The Invisible Circus (23 page)

Phoebe looked around the bright room, colorless now to her eye, looked at Wolf and found him colorless, too, one more person her sister had left behind.

He suggested a walk. In silence they roamed among the painted antique buildings of Munich’s Old City. The air smelled of sugar-roasting peanuts. Above the central square, life-sized mechanical dolls assembled in cheerful jerks around a clockface, preparing to strike the hour. Phoebe saw all this through a kind of gauze.

“I wish you’d say something,” Wolf said as they left the square for darker, quiet streets.

But Phoebe had nothing to say. Her thoughts amounted to nothing, as did Wolf and Carla and all the festive beauty of Munich, nothing beside the spectacle of her sister’s life. Terrorism, suicide; like a fast, beautiful car plunging straight down a mountainside. No wonder their father had watched.

“This is a pretty church,” Wolf said. “You want to go in?”

He led the way. The church was small and oval-shaped, its interior more ornate than any Phoebe had seen in Europe, all whorls and curlicues and gold leaf. It looked like a bribe to God.

They sat in back. The light was dense with gold. “What I told you back there,” Wolf said carefully. “Obviously it upset you.”

“I’m not upset.”

“Phoebe, you’ve disappeared. It’s like you’ve gone underwater.”

“I’m thinking.”

“Thinking of what?”

“I have to leave Munich.”

He stared at her. “Why? Did I—is something—”

“I have to keep going,” Phoebe said, the words a monotone.

“Where?”

“I told you before.” But Wolf seemed not to remember. “Italy,” Phoebe said. “Corniglia. Where she did it.”

The name impacted on Wolf physically. “Will you listen to me, Phoebe?” he said. “Will you be with me here a second?”

The intensity of his gaze brought Wolf into sudden focus, upsetting the drift of Phoebe’s thoughts. She looked away. Wolf exhaled slowly, then stretched, arching his back over the pew, his spine cracking like knuckles.

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll go with you.”

Phoebe frowned.

“I’ll go. To Corniglia.”

“Oh no,” Phoebe said. “No.”

“Pretend I’m not there,” Wolf said. “I don’t care if we speak. But you’re not going down there alone, there’s no way.”

“I’m sorry,” Phoebe said. “I’m sorry, Wolf.” She shook her head, smiling, and it felt like so many other times, disengaging herself from a boy’s car, a party, leaving a football game when suddenly the shouts and bright pom-poms had fallen silent in her mind and she saw the empty truth of them. And then she left them behind. Again and again, she left them. It was only hard for a minute.

“I’m not asking you, Phoebe,” Wolf said.

He watched her eyes, his own flicking back and forth between them as if to find some route inside Phoebe’s head. She felt the warmth of him, Wolf’s physical presence beside her, breathing, watching.

“I don’t want you,” she said, and stood, leaving the pew and then the church, not running, hardly walking even, just releasing herself to the peaceful drift of her solitude. But Wolf was right beside her. On the street he suddenly took Phoebe in his arms, like that first day on the staircase. She held still, hands at her sides.

“Come back,” he said. “Please, Phoebe. Come back.” And she felt the pain in his voice, distantly at first, then right in her chest. She looped her arms around Wolf and rested them there.

They stood in silence. From somewhere came the sweet, oily smell of fried bread. Wolf’s heart beat loud in her ear. Phoebe thought of him hugging Faith, the gun between them, and was stricken by a grinding, painful sense that her sister had gone away, left the two of them here to fend for themselves. And maybe it was right, Wolf coming with her, maybe it would help. His chin rested on top of her head, he was that tall.

seventeen

High in the Italian Alps, midway through their drive, Phoebe and Wolf stopped for lunch. The town was like an afterthought of the road: a single restaurant, a store with shutters tightly closed, a tiny bruised-looking church. The cold dry air pinched Phoebe’s nostrils and throat. She and Wolf stepped from the car into whispery silence, as if the clouds, which seemed only inches away, were gently buffing the tinny sky.

The restaurant smelled of woodsmoke. The proprietress was an elderly woman whose lively face and hands made her age seem accidental, something that had befallen her in a moment of carelessness. To Phoebe’s surprise, she spoke German. Wolf explained that this region had been joined to Italy only since World War I. The squat clay jug on their table was filled with red wine.

The restaurant’s sole customer was an elderly man wearing oversized black trousers hitched to his chest by a pair of startling red suspenders. A great playfulness seemed enfolded like a prize among the wrinkles in his face. To Wolf and Phoebe he raised a tiny glass filled with clear liquid, grappa, Wolf said, pretty powerful stuff. They toasted him and drank.

Their trip had begun that morning, after a week’s delay while Wolf completed the scoliosis manual. At first he’d seemed present in body only, uttering scarcely a word as they drove south from Munich over fat green hills into Austria. The air turned bracing, tangy; blunt speckled rocks nosed their way up from beneath the soil. The tallest mountains veered straight into clouds, like columns of stone reaching up to the portals of palaces miles overhead. Phoebe had never seen Carla again; Carla was working, Wolf kept saying, but his strained tone made Phoebe wonder if all was well between them. He’d spent every remaining night at Carla’s apartment, leaving Phoebe his bed, made up for her with fresh striped sheets.

They skirted Innsbruck and then crossed the Brenner Pass, where a handsome, mustachioed Italian checked their passports and waved them into his country. Soon after, they shifted onto a smaller road. The slower pace seemed to relax Wolf.

“I hope it’s okay,” Phoebe said. “You coming with me.”

“Sure it’s okay.”

“I mean, with Carla.”

“It worked out all right,” Wolf said, hesitant. “It’s a tough situation.”

“Because of Faith?”

Again Wolf paused, his wariness giving Phoebe the sense that his fiancée was nearby, within earshot. “Unfinished business is tough,” he said, and glanced at her. Phoebe felt his life tip open just slightly, in a way it hadn’t before. She crept gingerly toward the opening.

“How much did Carla know about her?”

“Everything, pretty much,” Wolf said. “Early on I kind of laid the whole thing out for her. But after that I never talked about it—we never talked about it. Even though I wanted to, sometimes.”

Phoebe waited, afraid of stopping him. “Why didn’t you?” she said.

“I felt awkward, I guess, bringing it up. I thought, Hey, you’re in love, you’re not supposed to be thinking about all that. Even when Carla asked me about Faith, I’d resist, tell myself it was self-discipline, putting the whole thing behind me. But I’m seeing now it’s the opposite, I wasn’t letting go.”

He shook his head, as if the discovery confounded him still. Phoebe felt a peculiar warmth. Wolf hadn’t let go.

They began a slight descent. It felt like exhaling. Something had finally loosened between them, a change even the landscape seemed to reflect: gentler mountains, exposed rock, yellowish and crumbly-looking like something baked. Punishing turns exposed views of staggering beauty; often Phoebe would stare in confusion before she could even react. “Look,” she cried. “Oh my God, look!” By lunchtime she was exhausted.

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 always 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.”