Second Nature: A Love Story

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  She didn’t. The three of us took off about seven p.m.

  When we went outside, I saw that apparently no one (no one) in Venice Beach had heard the news about skin cancer. I’m not fair-skinned by any means, but the strip of my exposed belly, compared to the general populace, looked like the gesso I used on my canvases in college. We walked to this little sushi place where it seemed that everyone expected him to show up every day at more or less the same time. I had tempura shrimp and summer rolls, which I ate so fast that Beth asked if I wanted some of her cucumber sushi. And I ate all of that too.

  The perfect lady.

  Later that night, Beth made me show Vincent my virus-chomping antibody project and he was appropriately impressed, particularly by the color field. We watched a rough cut of the new movie that Gwyneth Paltrow had directed, then Beth had this desire for ice cream. The two of them walked across the street to a little stand with sweet, cheesy old-fashioned Christmas lights strung across the roof. I watched them from the window, the rising moon copper like a veiled coin between their heads as they stopped to take off their shoes.

  I had seen Beth with Ben and they were easy together, teasing and comfy. On Labor Day, Marie and I had gone to a picnic with all of the Cappadoras at Beth’s, and it was the first time I met Ben’s grandparents and one of his aunts, Teresa—called “Tree.” Pat was grilling burgers—you would never have known that he owned a restaurant, because he looked like he was trying to figure out how to operate a particle accelerator. We ate in stages, first the potato salad, then the corn, and finally the burgers. When Ben had a third cheeseburger, Beth lightly patted his tiny bit of a gut. “Cut it out, Ma!” he said. “I never get to eat ethnic food!”

  She was different with Vincent.

  Perhaps because she saw him seldom, Beth watched Vincent with something that verged on infatuation. She did not miss an opportunity to touch him, to pat his arm or mess up his hair. Eliza had once made a passing reference to a time when things between Beth and Vincent were worse than strained, when they were splintered and raw. Beth’s joy in whatever healing had happened was clearly still unstained. It made me happy to see her so proudly courted by her successful son.

  When they came back, Beth said, “Do you want to go with me tomorrow for the first meeting at the gallery?” It was too soon for me to remember that people could now read my expressions, and I felt silly when she started to laugh. “Don’t look like you’re going to throw up, Sicily. You don’t have to go.”

  “I want to go,” I said. “That’s not it.”

  “Then what?” Beth said.

  “I majored in studio art and biology. I can tell you what’s in half the galleries at the Art Institute and in what order. That’s all. It was one of the only places on earth where people looked at something besides me.”

  “What would you like to do?” Vincent asked. “I don’t have anything to do tomorrow. I can show you around. Do you want to go to a studio? Or shopping in Beverly Hills or something?”

  I said, “I would like to go to Disneyland.”

  They both laughed.

  You have to understand that, in some very basic ways, I had never grown up, and so I was more interested in the teacup ride and the haunted house than I was in the food, the parades, or especially the performances. We went through the haunted house only twice, but I believe I still hold the outdoor record for consecutive spins on the teacups. All the baby rides, especially the Peter Pan ride over a cheesy, charming scene of Olde London Towne, drove me wild. I grabbed Vincent’s arm and practically shouted, “Look at the mermaids in the pirate lagoon!” He nodded, pressing his lips together, maybe to stop himself from saying something insulting or else something loud that would let other guests know that he would have to take his mentally challenged sister back to her independent living complex this evening. I would look back on this later and realize that I probably was more oafish than girlishly charming, but at the time Vincent seemed to be the perfect companion. He knew his way around places I didn’t, and also I would never see him again. Beth, not her son, was my friend.

  After four or so hours, Vincent began to pale visibly. I would have stayed all night. He said, “Would you mind terribly if we went somewhere quiet for a while? Where there aren’t several thousand kids all screaming?”

  “Don’t you like kids?” I asked him.

  “I do. I like Stella. But this reminds me of some gladiator scene from an old movie. It’s been a long time since I’ve been here.”

  “How long?”

  “My whole life. I’ve never been here.” We began to walk quietly toward the exit, shoulder-to-shoulder with ranks of fat parents in college T-shirts dragging footsore, outraged, sticky children. “A lot of animators work for the Rat,” Vincent said. “It’s a great job environment, if you can stand it. Emily worked here when she was a kid.”

  “Your girlfriend?”

  “My ex. I guess. We’re like a puzzle that doesn’t ever quite fit. I really care about Emily. But some of her stuff … Life is hard.” He shrugged. “Let’s go to the Cub Bar at the Peninsula and look at movie stars, okay? It’s a long drive but, I promise, I’m a very bad driver. It’ll be like a thrill ride.”

  I was ready to leave. Belatedly, I’d noticed that the Grumpys and Dopeys looked the way I had post-surgery, with my stretched and swollen mask face. Suddenly it seemed that everyone was staring.

  Vincent noticed my silence and said, “What’s the matter? Are you disappointed?”

  “Just … they can tell, I think.”

  “They can’t tell.”

  “Maybe they saw it on the news. I think my aunt did a syndicated photo-essay thing.”

  “There’s a lot more on the news than you.”

  “I didn’t mean that, Vincent,” I said. “You can drop me on the way to the star bar.”

  “Don’t be touchy,” Vincent said. “They’re looking at you because you’re a pretty girl who has hair down to your elbows. I have some experience with hostile stares. The women just wish they could go back twenty years and thirty pounds. Get used to it, Sicily. That’s what you came for, right?”

  We drove through the Technicolor twilight to Beverly Hills, a place as bone-deep unreal as Disneyland, where everyone looked dressed for the kind of event I’d never been to. As we walked from the parking lot, several of the people who acknowledged Vincent, some with a kiss, were people I’d seen on movie screens with foreheads twenty feet wide. I expected the bar to be vast and gleaming, but it was tiny, unremarkable, although outside the azaleas were the size of the teacups on the Disney ride. When Vincent asked me what I wanted, I told him, “A martini. Absolutely. A dirty martini.” Kit drank martinis. I’d never had anything stronger than champagne. Of course, with the day of unaccustomed sun and nearly continuous spinning, two fast martinis knocked me on my ass.

  When we left, I’m afraid that I wanted to swing dance in the parking lot and insisted that I was very good at it. Instead, we drove to a sui generic California drive-in, where I restored my equilibrium with something called a Cyclone burger, large fries, and half of Vincent’s modest BLT.

  “Are you a wrestler or something? Women don’t eat like you,” he said. “I always thought they ate like Scarlett O’Hara—a loaf of bread at home, so they can come out and pick at a thirty-dollar steak.”

  “Well,” I said, “I couldn’t really eat in public for a long time. And eating was a nuisance. A good dancer is never over a hundred and ten pounds. I weigh, well, more. And the guys are tiny. I have to work out more now, because I eat so much. But I’m a dancer—I don’t mean in parking lots. I’ve danced all my life. Ballet. I got too tall to be really good at it but … I’m devout. You get strong.”

  “Why couldn’t you eat in public?” Vincent asked me. I was on the way to sobering up by then but not all the way there: We were not far from his house. In vino veritas.

  “The food fell out of my mouth unless I tossed it back like a shot of booze. Which I have never had, by the way.
Or a martini. I have to believe your mom showed you the pictures of me before.” Vincent gazed straight ahead, betraying himself only by minutely adjusting his hands to the very correct ten-and-two position on the steering wheel. “What you can’t see in pictures is that my mouth didn’t close all the way.”

  “That’s rough,” he said.

  I didn’t answer.

  “I have to do something in the morning, but do you like to go swimming? I could take you guys later. My buddy Rob has this little house on a quiet part of the beach, where’s there’s almost no current in the afternoon and you can snorkel. It’s cold—you’ll need a wet suit. But Rob has twenty in girl sizes.”

  My first reaction was terror for the face. But Hollis had said I should use my face just the way everyone else did. I murmured something about not having brought a swimsuit—to California. Vincent said his mom probably had ten swimsuits at his house and—since men think all women can wear anything from a size four to a fourteen—one would probably fit me. I’d gone to Phil’s Beach in a high-necked tank suit in front of Joey and worn the same thing in therapy pools at the hospital, but never in front of … a regular person. Then again, although I was having a really great time with Vincent, as I did with all the Cappadoras I knew, I would very likely never see him again, so he was virtually disposable.

  “If it’s a two-piece, it probably would. Beth’s skinnier than I am, but she’s shorter too.”

  Right after that, we got stuck in traffic and I fell asleep, my cheek against the soft leather of the headrest, my legs curled under me. I woke up in my bed, and the thought of Vincent having carried or helped me up was unsettling. Except not in a bad way. I wished I could remember him touching me. I also wondered how he got up a flight of stairs carrying someone who weighed a hundred and twenty pounds.

  In the morning, I breakfasted on toast, aspirin, coffee, and anti-rejection drugs. Beth was going to drive and we would meet Vincent at Rob’s house. But the bathing suits she offered me were way too Bolivian. I got the strong feeling that they had not ever really belonged to Beth, whose was a well-made black Speedo.

  So we drove up to the little shopping mall and I ended up buying two of them, my first bikinis: one red, with a halter top that nicely hid the still-red scar that sat just below my collarbone like the border between the United States and Mexico, and another that was a delicate spring-leaf color and hid practically nothing. I had to remind myself again that there was every chance I would not use either of them, that Vincent would get tied up in meetings and forget he’d ever undertaken the obligation of squiring his mom and her project around town.

  He did show up, however, and big, bluff Rob Brent, Vincent’s business partner, opened the house to us. It was very tidy, with miles of white leather couch and one gigantic black-and-white photo Beth had taken of a Banksy wall. There seemed to be computers on every flat surface. I sat down and starting fooling with one of them, and Rob and I ended up spending an hour goofing with the virus hunter, like two guitarists in an impromptu jam. Then Rob took off, reminding Vincent to punch in the code that locked the door, and we got ready to swim. Standing in Rob Brent’s bathroom, I tried the red swimsuit on and then the green swimsuit and then put the red one back on again. Then I went back to the green suit, which was just so pretty and, what the hell, so was my body.

  I would never see Vincent after this week, I told myself. I reminded myself.

  Of course, he looked right at the scar. It pissed me off, and I made a point to stare right at the bulge in his faded surfer-dude trunks. For a good ten seconds. Vincent laughed, low-pitched and ticklish, ending, like Beth’s laugh, in a goofy snort. “Gotcha,” he said.

  Then I struggled into my wet suit. It took me no time to get the hang of the snorkel and mask. Then I wanted to never come out. Hours passed. Every common coral and angelfish was a magic messenger. Farther out, in the murk, I saw a turtle loft itself toward the surface like a winged drum. As I turned to swim back, Beth tapped me to say that she needed to get inside: She was worn out and the sun was making her skin prickle in an ominous way, despite the thorough slathering we’d given each other. Reluctantly, after a few more minutes, I followed Beth and Vincent through the strip of sand to the rear of Rob’s little house. There was an outside shower and we all rinsed off. I liked the way the salt water made my hair feel, so I didn’t wash it, just slipped on the drawstring pants and a light linen shirt I’d brought.

  I’d assumed we’d go to dinner, but Beth said she wanted a nap and a tuna-salad sandwich. Vincent asked me, “Do you want to go someplace fancy?” I shook my head. “Do you want to have a picnic on the beach? I have a permit I never use.”

  So we drove to Santa Monica and parked near the pier. Then we carried shopping bags of wine and apples and cheese down the beach for about five miles, until Vincent got to just the place he wanted. At that point, I was ready to fall asleep. I wasn’t used to being outdoors all day. He spread the blankets near this small rock circle, then went over to a lifeguard sign and started hauling back the tarp loaded with driftwood and thick branches. I slipped my sweater over my head.

  “You’ll warm up when I make a fire,” he said.

  I leapt to my feet. “A fire? I thought that stuff was just to block the wind. I’d rather put my hand in a fan than sit next to a fire.”

  “Oh, Jesus. Sicily. I’m really sorry. All I had to do was think instead of running my mouth …”

  But, by that time, I was thinking too.

  Face the music. Face your fears. Put your face against it.

  “Go ahead,” I told Vincent. “Go ahead. I’m scared of it, but nothing will happen. It’s a proper fire pit with sand all around. I have to live. We’re at a beach at night. Make a fire.”

  He hesitated.

  “I don’t want to be the one to give you a brand-new trauma,” he said.

  “No. If I feel like I’m going to flip out, you can douse it, right?”

  Vincent studied me, as if gauging how serious I was. Eventually, slowly, he laid the fire and then, even more slowly, lit it.

  I yoga-breathed and watched the spurting column of orange and blue flames, carefully locating myself outside the radius where sparks could fly. We ate our apples and cheese and I drank a single glass of wine. Then we sat cross-legged on the blankets, just listening to the water. The night was egregiously gentle and extravagant with stars. I couldn’t help but see them as “cels,” the old-fashioned form of animation, when artists painted on cellophane and occasionally increased the illusion of depth by laying one cel over another. That was what the stars were like, layer upon layer, some close enough to touch, some distant as underwater pearls. I lay back and felt that the world had reversed and I could dive into the stars. I asked Vincent if the nights were always this beautiful. “You must want to do this every night.”

  “No,” he said. “There’s way too much smog most of the time. But this is pretty great. If you live here, you think it’ll always be here. Like the running path out by … what, Marina Towers? How often do you run along the lake?”

  “Maybe twice a week.”

  “Well, mainly what I do is drive an hour to see somebody for ten minutes.”

  “Why isn’t anyone else out here?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s a Tuesday night. Kids are in school. People who aren’t in the business have real jobs.” Vincent lay back on his elbows, slowly folding down the cuffs of his shirt. “Generally I hate California, but this is all right.”

  “Why live here?”

  “It’s easier to work. My partner lives here. This neighborhood, it’s not so bad. People have families here.”

  “Thanks for going to the trouble to take me around,” I told him. “I was so afraid to fly. I never swam in the ocean. I was afraid to sit by a fire. I should have had the sense to be afraid of the martinis. But, wow—I may just keep on going, new thing to new thing, from now on.”

  I thought that Vincent was leaning forward to point out a feature of the light-lacy skyl
ine. Instead, he kissed me. It was a gentle kiss, not preliminary to anything. But I got engrossed in it, not just the sour-and-sweet taste of wine and apples but the pressure of his lips, the warmth and softness, the way he fit his mouth to mine. When he drew back, after a thick strand of my hair blew between us, I said, “Okay, one more. That also is my first kiss.”

  “Uh-uh!”

  “I was thirteen when the fire happened.”

  “But you were going to marry some guy.”

  “I didn’t say it was my first anything, forever and ever, amen. Just my first kiss, with a mouth.”

  Vincent shook his head.

  “With me having a mouth.” Instantly, I regretted having mentioned it: For some people, the notion of kissing the mouth of a girl who’d died would be obscene. For me, I wondered briefly if I could have had it all wrong about immortality and if Emma was smiling.

  Vincent said, “Sicily, that’s such a crazy thought, it’s hard to process it. I didn’t know it was an occasion. Did I do okay?”

  “Very well. I would do it again.” We lay down facing each other and kissed like starving people. Gently then, Vincent raised my sweater and, after asking me if it was okay, put his lips against my belly, my breasts, and then my scars. It was the most sensual and considerate thing any human being had ever done to me. My core rang like the final tones from a tuning fork, spreading outward, every nerve pitched high.

  “It’s hard for me to imagine, a beautiful kid like you, living all that time that way.…” he said.

  “I’m not a kid,” I told Vincent. “And I’m not beautiful. I sure wasn’t then.”

  “How old are you, Sicily?”

  “I’m twenty-five,” I said. “How old are you?”

  “Real old. But this is probably the only place on earth that a girl like you would be over the hill.”

  “Do you mean … like, something’s wrong with me? You don’t want me?”

  “I said I was old. I’m not crazy or dead, Sicily. Of course I want you. Although I feel my mother’s hands tightening around my throat. And there’s a technical issue: I didn’t come … prepared.”