Whitegirl

by Kate Manning

  Charlotte, he whispered, come back here.

  I was at his mercy. It was up to him.

  He touched my shoulder. He ran his hand down my arm, up my rib cage, placed the flat of his palm against my cheek. He took my hand then and put it on his face. He pulled it down along his ribs, his flanks, down along his long folded length, the muscles of his legs, the knots of his knees and his elegant feet. He left my hand to wander back where it would. And it did. I felt how he was the same; mine. His eyes stayed on my eyes. Look at me, he said in the dark. He sank me down on the pillows. He was shaking. I missed you, he said. Where’ve you been? as if it was me who’d been gone.

  Nowhere, I said. Right here.

  He said, Sorry sorry sorry.

  I said, No, I’m sorry. I am.

  We fell asleep and slept till morning. We didn’t hear the baby cry, if she cried, and we didn’t have dreams. When I woke, Milo woke at the same time. I felt him stirring, the skin of my face stuck to the skin of his shoulder where I was lying on it. We pulled apart and I saw the imprint of my weight on his flesh, dents and lines in a creased pattern.

  “Morning,” he said, and the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes from smiling at me made him look like the best man ever, the best one I knew, or could imagine.

  It was something we weathered. The Aftermath. I thought so. We grew accustomed to all the new things we were: mother, father, Californians, Famous and Mrs. Famous. What helped me was the feeling I had from that night, that Milo loved me because he needed me, beyond what he could see, touch, take to a party. Milo loved me. Maybe I hadn’t really believed it till then, because I did believe it.

  26.

  Marcy Aquino came to work for us. A nanny. She had straight black hair with bangs cut across her brow, and her bones were small, like a hummingbird’s. She was some kind of Zodiac practitioner from the Philippines, about thirty, like me. Marcy moved into the guest house above our garage when Hallie was six months old. On weekends, she went home to East L.A. She arrived with just a suitcase, her zodiac books, and six pots of geraniums for her room. She was gentle and practically a lunatic, I thought. According to her, everything about Hallie could be attributed to the fact that Saturn was crawling backward into her twelfth house.

  “Pisces. Overemotional,” said Marcy, when Hallie cried.

  “She still has a touch of colic,” I said.

  “Tcch,” she told me. “Because Pluto is opposing her sun. Give a little sugar water.”

  Marcy talked to me while I was feeding Hallie, while I was playing with her, when I was trying to talk on the phone. I was too shy to tell her to go away. I wasn’t a good boss. She told me all about her horrible childhood in Manila, how her father was a veteran of the war. (Which war? I wondered. Where were the Philippines, anyway?) The father was an amputee and Marcy’s eight siblings sometimes found food by scavenging outside restaurants, and if it weren’t for the nuns she’d never have bettered herself. I hid the bills and took the price tags off what I bought so she wouldn’t see how much I spent. Thirty dollars on a pair of knit booties. A hundred for an off-white baby Dior fleece coat that never even got worn.

  “You’re lucky.” Marcy said this often. “Your husband takes care of you.”

  I was lucky! I wasn’t complaining. I was bench-pressing 120 pounds now, more than ever, swimming laps three times a week, running with Milo the way we used to run, on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. I was thinking about maybe working a little bit. I was learning my way around Los Angeles. I was learning not to take things personally, I hoped.

  Hallie loved Marcy, who had a musical laugh and got right down on the floor and played. Hallie would be fine with her, I thought, but wistfully. Sometimes when we went out together people assumed Marcy was Hallie’s mother. Don’t take it personally, Milo said all the time. I tried not to, and felt more and more worried that I had to do something with my days now besides shopping, running, and listening to Marcy call the hotline for our horoscopes. Sagittarius for her, Leo for me. I only remember one of them, the day when hers said You may look forward to a prolonged period of prosperity, and mine said Plan ahead for retirement.

  That horoscope made me return Kevin’s call as soon as I got it. I had not spoken to him since before Hallie was born.

  “Charlotte!” he said. “Are you surfacing?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”

  I wanted him to talk me into it. He said he was just dying to see me.

  “You just want to see if I’m fat,” I said.

  “I will love you even if you are,” he said. “I have a project for you.”

  A week later, he came to L.A. just for me and I took him to lunch. He was so pale. He was wearing a Brooks Brothers suit, but with some creative necktie made from strips of old porn film knotted around his neck.

  “I hate my job,” he said.

  “Which is what again now?”

  “I am a style editor for people with repulsive style,” he explained. “It’s all so sickening, the whole fucking fashion kingdom. It’s a charade.” He said he was quitting. He had nothing but disgust for all the big glossies. “They’re only about money and lies and contempt for others disguised as fantasy.”

  “Whoa,” I said, shocked, really. “What happened to you?”

  What happened to him, he explained bitterly, was that six people, five friends of his and the man he loved beyond belief, were dead of AIDS in just the last year. When he said that part, loved beyond belief, his eyes filled up with tears. “His name was Douglas,” Kevin said. “He was only twenty-eight.”

  I put my hand across the table toward him.

  “Don’t,” he said. “It makes it worse.”

  He drank back an entire bottle of mineral water, put his napkin to his eyes briefly, and shook himself. “Okay, now,” he said, too brightly. “So I’ve changed! Now I see life in a whole new light!”

  “What light is that?”

  “Oh,” he said, “the harsh light of death! It’s a fuck-it-all light.”

  He worried me a little. He was joking but he seemed so tired. He didn’t ask about Hallie or Milo; he only talked about his new project, a magazine called Edge. It was going to be a downtown, avant-garde, high-end, totally new kind of glossy. Kevin and this former Voice editor named Lucy were working on it, raising capital to start it up. They were shooting the mock-up for investors and advertisers in a couple of weeks. “It has to be real and dramatic and startling,” he said. “It’s about fashion, but not fashion the way we’re used to it.” He was thinking of me as the Face of Edge.

  “I need you,” he said, his eyes burning and lively. “Your experience, your so-called American look. Because believe me, what we want to do is take that look apart completely and comment on it in a way that hasn’t been seen before.” He wanted me to be like a character in a story, recurring in the different issues, having different adventures. Everything would be on location. No studio stuff. “You’re interested, right?”

  “Of course,” I said. I liked the sound of the adventures, of being a character in a story.

  “You’ll have the first cover,” he said. “But I need more than just your face, Charlotte. I need your help.” He wanted me and Milo to invest. He explained he needed individuals with a high profile. “You and Milo are exactly right,” he said. “You’ll be part of our publishing consortium.”

  “Well, sure,” I said again, because every time I did, Kevin looked more cheerful. If only I hadn’t said it. If only I wasn’t such a sucker for a cover, for flattery, the fancy sound of the word consortium.

  I signed to do six issues a year with Edge. Milo agreed to a 25 percent stake in the magazine, which was a pittance for him, considering what he was paid to sign for Cade II, called Beyond Fury. We flew to New York with Hallie and Marcy in early April and put Marcy up in a hotel, which she loved. Every night, she explained, someone came and left chocolate on her pillow. We stayed in our Mercer Street apartment. When we opened the door, there was the loft
sweeping out in front of us, with those huge sunlit windows at either end, and the six-winged Indonesian goddess sculpture we bought years before in the Village, welcoming us by the front door. Still, it felt odd somehow, to be on Mercer Street with Hallie. There was no trace of her there yet, no sign of how she had transformed us.

  The first shoot was on a Monday, in the meat district by the Hudson River, under the old elevated highway. It was a neighborhood of trucks and stench and hookers. We would be working in a meatpacking warehouse, rented for the day. “It’s gonna be a real trip,” Kevin had said, “so be ready. It won’t be like any shoot you ever did before, Charlotte.”

  I have to say, I was shocked. A meatpacking plant! The smell alone was enough to knock you flat. One of the three other girls, Didi, left right away. She was a vegetarian, and nearly threw up. Frankly, I wanted to leave with her, after seeing the pale, skinned cows hanging in a row, marbled with blood and headless. But I’d done shoots in missile silos and junkyards, on lobster boats and factories, working with extreme photographers who were always thinking up outrageous things for us to do. You were good only if you could give them what they wanted, so I did. I was happy to be back at work. My job was not to have my own vision but to mold myself to fit theirs.

  This time my job was to stand in the big freezers next to the cow carcasses and the sides of meat and the big steel hooks hanging from the ceiling, wearing the clothes. I went first. Kevin had me walk down a conveyor belt wearing a spring shift, shocking pink silk, with spike-heeled mules of the same color. “Oh, my God, Kevin,” I kept saying, as his photographer snapped away, “this is so obvious!”

  “It’s great!” he said. “We can see the meat behind you!”

  “I’m supposed to be meat, too, right?” The place was freezing.

  “Right!” he said; he was laughing. “The first issue of Edge is called Off the Rack! Isn’t that great?”

  “It’s disgusting!” I said. “I feel sick!” The smell was strong and raw. But I put all thoughts of where I was out of my mind and walked the conveyor belt as if it were a Paris runway.

  “As of right now,” I said to Milo at the restaurant that night, “I’m a vegetarian.” I ordered some salad made of cracked wheat and told him all about the day.

  “A meat shoot!” Milo kept calling it that. He kept laughing and shaking his head. “That’s wild,” he said. “That’s great. It sounds really rank.” He seemed impressed and proud of me. “I have to say, you seem like your old self.”

  “I have to say. So do you.”

  After dinner we walked down Prince Street, looking in the windows of the bars and the dark galleries. We turned onto our old familiar block and went upstairs to our lofty apartment, packing Marcy off to the chocolates on her pillow. We checked Hallie and took turns brushing our teeth. Milo closed the bathroom door and I could hear him in there, gargling and spitting and listening to the radio. I went to sleep to the ordinary sound of it. I felt safe. I always felt safe with him in our house.

  Edge got a reputation fast. The magazine was hot and hip and the launch party was one of the best times I ever had, high up in Soho, in the Puck building, dancing barefoot to Haitian compas, and Milo feeding me oysters directly out of the shell, flashbulbs going off like it was a wedding or some historic moment, not that we noticed the flashbulbs. For once, we didn’t. We were having too much fun. We were among friends. It’s a shame, but that was the last time we could afford not to notice, since that was the year the phone calls got ugly and the mail got chilling.

  “Charlotte Robicheaux?”

  It was a man’s voice that summer, on the phone in the Malibu house. White-sounding.

  “White slut,” he said.

  I ripped the plug out. I was shaking.

  He called several times. The same one. I recognized the voice. We got other calls of that nature, all of them from white people. Or at least white-sounding. We unlisted all our numbers and still had to change them, often. But it was hard to avoid the mail.

  You are nothing but animals, dogs, making a mongrel race like monkeys.

  That letter came with the picture of us, the one of Milo feeding me oysters, that had been on Page Six of the New York Post. This was the first published picture of us together since Milo had become Cade. Clipped to it was another one of our family, that somebody—who knows who?—had taken at LAX airport. There was a big X inked over Hallie’s face, a noose drawn in dark ink around Milo’s neck, a gun drawn pointed at my head.

  It made us ill. Because of Hallie. That was the worst one. Thinking of it still fills me with panic. We took it to the police, along with some others, such as the one that arrived addressed to me. “Dear Traitor,” it read. “In the coming White Rage War, Race Traitors like you will be the first to die.” It had a letterhead with a little motto on it that said: “Your skin is your uniform! Wear it with pride!”

  Milo got very quiet over that mail. It just made him grim. All the small muscles in his face flexed and stayed taut while he read it, and then he crumpled the paper like he was killing something. Fuckers, he always said. Cracker fuckers. He tried to tell me it was nothing new, and it’s true he’d gotten this kind of thing before. But never so much. And never involving Hallie.

  The worst of it happened that summer, when Milo was promoting Beyond Fury at various locations around New York and Los Angeles, and I was traveling a lot for Edge. Darryl hired extra security for us whenever we went out in public. “You take this seriously,” he said.

  “I do up to a point,” Milo replied. “But: sticks and stones.”

  “Break your bones,” said Darryl. “This is America. There’s some sick people.”

  “It’s a free country,” Milo said.

  “It’s a sick country,” Darryl said. “You watch out.”

  “But at a certain point you gotta live your life,” Milo said.

  “It’s my job to protect you,” Darryl told him.

  “Whattya gonna do, Hardhead, box ’em?” Milo laughed. “Pow pow! don’t write them mean letters no more to my buddy Milo or I’ll bust your head.”

  “Milo,” I said, “Darryl is serious. You listen to him.”

  “I’m listening,” said Milo.

  We bought the apartment downstairs from us in New York and installed twenty-four-hour security guys in it. In L.A. we had big gates put in front of the house, with intercoms and buzzers. The neighborhood was secure, we thought. A private security guard patrolled in a car twentyfour hours a day. We had sensors and alarms and big lights around our property, but still, they didn’t stop the hate mail.

  Milo got other kinds of letters during that time. People asked him to marry them. They asked for pictures to put on the walls of their hospital rooms, their prison cells. They asked for money to get them off the streets, into college; to buy their babies’ diapers or their medicine.

  Just 15 dollars a week would buy Pampers for my son for the entire year.

  If you would contact a lawyer specializing in Death Penalty cases I’m sure your influence would make a difference on my behalf.

  These letters weighed on him. On me, too. They were overwhelming. Milo was nothing but an actor, a celebrity, not some institution with power. He was not a Supernatural Being, though I wondered if he had started to believe he was. I could make a real difference, he said, often now. We gave our money away, lots of it, but we kept lots, too. Crunchy the accountant and Pepe the financial advisor set up all these accounts for Milo, bonds and trusts and funds and stocks. Darryl liked to call himself Milo’s Minister of Portfolio, or the Secretary, since he came by about once a week, with stacks of things for Milo to sign, deals and ideas for deals, scripts and ideas for scripts, and all his fan mail.

  One of those days, a Wednesday morning around nine o’clock, Darryl arrived at our house in Malibu. “Hey, Snowflake!” said his voice on the intercom. “It’s D.!” I buzzed him in and opened the front door with Hallie in my arms. There was Darryl, balancing a cardboard coffee tray, his arms full of
bags.

  “Hey, Pink!” he said. “I brought breakfast! Where’s the Snowflake?”

  “Asleep.” Milo had been out late at a party the night before.

  Darryl put his packages down and headed up the stairs.

  “Hey,” I said. “He’s asleep!”

  But Darryl kept going, went straight into our room and dove next to Milo in bed. “Wake up, Snow! Wake up! We got work to do!”

  “Fuck out of here, Haynes,” Milo said. “Out, you motherfucker.”

  Darryl mocked him, saying “Out, you muth-err fuck-err,” with a hard pronunciation of the rs, like a choirboy trying to curse.

  I could hear them. I handed Hallie off to Marcy and was coming up the stairs, padding down the carpeted hall in my bare feet. I stopped to listen, waiting just outside the door of our room.

  “So,” Darryl was saying, “this is where you do your dalmatian love thing. You know, ’flake, I was surprised you didn’t have a cute little dalmatian baby, spotty black and white! Robicheaux! Wake up! I’m talking to you! When you gonna get yourself some brown sugar!? Instead of chasing this vanilla frosting shit. Why you gotta have that silk? when I got a hundred chocolate foxes just dying for your ass.”

  “Shut up with that rap, Haynes,” Milo said. “This is my goddamn bedroom.”

  “Eau, eau, eau,” Darryl said, with a British accent. “Your goddamn bedroom! Don’t get bent outta shape on me. You know I love you. You know it, Robicheaux! I love you! We got work today! Big plans! I got contracts for you! Deals!”

  “Darryl, get the hell out of my bedroom,” Milo said, but I could hear he was laughing, and when I showed up in the doorway just then, I could see Milo pounding a pillow on Darryl’s head.

  “The lovely Mrs. Robicheaux,” Darryl said when he saw me. He put his arms behind his head on my side of the bed, his legs stretching down next to Milo’s. “Your wife is very beautiful, Milo, for a white woman.”