The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [119]
A towel at his waist, Wolf examined his beard in the mirror above the sink. He’d been shaving twice each day so his stubble wouldn’t hurt her, and so much shaving had made a rash on his neck. Watching him, Phoebe was startled by the look Wolf exchanged with himself: a cold mix of regret and stubbornness, the look of a man who believes he has ruined his life. But when his gaze met Phoebe’s, she saw the tenderness again, that helpless opening which seemed to flush away everything else. “Let me dry you,” he said, and did so very gently, tamping Phoebe’s shoulders and breasts as if wiping sweat from a feverish child.
In the bedroom they switched on a light. The room was beautiful. Their failure to make proper use of it dogged Phoebe. Clothing lay everywhere, though the bed looked surprisingly neat.
“All right,” Wolf said, checking to see they’d left nothing behind. “We’re doing okay here.”
The night was cool and clear, moonless. The only illumination on the empty road came from the sweep of their headlights. To Phoebe the glittery sky had a hapless, random look, as if some precious substance had been wasted there.
“Here’s my idea,” Wolf said when they’d driven a ways from Lucca. “I think we should get out of Italy.”
The suggestion caught Phoebe off-guard. “Why?”
“Because I think we’re in some kind of limbo here, and it’s having this weird effect on us.”
“What about Corniglia?”
Wolf turned to her. The town had not been mentioned for days. “You still want to go to Corniglia?”
Phoebe hesitated. “No.”
“So the question becomes, what are we doing here?”
They twisted through the dark hills. The feeling between them was fragile, dangerous. They’d reached the center of something. “So where would we go?” Phoebe asked.
“Anywhere. Greece, Yugoslavia, hell, Mozambique. We can go anywhere we want—”
“Except Munich.”
Wolf said nothing.
“What about your work?”
“I’ve got a few things pending,” he said. “I’d just—I don’t know, I’d get myself out of it.”
Phoebe listened with rising dismay. Not a word of this sounded plausible. Wolf was talking as if they were fugitives, planning a life on the lam. It was ludicrous. He must have felt this, too. “Hell, I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.”
Phoebe turned to the window. The land flew past. It seemed wasteful, how much of it there was. The world was a rash, chancy place, a hill here, a star there. Even this car, herself and Wolf inside it, hurtling under a pointless sky. None of it mattered; it could be this way or any other way.
But gradually something else began to happen. As they drove, the gritty stars seemed to shift, realign themselves before Phoebe’s eyes, and her sister, whom she’d barely thought of in days, suddenly felt quite close again. Faith simply returned. She collected there, gathering in around Phoebe like a mist or a change in temperature until Phoebe felt her presence everywhere, perched between them in the Volkswagen, peering down through the cluster of stars, as if this car, these loping hills—the whole of Italy—were encased within a crystal paperweight balanced on the palm of Faith’s hand. She was back. But of course she had always been here. Must have been, hiding as she’d loved to do, giving Phoebe a taste of her absence. She’d been around them and between them, pushing them together—crazy, the thought of leaving her behind, what madness! And what a relief to have her sister back, to feel the world surging back around her in its old familiar shape.
“What are you thinking?” Wolf said.
“That we should go to Corniglia.”
There was a long silence. Phoebe wondered if Wolf was aware of her sister’s return. It seemed to her now that he was—that he’d known all along Faith was there, and kept it secret. “I guess you’re right,” Wolf said, sounding defeated.
They rode in