The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [1]
He was staring at Phoebe. “I can’t believe this,” he said.
While Catnip went to extricate himself from the work crew, Phoebe struggled to catch her breath. For years she’d imagined this, a friend of Faith’s recognizing her now, grown up—how much like her sister she looked.
Together she and Catnip crossed the field. Phoebe felt nervous. There were blond glints of beard on his face.
“So you’re what, in high school now?” he asked.
“I graduated,” Phoebe said. “Last week, actually.” She hadn’t attended the ceremony.
“Well, I’m Kyle. No one’s called me Catnip in years,” he said wistfully.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-six. Yourself?”
“Eighteen.”
“Eighteen,” he said, and laughed. “Shit, when I was eighteen, twenty-six sounded geriatric.”
Kyle had just finished his second year of law school. “Monday I start my summer job,” he said, and with two fingers mimed a pair of scissors snipping off his hair.
“Really? They make you cut it?” It sounded like the Army.
“They don’t have to,” he said. “You’ve already done it.”
Traffic sounds grew louder as they neared the edge of Golden Gate Park. Phoebe felt like a child left alone with one of Faith’s friends, the uneasy job of holding their interest. “Do you ever think about those times?” she asked. “You know, with my sister?”
There was a pause. “Sure,” Kyle said. “Sure I do.”
“Me too.”
“She’s incredibly real to me. Faith,” he said.
“I think about her constantly,” said Phoebe.
Kyle nodded. “She was your sister.”
By the time they reached Haight Street, the fog was beginning to shred, exposing blue wisps of sky. Phoebe thought of mentioning that she worked only two blocks away—would be there right now if not for the Revival of Moons—but this seemed of no consequence.
“I live around here,” Kyle said. “How about some coffee?”
His apartment, on Cole Street, was a disappointment. Phoebe had hoped to enter a time warp, but a sleek charcoal couch and long glass coffee table dominated the living room. On the walls, abstract lithographs appeared to levitate inside Plexiglas frames. Still, a prism dangled from one window, and tie-dyed cushions scattered the floor. Phoebe noticed a smell of cloves or pepper, some odor familiar from years before.
She sat on the floor, away from the charcoal couch. When Kyle shed his army jacket, Phoebe noticed through his T-shirt how muscular he was. He took a joint from a Lucite cigarette holder on the coffee table and fired it up, then lowered himself to the floor.
“You know,” he croaked, holding in smoke as he passed the joint to Phoebe, “a bunch of times I thought about dropping by you and your mom’s. Just see how you were doing.”
“You should’ve done it,” Phoebe said. She was eyeing the joint, worrying whether or not to smoke. Getting high made her deeply anxious, had paralyzed her more than once in a viselike fear that she was about to drop dead. But she thought of her sister, how eagerly Faith had reached for everything—how Kyle would expect this of Phoebe. She took a modest hit. Kyle was bent at his stereo, stacking records on a turntable. Surrealistic Pillow came on, the rich, eerie voice of Grace Slick.
“She remarried or anything, your mom?” he asked, resuming his seat.
“Oh no,” Phoebe said, half laughing. “No.”
As Kyle watched her through the smoke, she grew self-conscious. “I guess that phase in her life is kind of over,” she explained.
He shook his head. “Too bad.”
“No, she doesn’t mind,” Phoebe said, wondering as she spoke if she knew this for sure. “She’s sort of past the age of romance.”
Kyle frowned, toking on the joint. “How old could she be?”
“Her birthday’s next weekend, actually. Forty-seven.”
He burst out laughing, spewing smoke and then coughing with abandon. “Forty-seven,” he said, recovering himself. “That’s not old, Phoebe.”
She stared at him, stunned by his laughter. “I didn’t say she was old,” she said.