by Kate Manning
“You don’t want anyone to know about me,” I said one night, after nearly three weeks of Milomania. I was reading about Milo in a magazine, looking for some mention of his wife, Charlotte Halsey. Just a hint of a family. His parents were in there, with quotes. His mother, Hattie, said her son was always something of a showman. His sister was quoted, too. But there was nothing about me, or Hallie. “You want everyone to think you’re a bachelor,” I said.
“Not me,” said Milo.
“Who then?”
“The handlers,” he said.
What was that supposed to mean? I asked him.
He came over and scooped his arms around me where I sat feeding Hallie with the movie magazine folded and balanced on a pillow. He told me what Darryl and the Ray Group had explained to him, how publicity-wise it was just not smart, careerwise, for the Wife and Child to appear with Milo. There would be marketing problems for Milo’s movies, especially in the South, If it were known about the interracial nature of his marriage. Advertisers would pull out of magazines or TV shows if there was any hint of, you know what: miscegenation, a word that always makes me think of mangling and vegetation, for some reason, like it couldn’t possibly be a word that meant anything.
“Darryl says it could wreck my career.”
“Oh, come on,” I said.
“Maybe not wreck, Darryl says. But hurt.”
“This is not 1955,” I said.
“Nineteen fifty-five, 1985. Can’t do it,” said the savvy new media-guy Milo. “For example, you know what surprised me?”
“No,” I said. “What?”
“No black person, except maybe my mother, will even listen to a Harry Belafonte record,” said Milo. “Not since he dumped his black wife for a white one.”
No black person, Milo said, like words handed down from the top of the Mount on a tablet. Like there was a test you could pass, with final authorities.
“Who told you that?”
“It’s true. It’s not done. The Ray Group says Quincy Jones never appears in photographs with his wife. Or Sidney Poitier, either.”
“Why can’t Quincy appear with Sidney?” I asked.
“It’s not funny,” Milo said. “Too many nutjobs and wackos and stalkers and sickos. From now on we say: ‘Mr. Robicheaux is reticent about his private life.’ Period.” Nobody was even permitted to ask Milo about me or Hallie, or he’d refuse the interview.
“It’s not safe,” Milo said. “Look what happened to Vernon Jordan.”
I waited for him to tell me who Vernon was and what happened.
“Shot. He’s head of the NAACP. Shot. Just for getting a ride in a car with a white woman. We have to be careful.” He turned my face to him by crooking my chin with his finger. “We do.”
I put my head on his shoulder. Hallie had fallen asleep. Milo now gently moved her aside and kissed me. We kissed over our sleeping baby until the magazine I’d been reading fell on the floor, open to the picture of Milo with his shirt unbuttoned almost to the navel, a hint of oiled chest showing and a gleam in his eye. I stopped.
“They want everyone to think you’re available,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, “but I’m not.” He kissed me some more but I was distracted. “I am a Family Man!” he said, pushing his lips at my ear, whispering. “I’m not available, am I?”
“Aren’t you?” I said.
It came out wrong. I couldn’t help it. My voice was like a balloon leak. I was having a hard time coping; a hard time squaring how I felt with how I was supposed to feel.
Isn’t it great? You must be so happy!
Look at you, Charlotte!
Will you look at her?
God, look at her. Just had a baby and more gorgeous than ever.
People said these things to me, but I didn’t trust them. Maybe I didn’t look different to them, but I felt different. I was a mother! It changed me. I’d be waiting in the dark with Hallie when Milo came in late. He’d be happy because he was always so happy during that time, with his new darling baby, and Cade doing so well. He’d be a little drunk, full of some story, some new deal, and he’d take me up in his arms and say, Isn’t it wonderful? his lips at my sour milk-smelling neck, his hands on the hard torpedoes of my chest, streaks of pain making me leap back away from him. And he’d say: Oh, I see how it is.
No—I’d start to explain. I’m so tired.
Rest, Milo would say, and pull my head on his shoulder, as if I would soon revive, stroking my hair until I pulled away. I was the one who pulled away. It was me. This happened more than once during those early days. He was tender. He didn’t understand because I couldn’t explain: how it was different, how I was exhausted, how I was afraid of him—the famous one with the oiled chest, afraid of how he saw me now, a mother, and what he would think if his hands traveled down my ribs, looked for my waist and couldn’t find it, couldn’t find me, the muscles and flat planes of his memory. And my memory, too. That used to be me, I thought, the one in the pictures.
Aren’t you? I asked him. Aren’t you available?
“Charlotte,” Milo said, sick of me, “for Chrissakes. You don’t need to ask that.” He got me off his lap and got up. “You don’t. That’s. That’s—” He couldn’t say. He was mad. He shook his head and left the room.
But any woman would wonder, would ask. There was never any mention of his wife. He was out all the time, being famous. When I went with him—and I did, once or twice a week—I saw the candy box of girls at those parties. Chinese Cherokee African Caucasian Latin hyphen American, wearing whatever you can dream. Marabou. Spangles. Hanging all over Milo and kissing him. He kissed them back, winked at me and gave me a look like Help! and kissed them again. He made a point to look at me, I thought, he always had.
You don’t need to ask that. I had to believe him. He looked at me over the heads of those party girls and didn’t seem interested in them. His gaze followed me. We went home and as far as I could tell he was the same Milo. He still ate cereal directly out of the box, drank milk straight from the carton, ran eight miles a day. He kissed me over our sleeping baby. He wanted us to be safe, wouldn’t do anything to risk his family. He was the same Milo as ever, only right now he was the guy of the hour. Girls were after him. Of course they were. It was part of the celebrity package.
I hung in there, but that doesn’t mean I handled it. Motherhood is a hard enough road, without celebrity and race and money piled across it, flaming like barricades of burning tires. Sometimes I think our days have been like that, our family driving along in one of those outlaw countries where desperadoes stop you, waving machetes, speaking some language I wasn’t equipped to speak.
Milo came home after dinner one Thursday night, early for him. It was May. Hallie was about three months old and so colicky. Crying, crying, crying. You have no idea. That sound. Rage and pain boiled into a teapot scream. At first you say there there baby sweet lovey shhhh, and you are scared. You think there is internal bleeding. A pin sticking her somewhere. You say shhh shhh shhh, there there there for an hour, four hours. You try all the remedies and nothing works. Colic is a mystery! the doctors say. It will go away. She screamed every night without relenting and what was a mystery to me was how much I loved her anyway. It was Milo I resented, for being out.
He burst in the door around nine o’clock, so excited. “Hey! Where’re my girls!?” He’d been interviewed again and he was beaming. I was on the couch, still in my nightgown from the morning.
“Hey, babe. Hey, darlin’.”
“Take this fucking baby,” I said.
“Jesus, Charlotte, control yourself.”
He took Hallie from me. “Aww, sweetcake, Daddy’s home.” I ran to the bathroom and shut the door and cried and took a shower, crying in there. A failure. A shrew. Take this fucking baby, I said, of my own daughter, my darling. I loved her. She was all I ever wanted. I said fucking baby.
I cleaned myself up and put on perfume and lipstick. Everything was fine! I was a happy momm
y. Happy, happy, happy. When I went out again Hallie lay quietly on Milo’s chest, as he hummed some soft song to her.
“Hi.”
“Look who’s got the touch,” Milo said smugly.
I burst back into tears.
“Jesus, you’re a mess,” he said. “Just hire someone.”
He patted my head with his free hand while deftly maneuvering the baby down into the crook of his arm. Everything he did, he did with athletic grace and efficiency. Everything’s easy for Milo, I thought.
“Get someone to live in,” he said. “Would you please?”
I didn’t want someone. I wanted him. He was the father. We had talked about it even before she was born, how our baby would not be like those other babies, the bonneted ones we saw around Beverly Hills, pushed by people in uniforms. It’s true we had not really understood how hard it would be, but we had said we would raise her, the two of us together. Now here was Milo barely three months later saying Get someone to live in.
“What about you?” I said. “Why don’t you live in a little? Instead of out?”
“Someone has to work around here,” Milo said.
As if shooting movies is work, I thought. As if we’re starving.
“As if I’m sitting by the pool eating chocolate-covered cherries,” I said.
That was when, I think, my voice got that whine. I heard it, but couldn’t help it. Milo never said anything about the twelve diapers a day, the ten feedings, the bath, the no sleep, the hours of colic, the trips to the market, the staying home and organizing all those pool cleaners and hedge clippers, house cleaners and drivers, the swarm of smiling silent illegal guys who came to cut the grass. What I did all day did not count. I knew complaining was unseemly, surrounded by this life, but Milo went out in the world, where Cade had opened to huge crowds in Europe, Canada, Mexico; he went to meetings and parties, was already planning for Cade II, while I was tacked to the feeding chair like a butterfly on a pin.
Someone has to work, he said, meaning You’re too fat to work. Is that what he meant?
“As if anyone would hire me right now,” I said.
“Charlotte,” Milo said, “snap out of it.”
I went in the kitchen to steady my nerves. Milo followed me and said nothing when he saw the glass in my hand. But he looked. As he poured for himself, he looked, raised his eyebrow. They say consumption of alcohol encourages something called the letdown reflex in a nursing mother, eases the flow of milk. That’s what I told him. “I’m encouraging the letdown reflex.”
He said, “I’m worried about you.” He was. His eyes were steady with worry.
“We just had a baby,” I said. “You’re always out.”
“Just for work.”
“You’re never home. I never see you.”
“See me now, don’t you?” Big grin, big arms open wide.
“Every week you’re somewhere: Paris, Montreal, New York.”
“So come with me!”
“We have a new baby.”
“Baby-sitters!” he said. He spelled it out for me. B-a-b-y-s-i-t-t-e-r-s.
“We have a tiny new infant, Milo.”
“Charlotte. This could all be solved if you would hire someone.”
“That’s not the point. Hiring someone is not the point.”
“What, then?”
He was frustrated. Men hate it when they can’t fix something. You know why Jesus was a carpenter. “Get a grip,” he said. He went out of the room and I heard him rummaging around the garage. When he came back he had a flashlight and a small night-light. “Look,” he said. “I thought of these.”
This was his solution: a night-light for me. So I wouldn’t have to turn the lights on when I did the 4 A.M. feed. He was really very sweet, a boyish look on his face.
“Oh, thanks,” I said meanly. “So I won’t wake you up? So you can get your rest? How thoughtful.” I practically threw the lights back in his face.
He stood there smoldering. He picked Hallie up and carried her upstairs. A few minutes later I could hear water running and Milo singing Bob Marley, Three little birds sittin’ roun’ my doorstep, singing sweet songs, a melody pure and true… When I went up he was bathing Hallie, washing her small heart of a face, the book about how to do it propped on the sink, singing at the top of his lungs.
I admit I was the whiny one. The winey one. I can’t say that I quote unquote started really drinking then, because I’ve always had a taste for it. And no more or less than our friend Milo. You can go ahead and say I had a problem. But look: It was the stress and the jealousy. My drinking gets bad when everything else gets bad. I could’ve quit anytime. Later I did quit, often. I didn’t need it, but I wanted it. I’d have my bottle and Hallie’d have hers, each with our own formula. It got me through the nights.
“Are you okay?” Claire asked me on the phone. “You sound a little loony.” Hallie was four months old then.
“I miss you.” I hadn’t seen Claire in almost a year.
“You must be so happy,” she said. “You’re so lucky.” She wanted her own baby, I knew.
“Yes,” I said. “Oh, yes, of course.”
“You seem—” She stopped.
“No, I am, I am.” I couldn’t explain to her. What did I have to complain about? I loved being a mother. I was getting better at it. When Hallie looked up at me her eyes were full of … gifts, what we used to call gifts, of the spirit, of prophecy and tongues and healing. She loved me. It brimmed out all over her face. She saw me and smiled. Even when she cried now, I knew what she wanted. Me. She turned her head to the sound of my voice the way a sunflower follows the path of the sun all day. Her noises—her coos and raspy bird sounds, how she laughed—got me in the heart so I could feel it swelling up. “Half the time I just want to cry,” I said to Claire. “I do cry.”
“Oh, Charlotte, you’re sad?”
“No! It’s out of love,” I said. “Unbearable love.”
“But, what?” she asked, her voice sharp with suspicion. “Is Milo behaving?”
“As far as I can tell,” I said. “But lately we can’t even go for a walk without people surrounding us, trying to get near him. It’s creepy.”
“Oh, the Price of Fame,” Claire intoned, rolling her rs. “The Terr-rr-ible Prr-rrice.”
I wasn’t going to get any sympathy out of her. She thought I should be enjoying myself. She would be, she said. “Are you two getting along?” she asked.
“We argue a lot,” I said. “All the time.”
I was exaggerating for her benefit. I knew how she imagined my life, as a spangled starry ball. It would make her feel better if I told her something she didn’t have to envy.
“Sometimes I think Milo just—doesn’t want me around,” I said.
“Oh, honey, really?” Now she was paying attention. Claire is happier when she is comforting me.
“I’m just jealous, probably,” I told her. “Plus all these hormones, and I’m exhausted, and this matronly shape I’ve assumed.” I put my hands on my waist as if she could see me.
“Jesus, Charlotte,” Claire said. “You know what you need?” Since I was pouring wine again I thought she was going to tell me long-distance to stop drinking, but she said, “Work.”
“Whoever heard of a mother who was a fashion model?” I said.
“Oh, shut up,” she said wearily. “Your face is probably even better now, right? With tiny hints of experience and character in it.”
“Age, you mean.”
“If you want to call it that,” she said, disgusted. “We’re barely thirty.”
After we hung up, I looked hard at myself in the mirror. I did not see lines, exactly, but something different. Some weariness around the eyes. Like Milo’s mother had, maybe. Like a mother. That’s how I saw myself now.
We all know we will grow up and grow old. That knowledge is what makes us different from other animals, who just plod along contentedly on four legs until they die under a tree. They don’t know what’s com
ing. But we do, supposedly. Then it comes, and still we are shocked! Shocked at the broken veins in the leg! The liver spots on the cheek! Apparently, until I became a mother I had not believed any of that would happen to me. I was “beautiful,” had been told that since I could make sense of speech, and all that time, I was a scoffing young girl, wondering if beauty even mattered. But now, glimpsing that weariness in my face, I realized I had bought the whole line about beauty like I bought the blusher, the concealer. That it was truth. Apparently it had mattered quite a bit to me, because I was chumped now, wrinkled. Grown-up. Someone’s mother, never a glamorous role.
Oh, yeah, yeah, woe for the loneliness and sad trials of the fashion model. What a joke. No one will feel sorry for you. So grow up and get over it, Charlotte.
I tried to get over it, but I’m not sure I ever did, really.
25.
Darryl had a party. He had lots of parties. The blowout biggest one was the housewarming in June, after Cade had been filling theaters for four months. Thanks to Cade, Darryl had bought a big Hollywood mansion with a ballroom. He loved that it had a ballroom, and to fill it up for the party, he invited everyone he knew or wanted to know. He hired a serious funk band and a DJ. The studio was sending ice sculptures.
“Charlotte! You gonna get yourself back in your Barbie doll shoes for this bash?” Darryl said. He had arrived at our house one morning to drop off some mail, and an invitation. His party was a week away.
“Charlotte hasn’t been getting out much,” Milo said.
“She needs to get out!” Darryl said. He smiled his cheeky smile at me. “You coming?”
“She’s been staying home with Hallie,” Milo said.
He doesn’t want me to go, I thought.
“That’s a good mama, staying home,” said Darryl.
“Yeah, she is,” said Milo, roping me in by the neck. It made me feel safe when he did that. Usually. “We’ll miss her,” he said. “Won’t we?”