The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [63]
Miss Mary Mack …
Phoebe gazed at the sky, singing softly to herself. She thought of how young she still was, all the things that hadn’t happened yet. She felt her connection to the stars and the planets, the old men smoking cigars on a bench next to hers, the people in yachts and slums and forests; above all, to Pietro Santangelo, who had saved her. Hope, Phoebe thought. There is always hope. A part of her was with him even now, Pietro Santangelo, riding past the stubbled, glittering fields that were God’s work, watching the sky fade to black.
twelve
Paris, Wow!!
Love, Faith
Phoebe sat on a front pew inside Notre-Dame, the white envelope in her hand. The acid itself was on a tiny white square of construction paper, smaller than her smallest fingernail. A red Mickey Mouse in suspender shorts was printed on it, one fat finger pressed to his lips as if to stifle a smirk. Phoebe found him menacing, but maybe Mickey Mouse had always looked like that.
She’d come to Paris after it became clear that nothing she did would revive the spell cast by Pietro Santangelo and the Reims Cathedral. She’d known the feeling was gone the moment she woke the next day in that cinderblock room, had hurried immediately through heavy rain to the Reims Cathedral, only to find it chilly and dark. She’d tried kneeling, standing, praying, slowly descending the nave with her eyes closed, then turning around at the altar and popping them open to gaze with all her strength at the rose window. But the hum was silent. Her wet hair dripped on the stone floor.
Phoebe had taken the train to Paris and arrived late the previous afternoon. She paid for a small blue room off the Place Saint-Michel, with a sagging bed and a window overlooking the street. She bought a falafel sandwich, wrote her mother another postcard and went right to sleep.
Another failure. Even Pietro Santangelo had seen this one coming—even he had recognized whatever it was in Phoebe that kept her from making the final, crucial leap. All morning she’d sensed her sister’s mounting impatience, imagined the antsy look Faith got when things went on after her mind had already strayed from them. And it seemed to Phoebe now that her time had nearly run out.
Gingerly she clasped the tiny square of acid and set it on her tongue. It had no real taste, just a faint sweetness at the back of her throat. She chewed until it turned gummy, then swallowed.
Two minutes, five minutes. Anxiety clutched at Phoebe’s stomach. The cathedral’s blue stained glass and echoey clamber of tourists reminded her of the vast indoor swimming pool where she’d taken lessons as a child: its warm, chemical smell, the dozens of strange children and slender, bushy legs of their instructor, who wore buried in his chest hair a gold whistle, which he blew to make them jump. Gazing in fright at the glossy, viscous-looking water, dreading that whistle—certain, once she’d plunged into the water’s sticky depths, that she would not resurface.
After fifteen minutes Phoebe left Notre-Dame for the open air. The acid might not work, she thought. After all, she’d been given it months ago. Did acid even last that long? And the thing was so small.
Following her map, Phoebe took Rue de la Cité across the Seine, then walked toward the Louvre along Rue de Rivoli. Life-sized female statues were draped languorously alongside windows and above them, their arms dangling, loose garments falling open.
Dear Mom, Phoebe and Barry, My French is the worst but luckily we have a friend who translates. Everyone in Paris keeps talking about the demonstrations of two years ago when they tore up cobblestones from the roads and threw them at the cops and they built barricades like the French Revolution. The whole country went on strike for a couple of weeks literally no one worked or studied they just wandered through the streets talking to each other. Nobody locked their doors people slept in strangers’ houses and fell in love and pulled the hands off the clocks outside because time was stopped. (Remember Mom?)