by Kate Manning
“Sorry Mommy,” Hallie said, and began to eat her french fries directly off the table.
“Use your fork,” I said.
“I’m pretending I have no hands,” she said.
“Honey, please.”
“If you have no hands,” she said importantly, “you have to scratch your nose like this.” She scratched her nose on the edge of the table and this time her cup fell on the floor with a crash.
“I told you!” I screamed at her.
“Mommy!” Now we were both crying.
“Goddammit!” I threw the wadded, sodden towel at the sink, where it landed and broke a wineglass.
The phone rang.
“What?” I shouted into the receiver. There was silence, which was strangely calming. “Hello? Hello?”
“Hey, Kitten!”
It was the equivalent, for me, of the arrival of the man on the steed. Just when you need him. Spurs jingling, hair streaming back, standards waving in a fair wind. Just in the nick of time.
“Hi, Charlotte?” said his voice. “You know it’s me, right?”
“Jack Sutherland!”
Milo came into the kitchen exactly then. His timing was perfect. I was amazed at how quickly I swallowed and got the tears out of my voice, the anger. The flush on my face was useful. I tucked my hair behind my ears, flirted right into the phone.
“Ja-ack,” I said tenderly. “How was your trip?”
Jack wasn’t quite settled yet, he said, but he wanted to see me. He wanted to get together. I made arrangements to meet him the next night. I did it loudly, in a way that Milo could hear, and when I had said goodbye to him, fondly, several times, and hung up, I went back to the table where Milo was trying to clean up the broken plate. “It’s so wonderful to hear from Jack,” I said. “He sounds wonderful. He’s moving back here, you know.”
Milo said nothing, and I threw caution to the wind, held it out like a handful of sand and blew it all over the floor with the peas and the ketchup. I’ll say what I want, who cares? It was a relief.
“After all these years,” I said. “His voice is exactly the same.”
Milo ignored me. Hallie was using a french fry as a lipstick, painting her mouth with ketchup.
“I know you always hated Jack,” I said, “but really. You’re turning white with anger, Milo.”
“Fuck you,” he said.
“Daddy!” Hallie said. “Bad word.”
“Hallie,” I said, “let’s go watch something,” and when I came back from parking her in front of the television so that she would not be scarred for life by having to watch her parents disintegrate in front of her, Milo was seething.
“He’s been calling here, hasn’t he, Charlotte?” he said abruptly.
“No, he hasn’t.”
“You’re lying,” he shot back at me. “I heard that message from him yesterday. Don’t think I didn’t hear it.”
“Don’t start, Milo,” I said.
“He’s the one who hangs up whenever I answer, right?”
“No.”
“How long has he been calling you?”
“He hasn’t,” I said, but it wasn’t quite the truth.
“I don’t believe you,” Milo said.
We regarded each other so coldly. There was half a smile of triumph on my lips, and I know he saw it. His eyes were shot through with red and he looked wrecked. Good, I thought. A taste of his own medicine.
“Maybe it’s someone calling you,” I said. “Maybe it’s her.”
“She has no reason to call, believe me,” he said.
“Believing you is a little bit hard for me right now,” I said.
“It’s not my kid,” he said, the words in his teeth. “It’s not.”
I wished for him to be right. I still did. I wished to reach across the kitchen, hold on to him and see what happened. But the word kid was stopping me, crawling along between us in its diaper.
“If you’re lying to me?” I said. “If that’s a lie, Milo. If that’s your son—I’ll …” I didn’t know what to say, what to threaten. I’ll die.
“You have to believe me.”
“If you lied?” I said. “I’ll take Hallie.”
He stayed quite still when I said that.
“I will, Milo.” I was so bold now. “And I’ll get her, too. You know I will.”
I’m not proud I said it, of what I was insinuating. “I’ll win,” I said.
He roared and picked up his drink and threw it. It smashed in the sink and sent shrapnel of glass splintering onto the counter. “This! is not! happening!” he said. “Not!”
We had it out then. We were throwing anything we could at the other, old sentences and misunderstandings, wounded feelings going back years. You said. No I didn’t. Yes you did. All of our hurled words were landing on each other, piercing and bruising. It was the cornered fight of the wounded married. It was that fight about love. About fear and hurt and truth. The same old fight couples have. Only with race smashing and breaking like an extra set of dishes around all our grievances. Is this about us? Or is it about It? Skin and History.
Milo was yelling for me to listen. I was yelling at him to shut up. He was yelling it wasn’t his! and I was shouting, What is that then, that picture? What is that date? Who sent it here? He did not know, he did not know, he did not know! He did not know whose handwriting, he did not know who took it, he was trying to find out! Liar! I shouted.
And then we saw Hallie in the doorway. I don’t know how long she stood there, watching us, listening. We saw her framed there and we both stopped. It was so quiet, with her looking up at us, her face a question mark.
“Oh, Hallie,” I said.
“I’m going,” Milo said.
I heard the front door slamming, his car starting in the driveway.
“Dad’s mad,” Hallie said. She said it a few times, pleased and distracted by the rhyme, as I was distracted by how pleased I was. At his anger. I wanted him to be jealous, to see how it felt. We were stalemated, and I know now, where that word comes from, the old crusts of our married mistrust too hard and moldy to chew.
I don’t believe you.
I don’t believe you, either.
That night I went to bed with a feeling that I would get even with Milo somehow and that I had already started.
It was foolish. I should not have gone. I should not have talked to Jack. I wish I hadn’t. But if you were there, at the moment, you would have seen how unreasonably happy I was, to have some strike I could make against Milo. The idea of it got me through the night, when Milo was there just briefly, long enough to sleep in the spare room; it got me through the morning and afternoon of the next day, Saturday—the day it happened.
Milo was gone early that day, after seeing me for just a moment in the kitchen. He came in from the guest room when I was pouring coffee. We did not speak. It was the last time I saw him. That I remember. We were alone in the morning light, but still the room was full of shadowy people: Jack was there, grinning, and so was Geneva Johnson, dancing around; that baby was babbling under our feet, while Darryl serenely watched from a comfortable chair in the corner. I stirred sugar in my cup and kept my mind’s eye on the word “Jack.” Milo was so stony, looking at me, knowing I was going out and he couldn’t stop me. A taste of your own medicine, I thought.
In the evening I took a long bath. I dried my hair and perfumed myself and marshaled all my wands and sable brushes and sharpened pencils. I wanted to be stunning. I wanted to be a bombshell on nonstop legs. The dress I picked was black and backless with a high halter neck that fastened in a band around the throat. With it I wore the wide, hammered-silver collar Milo gave me for Christmas with a matching wrist cuff, big silver hoops for my ears. As I fastened the clasp and brushed my hair, I thought about Jack, what he would think of me now, never having seen me, I remembered, in anything but jeans, the prairie-girl fashions we wore then. He would have adventures to tell me. Perhaps he’d married, had pictures in his wallet. But may
be not.
Milo was still out when I left so I wrote him a note. “Meeting Jack at Spago 6p. Home by 9. Dinner?—C.” To spite him. Or to invite him. As if I were inviting him. Maybe I was.
I arrived early and arranged myself at a table in the bar, crossed my legs. I saw Jack coming before he saw me, and let my hair hang down in a curtain over one side of my face. As he reached the table, just as he got there, I turned to him.
“Jack.”
It was terrible what I did. How I softly looked up from under my hair, said his name, stood and put my arms around him right there, let myself rest against him. Terrible the hushed murmur of his name I let escape. Jack. How odd it was, the familiar feel of him, his hands on the bare skin of my back. The same smell of Jack.
“Charlotte,” he said, and I could see by his struck, brimming smile that he had been waiting for just this greeting between us, was relieved by it. He looked down at me. I saw a leathery quality to his skin that had not been there before, but he was the same. His hair was long and still blond as mine, pulled back in a ponytail. He had that easy, crooked grin and a looseness in his limbs, sitting down slouched, stretching his legs out alongside the table.
“You guys are brother and sister, right?” said the waitress, handing us our drinks. “You are, right?”
“Who’s older, then?” I said, eyes sideways at Jack, and laughing.
“Oh, golly,” said the waitress. “He is?”
“You’re right,” I said. “Older and wiser.”
“Your parents must have a really good gene pool,” the waitress said.
“Yeah! Pool’s great,” said Jack. “Fabulous. Just a little incest in the family, is all.” And he leaned over the table suddenly and kissed me on the lips.
“Jack!” I said, startled, but smiling and laughing anyway, my hand to my mouth.
“Incest is best!” Jack said, with a mischievous eye on the waitress, who retreated like a crab back to the sea. He raised his flute of champagne and said, “Charlotte Halsey: to you.” He drank while gazing at me over the rim. “I could just drink you in,” he said. “As beautiful as ever. More.”
I smiled and raised my glass to him. “Thank you, Jack.” We sat for a charged minute. “Tell me about yourself,” I said. “Catch me up.”
“All right then,” he said, and took a deep breath. “You heard about the bogus so-called accident that ended my racing career.”
I arranged a polite hospital-visitor look on my face.
“I’m sure you know about it, or think you know totally about it, more like,” he said. “But this is not the time to try that case, you know?”
“No,” I agreed.
“Anyway,” Jack said, “I had major consequences of that injury for a long time. Dizziness. Memory problems. Balance.”
“Poor Jack,” I said.
“No. No. Not poor Jack.” His hand was up as if to stop traffic. “I’m fine now. Number one, I’m a philosophical kind of dude. If something is meant to be it’s meant to be. Que sera sera. Can’t be helped. Shikata ga nai, ne? as the nihonjin say. Things happen for a purpose. I accept that.”
“You have a really good attitude,” I said.
“Well, yeah, but, Charlotte, you helped. To accept it. I am patient. To everything there is a season, right?” He gave me a meaningful look.
“Right,” I said, puzzled.
He told me that he had gone back to Cabot College after his injury, finished up there and then moved to Japan, where he lived for thirteen years. He ran a ski school in Nagano, but was moving back now, he decided, after all those years abroad. “Had a premonition. Time to come home,” he said. “Turned out to be right.”
“You haven’t been back in all that time?”
“I checked in periodically. Visited. Just to see.” He looked at me. “Eetto ne, boku wa sukebei na hito desu yo, honto ni.”
“God, Jack, you’re amazingly fluent, aren’t you?” I had no idea what he said, but his personality changed as he said it, his face and voice did, something guttural in it. “You’re practically Japanese.”
“No way! Not this American boy. Never could be. An American? No way. Can’t be Japanese unless you are Japanese. Even a Korean. If you’re born there? Doesn’t matter. Still a gaijin.”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked him.
“A foreigner. Gaijin. Japanese believe they’re the most superior race on Earth.” He was incredulous, shaking his head, eyebrows arching. “It’s like part of their religion. Can you believe it?”
“Huh.” I kept my thoughts to myself.
“Anyway,” he said, “I ran Jacku-san no Ski Schooru up in Nagano.”
“That’s great. You must have just loved it.”
“Love is a funny thing, Charlotte, isn’t it?”
“I’ll say,” I said, under my breath, but I saw my words were not lost on Jack. He smiled as if he understood just what I meant.
“Japan,” he said. “Some of it I loved. Food’s great. Mountains are cool. But, hey: no place like home.” He looked meaningfully at me and then quoted that Byrds’ version of Ecclesiastes again. “To every thing there is a season,” he said. “And a time for every purpose? Right?”
“Yeah,” I said. We sat with our empty champagne flutes. Jack asked the waitress to bring another bottle to our table.
“Celebrating?” the waitress asked warily.
“Long lost love,” Jack said, melodramatically putting his hand on his heart. I smiled, but awkwardly. “Take your glass, like this,” he said, and showed me how to hold it resting on the open palm of my hand, while he poured. He explained the custom in Japan is for table companions to pour for each other. “Now you,” he said, and watched me fill his glass. “You do that well. Grace is like the most important quality for a woman in Japan, did you know that?”
“Really? And what else did you learn about women in Japan?” I asked, in a teasing sisterly way.
“A little bit,” he said, winking. “Of course … a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” He raised his glass. “So here’s a toast to you, Charlotte.” I raised my glass to his. “Campai!” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “Definitely,” and drank. “Whatever that means.”
“About the same as ‘ow, ow, ow, ow.’ ” Jack laughed, and snorted like the ski team used to do. The sound of it must have stirred some kind of nostalgia on my face, because Jack looked softly at me and brushed the back of my hand with his fingertips. I didn’t move my hand away but turned my palm to his.
How pale Jack was, pallid to me. The color of his fingernails did not stand apart from the color of his hands. His sweetcorn-colored hair had coarsened at the temples. I was conscious of inspecting him. I was conscious of my engagement ring turned under, how it clicked against my glass when I picked it up, gleaming weakly through the bubbles.
“So how are you?” Jack asked me. “Charlotte.”
“You know, I married Milo. Milo Robicheaux.”
“Yeah,” he said softly. “Of course I know.”
“And we have a daughter.”
“Aeggh,” he said, shaking his head, blinking.
“What?”
“Can’t believe it,” he said. “It just makes, it makes me—ah.” He sighed. “Never mind. It’s not the time, not the time.” He shuddered. “You’re here, here we are. Right now.”
“And I’m, I used to be a fashion model, for a while—”
“Of course. Know all about it.” He smiled. “Followed your whole career.”
“Jack,” I said. “Really?”
“Yeah, of course, really. Saw all the series you did, the cosmetic campaign, those ads you did for what’s his name, the designer? I’m like, so proud of you. I’m reading along, some magazine, turn the page: There you are, Miss Apparition.” He mimed himself reading, glimpsing a picture, doing a double take. “Me, a million miles away, and yet bingo: There you are. Your face. As if it was some kind of secret message for me, or something.”
“That’s ve
ry flattering,” I said.
“No, no, no,” he said. “Not flattery.” He smiled at me for the longest time, then he asked, “How’s your mom?”
“Fine.”
“She’s a great lady, your mother. As you know, I’ve called her, now and then, over the years,” Jack said, “starting when you left school and nobody knew where to find you. You just dropped out.”
“She did say once you called,” I said, “but I—”
“I always have remembered what she told me,” Jack said. “She said: Nobody knows the future, right? And one day maybe Charlotte will need a shoulder to cry on.”
“She did? She said that?” I asked him.
“Well, I know that—” He stopped. “She mentioned you had had some hard times,” Jack said. “I spoke to her last spring, I guess it was.”
Which would have been during all those days, weeks, that Milo was gone. Roaming in Wyoming. Not that I ever told my mother. The only one in my family that ever knew things like that about me was Diana. My mother would have heard about it from her. Milo’s absence.
“So, I know how it can be,” Jack continued. “Lonely days, hard times. And I just thought I’d give you a call.”
And since it was true, what he said, lonely days, hard times, when I looked back at him my eyes were full of tears.
He reached across the table and laced his fingers with mine. “Charlotte,” Jack said, “don’t now. Hey.” Tears spilled down my cheeks. I had not remembered Jack as a comforting man. But he stroked my hand gently, saying “It’s okay now, everything will be okay.
“I can’t imagine what it’s been like for you,” he said. “All this time.”
“Oh,” I said. “Just all kinds of people over the years who don’t want me and Milo together, you can guess how it would be.”
“Yeah,” Jack said, “I can.”
He seemed about to tell me what he meant, but just then the waitress arrived to say our table was ready, the one by the window. It surprised me, since I had not planned on dinner. I had said I would go home for dinner. In my note I said I’d go home, and suddenly I wanted to. “I’m not terribly hungry, Jack,” I said, after a moment. “I don’t think I could eat.”