The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [108]
eighteen
Phoebe woke to the sensation of having spent hours turning on a spit. She lurched to the sink and vomited, shutting her eyes afterward while she cleaned out the sink. She flapped the French windows to air the room, then scoured her teeth. When she lay back down, she was folded into softer sleep.
Later she heard Wolf’s footsteps next door and tried to remember the last sequence of events between them. Grabbing him and not letting go, that seemed the gist of it, Wolf forcing her away. Remembering made her weak with shame. The room kept turning; Phoebe closed her eyes to still it. They’d played this game as children, you whirled in a circle, then stopped, savoring the explosion of dizziness in your brain.
She would have to get away from him.
Phoebe rolled onto her stomach. Incredibly, that pulse of longing still beat through everything else, Poe’s tell-tale heart pounding from under the floorboards. Seamlessly it mingled with her sickness, like two halves of one thing. She had to get away from him.
Eventually Wolf knocked. From the bed Phoebe eyed him in the doorway. Somehow she’d managed to dress herself. Wolf looked unwell, his skin like clay, mouth ringed with white. He was holding her key. Dimly, Phoebe recalled dropping it in the hallway the night before.
In the covered Galleria near the cathedral they stood side by side at a bar drinking cappuccinos, eating brioches to calm their stomachs. Italian men in beautifully cut suits surrounded them, conversing with the fabulous speed of auctioneers. It was Sunday. The sound of church bells rocked through the parks and streets like laughter. The city felt empty. The bells and flood of bright sun made Phoebe think of her father’s funeral, a clear winter day in Mirasol, navy-blue sea stirring against the beach. The bells rang and rang—the same small church where her father had gone as a boy, only two blocks from the sea, so you felt grains of sand between your shoes and the tile floor. Something festive, celebratory in the heedless flinging of those bells, the blue sky. Bent cans outside the church were luminous; you could hardly open your eyes. As Grandma led Phoebe toward the doors, a dog had flailed up to her barking, flipping its tail. Phoebe crouched on the sidewalk to pet it. “Oh now, leave him be,” Grandma said, her pale, watery eyes full of sadness. Her son was dead. Their mother had not permitted a wake—“It’s bad enough they had to see him dying,” she’d said. “They’re not going to see him dead.” Grandma touched Phoebe’s head to make her rise, but the church looked so dark, sludgy organ music seeping from its doors. Faith went straight inside, but Barry knelt beside Phoebe and touched the dog, a shabby mongrel of a thing, its wiry tale beating ecstatically at this sudden bounty of attention. Barry leaned down and buried his face in the scrubby fur of its back.
August, Wolf was saying, the Italians were all at the seashore. They’d see them in Corniglia, he said, and smiled, though behind it Phoebe felt him watching her closely, trying to assess the damage.
There was no damage. Only the constant, uneasy desire to move nearer him. Now that it was there, it would never go away.
Their luggage was in the Volkswagen, parked off the cathedral square. Wolf wanted to get back there—Milan was full of thieves, he said. Stone dangled like moss from the cathedral façade. Phoebe’s eyes felt dry, raw; the bright light chafed them even through her sunglasses. Wolf unlocked her door and opened it. She looked up at him, squinting through her glasses. “I can’t go with you,” she said.
Wolf narrowed his eyes. “You’re not going with me,” he said. “I’m going with you.”
“No.”
Wolf stretched, the car keys flashing between his fingers, shirt lifting slightly from his jeans. “Shit,” he said to the sky.
“I can’t.” The simplicity of it satisfied her. The matter was out of her hands.
Wolf leaned