The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [90]
Wolf lowered himself to the rug and leaned against the base of the couch so he was in front of Phoebe, to the left of her shins. She couldn’t see his face. He lit a cigarette, using one bare foot to drag the ashtray over.
“Well?” Phoebe finally said.
“I’m kind of at a loss,” Wolf said. He sounded nervous.
“Just tell what happened.”
“I’m afraid it’ll sound weird, out of context.”
“About Berlin,” Phoebe said. “What you weren’t supposed to tell me.”
“Okay,” he said, “okay.” He dragged on the cigarette as if it were a joint. “Well, we left the States, Faith and me. You know that, obviously.” He gave a nervous, smoky laugh. “We left because of this bad feeling.”
“What feeling?”
“Just, things going sour. Things having already peaked. There was a mood in the air like something had turned, bad omens or something, I don’t know.” The cigarette shook in his fingers. “I guess Cambodia was the beginning. April. Or maybe not Cambodia … no, but it was, I mean, bad things happened before that, Christ knows, but invading Cambodia after everything we’d done to stop the war … you thought, Jesus, has anybody heard us? Then the National Guard just mows down those kids at Kent State. Kids, you know?—just blew them away. It was a level of evil you couldn’t cope with.”
Phoebe heard the bitterness in his voice, tinged even now by a flutter of amazement, a stung disbelief.
In the Movement, too, Wolf said, something had slipped. Hell’s Angels messing people up at Altamont, the Weathermen self-destructing, literally, in a New York City townhouse. All in a couple of months. The Haight was on a slide, full of junkies and runaways, gang bangs. They’d made a wrong turn somewhere back, that was how it felt. Now they were lost.
“Faith and I had been broken up almost two years, barely spoken,” Wolf said. “Then in June I spotted her across a courtyard at Berkeley during some rally, another windbag speech. I watched her getting more and more bored, and when she started to leave, I came around and intercepted her. We kissed hello. I said, ‘So, what do you think of all this?’ ‘I think it’s bullshit,’ she said. ‘I don’t mean the rally,’ I said. ‘I mean everything, the whole scene.’ She said, ‘That’s what I’m talking about.’
“It was this warm day, kind of sweet-smelling. Faith looked so beautiful, that long hair catching all the sunlight. ‘Let’s split,’ she said, ‘just take off.’ I said, ‘Cool with me,’ so we started walking toward my apartment and suddenly I was dying to be with her again, dying for all that craziness she brought. ‘You know, I didn’t mean split the rally,’ Faith said as we were walking. ‘I mean split.’ ‘I know that,’ I said, although I didn’t, I had no idea what she meant, but at that point I didn’t give a damn what it was, I just wanted it.
“We were gone in a week,” Wolf said. “Faith had a shitload of money, from your dad, I guess. Five thousand bucks. I had some savings, too, plus I sold my truck for seven hundred.”
“I got that money, too, that five thousand dollars,” Phoebe said in a rush, then wondered why.
“We were after something,” Wolf said. “We truly were. In a way that’s hard to admit, it sounds foolish now but it didn’t then, that’s the difference. Hundreds and thousands of us, all reaching. It’s a powerful thing, that many people believing in something at once.”
I know, Phoebe almost said. How would I? she thought.
“I’d see my dad go off to Chubb Insurance every day,” Wolf continued. “Year after year in his suit and tie … was he happy? I don’t know. It was like happiness didn’t come into it.”
“Or my dad,” Phoebe said.
“Exactly! Guy wants to be an artist—is an artist—works at IBM to support his family and the job drains him dry, he can hardly paint. Finally gets sick … it’s tragic.”
Phoebe stopped short of agreeing. If he was a bad painter, was it still tragic?
“He was constantly on