The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [83]
Phoebe murmured something, overtaken by shyness. It struck her only now, meeting Carla, how prepared she had been to dislike her.
Cloistered in the bathroom, Phoebe listened to Wolf and Carla speaking German, their gentle voices muting the harsh language as if muffling its edges with felt. A second door connected the bathroom to Wolf’s bedroom, where Phoebe’s backpack still was. While changing into jeans and a T-shirt, she peered around the room; last night when she’d slept here, she’d been too drained and dazzled by the turn in her fortunes to notice very much. Now she was drawn to Wolf’s dresser, a scatter of loose change and restaurant matchbooks. Phoebe hovered at the door, listening to Wolf and Carla. Was there a difference in the way he spoke to his fiancée? It seemed to Phoebe there was—a readiness to laugh, something. She knew only one phrase in German, Ich liehe dich: I love you. At least they weren’t saying that.
On the desk lay Wolf’s translation work, the unbound pages of a typeset German text on the left, and on the right, face-down, an enormous stack of handwritten pages. Phoebe flipped over the top sheet and found it crammed with minute, painstaking writing that she thought at first could not be Wolf’s. “In order to be effective,” she read, “the brace, which acts as a kind of corset on the growing spine, must be worn twenty-three hours of each day, with the remaining hour spent in therapeutic exercise (see Appendix 1).” The pen was one of those black artist’s pens whose ink comes out through a needle. Phoebe lifted a few more pages and read, “These sores, caused by heat and chafing from the plastic in the first weeks of use, should be treated with astringents, such as rubbing alcohol, in order to toughen the skin. Avoid all moisturizers, lubricants and balms; these will only prolong the condition.”
There was a knock. The door opened and Wolf regarded her quizzically. Phoebe realized she was crouched like a thief over his manuscript. “I was—curious,” she stammered.
Wolf grinned, moving closer. Phoebe sensed that he rather liked the idea of her spying on him. “Find anything interesting?”
“Yes” sounded shameless; “No,” potentially insulting. “I don’t know,” Phoebe said truthfully. “I’d just started looking when you came in.”
Wolf laughed. “Don’t let me stop you.”
They stood together, the manuscript before them. Phoebe smiled nervously.
“It’s a bore,” Wolf said in a different voice. “Treatments for adolescent scoliosis.” He shrugged, moving to the door. “Will you join us?”
Phoebe stood by the living room window. Outside, the tall trees shook dryly in the wind, their dense leaves distilling the white lights beyond to pinpricks. Wolf sat on the couch next to Carla, his right knee touching her left. Part of Phoebe refused to believe in the authenticity of their affection. She’d felt this skepticism with other couples, too, a suspicion that their closeness was contrived merely to persuade her, that without her there to watch, they would move apart indifferently.
Carla asked whether Phoebe had enjoyed Ludwig’s castles, her uncertain English giving the questions a stilted, textbook aspect. “I am sorry,” she said, lighting a cigarette and blowing a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. “My English is very …” She paused, as if groping for the proper pejorative, but managed only, “… bad.”
“You never speak it,” Wolf said.
Carla turned to him. “I know, but some years ago I am …” She looked away as if embarrassed, laughing suddenly. In that laugh Phoebe heard an eerie likeness to Faith—the same abandon, as if the laughter were a pair of arms she was letting herself fall into.
“I feel strange, in English,” Carla told Phoebe, real surprise in her voice. She motioned at