by Kate Manning
“Wrong about what?” I asked.
“Milo’s happy,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said, and hugged her. I was soaking wet but she hugged me back. “I hope you’re right.”
She wasn’t right, of course. The happy part ended about two weeks after we got back. Or maybe it had ended way before that, but without the words The End coming up on the screen to confirm it. Looking now at that Hawaii picture is like looking at photographs of people who have died, been hit by a bus or something, so that you think idiotically: They were so happy then, and now they’re dead. Milo and Charlotte. I remember the smell of coconut on our skin, the taste of pineapple and rum in his mouth. He is smiling down at me in the picture and his arm is around me, Hallie between us. It seems made up but it wasn’t. It happened. It was not even long ago. Just weeks ago. His arm is around me. Right after it was taken everybody went back to their own apartments. We put our salty sleeping little girl down for a nap and closed her door behind us. In our own bed, we lay stretched out with the room stippled by sun and shadows, the loud waves rolling in so close to our window they seemed to be all around us. We’re on an island, we said, and our whispers and murmurs and little cries were smoothed over, swept up into the hush of loud water and wind and breath.
33.
It was a Wednesday. I remember because Wednesday is a garbage I night in Malibu. Milo put the cans out. We could have hired a guy to put it out by the street, but Milo never seemed to mind doing it. It was just a quiet night. We did the dishes instead of leaving them for the maid. He took the garbage out and came back to the kitchen where I stood at the counter, a sponge in my hand.
“Charlotte?” he said after a while, watching me.
“Umm?” absently.
He came and took the sponge from me, placed it down on the counter. He looked me in the eyes, took my hand. “Come here,” he said. “My darling, we have to talk.” He led me, and with a lurch of terror I saw that dread and sorrow and apology were mingling in his eyes.
I didn’t know what he was going to say to me but right away I was mentally flattening myself down on the floor, going stiff, dragging back, skidding my heels, resisting. No, I’m not coming. But he pulled me into the living room, to the sofa by the glass doors. He slid them open. Smells from the sea came in, the sound of a siren somewhere. He sat me down. He was gentle.
“I have something to say to you,” he said. He swallowed. I remembered he had not eaten much at dinner, had said little. My own dinner was haunting me now already. “I thought I would never have to tell you this. I wanted never to have to say any of it,” he said.
“Then don’t.”
“If I don’t tell you someone else will. I have to tell you. I have no choice.” He closed his eyes and started.
“Listen: I will not lie to you. I will always tell you the truth even if it’s a terrible truth. Promise to believe me. Promise, Charlotte.”
“No,” I said. As if refusing could protect me.
“Somebody is trying to extort money from me,” he began grimly. “She’s trying to blackmail me into giving her money. The way she’s doing this is to say that her child is my child.”
My mouth opened but no words were in it. I bent my head, pressing hard against it as if to keep his words from exploding out the top of my skull. Her child is my child.
“That call you told me about. Mrs. Curtis. It was about—”
It was about how you can’t ever know anyone.
“—Geneva Johnson. Maybe you remember who she is, from the foundation, from the grant we first gave out. That dancer.”
I stared at him, not crying or even blinking. That dancer.
He kept talking, plodding on, avoiding my eyes.
“Althea Curtis is her mother. They’ve been threatening to expose me as the father of this kid if I don’t pay the daughter a half a million dollars now and something like six million over the next three years.”
The father of this kid.
“I have to tell you this. Because—I have to go to the police. It’s extortion. They’re threatening—They say if I don’t pay—They’ll go to the press with it.” He smiled ruefully, as if he hoped I might laugh at the ludicrousness of it. “She has a son,” he continued. “She claims it is my son. I’m telling you now, Charlotte, that it’s not.”
I imagine that if you fell out of a plane there would be the same howl of wind and sick free-fall feeling I had listening to him, knowing the hard ground was seconds away, what he would say next.
“You are not answering the question,” I said, ill and tumbling.
“Which question?”
But I wouldn’t ask it, knowing the answer as well as he knew the question. She has a son.
“I did sleep with her,” he said finally. “I’m sorry.” His voice hitched and his face contorted, but he set his jaw and kept talking. “Just one time. That time. Right after. I’m sorry. I wish it had never, Jesus. Charlotte, what you said that day … It just made me—If you had never—” He shifted, as if recoiling again from me, remembering. “I was supposed to be in Wyoming but I stayed in New York part of that time.”
Roaming in Wyoming. That phrase came back to get me now with its jaunty lie, the treacherous angle of its hat over glittering eyes, pushing me down into some slough of terror, forcing me to ask What is happening? What is he telling me?
“In our apartment?” I said.
He closed his eyes, shook his head. He couldn’t look at me. Couldn’t say it.
On Mercer Street. With that girl, the yellow smiley-face necklace. She’d be grown now, into a dancer, long neck, long legs, long arms.
“No,” he said, “not there—”
“Don’t tell me!”
“It was one time,” Milo said. “That time. It meant nothing. It was—when the building, when you said—When they were saying those things about me. Because of what you said. And then you were … so drunk. Later—when I …”
When you hit me.
“When … I left. And went out. That’s when it happened.”
I stood up trembling, got away from him, anywhere. Just away. I couldn’t talk or listen, stumbling through rooms.
“It was a long time ago,” he said, following. “It’s over.”
He’s over you, said Darryl. He is past you. Done.
“It was … it just …” He was behind me, talking.
“Why? Why?”
“I’m trying to tell you. I’m trying to get through telling you.”
“I hate you.” I was crying so much. “God damn you!”
“It’s not mine,” Milo said. “He’s too old to be mine.”
It’s a boy. The way he said it. He’s too old. As if he knew him, had held him, that baby boy, knew all about him, his name, his first tooth.
“Go away from me,” I said. “Go to hell. I don’t want to talk to you.”
He doesn’t want to talk to you, is what Darryl said: He knows which side his bread is buttered on, he is hurt but he will find his medicine, rest assured, someone’s gonna go but maybe not me.
“Charlotte, it’s a six-month-old baby—”
I got up and ran to the car. I revved it, with Milo standing in the driveway, saying my name, saying don’t leave. His hands were up, gesturing, describing broken shapes in the air. Don’t, he said helplessly. Let me explain. I backed out and drove. Who knows where. Up into the hills, winding past canyons, on roads without streetlights, just headlights sweeping past eucalyptus trees, over the hills and back down, trying to stop my mind’s eye. The two of them, I knew just how he looked, knew his face, but with her. I was demented with it, exiting off the highway in Santa Monica, finding Venice Beach, careening down to the strand, tormented with Milo’s voice. She says it’s my child. I was braking, crying, nearly crashing, head down on the wheel, remembering That look. The day he came back, there in his eyes. It was guilt. He was fresh from her, shifting his gaze. Guilty.
How was skiing?
Fine.
&nbs
p; See Winks?
Yeah. Guy’s a lunatic.
I was crying so hard I was ill, wracked, holding on to the steering wheel as if it could comfort me. Milo milo milo. His name was a nonsense word, meaningful now as speaking in tongues.
Oh how I love you, I had said.
And oh how I love you, he had said back.
None of it meant anything now. It was all tainted, all a lie. Whatever he said. Betrayal remakes your whole life, so that the past is not what you thought it was, never can be again.
Him in the arms of her. Her soft brown arms.
He said it was nothing, meant nothing; when clear as these tears it meant something, everything. She had whatever I did not, could not give. Something he’d always wanted, wondered about, had to have. A soul mate, so to speak. With her surely he felt some ease, some relief, some kindred empathy, that he could never find with me, no matter what, and worst of all was the scalding thought that I deserved it. His affair. I couldn’t blame him, not after what I said, how I betrayed him first. To think it was my own fault. That killed me.
The ghost of Charlotte got out of the car and walked down some Venice Beach street, blinking, crying but trying to see, to find the bar, with some name like Deadeye Dick’s or Popeye’s, something like that, with eye in it. I went in and sat on a stool. The bartender didn’t talk, just poured shots of tequila and watched me get drunk right away. Three in a row. I rested and then had some more. I wasn’t counting. The jukebox played “Little Deuce Coupe.” It was a surfer bar but mostly for retired surfers. Grayish-blond guys with meaty stomachs hanging over their cutoffs sat in the back playing darts. The women had leathery skin and their hair hung in stiff bleached hanks of blond. They smoked. One guy—you could see where his cheekbones had been, how blue his eyes still were—came and sat next to me and said Buy you a drink? I said Okay. He put his hand on my knee when he talked. I don’t remember his name but his knuckles were puffed and the flesh grew up around his wedding ring. I don’t know exactly how long I stayed, or how I got out of there. Somehow I got out and got in the car, drove home.
Milo found me at four in the morning passed out in the front seat, the car in the driveway with the engine still running, headlights on. When he couldn’t get me to walk, he carried me in and put me to bed. I fought him. I vomited on him. I saw the mess: his shirt and the towel he cleaned it with. He told me all this later, the next day but I wouldn’t look at him when he said it.
“You were passed out.”
I wish I were still.
“You threw up. On me.”
Good.
He sat on the side of the bed. I couldn’t look at him. My head hurt, a sharp pain with every heartbeat. The bed sloped in a valley where he sat.
“I’ll take care of it,” he said. “I promise.”
I looked away.
“It will go away.”
My lips were pressed hard together to keep them from wobbling.
“Charlotte. You know I—”
“Stop,” I said. “Shut up.”
“It’ll go away,” he said again.
“It can’t go away,” I said. “It’s a child.”
“It’s not mine. I had to tell you.”
Every word he said was like something pelting me. I flinched and put my hands over my face.
“It’s not true,” he said. “First of all.”
“What? That you didn’t do it?”
“No,” he said, swallowed. “That part is.”
“For three years,” I said. “Since you gave her that check.”
“No!” he said. “I told you.”
“I don’t believe anything anymore. Nothing you say.”
“It didn’t happen then.”
“Didn’t happen when?”
“At that party, or whenever. The awards, with the picture.”
“Stop.” I remembered the picture. That handshake.
“I met her but it was nothing but formalities. It was—”
“Stop talking.”
He is lying. He remembers her even from the party. He was thinking of her, even back at the party, talking to her, not talking to me. She was shy. She ducked her head and looked at him from under her lashes and said he was an influence. She was tall and lovely. She had those teeth with braces. He talked to her and let me go off alone. He shook her hand and gave her the check and remembers there’s a picture.
I had my face to the wall. He tried to turn it toward him but I wrenched my chin out of his hand. He talked to the side of my head. “Charlotte. I had to tell you last night. They’ve been calling. It’s a swindle. They’re about to go to the newspapers. Her and the mother. It was just … it was that once. Please. The whole thing—just happened. You had said what you said on TV and there was all that stuff on the radio. Darryl was … He egged me on. He had her number and he called her.” Milo stopped. He was looking at the carpet between his feet. His bare feet.
He’s lying. He called her. It was his idea.
“It wasn’t my idea,” he said. “It got out of hand. One thing led to another.” He was so uncomfortable, forcing himself to come clean, as if that were the honorable thing to do. He talked on as if he could convince me of something. But what? That it didn’t matter?
I wanted to believe him. It was just the once. Could you forgive once?
“Charlotte. Sometimes, you know how the women, the way they throw themselves—” He stopped again. “It got out of hand.”
“It got out of hand,” I whispered. “And right into bed. Now there’s a baby.” I was crying, strangling the word baby so it died in my throat. “Go away,” I said. “I’ll never forgive you.”
“I’m sorry,” Milo said, breaks in his voice. “You know how … what you mean to me …”
“No,” I said, “I don’t.”
I made him leave and went in the shower. The water drilled holes in my head. It was scalding but I didn’t care. I got out and looked for myself in the mirror in a room full of steam. I wasn’t there. No one was. Just a ghost. A steam-colored ghost.
34.
Thursday afternoon I woke up shaky and ill, and was worse when I came downstairs and saw that Milo was gone. Hallie napped on the couch while Marcy read one of her zodiac books.
“Sorry you are not feeling well,” she said.
Meaning I’m sorry your husband has cheated on you. I was sure she knew everything, that it was aligned there in my star chart all along. Soon everyone would know. The papers, the TV, our parents, Bobbie. In the kitchen I washed down aspirin with coffee, then shut myself up in the den, to avoid Hallie waking, Marcy chirping to her. But there on the desk, the small red light on the answering machine was blinking. Probably tabloids calling, I thought, or so-called reporters. The blinking filled me with dread.
“Char-lotte,” said Claire’s voice on the machine. “Three o’clock, right? That would be today, okay? Don’t forget, ya birdbrain.” I sat woodenly while she left kisses and the number of her hotel, remembering that she and Tim were in town for some conference and I was supposed to take her shopping. Shopping? I thought. I couldn’t. I would call her and make something up, go back to bed.
There were other messages, people talking as if life just went plodding on. Hallie’s teacher. Our travel agent. Jack Sutherland. “Hey, Charlotte,” he said. “So I just got back. Call me.” I wrote his number down next to Claire’s. Maybe I would call him, maybe not; who knew what I would do now? Anything was possible now, any rash act. My handwriting was spidery, like someone else held the pen.
Next to the answering machine was the mail Marcy had brought in and piled up, special offers and bills addressed to Mr. & Mrs. M. Robicheaux, all in a stack by our wedding picture in a silver frame, as if nothing had changed. It was all appalling now, the wedding picture, the mail. But I opened it and read it, numbly, even the cancer appeals and the one with the picture of the starving child whose every bone was visible. You must cope, Charlotte. Cope. I tried to focus on the facts. On what I knew so far. What if
it was only the one time? What if Milo’s telling the truth, it’s not his? I leafed mindlessly through the pages of catalogues and magazines as if they might help me. What if I could forgive him? I can never forgive him. Perhaps I have to. Perhaps I am to blame. There was a large white envelope. It had my name on it with no return address, postmarked New York. I opened it up and fished out a plain sheet of paper with a single typed line.
Perhaps this will convince him was all it said.
Behind the paper was a photograph, enlarged and printed on thick stock, that stole my breath right there, looking at it, with a feeling like plate glass breaking at the top of my head and shattering down through the veins.
It was a picture of Milo and her. Geneva Johnson. It’s night. It’s in a restaurant or a bar because you can see glassware and candles with flames in the shape of white tears and a floral arrangement washed out by a flashbulb in the foreground. She is wearing a white strapless dress that scallops over the bosom like a dress Marilyn Monroe might have worn with underwire. Her hair is braided simply back off her face in rows and caught up at the crown of her head. Milo’s eyes are closed in the picture. The lashes of the eye nearest the camera make a fringe on his cheek that is so familiar, vaguely feminine. His hand rests on the flesh of her upper arm, hers likewise with him. Their lips touch.
I turned it over with a cry escaping me and saw there was writing on the back of the photograph: February ’89, SOB’s. Not Son of a Bitch as you’d expect or might reasonably say aloud, but Sounds of Brazil, a place I know in New York. A place we go. We have danced samba and salsa there, Milo and I. We had a play fight once with limes there, throwing them and missing, and once he put miniature umbrellas from a tropical drink in my hair. We have stayed there late into the night. It is near our place on Mercer Street, within walking distance. Last winter was February ’89, the winter before the building blew up, the winter we were sometimes in New York and sometimes in L.A., and the winter Milo was in Park City skiing, supposedly. February ’89 was the last winter the Hughes Homes in Newark were standing with the wind blowing through their broken windows, two months before they were blasted to rubble, before I said what I said, before the One Time it was supposed to have happened. The chronology alone was enough to make me insane, but I knew that if a baby was six months old now in April 1990—born in November, I counted on my fingers—February ’89 would be right about the time it would have taken root. February. Months before just the once.