Whitegirl

by Kate Manning

  Doesn’t want me.

  “I wouldn’t miss it!” I said. “Darryl’s going to dance with me.”

  “Oooooh, Pink, I don’t know about that,” Darryl said, sucking air through the space between his teeth. “Get myself a reputation like Robi-boy here. Mr. Robi-show.”

  “What reputation is that?” I said, teasing.

  “Just kidding, Pink,” he said.

  “Hey!” said Milo. He shadowboxed Darryl. “Nobody’s dancing with my wife but me! Right?”

  He doesn’t want me to come. It haunted me all week.

  “You sure you’re not too tired?” Milo said, while we got dressed to go.

  “You’re the one who said I should get out more,” I said.

  “And you should,” he said quickly. He was attentive. He complimented me. You look beautiful. Put your hair up. Yes, like that. No, not the satin pants, the others. What about those smaller earrings? Not the diamond ones. There, he said, perfect. But I couldn’t shake the feeling he wished I wasn’t coming, wished I was someone different, someone with her hair up.

  Arriving, we saw cars parked for blocks around Darryl’s new house. There were valet parking guys in uniforms and torches lining the driveway.

  “Hey, hey, hey,” Darryl said, opening the front door. “It’s Cade himself! Charlotte! Hey! Come right on in!” He bearhugged Milo, kissed me, said, “Make yourself at home.”

  It was the first time I’d been to Darryl’s new house. He’d been living in hotels for months and had just finished renovating this big palazzo up in the Canyon, a California mission-style place, with Mexican tile floors and arched doorways, a sunken living room. It was dark and the music was loud, with the bass line so heavy it throbbed in your rib cage. “Hey,” I said in Milo’s ear, “there’s dancing. Let’s dance.”

  “Not drunk enough,” he said.

  “Who, me?” because truth be told, I was the smallest bit drunk already, having started at home.

  “No,” Milo said, “me.” He was wearing his sunglasses indoors, a new habit of his, and I wondered how much he could see, looking for the bar in the boom-boom-boom of the music.

  A jheri-curled man I didn’t know pulled him off by the elbow. “Hey, Charlotte,” Milo called over his shoulder, “excuse me a minute.” He and the guy disappeared toward the pool, leaving me wandering around by myself. The rooms smelled of reefer and incense and perfume. Candles and oil lamps burned inside, lanterns and torches out by the pool. The place was opulent with tile and carpeting and crystal and chrome. TVs took up whole walls. A painting of a reclining nude, red-tinged nipples on brown breasts, hung over a desk in an office, where the shelves were full of books and the file cabinets bursting with paper. I was tempted to open them, see what was inside.

  I was one of maybe ten white people at this party, which was not such a big deal for me anymore, certainly not as much as the fact that I was probably the only mother, the only one not fumigating myself with spleefs and blunts and bones of weed and tobacco, the only one drinking guiltily, alone, turning champagne into mother’s milk while Hallie slept at home with a baby-sitter. The music now was softer and older, Al Green or Isaac Hayes. Nobody talked to me. I was shy to start, myself, and just sat on a couch, watching and drinking.

  Finally, a tall woman with elaborate hair extensions said, “Hey.” She sat down next to me. “I’m Khelli.” She had purple lipstick and triple-pierced ears, many rings on her hands, and a strapless red top. She was all of eighteen years old, it seemed to me.

  “I’m Charlotte,” I said.

  “Yeah, everybody knows that,” she said. “You’re Cade’s wife.”

  “So far,” I said. Who knows why I said that? It had something to do with the self-conscious feeling I had whenever I was the only white person in a new place: that I should signal I didn’t take anything for granted, demonstrate I was not unaware of the complexities. “So far.”

  Khelli hooded her eyes and smiled in a way that meant something mysterious I didn’t care to ask her about. “I for one was not shocked to find he had a white wife,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said. Do go on. “Why not?”

  “Because”—she shrugged—“you take a man like him, you know, raised like that among white people, doing what they do, skiing and that, then you know he’s not really black, down deep, right? So unlike some other people I was not shocked.”

  Black down deep.

  I tried to think what to say, but all I could imagine was guts, the organs all black like rotten bananas. Better not mention anything like that, I decided.

  Luckily, Darryl came over to us then, sat on the coffee table, and kissed Khelli smack on the lips. “Is this not the most beautiful woman you ever saw?” he said to me, pointing to her.

  “She sure is,” I said. “Gorgeous.”

  “Gorgeous,” Darryl said to Khelli. “That’s a good name for you.”

  Khelli beamed.

  “What is your name?” Darryl asked her.

  “Khelli.”

  “Sheee-it,” Darryl said, laughing. “Name like that you’d think you were some kinda colleen, right? Little shamrocks, little rainbow, little pot of gold.”

  “Khelli with an i,” she said. “And a k-h.”

  “I’m gonna call you Gorgeous.”

  “You can call me Gorgeous when I say,” she said. She was trying to be tough but she was dimpled up with pleasure and the flattery of his attention.

  “You an actress? A singer?”

  “A singer.”

  “Maybe you need an agent?”

  “I do,” she said. “I’ve heard you might know somebody.”

  “Darryl Haynes,” said Darryl, extending his hand, “Super Agent. You call me in the morning.” He drummed his fingertips together and raised his eyebrows at us to show he didn’t take himself too seriously. “Charlotte is not—obviously—one of my clients,” he said to Khelli, laughing. “But her husband is my Number-One Man. You know Cade?”

  Darryl had used Cade and Milo to make himself into Super Agent. Now he had a big crop of new talents. Khelli would soon be among them, I could see, one way or another. I got tired of her wide-eyed questions to Darryl about demo tapes and studio musicians and record labels. So I excused myself and strolled through the crowd out to the pool. Torches were planted all around, and people were dancing on the terrace. I saw Milo across a glowing blue lilypad of pool water. He was standing with a group, laughing, his sunglasses still on. They looked good on him. I still get a knot in my stomach, thinking of his looks. That night he had on a black sport jacket with a pale green shirt. No tie. The Italian pants I picked for him showed off the taper of his waist. I went over and touched his arm. He was talking to a very tall man with short dreads and a round face, round glasses with black frames. The woman standing next to him was laughing at what Milo said. She had short finger waves and a wide mouth that she covered with her hand sideways when she laughed. They stopped talking when they saw me.

  “Charlotte Halsey,” Milo said, introducing me.

  “His wife,” I said, and what with my right hand holding a drink, stuck out my left hand with its flashing diamond, so the man with glasses had no choice but to take it. “Hi,” I said. The woman looked at me and then at Milo and back to me. Even with his sunglasses on, Milo looked sheepish.

  If I could change myself into a bird, I thought. If I could airbrush myself out of the picture. If I could be a brownskin person. I wish I were.

  I had never wished for that before. Not that I would trade.

  “Excuse me,” Milo said. He turned away from the group and steered me across the terrace.

  “More champagne!” I said gaily.

  “Haven’t you had enough of that, Mother?”

  “I am not your mother,” I said, wheeling past him into the house.

  It was a hairy ride home, both of us under various influences, not all of them chemical. It was two in the morning. Milo tapped his ring on the wheel and I had the idea he was trying to apologize,
watching me across the front seat. He reached a hangdog hand over and touched my knee. I pretended to be asleep.

  Hallie woke up the minute the baby-sitter left, screaming for a feed. There, Hallie, there you go, I said, glad to see her. We lay on the bed, our small family, Hallie drinking and the carousel room circling.

  “Where did you go?” Milo said after a while. “I tried to find you.”

  You did not, liar. You stayed out on the patio.

  “Where did you go?”

  “Inside.”

  “Who’d you talk to?”

  “Khelli.”

  “Khelli?”

  I said some stuff to describe Khelli while thinking: She’s the one who said that, unlike some others, she was not surprised to find out you have a white wife. I was not going to say that part.

  But then I did. I said it anyway.

  “Why was she not surprised?” he asked.

  “Because. Never mind.”

  “Why?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Tell me,” he said.

  Well, I was drunk enough to say anything. “She says you’re not really black, you know, deep down, so it’s not surprising your wife is white.”

  “Plgggghh,” Milo said. He blew air so his cheeks made noise like a winded horse. He turned in the bed away from me. Fuck her, he said. He got up and went in the bathroom and ran the water and dropped something that clattered. Another curse.

  “Milo?”

  Another crash. Hallie startled. I could tell by the cascading sound of glass breaking that Milo had just swept everything off the vanity onto the floor. A bottle of aspirin, cakes of blusher, hand mirror, whatever else was by the sink. He swore and slammed cabinets. “Shh, honey.” I covered Hallie’s ear with my free hand. “It’s okay now.” I lay there waiting for it to be over.

  Milo felt better, smashing that stuff. He calmed down and took a shower, cleaned everything up and came back to bed like it was an ordinary night at our house. He spooned around me where I lay feeding.

  “I hate that you’re so guilty to be with me,” I said after a while.

  “Shee-it. I’m not, I’m not,” Milo said. He kissed the back of my neck.

  Shee-it. He said that now, sometimes. He said my man, my brutha. That’s solid, that’s phat. He dropped his gs.

  “You know, excuse me for noticing this, Milo,” I said thickly, “but whenever you’re around Darryl you talk like him.”

  “Hmmmm. Well: when in Rome.” He closed his eyes, fingers twisted in my hair.

  “I’m just wondering,” I said in a small voice, “which is Rome for you? When you’re with me? Or with him? Which is Rome and which is home?”

  “Maybe they’re both Rome,” he said. “Maybe there is no home, somebody like me.”

  I brooded about it. I couldn’t sleep and lay there with a headache.

  Maybe they’re both Rome.

  Milo was awake, too. He was up and down that night, checking Hallie in her crib, in the den with the light on, reading. He was leafing around in all those books Darryl gave him. Invisible Man. No Name in the Street.

  In the morning I saw them open by his big chair. They threatened me, those books. It seemed to me Milo was looking for answers in them the way I looked for fortunes in the Bible, and that the answer he found was that he should be ashamed of me now, because he was Cade, the Rebel Fury. Rebel Furies couldn’t have white wives.

  If I had known any better, if I had not been so tired, if I was not such an ignorant person or such a selfish one, maybe I would have understood that Milo had his own growing pains. But we didn’t talk about what those pains were, or what was going on between us. Milo wouldn’t. I couldn’t.

  People watched him more than ever. Strangers thought he was fair game, and Milo was having trouble accepting the fact that we couldn’t walk around anymore without paying the price of fame, as Claire called it, the terrible price.

  One Saturday morning in July we went to Venice Beach and walked the Strand with Hallie in her carriage, Milo in his cap and dark glasses. I sat on a bench in the shade, and Milo went to get iced tea for us. A woman in a wetsuit, not younger than sixty-five, sat down next to me and looked at Hallie, looked at me. “So beautiful,” she said, smiling. She picked up Hallie’s hand. “Aw,” said the woman, “I really really believe in adoption.”

  I must’ve made a face.

  “She is adopted, isn’t she?”

  Milo came back then. The lady smiled at him and fled.

  “Don’t take it personally,” Milo said, when I told him. He handed me iced tea and took Hallie, fed her a bottle. We soon had some fans around. Girls. “Oooo, Cade,” said the one with the pierced eyebrow, “what a good daddy.”

  He is a wonderful father. I wouldn’t take that away from him, or his success, which he deserved. He worked hard and he had gifts. For him the problem was everybody telling him that all the time. Milomania. The girls at the beach. We had to leave and even so they followed us. “I can’t get away from it,” he said that day. “I’m not complaining. But I can’t get away.”

  “What about home?” I said.

  “That’s the only place,” he said, and he smiled at me. “Home with you and this girl.” Then he leaned down and whispered to Hallie, “Except your mother here is crabby half the day. She’s not the feisty Charlotte of yore.”

  I knew he was trying to tell me something, talking through Hallie. I stewed over it the whole afternoon and all through the small but well-integrated dinner party that night in Beverly Hills, where I tried to be feisty as hell, wearing a tiny black cocktail dress with a rhinestone zipper up the front that constantly threatened to unzip. Milo watched me across the table. I laughed for his benefit and ate almost nothing, drinking champagne and flirting with an elderly white screenwriter next to me, who kept talking about the blacklists of the 1950s.

  “Don’t say blacklist!” I said, teasing the guy even though he didn’t get my stupid joke. Milo heard me and I saw him trying not to smile. “Don’t say dark forces of McCarthyism.” The poor guy kept trying to explain about rats who named names. “And what were the rats’ names?” I said, giddy and laughing with very little idea of what the guy was talking about, HUAC and the Hollywood Ten, movie stars accused of being commie pinkos, as my Uncle Paul used to call them.

  “You were having fun,” Milo said, after we got home.

  “Yes.” Was he, maybe, jealous? Yes! And of an old man!

  “I’ve been worried about you.”

  “Have you?”

  “You haven’t been yourself.”

  “You mean not the feisty Charlotte of yore?” I said. Then, quietly: “Of your what?”

  He laughed.

  “Your dreams? Your heart’s desire? Your requirements?”

  My tone was supposed to be the flirty one of the dinner party, but it came out tinged with vinegar, the champagne bubbles turning now. I had drunk a lot. Both of us had. We were lying on our bed but Milo couldn’t see me. I had my back toward him.

  “What’s the matter?” he said carefully, after a minute.

  “Nothing.” I had wanted him to ask but now that he had, I didn’t want to explain. He should just know what was bothering me, just see it.

  “Hey,” he said, propping himself up on his elbow. He put his hand on my face and felt the wet spill from the corners of my eyes. “Aww, honey.” He lay still a while and then he said something that surprised me. “I’m sorry. I know I’ve been distracted.” He took my hand suddenly, held it too hard. “Listen, I’ve been having trouble sleeping. I can’t sleep without you in the bed, up and down all night with the baby, and thinking of everything that’s happened. All this, this …”

  He waved his hand vaguely in the air, curling up the fingers as if trying to grasp something. “All this.” He felt, he said, as if I was angry with him now. As if people expected things from him and loved him for reasons that had nothing to do with him. And that I hated him for reasons that had nothing to do with him, either. �
��I can’t go out in the world and handle it all and then come back here and you’re—you’re miserable.”

  “I’m not miserable,” I said.

  He was under so much pressure, did I know that? “You think it’s easy,” he said, “but it’s not.” He talked and I listened.

  “It feels as if Hallie is your baby,” Milo said, “not mine. It’s like you’re soldered together.”

  “No!” I said. “It feels like she’s yours. When we go out no one knows I’m her mother.”

  “Forget it,” he said. “She looks just like you. To me she does. She wants you, looks for you. She won’t smile at me. Cries when I hold her. I think she’s scared of me, the big dark daddy, after looking at you all day.”

  “Milo!” I said. “All babies are that way. Don’t say that.”

  “I can’t help it,” he said. “Sometimes I think these things.”

  “Well, stop,” I said.

  “Want to know something strange?” Milo asked, after awhile. “Used to be, if I couldn’t sleep, what I’d do is run courses in my head, run the downhills at Lake Louise, or Cortina, hit the compressions, the meadow, jump the camels, hug the tower turns, you know? And I’d ski them all in my head. Take the mental chairlift and I’d fall asleep like that.” Milo turned now under the sheets and put his arms around me. “It doesn’t work anymore, though,” he said. “It’s the strangest thing. I can’t remember the courses. It’s like I never was a skier who could do that.”

  “Funny,” I said. “Same with me. I look at my book and see all the tear sheets and those contacts and the headshots and I say, ‘That’s not me. I never did that, wore that, stood like that.’ ”

  “Yeah, you did,” Milo said. “That’s you. And this is you.” He ran his hand over the safe cotton of my nightgown, down my side, down the ribs and over the hipbone, along the flank to the calf.

  You’re beautiful, he said. More than ever.

  When he held my shoulders and pulled back the strap of the nightgown that I never used to wear but wore now, every night, his hands on my skin and his words in my ears were warm as lanterns. He sat me up. He lifted the whole dress over my head and looked at me in the dim light, naked. I shivered, pulled the sheets over me. He pulled them off.