The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [124]
“Faith, what’s that thing you keep doing in church?” Phoebe asked that night as they lay in bed, Faith cupping one palm around the lump on her head.
“Praying hard,” her sister said.
Wolf returned from his shower, wet-haired and somewhat calmer. He and Phoebe were on best behavior now, like strangers sharing a train compartment. Phoebe showered, washing vigorously, possessed of a need to be absolutely clean. She combed the hair straight back from her face, pleased by the plain, childlike result. She wore her white summer dress. The bedroom seemed tiny with both of them in it.
They went back outside. Wolf took Phoebe’s hand, less a gesture of affection, she thought, than a desire to anchor her. Huge chunks of limestone were piled in a seawall at the harbor’s edge, and they hoisted themselves up to sit on one. The harbor was tiny, like a playground for the painted fishing boats. The sea looked dark and vast, streaked with silver bands of moonlight. Couples dined in the square nearby; sounds of their laughter and dishes lingered a moment, then vanished.
“Which direction is it?” Phoebe said.
Wolf gestured to the left, bulky cliffs a shade or two darker than the sky. “I guess Cornigila’s a couple of miles that way,” he said.
“Can you really walk there?”
“So they say,” he said. “I guess there’s a local train, too.”
“Let’s walk. I like the idea of walking.”
“Whatever you want.”
“I wish we could go now,” Phoebe said.
“We wouldn’t be able to see much,” Wolf said. “Not that there’s probably much to see.”
“You’re so grim,” Phoebe said. “It’s depressing.”
Wolf turned to her. “It’s funny you say that,” he said, “because I’m finding your elation pretty hard to fathom.”
“I’m not elated.”
“You are!” Wolf said. “You act like a goddamn miracle is about to happen.” He sounded exasperated, but in his face Phoebe saw the other thing, the trouble, and realized that Wolf was afraid.
“It’s like you think this whole thing is some kind of game, like she’s up there waiting for you. It’s surreal,” Wolf said, addressing the stars. “I find it absolutely surreal.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have come.”
“Are you kidding? The crazier you act, the gladder I am I did come.”
Phoebe said nothing. Wolf took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes until they looked smeared. “It’s a place,” he said. “You’ll walk up, you’ll walk back down.”
“Then what are you afraid of?”
There was a pause. “What I’m afraid of,” Wolf said quietly, “is what’s going to happen when the ghost you’ve been chasing all this time disappears into thin air.”
“No,” Phoebe said. “You’re scared to go up there.”
But she was only scaring him more. Wolf crossed his arms, looking into the water. “Why?” Phoebe said gently, turning to him. “Wolf, how come?”
“I don’t know.”
Phoebe put her arms around him, Wolf, her only ally. He rested his head between her shoulder and neck. “Why aren’t you scared, is what I want to know,” he said.
They decided to eat dinner, more for the ceremony of it than out of real hunger. At a table overlooking the sea they poked at bowls of steaming calamari in a thick red sauce. Couples surrounded them, elderly, teenaged, couples leaning together over glasses of wine, handing kicking babies back and forth. Phoebe watched a man lightly pinch a woman’s cheek as they shared a cigarette, the woman laughing, her color high, a white flower wedged behind one ear. We’re like them, she thought, taking Wolf’s hand across the table, but the gesture felt like bluffing. Phoebe held Wolf’s chilly hand and remembered spying through the crack in his kitchen door as Carla fumbled for his arm, Wolf breathing his fiancee’s smell while he read the paper over her shoulder. And with sudden, eerie dispassion, Phoebe saw that Wolf would never be hers in the way he’d been Carla’s, that the dazzling future she’d imagined with him was out of the question.
In the candlelight Phoebe stared at Wolf amazed, wanting to say this aloud. But his gaze was fixed in the direction they would walk the next morning. Maybe he already knew, Phoebe thought, maybe he’d known from the start.