The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [112]
The remark seemed to echo. Something had happened, all right.
“Look,” Wolf said, lifting himself on his elbows, “we can get up and leave right now, all our stuff’s in the car. It’ll be one of those things we just had to get through, since we couldn’t seem to get around it.”
Phoebe nodded intently, as if taking directions. “Okay,” she said. “That sounds good.”
They lay still, watching each other. Get up and leave? Wolf’s eyes moved anxiously over Phoebe’s face, and abruptly she felt it again, a stirring right through the pain, through it, around it, until the pain seemed only to sharpen her longing. She moved to Wolf and he kissed her, tentatively at first, then deeply, her head in his hands. He was hard again—perhaps had been the whole time they were talking. The thought of Wolf wanting her again but holding back, letting Phoebe make the choice, overpowered her. Fearful, curious, she reached down and touched him. She knew nothing at all of men’s bodies. The effect of her touch was awesome: it seemed to stop Wolf’s very breath. He lay back, eyes closed in a wince. Reluctantly his hand encircled Phoebe’s, guiding it in a kind of agony, as if he were caught in a lunatic dream he could not burst out of. Sounds issued from deep within him, as if Phoebe were touching his very soul. Soon he began stilling her hand, keeping it there but not letting her move; for whole minutes they wavered in thick silence, Wolf’s hand on hers, his heart beating so loudly she could hear it. Phoebe sensed him teetering at the brink of an excruciating pleasure, his fear of tumbling into it. She moved her hand. Again Wolf stopped her. But after a moment she resumed, gently, resisting his pressure. “Stop,” he whispered, eyes still closed, then again, hoarsely, “Stop!”
nineteen
Phoebe tried in vain to keep track of the days. Her time was measured now in journeys between longing and fulfillment, the pace of which might vary from merciless speed to agonizing stillness. The resulting calm was always short-lived. Eventually the trip would be repeated, often so many times in a day that the day itself became meaningless. After four, Phoebe lost count.
Time compressed. She felt herself aging telescopically, older now than she’d been last week, or yesterday, even this morning, before the sun made its lazy arc across the bed.
She and Wolf left the room only rarely. When hunger drove them out, they ate ravenously at one of the town’s three restaurants, eyes fastened together across a white cloth, feet buried in each other’s laps. They ate mushrooms big as steaks, melting gnocchis in pesto sauce; they washed down lamb and veal and osso buco with bottles of Chianti. Phoebe grew fond of Tuscan bread, rough and saltless, perfect with the dry, tart cheese they were often served. When they’d eaten their fill, they walked straight back to their room and undressed.
Often it was too much trouble to eat. Phoebe lost weight, hips and ribs prodding from under her skin. Every part of her ached, legs and back and abdomen, her raw flesh. Yet far from quelling her desire for Wolf, the tinge of pain seemed to heighten its fevered pitch. At no time in her life had Phoebe felt so entirely her body’s citizen, yet at the same time her detachment had never been greater. She felt like a spectator, observing her physical self in baffled amazement as if it were a violent, stricken creature she were nursing through a fit.
Phrases she had heard or read would float to mind: “I melted at his touch,” “couldn’t keep our hands off each other,” “consumed by passion,” clichés that still provoked Phoebe’s scorn, but not her skepticism. From the depths of sleep she reached for Wolf; mornings they woke to each other’s caresses, afterward collapsing back into sleep without having spoken. Their appetite sharpened with the days, until sometimes it seemed only minutes since they’d crumpled helplessly on the four-poster bed that was their home before Phoebe found herself turning again to Wolf, half-ashamed until he pulled her to him with equal readiness.