The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [103]
Back on the road Phoebe battled a froth of nervous laughter that seemed continually on the verge of overflowing her. She’d felt this way for a while, waiting to leave Munich with Wolf. Their imminent departure had infused the city with fresh exquisiteness—tumbling church bells, piles of white sausages, the burned smell of sugar-roasted peanuts—these broke across Phoebe in moody, shuddering waves, like memory. She assumed her happiness must come from knowing she was headed toward the danger, the bright simmer of Faith’s activity. At times Phoebe practically saw it: a flicker of motion, like the shadows of flames, just beyond the edges of her sight. She wasn’t afraid. After all that had happened, it seemed there was no fear left in her.
As a child, before holidays or her birthday Phoebe might be doing the simplest thing—say, cutting up a peach—and find herself smote by this same delicious awaiting. The world shivered around her, winking, complicit, the wet peach opening like a grin in her hands.
Wolf was laughing, too, but always after a pause, as if Phoebe’s high spirits were bright coins fluttering down to him through deep water.
The air turned humid, heavy with the scent of eucalyptus. Fingers of cypress rose among the pines. Deep, ragged clefts gouged at the hills like the marks of recent violence, as if the hills themselves had been torn from the earth only hours before.
For the first time since her arrival in Munich, Phoebe no longer felt like Wolf’s guest. They were sharing an adventure now; it was Wolf who first pointed out the rows of grapevines stitched neatly into the hillside. He pulled over and put down the Volkswagen’s top, and they stood quietly outside the car for several minutes, inhaling the tart smells of soil and ripening grapes.
When they were driving again, Phoebe sensed in Wolf the beginnings of a new curiosity, an eagerness to separate her from the tide of history and coincidence that had swept her into his midst. He mentioned her father. “I was sorry I never got to meet him,” he said.
“You would’ve loved him, my dad,” said Phoebe.
“How well did you know him?”
She turned to him, offended. “He was my father!”
“You were little when he died, that’s all I mean,” Wolf said. “Although hell, plenty of fathers live to be eighty and never know their kids. The majority, some would say.”
“Well, not mine. You would have loved him.” Phoebe realized she’d already said this.
“Sometimes I felt like I almost knew him,” Wolf said. “Everything he left behind—that house, all those paintings, you guys … when I looked at the shape of all that, sometimes I thought I could see his outline.”
Phoebe wanted to ask what he’d seen, but was afraid Wolf might interpret the question as her not knowing her father. “What did you think of his paintings?” she asked.
Wolf considered. Phoebe tried not to look as if she actually cared. “I always wondered why he never painted you,” he said. “There were a few pictures of Barry around, not many, about a zillion of Faith. I think I asked her once, why he never drew you, but she didn’t know.”
“I was a bad subject,” Phoebe said. “Barry too.”
“What, you squirmed?”
“I was too stiff. I sat still okay but I was just stiff, I came out like a wood doll.” She laughed, empty, skittish laughter. She was remembering the deep apprehension she’d felt under the scrutiny of her father’s dark eyes, the powerful beam of his attention. “Hold still,” he would say, and Phoebe would freeze on the spot, hesitant even to breathe for fear of breaking that attention, scattering it like birds startled from a tree. But it was no good, she couldn’t relax.
“It was my fault,” she told Wolf. “I didn’t look natural.”
He nodded, noncommittal. But it was true: at the hospital, during the few times when Faith’s energy had abandoned her and she’d stayed at home or collapsed sleeping in the chair by her father’s bed, Phoebe had tried to replace her, poised on the hard stool, determined, like Faith, to hold utterly still while giving the impression