The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [74]
“Wolf, what?”
“Nothing,” he said absently. He seemed disoriented, as if he himself were unsure what had just happened. “Let’s get out of here.”
They left the park in silence. Phoebe didn’t ask again. As Wolf had gazed up at her from the path, she’d seen a kind of parting in his face, like a door swinging open and shut on a dark room. Phoebe had no idea what this meant. But she was glad, relieved in some way to have seen it.
They ate lunch at one of the oldest restaurants in Munich, businessmen inside glowing cocoons of smoke, smells of beer, salt, oiled wood. Diamond-shaped panes of glass filled the windows. Wolf and Phoebe climbed a narrow flight of steps and were seated at a scarred plank table. Wolf ordered beers, which arrived in bell-shaped glasses tall as wine bottles.
He raised his glass. “To the pleasure of drinking with you, Phoebe,” he said. “Legally, no less. Who would have thought?”
Phoebe sipped the sweet, malty beer, cloudy in her glass. The taste was whole, like a meal in itself. She hadn’t drunk alcohol since the champagne in Epernay with Pietro. It felt like a previous life.
Wolf watched her drink. “By the way,” he said, “my name is Sebastian.”
“Sebastian.” Phoebe burst out laughing. The beer seemed to flood her brain. “No way. Sebastian?”
Wolf laughed, too, reluctantly. It occurred to Phoebe that Carla was probably quite serious, being a doctor. She swallowed back her laughter.
“Right now I feel like Wolf,” he said. “I won’t deny it’s a pleasure.”
“So, should I call you Sebastian?”
They both smiled. The name hung there, ludicrous.
“Call me Wolf,” he said, “what the hell.” After a moment he said, “I’ll be thirty next year, can you believe it?” He seemed sobered by the thought, as if there were untold things he needed to accomplish before that day.
“Thirty isn’t so old. Sebastian,” Phoebe teased.
“Danke schön,” Wolf said.
He ordered sausages, sauerkraut, stuffed cabbage. The food arrived on dented pewter plates, and Phoebe ate until she felt faint. She drank a second beer. Wolf drank two more. Drunk, Phoebe felt her hold on the present beginning to slip; it was less clear to her now what sort of person she was trying to be. The confusion made her quiet.
The restaurant emptied suddenly, as if an inaudible whistle had summoned the businessmen back to their offices. Pale light fell through the windows, cutting the smoky air into diamond-shaped bands. Wolf lit a cigarette.
“I’ve thought about you a lot, Phoebe,” he said, “all this time.”
Phoebe was touched, amazed that Wolf had thought of her at all. “Really?”
“I mean it,” he said. “Just, hoping you were okay.”
There was a pause. “I guess I am,” Phoebe said nervously.
“I know this sounds crazy but I have to say it,” Wolf said. “I hope you haven’t suffered too much.”
Phoebe felt herself go red. “I don’t know,” she said. “I mean—”
Wolf shook his head. “That was for me, not you, that question,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” she said, unnerved. The truth was, the effect of Faith’s death on her own life was something Phoebe rarely thought about. The very event was blurred in her mind; her mother’s white face in a doorway was all she remembered, and for some reason a blue plastic horse, just a plain blue horse, square-bodied, round white eyes, a toy she’d pulled from the Wishing Well at the shoe store. Holding that horse and trying to believe that her sister was dead.
“When was the last time you saw her?” Phoebe asked. “Faith.”
Again something flared in Wolf’s eyes, that pain or alarm she’d seen earlier, by the bronze dome. “August,” he said. “Nineteen seventy. We went to Berlin from Paris. I left in August, she died in November. As you know.”
He leaned across the table, adjusting himself as if to offset some pain in his stomach. “After Berlin I came here, to Munich. I thought she might come down, but she never did. I was still here when it happened; my parents called. I talked to your mom, told her everything I knew, but it wasn’t much.”
“I remember that,” Phoebe said. “You talking to her.”
“We stayed