The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [75]
“Faith didn’t want me around anymore, is the bottom line,” he said.
“I know.”
He looked startled.
“Her postcards,” Phoebe said. “I saved them.”
Wolf shifted in his chair. “What did she say?”
“Just, how she was glad when you left. How you’d been holding her back and now she was free.”
Something moved around Wolf’s mouth. Phoebe wished she hadn’t told him. He took a last pull on his cigarette and mashed it into the ashtray. “I’ve thought a lot about why it happened, needless to say,” he said. “But I don’t know. I honestly don’t know why.”
“Well, I want to know,” Phoebe said.
“Understandable.”
“That’s what I’m really doing over here,” she went on, unable to stem the surge of confession rising in her chest. “I’m going to every place she went, all the way to Italy, you know, to Corniglia. Where it happened.”
Wolf’s narrow eyes widened visibly. “Jesus,” he said. But Phoebe barely noticed; for the first time in days—weeks, it seemed—some confusion had lifted and she knew again why she’d come here. To find out what happened.
“What do you think you’ll learn, going down there?” Wolf said.
“I don’t know,” Phoebe said. She felt exhilarated.
Wolf shook his head. “Me either.”
Phoebe sensed from Wolf’s expression that she’d given something away, that he saw her differently now. But her impression of Wolf had shifted, too; he was a man who had nearly recovered from something. His diminished size seemed part of this evolution, as if growing older had been, for Wolf, a matter of scaling back.
“How come you never went home?” Phoebe said.
He took a long breath, drawing a cigarette from his pack but not lighting it. “I couldn’t,” he said. “Start up again, like nothing happened? How could I do that?” His face looked bare, stripped of something. “So I waited,” he said. “Years kept passing. This ended up being my life.”
He opened his hands and smiled his new, hesitant smile. Phoebe smiled back. An understanding passed between them, as if, for the second time that day, they’d turned in a stairwell and recognized each other.
It was late afternoon when they walked back to Wolf’s apartment. Carla’s shift at the hospital would end soon, and he wanted to meet her. Phoebe felt nearly comatose, done in by the beer and her lingering frailty. She would go to sleep at Wolf’s, they decided; he would stay at Carla’s that night and come back for Phoebe the next morning. He would take her to the countryside; they’d tour some castles.
Phoebe noticed Wolf looking at her often now, as if his wonderment at her presence had sharpened with the hours. “Goddamn, this life is strange,” he said when they reached the street where his building stood.
“But good,” Phoebe said. “Right?”
Overhead, the white trees spilled their blossoms heedlessly, like artificial snow.
fourteen
It wasn’t Wolfs old pickup truck, but it felt something like it to Phoebe: an orange Bug, top down, Janis Joplin rasping over the tape deck. Wolf drove as she remembered, sprawled languidly in his seat, one hand nudging the wheel as if it were a fan whose breeze on his face he was adjusting.
They were headed south, toward King Ludwig’s castles. Wolf had come back from Carla’s that morning with eggs and pears and dark bread, and fixed Phoebe breakfast. He’d made a careful sightseeing plan, a change from the old days, when Phoebe recalled him herding people indiscriminately into the back of his truck, then thundering into the hills without direction, scaring up clouds of silty dust.
Phoebe felt exceptionally clean. She’d showered for thirty minutes in that scalding white bathroom, scrubbed her feet and legs and elbows where it seemed an invisible layer of dead skin had collected. Finally she’d opened the bottle of Chanel No.