by Kate Manning
I chose Milo. He was a good man. He was raised right. He loved his family. He was strong and he worked hard and played by the rules. He used his gifts and never gave up. He was brave. I could see that. He knew his own heart, an all-or-nothing kind of man. He had no room for I don’t know.
Charlotte, she was headlong. I was. Heedless. He liked that about me. I unhinged him, he said I did. I couldn’t say no, never knew my head from my heart. I wished and thought wishes were truth. I was raised wrong, raised on appearances, the virtue of beauty. I loved my family but wistfully, in spite of them. I worked hard but only to escape. He said I had backbone. He said I was confusing. He said I was funny. He had said it was up to me. I remembered that, in the mildewed Palm Beach hotel room.
But he drove off and had not looked back.
It was that: the idea of never seeing him again. It was unbearable.
When I got home I went straight to his place from the airport and waited outside his building, waited there for two hours, till he came back from work. He saw me standing there leaning against the brass post of the awning, leaning and waiting, and he knew. Where it was going, where the little arrow pointed. And so did I. We thought we knew.
16.
What are you doing here?” was what he said when he saw me.
I smiled, but barely.
“Charlotte, what are you doing here?”
“I’m here,” I said. “I’m here is the answer.”
“To which question?” he asked, his eyes wary.
“You said you had no room for I don’t know.”
“So,” he said, “do you know?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” he said.
I saw he had a Band-Aid on his thumb and doubt on his face. I walked close to him and put my forehead against the top of his arm, his damp raincoat. He didn’t move. It was like leaning against a tree. I couldn’t see his expression now so I can’t say whether he was dismayed or glad, or if there was anything grudging about the decision he made.
“Well, come up then,” he said finally. “If that’s what you’ve decided.”
“It is,” I said, and when I pulled back to look at him, he was smiling and kind of shaking his head as if he couldn’t get over me, like I had convinced him of something in spite of himself and his best intentions.
So I went. He looked happy about that. We didn’t talk any more about what happened on top of the mountain, him leaving, sending me away, not one pearly word. Not about the whole thing with the cops, either. We just let it lie the way we left the remains of the deer behind in the woods, and moved on, into his building and upstairs, where Milo came up behind me and crossed his arms around in front of me. “So you’re back,” he said into the collar of my sweater.
“I missed you too much,” I said.
“Did you?” he asked, warm breath on my neck. “Good.”
I had mostly been living in his apartment ever since, almost two weeks. It was December, hurtling toward Christmas. I had been home, but not to sleep, just for clothes, or mail, to see Claire. One cold day I fetched a winter coat. Wearing it back downtown, hood up, I could not get warm. I had chills in the taxi. My teeth rattled and the muscles of my arms were clenching and unclenching, and now I was a miserable pile of chills in Milo’s bed. He came in from work to find me there with my knees pulled up under my wings, up to my chin, under the covers with my coat still on.
“What’s the matter with you?” he said. We were supposed to be going out. He felt my head awkwardly. It was obviously something he wasn’t used to. He pushed the hair off my face, stroking my forehead with the pads of his long fingers as if he could cool me that way, brush the fever off.
“You’re boiling,” he said.
“I’m freezing.”
He didn’t know what to do. He wasn’t a nursemaid kind of man, he said. I thought he was going to coach me from my chilly nest, bark at me: Up and at ’em, Snap out of it, Hup two three four. But he sounded worried. He lay down next to me, under the blankets, in all his clothes. Heat came off his chest and legs and thawed out the parts of me they touched, but most of me was shaking.
“I’m cold,” I said. My teeth rattled and my head was pounding as if something was being installed in there with heavy equipment.
“It’s okay,” he kept saying. “Hang on.” He was sort of panicky and tender. He got up and covered me with a comforter, a heavy one, of gold velvet, with tassels. It was new. The pillows were new and the sheets, too. Milo had been buying things. Whatever he wanted, whatever I did. His house was filling up with a wacky mix of furniture and stuff that we bought on weekends and found in window displays walking around town after work.
Whatever you want, Charlotte.
If I said I liked something he just bought it, which was brave of him, since his own taste, if you could call it that, tended more toward the hunting lodge, with his downhill skis crossed over the mantel, a trophy deer head on the wall. I tried to mock him away from his natural snowshoe inclinations. “Milo, you may not have plaid,” I said. “Plaid is banned.”
Whatever you want, my darling, he said.
In this way, in the space of a few weeks, his apartment no longer echoed. It was beautiful. The bedroom! It’s a goddamn boo-dwah, I said to him, and he had to correct me, pronounce it properly, Boudoir, pour toi, chéri, in his perfect French. We ordered the bed right out of a magazine, dripping with tassels, laden down with dark persimmon-colored shams and silk pillows in flaming shades of orange and red.
“Milo,” I whispered hoarsely, from under the covers. “Milo.” But he didn’t hear me. He was leaving the apartment, or maybe not; he was gone forever or maybe he never left. I couldn’t tell. I was hallucinating and freezing and sweating simultaneously.
He came back with aspirin and a thermometer, which he put in my mouth. “Under the tongue,” he said, as if he weren’t quite sure, or it scared him. He read it after a while. “A hundred four,” he said. He wanted to call a doctor but the only one he knew was Danny Morehead, the U.S. Ski Team orthopedic surgeon.
“Hey, Danny-boy,” he said, into the phone. “It’s me. Yeah. (Pause) Knee is fine. (Pause) My girlfriend is sick. (Pause) No! She has a fever. A hundred four. Chills, all that. Lying here shaking. (Pause) No, she is not knocked up. No! Never mind, Morehead, she’s sick. Ill.”
He listened for a while, talked some more, but I just lay there thinking how he called me his girlfriend. How he called me that now. How I was practically living in his apartment. How he called the doctor about me, as if I was someone in his family.
I fell asleep, woke up, fell asleep again. The night passed in sweat and shivering, running for the sink, vomiting, lying on the bathroom floor, burning so that the cool tiles felt like medicine on my skin. Milo was right there the whole time. I was sure the whole thing was repulsive to him.
“Go away,” I said, humiliated.
“No, now,” he said. “That’s okay.”
He fed me sips of water and put toothpaste on a brush for me and had a washcloth for my head. “Thank you, Florence,” I kept saying, and he made me laugh by folding a little white nurse cap out of a paper pharmacy bag and wearing it around on his head.
In the morning when I woke up he was still there. “It’s noon,” he said. He sat on the edge of the bed and felt my clammy head. My fever was gone by then but I was exhausted and limp.
“You’re not pregnant,” he said, out of the blue, “are you, Charlotte?”
Well, that startled me. “Not as far as I know,” I said. “Why?”
“Just—you were sick. Morehead was ragging me. I don’t know …”He shrugged.
“So what would you do?” I asked. “If.”
“If what?”
“I were.”
“What would you do?”
“I asked you first,” I said. “Do you even like children?”
“Of course,” he said, as if children were so obvious a thing to like that if I didn’t know that fact about him, then I didn�
��t know anything. We never talked about children. I couldn’t name a child I knew, except some faraway nephews, Peter’s children.
“You’d run, I bet,” I said to Milo. “You’d head for the hills.”
“Well, I like hills,” he said coyly.
I like hills. Maybe it was only a joke. I didn’t press him; any small hint of his leaving sent me into a frenzy of doubt, having watched him drive away once already. You’re not pregnant, are you? His question startled me and started me thinking What if I was? I put my hands to my stomach, felt how my hipbones made a bowl under the skin, a cradle. What if I was?
Maybe it was the power of suggestion, but a few weeks after that, I was late, and I recognized the symptoms from before: the breathlessness, tenderness of the breasts, a hint of blood, and then nothing. Not for a week. Longer. It made me quiet and still. What if I am?
“What’s the matter?” Milo asked me, home from a party one night, late. We were sitting on the edge of the bed, me sliding stockings off.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think maybe I might be, actually.”
“What?”
I just moved my eyebrows, but he knew.
“God,” he said. He put his hand out and rested it on my leg, watching me. Looking at his worried face I knew right then what I wanted. A baby. Ours. Wanting it felt like a sudden hot blast from the oven. A baby. I let myself picture it. A light brown child with dark eager eyes; a girl, with downy hair and fat rolls and shining pink gums without teeth, just a flash of this baby smiling and squalling before I banished it. Tamped it down. No. He wouldn’t want it. He would run. It was impossible. Was it?
I was religiously careful but not every time. Milo hated all of that stuff, the chemicals and the apparatuses and the timing and thinking about it. The terminology alone! Barriers and methods and interruptus. Just the word spermicide is heinous to a man, I think. He pretended he didn’t hate the subject but he did. I was always very good after what happened in high school. Still, there are always equipment failures, human failures. When I was drunk.
We sat on the bed. My sloughed-off stockings were a dark limp pile in my lap. You could smell stale party smoke off Milo’s jacket, off my hair.
“Why—what, why, do you think you—” He couldn’t bring himself to ask the whole question.
“I’m late,” I said.
His eyes dropped down to my waist like sinkers on a fishing line. “Oh, boy,” he said.
A boy would be nice, I thought, but I imagined a girl.
“Don’t think about it right now,” I said. “Let’s not.” But I did think about it. I had been through this once before, don’t forget; not that he needed to know.
He asked in the morning and I said: Still late. He said, Can’t you do a test? I snapped at him, I’ll do the test when I damn well want to do the test. I couldn’t help snapping. I was nervous and sure by now of what the test would show: a twister forming, funnel clouds in a dervish heading toward us. The stick would turn pink, meaning yes, I was. If I said I wanted it he’d clear out. I like hills. He hadn’t said otherwise. If I took care of it—which I would if I had to—he would leave anyway, because I would be depressing, not fun anymore, full of sorrow and anger and resentment over wanting it, not a terrorist in the bag or any kind of party animal. He would tire of me. I didn’t entertain other possibilities—such as him sticking right by me with his little paperbag Florence Nightingale hat on. If I imagined that, or the idea of a real living baby with us both as its parents, I made myself stop because that little family would be impossible, I thought.
After three more days I finally did the test. Alone. I didn’t want him there. I took the vials and the droppers and set them up on the bathroom sink, watching the hands of my watch tick around.
The stick was pink. Of course it was.
I was shaky but I didn’t cry. I put the test stick in my pocket and went across the park to get Milo at work. They knew me there at the Network, let me in and up the elevator without a pass. I went through the newsroom to his office and closed the door. Some production assistant went to fetch him out of an editing room. His big carpeted office was full of pictures: Milo with Carl Yastrzemski. To Big M from the Yaz, it said. There was Milo and Reagan; Milo and that football player, the Refrigerator, along with Lawrence Taylor and some other very big, padded men. There was Milo’s typewriter, coffee cup, phone, roll of mints, leftover sandwich. His little compact of pancake makeup.
He knew right away. He closed his door and put his hand on my cheek, scanned my face. We left and went to the park across the street and sat in the miserable cold. December 10, I think it was. Pigeons were the only ones out, strutting around us hopefully. Milo’s face was furrowed with worry. I took the pink test stick out of my pocket and gave it to him. “Aw, Charlotte,” he said, so it made me cry.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not dragging you into anything.”
“I didn’t say—” he said. “Come on.” He took my hand and went to a pay phone where he called in sick. Then he hailed a cab and we went home to Milo’s apartment. I opened his wine closet and got out a bottle of red wine, poured it, took a big swig, and then another.
“So I’ll just go and take care of it,” I said.
“Is that what you want?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Look, I’ve done it before.
“It does matter,” he said.
“To you?”
“Yes. It’s not some small thing.”
“It’s small right now,” I said. “But not for long.”
“Charlotte.”
“I’ll just go and have it done.” I said this again so he would talk me out of it, or into it. I said it before I had to listen to him say it. I assumed that was what he’d want. “I’ll just do it.”
“Well, maybe,” he said.
I checked his face and saw the relief and the decision there. So, it seemed we had agreed, to go and have it done. As if this were hair or nails we were speaking of. He didn’t want a baby not with me, not at that time. He swallowed and looked away. I tried to take a breath but I was crying.
“No, no, no, oh no, now,” he said, gathering me up.
“I just wish—” I tried to speak but my throat was swollen so the words would barely fit through. I had to say them with my eyes closed.
“I just wish I didn’t have to,” I told him. “I don’t want to.”
“Aw, honey,” he said.
“I wanted it,” I said, hiding my face. “You know?”
“No,” he said, “I don’t know.” And I could see he had no idea what I wanted. I hadn’t told him. He let me cry in his lap.
“What do you want?” I asked him.
“Jesus,” he said, blowing out so his cheeks filled. He picked up my glass and drank.
“Hasn’t this ever happened to you before?” I asked from down in his lap where I couldn’t see him.
“No,” he said. “Not that I know of.”
“I would think it would have.”
“No. Has it to you?”
I waited and didn’t answer.
“Has it to you?” he asked again.
“Yes,” I said, after a long while.
“When?” he asked.
“When I was sixteen,” I said. Telling him made me see myself back then, how young sixteen is, my dolls still in their doll beds in my room, how far gone I was, buttons popping, before I could admit to myself what was happening. The bleeding for days after. I told Milo what my parents said about me, how I was Damned, how furious they were. “They never really got over it, what I did,” I told Milo. “It was like I betrayed them and became a stranger.”
“Are you sorry?” he asked me.
“No,” I said quietly. “I’m not sorry.”
“And is that the reason why you think you want it this time?” he asked uncomfortably. “It’s not some—because of your religious belief?”
“Of course not.” I was angry he would think it. “I’ll do it again if I have to.”
The pink home laboratory test stick rested on the coffee table next to the wine bottle. Milo picked it up and fingered it. “If we had a baby most likely it would not … look like you,” he said carefully. “You’ve thought about that?”
“Well,” I said, “why would it look like you, either?”
“Perhaps it wouldn’t,” he said.
“It would be beautiful.”
He smiled.
“Half you, half me,” I said.
“But who would know by looking?” he asked.
“Who cares?”
“Plenty of people,” he said.
“You? Do you care?”
He shrugged.
“I don’t,” I said. “I don’t care about anybody else.”
“What do you care about, then?” he asked.
“You,” I said.
He pulled me up on his lap, swung my legs over his knees so my feet dangled. He put his head against me with his ear near my heart and tightened his arms so my ribs shifted. We stayed like that a long while, breathing.
“Let’s get married,” he said straight into the fabric of my shirt.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay,” he said.
“You don’t mean it,” I said.
“I never say anything I don’t mean,” he said.
We woke up in the morning and there was a new membrane of shyness between us. Were you serious? I whispered uneasily. Milo nodded and smiled but didn’t take up the conversation. He went to work as he always did. See ya, babe. He came home late that night from covering a basketball game and before we fell asleep, he squeezed my hand under the blankets. Will you see a doctor? he asked me. Yes, I said, on Monday.
He’s having second thoughts, I was sure. I worried until a couple of days later, when something happened. I will spare you the details except to say it woke me up. Cramps and pain, some sort of early miscarriage. I was disappointed but also relieved. A little teary and blue. I was not pregnant but still altered somehow.
I went out to the kitchen and made coffee and looked out the window, watching pigeons wheel and strut along the window ledge across the way, watching the drab light fill the city. I was feeling thick and achy. I wanted to go back to sleep, but I had an early call that day and so did Milo. He was headed to the airport, flying down to Miami for preproduction on all the holiday football games. I would have to tell him. He would think I made up the whole thing. Invented pregnancy. He’d think I was a lunatic. I went and lay down next to him and watched him for a while, then whispered what I had to say, shy and uncomfortable.