The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [120]
They reached the town and parked outside its walls. Hand in hand they walked up the same sloped avenue they’d traversed that first day. The town felt abandoned by all but a few skulking cats, raking their backs against houses. As they walked, Phoebe felt herself slipping back inside the present time, enfolded with each step, though it was tinged now by a certain nostalgia. Or had it always been?
Wolf unlocked the front door, then lifted Phoebe into his arms and carried her up the carpeted stairs to their room. Some pressure between them had eased, and they laughed now, undressing each other and falling onto the freshly made bed. Phoebe looked at Wolf’s face, where it seemed she could read every thought. Yet he’d known Faith was there, known all this time and said nothing.
twenty
As it turned out, you couldn’t drive to Corniglia. So mountainous was that stretch of coast that the roads all veered inland; it could take hours to get from one seaside town to the next. Wolf and Phoebe learned this in Pisa, where accordingly Wolf parked the Volkswagen on a back street near the train station and left it. Phoebe worried about leaving the car when he’d talked so much about thieves. But he seemed indifferent to its fate.
Wolf’s dread of going to Corniglia had grown palpable in the days since their Lucca trip. Phoebe would wake in the dead of night to find his eyes wide open, riveted to the ceiling. “What?” she said. “What?” But Wolf shook his head, seeming not to know. He made love with a ferocity that half frightened her, as if by forcing them both more deeply into that moment he might propel them beyond it, to freedom.
Phoebe, too, was distracted by thoughts of Corniglia, but it was a thrilling distraction, a promise. The sense of a secret awaiting revelation had grown in her. She and Wolf would embrace it together, and in doing so, seal a final bond between themselves. Yet for all her anticipation, Phoebe felt no impulse to move. Days kept passing. It was Wolf who finally said early one morning, “Let’s just go. Today. Get this thing over with.”
In Pisa they boarded a local train for Genoa. The elusive Corniglia was not among its many coastal stops; they would have to get off one town north, in Vernazza, and spend the night. By now it was nearly sunset; packing, driving, planning their next move had taken up the day. The train was jammed with Florentines headed for the seashore. Phoebe and Wolf were forced to stand. There were groups of warbling schoolchildren, also hundreds of adolescents dangling from the windows with cigarettes dangling from their mouths, trading salvos of shrill Italian. Phoebe watched, amazed by their swaggering naivete, a thoughtless arrogance she could not imagine in herself. She envied them. Yet mingled with that envy was a curious desire to protect these children, shield their innocence.
Eventually she and Wolf landed facing window seats. The surrounding commotion made it difficult to talk. The train moved languorously as the sun dropped to the horizon. Two leathery older women sharing their compartment pulled sweet after sweet from their beach bags, devouring each with furtive pleasure. Before the train had reached the coast, Phoebe sensed the presence of the sea and felt a wild urge to see it, just see the water spread wide into the distance. She was used to seeing the ocean every day of her life. It struck her only now how much she’d missed it.
Phoebe nearly cried