Second Nature (24 page)

“I’m impregnable,” I said. “They make you take supershots because of the anti-rejection drugs.”

“It’s not that.…”

“You don’t have a disease. You’re Beth’s son. I don’t have a disease. It would have turned up on one of my one thousand blood tests. And I’m one guy away from a virgin,” I said. “Please. Do it.”

“Sicily, I’m not a jerk. But I feel like you’re brand-new. I don’t want to give you the wrong idea.”

“Like, you took off all my clothes so we could have an ethical discussion? Do you think I’m going to fall in love with you and hide under the porch when Beth leaves?”

“No.”

“Are you afraid I won’t like it as much as I liked the teacup ride?”

“No. I’m afraid you will.”

“You have to face your fears,” I said.

The moon came out, and both of us, naked, were silvery as the fish in the cove. I guided Vincent’s hands into the shadows of me, throwing off the nuisance quilt, pressing myself small to lie beneath him. I was telling big lies through my pretty white teeth. I was already ten times drunker on him than on the dirty martinis. But I said to myself,
Sicily, this is ordinary adult recreation
. Vincent moved so slowly and so gently. I tried, I really tried, to do the same thing, to be as shy and diffident as I had been every other time in my life that this had happened. But my body was disinclined to be gentle or shy, and the ache in my belly grew more insistent, until finally a … it was like … it was like a flashover, consuming and dangerous and filled with awe. I thought, during it, that this was the only time I’d ever really felt that thing you’re supposed to feel, your customary self vacated, like the planet could blow up next to you and you would attend to it later. I wanted to have it happen again, a hundred times all at once.

I wanted to hold the outdoor record.

When I was ready for thirds, though, Vincent made a noise that was halfway between a laugh and a sigh and pointed out that while I was twenty-five, he was not. He mentioned also that it was by now 4:00 a.m. and fifty degrees, not to mention that the tide was about ten feet from us. We got up and carried the damp remnants of our innocent picnic back to the car. Oh, the Sicily who had been so sleepy when she arrived, I was not she. Now I was certain I would never waste an hour of my life on sleep again.

Everything I wanted was in the front seat of Vincent’s car. He looked at me as he started the car and said, “Don’t smile like that.”

“How come?”

“You … you’re so cute. Cute and eager.”

“Is it about Emily?”

“No. It’s about me. I mean, I live in California, and that implies bad behavior, but I met you only the day before yesterday, not to mention … this is crazy.”

Lights that even Vincent admitted he had never realized he had in his house announced themselves like fanfare behind every window when he pulled into the driveway. As soon as he cut the engine, Beth pulled open the door and said, “Excuse me. But, Vincent? What the fuck?”

I had never heard Beth talk that way. I had never seen her this way. She seemed literally larger.

Vincent defended himself. I defended him. He defended me. At last, he said, “Ma. We’re both adults. I semi-understand why you’re awake. I even semi-understand why you’re out here. But I’m not going to be okay if you say anything else.”

We stepped into the foyer, where I stood with my hands in the pockets of my pants. As I turned and started to scamper up the stairs to my room, up past all those lights blaring against the dawn, Vincent said, “Sicily. My room is at the end of the hall. I’m not as much of a neat freak as Rob is, but I do make the bed.” I thought Beth was going to sock him in the face right then. She began to huff in a way I would have found funny if I hadn’t been scared of her. If I went into Vincent’s room, I would feel oddly disloyal to Beth, but if I did not, it would telegraph the message that the night had been no more than an inebriated impulse.

I went into Vincent’s room, brushed my teeth with a wet washcloth, pulled off my clothes, and lay down and willed myself to sleep for just ten minutes. After a long while, I did slip into a doze, but for the next hour I heard Beth turning off lights and slamming cabinet doors and rearranging stuff in drawers and talking to Vincent in words I couldn’t discern but that sounded like someone throwing handfuls of stone against a metal shed. All this I experienced gradually, as a dream, that tumbled into the dream of Vincent’s body in the hot firelight and then in the cold moonlight and then in the morning light, when he was there and real, beside me and then on top of me.

I had come here through the air and gone under the water and faced the fire. I didn’t forget that if you set a fire, you were responsible for whatever it burned. I knew that. But in just three days I’d become a woman with wings spread for the first time, with the knowledge that they had the force to take me where I wanted to go.

Every night, Beth and Vincent and I ate a brittle dinner and did something else that passed the time before Beth gave us a laser look and headed upstairs with her book. Then, before he and I lay down and did it again, Vincent said to forgive him, he knew he was nuts. Every time we made love, he was careful, using extra protection, which I appreciated, although I also didn’t give a damn.

After that first night, there were only six more days left for me to ride that spinning cup. I did.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“
Y
ou don’t mess with this,” Marie said. “We should call Dr. Grigsby. You probably caught something on that plane. Nothing but a can of germs in the air. You didn’t wear a mask, did you?”

“No,” Sicily said. “Everyone else on the plane did, though.”

That Sicily still had the vigor for sarcasm was comforting. But the way Sicily looked contradicted her bravado. Deep hollows under her eyes looked artificial, as though meant to be seen from the balcony in a heavy-handed production of
La Bohème
. She complained that her head ached as though someone were using a fork to pry her skull off her spine. She had no energy for ballet—and ballet was Sicily’s church—and barely touched the computer that she ordinarily checked every hour like a pioneer bride tending her hearth.

Only ten days before, Sicily had returned from California, frothing like champagne cooled too long in the freezer. She sang and drew and danced, the thump of her music against Marie’s adjoining wall reassuring now instead of irritating. Every report of Sicily’s adventures seemed to begin with,
Vincent took me to
 … and,
Vincent said he’d never seen that depth of color in …
and,
Vincent showed Beth and me scenes from the animated …

Vincent.

Marie was many unfortunate things, she thought, but she was no fool. Initially grateful to Beth for the change of scene that had restored Sicily’s spirits, Marie now wanted to slap every Cappadora except Eliza.
You arrogant jerk with your Oscar. You with your so-fabulous black-and-white portraits. You with your license-to-print-money spaghetti joint. You with your …
Marie couldn’t think of anything bad to say about hearty, sweet-spoken Ben.

Vincent. Was he too dumb to know a permeable heart when he saw one, or could he simply not be bothered to care?

Two more days passed, then four, then six. Sicily’s ebullient chatter slowed, stuttered, and stopped altogether.

“Have you heard from Beth’s son? The one whose house you visited?” Marie asked lightly. “What’s his name? Victor?”

“Vincent. And no,” Sicily said. “Let me sleep.” Sicily’s long naps were punctuated by brief visits to the bathroom to shower and brush her teeth, after which she slipped into one of the pairs of blue surgical scrubs she’d collected during her many hospital stays. And then Sicily slipped back into bed.

“You have to eat,” Marie said. “How about a spinach salad?”

Obligingly, Sicily got up and pushed the dark-green leaves around on her plate, speared a cherry tomato, and gazed at it as though it were some kind of rare shell.

“Sicily, what is wrong with you?” Marie said, teetering along a line that wavered between sympathy and a slow burn. “Do you think this is an episode of rejection?”

Sicily laid her fork down on the yellow place mat. The cherry tomato rolled off the edge of the table.

“Kind of,” Sicily admitted softly.

“
Kind
of? We need to be at the emergency room, then, Sicily.”

“It’s not that kind of rejection.”

“Okay, then, let’s hear it.”

“Just let me sleep. Haven’t you ever heard of sleeping it off?” Sicily laid her sleep mask over her eyes and resumed a pose that would have been just right for a sarcophagus.

Resigned, Marie retrieved her briefcase and sat down in Sicily’s slim leather recliner. Grabbing the remote, Marie sat, eyes glazed, through three reruns of some old show about a minister raising six daughters on his own. On TV shows, everyone killed mothers off. Single fathers were adorable. Single mothers were pathetic. After switching off the lights and the television, Marie was about to make a quiet exit, when Sicily sat up, wide awake and clearly alarmed.

“You don’t have to leave,” Sicily said.

“Do you feel worse?”

“Not when you’re here.”

“I don’t need to leave.”

“Auntie, remember the day we found out about the fire, the day of my engagement party? When you told me that you fell for my father after just five dates? Can a person really fall in love at first sight? Isn’t it possible? Why else would people have written all the poems and songs?”

“I think it’s something people like to believe,” Marie said evenly, and thought,
Oh, give me strength
. And yet, wasn’t this bound to happen? If Sicily learned to fly, she was going to hit the ground hard, and not just one time. There would be men who would consider her … well, just a pretty face, an interesting case, her transformation a beguiling twist on the common run of girls. But why did the first have to be some himbo who lived three thousand miles away, surrounded by the human equivalent of gazelles in short shorts? “And, as for Jamie, oh, for heaven’s sake, that was just silly girl talk about a thirty-five-year-old error of judgment. Your dad and your mom—my sister—were a match made …”

“You can say a match made in heaven. People say it all the time to me. You don’t have to treat me like I’m made of glass.”

“What this proves,” Marie said finally, “is that you can feel all those things again. That’s good news. The bad news is, it’s so tough to experience a high like that and then come back to the everyday world. And so soon after it was over between Joe and you.”

“Do we have any aspirin?” Sicily asked. “My head is going to split up the back like a gourd.”

“You’re not supposed to take aspirin if you might have flu.”

“Do we have any heroin, then?” Trailing her comforter, Sicily padded into the bathroom and returned with a bottle of Tylenol. “Auntie! I’ve missed everything! Why didn’t you tell me what I was missing?”

“How many times did I ask you to go with me to California? Paris, London, Sydney? Dallas?”

From the habit of years, Sicily had placed the tablets on the back of her tongue and tilted her head back before sipping water through a straw to swallow them. Then she quickly turned to Marie and said reprovingly, “Dallas? Who wants to go to Dallas?”

“All I meant was, the first time
Beth
asked you—”

“Was also the first time anyone asked me to do anything after the face transplant.” Sicily lay back down. “Dallas! Marie, you know I didn’t mean restaurants and historical sites. You know I didn’t mean I’d missed out on the hot spots of Dallas. Or even El Paso.”

“I hoped you meant that. I gave it a good try.” Marie smiled. “I know you weren’t referring to sightseeing.”

“I mean I didn’t know. I didn’t know what love was. Why didn’t you tell me?”

First
, Marie thought,
because you
were
missing out on it and then because I thought that what you had would be all you ever needed. And now, Sicily, I can’t say, Get up and stop sulking. Just chalk this one up like the compressed equivalent of a summer romance. You’re on the rebound. You’re on the mend. You’re confusing lust with trust and a moment’s enchantment with a life’s commitment. I can’t say that, because you can’t
hear that when you’re twenty-five, especially if you’re really eighteen going on twenty-five going on eighty-seven, the newest and oldest woman in the world
.

So Marie talked tough in another way. “I have to say, Sicily, that I had some zingers in my time when it came to one-night stands, and after they were over, I didn’t take to my bed.”

“It was a seven-night stand.”

“And I have to wonder how Beth could …”

“Allow this? She was not at all pleased,” Sicily said. “But it wasn’t any of her business. It’s actually none of
your
business, except you’re my mother and who else can I act like an idiot with? I think about him every five minutes, other than when I’m asleep, and when I wake up I start thinking of him all over again, playing it back like you play the good parts of the movie. The beach. The sky. The birds outside the window waking me up. How do you stop doing that? You’ve had a hundred lovers.”

“Maybe not a hundred …”

“How do you get over them?”

In fact, Marie thought, with a few exceptions her own relationships had been cheerful, robust affairs, and it was more often than not she who got engrossed in a story or in Sicily’s latest issue and woke up one morning to realize that she had forgotten until Thursday the call she’d promised to make the previous Saturday. Sicily had lost her outer layer of skin in more ways than one. She was like the Visible Woman, that old toy that Gia had, the plastic model of the human body with all the veins and organ systems plain to see. Like the statue in the block of stone.

“Did you make plans to see each other again?” Marie asked.

“It was sort of presumed that we would, when he gets out here again, maybe when Eliza’s baby is born, if not before then. But maybe not before then. He’s in the middle of making a film. But he hasn’t called me. I called him and left a message. Well, I didn’t leave a message. He would have seen my number and known it was Chicago.”