The Invisible Circus (24 page)

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 found 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?”

Phoebe nodded, pleased that Wolf assumed she’d had boyfriends.

“Well, that’s all we were doing,” he said. “I mean, we were teenagers.”

Phoebe shook her head. “It wasn’t the same. By the time I got to high school, nothing was real anymore.”

Wolf looked at her quizzically.

“It’s true,” Phoebe said. “Everything was kind of fake.”

“Fake,” Wolf said, clearly perplexed. “Why would it be fake?”

“How should I know?” Phoebe said. “It was just fake. I couldn’t take it seriously.”

Wolf shook his head. Phoebe played with the hot candle wax, letting it harden on her fingertips. “Some things are real, some things are fake,” she concluded.

“How about this, right now? Fake?” Wolf asked lightly, but there was an odd tug in his voice, and Phoebe sensed that her answer mattered. She had a perverse urge to tell him yes.

“No,” she said. “Right now is real.”

Wolf gave a half-smile. “I’m relieved.”

Phoebe waited to feel angry with him for prying, but each hoarded truth Wolf teased from her seemed to leave behind it a lightness, like fragile heavy packages being lifted from her arms. Now they were Wolf’s, too. He was helping her carry them.

“I think one of these days the world’s going to look a lot different to you,” he said.

Phoebe was intrigued. “How?”

“Just—yours,” he said. “Yours.” And he looked at Phoebe with such palpable sympathy that she wondered what in herself could possibly have inspired it.

“I hope you’re right,” she said.

Wolf grinned. “I’m right.”

Veal, chicken, ribbons of salad; like casualties, the empty plates and second empty bottle were spirited away from their table. So much wine had eroded Wolf’s usual guard; gone was that studied good nature reminiscent of young male teachers at Phoebe’s high school. She found her gaze stumbling against his and leaning there, unable to break away, and again that desire would stun her. She stalled mid-sentence, too amazed to continue. For all her crushes on boys, Phoebe had never felt so powerfully drawn to anyone. In fact, often when she and the boy finally sank back on the sand or a bench or the seat of his car, something in Phoebe shrank from his soft lips and clamoring heartbeat. Her mind wrestled free, veering back to Faith and Wolf in her mother’s bedroom, the white door shut, watching from the end of that long hall, trying to fathom it. “Come on,” Faith said, taking Wolf’s hand, and Phoebe would try with her mind’s eye to follow, always realizing that whatever happened between herself and this boy would not bring her any nearer that door, not make the slightest difference in her life. Finally she would have no choice but to break free as she had that day from Kyle, for already she was gone. Like hearing her name called again and again, louder each time, finally having to turn.

But this was Wolf.

And her very certainty overwhelmed Phoebe now with a riveting sense of power; light seemed to pour from behind her eyes, her smile was a nimble pair of arms reaching out to gather Wolf in. Other people did these things—why not her? Why not this? When Phoebe leaned down to adjust her sandal, the top of her dress fell open just slightly, her thick liquid hair spilled down her shoulders, pooling like oil in her lap, and Wolf watched. Phoebe felt him watching. Her very longing was a thing she could harness; it sharpened her, distilled her every impulse to a single burning knot between her stomach and her breasts, like a star, Phoebe thought, a magnetic field whose pull would either draw Wolf irresistibly to her or cause her to implode. But what had she to lose? Nothing! Nothing, Phoebe thought, and wanted to laugh, for unlike Wolf she had nothing to lose. She was eighteen years old.

Phoebe ate his dessert. Something with pears, a sweet glaze. Wolf laughed and ordered a second. His lips and teeth were stained from the wine. The restaurant was nearly empty.

“All right,” he said, mashing out a last cigarette. “Let’s make our exit while we still can walk.”

The darkness smelled of flowering trees and motor oil. Phoebe tugged in lungfuls of warm air to stop the violent spinning of her head. She nearly toppled off the curb, but Wolf was behind her. “This way,” he said. “Here, okay,” laughing, slinging an arm around Phoebe’s shoulders. She leaned against him gratefully. Right away she felt better; closing the gap between them seemed to ease some tension within her, as if hundreds of taut, quivering strings had relaxed for the first time in hours. A silence overcame them. Wolf navigated briskly toward the hotel. Phoebe drank in the warmth of his skin. This is crazy, she thought, I’ve gone absolutely crazy. Her blood felt thick, clogging her veins.

When they reached the hotel, Wolf let her go. In the elevator he stood opposite Phoebe, craning his neck to study the overhead cables. Phoebe watched the bones in his chest. She felt predatory, thirsty, already slightly sick.

Wolf took their keys from the desk and led the way to the rooms. The hall was poorly lit. He opened Phoebe’s door and handed her the key, kissing the top of her head.
“Schlaf gut,”
he said, but as he tried to move away, Phoebe lifted her arms to him blindly, craving again that relief of closing the gap. And here were his legs against hers, his stomach, so many points of contact that their meeting felt miraculous, irrevocable. The keys slipped from her hand and clattered to the floor. Wolf held quite still, arms at his sides, while Phoebe hung there, foolish and drunk, fastened to the heat between them, chest and ribs, the roll of his throat as he swallowed.

“Whoa. Whoa, Phoebe, hey,” Wolf said, half laughing, trying to shake free, but Phoebe heard the falter in his voice and she cleaved to him, turning her head so her lips met the hot skin of his neck. Abruptly Wolf pulled her against him, a swift, fierce tug at the small of her back. He lifted her onto her toes, one hand fisted, holding his keys, his heart beating into her like something come open.

It lasted an instant. Wolf seized Phoebe’s arms and forced her away, hands trembling. “Stop,” he whispered. “Jesus, we’re out of our minds.” In the half-dark he watched her, a stunned look on his face as if she’d punched him with a strength he couldn’t fathom. Then his grip on her arms softened, as if suddenly he felt her there. One kiss, Phoebe thought. It was that close. The enormity stopped her.

Wolf let go. “It can’t happen, Phoebe, listen to me,” he said. “Are you listening?” His voice filled the hallway, half-angry, half-disbelieving. “This is not a possibility.”

They parted without another word. In her dark room Phoebe clawed the sundress over her head, yellowy street light spilling across her damp skin. Deep in her belly a small ravenous animal lay coiled; Phoebe felt it breathing, felt its heartbeat.

She yanked the bedspread away and lay under one sheet. Across the wall she heard the jerk of bedsprings and realized that Wolf’s bed and her own met against this same thin wall; they were practically touching. Across the wall she heard tiny movements and imagined him in his bed, what he must be doing now or be about to do. Phoebe braced her head against the pillows until her neck felt ready to crack, every nerve in her body trained on that wall—this was sickness, sweet awful sickness, her flesh an open wound she could barely touch yet had to, mercilessly, again and again, nothing else would heal it.