The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [85]
“This year, 78. Oh yeah,” she admitted. “I guess it is a decade.”
“You are how many years?” Carla asked.
“Eighteen.”
Carla exclaimed, speaking in German to Wolf.
“She says you’re young to be traveling alone,” he translated, adding with the same tense joviality, “which is true enough.”
Phoebe considered alluding to his own youthful travels but thought better of it. That would be almost like bringing up Faith. She shrugged.
“In America we grow up fast,” Wolf said with mock bravado.
Carla grinned. “But you are staying children for always.”
After dinner Wolf and Carla pushed their plates away and lit cigarettes. They divided up the newspaper, spread it over the glass and began combing the apartment listings. The Lakes would return at summer’s end; they had to find one before that. Phoebe left them in their cloud of smoke and brought the plates to the kitchen. “You guys cooked,” she said, dismissing their languid offers of help.
She piled everything in the sink and turned on the water. While it ran, she began quietly opening drawers, surprised at how fragrant some were despite their emptiness, cloves, coffee, peppermint, as if the contents had just been removed. She found a sack of prunes, a bag of straws. Phoebe hoisted herself onto the counter and stood upright to inspect the highest cupboards. Here were products still in boxes—the Lakes’ wedding gifts?—a cheese board shaped like a crescent, a small hibachi grill and shish kebab set. A dense silence clung to these objects. Phoebe had loved to babysit for precisely this sensation: other people’s lives spread open around her, like having the power to go inside rooms you’d glimpsed through street windows. Inevitably Phoebe would open the father’s closet door to look at his ties, suspended there as if forever, so still and elegant.
Phoebe stepped along the counter as far as she could go without entering Wolf and Carla’s range of vision, working her way through a set of lobster bibs, a fondue pot, some cryptic machine whose apparent purpose was the compression of bread and leftovers into tidy loaves. No wonder the Lakes hadn’t used it. When the sink was at the point of overflowing, she climbed back down and washed the dishes, a delicious lightness in her chest. Afterward she left the water running in the empty sink and hid impulsively in the V of the open door, peering through its crack at Wolf and Carla leaning over their newspaper. Carla exclaimed at something she’d found, set down her cigarette and circled the item with a stubby pencil, her other hand groping for Wolf as if for a pair of glasses or a cigarette pack, finding his wrist without lifting her eyes from the paper. The gesture transfixed Phoebe—the inadvertence of it, the thoughtlessness. Wolf rose from his chair and leaned over her, his chest to Carla’s back. He kissed her temple, breathing in her smell while his eyes perused whatever it was she’d found in the paper. The sheer ordinariness of it all confounded Phoebe, as if any one of these things might happen several times in a day, with no one watching. They belong to each other, she thought, and found herself awed by the notion—knowing someone was there, just there, reaching for that person without a thought.
Later the three of them moved to the living room. Wolf discovered he’d left his tapes in the car and ran downstairs to get them. “Wolf,” Phoebe called after him, wanting him to check for a hairbrush she couldn’t find. But she’d missed him.
Carla lay haphazardly on the couch, one leg over the armrest. Phoebe noticed the curve of her hipbones through her jeans. “This name you are giving to Sebastian,” Carla said. “Olf?”
“Oh, Wolf,” Phoebe said. “It’s a nickname.”
“Like animal? Wolf? Yes, yes,” Carla said, approving. “The eyes, yes.”
Wolf returned, puffing from his sprint. He squatted by the stereo.
“Wolf,” Carla called to him playfully. “Why I am never learning this name?”
Phoebe saw Wolf stiffen. Lightly he said, “It’s old.”
“Where is coming from, this name?”
Her question was aimed