The Invisible Circus

by Jennifer Egan

  “Let’s go back,” Phoebe said.

  The sun fell as they walked, burning the sky. Phoebe felt as if she and Wolf were the last two people leaving the scene of an accident.

  In the end you had to. What else was there to do? You left and went on with your life.

  Phoebe wondered if Faith could have known this when she threw herself away.

  Time never stopped, it only seemed to.

  part four

  twenty-two

  Phoebe returned to San Francisco in the first week of September. It was late afternoon when her flight touched down, and pressing her face to the plastic window, she watched the land clarify from a white-washed blur into houses and roads, turquoise fingers of water.

  She’d called home from Heathrow Airport, the first time since leaving in June. Her mother had sounded ecstatic. But as Phoebe stepped from the plane into a pool of bright light flooding the thick airport glass, she thought at first there was no one to meet her. She walked on uncertainly until her mother’s arms were around her, her mother’s hair in a softer, more natural style, small gold hoops in her earlobes. Phoebe hadn’t recognized her.

  Arm in arm they walked to the baggage claim and then to the Fiat, each carrying half the unwieldy backpack, dusty and strange-looking in its new surroundings. “I can’t believe you tromped around under this thing,” her mother said. “I’m surprised you’re not a hunchback.”

  “But I did!” Phoebe told her breathlessly. “I got totally used to it.”

  Riding home, she squinted in awe at the sherbet-colored houses, the familiar brown hill branded SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO—THE INDUSTRIAL CITY like the hide of a cow. The city felt vast, metallic and glassy, so different from cities in Europe.

  By the time they reached San Francisco proper, conversation had flagged. Phoebe felt as if she had lost the power to read her mother. The new hairstyle, the short-sleeved black sweater and the thin, graceful arms at the wheel—all of it threw her into confusion. For the first time in weeks the memory of their fight reared up again in Phoebe: the terrible thing she’d said, her abrupt and outrageous departure.

  “So. You had fun over there,” her mother finally said.

  “Not really,” Phoebe said. “Not fun.”

  Her mother’s brows rose. She said nothing.

  “It was hard,” Phoebe said.

  “Hard in what way?”

  “Scary.”

  A tender look crossed her mother’s face. Only when it had passed did she turn to Phoebe. “I was scared, too,” she said.

  “I sent you postcards,” Phoebe protested. “I told you I was fine!” But only now did it strike her, for the first time, how little comfort her postcards would have provided.

  They spent the remainder of the ride in silence.

  Phoebe had pictured her first weeks home as a kind of montage: running to classes at Berkeley, coming into the city at night for long garrulous dinners with her mother and Barry and Jack—Jack, whose respect she would finally have earned, going off on her own and surviving.

  A letter from Berkeley awaited her. It had come shortly after she’d left, in response to her own request for admission deferral. Since Berkeley didn’t offer this option, the letter said, Phoebe’s request was being treated as a withdrawal. If she wished to reapply for the subsequent year, 1979, she should note the usual November deadline.

  Phoebe reacted to this news with disbelief, then panic. Frantically she called the Admissions Office, but the only concession she managed to wrest from the officer with whom she spoke was an agreement to revive her application to be considered for admission in January, versus the next September. She would learn in late October whether she’d been accepted.

  On her second night home, Phoebe met her mother and Jack and Barry for dinner at Basta Pasta, a new restaurant in North Beach. Her mother and Jack arrived straight from work, holding hands. Barry came later, having driven in directly from the airport after a business trip to Tokyo.

  The moment Jack greeted her, offhand, still breathing smoke from his cigarette, Phoebe saw how deeply she’d miscalculated his reaction to her disappearance. Jack’s pale blue eyes flickered with skeptical indulgence, a look he plainly reserved for those he viewed as a royal pain in the ass, yet had to treat well.

  Jack had never been to Japan, and when Barry arrived, he was eager for information. “Barry O’Connor’s prediction: next big electronics fad,” Jack said. “Any ideas?”

  “I’ve got it right here,” Barry said, and pulled from his briefcase a miniature Sony tape player with tiny earphones attached, inspired, he said, by the chairman’s wish to listen to opera while skiing.

  Jack donned the headset and fiddled with the buttons. “Sound quality is unbelievable,” he bellowed at a volume that made Phoebe wince.

  “What did you eat over there?” their mother asked.

  “Raw fish.”

  “Good God. What did that taste like?”

  “Tasted raw,” Barry said, grinning.

  “You guys act like you haven’t seen each other in months,” Phoebe said, more peevishly than she’d meant to.

  Her mother turned to her. “That’s because we’re usually in close touch.”

  There was a tense silence. Jack removed the headset and placed it quietly on the table. When he looked at her mother, Phoebe saw in Jack’s eyes a tenderness that startled her.

  “Walked into that one, Pheeb,” Barry said, but no one laughed.

  For the rest of the meal Phoebe sat in virtual silence. She’d wondered on the plane how much to reveal about her trip, but everyone’s questions had been so perfunctory. And it struck Phoebe then, with sudden, dazzling force, that she knew what had happened to Faith. She knew. She could say it right now, “I found out what happened to Faith,” and watch their lively faces go still with surprise. But Phoebe said nothing.

  Afterward Barry offered to drive her home. They rode first to Coit Tower, hooded in fog but still swarming with tourists, some gamely feeding coins into the pay telescopes, as if these might have the power to bore through the whiteness. Barry parked and they sat in the Porsche.

  “Look, I can see things are tense with you and Mom,” he said.

  “Tense,” Phoebe said, half laughing.

  “I think she was too scared while you were gone to really be mad,” Barry said. “So you’re getting it now.”

  Phoebe looked out the window. “I think Jack hates me.”

  “Give it some time.”

  Phoebe glanced at her brother, amazed that he seemed to take no relish at all in her exclusion. She had an urge to confide in him, tell him what she knew about Faith, but as the moments passed, Phoebe reconsidered. Why? she thought. News of their sister was the last thing Barry wanted.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I’m glad you’re back. For what it’s worth.”

  “I don’t see why, Bear.”

  He looked surprised. “Come on,” he said. “You’re my sister.”

  In silence they gazed through the runny windshield. Now and then a cluster of lights flared up through the fog like live coals under white smoke. “Were you scared, too?” Phoebe said. “While I was over there?”

  “Yeah,” Barry said. “Especially when you weren’t at the Che Guevara screening, I thought, Shit, she’s just, like, gone—”

  “Oh my God!” Phoebe said. “Mom’s film.”

  Barry glanced at her. “That was months ago,” he said. “Anyhow, at the same time I kept having this feeling you’d be okay. That was stronger, I guess. In the end.”

  “Huh.” She was disappointed.

  “Not that I wasn’t relieved—”

  “But you’re right,” Phoebe said. “You are. I’m the kind of person who stays around.” For some reason she laughed.

  “You’re a survivor,” Barry said simply, his earnestness giving the cliché an unlikely ring of truth. “You just are. You and me both.”

  That night, as Phoebe lay in her sister’s bed with the chimes fluttering at the wind
ow, she was racked by an intolerable sorrow. For years those chimes had seemed an echo of her sister’s voice, reminding Phoebe that Faith was there, somewhere, waiting for her. Now they sounded empty. Phoebe moved back into her old room the next day for the first time in years, sleeping before a bright-eyed audience of faded stuffed animals.

  Phoebe remembered a movie she’d seen years before on TV called Latitude Zero. When a ship reaches latitude zero, its captain finds himself transported to a marvelous land beneath the sea where the streets are paved with diamonds. He grabs a handful of gems and crams them into his tobacco pouch to bring home with him, prove what he’s seen, but back in the real world he opens the pouch and finds it stuffed with tobacco again. No one believes him.

  Phoebe’s first week home was blessed with a certain novelty despite its disappointments, but as the second week passed, a numbing depression settled over her. Nothing had changed, and against the sameness of this city, her life within it, Phoebe’s time away—a lifetime unto itself—seemed reduced to a brief, hallucinatory flash.

  She began staying indoors, wandering the house or lying on her bed staring out the window, unaware of the passage of time. She slept and slept, and when she wasn’t asleep, she daydreamed about her journey. Phoebe saw herself cloaked in a golden haze, riding trains, waking up beside Wolf with fresh sunlight pouring over the bed—could she really have been there, done those things? Already it seemed far-fetched, an exotic wish. Even her worst times assumed, in retrospect, a powerful, moody allure. But Phoebe gave her present self no credit for them. On the contrary, the subject of her memories seemed another person altogether, to be admired, envied, measured against.

  She and Wolf had ridden by train from Vernazza up to Genoa, then into France. “What about the Volkswagen?” Phoebe kept asking as they were making made these arrangements. “Shouldn’t we get the car?”

  “I’ll get it later,” Wolf had replied, evasively, and finally, “The thing was on its last legs anyway.” Only during their two days of chaste train rides in crowded sleeper cars did it occur to Phoebe that the real reason might be that he didn’t want to drive with her. Driving would be like before, with everything between them still about to happen.

  Finally they’d crossed the Channel and arrived in London, cool, doused in light rain, looking quite unlike the festive city Phoebe remembered from her June arrival. In a heavy mood they walked to the Laker Airways office and arranged for her return the following day. To escape the rain they went to the National Gallery, trudging dutifully among the portraits and landscapes, then Wolf had phoned some friends, whom they’d gone to meet at a pub on Hampstead Heath.

  By then it was dusk, the air filled with a pungent odor of smoking wood. The sky was beginning to clear, a virulent orange behind the last debris of clouds. Phoebe drank a half-pint of cider and grew tipsy—she was going home—watched Wolf laughing across the big table over his pint of Guinness topped with its layer of creamy foam and was struck by the change in him. Wolf’s hair had grown, he was tanned, wore two days’ growth of beard, but the change went deeper: an absence of some tension in his face that Phoebe had come to assume would always be there. He looked free. And she herself had occasioned that freedom—not Faith or Carla, not anyone else. She had lifted a terrible weight from him. They were sharing it now, though from Wolf’s peaceful face, Phoebe wouldn’t have guessed he felt anything.

  As if hearing her thoughts, Wolf glanced up. Through the smoke and clatter and wet carpet smell Phoebe sensed his acknowledgment, his gratitude.

  She left her chair and went outside, knowing Wolf would follow. Loud drinkers had amassed at wet, steamy tables. Amid the humid smell of beer and rain she looked over a hedge at the Heath, reams of lush grass steaming faintly in the sudden, late sun. Wolf came up behind her, wrapped his arms around Phoebe and lifted her hair, putting his face to her neck and breathing her smell. Phoebe turned around and they hugged, but when she tried to find Wolf’s lips, he stepped away, releasing her. They looked at each other. And instantly Phoebe knew it was over, that this embrace had been the last of something. The desire had left Wolf’s face, and his eyes, when Phoebe looked at them deeply, remained opaque. She felt an ache in her chest.

  “I’m going home, too,” Wolf said.

  Later, as they said a tense good-night outside their separate bed-and-breakfast rooms, Phoebe was despondent. “I feel like it’s gone,” she told Wolf. “All of it.”

  He took her in his arms. “It’s the opposite,” he said. “It’ll always be there. We’re just moving away from it.”

  And afterward, lying in her soft, narrow bed, Phoebe had felt the Heath outside the window, dark and still as a lake, and all at once Corniglia had felt so distant, as if two days of train rides had brought them years away, completing their escape.

  In her third week home, Phoebe called him.

  “Phoebe,” Wolf said, sounding taken aback. “You at school?”

  “No.” Morosely, she explained the Berkeley debacle. Talking on the phone to Wolf felt strange; she’d never done it, except on first arriving home, a brief call to tell him she’d made it.

  “How are you?” she asked shyly.

  “Hanging in there,” he said. “I seem to have a few clients left.”

  “Did you—”

  “At least—” They both laughed, exasperated by the lag time in their overseas connection. “The Lakes are in Brussels another six months,” Wolf yelled, as if volume might solve it, “so that’s a reprieve.”

  “How are things with Carla?” She was hoping for the worst.

  “Improving.”

  “Are you still getting married?”

  He hesitated, the old guardedness back in his manner. “Unclear.”

  “But you might?”

  “I’m hopeful,” he said. “Let’s leave it at that.”

  Phoebe felt a flash of despair. “What about the car?” she asked. “Did you get it back?”

  He laughed. “A friend of mine was in Pisa, said it was stripped to nothing. So I’m buying a Fiat.”

  “We have a Fiat,” Phoebe said uselessly.

  “You take care,” Wolf said. “Keep in touch.” Meaning, Phoebe thought, I’d rather we not speak again.

  “Okay,” she said. “You too.”

  She’d lost weight in Europe, and despite her unease in Faith’s room, Phoebe couldn’t quell an urge to measure herself against her sister’s old clothing. Finally she succumbed.

  The garments released a peppery, cinnamon smell as she pulled them on. And they fit, lo and behold; some were even rather loose. Ecstatic, Phoebe leapt around her sister’s room in corduroy hip-huggers and a macramé blouse, the star-buttoned jacket pulled over it. She blasted King Crimson, lit too much incense and posed breathlessly before the mirror in a floppy hat with a long peacock feather attached. Abruptly she collapsed on the bed, drained and lightheaded, resting her eyes on the batik ceiling while outside the window Faith’s chimes made their sad, splintering sound. She fell asleep.

  It was almost dark when Phoebe woke. She climbed from Faith’s bed feeling groggy and soiled, then went to the basement and scrounged up five grocery boxes, which she brought upstairs. She packed her sister’s clothing into the boxes, folding it neatly, adding Faith’s hats, her Indian beads and poison ring and clay scarab on a leather string. She had to go back for more boxes. When everything was packed, Phoebe sealed the boxes shut with thick plastic tape. She stacked them into a column in the middle of Faith’s room and left them there.

  Phoebe still paid occasional visits to the Haight, sniffing the bowls of powdered incense at her favorite occult shop, lying on her back in the grass on Hippie Hill. But the pleasure afforded her by these pastimes was fleeting and faint. She felt like the ghost of her former ghostly self, flickering outside even the narrow, shadowy realm where she’d once been at home. And there was nothing to replace it.

  Everything should be different, Phoebe kept thinking, now that she knew what had happened to her sister. B
ut that difference had failed to register in the world. Perhaps the problem was that except for Wolf, no one knew what she’d learned about Faith. Tell her! Phoebe would urge herself while she and her mother unloaded broccoli and yogurt from Cal-Mart bags in their quiet kitchen. Go on, say it. But something always stopped her—fear of betraying Wolf, fear of more unpleasantness with her mother that she would be powerless to undo.

  During Phoebe’s fourth week home, her mother returned from work one evening and announced, with an odd mix of anxiety and disregard, that for several weeks her realtor had been negotiating with a buyer for the house. As of today, it was sold.

  Phoebe took to reading the newspaper voraciously each day. President Carter, Idi Amin, Mayor Moscone—she hung upon their words and deeds as if she might be called upon to respond. John Paul I dead after thirty-four days as Pope, gold at a record high, Isaac Bashevis Singer the winner of the Nobel Prize. Sid Vicious charged with killing Nancy. Sadat and Begin making peace while the Middle East boiled. That was the world. And separate though it felt from the tiny web of hilly streets where Phoebe led her life, she strained to touch it, press her face to the glass. The more she knew of the world, the less painful was its absence.

  Early one evening Barry picked Phoebe up and drove her to Los Gatos for the night. He’d fixed up a guest room, daisies by the bed in a blue ceramic vase. They dined at an elegant Indian restaurant tucked incongruously in a vast shopping mall, and both drank too much red wine, nervous, overanxious that the visit go well.

  The next morning, still woozy, Phoebe accompanied her brother to work. The friendliness of his colleagues surprised her, to say nothing of their youth; in their Levi’s and longish hair, they reminded her of brainy high school students wired from too many all-nighters.

  Barry’s office building was the diametric opposite their father’s at IBM—sprawling and flat, full of glass and light and dozens of the sleek, unapproachable computers, which Barry and his colleagues handled with the same rough ease they might use to operate a sink. There was a grand piano, plus two massive refrigerators stocked with exotic juices. Phoebe had expected her brother to strut and brag in his childish way, steeled herself for it, but Barry’s authority seemed effortless. After all, she reasoned later, the company was his own, all the people there his employees. What was left for him to prove?