

  “Mark your own words, Claire,” I said, cranky at her.

  “I’m not saying I see it,” she said. “Other people do.”

  “I don’t care about other people,” I said. “It doesn’t have to be about that.”

  It. Thing. That. We knew what we meant. We couldn’t say any of it.

  “Look. We had a good time,” I told Claire. “We had fun. I like him. Milo is … He is—”

  “Handsome. Also famous.”

  “Tch.”

  “What?”

  “I like him.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Good. I like him, too. I always thought highly of him. But.” She gave me her psychiatric nurse smile, full of reassurance and don’t say I didn’t warn you. It was a smile of Yes dear. “I think you should just adopt a wait-and-see attitude.”

  But it was all waiting and no seeing. Milo didn’t call me. Not the next day or the next. A week passed. More. He didn’t call. I thought I would dry up and die if he didn’t. My hands were cold, yet sweating, I couldn’t eat; everything tasted dry as pet kibble. I was obsessed with him, with that night. What we said, the sugar on his fingertip, how he put it to his mouth, a crystal on his finger. It killed me. I nearly passed out thinking of it. I wanted to call him but I couldn’t. It was medieval, truly, it was pathetic. But I was afraid he scorned me now. He was not calling, so neither was I. Equal and mutual not calling.

  A woman never throws herself at a man.

  I thought of it, hurling myself at Milo. Or hadn’t I done that already? Wasn’t that the problem?

  “He’s probably out of town,” Claire said, to be nice. Her other hypotheses were: “You’re too gorgeous.” “He’s ill.” “You probably scare him,” or “He’s dead.”

  I looked for him on the news, where he was not ill or dead at all, but bantering away with Tracy Austin and all the young players on the U.S. Women’s Tennis Team. Tracy’s ponytail wagged when she talked. He looked right out of the screen, handling the microphone, already a pro after two months.

  He wasn’t calling because he was busy. He was afraid of me. You intimidate men, sweetie, the way you look, my mother had said to me often. I had all kinds of theories. The theory of the photograph on the dresser. The theory of You know. That.

  Just because he didn’t call me back? That meant it was about skin? It was about skin. Of course it was, some of it, in the beginning. I can’t say it wasn’t. Claire’s question, What they say, is it true? the rumors and the history books and the second-guessing, all that was there, like the graffiti on the bathroom wall. It was there when Milo and I were maneuvering around the party, there when I wrapped my arms around his back and felt the valley along his spine, made by the hard muscles on either side of it. I felt those muscles, like warm stone, how they fit in the bowls of my hands, how they ran down to meet the high curve of his backside, and I thought, This has nothing to do with skin.

  He didn’t call me.

  Nothing to do with skin. Ha! I was already angry over it. Petulant. I hated that I had to think about it. Interrogating myself. Claire wagging her eyebrows, saying So? What’s it like? made me furious. But. Okay. I will admit. Between me and Milo that night, was me, thinking: A black man. I thought this even before his name. A black man. I confess it. I’ve never admitted it. Your race is there in the bed with you, and his, too. The first time, it would have to be; the minuscule differences, especially, or, what I mean is: the idea of the differences, what we think they mean; the different hair, his for me, springy under my fingers. (Mine for him? No, for him it wasn’t new.) Smells. Like ripe fruit in the sun, like pine. Like Milo. Then, I wondered, was it him? Or was it them? Did smells have race? Did sounds? I outgrew these questions, but back then I didn’t know anything. I was not White then, when I met Milo. I was green. Green and dumb as a grassy lawn.

  11.

  At work I was a wreck and couldn’t concentrate.

  “Charlotte.”

  “Charlotte.”

  “Hey!”

  “Put your heart in it, sweetheart.”

  After two weeks of waiting I was booked for a big show during New York Style Week. The Couture King wanted me on the catwalk, to be one of his new faces and then later to do a big campaign, including TV spots. My booker wrecked her vocal cords, screaming, to tell me. Kevin called to say how proud he was, how happy. It was a great moment for me, he said.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Baby?”

  “Men,” I said.

  “Tell me about it,” he said, wearily.

  For one whole day we had to shoot promo stills, for previews, for press releases. By the time we finished work, around eleven, I was wrung out and cranky. My scalp hurt from hot combs, and my arches were collapsing in the shoes. They had given me the clothes I had on at the end of the shoot, a short leather jacket, leather pants, but I was too much of a hellhole to say thank you. No, I wouldn’t wait for Anthony, didn’t want to go to the Mudd Club with Gillian. I was going home. I didn’t even change out of the leather stuff. Makeup was still on my face and my hair was teased in a wild way. I was marginally sane.

  On Eighteenth Street I looked for a cab but there wasn’t one. So just walk. I didn’t want to go home, anyway, where the phone was blatantly not ringing, where the answering machine was blinking regularly as a heartbeat, but without that particular recorded voice, Hey, Charlotte. I didn’t want to go anywhere near home. Claire and Carl were there, with their closed door, their linen napkins folded, their wineglasses washed by the sink, everything poignantly paired. No, not home. Shaughnessy’s. There it was, like an omen, a bar I had never noticed. A fairy godmother must have put it there in my path. I went in and sat on a stool. I normally didn’t ever do this, didn’t go out alone, didn’t drink alone. I never was alone.

  I sat four stools down from Plaid Shirt and Gas Station Shirt, both of them with mustaches and wolfy eyes, staring as if the most succulent of the three pigs had just walked in and laid down on their plates. I would not look at them. I swiveled my stool away, toward the corner. So what if I had on leather pants? They could just go wank in the bathroom for all I cared. Wank is a Simon word. Fuck Simon. Don’t want bloody Simon. I had two dark rum and tonics with lime. I lit a cigarette and dragged the smoke into my lungs. Milo isn’t going to call me up or come and see me or otherwise hold me in his arms again, I thought. He wasn’t. It had been two weeks. Longer. He had shown
up and settled some score with me and then gone on ahead. He wasn’t my savior. Not my redeemer. Apparently any saving or redeeming would have to be done by me. It was a frightening thing to realize. I had never gone after anybody. People had always gone after me. I had never tried for anyone. Never had to. Never wanted to.

  I paid for my drinks and left the bar and walked downtown to his building. It was right there. Just six blocks away. Petunias in the urns. Same doorman.

  “Excuse me, would you just ring Mr. Robicheaux’s apartment.”

  You would not be able to tell the degree to which I was fortified by rum. Not by looking at me. What the rum made me was charming when I wanted to be charming. I wanted to be. I had decided.

  “Okay,” he said, obviously impressed by my leather ensemble. “May I tell him whom is calling on him?”

  “An old friend from college,” I said.

  Yeah, sure, said his expression. “Your name?”

  “Charlotte Halsey,” I said, as the doorman dialed Milo’s apartment.

  “He says come up,” said the doorman, eyebrows waggling like woolly bear caterpillars.

  Milo answered the door barefoot but still in his suit, the tie half off and the collar unbuttoned. His throat was beautiful. Dear Lord. I couldn’t help thinking it. And his feet. Long long toes.

  “Hello,” he said, rearing back at the sight of me.

  “Hello,” I said. “You’re home.”

  “Just got home,” he said. “I was—”

  “Let’s go out,” I said. “Want to?”

  “Out?” he said, but he was smiling.

  “I finished a shoot,” I told him. “I just got done. Just a few blocks from here. I’ve been working all day. See this?” I said, and twirled for him, showing him my leather stuff. “I got this for free.”

  “Least you didn’t pay money for it.” He looked at my shoes with concern.

  “Free shoes, too,” I said. “Let’s go somewhere. Let’s go out.”

  “I just got in,” Milo said. “I was—Why don’t you come in? Come on in for a minute.”

  “Oh, no,” I said, pretending to be scandalized. “Never. Not me. Put on your shoes and come on, Robicheaux.”

  He took a breath and blinked and looked at his watch. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll be right there.”

  We went down the street to a joint where students went to be serious and smoke and as we walked Milo asked me pop-fly questions: “What’s new? How are you?” Fine, just fine, I said. I told him I had something to celebrate but I didn’t say what. I didn’t ask him anything. Didn’t say: Where have you been? What is going on? My strategy was to blunder ahead blithely, to make jokes, to acknowledge nothing of What Had Passed Between Us.

  “I’ve been out of town,” he said.

  “Me, too,” I lied. I said I’d been in Paris.

  He said he’d been all over: L.A., Denver, Boston. “My sister lives in Boston.”

  I didn’t say, Did you think of me? I said, “You have a sister?”

  “She’s two years older,” he said.

  I made Milo tell me about her while we drank our drinks.

  “My sister Bobbie,” he said, “is so smart she could talk a dog off a meat wagon.” Which was an expression of his mother’s. His proverbial sainted mother, Hattie. She and his wise father, Milton, along with the brilliant Ph.D. sister, Bobbie, were the rest of the Robicheaux family. He quoted them. As he talked he got a nice look in his eyes. He used the words “we,” “us.” We always chopped our own tree at Christmas. We had a big garden, every year, each of us had our own specialty. Milo grew corn because he liked to eat it. Bobbie grew rutabaga. Rhubarb. Sassafras. Not because she would eat these things but because she liked the words. She just wanted to say “I’m growing my own rutabaga.” He was proud of them and missed them, I could see. It made me jealous, hearing about his happy family in New Hampshire, running around in the wholesome air. And his stories lowered my guard. I was not wrong, I thought, watching the way he leaned toward me, the animated movements of his hands, his unsettled and unsettling gaze. He was interested in me.

  When you’re ready, you’ll tell me.

  “My own personal parents are aliens from another planet,” I said.

  This troubled him immediately. He furrowed his face and asked quietly, “What do you mean by that?” I remembered he didn’t like to say anything bad about anyone.

  “We were all raised to be saved,” I said, “and there was no saving me. I was hopeless, you know?”

  “Saved from what?”

  “Sin. Damnation. Et cetera,” I said. “Mostly et cetera. You had to really watch out for that.”

  He wasn’t quite sure if I was kidding.

  I didn’t know how to explain except to quote the Book of Matthew. I took a deep breath, made my voice whispery and urgent like a preacher’s. “You will see the Son of man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And He will send out His angels with a loud trumpet call …”

  The words made me remember a picture in my old room, of an angel in white robes helping some children across a stormy sea. I told Milo about that, too, the picture, and how I used to tell Diana, That’s you and that’s me, picking out two little girls holding the angel’s hands. He’s taking us to the shore.

  “Whoa,” Milo said, fascinated. “Are you some kind of a Bible-thumper? Are you a Jesus freak?”

  “Don’t call me that,” I said. Snapped. “Just don’t.”

  “Sorry,” he said, and backed off right away. “It was a joke.”

  And right there we had this moment of checking, back and forth for safety, like looking both ways in a crosswalk. We looked away fast. But I saw it: that other night. It was there between us, hanging in the air with the murk of bar smoke. We didn’t mention it. The moment passed like a big truck on the road, leaving a wake of wind.

  “I wasn’t raised in any church,” he said. “We only went to church summers, back in New Orleans. My parents didn’t like the ones near us in New Hampshire,” he said. “So I’m something of a pagan.”

  “I’m not even a pagan,” I said. “I’m a failed pagan.” I told him how even though I didn’t believe any gospel, I still looked for signs, prayed, tried to identify some angels, but never did see one, not even once. I told him about my mother the Avon lady and my sister Diana the Sunday school teacher. About my father’s temper and my brother Peter, the pastor. I didn’t say much about Sean, who was a taxidermist in Oregon—he still is, really, a taxidermist. I mentioned Kids for Christ.

  “What did you do for fun?” he asked me.

  “Needlepoint,” I said. “Prayed. Polished our nails.”

  “Not really.” Milo looked as if he couldn’t believe any of this about me.

  “Yeah, really,” I told him. “At least, until I had a religious conversion.”

  “What kind?”

  “I’m not sure what you’d call it,” I said. “If it’s called ‘born again’ when you find religion, what would it be called when you realized it was all a lot of crap?”

  “Born again,” he said, and smiled.

  I liked that he said that.

  We stayed out till three in the morning, until Milo looked at his watch. “Holy smokes,” he said, like a Boy Scout.

  “I have to go.” I spoke before he could. “I have to get some sleep.”

  On the sidewalk outside, we were quiet for an uncomfortable moment.

  “Thanks for dragging me out,” he said.

  “Anytime.”

  He noticed my outfit again, the leather. “You don’t look like a failed pagan at all, not in that.” He poked the jacket. “You look like you just need a helmet and the Harley and they’d sign you right up.”

  “Ha ha.”

  “I have an old chair that needs upholstering,” he said, poking again.

  “It’s fashion!” I said primly. “It’s designed by the Couture King of the USA.” Then without really thinking about it, I invited him to come to my show, the Ki
ng’s new fall line, featuring Charlotte Halsey. “It’s next week.”

  “Next week.”

  “You’re invited. So come.”

  “Okay. I’d love to.”

  We did not kiss. He said good night.

  “Good night,” I said.

  “Sleep well,” he said. But I saw he knew I wouldn’t, and maybe he wouldn’t, either. He hailed a cab for me and I headed uptown toward home, happier for the moment. He was coming to my show, anyway. Love to, he said.

  To get on a runway for the Couture King, you have to be no bigger than size 6, you have to be five ten or taller. You have to be exotic, which is the word they used at the time. I was not exotic, just muscular, with biceps and quadriceps and lats, as well as a big long crop of whitecorn-colored hair. In those days, in the ravaged aftermath of Twiggy, I was extreme.

  The shows are always bedlam. You walk out onto the runway with straight pins sticking into your flesh. You have Band-Aids taped across your nipples. Or nothing. You are blinded by lights; music pumps you up and propels you out from the pit of backstage. Backstage is frantic. People are pulling clothes off you, pinning you, stapling you with staples, into the next thing. You’re naked half the time. Dressers think nothing of taking off your bra while you’re taking off your shoes.

  “Thirty seconds.”

  “Watch my hair.”

  “Left earring.”

  “Touch up the chinline.”

  “Suck in, babe.”

  “You suck in.”

  “You’re getting fat.”

  “Not as fat as you, precious.”

  Everyone in the seething place is pretentious and frivolous and calling each other darling constantly. Absolutely everyone is sweetie or babe or hun. Everyone obsesses; everyone’s skin is thin as onion peel, everyone has to have their waters bottled and iced just so, with mint, with lemon, with the blood of their rivals. The girls are cold-shouldering each other and hugging everyone in sight. We’re sliding our eyes at each other to see who’s wearing what, if hers is better. Dressers are dabbing you and wiping your armpits dry and blowing your hair. Compliments are flying around like common colds. Fabulous, marvelous, stunning, gorgeous. They mean nothing. You can’t go on without them. You own it you own it.