The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [77]
Wolf burst out laughing. “Phoebe, you’re wonderful,” he said, easy again. “You’re so completely without irony—it’s like discovering one of those tribes untouched by civilization.”
Phoebe was taken aback. She thought of irony as a purely literary concept, an elusive one at that. “I’m even not sure what it is,” she said.
Wolf wiped his eyes on the back of his hand. “I think irony may be one of those things you either can’t see at all or can’t see anything but,” he said.
They began to climb, land cresting and falling beneath them. Silvery flashes of lake appeared, as if the car were upsetting pitchers of bright, mercuric liquid, spilling it on the roadside. Far off, Phoebe caught her first glimpse of mountains, magnificent beyond the foothills like a giant white stage above the burly shoulders of an audience. She remembered clattering into the dusty hills in Wolf’s truck, how once, on a hot deserted road, he’d walked tightrope across an electrical wire, holding a fallen branch to balance himself. “Don’t!” they’d all shrieked when he started climbing the pole toward the wire, dragging the limb behind him. Someone knew someone whose cousin got electrocuted. But Wolf continued up the pole, and when he reached the top, he grinned down at Faith—it was Faith he was showing off for—grinned down at all their worried faces and said, “Hey, come on. Nothing’s gonna happen to me.” And then he’d done it, cool and white-toothed, taking step after step across the wire with a lazy elegance that had seemed the very essence of Wolf.
“Do you think you used to be arrogant?” Phoebe asked.
Wolf laughed. “Probably,” he said. “Did I seem it?”
“I’m not sure.”
Wolf grew thoughtful. “When I think of that time,” he said, “what I remember most was feeling like nothing could ever go wrong for me.” He turned to Phoebe with a hard smile. “That’s arrogance.”
“So how does irony fit in with that?” she said.
Wolf smiled again. “Blows it to pieces.”
Panting tour buses filled the parking lot. Perhaps a mile off, above a staccato of pines, rose a castle whose dimensions were eerily familiar to Phoebe, like a vision from one of her dreams. Crenellated towers, white stone, spires slender and pointed as paintbrushes—it seemed the precise castle she’d spent hours of her childhood trying to crayon. “What is that?” she asked. “I know I’ve seen it.”
“You have,” Wolf said, raising the Volkswagen’s convertible top and clamping it. “Disney used it as Sleeping Beauty’s castle. In the movie.”
“Oh.” This was not what she’d expected. Phoebe turned away dismissively, then looked back in spite of herself, drawn to the castle by a pull she remembered from encounters with famous people at Jack’s cocktail parties. It was never their achievements so much as sheer recognizability that made Jane Fonda and Michael York so luminous across a room, as if, in a random and chaotic world, they alone were meant to be. “Can we actually go in it?” Phoebe asked.
“That’s the idea.”
They went first to a smaller castle nearer by—Hohenschwangau, where “Mad” King Ludwig II spent his childhood. Trailing their robotic guide, the group sifted past soup tureens, porcelain dishes, faded tapestries of hunt scenes. The walls of King Lud-wig’s bedroom were painted with tiny yellow stars, and at the foot of his bed a door opened onto a miniature flight of steps leading down to the room below, where his future queen would sleep. But Ludwig never married. There was a brief engagement, broken without explanation, followed by his removal from power and mysterious death.
Phoebe lost herself in the tale of the ill-fated king. Dreamily she followed the group up a curved flight of marble steps that resembled bars of soap, hollowed from a century of footsteps. Upstairs, narrow windows overlooked rollicking hills. Wolf remained at Phoebe’s side, steadying her once when she stumbled, so that she couldn’t resist stumbling again on purpose, inviting his protection. She was aware of someone watching them, a young girl with pale hair and a frail, birdcage face. Only days ago Phoebe had scrutinized