The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [37]
“I’m tired, too,” Phoebe sobbed.
Her mother held her another moment, then let go. “You seem awfully tense,” she said. “Is something wrong?”
Phoebe shook her head, ashamed of having cried. “I have to go,” she said. “I told them I’d come in early today.”
“Let’s have supper tonight,” her mother said. “Get dressed up and go someplace nice, drink some good wine. We haven’t done that enough lately.” Phoebe sensed her mother’s gaze playing over her anxiously.
“Okay,” she said, pulling on her down vest, which she wore even in summertime.
“If you want to,” her mother said. “But if you have other plans, we can wait …” She was searching Phoebe’s eyes.
“I don’t have any,” Phoebe said.
She was working with Patrick again. Phoebe nodded hello and donned her apron without a word. He took the hint. They worked the morning rush in silence.
During a lull Patrick shared a cigarette with Art. “Can I have one?” Phoebe asked them.
“Of course, dear,” Art said.
“No, I mean it.”
Patrick cocked his head, took a filtered Camel from his pack and gave it to Phoebe. She felt both men’s eyes on her as he lit it. She inhaled deeply, feeling a blow of white dizziness. When she looked up, the men were still watching her. Art looked worried.
“So I’m smoking,” Phoebe said. “So what?”
“What about your promise?” Patrick asked.
Phoebe leaned weakly against the counter. “Promise?”
“Not to smoke.”
The information seemed to take a moment to reach her. “Oh,” she said. “It broke.”
Phoebe spent her lunch break on the phone in Art’s office. She called her father’s lawyer, Henry McBride, whom she dimly remembered having known as a child. Come down to the office, he told her, sign the papers anytime. Her check for five thousand dollars would arrive about two weeks later.
“There’s no way I could get it today?” Phoebe said. “Or tomorrow?”
Henry McBride laughed. Phoebe imagined him, white hair, boozy red nose. “Sorry, my love,” he said.
Phoebe called Laker Airways, whose flights to London proved to be booked solid through the rest of summer. Alone, she might get on standby, the man said, but he couldn’t guarantee it. Phoebe returned to work feeling oddly relieved; for the moment, at least, there seemed no way she could leave the city.
She shared another Camel with Patrick when their shift ended.
Phoebe had long viewed herself as the sole audience for her mother’s unfashionable beauty, a subtlety lost on the fools she dated and Don Juans for whom she was nobody, a middle-aged woman in eyeliner. But tonight she sensed a keen awareness of her mother in every man they encountered, from the young valet who parked their car to their waiter, whose gaze never strayed from her mother’s face while he recited the specials. Pair after pair of moist eyes, and Phoebe saw what drew them: a new liveliness sharpened her mother’s features, dissolving her usual wistfulness like a mist burning off around her. Her long bare neck and delicate wrists seemed too exposed. Phoebe wanted to hide them.
“A Sancerre? Does that sound good?” her mother asked.
Phoebe nodded. The restaurant was new to her, a bustling, elegant place on Union Street, French waiters, specials scribbled carelessly on small chalkboards and propped at each table. No doubt her mother had been here with Jack, Phoebe thought, and felt a sudden, uneasy need to entertain her.
“How’s work?” she asked, buttering her bread with care.
“Well, it’s been great …”
“Are you—”
“We’re—”
“Go on …”
They shared an edgy laugh, both gulping their wine.
“I was going to say, we’re having our first rough-cut screening of the Che Guevara project next week. So that’s exciting.”
“Wow,” Phoebe said, oppressed by her mother’s frequent use of the word “we.”
They studied their menus and ordered, then her mother straightened the heavy silverware beside her plate. “I have some other news,” she said, obviously nervous. “Surprising news, I think.”
Phoebe’s heartbeats