The Invisible Circus

by Jennifer Egan

  Phoebe visited her brother often after that, boarding the train at a station near the Greyhound bus depot. In the flat, open spaces of Silicon Valley he taught her to drive, sitting by with apparent unconcern while Phoebe jammed the gears of his Porsche, narrowly avoiding stray shopping carts in Safeway parking lots. When she was comfortable enough, Barry encouraged her to follow the narrow roads twining up the thickly wooded hills. Descending, he taught her to downshift. “If you’re going to drive, it might as well be fun,” he said.

  Phoebe volunteered to help her mother look at apartments, hoping somehow that the project would bring them together. It was dreary business, trudging through abandoned-looking rooms, trying to imagine their lives occurring inside them. Her mother’s anger had winnowed down to a tense cordiality that Phoebe found even more oppressive. The onus was on her, she sensed, to break the spell between them, but Phoebe had no idea what her mother expected.

  On Russian Hill they saw a two-bedroom apartment with high ceilings and honey-colored floors. The bedrooms were far apart, an advantage (though it went unmentioned) now that Jack often spent the night. In spite of herself, Phoebe felt a certain excitement, wandering the grand, empty rooms as dusk blinked in through the curtainless windows. Her mother, too, seemed inspired by the place. “A dining room!” she exclaimed, though their own was much bigger. “We can start throwing dinner parties.”

  They discussed rugs and desks and curtains, which of their several couches they would keep. Their voices echoed through the empty rooms. Abruptly they heard themselves, and a momentary shyness overcame them.

  “Mom,” Phoebe said.

  Her mother looked up.

  Now, Phoebe told herself—now! There was a long pause while she wondered what exactly she’d meant to tell her mother. For something else was pushing out from inside her, clamoring to be heard. “I’m sorry I disappeared,” she said. “And missed your film.” It was almost a whisper.

  Her mother crossed the room and took Phoebe in her arms. Her lemony smell seemed to arrive from a great distance. “I missed you,” she said.

  Back outside, they paused to look at the building. It was of an old California style, salmon-colored, decorations like frosting, lacy black grillwork over massive glass doors. Behind it the sky was a dark, lucid blue, fog rushing across it. Phoebe’s pulse was still racing from what had happened in the apartment. What was it about Faith that she’d wanted so badly to impart? It seemed to Phoebe now that she had never named it directly, even to herself. Was it Wolf’s having been present when she died? The terrorists? The dead man? But no, it was none of these. The truth was that her sister had killed herself. And everyone knew it.

  As they walked to the car, Phoebe’s mother took her hand.

  They rented the apartment. They would move the fifteenth of October.

  Through open windows a wind flushed their house, lifting clouds of silty dust from the floors, bare now of furniture. Moving men with trembling biceps carried everything down the brick steps to a long Bekins truck.

  Barry had taken the afternoon off to help with the move. He and Phoebe had the job of sorting through their father’s paintings, picking three or so to keep, packing up the rest to give away. In silence they descended the basement steps to the storeroom, a jigsaw of canvases crammed haphazardly from wall to wall. Barry unfolded several huge Bekins boxes and they began, Phoebe handing paintings to Barry, who fitted them carefully inside the box. The older paintings were deeper inside the room, so as they worked, the years seemed to lift from Faith, transforming her from the sad teenager propped by their father’s hospital bed to a sweet, grinning child.

  Phoebe lifted one painting and paused, holding it up to the stray, weak light from the door. It was a portrait of her sister aged eight or nine, standing on the very cliff where, not ten years later, they had scattered her ashes into the sea. She wore a white sunsuit and was grinning, reaching out, a purple ice plant flower clutched in her fist. “Bear,” Phoebe said.

  He came over. They looked at the painting. At first glance, Faith appeared in her usual state of chaotic happiness, but the longer Phoebe looked, the more her sister’s hectic grin seemed belied by a deeper anxiety, as if with this flower she were warding something off. Phoebe looked away, jarred by the impression, then wondered if what she’d seen was really there. She couldn’t tell. When she looked at the painting again, her sister just seemed happy.

  Barry seemed about to speak, then didn’t. “Let’s keep it,” he said.

  Finally the paintings were packed, arranged meticulously in four giant boxes and part of a fifth. “I guess we should pick two more,” Barry said, but he seemed restless, weary of the project. “You do it, Pheeb.”

  Phoebe looked at the boxes of paintings, drawn by the thought of going back through them slowly, losing herself in the project. But no. It was the memory of a longing.

  “Maybe just that one,” she said.

  They dragged the boxes into the garage, then went outside. The backyard was overgrown, fragrant. Miniature daisies peppered the grass. Barry stretched, reaching toward the sky, then he grinned and dropped to the ground, lying on his back. Phoebe lay down beside him, her head at Barry’s feet. The earth was warm, soft. The gloom seemed to lift from her then, like a dark oily bird flapping out of her chest. She breathed the smell of grass and watched the slow-moving clouds.

  “You hear those birds?” Barry said, his voice far away, husky-sounding from lying down. “That chattering? You hear it, Pheeb? I don’t know why but I love that sound.”

  As Phoebe sat reading No Exit in Washington Square one Saturday, someone blocked her light. “Phoebe?” a man said.

  She looked up, recognizing the guy but unable to place him. He was carrying a little girl in his arms. “Remember?” he said. “You trained me.”

  “Oh yeah. God,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re …”

  “Patrick. This is my daughter, Teresa.”

  “Hi,” Phoebe said. She left her seat to look at the child, who had curly red hair and her father’s green eyes. “She’s so pretty,” Phoebe said. “I can’t believe you have a daughter.”

  Patrick laughed. “It amazes me, too.” He wore loose jeans with what looked like swipes of plaster on them. After a moment he said, “You disappeared.”

  “I went to Europe.”

  “Just … up and went.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Art was sure you’d been murdered. He kept saying, ‘I know that girl, she’s never even late!’ I guess he finally reached your mother.”

  “Poor Art,” Phoebe said. “I should go apologize.”

  “I’m sure he’s forgiven you.”

  Teresa was squirming. Patrick set her in the grass and she tottered toward Phoebe, slapping her fat hands on the bench.

  “Do you still work there?” Phoebe said.

  “Actually not,” Patrick said. “I was down on my luck that month, but things’ve picked up, so I quit. Spend some more time with this one.” He lifted the little girl back into his arms. “I’m a sculptor,” he said. “My studio’s right over here, on Green Street. Three eighty-five. Come around during the day sometime, I’ll make you coffee. Or you can make it—aren’t you sort of an expert?”

  “All right,” Phoebe said, laughing. “Maybe I will.”

  As Patrick crossed the square, his daughter swiveled her head like an owl, keeping Phoebe in sight. Phoebe waved to her. The bells of the Church of Sts. Peter and Paul filled the air, striking the hour.

  Something was gone. But something also was beginning. Phoebe felt this more than understood it—a jittery pulse that seemed to flutter beneath the city. A new decade was upon them. In Barry’s office the mood of manic anticipation infected Phoebe at times with a wild certainty that the world was in the grip of transformation. Everyone seemed to feel it—the clean, inarguable power of machines, the promise of extraordinary wealth. It filled them with hope. Phoebe was amazed that the world could ever feel this way again, much less
so soon. Yet she felt it herself.

  Women were cutting their hair. Not the soft, blow-dried Dorothy Hamill cuts of a few years before, but sparser, tighter ones, emphasizing the angles and power of the head. In front of the mirror Phoebe would gather her own reams of hair and hold them behind her, away from her face. The idea of cutting it off appealed to her, the lightness of it, like stepping out from behind a pair of heavy drapes.

  Toward the end of November, Phoebe drove to Coit Tower at dusk. By now the tourists had gone, and there were plenty of spaces in the parking lot. Phoebe parked her mother’s Fiat and got out.

  It was dusk; a charge seemed to hang in the air. There was no fog. Phoebe circled the tower, taking in every angle of the lavish view, the neon-blue sky, and wondering how, when exactly, her life had righted itself. For it had. She’d been accepted to Berkeley for January, that was part of it. But something in Phoebe had also relaxed, and now the loose, random way in which her life unfolded seemed to offend her imagination less and less. She still ached to transcend it, cross the invisible boundary to that other place, the real place. But you couldn’t have that every day. No one could sustain it.

  Phoebe still thought about Faith, of course, but remembering her sister had become a calmer experience. She was gone. The gap between them would be impossible to cross, and it seemed to Phoebe now that her sister was the loser for it. She would miss everything—Faith, who loved so much to be at the center of action.

  And yet. And yet.

  What came to Phoebe now, looking down at the city and bay, was a day when her whole family, even her parents, had played hide-and-seek by a field in Golden Gate Park. A sunlit afternoon, an oceany wind, glimmers of moisture on every leaf. Faith hid first. They all split up to look, Phoebe poking through the pinecones and eucalyptus leaves with a stick, then wobbling among the bushes surrounding the field, not expecting to find Faith—Phoebe was four years old at the most, too little yet to win these games, or even really compete.

  Yet to her own surprise, Phoebe parted a clump of bushes and there sat Faith in a tiny clearing. She was grinning from ear to ear. “You found me,” she whispered. “You won!” But instead of calling out to everyone else and ending the round, Faith had taken Phoebe’s hand and guided her to the soft place where she sat. They waited together, hiding, Phoebe folded in her sister’s lap surrounded by her breath and heartbeat and warm long hair. She felt the cross-hatching of sun and shadow on her face, smelled rainsoaked earth and eucalyptus leaves and was overwhelmed by an almost unbearable happiness. She’d won the game.

  Phoebe squirmed to look up at Faith, but her sister’s eyes were attuned to movement outside the branches, where the rest of the family was looking for them. A trickle of flute music reached her, faint, meandering, and something had risen in Phoebe, a joyous belief that at any time her plain surroundings might part to reveal this radiant, hidden place. And Faith would be there, waiting for Phoebe to climb into her lap.

  JENNIFER EGAN

  Jennifer Egan is the author of Look at Me, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, The Invisible Circus, The Keep, A Visit from the Goon Squad, and the story collection Emerald City. Her nonfiction appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.

  Books by Jennifer Egan

  A Visit from the Goon Squad

  The Keep

  Look at Me

  Emerald City and Other Stories

  The Invisible Circus

  BOOKS BY JENNIFER EGAN

  EMERALD CITY

  These eleven masterful stories—the first collection from acclaimed author Jennifer Egan—deal with loneliness and longing, regret and desire. Egan’s characters—models and housewives, bankers and schoolgirls—are united by their search for something outside their own realm of experience. They set out from locations as exotic as China and Bora Bora, as cosmopolitan as downtown Manhattan, or as familiar as suburban Illinois to seek their own transformations. Elegant and poignant, the stories in Emerald City are seamless evocations of self-discovery.

  Fiction/978-0-307-38753-0

  THE INVISIBLE CIRCUS

  In Jennifer Egan’s highly acclaimed first novel, set in 1978, the political drama and familial tensions of the 1960s form a backdrop for the world of Phoebe O’Connor, age eighteen. Phoebe is obsessed with the memory and death of her sister Faith, a beautiful idealistic hippie who died in Italy in 1970. In order to find out the truth about Faith’s life and death, Phoebe retraces her steps from San Francisco across Europe, a quest that yields both complex and disturbing revelations about family, love, and Faith’s lost generation. This spellbinding novel introduced Egan’s remarkable ability to tie suspense with deeply insightful characters and the nuances of emotion.

  Fiction/978-0-307-38752-3

  THE KEEP

  Two cousins, irreversibly damaged by a childhood prank, reunite twenty years later to renovate a medieval castle in Eastern Europe. In an environment of extreme paranoia, cut off from the outside world, the men reenact the signal event of their youth, with even more catastrophic results. And as the full horror of their predicament unfolds, a prisoner, in jail for an unnamed crime, recounts an unforgettable story that seamlessly brings the crimes of the past and present into piercing relation.

  Fiction/978-1-4000-7974-2

  LOOK AT ME

  At the start of this edgy and ambitiously multilayered novel, a fashion model named Charlotte Swenson emerges from a car accident in her Illinois hometown with her face so badly shattered that it takes eighty titanium screws to reassemble it. She returns to New York still beautiful but oddly unrecognizable, a virtual stranger in the world she once effortlessly occupied. With the surreal authority of a David Lynch film, Jennifer Egan threads Charlotte’s narrative with those of other casualties of our infatuation with image. There’s a deceptively plain teenage girl embarking on a dangerous secret life, an alcoholic private eye, and an enigmatic stranger who changes names and accents as he prepares an apocalyptic blow against American society. As these narratives inexorably converge, Look at Me becomes a coolly mesmerizing intellectual thriller of identity and imposture.

  Fiction/978-0-385-72135-6

  ANCHOR BOOKS

  Available at your local bookstore, or visit

  www.randomhouse.com

  First Anchor Books Edition, October 2007

  Copyright © 1995 by Jennifer Egan

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Nan A. Talese, an imprint of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1995.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Nan A. Talese / Doubleday edition as follows:

  Egan, Jennifer.

  The invisible circus / Jennifer Egan.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Teenage girls—United States—Fiction. 2. Hippies—United States—Fiction. 3. Sisters—United States—Fiction. 4. Death—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3555.G292I55 1995

  813′.54 —dc20 94-6205

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76518-5

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v3.0

 

 

 
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