The Invisible Circus

by Jennifer Egan

  “You a friend of Steve’s?” he said over his shoulder.

  “No. But I know his cousin, Kyle Marion.”

  He paused mid-step. “Not San Francisco Kyle Marion.”

  “Yes!” Phoebe said. “You know him?”

  There was a pause. “I went to high school with him,” the man said. He waited at the next landing. Phoebe’s curiosity had the better of her now, and in spite of her bruises she looked full at him. The recognition broke across her in a single white flash, raising goosebumps on her legs and scalp.

  “Wolf,” she said.

  The color had left his face.

  They both stared, speechless. It was Wolf. He looked as if he might faint. “I’m Phoebe,” she said.

  “I know who you are,” Wolf said, and he pulled Phoebe to him, rocking her in arms whose feel was instantly familiar to her. “I know who you are, Phoebe, Jesus.” He drew away to look at her, smiling that sheepish smile of older relatives who haven’t seen you in years. He gripped the tops of Phoebe’s arms, her heavy backpack still dangling from his shoulder. “Phoebe O’Connor,” he said. “I’ll be damned.”

  He looked smaller than she remembered. In Phoebe’s mind Wolf had grown vast with the years, ballooning in size and strength at twice the rate she herself had, since childhood. Now his chipped features looked almost frail. But his face was the same: white teeth, narrow green-gray eyes like the animal he’d been nicknamed for, the brown hair that once had fallen halfway down his back cut short now, so it stood up a little from his head. He’d lost his indelible tan. But for all that he was Wolf, familiar in every detail down to the hands on Phoebe’s arms, hands she’d watched rolling joints, steering his pickup truck with invisible ticks of movement, sifting through her sister’s hair.

  “What are you doing here?” Wolf said.

  “Traveling.” It was all the explanation she could muster. “How do you know Steven Lake?”

  Wolf shook his head. “Americans in Munich,” he said. “I’ve known him for years.”

  “But you never knew he and Kyle were cousins?”

  “No idea. I mean … isn’t Steve from New York?”

  They were climbing the last flight of stairs. Through an open door Phoebe stepped into a large, spare living room overlooking a backyard. In contrast to the sumptuous decay of the building, the apartment itself was sleekly renovated, crisp walls, knotty blond floor.

  “Have a seat, walk around, make yourself at home,” Wolf said, setting Phoebe’s backpack inside the door. “Some coffee?”

  Phoebe followed Wolf into a kitchen. His shape was the same, she decided, broad torso, long legs, but the smallness, the slight ness of him disconcerted her. He was no bigger than any other tall man.

  Wolf set the kettle to boil and turned to Phoebe, smiling. “You grew up,” he said.

  Phoebe crossed her arms.

  “You were, like, a child the last time I saw you.”

  “Ten,” she said. “I was ten.”

  “Now you’re what, sixteen, seventeen?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Eighteen,” Wolf said. “God, I forget how long it’s been.”

  The kettle sang. He lifted it from the stove with a potholder, pouring an arc of scalding water into the filter.

  “Your hair’s so short,” Phoebe said shyly. “And you have glasses now.”

  “I always had glasses, I just never wore them,” Wolf said, laughing. “My blurred youth.”

  “You look different,” Phoebe said. She couldn’t get over it. “You look, I don’t know, respectable.”

  Wolf gave a wry half-smile. “It’s a different world.”

  They brought their mugs to the living room and sat on a striped blue couch. Sunlight poured through the windows. In the bright light Wolf suddenly leaned toward Phoebe, peering at her forehead. “What’s happened to you?” he said softly.

  “I fell.”

  Gently Wolf pressed a palm to Phoebe’s head. The cool of his hand felt good. “Looks like someone beat you up,” he said. “How did you do this?”

  “Oh, it’s not worth telling,” Phoebe said. “Stairs.”

  Wolf let it go, but she sensed his reluctance, his concern, and they felt like balm. The bright light hurt her eyes; she closed them awhile and leaned back. It seemed an unfathomable luxury, being in somebody’s home.

  “How’s your mom?” Wolf said.

  “She’s good, I guess. She has a boyfriend. Actually, her boss, Jack Lamont? It’s him.”

  “Get out of here!”

  “Swear to God,” Phoebe said, pleased that Wolf could appreciate the bizarreness of her mother’s choice.

  “Well, hey, that’s fantastic,” Wolf said. “If she’s happy, that’s fantastic. And the Bear? What’s old Barry been up to?”

  “He’s a millionaire,” Phoebe said, and gave Wolf the short version of her brother’s success.

  “Well, there’s some justice for you,” he said, grinning. “I always liked your brother.”

  Phoebe was keenly aware that neither one of them had spoken Faith’s name. She wondered whether in Wolf’s eyes she looked as much like her sister as everyone said. She hoped so.

  Wolf relaxed, spreading his long arms across the back of the couch. “Phoebe O’Connor,” he said. “I have in my head the most vivid picture of you—outside your house, waving to us as we drove to the airport.”

  She laughed, embarrassed. “You remember that?”

  “You were barefoot,” Wolf said, a catch in his voice.

  Phoebe recalled the absolute stillness that had fallen on the street the moment his truck disappeared, as if everything loud and bright in the world were gone, too, packed away among their sea-shells and bandanas. She’d knelt on the pavement, touching the warm spot where the truck had been, keeping her hand there until the pavement cooled and even after, for many minutes more, until the fog made her teeth chatter.

  “Anyway,” Wolf said, “I want to know everything that’s happened to you since.”

  Phoebe laughed. “That’s a lot,” she said, though of course it was really so little.

  The telephone rang in another room. Wolf went to answer it, and through the open door Phoebe admired his virtuosic German. The language made her picture someone clipping bushes with a pair of oversized shears.

  “You sound totally German,” she commended him when he returned to the living room.

  Wolf laughed. “I practically am, at this point,” he said. “I’m a legal resident, so I’m allowed to work here and everything. And my fiancee’s German, Carla—that was just her on the phone. So I’ll become a citizen after we’re married.”

  “You’re getting married?”

  “I am,” Wolf said, hesitant. “We were engaged in March.”

  “Wow.” Phoebe felt as if she’d been struck. Her bruised head began to throb.

  “It must be tough, hearing that,” Wolf said. “I’m sorry.”

  Phoebe nodded and looked at the windows. A hummingbird hovered outside the glass like a giant mosquito.

  So Wolf’s life had moved on. The strange thing was not so much that this had happened, Phoebe thought, but that suddenly she knew it. In her mind he’d remained shirtless, sun-soaked, restlessly prowling her thoughts. Now she felt the shame of facing an acquaintance she’d dreamed about, hoping he wouldn’t read it in her face.

  “How did you end up in Germany?” she asked.

  Wolf resumed his seat beside her on the couch. He’d never really gone back to the U.S., he explained, had stayed here illegally for years, working in restaurants, factories. He’d studied German at Berkeley for his biochemistry major, so he spoke the language.

  “You dropped out of Berkeley, right?” Phoebe asked. “To go to Europe with Faith?”

  There. Her sister’s name filled the room. Phoebe wanted to say it again, yell it out.

  “Yeah,” Wolf said. “I loathed America then. I was dying to escape.”

  But the name had done its work. A respectful silence d
escended over them.

  “Anyway, I’m a translator now,” Wolf concluded. “Mostly technical stuff, brochures, annual reports for companies doing business in the States. Lot of drug companies, so the biochem wasn’t a total waste. Actually comes in pretty handy.”

  “So everything’s worked out great,” Phoebe said ruefully.

  Wolf knocked twice on the coffee table, as if hearing this made him nervous. Or maybe he just felt guilty, parading his happiness.

  “Oh, I forgot,” Phoebe said, fumbling in her purse for her wallet. “I was supposed to give this to Steven Lake. From Kyle.”

  She pried the pink joint from the crease in her wallet. It was bent and smudged from the long trip. Wolf took it, smiling at its condition. “We’ll save it for Steve,” he said.

  The bathroom was full of spotless white tile. In the medicine cabinet Phoebe found a bottle of Estée Lauder perfume and several light-brown hairpins laid neatly in a pile. A pair of jade earrings shaped like tears, a bottle of coconut-smelling lotion; Phoebe stared at these items, trying to conjure up the woman who had bought them and worn them, placed them so carefully here. Their neat economy could not have been less like the bright jumble of Faith’s possessions, yet when she tried to picture Carla, all Phoebe saw was her sister’s face.

  In the hot shower her hand began to throb. The cut from the mirror had become infected at first, but was healing now. Phoebe moved cautiously, as if the shower tiles were made of eggshell. I’m in Wolf’s apartment, she told herself, awaiting a jolt of elation at this spectacular good luck, but her feelings were dulled. Too much had happened; finding Wolf seemed the fulfillment of a hope she’d abandoned when her journey veered inexplicably from adventure into survival. Why had she come to Europe? Phoebe no longer felt sure; all she knew was that she’d barely survived a nightmare. The prospect of portraying a happy girl on vacation for Wolf exhausted her in advance, made her want to stay in the bathroom forever.

  “What’s your fiancée like?” Phoebe asked as she and Wolf traversed the wide, regal streets of Munich. The churches looked like big armoires, the sky was flawless blue. Outdoor clocks were striking noon.

  “She’s a doctor,” Wolf said.

  “A doctor. Wow.” It made the fiancée seem old. “So you must be incredibly healthy,” she joked.

  Wolf laughed, tipping back his head as if the laughter were a substance, like smoke, which might offend Phoebe. “Slowly but surely,” he said with affection. “I’m not an easy patient.”

  He pointed out sights: the old and new painting museums, the technical university where he would teach a course in translation this fall. Phoebe gave them only passing attention. Mostly she looked at Wolf, filled with wonderment at the thought that he was the same boy whose shoulders she’d ridden down Haight Street, kicking his ribs to make him go faster. Perhaps Wolf, too, was remembering that time, for he asked suddenly how much San Francisco had changed.

  “A ton,” Phoebe said. “You wouldn’t believe it.”

  “How? I mean, what are the changes?”

  “You never go back?”

  “Oh, I do,” he said. “Occasionally. But my parents live in Tiburon now. I never go to the old places.”

  “There’s no point,” Phoebe said.

  “What about our high school? What I hear, it sounds almost like the fifties again, cheerleading, football …”

  “Disco music,” Phoebe said. “Everyone goes dancing in discos.”

  “It sounds healthy,” Wolf said, half laughing. “It sounds … innocent.”

  Phoebe turned to him, amazed. “I can’t believe you’re saying this.”

  “Age,” Wolf said, and smiled.

  They had entered the Hofgarten, a large formal park filled with red and white flowers in soft rectangular beds, thigh-high bushes clipped to look like walls. At the far end a square-columned building rose from inside a ring of trees. It was capped with a dark metal dome like a bronze helmet.

  “But something must still be there,” Wolf said. “From before, just—even if it’s nothing.” And Phoebe was struck by the change in his voice, a wistfulness. She told him about Hippie Hill, the empty Panhandle, Haight Street full of junkies; and strangely, as Phoebe described these disappointments, her bitterness over what she’d missed was eclipsed by a sudden, painful yearning for all she’d left behind—for home.

  They had slowed to a stop. Sunlight poured over the bronze dome, turning it gold. It looked like a mystical, curative sphere. Wolf took a step or two back and held up a hand, his eyes fixed on Phoebe. “Wait,” he said softly. “Stay there.”

  She glanced at the dome behind her, a shimmering hump of black-gold. When she looked back at Wolf, he’d dropped to one knee. Phoebe nearly laughed, but the noise caught in her throat. Wolf looked as vulnerable, as empty-eyed as someone asleep. “What is it?” she asked softly.

  He rose to his feet, slowly brushing dust from his jeans.

  “Wolf, what?”

  “Nothing,” he said absently. He seemed disoriented, as if he himself were unsure what had just happened. “Let’s get out of here.”

  They left the park in silence. Phoebe didn’t ask again. As Wolf had gazed up at her from the path, she’d seen a kind of parting in his face, like a door swinging open and shut on a dark room. Phoebe had no idea what this meant. But she was glad, relieved in some way to have seen it.

  They ate lunch at one of the oldest restaurants in Munich, businessmen inside glowing cocoons of smoke, smells of beer, salt, oiled wood. Diamond-shaped panes of glass filled the windows. Wolf and Phoebe climbed a narrow flight of steps and were seated at a scarred plank table. Wolf ordered beers, which arrived in bell-shaped glasses tall as wine bottles.

  He raised his glass. “To the pleasure of drinking with you, Phoebe,” he said. “Legally, no less. Who would have thought?”

  Phoebe sipped the sweet, malty beer, cloudy in her glass. The taste was whole, like a meal in itself. She hadn’t drunk alcohol since the champagne in Epernay with Pietro. It felt like a previous life.

  Wolf watched her drink. “By the way,” he said, “my name is Sebastian.”

  “Sebastian.” Phoebe burst out laughing. The beer seemed to flood her brain. “No way. Sebastian?”

  Wolf laughed, too, reluctantly. It occurred to Phoebe that Carla was probably quite serious, being a doctor. She swallowed back her laughter.

  “Right now I feel like Wolf,” he said. “I won’t deny it’s a pleasure.”

  “So, should I call you Sebastian?”

  They both smiled. The name hung there, ludicrous.

  “Call me Wolf,” he said, “what the hell.” After a moment he said, “I’ll be thirty next year, can you believe it?” He seemed sobered by the thought, as if there were untold things he needed to accomplish before that day.

  “Thirty isn’t so old. Sebastian,” Phoebe teased.

  “Danke schön,” Wolf said.

  He ordered sausages, sauerkraut, stuffed cabbage. The food arrived on dented pewter plates, and Phoebe ate until she felt faint. She drank a second beer. Wolf drank two more. Drunk, Phoebe felt her hold on the present beginning to slip; it was less clear to her now what sort of person she was trying to be. The confusion made her quiet.

  The restaurant emptied suddenly, as if an inaudible whistle had summoned the businessmen back to their offices. Pale light fell through the windows, cutting the smoky air into diamond-shaped bands. Wolf lit a cigarette.

  “I’ve thought about you a lot, Phoebe,” he said, “all this time.”

  Phoebe was touched, amazed that Wolf had thought of her at all. “Really?”

  “I mean it,” he said. “Just, hoping you were okay.”

  There was a pause. “I guess I am,” Phoebe said nervously.

  “I know this sounds crazy but I have to say it,” Wolf said. “I hope you haven’t suffered too much.”

  Phoebe felt herself go red. “I don’t know,” she said. “I mean—”

  Wolf shook his head. “That wa
s for me, not you, that question,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine,” she said, unnerved. The truth was, the effect of Faith’s death on her own life was something Phoebe rarely thought about. The very event was blurred in her mind; her mother’s white face in a doorway was all she remembered, and for some reason a blue plastic horse, just a plain blue horse, square-bodied, round white eyes, a toy she’d pulled from the Wishing Well at the shoe store. Holding that horse and trying to believe that her sister was dead.

  “When was the last time you saw her?” Phoebe asked. “Faith.”

  Again something flared in Wolf’s eyes, that pain or alarm she’d seen earlier, by the bronze dome. “August,” he said. “Nineteen seventy. We went to Berlin from Paris. I left in August, she died in November. As you know.”

  He leaned across the table, adjusting himself as if to offset some pain in his stomach. “After Berlin I came here, to Munich. I thought she might come down, but she never did. I was still here when it happened; my parents called. I talked to your mom, told her everything I knew, but it wasn’t much.”

  “I remember that,” Phoebe said. “You talking to her.”

  “We stayed in touch for years,” Wolf said. “Four, five years. I’d check in occasionally. She was so great. Whenever I called, she’d say, ‘Wolf, it’s always wonderful to hear from you. And if a time comes when you don’t feel like calling anymore, I’ll understand that, too.’” He lifted his empty glass, then set it down. His olive skin looked gray without its tan.

  “Faith didn’t want me around anymore, is the bottom line,” he said.

  “I know.”

  He looked startled.

  “Her postcards,” Phoebe said. “I saved them.”

  Wolf shifted in his chair. “What did she say?”

  “Just, how she was glad when you left. How you’d been holding her back and now she was free.”

  Something moved around Wolf’s mouth. Phoebe wished she hadn’t told him. He took a last pull on his cigarette and mashed it into the ashtray. “I’ve thought a lot about why it happened, needless to say,” he said. “But I don’t know. I honestly don’t know why.”