“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 said. “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
I
nitially, 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.”
“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.
She didn’t. The three of us took off about seven p.m.
When we went outside, I saw that apparently no one (no one) in Venice Beach had heard the news about skin cancer. I’m not fair-skinned by any means, but the strip of my exposed belly, compared to the general populace, looked like the gesso I used on my canvases in college. We walked to this little sushi place where it seemed that everyone expected him to show up every day at more or less the same time. I had tempura shrimp and summer rolls, which I ate so fast that Beth asked if I wanted some of her cucumber sushi. And I ate all of that too.
The perfect lady.
Later that night, Beth made me show Vincent my virus-chomping antibody project and he was appropriately impressed, particularly by the color field. We watched a rough cut of the new movie that Gwyneth Paltrow had directed, then Beth had this desire for ice cream. The two of them walked across the street to a little stand with sweet, cheesy old-fashioned Christmas lights strung across the roof. I watched them from the window, the rising moon copper like a veiled coin between their heads as they stopped to take off their shoes.
I had seen Beth with Ben and they were easy together, teasing and comfy. On Labor Day, Marie and I had gone to a picnic with all of the Cappadoras at Beth’s, and it was the first time I met Ben’s grandparents and one of his aunts, Teresa—called “Tree.” Pat was grilling burgers—you would never have known that he owned a restaurant, because he looked like he was trying to figure out how to operate a particle accelerator. We ate in stages, first the potato salad, then the corn, and finally the burgers. When Ben had a third cheeseburger, Beth lightly patted his tiny bit of a gut. “Cut it out, Ma!” he said. “I never get to eat ethnic food!”
She was different with Vincent.
Perhaps because she saw him seldom, Beth watched Vincent with something that verged on infatuation. She did not miss an opportunity to touch him, to pat his arm or mess up his hair. Eliza had once made a passing reference to a time when things between Beth and Vincent were worse than strained, when they were splintered and raw. Beth’s joy in whatever healing had happened was clearly still unstained. It made me happy to see her so proudly courted by her successful son.
When they came back, Beth said, “Do you want to go with me tomorrow for the first meeting at the gallery?” It was too soon for me to remember that people could now read my expressions, and I felt silly when she started to laugh. “Don’t look like you’re going to throw up, Sicily. You don’t have to go.”
“I want to go,” I said. “That’s not it.”
“Then what?” Beth said.
“I majored in studio art and biology. I can tell you what’s in half the galleries at the Art Institute and in what order. That’s all. It was one of the only places on earth where people looked at something besides me.”
“What would you like to do?” Vincent asked. “I don’t have anything to do tomorrow. I can show you around. Do you want to go to a studio? Or shopping in Beverly Hills or something?”
I said, “I would like to go to Disneyland.”
They both laughed.
You have to understand that, in some very basic ways, I had never grown up, and so I was more interested in the teacup ride and the haunted house than I was in the food, the parades, or especially the performances. We went through the haunted house only twice, but I believe I still hold the outdoor record for consecutive spins on the teacups. All the baby rides, especially the Peter Pan ride over a cheesy, charming scene of Olde London Towne, drove me wild. I grabbed Vincent’s arm and practically shouted, “Look at the mermaids in the pirate lagoon!” He nodded, pressing his lips together, maybe to stop himself from saying something insulting or else something loud that would let other guests know that he would have to take his mentally challenged sister back to her independent living complex this evening. I would look back on this later and realize that I probably was more oafish than girlishly charming, but at the time Vincent seemed to be the perfect companion. He knew his way around places I didn’t, and also I would never see him again. Beth, not her son, was my friend.
After four or so hours, Vincent began to pale visibly. I would have stayed all night. He said, “Would you mind terribly if we went somewhere quiet for a while? Where there aren’t several thousand kids all screaming?”