The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [64]
Daffodils in white paper.
Waiters shaking white cloths over restaurant tables.
Deep in Phoebe’s stomach, something was slowly uncoiling. When she rubbed her eyes, an electric mist hung in the air. My God, she thought, it’s actually going to work, and felt a thrill of fear.
From Rue de Rivoli she turned onto the massive Avenue de l’Opéra, but before reaching the Opera House itself, Phoebe veered right onto a smaller street, Rue des Augustins, then left, and soon was lost among a web of tiny streets that lifted gradually uphill into some kind of wholesale shopping district. One store contained nothing but racks of turquoise T-shirts with roaring lions on the front. White sailor hats crowded another. The cheap, garish clothing mesmerized Phoebe, as if her eyes had craved precisely these gold-tasseled combs and fake clotted pearls, necklaces of candy-plastic gems. “Blue T-shirts,” Phoebe said aloud, staggered by the power of word and object combined. “White sandals,” the phrase whispering across her lips, “white sandals …” whiter and more delicate than any pair of sandals she had seen.
Phoebe began to feel someone else’s gaze upon her, taking in her movements, approving. I’ve done the right thing, she thought excitedly and then stopped, distracted by the fluid, translucent skin of her arms, her opalescent fingernails.
By slow degrees, the landscape was flattening into two dimensions like children’s-book lands or religious paintings. Copper horses leapt from rooftops. Phoebe looked at the azure sky and laughed, knowing her sister was near, sensing Faith’s passion and humor and wondering why she hadn’t swallowed the white paper instantly upon arriving in Europe, saved herself so much sorrow.
Dear Mom and Phoebe and Barry, Yesterday at a chateaux outside Paris Wolf and I jumped over those velvet ropes that block off where you aren’t supposed to go. And we walked through the rooms nobody ever sees they were so beautiful and quiet with silk furniture and little glass things you could pick up. We pretended like we really lived there and lay down on a canopy bed with carved posts but maybe some kind of silent alarm bell went off because a guard came running in and totally freaked and we got thrown out but still it was worth it (Wolf doesn’t think so). But sometimes I think those velvet ropes are all over the world you just cant see them. In Paris I keep thinking where is the best most intense part of Paris, where is the absolute center of Paris and I cant exactly tell, I’m stuck outside the velvet ropes and I just hate them, it makes me so furious when all I ever see is the same normal stuff everybody sees. I wish I could climb over like in the chateaux but the problem is, in Paris unlike a museum the ropes are invisible, you cant tell which way is in which way is out. So you just keep trying. Love, Faith.
The world shuffled, arranged and rearranged itself around Phoebe like a bird puffing out its feathers. The speckled pavement poured downhill, gallons of loose sand. She jumped to avoid it touching her shoes, but the air felt so thick, thick as water, slowing her movements.
At the heart of each sensation lay the kernel of something familiar, a germ of ordinary perception or thought distorted beyond recognition. Sounds became indistinct; traffic, voices, airplanes, everything ran together into one larger sound like a crowd, hundreds and thousands of people assembling nearby. Something is going to happen, Phoebe thought, some tremendous thing is on the verge of taking place and she stopped where she was, stilled by a dragging, irresistible force like the sea’s undertow, stood quivering, waiting for the crowd to rumble into sight and sweep her along, but the crowd never quite appeared,