The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [81]
Phoebe turned away in despair. The water looked like dark beer against the rocks. Two old men stood nearby, surrounded by white geese snapping at hunks of dry bread they pulled from their pockets.
“Don’t get me wrong, I was in love with her,” Wolf said. “Crazy about her, absolutely crazy. I don’t expect I’ll ever, ever feel that way about someone again. Jesus God, I hope not.”
He squatted at the water’s edge. Phoebe sat hunched on the grass, chin on her knees. “What about Carla?” she said.
“It’s night and day,” Wolf said with feeling. “You can be in love and still have a life, you know? You can build something. Faith and I were like thieves. Nothing belonged to us, it was one long spree.” After a moment he said, “On the other hand, we were kids.”
Phoebe lay flat on the grass, watching the clouds break apart and recombine like railway cars. Wolf came and sat beside her, and she saw that the anger had left him. “I’m not saying Faith was bad,” he said. “You know I’m not, Phoebe, you know all this—you must! She was full of conflict. Before we ever spoke I knew that, just seeing her at school, the sadness in her face. Skirts every day, blouses buttoned to the neck. These weird, sad eyes. It’s the clearest picture I’ve got of her, in a way.”
“You had a class with her, right?” Phoebe said, sniffling. “Physics or something?”
“No,” Wolf said. “We were three years apart—we wouldn’t have had any class together. She probably made that up.”
Phoebe sensed him debating whether or not to go on, weighing the use of it. “What happened really?” she said.
He’d noticed Faith, Wolf finally said, watched her with mild curiosity for weeks until once he was driving home from school in his truck and he’d spotted her hitchhiking—in her proper blouse and skirt, the most weird, incongruous sight. After that he’d look for her sometimes driving down Eucalyptus, and now and then she’d be there, thumb out. Alone, always. Once he’d driven past just as Faith was getting into someone’s car and he’d had a silly urge to follow it, make sure nothing happened to her. But he had a girlfriend at the time, Susan, and she was with him.
Phoebe raised herself onto her elbows. She could hear Wolf sinking into the story, wanting to tell it. There was yielding in his voice, the pleasure of giving way where normally he would resist. “So what happened?” she said.
Once, when Susan wasn’t there, he’d driven down Eucalyptus and, sure enough, there was Faith hitchhiking, so he’d pulled over and picked her up. “I think we go to high school together,” he’d said, which apparently was news to Faith. This surprised him, he had to admit; he’d kept a pretty high profile. Faith was achingly shy, just looked out the window saying nothing, and Wolf had no idea what to say, either, that’s how edgy she made him. Finally he asked why she hitched, didn’t she know that was dangerous for a girl to do alone? Still watching the window, Faith said, “The bus is slow.”
Well, look, how would she feel about a detour to the beach? Faith said okay, not seeming to care one way or the other, so Wolf drove her to Ocean Beach, wondering what the hell he thought he was doing, it wasn’t even nice out for chrissakes, but he parked on the Great Highway and the two of them sat looking over the dashboard at the dunes and ice plant, fog condensing on the windshield. Gray sky, waves lumbering up, nose-diving onto the sand. Faith just stared out there saying nothing. Wolf getting more and more nervous at the silence, when suddenly she turned to him and said, “Hey, want to go swimming?”
He assumed this must be a joke. No one swam in San Francisco—who swam? It was late fall, the water gray and impermeable-looking as rock. But Wolf said, “Sure, why not?” thinking if it was a joke then hell, he’d call her bluff, and he followed her out of the truck onto sand that felt heavy and cold as freshly poured concrete. Faith took off her shoes but kept on the rest of her clothes, a blouse and skirt that whipped her legs in the wind, a