by Kate Manning
You do. You have to. You take those words and you flaunt that piece of fabric around as if it’s yours, right out of your closet. You wear it like it’s ordinary but you’re not. As if by wearing it, Mrs. Horseface Old Money and Mrs. Helmet Hair Captain of Industry and Mrs. Facelift Society Page will have everyone look at her, the way everyone on either side of the apron is looking, clapping, murmuring about you. I liked that feeling. I craved it. I was so pumped and excited to do this show. There would be a lot of press. Women’s Wear Daily. The Dragon Lady of Vogue. Jackie Onassis and Princess Grace. Milo. I made sure he was in the front row.
The Couture King gave us a pep talk before the show. He is a pompous blowhard phony with sideburns and big black-framed glasses. Elvis is alive, I used to say behind his back. Look, girls, it’s Elvis. He thought we couldn’t get enough of him. He was on his third wife, each one younger than the last by a factor of three. He kissed us and held us, each individually. “Charlotte,” he said to me, “you’re the embodiment of my work, with that American face, all those biceps in your arms. Those long legs.”
Pretentious pug, I thought. You say that to everyone.
“It’s you,” I said. “You make anyone look good.”
The first piece of mine was a long metallic taffeta dress, purple with a ruffled train, slit up to Kingdom Come, with a tight strapless bodice. It had a small bolero jacket cut high. My legs led and my face was impassive. Bored. I walked. Milo was washed out by the lights. I knew just where he was, though, felt his eyes at the height of my ankle. He was there. I slipped the jacket off to show the back detail, to show my shoulders. He would remember them.
I walked out nine times. Sportswear, more evening wear. Last was a short slip with a lace-bra top. It was made of shimmering green gauze the color of caterpillars, worn with enormous bright red beads, red sneakers. I flexed my biceps gracefully at the end of the catwalk, one at a time, half fighter, half dancer. People clapped. The press said later I was an embodiment of the new confident woman of the ’80s. The New Athleticism. Feminism Comes to Fashion, they said. Ha. Right.
I don’t remember where we went afterwards. I do remember Milo was bowled over, he said he’d never seen anything like it, me on the runway.
“I never knew you did that, that you could do that.”
“Do what?” I said. “It’s just walking a line.”
“Some lines are harder to walk than others,” he said.
“Yes. True.” And some lines mean more than what they seem to mean, and some are just lines.
“I mean it, Charlotte. You’re gifted. You looked different every time you came through the gates.”
“The gates?”
“Well, that’s just how I think of them,” he said. “Starting gates. Anyway, you cranked out there.”
They weren’t lines. He had respect in his voice.
We went home separately. It was old-fashioned and unspoken, as if we had agreed about it.
“So good night again,” he said, something mischievous going on with his smile.
“Yes,” I said. “Good night again.”
We had several weeks of this hellish pretend Victorian courtship. It took forever, as long as the gestation period of an elephant or a whale. We talked on the phone sometimes. We met once for lunch. For dinner, a couple of times. We didn’t go out after, we didn’t go dancing. Once we tentatively kissed in a taxi. We were riding uptown and when we got to his corner, Milo gave me fare money and opened the door. One of his legs was on the sidewalk already when he leaned back toward me. He meant to kiss my cheek, but our lips touched. I remembered his from before, dry and muscular. I nearly fainted. He stopped and pulled away for a reason I didn’t know, didn’t ask. Whatever it was made him look ill.
“See ya,” he said. He looked just terrible.
“He’s using you,” said Claire. “You’ll never learn.”
She saw Milo a couple of times, when he came to pick me up. He was charming to her, and she was shy in front of him, in her old sweater and glasses. “Claire!” he said, and hugged her. “You look great, you look just the same!” He was always in a hurry. He kept looking at his watch. “Let’s go, let’s go.” He held my jacket for me. He looked in the mirror in the entryway and yanked at his tie knot. “See you, Claire,” he said.
“He’s definitely using you,” Claire said when she saw me home early, in the door by eleven.
“For what?”
“He needs someone flashy, picked you.”
“Why wouldn’t I be using him?”
“Maybe you are,” she said.
There was no talking to Claire for some reason. She seemed to think Milo was just another folly of mine. “You’ll need a broom to sweep up what’s left of your heart if you hang it out there for that guy,” she said. To tell you the truth, I wondered if she was jealous, or threatened. She talked about the handwriting on the wall, and how I should wake up and smell the coffee. Later she had this comfort to offer: “There must be someone else.”
“I thought that, maybe.”
“Why?”
“Picture, on his dresser.”
“Of whom?”
“Girl.”
“Do you ask?”
“Sort of. I go, so, Milo, who’s the babe in the picture? And he says, you’re the babe in the picture.”
“He says that?”
“Said. Once.”
“Slick,” she said.
He didn’t seem slick. Not to me. He was dazzling. Everywhere we went, people asked him to sign things, shake hands, smile for the camera. He was a new New York Darling, polite and dashing. He had millions and millions of dollars and all the accoutrements: apartment in New York, house on the beach, Park City condo. The talk shows booked him in their guest spots, newspapers and magazines wrote about him: his recovery from his injuries, his appearance at this or that city sports clinic, his probable role in an upcoming film, his new career in broadcasting. They all loved him. He had chemical qualities that made you want to watch him. The way he carried himself was graceful, contained. He did not look left or right, he looked straight ahead. He was aloof until he wasn’t. When he looked at you, you almost had to turn away, because the touch of his gaze was so steady. It was like being recognized.
“That’s what I thought about you,” he said, when I told him this later. “Every time I turned around you were watching me.”
“I was,” I said. “I couldn’t help it.”
“It got to me,” he said. “It got me.”
But it took so long, to get to him.
In June we went to Sweetwater’s. It was maybe five weeks into our renewed acquaintance. Sweetwater’s was a jazz club near Milo’s office, and this was our second time there. It had good music and sloe gin fizzes. Milo and I watched the sax player that night and started talking about how you get good at something. Music. Skiing. Being a stupid fashion model.
“It’s not stupid,” Milo said.
“You have no idea how stupid,” I told him.
“So quit.”
“It’s all I can do,” I said. “When I got here, everyone said my face was the only thing I had that could save me.”
He looked frustrated with me. “That’s not all you had,” he said.
“What else?”
He reached around me and ran his fingers down either side of my spine. “Spine,” he said, and ran his fingers up again so they bumped on the knobs of bone.
“Spine?”
“Yeah.”
“Not me.”
“What kind of attitude is that?” Milo said. “That’s no way to talk.”
I shrugged.
“You know what you need?” he said. “You need to see the story.”
“What story?”
“The story, the story. What’s your story?”
I didn’t follow him.
“Okay. Listen,” Milo said, and he started telling me about his network job. “Somebody’s always saying to me ‘What’s the story, Robicheaux? You gotta f
ind the story.’ See, the way I always thought about the story was: Who’s winning? Who’s ahead? Who’s got the technique? Who’s got the speed? But now, as a reporter, they’re always saying to me: ‘Yeah, I know she’s fast, I know they won, I know he leads the league, but what’s the story?’ ”
Milo looked at me as if I was supposed to get it, but I still didn’t, so he kept explaining. “I mean,” he said, “is the athlete winning after overcoming a childhood handicap? Is she skating to honor the memory of her father, the former Lithuanian skating champ? That kind of thing.”
“Oh,” I said, “now I get it.”
“So, what’s your story?” he said. “The story of Charlotte.”
“Born in California?” I said. “Came East to make my fortune? And someone gave me a job? And here I am? Is that a story?”
“No!” he said. “Not if you tell it like that. The story is: You got out of there, didn’t you? Smalltown, California. Charlotte Halsey got out. Wherever you came from. You had your religious conversion, I believe you called it.”
“I guess,” I said.
“Not: You guess. You know.”
“But everybody leaves home.”
“Not like that, they don’t. Right? Takes guts. Can’t have been easy.”
Nobody ever praised me that way. Milo was the first person I knew besides Claire who never went on and on about my looks. He didn’t flatter. Guts and spine. I liked that, since mostly I’d thought of myself as invertebrate, holding my shape with an exoskeleton of hair spray.
“Thank you,” I said. “I never heard that story before.”
“You tell that story, now,” Milo commanded. “Whenever anyone asks.”
“I’ll try.”
“No,” he said, “not try. Say: I will.”
I tried but no words came out.
“Say it, Charlotte, say: I will.”
“I will.”
My eyes filled up with tears.
“What’s the matter?” Milo asked, with alarm in his voice and that tenderness I’d heard before. Which made it worse.
“Nothing.”
“What did I say?”
“It was nice, what you said.”
“It wasn’t nice,” he said, watching me. “It was true.”
“What about you?” I said after a while. “Your story. Didn’t you ever want to give up?”
“I have a motto,” he told me finally. “Keeps my nose to the grindstone.”
“Motto?” I said. “Like: Semper Fi?”
“Yeah. Like that.”
“What is it?”
“You don’t need it, you just want it.” He whispered it but like a military order. Then he laughed.
You Don’t Need It, You Just Want It. That was his motto.
“Did you make that up?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” he said, “I did.”
It was a way to deny himself things, he told me, certain kinds of pleasure or comfort. When he was a little boy, he’d get cold, skiing, wish to go inside for warmth; he’d wish for a new bike but would save his money for skis; he’d want to blow off the last practice run and go get hot chocolate with whipped cream, but he’d tell himself: You don’t need that, you just want it.
“It’s what I say,” he said, “to stay out of trouble.”
“Oh,” I said. “And am I trouble?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“I don’t want to be trouble,” I said simply. “I don’t.”
We left. Silver sprays of rain glittered out of the darkness, the streetlights like shower nozzles. Milo put up his umbrella, held it over our heads, hailed a taxi. “Good night,” he said. “Charlotte.” And then without warning, he pulled me back from the open door of the cab and kissed me. The umbrella made a tent around our heads, rain battering it. People were coming and going, stepping around us. We were kissing like mad, stealing each other’s breath. The taxi honked and then pulled away. The umbrella tipped in the wind and turned inside out. Milo dropped it. A man passing us pivoted around and stared, our umbrella flying at him as he walked backward, looking at us still kissing in the downpour. We ignored him, the pop-eyed fool. We knew where we were going, that night, anyway. When we got there, we didn’t get up for a while.
12.
After that, we went out all over town. We were seen together. They wrote about us: boldface Milo Robicheaux seen squiring boldface model Charlotte Halsey. It was a gas, all that boldface squiring around with Milo. We were wild now, laughing, flirting, staying up all night dancing, getting out of limos, drinking sparkling alcohols out of flutes. I was reckless, wherever we went. My arms were always around Milo’s neck, like ropes of pearls. For weeks I did my best not to think about anything serious, jettisoning questions and worries the way balloonists throw out sandbags, to stay aloft. But it scared me, how much time I was biding, waiting for the end of the party, wishing for later, the dark of his room.
“I like this room,” I said, lying there one night.
“I like you in this room,” he said.
“Why did you wait, then?”
“When?”
“After the first time.”
“What.”
“To get me back in here.”
He shrugged.
“You weren’t going to call me.”
“Maybe not, no.”
“I was starting to think you hated me.”
“I did hate you, actually,” he said lightly. “For making me interested.”
“So why did you wait, if you were interested?”
“You Don’t Need It, You Just Want It,” he said.
I whacked him across the bare chest with a backward shot of my forearm.
“Ow,” he said, annoyed. “All I meant was, I just was not in the market for any more of these cross-cultural encounters of the so-called ebony and ivory kind. I’ve had quite enough international experience, if you know what I mean?”
“Me American,” I said. “You American.”
He lifted his eyebrows at that. “You think so?” he said. “Because I had been thinking that in New York, I’d finally be somewhere I could find what you could call … a soul mate.”
I sat up and pulled the sheet around me, listening.
“At first,” Milo said, “I thought that you would be … how shall I say this delicately? An easy target, or maybe, like a little short-term therapy. To settle an old score.”
“What score?”
“Just to see if you’d notice me now.”
I was noticing everything about him now. The moons on his fingernails. The hair on his arm.
“But then, Charlotte, you turned out to be a little complicated. A little scary.”
So he had said it. Scary.
“I didn’t know what I’d be getting myself into,” he said. “So to speak.”
I hit him another time, socked his shoulder.
“Cut it out,” he said. “Listen. What I’m saying is: I dislike confusion.”
“Are you confused?”
“No,” he said, “I’m not.” And he pulled me down and kissed me so I had to stop talking. Which was why he kissed me, I knew, to keep me from asking things, to be heedless of anything but the turmoil of limbs and sheets and sweat drying pleasantly on the skin.
He was not confused, he said.
But I was. He was the scary one, with all his evasions. Why was he with me? What was so scary? Because I’m a white girl? I couldn’t ask. The question would give the idea respect it didn’t deserve, would insult him, would make it, color—I still had trouble naming it—a problem when it wasn’t, not for me. Or I wanted it not to be a problem. I actually believed it was a choice I had.
The girls were all curious about Milo. “How’s Mr. Olympics?” “Hey, Charlotte, how’s Anchorman?” We were shooting the Couture King’s new spring sportswear line, standing on the steps of the library between the big lions. It was August, early morning, and they had the newspaper open to the picture of Milo and me on Page Six. A girl named
Jenny was reading, The lovebirds were seen kissing on the dance floor of the Peppermint Lounge. Everybody was hooting and teasing me. “Whoa, Char, hot date!” “Kissing on the dance floor!”
But then there was Glenda. She was one of the few black models they used a lot in the ’80s, so beautiful she made you want to put a bag on your head. She was tall and ethereal with ginger-brown skin and brown eyes with yellow in them. She came from the islands—from Trinidad? I wasn’t sure. It was as if the sun had lightened her eyes. These days she’d be one of the top faces, I’m sure, but even in 1981 they’d only put one black girl on the cover of a major fashion magazine. Ever. Black covers wouldn’t sell, they said, and tongue-clucked about what a shame it was, that readers weren’t interested. They blamed the readers. Glenda had worked on a couple of jobs with me and we were friendly.
“So,” she said, “what’s going on with you and Milo the Skiing Brother?”
“Oh, just—I don’t know.”
“Well, what do you want?”
“I like him,” I said, looking down at my feet. “That’s all.”
“Well, just be careful,” she said.
“Why?”
She wouldn’t say at first but I kept after her. She explained to me kindly, as you would explain something difficult, like death, to a child: “It’s this thing with them.”
“Who?”
“Black men.”
“Come on,” I said.
“Listen: They have this thing about a blond model-type woman, okay? Or any kind of white, you know? It’s some sick status thing.” She seemed weary when she said this.
“We knew each other in college,” I said. “I’ve known Milo for years.” Glenda was making me uncomfortable. I was picking at invisible pills in the weave of my sample coat. “He already has status, all by himself. He has two gold medals.”
“Right, but he doesn’t—” Glenda made a bitter mouth, lips tight. She was shaking her head as if there was no way I could understand. “The other part of it is, it’s kind of like a self-hating thing, or sometimes a revenge thing, against white guys, like, Nyah, nyah, nyah, I got your woman type of thing.”