The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [101]
The restaurant’s sole customer was an elderly man wearing oversized black trousers hitched to his chest by a pair of startling red suspenders. A great playfulness seemed enfolded like a prize among the wrinkles in his face. To Wolf and Phoebe he raised a tiny glass filled with clear liquid, grappa, Wolf said, pretty powerful stuff. They toasted him and drank.
Their trip had begun that morning, after a week’s delay while Wolf completed the scoliosis manual. At first he’d seemed present in body only, uttering scarcely a word as they drove south from Munich over fat green hills into Austria. The air turned bracing, tangy; blunt speckled rocks nosed their way up from beneath the soil. The tallest mountains veered straight into clouds, like columns of stone reaching up to the portals of palaces miles overhead. Phoebe had never seen Carla again; Carla was working, Wolf kept saying, but his strained tone made Phoebe wonder if all was well between them. He’d spent every remaining night at Carla’s apartment, leaving Phoebe his bed, made up for her with fresh striped sheets.
They skirted Innsbruck and then crossed the Brenner Pass, where a handsome, mustachioed Italian checked their passports and waved them into his country. Soon after, they shifted onto a smaller road. The slower pace seemed to relax Wolf.
“I hope it’s okay,” Phoebe said. “You coming with me.”
“Sure it’s okay.”
“I mean, with Carla.”
“It worked out all right,” Wolf said, hesitant. “It’s a tough situation.”
“Because of Faith?”
Again Wolf paused, his wariness giving Phoebe the sense that his fiancée was nearby, within earshot. “Unfinished business is tough,” he said, and glanced at her. Phoebe felt his life tip open just slightly, in a way it hadn’t before. She crept gingerly toward the opening.
“How much did Carla know about her?”
“Everything, pretty much,” Wolf said. “Early on I kind of laid the whole thing out for her. But after that I never talked about it—we never talked about it. Even though I wanted to, sometimes.”
Phoebe waited, afraid of stopping him. “Why didn’t you?” she said.
“I felt awkward, I guess, bringing it up. I thought, Hey, you’re in love, you’re not supposed to be thinking about all that. Even when Carla asked me about Faith, I’d resist, tell myself it was self-discipline, putting the whole thing behind me. But I’m seeing now it’s the opposite, I wasn’t letting go.”
He shook his head, as if the discovery confounded him still. Phoebe felt a peculiar warmth. Wolf hadn’t let go.
They began a slight descent. It felt like exhaling. Something had finally loosened between them, a change even the landscape seemed to reflect: gentler mountains, exposed rock, yellowish and crumbly-looking like something baked. Punishing turns exposed views of staggering beauty; often Phoebe would stare in confusion before she could even react. “Look,” she cried. “Oh my God, look!” By lunchtime she was exhausted.
A strong wind battered the restaurant. Wolf swirled the wine in his glass, then drank. “Do you ever think how things might be different for you if Faith were still alive?” he asked.
“For me?”
“It’s a weird question, I know,” he said. “But I mean, she’s on your mind a lot.”
“She would be anyway,” Phoebe said warily. “I mean, she’d still be my sister.”
“It’s funny, though,” Wolf said, “how things—people—have a lot more power sometimes when they’re not actually there.”
“Faith always had power.”
“True. True,” he said. “But it’s one thing to be a precocious kid. Twenty-six years old is different. She’d have made choices by now.”
“Maybe you guys would be married,” Phoebe said, but Wolf winced, and she was sorry she’d made the comment. The truth was, she found it hard to imagine Faith just living a life the way other people did. It seemed unlike her.
“It’s strange,” Wolf said.
“What?”
“How when somebody’s gone they can start