The Invisible Circus (33 page)

“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. But 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?

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.