Whitegirl

by Kate Manning

  Could I forgive once? Yes, perhaps.

  But not a lie. Not love. Not a son.

  I stood up, trying not to sink down. The picture lay facedown on the desk, and I pushed the pile of mail over it, like hiding a stain. I was weak from seeing it. It is one thing to imagine, but to see, to have a photograph: I would never get it out of my mind now, their lips frozen, touching for all time by candlelight. My legs gave way, thinking of it, and I lay back down on the recliner. On the cold leather I could smell the faint spice of Milo’s hair lingering terribly. Just a moment ago, I thought, I was about ready to forgive the once, coming around to believe what he said, It was a one-time thing. But now here was this picture, February ’89, months before just the once, laughing at me.

  Maybe this will convince him.

  Well, I didn’t know about Milo, but surely that photograph convinced me. I couldn’t stay here, trapped in the den with it and a pair of his sandals kicked off under the couch, empty, shaped like his feet. I concentrated on getting out of the chair, finding my jacket, pocketing my car keys. I told Marcy I was going out and climbed in my car. I would find Claire. She would know what to do.

  I pulled up in front of her hotel a little after three o’clock. Claire was standing there checking her watch and straightening her skirt, looking for me in the passing traffic. Watching her for a moment, it struck me, how long I had known her, how long she had been my friend. I didn’t know how I would tell her, say what I had to say: Milo has this child with someone else. I nearly drove away, afraid of uttering the words, but she saw me and waved. Her face lit in a smile.

  “Hey!” she said. She ran toward me and opened the passenger door; climbing in, she saw my face. “Oh my God,” she said. “What?”

  I shook my head. I had trouble talking. “You drive. I can’t drive.” I slid over and she ran around and got in the other side. “Just get on the highway,” I said. “Just get as far away out of here as possible.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” she said. “Are you frightened of somebody? Are you hurt?”

  I shook my head no.

  We drove up the Pacific Coast Highway in silence, with Claire worried and reaching to touch my arm now and then. Her questions and what I had to say were riding like fat passengers in the front seat between us. After about twenty minutes I said, “Okay. Okay. Here.” I told her to pull off by a scenic overlook pretty far north of Malibu.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll just say it.”

  I had a hard time getting through it. Claire had to keep saying “Just slow down. Just take your time.” She didn’t ask me anything yet, about the picture or the timing or where Milo was. Her face was so focused, listening, and there was no judgment on it, not of me. But sometimes, such as when I said He says it’s not his, she looked furious.

  “I’m having trouble,” I said, my eyes raw, “knowing what to believe.”

  “I’m not having that trouble at all,” Claire said. “There’s a picture.”

  I winced.

  “You might as well get drunk and celebrate now,” she said, “because the sooner you praise the fact that you are free from someone who would do this to you, the sooner you will feel better.”

  “I will never feel better.”

  “Take it from me,” she said.

  I took it. What else there was to take I didn’t know. At least for the time being I would take what advice and solace I could from Claire. She knew how it felt.

  “Sweetie,” Claire said quietly, “this is not a man you want to hang on to.”

  “But I do,” I said mournfully.

  “This is a man who has another child.”

  I winced again.

  “He has hit you in the face,” she said gently. “I haven’t forgotten, you know. And while I respect what seems to be your wish not to speak of it, I am not surprised now to hear about this latest so-called development. I see it all the time.”

  “But—he says it’s not his.”

  “Awww, sweetie,” Claire said sadly. “You have a picture. With a date.”

  “But who sent it?” I asked her.

  “Are you defending him?” She was shaking her head. She started the car’s engine and backed up out of the rest area. “We need to drown your sorrows. Come with me.”

  We went back to Claire’s hotel and sat in the bar and ordered rounds of whatever we could think up, and continued in the hotel restaurant for dinner.

  “You’ll move on. You’ll be glad,” Claire said. “I was, after Carl.”

  “No,” I said, “I won’t.”

  “But, Charlotte, face it, you and Milo are just so different. It’s at the heart of all your problems, don’t you think? All your fights. You’re just so different.”

  Yes, he has two children and I have one, I thought. I didn’t want to ask Claire what about us was so different. I was tired of what I thought she thought. I drank and listened to her various prescriptions and coping techniques with a detached feeling, as if I was watching a slow movie, waiting for it to be over so I could go home.

  “You should not go home tonight,” Claire announced. “It would be a mistake. Stay here. Get a room.”

  “Milo will think I’m with some other man,” I said.

  “Well, we don’t want him to think that,” Claire said.

  Yes we do. The idea interested me. “Yes we do,” I said.

  “No! That’s insane,” Claire said. “You need to be very, very careful.”

  “Claire,” I said, “it’s just Milo. We just have to talk.”

  “When a man hits you—” She was on a prosecutorial roll.

  “But—that’s not the point,” I interrupted. He has another child.

  Claire leveled a look at me. “Charlotte,” she said, “you know you’ll need to leave him, don’t you?”

  I stared at the glasses on the table, glassy myself.

  “You will have to begin facing it,” she said. “The sooner the better.”

  “I think I should go home.”

  “You stay with me tonight,” Claire said. She began developing an elaborate plan, which involved canceling her flight the next day at six in morning. Tim would go back to New York without her and we would get Hallie. All of us could stay in the hotel until I was “stabilized.” That was her word. “I can stay through the weekend at least,” she said. “Till you figure this out.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You go back with Tim in the morning.”

  “But I can’t just abandon you in this situation.”

  “It’s not what you think,” I said. “I have to go home.”

  Claire looked very skeptical and worried. “I think you’re making a mistake,” she said. But she knew me well enough not to try talking me out of it. Later she said she wished she had. She was so sorry. But she never would have changed my mind. I was going home. I was not really thinking about the scene once I left her. I just concentrated on operating the heavy machinery of my arms and legs, getting up from the table, walking Claire to the hotel elevator. I said good-bye to her and left, wobbling drunk past a trash can where I threw out all my teary Kleenex, and also my promise to take a taxi, and all of Claire’s ideas about leaving Milo, moving on. She’s wrong, I thought. I just have to face it, going home.

  When I got there, the cathode blue flicker of the television lit the windows at the side of the house. Milo would be watching the game. I didn’t want to start, didn’t want to go in, to say what I found. That picture was smoldering in there, kissing inside my home, singing foreign music from the nightclub Sounds of Brazil; it was lying in wait there on the desk, whispering huskily, teasing me. I will just go get it, I thought, Carry it out to the beach and leave it on the rocks for whoever finds me floating, like a note explaining why. But just as I came around the side yard and crossed the flagstones, Milo yelled. “Agggghhh!!” A bellow. It startled me and I stopped. The sneaker squeaks and the crowd roar of the basketball game filtered through the screens into the night air. Slowly I went to the window of the den off the te
rrace and looked in, watched Milo through the glass.

  Magic with the rebound over to—oh, now it’s a Phoenix ball—

  “Goddammit, Magic!” I heard Milo say. “Get with the game!”

  The Lakers were playing the semifinals. How could Milo be interested in it? A game. How could he be? I watched through the window. He was in his chair. The phone rang and I watched him pick it up. He spoke several times into the receiver: Hello? hello? Who is this? He cursed and hung up, annoyed.

  It was like he was inside a diorama. I stepped right up close to the glass but not so any light fell on me. He couldn’t see me. He was unguarded in the way his face furrowed and relief crossed it; so unfailingly attractive to me. Hairline cracks had begun to appear at the corners of his eyes, which gave him a look of kindness. He was thirty-four years old, and his body was taut and muscular as ever. His calves were ropy and hard; the blades of his shoulders were sharp in his back. His habits were so familiar and dear to me, the way he curled the tip of his tongue over his lip, thinking, the jiggling of his leg. His feet were bare, and his toes gripped the carpet, long and fine-boned, Like little spaghettis, his mother said, Milo’s toes. The sight of his feet hurt me. As I watched him I realized I could never fix my feelings for him; and it felt at that moment like I loved him despite anything, his betrayal and his lies.

  Phoenix driving toward the net, only thirty seconds left on the clock in the first quarter. Magic up to block the shot. Foul!

  “Goddamm it, Earvin!” Milo yelled. “Shit!” He lowered his head to his hands. His team was losing. He was grief-stricken over a game. He was cursing now, talking to the television. He had more passion and sorrow in him about the orange ball lofting up and falling through a net than anything having to do with us. I went inside, looking for a fight now, the real fight, about proof and love and what was going to happen to us.

  “Charlotte? That you?”

  “Were you expecting someone else?”

  “It’s late,” he said. “I was worried.”

  “Why, that your team would lose?”

  “No,” Milo said. “About you.”

  “About whether I’d stay out long enough for you to watch the whole game in peace?”

  “Charlotte, please.”

  “Charlotte, please,” I mimicked him, making my voice low.

  “Stop.”

  “Stop.”

  “Stop. That’s it! I’ve had it!”

  “You’ve had it! You!” I said.

  “Don’t mock me!” His teeth grit.

  “What about me? What about me?”

  “What about you?” he said. “I apologized! I’m sorry! Please. What more can I do?”

  “Stop lying is what.”

  “I told you I wouldn’t lie to you,” he said. “I am not lying.”

  “Then what’s this then?” I walked over to the desk and fished out the picture and the typed page along with the envelope, and handed them over. He took these from me, puzzled, and I turned to the window, the way you would turn your back on someone undressing. I heard the rustle of the paper and the way his breath fell out of his mouth.

  “Oh,” he said. “Well.”

  I looked at him now. He was standing with the picture still in his hand. His eyes were cast up to the ceiling, then at me, then over to the side, full of something, shining, trying to speak. “It’s … I told you,” he said. “Where did—who gave you this? How—”

  “Turn it,” I said. “Look on the back.”

  He did and his face creased, taking in the writing, the date, the meaning of it. Caught, I thought. He shook his head. “No,” he said, “that’s not right, this was that time, this was the time, this is not—”

  On the television the Lakers missed their free throw and I saw Milo checking the game from the corner of his eye.

  “How can you watch this?!” I screamed. “How can you?”

  He looked panicky at me, caught with his eyes not on me, the photo in his hands fluttering because he saw I was holding that wedding portrait of us in its silver frame and my arm was cocked back to throw it like a rock at him.

  “No, Charlotte,” he said, holding his hands up.

  I threw it. I hurled the picture at his head and it hit his hand and broke.

  “God damn you!” he said. He was bleeding where the glass cut him.

  I ran then. I stumbled through the house, drunk and out of my mind, when I saw he was chasing me. “Don’t you throw that at me!” he was shouting. “Don’t you fucking throw anything!”

  “Leave me alone!” I was screaming, the two of us running in and out of our house, through the front and then around the back like a cartoon chase.

  “Listen to me,” he shouted. “It’s a mistake.”

  “Shut up!”

  “It’s not the right—!”

  “Leave me alone!”

  God knows what Hallie heard, from upstairs, or the neighbors. Surely they heard me slamming all the doors in Milo’s face, locking the one in front, heard him pounding, “Goddammit, Charlotte, open the door!” He kicked and banged, rang the bell, rapping with his knuckles, hammering the brass knocker, engraved with R for Robicheaux. Milo locked out of his own house.

  “Let me in! Goddammit! You hear me? Open up!”

  Right back to where we began so many years ago, with Milo at my door, me behind it, face pressed to the wood. Only now I was yelling “No! No, get out of here!” And he was out there kicking, hurling himself, bellowing, shouting that it was not the right date, that it was not his handwriting anyway, where did I get that fucking picture? saying Listen to me! But I hated him too much to listen. I was sure whatever he had to say was lies. I never did know whose handwriting or how the picture got there, who sent it. I never did hear his side. Maybe I should have listened that night, when he was pounding the door and roaring. I could see his face through the glass panes at the sides of the entry; saw him seething. He was trying to get to me, make me see it his way.

  I set the alarm and went upstairs, dizzy, into Hallie’s dark room. I bent over her, laid my cheek against her head, her heart. I rested next to her. But there was something unbearable about the softness of her hair, the flowery smell of it like some inarticulate longing, so that I had to cover her and leave. I went out onto the terrace off our bedroom and stayed bunkered in a chair, awake all night, gazing out across the trees to the black water out there, to the safe peace of the dark sea, the dark sky. After a while, I heard footsteps and crashes downstairs. Milo had gotten in somehow, breaking something. I heard him disarming the alarm, punching numbers on a keypad. The phone rang and I knew it was the security people calling, asking for the code. “Ice,” Milo would tell them, the password we picked. “All is well.”

  Then it was quiet. I listened, frightened of our fight. He did not come up. I wanted him to. I’m telling you I still wished he was right there with me. I tensed for him to come, expecting him, and dreading it: How he would say my name, whispering at the door. Charlotte? He did not come, though. I sat breathing around the stones and bricks in my chest, and watched the clouds thin out. A shaving of moon appeared. It lit a white path across the glossy black water, one that seemed to stretch beyond the reach of my eye, far away to China, to Japan and Australia, spreading out like a white burn on filmstrip, fading away with the sunrise, the bluing of the morning sky. And out of that blue, Jack called.

  35.

  Maybe I slept an hour. I woke and it was Friday now, early. Hallie was in my bed with me, bouncing and whispering I won’t wake you up so you won’t be mad so I’m whispering. When I got down the stairs with her there was a message on the machine from Marcy: Did I remember her doctor’s appointment was today? She was taking the day off. Did I remember that? No, not that, but everything else: that bad dream that was not a dream. Milo was nowhere to be found, but the broken glass from the broken wedding picture had been swept away, I noticed.

  All day I let Hallie have whatever she wanted: television, sharp scissors, glitter glue, candy
. I couldn’t speak much, and when I did my voice seemed as if it were coming from a long way off, somewhere down in Central Charlotte, buried and faint. Hallie kept me functioning with her demands. Glitter glue stained her in patches, so that when the late-afternoon sun came through the kitchen window she caught the light and was dazzling, my dazzling daughter. I had a glass of wine to numb the effect of her beauty, another one to dull the heartbreaking surroundings of our house, our possessions and furniture turning cold now.

  Around five o’clock Milo pulled into the driveway. Hallie rushed him, and I kept my distance. He looked at me warily, expectantly, but I stayed away, hating him but also wishing he would come over and say What’s the matter? so that I could turn and put my head on his shoulder and say It was a nightmare. But he went upstairs without a word.

  I was feeding Hallie dinner when the phone rang.

  She was singing Little Rabbit Foo Foo hopping through the forest, scooping up the field mice and bop them on the head … jumping one of her french fries around the table like a rabbit and trying to scoop up peas but of course the plate slipped so ketchup splattered me and I began to cry. Green peas were bounding all over the place, rolling across the floor as I swabbed it with a dishtowel.