The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [106]
“What about you?” he asked. “What lives do you imagine for yourself?”
“None,” Phoebe said truthfully. “It’s always been a blank.”
“That’s funny. I think of eighteen as the age of grand illusions,” Wolf said.
“Maybe when you were eighteen.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Oh, it’s different,” Phoebe said. “Things are totally different now.”
“Well, sure,” Wolf said. “But the basics are the same. I mean, you went to high school, you had friends and boyfriends, all that, you went to parties, concerts, am I right?”
Phoebe nodded, pleased that Wolf assumed she’d had boyfriends.
“Well, that’s all we were doing,” he said. “I mean, we were teenagers.”
Phoebe shook her head. “It wasn’t the same. By the time I got to high school, nothing was real anymore.”
Wolf looked at her quizzically.
“It’s true,” Phoebe said. “Everything was kind of fake.”
“Fake,” Wolf said, clearly perplexed. “Why would it be fake?”
“How should I know?” Phoebe said. “It was just fake. I couldn’t take it seriously.”
Wolf shook his head. Phoebe played with the hot candle wax, letting it harden on her fingertips. “Some things are real, some things are fake,” she concluded.
“How about this, right now? Fake?” Wolf asked lightly, but there was an odd tug in his voice, and Phoebe sensed that her answer mattered. She had a perverse urge to tell him yes.
“No,” she said. “Right now is real.”
Wolf gave a half-smile. “I’m relieved.”
Phoebe waited to feel angry with him for prying, but each hoarded truth Wolf teased from her seemed to leave behind it a lightness, like fragile heavy packages being lifted from her arms. Now they were Wolf’s, too. He was helping her carry them.
“I think one of these days the world’s going to look a lot different to you,” he said.
Phoebe was intrigued. “How?”
“Just—yours,” he said. “Yours.” And he looked at Phoebe with such palpable sympathy that she wondered what in herself could possibly have inspired it.
“I hope you’re right,” she said.
Wolf grinned. “I’m right.”
Veal, chicken, ribbons of salad; like casualties, the empty plates and second empty bottle were spirited away from their table. So much wine had eroded Wolf’s usual guard; gone was that studied good nature reminiscent of young male teachers at Phoebe’s high school. She found her gaze stumbling against his and leaning there, unable to break away, and again that desire would stun her. She stalled mid-sentence, too amazed to continue. For all her crushes on boys, Phoebe had never felt so powerfully drawn to anyone. In fact, often when she and the boy finally sank back on the sand or a bench or the seat of his car, something in Phoebe shrank from his soft lips and clamoring heartbeat. Her mind wrestled free, veering back to Faith and Wolf in her mother’s bedroom, the white door shut, watching from the end of that long hall, trying to fathom it. “Come on,” Faith said, taking Wolf’s hand, and Phoebe would try with her mind’s eye to follow, always realizing that whatever happened between herself and this boy would not bring her any nearer that door, not make the slightest difference in her life. Finally she would have no choice but to break free as she had that day from Kyle, for already she was gone. Like hearing her name called again and again, louder each time, finally having to turn.
But this was Wolf.
And her very certainty overwhelmed Phoebe now with a riveting sense of power; light seemed to pour from behind her eyes, her smile was a nimble pair of arms reaching out to gather Wolf in. Other people did these things—why not her? Why not this? When Phoebe leaned down to adjust her sandal, the top of her dress fell open just slightly, her thick liquid hair spilled down her shoulders, pooling like oil in her lap, and Wolf watched. Phoebe felt him watching. Her very longing was a thing she could harness; it sharpened her, distilled her every impulse to a single burning knot