Second Nature: A Love Story

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “I’m not a directive kind of psychologist,” Polly said. “But I would guess you feel guilty.”

  Well, there you have it. I had outlived everyone, and I looked good too.

  Emma was innocent. She died and I survived and then I thrived. Her mother had nothing but this bittersweet satisfaction for the sacrifice of Emma’s body to the whole tortilla. My father had died and he could not see me restored. His last glimpse of his only little girl was alive but who knew how damaged? My poor mother would never see me except as the human equivalent of a boiled potato.

  I began sleeping too much. As in, noon was early.

  Whenever I hauled myself out of bed, I worked on this project for Frank Bom, the TV doc who had the show The BOM! about health topics that concern you. I was making an animated presentation of the way flu antibodies captured and fought off the H2N, what everyone called the Zoo Flu, to be projected on a green screen that Dr. Bom could move around with his hands. It was a cool-looking project, if I do say so, because, of course, nobody knows what color a virus is—and so we can imagine they’re anything we want. We can make them yellow and purple and neon-blue, like spined sea creatures, and set them moving in the artistic version of an acid trip—although that was another thing I hadn’t done. I was still a recreational-drug virgin.

  It was when Beth saw my preliminaries for that up on my screen that she invited me to come along with her to California.

  “How would that move?” she said. I showed her.

  “Get out of here!” she said. “That’s amazing!”

  “It’s not that difficult,” I told her. “Medical illustrators believe that God’s middle name is Mac.”

  “That’s like digital photography. Sometimes I use my medium-format camera just to prove to myself that I’m still human. If you can erase your mistakes, you start believing you never made them.”

  “But the results look different,” I said.

  “Nowadays, with that,” Beth gestured to the computer, “you can make anything look like a painting. But, yes, really, you can’t replace the large-format-camera or a medium-format-camera look. When you look at a picture by Richard Avedon or Alfred Stieglitz, that painterly thing that’s going on … For our thing, I want to mix it up, black and white and color, snapshots and set-up portraits. But tell me about this computer-drawing thing. Aren’t there people who are better than others? Software can’t make an artist out of a dud.”

  “No, but it can make a working graphics designer from somebody who just knows what she likes.”

  “Vincent should see this,” she told me. “Vincent is my son who’s the filmmaker?”

  “Beth, I still had eyes and ears. And my aunt is a TV news anchor.”

  Beth shrugged and made a pistol out of her hand, which she fired at me.

  “Vincent is making an animated film now. It’s about this guy who shrinks to the size of a cell or something to go after this bacteria that a terrorist has voluntarily put into his own body, and he’s spreading it all over the Midwest, at county fairs and zoos …”

  “How original,” I said.

  “Isn’t it?” Beth said. “It’s so cool!”

  Obviously, Beth had not seen The Fantastic Voyage, the corny old classic about the ultra-miniaturized submarine Proteus, which carried two surgeons through the bloodstream to do microcosmic surgery on a brilliant scientist, who had a secret that could save the world but was unavoidably detained by a coma. Back in the day when that movie was made, Beth would have been a kid. But all movie culties knew about it. I didn’t have the heart to tell Beth that somebody had more or less had the same idea as Vincent, and back when his mom was eating crayons. I liked Beth. Sort of in the aunt-ly way I didn’t feel about my own aunt. I didn’t want the little goldy lights in her green eyes to go dull. The Fantastic Voyage was based on a famous Isaac Asimov story. Remakes happen all the time. Probably, Vincent’s twist (in our terrorism-obsessed country) would be a big hit anyhow. People who remembered The Fantastic Voyage and The Abyss and those other wacky sci-fi medico things would take their grandchildren to see it. The computer animation would be over the top now.

  I thought about it for a moment.

  “If they know who the guy is well enough to send this molecular inner space guy after him, why don’t they just take a gun and shoot him?” I asked Beth.

  “There’s a reason,” she said. “I think that it’s either two guys or that he’d blow up and infect everyone for fifty square miles if they did that. In fact, yeah, I think he’s like a human time bomb, going around infecting, and then he’s going to blow up in Times Square. Or something.”

  “It’s always Times Square. Terrorists are just drawn to it.”

  “Filmmakers are just drawn to it. Times Square is always there,” Beth said. “Anyhow, why don’t you come with me to California? I’m going out there because the Ossum Tate Gallery wants the photos for a show, after the magazine piece runs in Sense and Sensibility. I’m demanding a main gallery, and they agreed. They’re going to have to do it up big, a whole reception thing and the right press.”

  “I don’t go places, Beth. The thought of getting on an airplane makes me want to throw up on your shoes. I would have to be sedated.”

  “Don’t,” said Beth. “I like these shoes. But come on! Vincent lives in Venice Beach. It’s this cute town haunted by old Hollywood types, gorgeous lioness faces on these withered-up bodies. He has a cute little house. He used to live in a house—I’m not kidding—that was a guy’s garage.” She stopped and got out her camera and began to circle me, shooting close in. “He sold that garage for about two hundred grand. Life out there is nutso. It’s Halloween every day. Maybe he would want you to work with the computer animators as an adviser.”

  “He’s probably got plenty of advisers.”

  “Not advisers who are real medical illustrators, I bet.”

  “He could probably find one.”

  “You’d probably be cheaper than anyone who’d ever worked in the movies.” Beth stopped shooting. “What? What’s wrong? I didn’t ask you to blow yourself up in Times Square. You could stay at a bed-and-breakfast if you feel funny staying with him and me. It would be interesting—your first trip as a person who looks just like any other person. Are you afraid to visit my family?”

  “No, I visit your family all the time. I like your family.”

  At least half a dozen other times since that first dinner, Eliza and I had gotten together. We’d taken Stella to the Brookfield Zoo. But now, her pregnancy advancing, Eliza was literally dragging, with barely enough energy for her patients. Kit wasn’t so attentive anymore either, although I expected her back momentarily. Fall had come, and Kit’s romance with Marc-Until-Labor-Day had inevitably entered decline. Soon she would be by my side, as I rode shotgun and tried to see if there was more than one black Toyota Camry in a dark parking lot behind wretched Marc’s ex-wife’s apartment building.

  I thought about Beth’s offer. I wanted to see California, the ocean, and Vincent. I’d never met a filmmaker. It might even lift my general misery, for which I now honestly considered needing medication.

  “I can’t get on an airplane,” I told Polly Guthrie. “It’s out of the question.”

  “Well, easy does it,” Polly said. “At least you’re identifying your fears. You’ll do what you need to do, in your own time.” My sigh of relief was genuine. I had Polly’s official permission not to go to California. I had a medical stamp that permitted me to be … something I had never imagined myself being. A coward.

  “I want to go, though,” I said.

  “Like I said, Sicily, slow and easy.”

  “I want to go now. I want to knock down one of the fears.”

  “Well, what would make it easier?”

  “I’m all for drugs,” I said.

  “I’m all for going for it,” Polly said. She said she’d ask Dr. Grigsby to give me a prescription for six tablets of diazepam, five milligrams.

  “Please, Polly,” I sai
d. “I may not be the size of a wrestler, but this body is a one-woman drug cartel.”

  She agreed to ten mils, fifteen of them. Within days, Kelli Buoté, the social worker, had arranged for me to have a new UIC student ID and to have my Depo-Provera birth-control shot a week early. Its effects waned at the end of the three-month period in any case, Polly said.

  “I so don’t even need it,” I told her.

  “It helps control acne,” said Polly, who was becoming quite the jokester.

  Finally, I called Beth. “Remember California?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you still want me to come with you, I’m … I’m game,” I said.

  “I’m not really game. But I would love to go. I am terrified of the airplane, of anything that has to do with fire.”

  Beth said calmly, “I felt weird and awful for nine years once. People think you can’t help it, but in the end you’re the only one who can. You can help it. You don’t just face your fears. You have to put your face right up against your fears. What’s the worst that could happen that hasn’t already happened?”

  “You’ve used the word ‘face’ twice in ten seconds.”

  “Face the music,” said Beth. “That’s three.”

  On the day we left, I took two (okay, three) ten-milligram Valiums right after I’d explored the immediate area around me on the plane, just so I would be able to recall having been on it. Then I slept all the way. Beth had to wake me up five minutes before we landed. Since the Ossum Tate Gallery had paid for first-class, I got to wipe my face off with a hot lemony towel and put some gloss on my lips, which were dry as pavement. Then I followed Beth down the labyrinthine mall that was LAX. It was a cool day for early October in Southern California, maybe in the middle sixties. I slipped my black sweater out of my bag and over my shoulders.

  Down in the luggage area, I saw this guy right away: In a whole airport filled with people who were six feet tall, of indeterminate gender, and who’d never met a piece of blue leather or a tattoo they didn’t like, he looked larger than life, although he was not even large. He was slight and thin, not much taller than I was, and wore jeans and this soft blue shirt with long sleeves rolled up. He had longish straw-colored hair and a way of standing that wasn’t cocky but seemed to say that nothing ever made him panic.

  I thought, That must be an actor. I also thought, That is a sexy guy. Already, I had cheered up. I had noticed a guy.

  But when that same guy saw Beth, he looked as though someone had just given him a shopping cart and five minutes to run through the Vatican and grab whatever he wanted to take home. She walked up and put the heel of her hand on his forehead and shoved it back and then laid her head on his shoulder. He covered the back of her head with one hand. He looked nothing like Ben. He looked everything like Beth.

  A moment later, the guy put his hand out to me. Close up, I could see he was older than he looked at a distance, with little lines arrayed at the corners of his eyes—eyes that were really gray, the same color as mine. He said, “Welcome to the land of smog and Botox. I’m Vincent. You must be Sicily.”

  I was sure that I was. But I couldn’t say anything at all.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Initially, I slept.

  I was shocked by how exhausted I was, much more than could be explained by jet lag or the discharge of tension following my first and uncommonly long plane flight. Maybe away from the pressure to answer the telephone and smile for my aunt and Polly and Dr. Bom and act so much more normal than I felt, I just deflated like a balloon in hot weather. Hearing Beth and Vincent chatting downstairs, the door opening and closing and the soft ebb and swell of radio music and voices, the smells of mustard and salt and exhaust that drifted in like ribbons from the boardwalk … and, farther away, the susurrant regular breathing of waves—all this was experienced by me as the events of a dream.

  When Beth finally shook me, I held up my hand to block the bright yellow square of sunlight.

  “I was checking your pulse,” Beth said. “You’ve been asleep for sixteen hours.”

  “No way.”

  “You have. Are you sick?”

  I sat up and gulped my immunosuppressant pills from the little ten-pack Eliza had given me, drowning them in the most exquisite swallow of iced tea I’ve ever had to this day.

  “I could eat a cow,” I said. “But I’m so humiliated that I slept a whole day in the house of someone I don’t even know that I want to leave by the back door.”

  “If you mean you’re embarrassed because of Vincent, forget it. He’s been gone most of the time. He had a dinner meeting and then he stayed at Emily’s. He’s going to be home in a little while and apologizes to you for being rude.”

  “Who’s Emily?”

  “His girlfriend, Emily Sydney. She’s a film editor. She worked on the documentary with him. They’ve been dating on and off for about a hundred years. I don’t know what’s up with that. Maybe Vincent has commitment issues. Maybe Emily does. She’s Canadian.” How did that signify? I wondered. A citizenship issue? Allegiance to different hockey teams? “Anyhow, they’re in the dreaded talking stage. I always hated the talking-it-over stage,” Beth said. “I don’t think Vincent slept over there for reasons of, uh, passion. When they’re on the phone, he sounds like a mute. I hear him say, Yes. Kind of. I guess. No. Not really.”

  “Did you really ever go out with anybody except Pat?”

  “Sure. Three or four guys. But I take great pride in the fact that I never said those words to anybody. You know: ‘We really need to talk.’ ”

  “Me either.”

  “Yeah,” Beth said. “Well. The towels are in the bathroom, and there is a big bunch of French toast and bacon on the table. And the beach is across the street.”

  “I’m going to take a run quick.”

  “It’s high noon in California, Sicily.”

  “I’ll wear SPF seventy-five and a baseball cap. I have to move around. I’ve been in, like, the fetal position for the past day.” I pulled on running shorts and a modest sports halter. Beth knew what she was talking about as far as high noon in California. After a mile, I turned around, spent and cooked, and tried to pour it on and sprint most of the way back. Although I’d only recently been freed to work out hard again, I’d been running like a madwoman and I ached, real liniment-quality ache-age. Still, it had been worth it. I felt like the rightful owner of my own body. To be safe and not lose my way, I’d run in a square, from Vincent’s corner, down Shore, up LaFlore, over to Cabrillo, and back toward Vincent’s small blue clapboard house on the corner. There were so many joggers that the sidewalks should have had fast and slow lanes, but everyone was cheerful. I hit the porch, sweating from every pore and smelly as onion soup, just as Vincent pulled up in his car. He got out. I took off my ball cap and looped my hair into a knot at the nape of my neck.

  “Hello!” he said, and bit his lip to avoid the obvious scan of my body. With a kind of mental pop, I realized that Vincent was looking at me not the way men did once—because my body didn’t match my disquieting blob of a face—but because it did match the face I had now. “You like it here?”

  “It’s obviously and completely beautiful. Runningwise, a big improvement over Chicago. Everybody here is, like, Hi, nice day, and everybody there is, like, Fuck off, passing on your right. Oh, God, excuse me. Nice first impression.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I grew up there too.” He opened the door and let me step in in front of him. I pulled off my shoes, and sand dribbled all over his lava-colored carpet. “Don’t worry about that either. This lady I know collects sand. I let her have mine without paying me for it.”

  I nodded. He must have thought I was retarded.

  “I mean, the housekeeper will vacuum it up. It was a joke.”

  “Oh, sure,” I said. “Sure. I’m going to, uh, shower and … uh, then …”

  “Don’t go back to sleep,” he said.

  “Sorry about that. I’m a very good sleeper.”
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br />   “Do you like Japanese?” Vincent asked suddenly. I told him I’d never had it. “Let’s go later, then. There’s a great joint just down a couple of blocks.” I was halfway up the stairs when he said, “It’s amazing that you can’t tell.” I knew right away what he meant. The high neck on my sports halter covered the larger of my scars.

  Lightly, I said, “That’s the idea!”

  But I walked back down, every atom of my cerebrum shouting obscenities in protest. Face it. Just face it, Sicily. I lowered the strap of my halter. “Right there, my skin is a slightly different color. And if I raise my neck, there’s still a scar.”

  “But even that—it looks like a sunburn. I’ve seen some of my mother’s pictures. I think they’re some of the best stuff she’s ever done. When you were … scarred, did it hurt you all the time?”

  “Not after the first five or six years,” I said. “I’ve really got to clean up.” Five minutes into our first conversation, I’d sworn like a Teamster and shown Vincent my ouchies. I had planned to impress him, maybe even snag a consulting gig on his germ flick. And that was before I saw him.

  I didn’t bother to dress up for lunch. I did dress carefully, choosing cream linen drawstring pants with a lemon-yellow sleeveless crop top. I heard Vincent downstairs trying to cajole Beth into coming along, which somehow made me feel not tender toward him but vexed. What Italian guy doesn’t love his mother, I thought, as I downplayed my eye makeup? And yet, why couldn’t she want to stay home with a cup of tea and sort her negatives.