Second Nature (23 page)

“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 skyline. 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.”

I placed my hands on the warm back of his head and held his face to mine, and, light as leaves, our clothes opened and fell around us.

Vincent cupped my breasts and then traced my spine with his hands. He said, “Sweetie. Wait. I mean I really didn’t come prepared to do this. I didn’t plan on making love to you. We should go back to my house. Or wait. Until tomorrow.”

Wait?