The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [31]
Phoebe took the cigarette. The boy’s hands were thin, freckled. They trembled a little. “Light?” he said.
She nodded, placing the cigarette between her lips. It was filterless, and mixed with the tobacco was an oily taste from the boy’s hair. He struck a match and held it for her. Phoebe let the smoke wander from her mouth. “Thanks,” she said.
“Sure.”
Phoebe puffed, gently inhaling. A swell of dizziness stunned her. She smiled at the boy and he smiled back, his teeth gray, the bottom ones missing in front. “So long,” Phoebe said.
He nodded. As Phoebe wandered down the block, she thought she felt the boy’s eyes on her. At the end of the block she swung back around, expecting to intercept his gaze. But the boy was facing the street, eyeing the slow parade of traffic.
six
Phoebe walked quickly, trying to hold the fragile emptiness in her mind. Down Polk Street to O’Farrell, then into the Tenderloin, where prostitutes in hot pants and feather boas sauntered up to cars with the wary swagger of lion tamers. The air smelled of sweet, ripe things gone bad. Phoebe’s hands shook from the cigarette, and she threw the butt in the gutter.
But she kept thinking about her mother.
Again and again the scene played through Phoebe’s mind: her mother and Jack holding each other in the half-dark; herself, invisible, watching them. It had the terrible, fated power of a dream.
For years when she felt ignored at school, Phoebe would tell herself, I always have my mother, and imagine herself back at home, how funny she was, talkative, how lost her mother would be without her.
Phoebe walked up lower Powell toward Union Square. The air was heavy with fog, cold points of moisture on her face. The ocean felt so near, black and deep, ships’ foghorns crowding the night with their plaintive, guttural cries. Phoebe gazed at the palm trees flapping above Union Square and felt a tightening around her heart. This would never have happened to Faith.
And Phoebe saw, with a dreadful clarity, that in the end she’d failed to interest her mother enough, failed to hold her attention. Some flaw within herself made her extraneous to everyone. She stopped on a corner overwhelmed by a terrible pain. It was her fault, her own fault. She’d done everything wrong.
Wait, she thought, but wait—walking again, faster now—maybe she’d misunderstood, maybe the deal with her mother had been that they each would live a secret life and not tell the other, but Phoebe hadn’t realized—she’d failed to live the secret life and now her life was only this, a hundred empty years stretched uselessly behind her.
She entered Union Square. This was not a place you went at night. Phoebe sat on a bench and looked at the empty square. Overhead, white fog swept past. How could she make up the time?
A young black woman ambled through the square in thigh-high magenta boots, a silvery wig on her head. When the woman was some distance away, Phoebe left her bench and followed her from the square, up Stockton Street. She’d done this many times before, followed people who she sensed could lead her to shadowy, interesting places. Always at a distance. The woman turned inside a hotel lobby near the entrance to the Stockton Tunnel, and Phoebe continued on through the white, echoey tunnel, ignoring the elongated whoops of boys in passing cars. She emerged in Chinatown and turned down Broadway, heading into the thicket of strip joints and X-rated bookstores she was always straining to see through her mother’s car window. The night world glimmered around her, its colored light garish, too bright for ordinary life, like stained-glass windows. Phoebe passed the Condor, where the famous Carol Doda danced; Big Al’s, where tired-looking girls in spike heels and bathing suits were poised at the entrance before red velvet curtains, music pulsing out from behind them. Phoebe allowed herself only a glance, not wanting to draw attention, but she longed to stare at the women, to