Second Nature: A Love Story

  Even as hallucinations go, it was cheesy.

  The truth was, I hadn’t even turned on the intercom thing. I couldn’t reach it. How I felt was as though I were in an “environment,” the way higher-order mammals are at a zoo, a place that had all the accoutrements of a home—a swing and a bed, plenty of food and water—but no simple affectionate touch, no freedom, no privacy, no will. I always imagined that this was the reason orangutans looked so sad. I pointed at the simple system and at the nursing station, trying to get Vincent to summon someone to turn the damned thing on. I was afraid to stretch to depress the button. So I smiled at him, at his cotton sweater tied around his shoulders in a way that would have looked femme at best on any other guy and at his sad-amused gaze, like a song I used to know. He put two fingers to his lips and laid them on the Vestex in the vicinity of my distant lips and then again in the neighborhood of the mound of my belly.

  Because there was no way he could hear me, I shook my head and said, “Vincent, I love you. I have such a crush on you. Maybe I’m a jerk, but I can’t lie. I know I’m going to lose you. But loving you was worth the price of admission.”

  At the time, Vincent probably thought I was talking about needing a brush for the dust. Maybe that I was saying I couldn’t get the thing to work and didn’t know why. He probably read my lips and believed I was telling him that what I could use was a good electrician.

  Finally, he got the message. A nurse came and flipped the little switch.

  “Houston,” I said. “We have contact.”

  “What are you in for?” Vincent said.

  “Two more months and then some hard labor.”

  “Well, I was in the neighborhood …”

  “Really! Shooting viruses in Chicago?”

  “No, Sicily. I got here as soon as I could. As soon as my mother called. Actually, I got here sooner than I could.”

  “How?”

  “I chartered a plane.”

  Now, I was still only twenty-six years old, a kid from Chicago who’d been on an airplane once and had come back with a hostage. “Get out,” I said. “You chartered a plane for just yourself?”

  “It’s okay. I wanted to get here and I didn’t want to wait in line and be scanned and get stalled on the tarmac. It’s the way to go. Rob and I have flown private a couple of times, and if I had real money, I’d buy a plane and find somebody to share a pilot with. You just get right off and into a cab. It’s like you’re a diplomat.”

  “What did your mother tell you?”

  “She said you were in labor and that you might lose the baby.”

  “But that settled down. It’s still not so great, but here I am. And there he is.” I couldn’t move, so I made eyes at him, my old gift. “You were going to come here even if I lost the baby?”

  “Sicily. Especially then. I let you go through hell alone before. I won’t do that again. But I don’t think this will end that way. I think that’s a pretty cool little girl in there.”

  “It’s a boy,” I said, deadpan. I was testing him, to see if he looked too delighted.

  “It is? For sure? That’s great. But I would have loved a girl.”

  “The truth is, I don’t know at all what it is. Stick around. They’re bound to do an ultrasound in twenty minutes tops, maybe before lunch. Lunch is around three-thirty on this floor, dinner at five.” I turned in bed slightly.

  “Don’t. Do you want something?”

  “Just some water. I can get it. When I talk through the curtain, I feel like I’m yelling. Earlier, I was yelling. I was pretty tense.”

  “My mother was having a nutty. She was convinced it was the Cappadora curse.”

  “So she said.”

  Vincent approached the nurses’ station, and in no time, a brigade of more nurses than it would have taken to treat the injured in an eight-car pileup wheeled me even closer to the Vestex panel, positioning me so my mouth was near the intercom. Someone brought Vincent a chair. Everyone had figured out by now that this was the Vincent Cappadora, of germ-warfare pop-movie fame and sensitive Oscar-winning documentary fame. He was humble and charming and cute, and they were fluttery and deferent, and the whole thing made me very proud and also made me feel like it would be fun to push him off an overpass.

  “I saw The Germinator,” said the nurse named Derry. “I took my boys. They’re nine and twelve. Lance and Porter.”

  “Wasn’t it profound?” Vincent said, with a straight face.

  “I thought it was more … fun,” Derry said. Good for her.

  “I saw it last night for the first time. It caused preterm labor,” I chimed in.

  “Are you serious?” Vincent said. Derry shook her finger at me as she walked away.

  “No, I’m not serious. I did have a nightmare about that first terrorist.”

  “Serge. He’s the sweetest guy on earth.”

  “There you go,” I said. “Appearances are deceiving. Take you, for instance.” He laughed. “You look like you wouldn’t hurt a fly. Much less break a lady’s heart.”

  He made a mobster face. “I don’ see no lady here.” Then he said, “Sicily, I never meant to even bruise your heart, much less break it.”

  “I know that, Vincent. And when you left at Christmas, I was a complete idiot. I knew I wanted this, but I was so scared.”

  “I was the idiot. Your life and what you went through, Sicily—you had every right to end this the second you found out. It was the sane thing to do. I got all … Look at me. I’m a father! And I got carried away. I’m sorry.”

  “And so am I.”

  “So what comes next?”

  What came next was an unexpected ceremony.

  An ultrasound technician turned up, trundling her machine down the hall. “Dr. Neville requested some images earlier, but you were asleep, Sicily. We didn’t want to wake you. If this is a bad time, we can come back,” the woman said.

  “See?” I said to Vincent. “Right on schedule.”

  Actually, I couldn’t have been happier, despite the intrusion. It was the techno-biological equivalent of a greeting card. I thought, not unreasonably, that it would be wonderful for Vincent to “see” the baby.

  “No, let’s do it, but is there a way that you can sort of squeeze in here where I am?”

  “I thought we’d push back so you could have some privacy,” the tech said. “Is your brother going to wait?”

  “He’s … not my brother.” Jesus Christ. “He’s a friend.” Now I sounded like I had the roundest heels in Chicago. “He’s my … whatever. He’s the baby’s father.”

  “I’m her whatever,” Vincent said.

  “So you want to share this with him?” the tech said.

  Oh, kind of! More than I want about anything else! This was precisely the fourth time that Vincent and I had seen each other, and we were about to observe something usually vouchsafed for people who were smart enough or dumb enough to be charmed by it. We were both.

  “Would you like to see it?” I asked. Suddenly, I was unaccountably shy. Vincent nodded. Okay, I thought. This Moment, Brought to You by Fate.

  “At least let him come in,” I said. “Let him come in for the ultrasound. Please. Privacy. Like you said. He’s the baby’s father.”

  “Let’s ask somebody,” the tech said. “I’m just the lowly hardware lady.”

  The senior nurse paged the resident. After the fifteen minutes it takes in a hospital to reach you if you’re spouting arterial blood, the resident came ambling around the corner of the desk.

  “Miss Coyne would like another person to come in. This is the baby’s father. He’s come from out of town,” the nurse said. Her admiration noticeably wobbled. He was famous. But perhaps also a dickhead. The resident paged Hollis. For the first time in the history of me, Hollis wasn’t around.

  “Page Dr. Cappadora,” I said. “Eliza Cappadora.”

  “I’m a third-year resident,” said the third-year resident. “She can’t make this call and neither can I.” The resident
was adamant: He couldn’t do a thing without the permission of an attending.

  “My aunt and his mom come in all the time. My aunt interviews criminals and drug addicts. How could his germs be worse? He flew here on a plane with only him in it.”

  In any case, the young doctor continued, I was used to Beth and Marie. At least, my body was. Vincent’s germs might be even more of a threat because they were new and imported, and who could tell if Vincent was sick and simply not showing any symptoms yet?

  “But on any given day, who could tell that about my aunt or Beth? They might just have come from volunteering in a typhus ward. They don’t live in sealed capsules,” I argued.

  “No, they don’t. But I still can’t make this call, not in a situation like this. That Vestex panel is in place for a good reason. You’re in isolation on an ultraclean floor and you are in a compromised situation. I have a hunch it would be fine. But I can’t proceed on a hunch. I am sorry, though.”

  The resident asked if he was needed anymore. I told him that he certainly was not, ever.

  Despite my pout, a draped nurse and the sonographer did crank my bed higher. Then they tucked a paper drape around me and the monitor in a way that made me feel absurdly self-conscious. Then the tech began the baby-baby-where’s-the-baby search with the transducer, and suddenly there it—he? she?—was.

  In silence, Vincent took another live-action look at the little creature, which now resembled a slightly miniaturized version of the real thing. “Wow,” he said. “Wow. What’s the gender?”

  “I decided that—” I began.

  “It’s a girl,” said the sonographer. Damn. Vincent was right.

  “It’s a girl? It’s really a girl?” Vincent stood up, raked his hair, walked around his chair like a child in a game, and sat down again. “It’s a little girl.”

  All I wanted was to touch him. Stupid skin hunger and rude biology once again overcame my having the intellect of an avocado.

  “So what do you think, huh?” I asked evenly.

  “It’s my daughter. It’s our daughter. A little girl,” Vincent said softly. “Oh, Sicily. What do you know? We made a little girl. Wow! I feel like a million bucks. And you. I wish I could be in there with you, all the time. Until she comes.”

  The sonogram was running off images, taking measurements, snapping pictures for Vincent, Marie, his mother, the Tribune.

  “Why didn’t my aunt come back?” I asked. “Or your mom?”

  “So we could be alone for this.”

  The sonographer said she was going to slip the machine out and that she’d bring a durable picture for Vincent to keep, from the printer down the hall.

  “Sicily, I’m so proud of you.”

  I didn’t want him to be proud of me. I wanted him to love me.

  “You’re such a tough kid.”

  Say anything, Vincent, I thought. But don’t treat me like I’m on your little brother’s softball team.

  “And I meant what I said at Christmas. I’m not abandoning this baby. I know that she’s my responsibility. If you want that in writing, I’m ready to give you that. And if you need support during the early months, I can help with that too. It’s the least I can do.”

  “It certainly is,” I said.

  “I’m glad you agree.” He looked a little taken aback, as though he’d expected brave talk and demurrals.

  “Wait a minute, though,” I said. “Don’t you think we should talk about this?”

  Vincent answered with a wry twist of his mouth that could barely be called a smile. “About what we do afterward?”

  “Well, I will feed her and help her sleep and teach her to walk, and you—what will you do?”

  Vincent, I thought, for shit’s sake, now is the time for you to say, I’ll come here. You come there. We’ll have two residences. Or I’ll commute. Or you will.

  Vincent said, “I mean, we should just talk.”

  I went on. “We don’t know each other. And we’re going to be, like, related. Your chromosomes married my chromosomes. And the parents of those chromosomes are virtual strangers.” I thought, This is how people end up, fifteen years later, on cable reality shows.

  Vincent sighed and leaned forward in his chair. “Sicily, my mother is waiting downstairs. Marie is there. She has the night off. I have to go back. I have about twenty meetings tomorrow.”

  “That’s more than two an hour. You’ll set some kind of indoor record.” The last time I’d said anything like that had been in California, in Vincent’s bed—my body discovering its new vocation in its fusion with Vincent’s body. Now, I felt old and cold and absurd. Out in the land of tangerine and violet clothes, not to mention sunsets, the meetings that masqueraded as kiss-kiss hug-hug but were actually $100-million-serious, things had to go forward. The people needed movies about special ops and spy girls. Who cared about the occasional too-early-to-be-born baby? Who cared about the woman with the scar under her chin, the one that Vincent had thankfully not noticed, at least so far?

  How calculating. How cowardly. How unworthy of me, either way.

  Vincent said, “Sicily, you look good. Funny. Cute. So different in such a short time.”

  “And yet you haven’t changed. Ain’t that a kick?”

  “How far along in the pregnancy are you now?”

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  Vincent consulted his phone. “Nearly eight o’clock.”

  “That would make me twenty-five weeks, five days, and about eleven hours pregnant.”

  “Always the comedian.”

  “That’s me. Every day’s a party.”

  “What happened under your chin?” Vincent asked. So much for the tiny scar no one would ever notice.

  “I had an episode of rejection.”

  “Another one? Will this keep happening?”

  Every one of my neurons itched for me to say, Uh-uh, no way, all over, never again.… You’ll never wake up to a faceless, swollen … monster. I promise. But I said, “I hope not. The first year is almost over.”

  “So, Sicily.”

  “So, Vincent.”

  “I love that I got to see … her.”

  “Yep. Alive and—” Then, just where I imagined my appendix to be, there was a distinct tap. Then another tap. I dropped my hand. I had no experience of what “quickening” felt like. I’d felt a lot of flutterings and a few rolling waves, but they stopped before I could say for sure what they were. Some people said it felt like bubbles. Some people said it felt like indigestion. Some people said it hurt. This didn’t hurt at all. It was a distinct tap at the door of my womb, a human summons.

  “It moved. She moved,” I said. “The baby. I know she moves all the time, but I was never completely certain that it was the real thing before.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I nodded.

  Vincent beamed. “I got to be here? This is unreal!”

  It was so awful, like your-life-coming-soon-on-DVD, a parody of Taggert and Alisandra on some soap opera—or anyone else anywhere on earth at that very moment. He had to leave. She would say goodbye. Isn’t this just the way it would be? I wanted to give every ounce of attention to this everyday holiness. I wanted every second with Vincent. I also wanted this moment alone with my daughter.

  “I’m staggered. I came to try to comfort you, fearing the worst, and I got … this new dimension. It was real before, but now it’s really real.” Vincent paused. “I can’t believe I just said really real. I’ve lived in California too long.”

  “Well, I’ve been here the whole time. It’s real to me. So, when will you be back? In the neighborhood? Don’t you think … that we …?”

  I wanted Vincent to put his hand up on the plastic so I could feel the heat of his skin. And as though I had willed it, he did. We let our hands linger together.

  “This is so sad. Maybe this is more than I think it is. I …” He touched his shirt in the region of his heart. “I really want to say that right now, but it would be stupid. We?
??ll know more later, right?”

  “Right. Sure. It would be stupid now. We’ll know more later.”

  “The timing is so bad, Sicily. I’m not in a position to make films in Chicago, New York, whatever. My life is just getting started out there. I’m finally becoming known. So maybe this wouldn’t be the right time for me, even if everything else was worked out.”

  “Now for me was exactly the right time,” I said. “It was downright convenient for me to spend months on my left side in bed.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I meant, right now I have to live in Los Angeles. My partner is there. My career is getting off the ground. We’ve said all this before.”

  “An Oscar for your first movie …”

  “It’s the kiss of death,” Vincent said. “No joke.”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  “So even if I did let myself believe that I was halfway in …”

  “In?”

  “In love. It would have to be a long-distance thing. Now. At this point. And I’ve tried that. They never work. Never.”

  “And I’m not portable.”

  “Don’t make this harder, Sicily. The truth is, on this thing, you’ve always been way, way …”

  “What?”

  Vincent turned his face half away from me, and something in me that had flooded out toward him at the moment he saw the ultrasound began to recede, back toward me, slowly and inevitably as the tide. I knew he had been about to say words that I would not be able to forget, or to paint over, or to dismiss as simply a guy-commitment thing, and I was sure in equal parts that I did and did not want him to finish saying them. But I’d already crossed off one too many fears to stop now. “What were you going to say, Vincent?”

  “Really, nothing.”

  “I’m not buying that.”

  “Okay. It’s just that, for sure, in this thing, you’ve been way, way ahead of me from the beginning. Even in California, you did sort of … move in on me.”

  I wanted to die but kill him first.

  “I moved in? You invited me in, Vincent. You led me into your room. You gave me clothes hangers. You cleared a drawer and a bathroom shelf.”