Whitegirl

by Kate Manning

  “It was because I was flustered,” I said finally. I explained about the shoot in Newark, the explosion. Did she know about that? She did, she said, Milo told her. Well, I said, you don’t know how upsetting it was. The crowd, the falling building. I wasn’t prepared for it. The reporter flustered me. I was rattled by that man who yelled at us. Why are you here? Why don’t you stick the camera in your own face?

  “I was upset because I thought he was right!” I said to Bobbie. “We shouldn’t have been there. He was right.”

  “Apparently he was.” Bobbie sniffed.

  “I wasn’t thinking,” I said, halting and stammering. “I was distracted and trying to please so I said what everyone else had been saying. The mayor.”

  “Ah,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish I had never—”

  She was studying my face as I talked. “And why exactly are you sorry?” she asked.

  “For saying what I said. For being stupid.”

  “Oh. You think you’re stupid.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. You’re stupid. It was stupid.”

  “I know.”

  “It was naïve,” she said, looking exasperated. “It was lazy. Ignorant. Thoughtless. I’m not saying I don’t blame you, because I do, but I’m also saying, it’s not surprising.”

  So she had been expecting it, too. What did that mean? Did it mean I could never be trusted? That I was hopeless?

  “There were other people there!” I said desperately. “Not just me! The mayor was there. They said the same thing! Same as I did. And that woman who pushed the detonator button, she was a former resident. She said good riddance. Nobody paid any attention to any of them. If there hadn’t been models there nobody would’ve cared that they were blowing up those houses.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “And if I wasn’t married to Milo.”

  “There you go,” she said. “See? Not stupid. Smart. Smart Charlotte.”

  “No,” I said sadly. “Sorry Charlotte. Stupid Charlotte.”

  “Oh, stop it, please,” Bobbie said angrily. She got up and looked out the window at the water. “Sorry’s not all that helpful after the first time you say it, right? Stop being sorry and do something about it. Do something useful. If being a fashion model in front of a housing project gets attention to the problem, then go do that! Stand in front of a crack house or a welfare office or a prison. Something. Whatever. You’re the one with the magazine, right? It’s up to you.”

  “I’m just a model,” I said. “I—”

  “Fine. You and Milo both. I said the same thing to him and I always have. But no! He’s just an athlete. You’re just a model. Fine. You were made for each other.” She wheeled away from the window and saw how her words stung me. “I said that to him and now he won’t speak to me, either.” She tried to smile but you could tell she didn’t feel like it.

  Hallie was watching us warily from where she played on the floor. “Go to the beach?” she said hopefully.

  “Good idea,” said Bobbie. “The beach.” She waited out on the sunny steps while I got a jacket on Hallie and found buckets and shovels and the beach blanket. We walked out over the dunes. I sat down on the blanket but Bobbie took Hallie’s hand and left me there. The two of them walked along, picking up jingle shells, orange ones the color of cantaloupes. The blue April sky surrounded them so they looked like cutouts, and the lettuce-leaf edge of the waves rushed at their feet. Hallie twirled and skipped and when she fell, Bobbie helped her up, brushing sand off her knees. I wondered what they were saying. What Bobbie was thinking. After twenty minutes, they came skipping back. Bobbie was calm again, amused by Hallie.

  “Look,” Hallie said, “crab bodies.” She showed me a bucket of dead spider crabs, like broken prehistoric toys in pink plastic.

  “Lovely,” I said, hugging her.

  “They’ll live in my room,” she said with a certain deliberate charm, roguish like her father’s.

  “Doesn’t she look like Milo?” I said to Bobbie wistfully.

  “Yeah,” Bobbie said. “Same rascal face.”

  We walked quietly along the sand for a while, me thinking about Milo’s rascal face. Enraged.

  “What else did Milo say?” I asked warily.

  “Well,” Bobbie said, “he’s a little wigged out right now.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Listen, I didn’t mean to yell at you,” she said. “I’m just so sick of how I have to constantly be the nursemaid and explain.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She glared at me for saying it. “What I meant is: You’re not alone. Milo is right up there with you, Charlotte, cruising at his hot-air altitude with his fame and his friends and his money. He was due for some of this. I was afraid of it.”

  I did not know what she meant but I wanted her to keep talking. “Darryl said—”

  “Darryl.” She snorted. “I don’t like the sound of that guy.”

  “Why?”

  She didn’t answer for a while. “We talked about Darryl,” she said. “Maybe he uses Milo, too.”

  “He said Milo—” I could hardly say it. “He said Milo’s gone. He said he’s not going to be calling.”

  Bobbie shook her head. “That wasn’t my impression,” she said. “Look, Milo is smart. He’ll figure it out. I hope so, anyway.”

  “I hope so, too.”

  “But you should be prepared,” she said. “It might take a while. A long time. And you will have to hang in there, because it might be … unpleasant.” She saw me wince at that word. It was medical. “Look,” she said, putting a hand on my arm, “my brother loves you. I believe this because I know him. He comes from a family where you stick things out, you get married if you’re a parent, you don’t give up, you’re honorable in good faith, you keep your promises. That’s what Robicheauxs are like, mostly. He loves you,” she said. “I’ve seen it. I’m pretty sure of it.”

  I wished I was sure; wished on stars, or anything that resembled stars: car headlights and neon signs, the tiny red battery light on the smoke alarm above the bed. I wished Bobbie was right. I wished Milo would come back. My brother loves you. For days after she left I held on to her words, winding them tightly around my dread like Catholics hold rosary beads wound in their fingers.

  31.

  Inever did tell Bobbie that Milo hit me. Maybe she knew from Milo. Maybe she guessed. Maybe she didn’t ask because she was waiting for me to say something. But I never did. Not to her. The only person I told was Claire.

  It took me five days; five days of Milo not arriving and not calling; five days of me and Hallie digging to China, going stir-crazy at the beach. But finally, fortified by drinking, I called Claire. I told her everything about the Bombshell shoot and Newark. I skipped what happened next: the shouting and the way he floored me. It was too shameful. Instead I told her I was alone there on the far end of Long Island and everyone on the radio was still talking about me as if I were toxic.

  Claire just listened.

  When I appeared to be finished she cleared her throat. “First of all,” she said, “I haven’t heard anything about it. Nothing about Newark or you, or Milo. It’s not on my radio stations, so it’s fringe. Number two: I have been in buildings like that. And guess what? It’s true: Those projects are just festering wretched breeding grounds for bad guys of every description. So don’t beat yourself too hard for saying they should be blown up. Just don’t.”

  I felt she was wrong but her words were oddly comforting to me.

  “Nuke them all, as far as I’m concerned,” she said. “Don’t feel bad.” She was about to launch into more of her speech when I stopped her.

  “Milo hit me,” I said, trying the words out.

  “He what?”

  “He … hit me.”

  “He hit you?” She was just shocked. I should have known. She was up and pacing around. I could picture her. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “I’ll kill him. I can’t believe he w
ould do that! Jesus. He hit you?”

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  “Oh,” she said, softly now. “Your face? Oh no, honey, your face.”

  “It’s okay, it’s just … a bruise.”

  “Just a bruise,” she said. She was writing something; I heard the pen scratching. “What else are you not telling me? Have you called the cops?”

  “No,” I said. “No. Listen, it was … my fault.”

  “Don’t say that!” she said. “That’s classic. Do you hear yourself? He hit you. You can’t blame yourself. You need a therapist. Maybe the cops—”

  “No,” I said. “It’s nothing. It’s not a police thing. Believe me. Look, I wish I hadn’t said anything. I wish I hadn’t told you.”

  “No, you have to,” she said. “Be careful, Charlotte. I see this all the time.”

  “Yeah, but I was just—asking for it.”

  “Stop saying that, please, it’s scary,” Claire said. “I know you care about him, but this kind of thing doesn’t get better. It’s a downward spiral. I’m worried about you, Charlotte.”

  “Claire,” I said, “I fucked up, is what happened and he got mad at me.” I told her it was really nothing, that Milo and I were both drunk and that it wasn’t that bad. “You know how I get, Claire, how I just go off and say whatever.” I wished I hadn’t told her. It was shameful. She was blowing it out of proportion with her prosecutor’s eye and her loyal concern. It made me mad at her, if you want to know the truth. I didn’t want to hear her theories. I wanted her to say it was a fluke, that she knew Milo, this wasn’t the kind of thing he would do. It would blow over, he would be back, he loved me and would forgive me. But she didn’t say what I wanted to hear, so I didn’t listen.

  The phone rang every day out on Montauk but it was never Milo. It was Claire, checking on me, or Bobbie. It was my agent, my booker, or Lucy, or Kevin. I apologized but they were all furious. Especially Kevin. “Your husband’s people are harassing me! They are suing me! What is going on, Charlotte? Tell me the meaning of this!”

  This was all the Robicheaux money, the entire investment stake pulled suddenly out of Edge. This was the Newark pictures—whichever ones included me, which was nearly all of them—completely tied up in a legal dispute by Milo’s people.

  “Unusable. Completely out of the question for the next issue, if ever, thank you very much,” Kevin said.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said sadly. “Kevin?”

  “Just go back to L.A.!” he shouted at me, and hung up.

  I would go back. Everyone said I should. Claire. Bobbie. My sister. Nobody in L.A. ever heard of Newark, that’s what Claire said. Nobody in L.A. had any memory. They could care less. Maybe she was right. So after my face was healed and clear, after three weeks of waiting for Milo to call or pull in the driveway, I headed for the airport.

  My keys shook, standing on the doorstep. I don’t know what I was expecting. Him to be there? Us to start over? “In, in in,” Hallie said, pushing. I opened the door and the place spread out before us, full of sunlight, the bold full kind that blasts straight off the ocean. It smelled clean. It looked like someone’s lovely home, with draperies and lots of green plants, and carpets vacuumed in perfect stripes, like a newly mown outfield. There was that sculpture in the entryway, a large, polished piece of granite, a sort of human form curled into an egg, that we bought—Milo and I—in San Francisco, just before Hallie was born. There was her little wicker chair over by the window; there was her carved rocking horse.

  Our house. We had only been gone a short time, but it seemed to belong to other people now, not us. Hallie ran inside. “Where’s Daddy?” she said.

  There he is. On the answering machine.

  Hello. It’s me. I’m still in Wyoming. Roaming in Wyoming. Ha ha. Hi, Hallie honey. I’ll be home on the fourteenth. Which is soon. Okay? I’ll see you then.

  His voice came sixth, after the message from the security company saying the alarm had gone off, that a neighbor had checked, and everything seemed to be fine, Please call us at your convenience; followed by a child’s garbled voice asking Please can Hallie come over; then my sister saying It’s Mom’s birthday coming up; then my agent with Some questions regarding this Edge thing; then someone hanging up; then Milo. Followed by someone hanging up again; my hairdresser from Beverly Hills; Marcy, saying she’d be back to work the next day; another hang up. There were ten messages.

  I played number six again.

  Hello. It’s me. Roaming in Wyoming. Ha ha … home on the fourteenth.

  Well, I would be out on the fourteenth. It was two weeks away and I’d be somewhere else. Anywhere. Milo would see that I wasn’t sitting around pining, not Charlotte. I was that girl with spine, not some invertebrate paramecium on the couch sipping my drink at three o’clock in the afternoon, desperate and wrecked, waiting for my far-flung husband with Hallie nestled in the curve of my lap, the television on and the Bugs Bunny theme song finishing up right at that moment.

  Which is exactly what happened, I am not kidding.

  I had time to wonder if that was a car door slamming. I had time to sit up and then lie back down thinking No. Anyway, it’s the thirteenth, not the fourteenth.

  “Hey,” he said, so quietly it scared me.

  His hair was longer, or something. He looked different. Wild, or nervous, or maybe not so clean-shaven as usual. He had on a navy stretch shirt, short sleeved, with USA on the turtleneck. He had his mirrored sunglasses on and was just taking them off.

  “Daddy!” Hallie ran to him and leapt up into his arms.

  “Hey, pigeon,” he said, and kissed her and kissed her.

  She held his head in her small arms so his face was squashed up awkwardly, but still he was looking at me. He was holding her and saying “Hey, babycakes, hey, I missed you,” and he was looking at me.

  Milo, I said.

  Yeah, he said.

  It was excruciating, really, that moment.

  I stood up and walked toward him. Both of us said small nothings, talking through Hallie. Daddy’s home! He’s back! checking each other. What was that? I thought. There in that look? Some tightness in the way he was breathing, some sidelong avoiding of my eyes. I wondered if he might be ready to hit me again, or kiss.

  Both of us knew that we were not really going to talk about it, but that it would be decided now, today, any minute, that second. We would stay together or we would not. I did not know where he had been or what made him come back, but I was thinking: If I could only get my hands on his shoulders, and then, if it seemed okay, if I could just run my hands along the hourglass of his arms, then I would know.

  He smiled at me bleakly.

  I smiled back, looked away.

  “How was Wyoming?” I said.

  “Fine.”

  “Did you ski?”

  “Yep.”

  “See Winks?”

  “Yep.”

  “How’s he?”

  “Winks’s good. Fuckin’ lunatic.”

  “You thirsty?”

  “Sure.”

  I moved past Milo toward the kitchen, a lump in my throat like an egg.

  “Hey,” he said, and held me by the arm.

  “What?”

  He pulled me in, turned me hard, and pushed my head down on his shoulder, the palm of his hand to the back of my head. He held me there by his collarbone. It surprised me, the sudden way he did it and the familiar smell of Milo in the hollow by his shoulder.

  “Hey,” he said again softly, so the egg in my throat cracked and broke. We stood in the wide hallway, its walls hung with a hundred photographs. I was crying and Milo was saying Shh, while Hallie circled around our legs, chirping Pick me up, and all the photographs—of us and our parents and sisters and brothers, of newborn Hallie and the guys from the ski team, of Darryl and Claire, and of everybody we have ever known—stared at us from their frames, like witnesses.

  “So here we are in the hallway,” Milo said finally.

  “Yeah,�
� I said, not crying now.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “It’s nice here?” I said.

  “Let’s just stay then.”

  “Right where we are.”

  “In the hallway.”

  “We’ll stay put.”

  Hollow out a cave in the snow.

  “Up,” Hallie said.

  We sat down on the wide runner of carpet, and Hallie climbed into our laps, delighted, patting our faces and honking Milo’s nose so he had to say beep every time she did it, which forced us to laugh despite everything. We couldn’t help it. Beep.

  “You did not give me my space powers,” she said to him. “For a long time, not even any.”

  “You’re right!” he said. He took her hand and put kisses in it, made some space noises, closed her fingers around them. “There you go.”

  Solemn Hallie kept her hand closed, put it in the pocket of her jumper. “I’m keeping them in here,” she said.

  “Okay,” said Milo, smiling.

  So I held my hand out, too, palm up, asking for something, some small kiss like Hallie’s. Or maybe offering something.

  Milo hesitated. Some hitch was there again, in the way he looked or didn’t look. It was that way he had, of parking his gaze just to the side, or just above. I used to believe when he did this that there was something about me Milo did not want to see. But now I have come to understand that this shift of his eyes was really him hiding something. Something about himself he didn’t wish to reveal.

  My hand rested in the air, open in front of him. Milo took it, finally, holding it like a fortune-teller, tracing the lines of the palm with his fingertip. Then he put his mouth right down on it, so his lips left a warm impression, on the heart line and head line and life line, and I clenched my fist on whatever that foretold and stowed it away down the deep V of my shirt. Milo’s mouth cocked up in a smile. “Do that again,” he said. I held my hand out and he kissed it again, wickedly, so I smiled now, too, and stowed that kiss away with the other one.