The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [102]
“Speak for yourself,” Phoebe said.
Wolf started. “I meant you in general,” he said. “Not you you.”
For dessert they ate tiny mountain apples poached in red wine, thick sweet cream poured on top. A languor overcame them. Phoebe folded her arms on the rough wood table and rested her head in them. Absently Wolf touched her hair. She lay very still, wishing he would do it again, but Wolf had turned to bantering with the proprietress. A delicious prickling climbed Phoebe’s spine to her scalp, the sensuality of childhood, long hypnotic hair-brushings she’d traded with friends. Amazing, how easy it had been to touch people then. It felt so long since she’d touched another person.
The old man in suspenders rose carefully to his feet and donned his coat and a hat, which he tipped at the door as he took his leave. “I wonder where he’ll go?” Phoebe said. “This seems like the middle of nowhere.”
“Maybe he owns that little place next door,” said Wolf. “Maybe he’s eaten lunch at this woman’s restaurant every day for the past thirty years.”
“Maybe they’re secretly in love,” said Phoebe.
Wolf looked at her, surprised, then nodded approvingly. “I’ll bet he was waiting for us to get the hell out of here,” he said, laughing.
“I don’t think so,” Phoebe said. “I bet they’re just glad to be in the same room.”
Wolf glanced at the proprietress as if imagining it. “That’s nice,” he said.
As the woman added their bill, she spoke laughingly to Wolf, eyes teasing back and forth between him and Phoebe. Wolf made some reply and her expression changed. “Ah,” she said briskly.
“What did you tell her?” Phoebe asked as they moved to the door.
“I said we’re practically family.”
In the restaurant bathroom, more precisely the outhouse, Phoebe examined herself, poking at her flesh, and decided she was well again. Over the past several days a curious malady had afflicted her, sensitizing every cell in her body to the point of agony. She felt sprawling, obtrusive, conscious of her hands and feet and legs, her skin inside her clothing, her face and hair in shop windows she passed. At times her whole body hurt, a chronic, delicate pain like the ache of her scalp when she’d parted her hair a different way, then combed it back. Phoebe could not decide if her body itself was causing this ache, or her keen awareness of it. She tried to ignore her physical self, but for the first time in her life Phoebe found this impossible—every part of her seemed to clamor for attention. Her breasts felt so obvious, and she began plucking out her shirts when Wolf was around, to conceal their shape. Not that he’d paid her breasts the slightest attention; ironically it was her constant plucking he’d finally noticed. “What’s wrong, are you hot?” he asked Phoebe once, and though she swiftly denied it, he’d thrown open two windows.
Crazy as it seemed, Phoebe was certain her physical disorders could be traced to that brush with the prostitutes back in Paris—the moment when she’d realized that the women had mistaken her for one of themselves. Alone in Wolf’s bed she was assailed by memories of that encounter, broken windows, bruised thighs; she would place one hand on her breasts, one low on her abdomen, and feel an unnatural heat from inside them, a fever, an infection of the tissues or the blood. After three tormented nights she’d resorted to self-medication, first the penicillin tablets and cough syrup she’d brought from home, then a prescription drug from Wolf’s medicine cabinet that proved to be a sleeping pill and left her sprawled on the couch in a stupor all afternoon. Finally she’d tried the birth control pills, sensing as she broke the plastic seal that there was a certain logic to this choice that the previous remedies had lacked. She’d gulped one down, filled with hope that it would reign her body in, though afterward she feared the opposite might be true, that starting these pills might be another step toward relinquishing control for good.
But the pills had worked. The ache in her limbs had subsided, replaced by a pleasant calm. As of today, she