The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [139]
“Yeah,” Barry said. “Especially when you weren’t at the Che Guevara screening, I thought, Shit, she’s just, like, gone—”
“Oh my God!” Phoebe said. “Mom’s film.”
Barry glanced at her. “That was months ago,” he said. “Anyhow, at the same time I kept having this feeling you’d be okay. That was stronger, I guess. In the end.”
“Huh.” She was disappointed.
“Not that I wasn’t relieved—”
“But you’re right,” Phoebe said. “You are. I’m the kind of person who stays around.” For some reason she laughed.
“You’re a survivor,” Barry said simply, his earnestness giving the cliché an unlikely ring of truth. “You just are. You and me both.”
That night, as Phoebe lay in her sister’s bed with the chimes fluttering at the window, she was racked by an intolerable sorrow. For years those chimes had seemed an echo of her sister’s voice, reminding Phoebe that Faith was there, somewhere, waiting for her. Now they sounded empty. Phoebe moved back into her old room the next day for the first time in years, sleeping before a bright-eyed audience of faded stuffed animals.
Phoebe remembered a movie she’d seen years before on TV called Latitude Zero. When a ship reaches latitude zero, its captain finds himself transported to a marvelous land beneath the sea where the streets are paved with diamonds. He grabs a handful of gems and crams them into his tobacco pouch to bring home with him, prove what he’s seen, but back in the real world he opens the pouch and finds it stuffed with tobacco again. No one believes him.
Phoebe’s first week home was blessed with a certain novelty despite its disappointments, but as the second week passed, a numbing depression settled over her. Nothing had changed, and against the sameness of this city, her life within it, Phoebe’s time away—a lifetime unto itself—seemed reduced to a brief, hallucinatory flash.
She began staying indoors, wandering the house or lying on her bed staring out the window, unaware of the passage of time. She slept and slept, and when she wasn’t asleep, she daydreamed about her journey. Phoebe saw herself cloaked in a golden haze, riding trains, waking up beside Wolf with fresh sunlight pouring over the bed—could she really have been there, done those things? Already it seemed far-fetched, an exotic wish. Even her worst times assumed, in retrospect, a powerful, moody allure. But Phoebe gave her present self no credit for them. On the contrary, the subject of her memories seemed another person altogether, to be admired, envied, measured against.
She and Wolf had ridden by train from Vernazza up to Genoa, then into France. “What about the Volkswagen?” Phoebe kept asking as they were making made these arrangements. “Shouldn’t we get the car?”
“I’ll get it later,” Wolf had replied, evasively, and finally, “The thing was on its last legs anyway.” Only during their two days of chaste train rides in crowded sleeper cars did it occur to Phoebe that the real reason might be that he didn’t want to drive with her. Driving would be like before, with everything between them still about to happen.
Finally they’d crossed the Channel and arrived in London, cool, doused in light rain, looking quite unlike the festive city Phoebe remembered from her June arrival. In a heavy mood they walked to the Laker Airways office and arranged for her return the following day. To escape the rain they went to the National Gallery, trudging dutifully among the portraits and landscapes, then Wolf had phoned some friends, whom they’d gone to meet at a pub on Hampstead Heath.
By then it was dusk, the air filled with a pungent odor of smoking wood. The sky was beginning to clear, a virulent orange behind the last debris of clouds. Phoebe drank a half-pint of cider and grew tipsy—she was going home—watched Wolf laughing across the big table over his pint of Guinness topped with its layer of creamy foam and was struck by the change in him. Wolf’s hair had grown, he was tanned, wore two days’ growth of beard, but the change went deeper: an absence of some