The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [87]
Phoebe roused herself from half-sleep and returned to Wolf’s desk. To its right stood a narrow set of shelves, the top ones stacked with technical-looking books in German, crisp catalogs: “New Sulfa Drugs from HAAGER” read one, its logo suggestive of test tubes. Another, by a company called Kat, was entitled “Agricultural Fertilizers: What to Expect from the Eighties.” Phoebe made her way down shelf by shelf until finally, on the bottom two, were the first personal belongings of Wolf’s she’d seen in the apartment. A tattered German-English dictionary, a pair of binoculars, a single Havana cigar in its silvery tube. A photograph of his parents in a small Lucite frame, smiling in fancy dress. Phoebe recognized them, though she couldn’t think from where. An antique pocket watch, pale heavy gold, elaborately engraved with someone’s three initials. The paucity and restraint of these objects were painful to Phoebe, as if Wolf had chosen to pare himself down to the minimum, inhabit a life as lean as his body.
On the last shelf sat a broad antique box, its top curved with age, inlaid with bits of mother-of-pearl. The box was too large to be opened without removing it from the shelf; Phoebe slid it out with a grunt and set it on the rug. It was a heavy box. She hesitated before opening it.
Two pink seashells greeted her eye, the kind Faith used to collect on the beach at Mirasol. Phoebe’s heart nearly stopped. She held the shells in her palm, so light, smooth and cool as porcelain. Of course they might not be Faith’s, shells were shells after all, every beach had them. Carefully she set them by her knee. Next came a diploma of some sort, pronged German calligraphy on yellowy parchment. It curled in a loose cylinder when Phoebe lifted it from the box. She began probing in earnest now, hands shaking with guilty fear, a beat of excitement in her chest. She was looking for something. A particular thing, Phoebe thought, a secret.
Awards, certificates, all in German. A miniature basset hound made from brown and white pipecleaners. Newspaper articles toasted with age, one giant front-page headline with several photographs of young people beneath it, two men, two women; Phoebe wondered if these were criminals, wished she could read what they’d done. Then a manila envelope, at the top of which Wolf had neatly printed, “Pictures.”
With trembling hands Phoebe opened it, removing a pile of snapshots that seemed in no particular order. The first was of Wolf—the old Wolf, Wolf as Phoebe still imagined him when his present incarnation was not directly before her. He was deeply tanned, hair hanging past his shoulders, a string of Indian beads encircling one bicep. He flung at the camera a knowing, arrogant grin Phoebe perfectly remembered, a white curve of teeth. He was leaning against his truck, shirtless, the muscles of his brown abdomen stacked like ice in a tray. Phoebe had grown used to the change in Wolf from those days, but only now did she feel it, an ache in her chest at the loss of that confidence, that cocksure swaggering joy she saw clearly in every detail of this picture. It was more than gone, it was impossible even to imagine, as if Wolf today were a pure rejection of that boy, recoiling from him with all his being.
The first picture of her sister produced in Phoebe an eerie, marvelous sensation, a prickling chill from the base of her spine to her neck. She’d grown up surrounded by pictures of Faith, but always inside their house. Now, thousands of miles from home, here was Faith, standing with Wolf knee-deep in a field of blue cornflowers, her face blurred with motion, Wolf approaching her with what looked like a pipe in his hand, or possibly a piece of bread. On the back he’d written in his pinched hand,