The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [113]
At first she’d been timid. She knew nothing, absolutely nothing of sex, had always assumed it required certain requisite skills, like golf or tennis. But Wolf seemed aroused by Phoebe’s very inexperience, knowing she was feeling these things for the very first time—with him. The hardest thing proved to be letting herself not think, not feel ashamed, and here the sudden compression of time was a help. Soon Phoebe no longer minded lying uncovered in front of Wolf, would not cringe anymore if she made an embarrassing noise or cried out. In moments she felt a kind of madness fall on her, obliterating all traces of self-restraint. She wanted more, anything; she wanted to die. Afterward these spells appalled her. That wasn’t me, she would think.
So consuming was their erotic life that everything else seemed circumscribed within it. Thought, conversation—these began in the physical realm and led inevitably back to it. Phoebe assumed Wolf’s engagement to Carla was over, but he never said so and she never asked. Their physical urgency drowned out everything else—even Faith seemed faint beside it. Phoebe found herself not thinking of her sister for whole hours, sometimes even a day. At night she would lie awake listening to the echoey silence of empty countryside, thinking how nothing beyond this room seemed even half-real compared with what was inside it.
The purest moments between herself and Wolf were those of repose, recuperation. Lying perfectly still, they would gaze at each other in thick exhaustion and nothing would seem to divide them: they could float inside each other freely as fish drifting through windows of underwater castles. But desire reawakened the distance between them, teasing, irksome, piquing them both to begin again the excruciating journey toward communion.
They kept their window open, filling the room with sunlight, fresh air, sounds from the courtyard below. Still, there were times when they needed to get out, “be vertical awhile,” as Wolf put it. A ruined tower stood on the edge of the town, and from its moss-padded heights they gazed down at the sprawl of boisterous landscape. Seeing Wolf clothed, out in the world, Phoebe often was shocked at how unmarked he was physically by all that had happened between them. Their flesh seemed ready at times to fall apart limb from limb, yet here they both were, intact. Somewhat creaky, lips faintly bruised, but unmarked in any permanent sense. If they went their separate ways, there would be no proof. This troubled Phoebe.
During interludes in the outside world they were careful not to touch; in their present state the smallest thing was enough to arouse them both. A kiss was certain doom. It happened more than once that having left their lair only minutes before, they would lose heart and turn back, quickly retracing their steps. These false starts always left Phoebe feeling moody, exiled from the buoyant, carefree world that wafted in from the windows.
“How abnormal is this?” she asked on the third day, lying among bedclothes they’d made up carefully not fifteen minutes before. Outside, it had started to rain. They were still clothed, for the most part. Phoebe’s stomach chewed away at nothing.
“It’s one extreme,” Wolf said, sounding sleepy. Soft hair covered his legs; Phoebe loved how the woodlike bones were encased in such softness. When she touched his knee, Wolf flinched.
“Let’s eat,” Phoebe said, sitting up.
“You couldn’t live this way, that’s for sure,” Wolf said, turning on one side to face her.
“I guess you’d have a lot of kids.”
He laughed. “That would put an end to it.”
They’d made love twice that first day before Wolf had even thought to ask about birth control. “What if I’d said ‘no’?” Phoebe teased him later, and he’d been embarrassed, perplexed himself by the lapse.
“I would’ve just dealt with it, I guess,” he’d said.
Phoebe lay back down. The restaurant felt so many steps away; an eternity would pass before the food was actually before them. Rain spattered the bricks below, sending a fresh wet smell through the open window.
“It’s not