The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [39]
There was a rare, unmistakable jerk of anger in her mother’s face. “That shows how little you knew your father,” she said.
“I didn’t know my own father?”
“Not if you think he was perfect.”
“I don’t think that. But Jack—”
She was silenced by the arrival of their dinners. Phoebe glanced at the soft-shell crabs without recognition.
“Look,” her mother said in a hushed voice. “You adored your father, you were a little girl when he died, fine. I’ve never questioned that. But you haven’t the slightest idea what sort of husband he was, so please”—she shut her eyes—“please don’t presume to tell me.”
“You and Dad weren’t happy?”
“I’m not saying that! We were in love, we had wonderful times, but he was a difficult man and we had problems like every couple. You have no right to compare him to Jack, whom you hardly know, as if your father were some perfect ideal. I promise you, he was not.”
Phoebe looked at her hands, remembering her parents’ warm bed with its milky smell of sleep, what a comfort it had been to lie there. “You feel guilty,” she said. “That’s why you’re saying that.”
“Guilty? For dating another man after thirteen years?”
Her father bursting through the kitchen door breathless, the rattle of new paint tubes in his briefcase, dinner cooling on the kitchen table. The hope and strain in his face. “Because he never got to paint,” Phoebe said, and experienced in that moment a thrill of relief. All her life she had known this, they all had. But no one had said it.
Her mother’s face tightened. She stabbed at her fish, then set down the fork. Phoebe felt the weightless exhilaration of having gone too far. A fight would be unavoidable now, and she wanted it. She wanted to fight with her mother.
“I think we’d better change the subject,” her mother said. “Because in about one minute I’m going to say something I’ll regret.”
They eyed each other across the table. Their anger bent the air.
“Go on,” Phoebe said. “Say it.”
Her mother narrowed her eyes and sipped her wine. “How closely have you looked at your father’s paintings?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Phoebe, they’re bad. He was a terrible painter. There was passion galore, it was sweet to watch, but he had zero talent. Why else do you think he never had a single gallery show or even sold any paintings, for God’s sake, except to my parents? You think he was the first painter in the world who had to work for a living?” She paused, breathing shakily. Phoebe listened in speechless amazement. “I would never have said this to you, Phoebe—haven’t, in all this time. But for you to blame me, blame our family for your father not succeeding as an artist, well, that’s just wrong. I can’t let you think it. He invented that myth to comfort himself.”
“I don’t believe you,” Phoebe said softly. “I don’t believe he couldn’t paint.”
“The proof is hanging on every wall of our house.”
Phoebe felt a sudden, drenching wooziness. Something had begun that she felt powerless to stop. Her exhilaration leaked away, leaving her frightened—of her mother’s anger, of her own grinding urge to push things further, punish her. “Let’s go home,” she said.
“Fine.”
They sat in silence while her mother paid the check. The untouched meals were lifted away. Back in the car her mother fixed her gaze on the road, blue drop earrings leaping at each turn. Phoebe saw the pearlized gleam of her makeup—not for Jack, not for anyone but Phoebe—and was sick with regret at having wasted this night, tossed it away. What hope was there now of winning her back? Phoebe studied her mother’s sad face in the street light and felt only pity. Seizing this chance with Jack—why not? Taking Phoebe out to dinner to give her the big news, to celebrate. Now there was just the ashy disappointment of a ruined night.
Phoebe longed to apologize. She opened her mouth more than once, willing the words to come, but a weight seemed to push them back inside her. Too much had happened; to apologize now would mean accepting the terrible thing her mother had said