The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [143]
“Maybe just that one,” she said.
They dragged the boxes into the garage, then went outside. The backyard was overgrown, fragrant. Miniature daisies peppered the grass. Barry stretched, reaching toward the sky, then he grinned and dropped to the ground, lying on his back. Phoebe lay down beside him, her head at Barry’s feet. The earth was warm, soft. The gloom seemed to lift from her then, like a dark oily bird flapping out of her chest. She breathed the smell of grass and watched the slow-moving clouds.
“You hear those birds?” Barry said, his voice far away, husky-sounding from lying down. “That chattering? You hear it, Pheeb? I don’t know why but I love that sound.”
As Phoebe sat reading No Exit in Washington Square one Saturday, someone blocked her light. “Phoebe?” a man said.
She looked up, recognizing the guy but unable to place him. He was carrying a little girl in his arms. “Remember?” he said. “You trained me.”
“Oh yeah. God,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re …”
“Patrick. This is my daughter, Teresa.”
“Hi,” Phoebe said. She left her seat to look at the child, who had curly red hair and her father’s green eyes. “She’s so pretty,” Phoebe said. “I can’t believe you have a daughter.”
Patrick laughed. “It amazes me, too.” He wore loose jeans with what looked like swipes of plaster on them. After a moment he said, “You disappeared.”
“I went to Europe.”
“Just … up and went.”
“Pretty much.”
“Art was sure you’d been murdered. He kept saying, ‘I know that girl, she’s never even late!’ I guess he finally reached your mother.”
“Poor Art,” Phoebe said. “I should go apologize.”
“I’m sure he’s forgiven you.”
Teresa was squirming. Patrick set her in the grass and she tottered toward Phoebe, slapping her fat hands on the bench.
“Do you still work there?” Phoebe said.
“Actually not,” Patrick said. “I was down on my luck that month, but things’ve picked up, so I quit. Spend some more time with this one.” He lifted the little girl back into his arms. “I’m a sculptor,” he said. “My studio’s right over here, on Green Street. Three eighty-five. Come around during the day sometime, I’ll make you coffee. Or you can make it—aren’t you sort of an expert?”
“All right,” Phoebe said, laughing. “Maybe I will.”
As Patrick crossed the square, his daughter swiveled her head like an owl, keeping Phoebe in sight. Phoebe waved to her. The bells of the Church of Sts. Peter and Paul filled the air, striking the hour.
Something was gone. But something also was beginning. Phoebe felt this more than understood it—a jittery pulse that seemed to flutter beneath the city. A new decade was upon them. In Barry’s office the mood of manic anticipation infected Phoebe at times with a wild certainty that the world was in the grip of transformation. Everyone seemed to feel it—the clean, inarguable power of machines, the promise of extraordinary wealth. It filled them with hope. Phoebe was amazed that the world could ever feel this way again, much less so soon. Yet she felt it herself.
Women were cutting their hair. Not the soft, blow-dried Dorothy Hamill cuts of a few years before, but sparser, tighter ones, emphasizing the angles and power of the head. In front of the mirror Phoebe would gather her own reams of hair and hold them behind her, away from her face. The idea of cutting it off appealed to her, the lightness of it, like stepping out from behind a pair of heavy drapes.
Toward the end of November, Phoebe drove to Coit Tower at dusk. By now the tourists had gone, and there were plenty of spaces in the parking lot. Phoebe parked her mother’s Fiat and got out.
It was dusk; a charge seemed to hang in the air. There was no fog. Phoebe circled the tower, taking in every angle of the lavish view, the neon-blue sky, and wondering how, when exactly, her life had righted itself. For it had. She’d been accepted to Berkeley for January, that was part of it. But something in Phoebe had also relaxed, and now the loose,