The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [57]
The waiter arrived, a good-looking, careless fellow with long-ish blond hair. When Phoebe haltingly explained that she would be eating alone, he removed the table setting opposite hers with a flourish. Most tables were occupied by several people, and wherever Phoebe looked, her gaze snagged on someone else’s. She thought of asking to move but dreaded the waiter’s reaction. She picked up the saltshaker and turned it in her hand, studying it.
Her waiter brought the wine. He’d begun performing his duties with gross exaggeration, Phoebe thought, uncorking the bottle like a magician preparing it to flap from his hands as a dove. A withering gaze failed to quell his merriment. Phoebe drank and drank, craving that give, that welcome loosening of the world, but the opposite seemed to happen: her focus sharpened, as if she’d donned a pair of high-powered glasses that enabled her to see clearly the pitying looks other diners were casting her way. Her endive salad might have been weeds yanked from the curb, the chicken dish a table leg. She imagined smashing her dishes to the floor, hollering aloud to the room at large, Don’t be sorry for me! Can’t you see I’m here for a reason?
Phoebe finished the wine and asked for the bill, which seemed unreasonably high. She paid it anyway and left, not raising her head until she’d reached the street. Along the wide boulevard people were strolling, enjoying the warm night. Phoebe walked with arms crossed. The food sat uneasily in her stomach.
One step, another step; like a machine, she found herself plodding back toward the hostel, the last place on earth she wanted to be. Her heartbeat spiraled; she began to sweat. She went straight to the twelfth floor and switched on the light in her room. There was no curtain, and yellow streetlights below gave the darkness a sulfurous tinge. It was nine-twenty. The room seemed tiny. It looked so plain—Faith would have done something to brighten it up, bought flowers in town, something. She’d hated dull rooms, had scandalized Grandma O’Connor once by pinning all her brightly colored underpants to the walls of the room she and Phoebe shared in Mirasol. Phoebe dug the little jewelry she’d brought from inside her backpack, hair barrettes, the bottle of Chanel No. 5, and spread them over the night table and window-sill and small desk.
The bathroom was near the elevator. Phoebe paused in the dim hall and listened for movement, intending to knock at someone’s door and ask for an aspirin. But she heard not the faintest whisper of motion, as if she were the twelfth floor’s only inhabitant.
Phoebe changed into her sleeping shirt, turned off the light and lay on the bed, arms folded. The ceiling was made of white squares that sparkled faintly. Her heart pounded in her ears. Something was wrong. She’d failed, Phoebe thought, but at what? Imagining herself in Europe, she’d always pictured someone else, physically even, a tall blonde with an answer for everything—as if, in the course of this journey, she would not only shed her former life but cease to exist as herself. Yes, she thought, to leave Phoebe O’Connor behind and be reborn as someone beautiful, mysterious. But the opposite had happened; her own narrow boundaries had hemmed her in, keeping everything real at a distance.
She seized the two humps of her ribcage. If I just could calm down, she told herself, but her panic swelled with every second. It flashed through her mind that whatever drug she’d smoked in Amsterdam with Nico and Karl had damaged her brain. She stared at the walls frantic to call her mother, but had no idea where to find an international phone at that hour. She sprang from the bed and pawed through her purse in