The Invisible Circus

by Jennifer Egan

  A strong wind battered the restaurant. Wolf swirled the wine in his glass, then drank. “Do you ever think how things might be different for you if Faith were still alive?” he asked.

  “For me?”

  “It’s a weird question, I know,” he said. “But I mean, she’s on your mind a lot.”

  “She would be anyway,” Phoebe said warily. “I mean, she’d still be my sister.”

  “It’s funny, though,” Wolf said, “how things—people—have a lot more power sometimes when they’re not actually there.”

  “Faith always had power.”

  “True. True,” he said. “But it’s one thing to be a precocious kid. Twenty-six years old is different. She’d have made choices by now.”

  “Maybe you guys would be married,” Phoebe said, but Wolf winced, and she was sorry she’d made the comment. The truth was, she found it hard to imagine Faith just living a life the way other people did. It seemed unlike her.

  “It’s strange,” Wolf said.

  “What?”

  “How when somebody’s gone they can start to dwarf you.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Phoebe said.

  Wolf started. “I meant you in general,” he said. “Not you you.”

  For dessert they ate tiny mountain apples poached in red wine, thick sweet cream poured on top. A languor overcame them. Phoebe folded her arms on the rough wood table and rested her head in them. Absently Wolf touched her hair. She lay very still, wishing he would do it again, but Wolf had turned to bantering with the proprietress. A delicious prickling climbed Phoebe’s spine to her scalp, the sensuality of childhood, long hypnotic hair-brushings she’d traded with friends. Amazing, how easy it had been to touch people then. It felt so long since she’d touched another person.

  The old man in suspenders rose carefully to his feet and donned his coat and a hat, which he tipped at the door as he took his leave. “I wonder where he’ll go?” Phoebe said. “This seems like the middle of nowhere.”

  “Maybe he owns that little place next door,” said Wolf. “Maybe he’s eaten lunch at this woman’s restaurant every day for the past thirty years.”

  “Maybe they’re secretly in love,” said Phoebe.

  Wolf looked at her, surprised, then nodded approvingly. “I’ll bet he was waiting for us to get the hell out of here,” he said, laughing.

  “I don’t think so,” Phoebe said. “I bet they’re just glad to be in the same room.”

  Wolf glanced at the proprietress as if imagining it. “That’s nice,” he said.

  As the woman added their bill, she spoke laughingly to Wolf, eyes teasing back and forth between him and Phoebe. Wolf made some reply and her expression changed. “Ah,” she said briskly.

  “What did you tell her?” Phoebe asked as they moved to the door.

  “I said we’re practically family.”

  In the restaurant bathroom, more precisely the outhouse, Phoebe examined herself, poking at her flesh, and decided she was well again. Over the past several days a curious malady had afflicted her, sensitizing every cell in her body to the point of agony. She felt sprawling, obtrusive, conscious of her hands and feet and legs, her skin inside her clothing, her face and hair in shop windows she passed. At times her whole body hurt, a chronic, delicate pain like the ache of her scalp when she’d parted her hair a different way, then combed it back. Phoebe could not decide if her body itself was causing this ache, or her keen awareness of it. She tried to ignore her physical self, but for the first time in her life Phoebe found this impossible—every part of her seemed to clamor for attention. Her breasts felt so obvious, and she began plucking out her shirts when Wolf was around, to conceal their shape. Not that he’d paid her breasts the slightest attention; ironically it was her constant plucking he’d finally noticed. “What’s wrong, are you hot?” he asked Phoebe once, and though she swiftly denied it, he’d thrown open two windows.

  Crazy as it seemed, Phoebe was certain her physical disorders could be traced to that brush with the prostitutes back in Paris—the moment when she’d realized that the women had mistaken her for one of themselves. Alone in Wolf’s bed she was assailed by memories of that encounter, broken windows, bruised thighs; she would place one hand on her breasts, one low on her abdomen, and feel an unnatural heat from inside them, a fever, an infection of the tissues or the blood. After three tormented nights she’d resorted to self-medication, first the penicillin tablets and cough syrup she’d brought from home, then a prescription drug from Wolf’s medicine cabinet that proved to be a sleeping pill and left her sprawled on the couch in a stupor all afternoon. Finally she’d tried the birth control pills, sensing as she broke the plastic seal that there was a certain logic to this choice that the previous remedies had lacked. She’d gulped one down, filled with hope that it would reign her body in, though afterward she feared the opposite might be true, that starting these pills might be another step toward relinquishing control for good.

  But the pills had worked. The ache in her limbs had subsided, replaced by a pleasant calm. As of today, she’d taken four. They were pink, their colored outsides sweet as candy.

  Back on the road Phoebe battled a froth of nervous laughter that seemed continually on the verge of overflowing her. She’d felt this way for a while, waiting to leave Munich with Wolf. Their imminent departure had infused the city with fresh exquisiteness—tumbling church bells, piles of white sausages, the burned smell of sugar-roasted peanuts—these broke across Phoebe in moody, shuddering waves, like memory. She assumed her happiness must come from knowing she was headed toward the danger, the bright simmer of Faith’s activity. At times Phoebe practically saw it: a flicker of motion, like the shadows of flames, just beyond the edges of her sight. She wasn’t afraid. After all that had happened, it seemed there was no fear left in her.

  As a child, before holidays or her birthday Phoebe might be doing the simplest thing—say, cutting up a peach—and find herself smote by this same delicious awaiting. The world shivered around her, winking, complicit, the wet peach opening like a grin in her hands.

  Wolf was laughing, too, but always after a pause, as if Phoebe’s high spirits were bright coins fluttering down to him through deep water.

  The air turned humid, heavy with the scent of eucalyptus. Fingers of cypress rose among the pines. Deep, ragged clefts gouged at the hills like the marks of recent violence, as if the hills themselves had been torn from the earth only hours before.

  For the first time since her arrival in Munich, Phoebe no longer felt like Wolf’s guest. They were sharing an adventure now; it was Wolf who first pointed out the rows of grapevines stitched neatly into the hillside. He pulled over and put down the Volkswagen’s top, and they stood quietly outside the car for several minutes, inhaling the tart smells of soil and ripening grapes.

  When they were driving again, Phoebe sensed in Wolf the beginnings of a new curiosity, an eagerness to separate her from the tide of history and coincidence that had swept her into his midst. He mentioned her father. “I was sorry I never got to meet him,” he said.

  “You would’ve loved him, my dad,” said Phoebe.

  “How well did you know him?”

  She turned to him, offended. “He was my father!”

  “You were little when he died, that’s all I mean,” Wolf said. “Although hell, plenty of fathers live to be eighty and never know their kids. The majority, some would say.”

  “Well, not mine. You would have loved him.” Phoebe realized she’d already said this.

  “Sometimes I felt like I almost knew him,” Wolf said. “Everything he left behind—that house, all those paintings, you guys … when I looked at the shape of all that, sometimes I thought I could see his outline.”

  Phoebe wanted to ask what he’d seen, but was afraid Wolf might interpret the question as her not knowing her father. “What did you think of his paintings?” she asked.

  Wolf considered. Phoebe tried not to look as if she actually cared. “I alway
s wondered why he never painted you,” he said. “There were a few pictures of Barry around, not many, about a zillion of Faith. I think I asked her once, why he never drew you, but she didn’t know.”

  “I was a bad subject,” Phoebe said. “Barry too.”

  “What, you squirmed?”

  “I was too stiff. I sat still okay but I was just stiff, I came out like a wood doll.” She laughed, empty, skittish laughter. She was remembering the deep apprehension she’d felt under the scrutiny of her father’s dark eyes, the powerful beam of his attention. “Hold still,” he would say, and Phoebe would freeze on the spot, hesitant even to breathe for fear of breaking that attention, scattering it like birds startled from a tree. But it was no good, she couldn’t relax.

  “It was my fault,” she told Wolf. “I didn’t look natural.”

  He nodded, noncommittal. But it was true: at the hospital, during the few times when Faith’s energy had abandoned her and she’d stayed at home or collapsed sleeping in the chair by her father’s bed, Phoebe had tried to replace her, poised on the hard stool, determined, like Faith, to hold utterly still while giving the impression she was just about to move. But it wasn’t enough. Phoebe’s stomach would clench as she watched the familiar list-lessness steal across her father’s face, a glazed inattention his illness left him powerless to hide. Then the merciless exhaustion would enfold him and he would begin nodding off, pencil in hand. “Daddy,” Phoebe would say gently from her stool, and his eyes would jerk open, murky apologies at his lips, but he couldn’t shake the drowsiness, or rather, Phoebe couldn’t keep it off him. If he slipped away a second time, a sick panic would seep through her. “Daddy,” she would say sharply, “Daddy!”—hoping Faith would wake up, afraid something would happen to their father and the fault would be Phoebe’s. Because she wasn’t enough. In Faith’s presence alone was he safe.

  “I was a bad subject,” she said. “Faith was the natural. She had motion in her face.” Why was she going on like this? She felt ready to cry. Wolf just listened, eyes on the road. “You think I didn’t know my father,” Phoebe said bitterly.

  He looked at her, his face tense. “I think he should’ve had more patience.”

  A painful silence filled the car. “Anyway,” Phoebe said, struggling to recover herself, “that’s not what I even was asking. I meant what did you think of the quality?”

  “Of the paintings?” He seemed surprised.

  She nodded. “As art.”

  Wind yanked the smoke from Wolf’s cigarette. “I think he should’ve varied his subject matter.”

  The road dove sharply. Before long they had left behind mountains and even foothills, moving past them onto flat, dull farmland. Phoebe melted into sleep thinking of Corniglia, where Faith died. Phoebe had circled it years before with a black felt-tipped pen in the atlas at home, a move she later regretted; it seemed blatant, undignified. But on the Michelin map of Italy she’d bought in Munich, the town was disturbingly absent. Corniglia, she thought. A tricky coil of a name—ideal, somehow, for a place no one could find. Her mother had been there, of course, right after it happened, but that journey seemed unreal to Phoebe. She had pounded on Wolf’s door, herding the giant crackling map to where he sat among his X-rays of curved teen-aged spines, which looked like cats’ tails when Phoebe held them up to the light. With his needle pen he made painstaking drawings of these crooked spines, taking hours sometimes to finish one. “Don’t worry,” he’d told her absently. “We’ll find it.”

  “But how? It’s not even in my guidebook.”

  “We’ll ask around, go to a tourist office if we have to. I was thinking we’d stay a night in Milan anyhow, otherwise we’ll hit that coast in the dark.”

  “What if nobody knows?”

  Wolf had stared at her. “Phoebe, it’s a place. It exists. We can find it.”

  He’d laughed then, shaking his head, and Phoebe’s spirits had lifted. Laughter induced in Wolf a momentary helplessness, a flash of yielding she liked having been the cause of.

  Phoebe woke after sunset, sore-necked, a warm wind on her face. The sky was frantic with color. She looked at Wolf, so gratified to see him there, driving, and found herself filled with a sharp, peculiar longing; it rolled through her body, leaving a pounding sensation deep in her belly. Phoebe lay still. She swallowed uneasily and tried to think of Faith, but her sister seemed far away, as if, rather than heading toward her as Phoebe had imagined, they had been driving the opposite way.

  Wolf glanced over, smiled when he saw Phoebe awake. “Welcome back,” he said.

  Milan gathered around them slowly, then abruptly, like Christmas. The streetlights were puce. Combined with the heat, their bath of steamy light gave the city a stagy, lurid aspect. Wolf parked on a quiet street and took their things from the car, refusing to let Phoebe carry even his own small bag. The smallness of it depressed her. This was all so temporary, their being here, so purely circumstantial.

  “You’ve found a chauffeur who not only hauls your luggage but knows the cheap hotels,” Wolf said as they made their way under the gaudy trees.

  “You’re hired forever,” Phoebe said, then blushed in the darkness. It had come out clumsy, childish.

  But Wolf’s laugh was full of affection. “I can think of worse fates,” he said.

  The hotel was on the top floor of what clearly had once been a single family mansion. A black cage elevator descended through a cylinder of cords to greet them. As they rose inside it, Phoebe watched the grand stairway loop around them in wide ribbony arcs. At the top they were met by an elderly woman with bulging eyes and a tight painted face, breathing asthmatically inside her red suit. Yes, there were rooms, she said. Panting, she led them down a hallway.

  Phoebe’s room delighted her: an old-fashioned sink, a floor made of smooth green stone, a bed with brass posts. Wolf pushed open a set of French windows, admitting the warm night and papery leaves colored orange by the streetlights. “How much does it cost?” Phoebe asked.

  He waved this away, wrestling with the second window. “Relax,” he said over her protests. “It’s one night.”

  He took her passport and went to arrange things. Phoebe stood on her tiny balcony looking down at the street. Soon she heard Wolf’s boots on the floor of the adjacent room. The bed squeaked under his weight.

  Phoebe was aware of feeling inordinately happy, a rare, startling happiness that had nothing to do with dangerous or important things hovering at close range. They were far away, the dangerous things; her attention had lapsed and they’d sailed out of sight. She was glad to be rid of them.

  Phoebe showered down the hall and washed her hair. Returning to her room, she studied her face in the cloudy mirror above the sink. Normally mirrors invited a harsh focus upon her flaws, the unevenness of her eyes, the overall blandness of her features. Phoebe wondered sometimes if Faith’s face had been marginally smaller than her own, giving the same components greater resonance. But this mirror allowed only an impression of herself, as if from a distance.

  She dressed carefully and sat on her bed, waiting for Wolf to knock. She was nervous, and planned on drinking a lot.

  “Look at you,” he said, touching the small of her back as they left the room. Getting on the elevator, Phoebe thought Wolf paused to catch her smell, and again she felt that shock of longing, like a heavy object plunging into deep water. It was not quite painful, but had something in common with pain. She and Wolf rode down in silence, patterned light sliding over their faces.

  Outside, they agreed to walk. The warm darkness felt good on Phoebe’s shoulders, as did the weight of her long hair, still damp, the soft dress brushing her skin. This awareness of her body no longer troubled her; she actually enjoyed it. Perhaps she’d come late to a pleasure most girls her age already knew. Wolf wore a shirt made of soft rust-colored fabric, silk it must have been, big swashbuckling sleeves. A dress shirt, Phoebe thought, that he’d brought to wear with her.

  “Good news,” Wolf said. “I foun
d a map at the desk with Corniglia on it. So we’re all set.”

  Phoebe murmured her delight. It unnerved her how little Corniglia seemed to matter suddenly.

  Wolf shared her sudden thirst for wine, and a bottle was nearly gone by the time their pastas arrived. Phoebe’s cheeks burned; she was tipsy, reckless, filled with loud clanging laughter she didn’t recognize. Though her mood was clearly perplexing to Wolf, he didn’t seem offended; bemused, rather, as if unsure what exactly Phoebe was up to. Above all, she sensed his resolve not to hurt her in the smallest way. It felt like an advantage.

  Phoebe asked about his family. He was closest to his sister, Wolf said, a reporter for the Baltimore Sun now stationed in Prague. This impressed Phoebe deeply, a women reporter living alone in a Communist country. “I’m supposed to visit her this fall,” Wolf said. “I’ve scheduled the time.” His parents came to Germany each year; Wolf went to the States perhaps a third that often. He took a keen interest in what had become of the people he’d grown up with. “It’s incredible,” he said. “You look back and feel like you saw it all coming, but you didn’t, that’s the thing—you never could’ve imagined it.” Phoebe smiled. Her only such experience was of seeing Wolf himself after so long. But she would never have said his present life had seemed inevitable then.

  “What about you?” he asked. “What lives do you imagine for yourself?”

  “None,” Phoebe said truthfully. “It’s always been a blank.”

  “That’s funny. I think of eighteen as the age of grand illusions,” Wolf said.

  “Maybe when you were eighteen.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Oh, it’s different,” Phoebe said. “Things are totally different now.”

  “Well, sure,” Wolf said. “But the basics are the same. I mean, you went to high school, you had friends and boyfriends, all that, you went to parties, concerts, am I right?”