The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [32]
Phoebe turned off Broadway and went inside a bar. It had a close, velvety feel, like a jewelry box where the ballerina twirls. Small round tables crowded the shadows. Phoebe sat on a stool and ordered a martini. She’d never had one before, only the residue left on olives her father used to feed her at the country club, a vile, medicinal shock she’d endured as the price of the olive’s deliciousness. “On the rocks or straight up?” the bartender asked.
“On the rocks.” She liked saying it. The time had come for a hard, different life. Spotting a cup of pickled onions on the bar, Phoebe added, “With onions, too.”
“You want a Gibson,” the bartender said.
“A martini.”
“With onions it’s a Gibson.”
“Oh. Then no onions.”
“I mean,” he laughed, “I can make you a Gibson. I’m just saying.”
Phoebe’s face filled with heat. “Okay.”
“Okay what? A Gibson?”
She nodded. A certain weight of attention seemed to be gathering upon her, but she didn’t look around. The bartender set an empty triangular glass on the bar, then paused at the approach of another man, quite short, neatly dressed in a brown pin-striped suit. His companion, a woman whose hair was arranged in a pale, translucent ball, sat at one of the small tables. Her face resembled a tabby cat’s.
The man in brown flicked his eyes at Phoebe. “You got some ID, miss?”
Phoebe looked at the bartender. The brown-suited man did the same. “You gotta card ’em, Eddie, I keep saying,” he said. “You’re my eyes and ears.”
Phoebe wormed through her bag for her wallet. It was hard to feel much confidence producing her fake ID, a wrinkled card with a blurry photo, making the unlikely claim that she was a twenty-three-year-old Las Vegan. The brown-suited man took it, studying the card in the light from the bar. His hands were beautifully manicured. “No can do,” he said, handing it back.
“Aw, give her the drink for chrissakes,” said the tabby-faced woman. “Drive yourself crazy, Manny, what for?”
He turned on her fiercely. “I got cops up my ass,” he said. “June’s the worst month, you got all these goddamn proms over at the Hyatt.”
The woman breathed smoke like a retort. “She look to you like she’s going to a prom, Manny?”
Phoebe slid off her stool and made for the door, ears ringing. A disaster, a complete disaster.
“Go to Paddy O’Shaughnessy’s, sweetheart,” the woman called after her. “Sansome and Jackson. They got happy hour till eleven.”
Phoebe did not go to Paddy O’Shaughnessy’s, she went home and started to pack. A determination had seized her: to flee the city, the country, her life. From the closet of her old room she yanked the backpack her mother had bought her for an eighth-grade trip to Yosemite, a hail of dust and pine needles raining down from its waterproof canvas. Phoebe opened a window and shook out the pack over the backyard, turning her face to the wet air and closing her eyes.
What could she do? She could vanish.
They would hardly notice.
She began rounding up things she remotely imagined needing across the world: the passport she’d gotten for a trip to Mexico with her mother, calamine lotion, the hit of acid she’d been handed at a party and kept for months in its white envelope. Birth control pills some doctor had given her, cough medicine, a snakebite kit, a book of Charles Dickens stories. She lay on the floor and groped under the bed for the box of postcards Faith had sent from Europe. At one time Phoebe