by Kate Manning
“What were you thinking?” He tried again but stopped again and walked away, the whole length of the loft to the front window, where he stood looking out at the street. From the kitchen counter I could see his shoulders going up and down with his deep breaths and the size of the hard swallows he took from his glass. The juice of the lime in my hand dripped into a cut on my finger, searing and stinging, but I didn’t care. I felt ill. Milo didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he walked back toward me, to the kitchen. It seemed to take him forever and it seemed to me that he got bigger as he got closer.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I—”
He stared hard at me, as if he could find out something by looking at me, and then the phone rang. Milo was still watching as I picked it up. “Hello?”
“Is he there?” said Darryl. His voice was serious and flat.
I handed the phone to Milo.
“Hey, Haynes.” Milo took the phone and walked toward the window again, his face flexed and furrowed up. “I saw it,” he said. “Just now.” He didn’t look at me. He was pacing and nodding his head, speaking in a voice so low I could only make out some of the words.
“Yeah,” he kept saying grimly, “I know, I know.”
It was as if he was hearing news of someone’s death.
He hung up.
“Milo?” I said, and started over toward him.
“Darryl has gotten eighty phone calls.”
“Milo—”
“Eighty phone calls! Since six o’clock! He was out and comes back to find eighty calls! Since the six o’clock news!”
“Who—about what?”
“You don’t know?” he said. “If you don’t know, that’s a problem.”
“I was just—”
“What the fuck did you mean by that? Charlotte?”
“I was just—”
“They’re full of drug dealers and criminals? You said that!”
“They edited it! They changed it!”
Which was only partly true. I knew that. He did, too.
“They’re blowing up somebody’s fucking houses and you’re out there talking about fashion and clothes and how you’re my wife!”
“I said nothing about you!”
“Well, who did? Darryl says it’s all over the radio, everybody calling in, outrage this and that, and that he’s married to her!”
I was her now, to him, all of a sudden.
“I said Halsey. Charlotte Halsey.”
“You said drug dealers and criminals.”
“That was Lucy—” I said. “That was the mayor. I—”
“That was you. I saw it.”
It was me. He was right. I couldn’t think of what to say now. And what’s funny is that, standing there, I had the feeling that I’d been expecting this moment all along, that I was caught. Had always known I would be caught. Somehow, I think, Milo was expecting it, too.
“What the hell were you even doing there?” he said.
“I was on assignment,” I said plaintively. “I was working.”
“As if you need the money,” he said, and turned away, opened the door, heading out, his jacket over his shoulder. He hit the elevator button, but then when he saw me standing there he turned and started down the stairs.
“Milo—” I said, but he was gone.
I closed the door and leaned against it, shaking. Our apartment seemed empty, stripped, even though the lamplight was warm, the water for rice was boiling on the stove. The TV was dark and quiet and the phone squatted on the countertop, out of its cradle. Eighty phone calls. The ice made a fairy tinkling sound in my drink. The tequila burned my throat on the way down and made me shake, the quick shiver of a person touched by some sightless creature, a slug or a clam, trying to get the feel of it off her skin.
I was crying, walking around trying to think what to do. I thought of calling Darryl, asking him what he said to Milo on the phone. But Darryl wouldn’t tell me anything now. Eighty phone calls. From who? What did they say, the callers? It was dire, whatever it was. I knew that. I drank tequila till I was weaving. I picked up the phone and put it down. Who could I call? Kevin? Claire? Glenda? No. What would I say? That I was having a breakdown? I had no idea where Milo was, or if he was coming back. It was midnight. Then 2 A.M. The lights were off in all the other buildings. Milo was still out.
I checked Hallie. Her room was dim and smelled of lotion and dried bathwater. She was sweating in her sleep like she always did, with little tendrils of hair sticking to her face. I pushed them back. I leaned and kissed her and could smell the tequila on my breath coming back at me. She had kicked her covers off so I pulled them over her again. She stirred and I lay down on her small bed, curled myself around her. Her breathing was even and steady, and I fell asleep to the sound of it.
“Mom,” she said, at six in the morning when she saw me there next to her. “Wake up. It’s a brand-new day.” Bwand new day.
Huh. She was right. It was a bloody brand-new day.
When we came downstairs Milo wasn’t there. I put the TV on for Hallie, avoiding the news channels. I made coffee and when I had drunk three cups I went to get the newspapers. Just opening the apartment door and seeing them sitting on the mat made me dizzy. I sat at the kitchen table and opened the Times first, searching for what I knew would be there. Buried in the part of the paper no one reads was a small article, half the space above the fold. “Newark Public Housing Demolished.” There was a picture but no reference to us, nothing at all about what I said. The tabloids, I was hoping, would not find it newsworthy, either.
I waited for my hand to stop its tremor. With great effort I stood up and looked in the cabinet for something to help me, and found a bottle of Cointreau, that orange-flavored liqueur, which seemed somehow appropriate for morning. I poured it in my coffee and drank it gratefully. I lifted the Times now, looked underneath it at the Post, which had pictures.
The story took up page 4 and page 5. The photos were big. Photo One showed the building at the moment of implosion, gray newsprint puffs of dust. Photo Two was us three models posing with a spray of explosion in the background. I recognized it as one of the Polaroids Michael’s assistant had taken. Probably Lucy just handed it over. Photo Three was taken off the TV news, a freeze frame of me with sunglasses on top of my head and a strand of hair blowing across my face. Photo Four was a shot of Milo at the Oscars in a tux, smiling and waving.
I leaned in and read the captions.
Bombshell Models at Explosion Site. Model Charlotte Robicheaux (Yes! If the name’s familiar that’s because she’s HIS wife!) says housing projects “full of criminals and drug addicts … should be destroyed.” Robicheaux was shooting a fashion spread in Newark for her hubby’s new magazine Edge.
I began to cry. I couldn’t help it.
“Mommy!” Hallie said in a rage. “It’s over.”
She meant the show, of course.
“Change it!” she ordered.
I drank the rest of my orange-flavor coffee, changed the channel to some cartoon, and just as I had worked my way back to the kitchen table Milo came in. He sized up me and the papers and the Cointreau bottle with one glance. “Hallie girl,” he said.
“Daddy!” Hallie went running to him.
He swung her around and held her. His voice to her was warm but his eyes were flat, looking at me over the top of her head. I tried to look back but he avoided my eyes.
“I’ll be back in a sec,” he said to Hallie, and climbed the stairs. She settled herself again by the television and I waited. But for twenty minutes Milo did not come down, so I climbed the stairs to find him. “Hello?” I said, on the landing. He didn’t answer. In our bedroom I saw the bathroom door was closed. He was in there with the radio on. I put my ear to the door and listened.
Caller Didi, from the Bronx?
Didi: I was shocked! I mean, please, on top of these fashion people talking about us as an exotic location! The fact that he’s married to her is—We have enough problem
s in the community without his kind of role model, self-hating black man deserting the race kind of thing.
A man: I agree it’s the leaders like Cade, like this guy Robicheaux, excuse me, who need to come and give back to the community instead of being an owner or investor in some magazine which tries to exploit us, with his wife, you know, and I don’t know about you but why is every black athlete or movie star with a white woman? Am I right? Why is that?
Host: We’re taking your calls this morning.
Another woman: On top of the prison system, it is the white girls who are taking the strong black men from communities, too, because of some kind of fascination they have with it, and all that.
Host: Professor Harvey Grant of Harvard University is here in the studio today. Professor, your thoughts?
Professor Grant: I think first this incident reflects an interesting phenomenon which we’ve started to see in our society, which is that Robicheaux is not, in fact, actually black, he’s famous. Fame changes the racial dynamic, so a white woman like his wife, this fashion model, a woman of that background, would find it acceptable to marry him, to have a family with him, whereas if he had been an electrical worker, say, or even a banker, instead of a world-famous athlete and media star, there would not have been the willingness on her part to see him as a man, as a human being—if in fact she does see him that way—and certainly not as a potential partner in marriage.
Woman caller: I’d just like to say I think that unless, you know, this Robicheaux and his wife can apologize for what she said or remove themselves from either this whole magazine thing, then maybe we don’t go see his films. Am I right?
Host: Are you calling for a boycott, Aisha from Brooklyn?
Woman caller: I am. I have to say we need to blend together economically and get behind those who are behind us at the same time we stand smack in front of those who are not, and I’m wondering, is Cade behind us? or in front?
Behind or in front, which was it? In front of me was this door and these voices and behind me was nothing but this big mistake and I was upside down and sick from the sound of those people talking on the radio. They were loud and smart and mad. They were talking about us. Milo was listening to them. I wanted to stopper his ears, go in there, get him away from them. I reached for the doorknob and was sure it would be locked, but it wasn’t.
At first I didn’t see him with just the night-light burning low by the floor; it’s a big room, for a bathroom especially, and he didn’t have the lights on. But then he moved, looked up from the chair where he was sitting by the vanity. He startled, seeing me there.
“Milo,” I said, his name breaking in my throat.
Sharp radio voices overlapped what he said back to me, which was: “Isn’t there anywhere, one spot on Earth, that I can go to get away from you, even for one goddamn minute?”
29.
He was so furious. When he finally came out of the bathroom that morning, he was too furious to talk to me. He went back downstairs and when I followed him, sadly, he was on his way out with an attaché case of papers.
Marcy came in at nine and I went back to bed. When I woke again, in the late afternoon, Milo was still gone. He was off with Darryl somewhere, I was sure. They were having meetings, strategizing what to do with me: stuff my mouth with rags. Darryl would be going on about the hundred chocolate foxes, calling Milo Snow. Calling him Ice. Calling him Flake. Calling me Pink.
Milo didn’t call and didn’t come back. Lucy called twice. So did Kevin. Also my booker. I let the machine answer.
“G’night, Marcy,” I said, at 6 P.M. “Have a good weekend.”
I was glad she was gone so now I could drink.
I went straight to the refrigerator, where, lined up in rows, were many tall bottles of pale green glass, with miniature rivers meandering down the mist on their sides, each bottle a cool and peaceful vacation. I poured a glass of wine and fed Hallie her dinner and poured another.
“Where’s Daddy?”
“At work?”
“Not home!”
“Nope, not home.”
“Soon,” Hallie said, with confidence.
When Milo did come back she was asleep.
I was on the couch, just drinking and waiting for hours now. It was past midnight. I did not feel exactly drunk because I was sitting down. I was quiet and sad. But then I heard his key in the lock and right away panic made me stand up, sit down, stand up again, swaying. He came in and saw me, locked the door behind him, put his coat on the coat hook. It was so still. The air of the room felt thick with dust, as if walls and windows that had been standing just the day before were now not standing; as if actual rubble and debris was all around us.
“Charlotte,” Milo said. He sounded wooden.
I began to cry.
“Don’t fucking cry. Listen. Shut up. Listen.”
“What.”
He walked over to the bar and poured himself a drink. He sipped deeply and crossed the room to stand in front of me. “People are in an uproar over this,” he said in a dead, controlled voice.
“I heard the radio,” I said.
“It’s worse than that.”
“What?” I said. “Tell me.”
“Just, you know, don’t keep fucking crying, Charlotte, because I don’t feel sorry for you,” he said, barely calm. “At all.”
But I did. I couldn’t help it.
He raised his finger now and pointed it at me. “One thing,” he said. “I am not an investor in that magazine, that so-called magazine, from this minute on, is that clear? I am not a financial backer. Or any kind of backer.”
I nodded.
“Do you understand me?” His finger jabbed the air in front of my face, once, twice, as if he would really like to jam it deeply into my eyes, or poke me in the sternum, jabbing it on the bone to bruise it, or maybe have it go right through bone to the heart.
“And you will never, never, never talk to another fucking media person again or use my name, is that clear?”
“Okay, but—”
“Stop fucking crying.”
“You don’t want to know my side—”
“You’re right I don’t.”
“Wait. Listen—”
“Don’t. You. Say. Anything,” he said. “Not. Another. Word.”
He was right up close to me now, his finger under my chin. His teeth were having a hard time not gnashing and clenching. That finger, threatening and angry. It made me stop crying. It made me want to do something extreme, lash out, maybe rake him across the face with my nails drawing blood in claw marks right down his face, I was that mad and stoked up with alcohol and regret and fear.
“Understand?” he said, like I was some delinquent child.
And that did it right there. “Oh, sorry, Milo darling!” I said, wheeling away from him. “Too late! There was a reporter here just now! A whole pack of them. I let them in! They set up their lights! Sorry. Whoops!” I clapped my hand over my mouth. I was shaking my hair and vamping around. “I told a whole bank of TV cameras how I was your wife!” I said. “And how you were my husband!”
“Shut up.”
“I said: We have had sex! We have a child! I revealed the secret that Milo Robicheaux is my husband.”
“Shut up now.”
“Since you won’t talk to me, I talked to them!”
“I told you not to—”
I made a kiss with my lips and kissed it right at him. I kept on going, kept right on making this stuff up, knowing exactly what to say that would get him. I was on a tear.
“One was such a nice reporter, too!”
“Charlotte.”
“From the Amsterdam News, which, in case you don’t know, honey, is the African American newspaper here in New York, and I showed him our wedding album and gave him that roll of film from our last vacation in Switzerland! And I thought you would be so glad, you know, for the publicity, for the Milomania, you being such a media hound—”
He hit me.
&n
bsp; He backhanded me across the face and floored me.
I went down. Good, I thought. He hit me. Now I know. Now I know.
He stood over me, looking at me. I was down, holding my cheek. On the floor. On our carpet. The 200-hundred-year-old Persian one, handloomed by serfs or children probably, that we picked out at a private showroom for exclusive customers. Years ago. Ages. We had fallen in love with it, one rainy afternoon, with its rich reds and burnt ochres, the deep blue of the border, and the pattern of peacocks and flowers, and now here I was, curled among them crying, the scratchy wool pile hurting my cheek, my struck and throbbing cheek.
Milo stood over me looking down. I thought he would kick me. He was breathing in a shaky way. His cheek twitched so he seemed to be smiling. Like he might do it again. Like any moment he might pull me up and flatten me again for the fun of it.
He stalked away upstairs.
I stayed down on the carpet. I noticed dust balls under the couch. Also some magnet letters of Hallie’s that belonged on the refrigerator, an old dried-up apple core. It was safe there, in an odd way. To be down already, to be curled up. He hit me. I had asked for it. I had pushed him and pushed him, tested him and tested. I could feel my cheek swelling, a blue rising on the bone, puffy and welted up. Maybe my teeth were loose. I checked them and tasted blood from where I had bitten my tongue. If only I had bitten it—straight through. The strongest muscle in the human body, the tongue. If only I had shut up. Taunting him like that! I was just asking for it, and feeling so bad now, like I deserved it. Pow. You couldn’t recover from something like this, I thought, no matter how much you loved someone, or someone loved you, before. Could you recover?
I could hear Milo upstairs, the floors creaking as he walked back and forth. I lay on the carpet listening and waiting. When he came down the stairs with his bag packed, I didn’t get up and go to him. I didn’t apologize or try to make him listen to my side of the story. You know damn well I don’t really think all the people in those buildings were drug dealers and criminals. Don’t you see I just repeated what everybody else said that day? That I was distracted and trying to say the right thing so I said the wrong thing. You know how I get. I didn’t say any of that because it was not an explanation or an excuse. It wasn’t good enough. Nothing was. I lay there curled up on the carpet, resting my head on my folded elbow.