The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [140]
As if hearing her thoughts, Wolf glanced up. Through the smoke and clatter and wet carpet smell Phoebe sensed his acknowledgment, his gratitude.
She left her chair and went outside, knowing Wolf would follow. Loud drinkers had amassed at wet, steamy tables. Amid the humid smell of beer and rain she looked over a hedge at the Heath, reams of lush grass steaming faintly in the sudden, late sun. Wolf came up behind her, wrapped his arms around Phoebe and lifted her hair, putting his face to her neck and breathing her smell. Phoebe turned around and they hugged, but when she tried to find Wolf’s lips, he stepped away, releasing her. They looked at each other. And instantly Phoebe knew it was over, that this embrace had been the last of something. The desire had left Wolf’s face, and his eyes, when Phoebe looked at them deeply, remained opaque. She felt an ache in her chest.
“I’m going home, too,” Wolf said.
Later, as they said a tense good-night outside their separate bed-and-breakfast rooms, Phoebe was despondent. “I feel like it’s gone,” she told Wolf. “All of it.”
He took her in his arms. “It’s the opposite,” he said. “It’ll always be there. We’re just moving away from it.”
And afterward, lying in her soft, narrow bed, Phoebe had felt the Heath outside the window, dark and still as a lake, and all at once Corniglia had felt so distant, as if two days of train rides had brought them years away, completing their escape.
In her third week home, Phoebe called him.
“Phoebe,” Wolf said, sounding taken aback. “You at school?”
“No.” Morosely, she explained the Berkeley debacle. Talking on the phone to Wolf felt strange; she’d never done it, except on first arriving home, a brief call to tell him she’d made it.
“How are you?” she asked shyly.
“Hanging in there,” he said. “I seem to have a few clients left.”
“Did you—”
“At least—” They both laughed, exasperated by the lag time in their overseas connection. “The Lakes are in Brussels another six months,” Wolf yelled, as if volume might solve it, “so that’s a reprieve.”
“How are things with Carla?” She was hoping for the worst.
“Improving.”
“Are you still getting married?”
He hesitated, the old guardedness back in his manner. “Unclear.”
“But you might?”
“I’m hopeful,” he said. “Let’s leave it at that.”
Phoebe felt a flash of despair. “What about the car?” she asked. “Did you get it back?”
He laughed. “A friend of mine was in Pisa, said it was stripped to nothing. So I’m buying a Fiat.”
“We have a Fiat,” Phoebe said uselessly.
“You take care,” Wolf said. “Keep in touch.” Meaning, Phoebe thought, I’d rather we not speak again.
“Okay,” she said. “You too.”
She’d lost weight in Europe, and despite her unease in Faith’s room, Phoebe couldn’t quell an urge to measure herself against her sister’s old clothing. Finally she succumbed.
The garments released a peppery, cinnamon smell as she pulled them on. And they fit, lo and behold; some were even rather loose. Ecstatic, Phoebe leapt around her sister’s room in corduroy hip-huggers and a macramé blouse, the star-buttoned jacket pulled over it. She blasted King Crimson, lit too much incense and posed breathlessly before the mirror in a floppy hat with a long peacock feather attached. Abruptly she collapsed on the bed, drained and lightheaded, resting her eyes on the batik ceiling while outside the window Faith’s chimes made their sad, splintering sound. She fell asleep.
It was almost dark when Phoebe woke. She climbed from Faith’s bed feeling groggy and soiled, then went to the basement and scrounged up five grocery boxes, which she brought upstairs. She packed her sister’s clothing into the boxes, folding it neatly, adding Faith’s hats, her Indian beads and poison ring and clay scarab on a leather