by Kate Manning
At the hospital they had the TV on in my room. I heard it playing in and out of morphine dreams. The private nurse turned up the sound, thinking I was sedated.
Black Olympic skier Milo Robicheaux is still in jail tonight for resisting arrest in the charge of assaulting his wife, former model Charlotte Halsey, who lingers near death. Robicheaux, who assaulted a police officer, maintains his innocence.
Some of the nurses, I could tell they hated me. The icy, quiet ones held my wrist in their cold hands to feel my pulse, threaded IV tubes, checked my wound, changed the dressing. The noisy ones flipped through the entertainment news and the gossip columns, each whispering her own pet theory.
Drug dealers obviously.
A jealous lover.
Probably a botched suicide: She was a desperately unhappy woman with her looks fading, and there’s a black man in jail again.
You know there must have been a reason he had to run to the arms of another woman, one of his own people who really could understand him, wouldn’t ruin his reputation like this model.
Not to mention she’s a drunk.
A thick-legged white one whispered out in the corridor: “That’s what happens when you sink down to their level, poor thing. I seen it before, the way they treat their women.”
A sloe-eyed dark nurse with her hair cut close to her head dropped my wrist when she was done with the pulse and humphed out to the hall. “That’s the white wife,” I heard her say to somebody out there.
That’s me! White Wife!
There were some kind nurses, but I can’t remember anything about them except that they were kind.
Here at home now, my mother is careful not to leave the TV on. Because of Hallie, she says. But I’m the one she wants in the dark. I demand to know, turn on the radio, find the newspaper, the remote control. I don’t care that it makes me hysterical. It’s my right to know what they are saying about me, what the cops are saying, the hairdo-reporters, what Darryl says.
You know something? I was suckered in by Darryl for years. I always enjoyed him, all the time I knew him. He was funny, teasing, cracking on everyone. Here comes your Barbie wife, Milo. Look how her feet stay up in that high heel tiptoe. No really, check out those feet. Half the time that he was our friend, I wasn’t even paying attention. I didn’t hear what it was he was actually telling Milo: sun people, ice people. That whites were evil, no exceptions. Sometimes I forgot, in a certain way, that I was white. Melanin-deprived, he called me, ha ha ha. The way he said it it was like a big joke between us. He had me going for the longest time.
Hey there, Miss Anne, how’s the baby? He called me Miss Anne in what I know now is slang for snooty white girls, plantation mistresses.
Just fine, D., just fine. I called him “D.” out of affection. He had me. Had Milo, too. Perhaps he still has Milo, who knows? As I say, I don’t know what they talked about that night. The night in question.
I hate Darryl as much as I ever liked him. Hate. Call me whatever you want, call me cracker. Call me ofay. Get up there on your high horse and call me the big R word. You can believe whatever you want about me, but the truth is, I don’t hate him because he’s got brown skin. I hate him because he’s a bad man. Because he had chances to be a good man. He had power and ideas. He had money and brains. I trusted him and agreed with him. He was our friend and we helped him. But he ruined everything. Everything that ever mattered to me. Milo. He took love and baffled it into hate. He took hope and ridiculed it down to despair. He knocked me out, me and Milo both, with sucker punches.
Or was that us?
Maybe Milo did that. Maybe I did. Probably it was my fault. Yes, I have my own big sins to confess. Who started it? Chicken or egg? Milo’s betrayal or mine?
He got too famous. He believed what they said. The hype. None of this would have happened if we had just moved to a little house in the mountains somewhere, raised a family. I wish we had.
Milo! I am shouting at you. Do you hear me! Look! Look! Look! This is me getting old with you! This is our warm house and the dinner I made for you! This is our little girl! Come back here, listen to me. Hey! I am saying I love you.
I never did say any of that, not that way. My feelings were too hurt. I couldn’t find the right voice. The one I found came out plaintive and rank. I said: “I don’t believe you. I don’t trust you.” I had no faith. I said, “Where are you going tonight? Why aren’t you ever home?” I said, “What about me? What about me?”
20.
The day I met Darryl Haynes was the first time I had ever been in a room full of black people. Let me tell you, your average white person has no idea how this feels until you feel it. Maybe you have never thought about your white self in a room full of another race. Say you’re trying to imagine it now, walking into a big, high-ceilinged room and looking down marble steps at hundreds of elegantly dressed people who all seem to have known each other since childhood and who do not look anything like you. You might be thinking a range of things, depending on what kind of white person you are: We don’t belong in here, let’s leave. Or: We oughta drop a bomb on all of them. Or, to give you the benefit of the doubt, you might be the kind of white who thinks: No big deal, what’s the problem? I would feel just perfectly comfortable in a room full of black people; this is America. That was what I thought, when Milo and I went to the party for the Dance Theatre of Harlem, which he was proud to say had invited him to sit on its board of directors. I was excited to go with him. He was my husband. That diamond the size of a molar flashed on my hand. We had been married half a year. If I was with him, I thought, no problem, I’d have the stamp of approval. Everyone there would know: She’s okay. She’s one of the good ones.
Well. It’s almost poignant now, naïveté like that.
Milo was looking so fiercely handsome that night. He was such a beauty to me, more than ever. His hair was cut down close to his head, which was shaped so you wanted to hold it in your hands, to feel the planes of it, the rounding back lobe. He was looking warmly at me over his black tie, his narrow hard waist circled by the cummerbund, satin ribbon running down his pant legs. We left our coats in the cloakroom, and the gray-haired woman sitting there said: “Milo Robicheaux?” She was thrilled. “I just loved that story you had on the other night about that racehorse!”
“Thank you,” said Milo. He put a ten-dollar tip in her hand and winked at her, took my arm. “You have a nice evening.”
Going in to the party, I was relaxed and looking up at Milo, smiling here and there, but when we got to the top of the marble stairs leading down to the ballroom, the kind of stairs descended by Cinderella and Audrey Hepburn, I was unprepared. Walking down, it struck me how pale and unnatural my feet were, in their dark strapped heels, flashing from beneath the slit in my dress. You could count the other white people down there in the room like dots on a domino. The guests were embracing and talking, holding long-stemmed glasses, laughing in their tuxedos and bright cloth scarves, their glittering jewel-toned gowns and a few African robes threaded with silver and gold.
People nodded at Milo as we made our way across the room and smiled at me thinly, or just ignored me. I might as well have been made of Saran Wrap. I stuck close to Milo but suddenly was not comfortable touching him or whispering with my lips at his ear. He was having a fine time, but it was almost as if he was there without me. The people who came and introduced themselves nodded at me and then quickly went back to asking Milo questions. I didn’t know what to say. I stood around with a glass in my hand.
“Hey, brother Robicheaux.”
Milo turned and grinned, put his hand out to a light brown man in a tuxedo with a kente-cloth scarf draped around his thick neck.
“Darryl Haynes,” Milo said. “How’re you doin’, man?”
“Who’s your lady?” Darryl Haynes asked him.
“This is Charlotte Halsey,” Milo said.
He did not say “my wife,” I noticed. He wasn’t in the habit yet. Neither of us was.
“
Charlotte, this is Darryl Haynes. The Darryl Haynes, middleweight Olympic boxing champion of 1976.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
Milo explained how he’d recently tracked Darryl down and interviewed him for a series about former athletes called “Where Are They Now?” “In the seventies, Darryl was an up-and-comer,” Milo said. “Olympic middleweight gold, going on world champion. We tracked him down.”
“Milo here was also Mr. Up-and-Coming,” Darryl said, and raised his eyebrows. “And he still is: still up, still coming.”
They were grinning at each other as if they knew each other’s secrets.
“Do you ever box anymore?” I asked.
“Nope, I don’t,” Darryl said. “I promote boxers, promote musicians, all kinds of talent. Mostly sports talent. Why, do you have a talent?”
“Charlotte’s a fashion model,” Milo said.
“Ho-de-ho,” Darryl said. “A fashion model!” He put his arm around Milo, knuckled him on the head. He had a smile that showed perfect, perhaps fake, teeth. “Robicheaux, Robicheaux, Robicheaux,” he said, and put his arm around me, too. His arms were hard and big as tires. He hugged us in by our necks so his tuxedo jacket lifted up and flapped out like wings behind him. “So we have Barbie here, and Black America’s Ken, out here in Harlem on a date. Isn’t that a beautiful thing?” He was laughing and punching at Milo, winking at me. He was twinkly, with a habit of tilting his head to the side in a question mark, just about irresistible, teasing Milo like that. “A beautiful thing, right, Charlotte?”
“Not exactly a date,” I said.
“Oh no? A business function?”
“No,” I said. “I’m Milo’s wife.”
“Oh, Lord,” said Darryl. “His wife now.”
“Yeap,” Milo said. “She got me.” He pretended he was shot in the heart.
“Then what you need is a drink,” Darryl said. “Bring you back to life.”
He asked if he could get me something, leaving me with the idea that they were coming right back. But ten minutes later, Milo was still at the bar talking, surrounded by people. When I wandered over to him, he handed me my drink but didn’t stop his conversation or pull me to his side. I went off and made an elaborate inspection of the vegetable arrangements, went to the rest room, listened to the women in there talking about the bank Goldman Sachs, which at first I got confused with Saks the department store. When I went back out Milo had migrated to a different room and was still drinking, laughing, talking, but not to me. I went back to the bar and took a long time to get wine.
In the end it was Darryl who rescued me. “So let me tell you about this party, Mrs. R.,” he said, nodding at the circling crowd. “This is New York’s Black Elite. There’s the Boro President and Prominent Columnist, there’s the man who sang Day-O, there’s the Morning Show Host with the Elderly Author, there’s the Fatcat Corporate Vice President and the Celebrated Defense Attorney standing with the Bigwig Law Professor. We have the brightest in here, and also the best, from the arts, law, politics, medicine. This is the crème de la crème—so to speak—of Black New York.”
“And what about you?” I asked, gave him a sidelong glance. Darryl’s neck was slightly too thick and it would be better, I thought, if he shaved his small mustache. He was not exactly handsome, but the way he listened with his whole face, the way his words were full of jokes—fatcats and bigwigs—made him attractive, relaxed you and made you laugh.
“The Elite,” I said. “You must be included on that list?”
“Me?” said Darryl. “I am the man they all need to get to the top! Back to the top! Over the top! I am their agent. I am their Black agent. You are well acquainted, I’m sure, with the meaning of that word? Agent?”
“Oh, yes,” I said.
He went on about himself. “I make demands my clients don’t dare make. I can get whatever they want for them: money, power, houses, cars, film scripts, recording contracts, arena stages, the center ring, royalties, broadcast rights, attention.” He was speaking grandly, as if addressing a large crowd, his hands expressive as a conductor’s. “They want it, I can get it.”
“How?” I asked him. “Just—?” I snapped my fingers.
He leaned in, as if divulging something. “Because what I do is not about money,” he said. “It’s not about fame. It’s about history, and truth. It’s about respect. And I have dedicated my life to winning respect for the people in this room.” Darryl looked hard at me, and I noticed he had a pale scar above his left eyebrow. Old stitch marks were faintly threaded in the skin. When he turned his head to profile, I saw his ear was cauliflowered.
“That’s God’s truth,” he said, “and I am not afraid to speak it. Wherever Darryl Haynes goes, Darryl Haynes wins his brothers and sisters their rightful honor. Their rightful place. You see what I’m saying?” And I could see, in his eyes, hear the drop in his voice, that he was sincere. I nodded, listening hard.
“That’s really great,” I said. “It’s wonderful.” I meant it, too. To be so dedicated, to stand for something, to have a noble purpose. If I did any standing, it was on pieces of blank background paper, moving my head, arms, legs. My standing was not about history or truth, just about style, getting the right angles and light.
“Your man,” Darryl said. “I want to talk to you about him.”
I raised my eyebrows. I was afraid to say anything, since whenever my mouth opened, filler words came out of it like soap bubbles. Really? You don’t say? My, that’s interesting.
“The treatment of the black athlete in America,” said Darryl, “is the moral equivalent of rape.” He waited, watching me. “Rape. It’s happening to Milo Robicheaux right this minute. I guarantee it. Did you know that?”
“Oh,” I said carefully, trying not to picture it. “Milo’s not a professional athlete anymore, though. He’s a sportscaster, a sports reporter.”
Darryl pulled his head back on his neck, like a turtle rearing into his shell. He looked at me with his hands open as if I had just said something ridiculous and obvious. “A sportscaster. Even worse,” he said. “He’s a piece of horseflesh. You oughta know that. What is a fashion model? Horseflesh. The question is simple: How much can they make offa your lovely behind? Same thing with Mr. Milo Robicheaux. He’s fast, but I guarantee you no matter how fast he goes on snow, he is right now sucking the exhaust of the snow-job boys that own him.”
“Oh,” I said, thinking about Jed and Mark and how just the other day Milo had complained they did not return phone calls, had canceled a lunch.
“Charlotte, I can see you are a progressive, enlightened woman. Am I right?” Darryl said. “So, I want you to get a message to Milo Robicheaux. I want you to tell him: He needs to come home. To his community. I can understand him in a way his Midtown pinstripe boys can’t. Darryl Haynes can get him what he is owed by this world, if he’s willing to reach for it, you see what I mean? You can help your man. You can make him see.”
I smiled and felt his flattery warming me the way a drink does. Right away he put me at ease. It seemed he respected me. An enlightened woman, am I right? That night, when he brought me around the room and introduced me to the people he knew, I thought he had simply noticed me feeling left out. I thought he was motivated by kindness.
“This is Charlotte Halsey,” he announced. “Mrs. Milo Robicheaux. Just married. Still got the shaving cream on the rear window and the cans tied to the bumper.” When he introduced me, people warmed up.
One man said, “The skiing brother!” and then did an imitation of Milo in a downhill tuck. “You’d have to be fast to catch a man like that, right?” he asked me.
A young woman came over then, in a conservative suit and strands of beads at her neck. She talked to Darryl awhile and then turned politely to me. Her name was Carla. She was a banker. “You look a lot like Princess Di,” she said.
“Really?” I looked nothing remotely like that princess, with her short feathery haircut, her slightly too-close-together eyes.<
br />
“Your hair and all,” said Carla.
“Oh,” I said, “maybe.” We talked about the Prince of Wales and the wedding, when the royals would have children.
“Charlotte just got married, too,” Darryl said.
“Oh, really,” Carla said. “Big wedding?”
“She’s married to Milo Robicheaux,” Darryl said, pointing. “The skier?”
“I know who he is,” said Carla. I could see judgments passing on her face.
“This one,” said Darryl, holding my arm a moment, “and Mr. Milo over there, don’t they look like some kind of Dairy Queen accident, you know what I’m saying?” Carla laughed but then covered her mouth with her hand. She looked with feigned disapproval at Darryl, who was grinning at me.
“He’s bad, this Darryl Haynes,” she said to me. “You watch out for him.” They were laughing. “A Dairy Queen accident,” she said again, under her breath, shaking her head as she went in to dinner.
A Dairy Queen accident. I pictured the dropped sundae, dark sauce on vanilla, and it made me laugh, too. I went to tell Milo. He was across the room talking to a girl, a teenager really, tall as I was, in a dress the color of mangos.
“Charlotte,” he said when I joined him. “This is—” he stopped.
“Geneva Johnson,” she said, ducking her head, like a child. “Nice to meet you.”
She had braces on her teeth. She had a yellow smiley-face on a necklace. She was an apprentice at the Dance Theatre of Harlem. She explained shyly how the founder wanted the young dancers to be here tonight to talk to people. They were supposed to be telling everyone how much young dancers like her appreciated the support. So she had come, and it was so exciting to be here, wasn’t it?
Milo put his arm around me. “I know pretty much zero about ballet,” he said, “but we’ll do what we can.” He looked at me when he said it, for the first time that evening. “Won’t we, Charlotte?”