Whitegirl

by Kate Manning

  “I have the lead,” Milo said to Darryl, on the phone. “I play the lead guy.” (Pause) “No no no, Haynes.” (Pause) “Of course I had my own trailer. Yes, they paid me. None of your business how much.” Milo was shaking his head, exasperated. “Haynes, you’re not going to beat the system. You’ve got to use the system.” Whatever Darryl said next got him, though. He cracked up laughing. I started to see that Milo was sort of fascinated by Darryl, wouldn’t mind having him for a friend.

  But Darryl seemed to have other ideas. He wanted to be Milo’s manager. He wouldn’t give up. You need me, I need you. He took Milo to lunch and invited us to performances and events he promoted: the Track and Field All Star Event, the New York City Playground Ball Championship, Double Dutch tournaments and boxing matches. He kept inviting us to the fights. The whole idea of boxing automatically made me cringe, but Milo wanted to go.

  “You’re wrong about boxing,” he said. “It’s pure. It’s about one lone athlete against another.” Milo admired boxers. You had to be in amazing shape to be a fighter, he said, and he respected that. So finally, one night, we went to the fights with Darryl.

  The Garden was full of men, smelled heavily of men, too: smoke and beer and sweat mingled with deodorant. What women there were all dolled up with makeup and tight pants. Our seats were ringside. “The better to get spattered with blood,” I said.

  “Don’t laugh,” Darryl said. “There may be blood. Always was when I was fighting.”

  “Yeah and not on you, either,” Milo said, laughing, but I didn’t think it was funny, men pounding each other like they were tenderizing steak.

  Darryl told us a guy named El Gallo and another one called the King would be fighting first.

  “Didn’t you have some nickname, too?” I asked him.

  “Hardhead,” he said, knocking on his skull. “Hardhead Haynes, the Boxer with Brains.” He winked at me. Three women in matching long chiffon gowns climbed into the ring, their hair piled high.

  “It’s a bridesmaid fight,” I said. “They’re gonna rip each other’s hairdos off.”

  “Ha. I’d promote that,” Darryl said.

  The announcer told us all to rise. The bridesmaids began to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and Milo and I stood with our hands on our hearts automatically, singing along. The song always reminded Milo of his Olympic medals, standing on the podium with the flags of the winning countries rising up and fluttering, everyone silent. I noticed Darryl was still sitting. He was tapping his heel and bouncing his knee. Milo moved his head at Darryl, like Stand up! But Darryl put his middle finger up and saluted the flag with it, wagged his eyebrows in disdain. Milo shrugged and kept singing.

  “You respect that song?” Darryl asked Milo when we sat down. “That rag, I mean flag?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Milo said, shrugged again. “Never thought much about it.”

  “Won’t catch me standing for that shit,” Darryl said loudly. Several people turned around. A couple of them smiled.

  “Hey, Haynes,” one man waved.

  “Land of the free nothin’,” Darryl grumped. “Man making a buck offa few guys they pick out of the garbage. Home of the brave, my ass. Home of the knave, you ask me.”

  “You’re making a buck offa few people yourself,” Milo said.

  “Like to make a buck offa you,” Darryl said. “Oh, please say yes, Mr. Robicheaux!” He looked at Milo and beamed.

  Milo was shaking his head. “Not a chance, Haynes,” he said, but he was laughing, covering his eyes so he wouldn’t see Darryl mugging and beseeching him, hands folded like a supplicant.

  The fighters made their entrance and quickly got down to their jobs of bopping each other on the head. I hated the fight. I kept covering my eyes. “The poor things,” I said, watching the fighters wincing and darting. They hugged each other constantly in exhaustion. “Poor guys.”

  “Shh,” Milo said. I was bugging him.

  “They are poor things,” Darryl said. “I oughta know. Every kid who gets in that ring got nothin’ but dues to pay.”

  For me it was impossible to tell who was the better fighter. Both men ended up bleeding. El Gallo did win. They put a big belt on him, with a medallion on it, something a Marvel Comic Hero-Man would wear. Darryl was disgusted, muttering about the phony score, just a point apart.

  When the fight ended a man came over to Darryl with a boy, about ten years old. “Haynes,” the man said, “my son here wants to know when’s my next bout?” He was a small dark brown man with a shaved head. A welterweight, Milo told me.

  “Milo and Charlotte,” Darryl said. “This is my client, Bones Rankel.”

  “John Rankel, ma’am,” Bones said formally. “Nice to meet you.”

  We shook hands and Milo talked to the boy while Bones pushed Darryl for a match, a date in the ring, anything. He looked hungry and angry.

  “Bones,” Darryl said, with his arm around the man, “the Garden. Vegas. Closed circuit. You name it. It’s yours.” He was showing off for Milo’s benefit, offering Bones a hired car home that very evening, peeling fifties off a big roll of money. “Don’t give up now,” Darryl said.

  But later, in a restaurant high over Times Square, Darryl told me and Milo that he was the one giving up. “I’m getting out of boxing,” Darryl said. “It’s a fuckin’ nest of vipers, hornet nest, barnyard epithet of scum and criminals.”

  “You love it,” I said.

  “Of course I love it,” he said. “Got me where I am now. But it turned out to be all a big joke. All these joke matches. They make you fight a ham sandwich, or any white club fighter without a main event on his ticket.” His voice hushed. “And the hurtin’ part of it is, all my idealistic dreams of a pure fight went up in smoke, because of what a travesty the whole sport has become.”

  Darryl looked tired, his twinkling eyes not so twinkly right then. “I’m quitting it. I’m moving on. I’m going to do movies,” he said. “With you, Robicheaux.” Again he asked Milo to sign with him, but Milo said no in polite clichés. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. He was doing well, he thought, he was on the brink of bigger things.

  “Too bad about Darryl,” I said, when we got home that night.

  “Yeah, but he’s deluded,” Milo said.

  “He wants to work with you.”

  “That’s not how it works,” Milo said.

  “What?”

  “He thinks it’s all politics, it’s all that radical stuff with him.”

  “How does it work then?”

  “It’s who you know, you know?”

  “He knows you,” I said. “You’re who he knows.”

  “He doesn’t know me all that well,” Milo said.

  “Like Ted and Mack?”

  “Jed and Mark.”

  “Right,” I said. “They know you like this.” With my fingers twined.

  A lot of people wanted Milo. Darryl was not the only one.

  Maybe that should have bothered me. Maybe I should have been jealous of Mr. Important Celebrity Milo back then, instead of later. But that’s not how he seemed to me. Yes, he was the handsome recognizable husband by my side, but he was also the concerned husband who was good at giving aspirin to a wife with a headache, he was the annoying husband who left his rotten socks on the floor, who forgot to rinse the stubble from the sink after shaving; the husband who demanded stone cold silence during televised sporting events, especially one that included him. He was studying the sportscasters, the way they bantered and spouted facts, compared to the way he did. “Shh, please, quiet please.” I mimicked him and teased him, Ooh, he hears the voice of God, but soon learned that if I did that stuff, I was in for it. “Shut the fuck up” is what he said sometimes. Once he threw a magazine at me to make me stop talking on the phone. At the time I thought: That’s just Milo. Just his temper. It was one of the things I hated about him, how set he was in his ways, how his ways were the ways we had to have. Mostly, though, I was happy for him. I liked his ways. This is how he must h
ave been as a child, I thought, obsessively learning to win. I was rooting for him, the cheerleader at the finish line.

  To tell you the truth, I was preoccupied with something else. I didn’t tell Milo, really, or anyone how obsessed I’d become. How for the better part of the last year, I could not pass a pregnant woman in the street without fumes of jealousy and longing following me in her wake. How I avoided store windows if there was any chance they might display wee little clothes or a baby bonnet. We hadn’t mentioned children, since our phantom baby had come and gone, a year before. Milo had forgotten the whole subject in the excitement of the wedding, his movie, the new apartment. I thought he had changed his mind, was not ready. He was young, only twenty-seven. But I was old. I was twenty-seven, too.

  Then one morning we left our building together and there was a woman holding a newborn infant no bigger than a heartbeat. Its thin bare arms hung over its mother’s shoulder as she stood talking in the sunlight to a shopkeeper. The fingers looked ancient and translucent and just as we passed, the child bleated, a cry so tentative and blind that it broke my heart.

  “Ohhh,” I said, stricken.

  Milo turned to see why my voice was strange.

  “Let’s have a baby now,” I said. “Let’s just have one.”

  He stopped walking and checked my face. “Okay,” he said. He kissed me on the head and took my hand so I wondered why I had ever worried, or thought I couldn’t tell him.

  “Scary to think about,” he said later. “That’s why.”

  It scared us both, the idea, that we could make a person, then have to be responsible for it. “I’m afraid I’d drop it,” Milo said. Me, I was afraid of the fat. I had creeps about fat the way some people do about mice. The thought of pregnancy made me picture some instant sprouting of an enormous abdominal pod, like a snap-on unit.

  As if fat was the half of it. Jesus.

  I had another miscarriage in the middle of that year. “We don’t know why this happens,” the first specialist told me and Milo. He was an old white man with moles on his eyelids. “Sometimes,” he said, “the partners’ cells are not compatible,” and explained how one person’s cells kill the other person’s, or something like that. About the previous so-called chemical pregnancy, he had this to say: “It usually means that something was wrong with the child, and it was nature’s way of taking care of it.” He looked like he thought it was for the best. That nature, in our case, was doing its job with our incompatible cells. Maybe this was true. But maybe he was a flaming fuck. We got out of there and Milo was furious. Veins stood out on his temples. “You get a new doctor!” he said, pointing his finger at me. Practically shouting till he saw my face.

  We were so sad. We could barely speak of it.

  “I got a new doctor,” I told him that night.

  He nodded. “Good,” he said. He was still upset, shaking his head. We sat on the couch and I leaned against him. “Don’t worry, sugarfoot,” he said. “It’ll be okay.” He kept me near him and treated me gingerly, as if I were breakable. There was nothing to say. What if we never had a child? Not out loud. Our cells were killing each other. We drank a bottle of wine down to the end. Milo poured till the last drips fell into his glass. He fingered the depression in the bottom of the bottle and showed me the way the glass rose up inside, like a hill.

  “In French this part is called le mont de désespoir,” he said, and didn’t need to translate. “Don’t despair,” he said. “There’s plenty more.” He opened another bottle and tried to cheer me up.

  It was harder for me than it was for him. For him it was all sort of … not real. He was always Mr. Optimist. He just went ahead with his days, making Slope!, doing his ads, his sports commentary.

  Me, I spent all my time in the waiting room. Hours and hours of many days in doctors’ offices lying on cold tables. I tell you, it’s not romantic. It reminds you of how you are a mammal. All the tests were on me, all the unmentionable exploration. I was a good sport about it. I modeled the paper gowns. I said the blood pressure cuff would make a high-fashion accessory. I was a trouper. Milo said so. “Hey, Champ, we’ll win this one, too, you’ll see.” He kept my spirits up. He coached me along, made me feel safe and sound. We were happy, weren’t we? he said. We were together. That was what mattered. The reason it was taking so long, he liked to say, was because we were making a deluxe model child. When our baby finally got here it would be perfect. But other times he got sick of the whole subject. He’d go out of town on crucial days, or leave the room when I started crying, go watch TV. “Jeez, Charlotte, you’re becoming such a mope,” he said once. “You’re so gloomy half the time.”

  He’ll go get a happy fruitful new wife, I thought.

  He did his best, I guess. I don’t know how to weight the good parts and the bad parts. He had his own challenges during that time. Darryl, for example, really gave Milo the hard-sell treatment. Not to mention headaches, and food for thought. Also a new career. That was thanks to Darryl, too.

  We were trying for a baby, but I think maybe something else had to be born first. Namely: Cade, Rebel Fury.

  22.

  Charlotte! C’mon and have coffee with me.” This was Darryl one spring morning, coming up behind me on the street as I was walking home from the gym, taking my sweaty elbow. “Whattya say? C’mon, let’s go have a chat. A business chat.”

  “Sure, okay,” I said.

  “Quack,” said Darryl, behind me. He was copying my walk, which is splay-footed, like a duck, with the shoulders back. “Quack, quack.”

  “Darryl, cut it out!” He made me laugh.

  “Quack, quack,” he said, toes out and waddling. We walked like ducks into a narrow coffee shop run by old Greek men with no time for words that are not on the menu.

  “What?” the counterman said.

  “Coffee light, extra sugar,” said Darryl.

  “Black,” I said.

  Darryl looked hard at me when I said that, a little grin on his face. Even coffee was a race joke to Darryl. When we sat down, he said: “Are you ready?”

  “For what?”

  “I got a deal for Milo he can’t resist.”

  “Why are you talking to me, then?” I said. “Talk to him.”

  “Because,” Darryl told me, “unlike your husband, I know you will give the black man a hearing.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Aw, c’mon, Charlotte, allow a little levity,” he said.

  Darryl had a movie he wanted Milo for. He started telling me about it, painting the air with his hands, framing words with his arms like a big screen. “A rebel leader, okay?” he said. “Cade. He’s a human from another time, the future, right?” Darryl told me the whole plot: alien masters, human slaves, fiery battles. It sounded far-fetched to me, but his excitement was contagious.

  “Have you got anything on paper?”

  “Yeah.” He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket, pulled out an envelope, and handed it to me.

  “I’ll give it to him,” I said.

  “Thank you, Miss Scarlett. I mean: Charlotte.” He batted his eyelashes at me. “Rhymes,” he said coquettishly, and paid the bill.

  Milo and I were eating dinner that night when I told him about it. “Darryl gave me something for you to look at. He has a deal you can’t resist.” I started to give him the envelope, but Milo put his fork down on his plate. He looked at me, chewing. He didn’t seem to be swallowing. He bounced his head in a way I now recognized as a prelude to fury.

  “What,” he said, chopping his sentences, “are you doing. Trying to tamper around. With my professional life?”

  “No, I—”

  “I don’t go telling you your agency is lousy or that your bookers are incompetent. Do I?”

  “But Darryl is—”

  “I don’t want to hear about ‘Darryl this, or Darryl that,’ ” he said. “Darryl is not what you would call bona fide.” He pushed back his chair.

  “Look. I’m really sorry,” I said.<
br />
  He sat back and calmed down. “Listen, forget Darryl,” Milo said. “He’s a smart guy. But he’s not part of the system and he never will be.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he refuses to play the game.”

  “Which game are you talking about?” I asked him.

  “You cannot refuse to stand when they play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ for starters,” Milo said. “You don’t give the finger to the flag. You don’t get anywhere by sticking it to the powers that be.” Then he said, “Much as you might like to.”

  “Would you like to?”

  “Let’s just say I never would’ve gotten anywhere if I stuck it to half the people who pissed me off,” Milo said. He stood up and cleared his plate, then he picked up the envelope from Darryl and threw it in the garbage. But the next day, tidying some papers, I noticed that he had fished it out and opened it.

  Still, whatever was in that envelope did not change his mind. What changed it, just six months later, had to do with Slope! and the way in which it bombed.

  That movie was terrible. A disaster. We burned the reviews, but I remember them, one in particular. “In the course of this embarrassing film, Johnny Miller, a stumblebum skier (Milo Robicheaux) who wins gold medals by accident, tries to help the members of the Soviet Winter Olympics team escape to freedom in the West, pursued by the KGB down every ski slope in Europe. The fine, real-life Olympian Milo Robicheaux is not memorable in the role.”

  Poor Milo. It was the worst time. The only lucky thing was that nobody—nobody in the public—seemed to notice. Or care. Hardly anybody got a chance to see the movie, which closed in a week, or even remember it had anything to do with Milo.

  Except Darryl. He was there right from the minute the credits faded out in the screening room high above Columbus Circle, and the house-lights came up to reveal a polite group of studio suits and distributors, and—luckily—nobody else we knew. How he found out about the screening, which was private, or got himself invited, I never discovered, but there he was, coming over to us through the crowd, with the sympathy of a funeral director on his face. “Say hey, my brother.”