Second Nature: A Love Story

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “Spartan-wannabe woman,” he said. “Sicily, are you craving exercise?”

  “I hike to forget,” I said. Vincent sighed again and I asked him, “So what do you think about everything? How’s it going in your mind? I wouldn’t know, because you’ve never spoken to me about it, or, come to think of it, about anything. You never called. You never wrote. I sound like an Italian grandmother.”

  Vincent sat down on a wooden bench that seemed to have been put there for the purpose. “I wanted to,” he said.

  “Please don’t say that. It’s not the biggest load of bullshit—that would be my aunt, Sister Mary Augustine, who you haven’t met, telling me that God saved me from the fire for a purpose that I, being only human, wasn’t meant to understand—but it’s close. No one who wants to call you doesn’t call you. If somebody actually wants to call you, he’ll climb eight thousand feet to the top of a mountain to get good reception. Say you thought about it in passing. Don’t say you wanted to.”

  “Didn’t my mother tell you why I didn’t?”

  “Your mother is a classy woman, Vincent. She hasn’t said a word to me about you or your motives for anything you did or didn’t do.”

  “I’m really cold,” he said. That was evident. He was huddled up on that bench like a wet cat. “I don’t mean in the emotional way.”

  “We could go to my house, I guess. You’ve never seen it. The view is pretty.”

  “Is that a good idea?”

  “You’re bigger than I am, Vincent, although not by much. I’m not going to rape you, if that’s what you think.”

  “It’s not you I’m worried about.”

  “Charming touch of wistful lust. Very good.”

  “Why are you being sarcastic? You aren’t making this easier, Sicily!”

  “It’s not supposed to be easy,” I said, tromping past him on the way to the car. I grabbed my scarf from Vincent’s neck as I passed him, intending only to put it back on—the sun was setting, and it genuinely was getting colder. But I ended up pulling him off the bench. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” Vincent said, and put his arms around me, holding my head against his chest as though I were a child, making wings of his leather jacket to enclose both of us. He placed his hand under my sweater and said, “Your skin is hot.” One touch of his hand and my whole body snapped to attention.

  “It’s physiobiology,” I said. “That’s how you … are. Hotter to the touch.”

  “I’ve never touched a pregnant girl.”

  “Yes, you have. At least once.”

  Vincent kissed me and kissed me, and when he moved his face to kiss me more thoroughly, I kissed his throat, and he slid his hands into my hair and pulled my face up closer to his and kissed me again. At first he barely opened his lips, and then he was almost rough, as though he could engulf me and swallow all that fear and wonderment through the gateway of my mouth. It worked. Maybe it was my lack of experience of the world, but I thought then, and I still think, that nobody else could ever reach in and wring my core the way Vincent did.

  As it turned out, the backseat of my car was just as the previous owner had described it—excellently roomy. I was on the brink of yet another first (car sex) when the shed layers of coats and scarves on the seat began to make me feel that we were trying to connect on the floor of a coat closet in some teenager’s room—or my closet, for that matter. “I’m pretty flexible, as people go,” I said. “But this is going to be kind of awkward.”

  “Did I hurt you?” Vincent asked. “Or the … your stomach?”

  “I didn’t know you cared.”

  “Sicily, shut the hell up. You did know I cared. This has nothing to do with my not caring. It has everything to do with trying to face life in a practical way.”

  “Like screwing in a car in a public park when you’re both homeowners.”

  “Okay, let’s go to your place. I’ll drive,” Vincent said. “I’m a bad driver, but you’re worse. You drive like you do everything else. Like it was a rodeo and you were the only rider.” So he drove and put on music that was sort of like blues, the kind of music you hear on a summer night from someone else’s open window. I fell asleep. In what seemed like a moment, Vincent was shaking me and asking what the address was.

  “I’m hungry,” I said, sitting up. “I’m starving! Could we go out to eat first?”

  Vincent said, “No.”

  When we finally got around to looking at the view from the graceful span of glass that made up the eastern wall of my bedroom, it was close to midnight. Why do people do things like that?

  ——

  We didn’t eat takeout in bed with my silver chopsticks.

  I’d like to think I’m not that fully a cliché.

  We ate takeout pizza in bed with a beach towel spread across our knees.

  “Is your aunt home?” Vincent asked, elaborately casual. I smiled at him and shook my head. If she had been home, she wouldn’t have heard the sounds I made, like the sounds of wounded birds, sounds I’d never heard myself make—even one Tuesday night at the beach. If she had heard them and considered the source, Aunt Marie would have tried to pretend she was having a nightmare.

  I began, “It must be true what they say about hormones, because nothing I ever did—”

  “You are just so … sweet,” Vincent said. “For what that is worth. But it’s not worth much. What we did in California was nuts, and now it’s nuts-er. It’s nuttier, I mean. It actually must be true what they say about hormones. But we should talk now, Sicily.”

  I would rather have continued to talk about the various gradations of orgasmic experience. He did have a point, if not the genuine right to ask.

  “I want to hear your answer. What are you going to do?”

  “I know it’s high time I answered. It’s high time I answered everybody. But I don’t know. Something’s keeping me back, and it’s not Eliza having Charley. It’s about me. I’ve scheduled the abortion for next Monday …”

  “I’ll stay,” he said. “I’ll stay to be with you.”

  “You don’t have to. It would not be the worst medical thing I ever went through, at least not physically, not by a long shot. But, anyhow, I’m not sure I’m going to have it.”

  “Have what?”

  I realized from the look on his face that Vincent thought I was saying that I didn’t know if I was having the baby. I glared at him.

  He said then, “You mean, have the … procedure.”

  “It’s an abortion. A ‘procedure’ is getting Botox or porcelain veneers. I hate when people use euphemisms like that.”

  Vincent got up and pulled his jeans on over his naked rear end. He didn’t even bother looking for his underwear. Since the “nonstarter” had taken hold of me in earnest, I’d felt as though my body was trilling with sexual longing about ninety percent of the day, waking or sleeping, and though I knew simply from his stance, from the hardening of the muscles in his back, that we were about to transition from lovemaking to love-unmaking, I still felt almost nauseated with lust. Or maybe just nauseated, as I learned two minutes later when I had to run in to the bathroom and toss my green-pepper-mushroom-and-onion. In the bathroom, I also brushed my teeth and hair and pulled on a clean white leotard and a white dance skirt that I found on the floor. I couldn’t walk back out there with a towel around me. Instinctively it was clear to me that being nude when someone else was dressed is sexy only if you’re both burning up, before you do it, or entwined afterward, and we weren’t any one of those. As I pulled back my hair and made a knot of it, I noticed that the leotard top was pretty see-through, but the light in the bathroom was superior and there was only one light turned on in my room, with a pale-blue scarf over the shade.

  When I came back, Vincent was sitting on the end of the bed, still wearing only his jeans, his hands palm-flat against each other between his knees, his head inclined. “It is some view,” he said, nodding toward the e
xpanse of my windows. “Sicily. There are about fifty reasons you can’t have a baby now. For reasons of your own health, obviously. I do know that much from the Internet. And what it could do to a baby. So why do you keep putting it off? It’s just making it harder.”

  “You were there too, as I recall. I didn’t assault you.”

  “You did say you were impregnable. Do you think I would have done that if I’d thought we were conceiving a baby?”

  “That’s how an unplanned pregnancy generally happens, unless someone is tricking someone else, and you know that I wasn’t.” I felt far less cocky than I sounded. There was something tightly set in Vincent’s jaw, a bully’s scowl. I could tell it was not the first time he’d ever worn such an expression. I wondered if what I was seeing was the Vincent from long ago, the one Renee had alluded to, the crazy, selfish kid. You can change your behavior, and if people are smart, mostly they do. But people don’t really change as they get older; and when they really get old, they just get more like their original selves, like the distilled essence of who they were to begin with. Everyone has a mean streak. Vincent’s was more like a fault line.

  “What?” I said. “If you think I’m going to decide this based on what you …”

  “On what I think? Isn’t it partly my choice too?”

  “If it was, why didn’t you find out about it sooner?”

  “How, Sicily? The guy doesn’t get morning sickness!”

  “You could have asked how I was. You could have wondered if I was doing great or if I was doing lousy. Or if I was alive.”

  “I didn’t know it was going on! I thought you were this cute innocent kid about ten years younger emotionally than she was physically and about ten years too young for me, physically and every other way. You’ve got to know how … just, I mean … appealing you are to men, Sicily. They don’t see that you have a scar on your neck. You’re very sexy. I don’t want to be responsible for something happening to that face, because of something I did. You look just the way you should look. You have to put this behind you and think of the future. You have to think of the future you’re going to have.”

  He didn’t say, The future you’re going to have—not with me. But he might as well have.

  “How would I know that? How appealing I am? Does the fact that I like doing it make me sexy? I didn’t even know until the last couple of months that I really liked doing it. How would I know that, Vincent? On the basis of twice? I still don’t trust this face, Vincent. All I ever knew was that I was pretty from the boobs down, maybe.”

  “Don’t be an ass. Your face is great. You can see the little scars at your hairline, and that only makes you not perfect in a way that’s … I don’t know, Sicily. I’m not a freaking songwriter.”

  “And still, six months ago, you—you in particular, Mr. Hollywood, who could date actresses—would have crossed the street not to have to look at me. Who would have called me even average? My ex-boyfriend, the arson accomplice? My hundreds of other lovers before him?”

  We were fighting, and the dampness of our lovemaking was still inside me, the scent of bleach on my hands, along with some lavender stuff or cologne Vincent used.

  “You don’t see how you look. You only see how you don’t look. You’re trying to have something you can’t have right now, the way you think you want it!” He grabbed his sweater, neglecting his T-shirt. “So maybe it’s just the effect you had on me. Maybe I’m drawn to birds with broken wings—”

  “Beaks,” I said.

  “I’m not listening to you. You always get the last word. Not this time. Maybe you didn’t know the effect you had on me. Here I am with this girl who likes everything I say and do, and I lay one finger on her and she goes through the ceiling. Wouldn’t any guy want to make a woman feel like that? That would make you even more … I don’t know what … sweet, like I said. But that doesn’t mean we should ride off into the sunset.”

  “Now tell me, It’s not you, Sicily, it’s me. Don’t blame yourself.” I pulled on my sweater and looked at him. “That’s the final part, right?”

  “It is about me. You had an awful unfair childhood. And I had a scary unfair—let’s not get into all that. But this is the truth. Life isn’t a song. I would fuck this up like I’ve fucked up everything I’ve ever done, except the one thing I don’t fuck up, which is making believe.”

  “Oh, please. That’s about as bullshit as I wanted to call you, but the tides of life held me back. This isn’t a made-for-TV movie about ditching someone, it’s really ditching someone. Tell me you don’t want to stand in the way of my future happiness.”

  “You’re good at that verbal crap. Hats off, Sicily. I really don’t want to stand in the way of your happiness. You have this thing I don’t know how you got that makes you able to be happy, or at least you think you can be happy. But here’s the thing. I’m not a bad person, but I’m not a nice person. Ask my own mother. Ben is a nice person. My sister, Kerry, is a nice person. I’m adequate.” Vincent stepped into his shoes.

  I thought, No, wait, this isn’t going at all the way it should. Don’t leave. Don’t leave me. Wait. Slow down.

  “Someday you’re going to have everything you want. Better and more.”

  “You don’t get to be the judge of that,” I said. “Don’t I get to choose at all?” I was swamped by a sudden tide of sympathy for him. Vincent really believed he was just adequate. He had a past in which he’d needed to choose to fight almost every day.

  He reminded me of me.

  “But who are you to judge men? Especially men a generation older than you? You have your father the hero and your ex-boyfriend the shit-head loser, so I would look pretty good.”

  Let’s rewind, I thought. I want a chance to tell you things. But I said, “Why is this so freaking different from anybody else? People have to figure this out all the time in their lives, and sometimes they don’t even know each other. And usually that’s a disaster. If you think I’m asking you to have a baby with me, Vincent, I’m not.” Certainly, at least in that moment, that was a big fat lie. I was asking just that and he knew it.

  I sat down hard on the bed and deliberately pulled my hair over my face. Vincent cupped the back of my neck in one of his hands. I felt myself merge into his touch. Just biology. It was cold in the room except at the intersection of Vincent’s hand and the nape of my neck. I bit my lip hard, and it hurt; I realized that I’d never bitten my lip. Effectively, it stanched the tears that would have come crowding into my eyes if I let myself think that I would never forget the precise way that his hand felt there. So I pushed out the words: “I’m not saying I want you to be my partner. I’m saying I don’t know if I want to end this pregnancy, because …”

  “Because why?”

  “Because I might want to share my life with someone I love.”

  “That’s what I said, Sicily. How could we know, either of us? The reason I didn’t call you was because it was easier to let you hate me and think I was a jerk from California who used you to get over my girlfriend. After you left, I got back with Emily. Did you know that? Then I broke up with Emily again. I couldn’t stand being around her. This was after we were together for, like, five years. And I don’t think of Emily anymore. If I ever loved anyone, it was Emily Sydney, and I don’t think of her anymore. How could you love anyone like that?”

  “Do you think of me?”

  “What I love is my work. I love my grandfather and my sister and my mother and my brother and my dad. That’s family to me.”

  “Do you? Do you think of me? I don’t care about Emily Sydney.”

  “Why does it matter so much? If I say yes, does that mean you’re going to have the baby? Sicily, why are you prolonging this? It’s … perverse. You could be hurting yourself right now and you don’t even know it. Don’t do that.”

  “I’m just talking, Vincent. I have to … have the abortion. I think I have to. But do you blame me for wanting a little of what other women can have if they want?”

/>   He stood up, and I realized with alarm that I was about to puke. This certainly would not have happened in the TV version. I ran into the bathroom and held my hair back, paralyzed with shame, then pulled myself up onto the sink, brushed my teeth with my finger, and sluiced my face with cold water. Vincent came into the bathroom with a wet washcloth and pressed it to the back of my neck.

  “Settle down, Sicily,” he said. “Come on now. Settle down. That’s a girl. That’s my girl.” The sudden crimp in the lines around his eyes and the way the color in them deepened, got too bright, the way Beth’s did—it gave him away. He meant what he’d just said. And he also didn’t mean it. The melody in the minor key was lovely, until the flat note. “Sicily, I thought of you all the time. I thought of you when I got in bed with Emily and said I was tired and pretended I had to go to sleep right away. Are you happy now? Because I’m not. I will not ever be a father. I don’t know how I could. The kid would never see me.” Vincent took my hand and led me back into the bedroom, where we sat in the darkness, side by side on the couch. “That’s not true. It’s not because I’m busy. It’s because I don’t know how to do things … Ben knows how to do them naturally.”

  And at that moment, I realized that I had been playing a kid’s game myself. I had no idea how to be a mother. I’d been raised by two good mothers, but they had never called upon me to take care of any living thing. I had no idea how to raise myself. Now I believed at last that Vincent wasn’t trying to do a slow and easy fade. He meant it. He meant that he couldn’t love me.

  I said softly, “You’re doing this whole riff, Vincent, about how this is all about you, and you didn’t hear what I said.”

  “What?”

  “What I said about sharing my life with someone I love, I didn’t mean sharing my life with you.”