Phoebe smiled, still unnerved by the laugh.
“In English I am not me,” Carla said, serious again. The strain of wanting to explain showed in her face. “I have only simple words, like baby.”
Wolf made some objection in German, but Carla waved him off. “In English I am …” Her eyelids fluttered as she groped for a word. She consulted Wolf in German.
He blustered in protest. “Colorless,” he finally said.
“Ja,” Carla said, nodding matter-of-factly. “Yes. In English I am colorless.”
Carla went to unpack the groceries she’d brought. “German food is very heavy, so we are making for you some Italians,” she told Phoebe from the doorway. The room felt deeply silent in her absence. Phoebe sensed Wolf wanting to say something, but when their eyes met, he looked away. An odd shyness overcame them.
“Look, Pheeb,” he finally said, “I’d rather you didn’t—I’d prefer we not talk about Faith in front of Carla.”
“Was I doing that?”
“No, no. Not at all. I’m just saying let’s not.”
The request seemed reasonable enough, yet Phoebe was stung by it. “Okay,” she said.
“It’s just,” Wolf said, “I hate inundating her with all that.”
“I won’t mention her,” Phoebe said, edgy.
Wolf idled at the door as if he’d meant to say something more, then left without a word.
Phoebe went to the window. Yellow light from the kitchen smeared the dark glass. She heard their laughter, the tinny sound of a radio, and it seemed to Phoebe that her sister’s life was entirely effaced, a shadow beside the vivid presence of Carla. Wolf’s fiancée reminded her of girls in high school who’d worn their boyfriends’ athletic jackets to smoke cigarettes outside on foggy days, sleeves reaching halfway down their slim, manicured fingers. They had seemed to Phoebe so dazzlingly complete, lockets tangled in their turtlenecks, a dozen rings, jade, turquoise; girls who didn’t hesitate, whose very thoughtlessness she longed to copy.
Phoebe began to explore the living room, listlessly at first, drawn to a stack of American board games she’d loved as a child, Candy Land, Life, Clue, but as she opened the latter box and fingered the tiny murder weapons, Phoebe began, as she had in Wolf’s bedroom, to feel an element of subterfuge. She imagined herself as an undercover agent posing as a dinner guest, with orders to search the premises by evening’s end. Like a cat burglar, she leapt to the stereo and flipped swiftly through an exhaustive record collection, ELO, Chicago, Journey, all bands she despised, though seeing their albums in German was amusing. Men at Work, the Bee Gees; having determined these records couldn’t possibly be Wolf’s, Phoebe left them, darting to a set of low, deep shelves filled with rows of books. She reached behind the books and found the space crammed with objects. Hands scuttling like crabs, Phoebe prised free a squeaky rubber mouse, a pincushion shaped like a tomato, a pair of seamed black panty hose still in their plastic. But all this clutter was the Lakes’, she knew; they’d thrown it back here to clear out the place for Wolf. At the sound of footsteps Phoebe jumped to her feet. “Dinner is coming,” Carla said.
Wolf and Carla served tortellini in a cream-and-peppercorn sauce, spinach and green-apple salad. They both ate quickly and efficiently, forks in their left hands. Still full from the sandwich she’d devoured at lunch, Phoebe struggled to finish her portion. Carla asked Phoebe about her travels: Where exactly had she gone? How did she get from place to place? Was her luggage heavy? Often she employed the present progressive—you are seeing, you are going—creating the eerie impression that she was narrating a voyage in progress. Behind Carla’s politeness Phoebe sensed real scrutiny, as if there were something specific she was trying to nail down. It made her nervous.
“You are living in San Francisco?” Carla said.
Phoebe looked up, surprised. She’d assumed this went without saying.
“Phoebe and I went to the same high school,” Wolf jumped in, “about a decade apart.” It sounded forced.
“Not a decade,” Phoebe said.
“No?” He seemed to welcome the challenge. “I graduated ’67. You?”
“This year, 78. Oh yeah,” she admitted. “I guess it is a decade.”
“You are how many years?” Carla asked.
“Eighteen.”
Carla exclaimed, speaking in German to Wolf.
“She says you’re young to be traveling alone,” he translated, adding with the same tense joviality, “which is true enough.”
Phoebe considered alluding to his own youthful travels but thought better of it. That would be almost like bringing up Faith. She shrugged.
“In America we grow up fast,” Wolf said with mock bravado.
Carla grinned. “But you are staying children for always.”
After dinner Wolf and Carla pushed their plates away and lit cigarettes. They divided up the newspaper, spread it over the glass and began combing the apartment listings. The Lakes would return at summer’s end; they had to find one before that. Phoebe left them in their cloud of smoke and brought the plates to the kitchen. “You guys cooked,” she said, dismissing their languid offers of help.
She piled everything in the sink and turned on the water. While it ran, she began quietly opening drawers, surprised at how fragrant some were despite their emptiness, cloves, coffee, peppermint, as if the contents had just been removed. She found a sack of prunes, a bag of straws. Phoebe hoisted herself onto the counter and stood upright to inspect the highest cupboards. Here were products still in boxes—the Lakes’ wedding gifts?—a cheese board shaped like a crescent, a small hibachi grill and shish kebab set. A dense silence clung to these objects. Phoebe had loved to babysit for precisely this sensation: other people’s lives spread open around her, like having the power to go inside rooms you’d glimpsed through street windows. Inevitably Phoebe would open the father’s closet door to look at his ties, suspended there as if forever, so still and elegant.
Phoebe stepped along the counter as far as she could go without entering Wolf and Carla’s range of vision, working her way through a set of lobster bibs, a fondue pot, some cryptic machine whose apparent purpose was the compression of bread and leftovers into tidy loaves. No wonder the Lakes hadn’t used it. When the sink was at the point of overflowing, she climbed back down and washed the dishes, a delicious lightness in her chest. Afterward she left the water running in the empty sink and hid impulsively in the V of the open door, peering through its crack at Wolf and Carla leaning over their newspaper. Carla exclaimed at something she’d found, set down her cigarette and circled the item with a stubby pencil, her other hand groping for Wolf as if for a pair of glasses or a cigarette pack, finding his wrist without lifting her eyes from the paper. The gesture transfixed Phoebe—the inadvertence of it, the thoughtlessness. Wolf rose from his chair and leaned over her, his chest to Carla’s back. He kissed her temple, breathing in her smell while his eyes perused whatever it was she’d found in the paper. The sheer ordinariness of it all confounded Phoebe, as if any one of these things might happen several times in a day, with no one watching. They belong to each other, she thought, and found herself awed by the notion—knowing someone was there, just there, reaching for that person without a thought.
Later the three of them moved to the living room. Wolf discovered he’d left his tapes in the car and ran downstairs to get them. “Wolf,” Phoebe called after him, wanting him to check for a hairbrush she couldn’t find. But she’d missed him.
Carla lay haphazardly on the couch, one leg over the armrest. Phoebe noticed the curve of her hipbones through her jeans. “This name you are giving to Sebastian,” Carla said. “Olf?”
“Oh, Wolf,” Phoebe said. “It’s a nickname.”
“Like animal? Wolf? Yes, yes,” Carla said, approving. “The eyes, yes.”
Wolf returned, puffing from his sprint. He squatted by the stereo.
“Wolf,” Carla called to him playfully. “Why I am never learning this name?”
“Where is coming from, this name?”
Her question was aimed at Phoebe. Wolf, too, turned to look at her, and Phoebe knew she’d misstepped. Had Wolf asked her not to use the name? Should she simply have known? Now she was at a loss. Not mentioning someone was one thing, lying to avoid it was another. She couldn’t believe Wolf wanted that. “It was Faith,” she said timidly, watching his face. “Wasn’t it Faith?”
“I don’t know,” Wolf said tiredly, turning back to the stereo. He slipped in a tape and turned it on. They sat, waiting in the crackling silence before the recording began.
“Faith,” Carla said, sounding confused. “Faith.” She pronounced it “Fate.”
“You remember Faith,” Wolf said, as if reading from a script.
“Yes. Of course I can remember Faith,” Carla said, frowning. “But why is Phoebe …? I don’t …” The words seemed to elude her, yet she didn’t switch to German.
“I’m her sister,” Phoebe said, blood rushing to her face. “Faith’s sister.” It felt like a proclamation.
Carla’s eyes were on Wolf now, her mouth slightly open. She spoke in soft, rapid German. He answered humbly, his throat dry. Phoebe thought he seemed afraid.
Carla ran a hand through her short hair, turned to Phoebe and said, “I did not know that you are the sister of Faith,” in the clearest English she’d used all evening.
Phoebe stared at her. There was a change in Carla’s exprèssion, as if she were seeing Phoebe clearly for the first time. There was pity in her face.
“I am sorry,” she said, moving closer, some delicate smell rising from her skin, and Phoebe was filled with a wave of sorrow such as she almost never felt about her sister, a longing to rest her head on Carla’s soft breast and be soothed. She very nearly did it.
Carla cupped her palm around Phoebe’s shoulder, her touch gentle but authoritative, a doctor’s touch. They sat in silence. Iggy Pop was singing “The Passenger.” Phoebe forgot Wolf was there.
The next day was Carla’s day off, and she’d bought tickets weeks before to a jazz concert later that night. Phoebe willingly bowed out. They would all be sleeping at Wolf’s, so while Carla changed clothes in the bedroom, Phoebe helped Wolf arrange a bed for herself on the living room couch. In ponderous silence they tucked in the sheets.
“Hey. I’m sorry,” Wolf said, grazing Phoebe’s eyes.
“She didn’t know who I was,” Phoebe said, her indignation awakened just by saying it.
“I know. I know.” His manner was harassed, but Phoebe saw shame in his eyes. “I wanted it not to be a big deal,” he said. “It was idiotic.”
Carla emerged from the bedroom wearing makeup, her black pants tucked into red cowboy boots. To Phoebe she looked reduced in some way, her delicacy and frank expression no match against the vague, tricky pull of Faith’s absence.
A new uncertainty had formed in Carla’s expression, as if she herself sensed a change in her standing. “We go?” she said tentatively, asking Wolf and Phoebe both.
Wolf moved to her quickly and drew Carla against him with a kind of urgency, as if the sight of her standing alone were more than he could bear. Phoebe looked away as they moved to the door. “Ich liehe dich,” she heard him whisper.
After they’d gone, Phoebe went to Wolf’s bedroom and threw herself on the bed. The overhead light was off, curtains were drawn; the green glass shade of an antique desk lamp made the room feel aquatic. The soft mattress dipped like a hammock. She listened as an airplane bored its way through the sky, trying to picture the people inside it, each with a destination, a life, luggage full of belongings they’d bought and packed and cared about. In Mirasol she and Faith used to lie in bed trying to guess the destinations of approaching trains; “Milwaukee … Decatur … Dallas,” they’d propose in increasing volumes, “Europe … Timbuktu … Florida,” and as the train passed, Faith often would leap from bed and run to the dark window, stand like an apparition in her white nightie until the engine had faded to silence and even after, when the whistle arced back from the distance like an echo. “Tomorrow they’ll be so far,” she said. “And we’ll just be here, isn’t that weird?”—always with a wistfulness that betrayed her envy of passengers traveling through the night at high speed. It was a mystery to Phoebe, her sister’s envy; why, when she and Faith were so clearly the winners, curled in warm beds, with Grandma’s rough starched sheets pulled tight across their chests? Given a choice, who wouldn’t choose home?
Phoebe roused herself from half-sleep and returned to Wolf’s desk. To its right stood a narrow set of shelves, the top ones stacked with technical-looking books in German, crisp catalogs: “New Sulfa Drugs from HAAGER” read one, its logo suggestive of test tubes. Another, by a company called Kat, was entitled “Agricultural Fertilizers: What to Expect from the Eighties.” Phoebe made her way down shelf by shelf until finally, on the bottom two, were the first personal belongings of Wolf’s she’d seen in the apartment. A tattered German-English dictionary, a pair of binoculars, a single Havana cigar in its silvery tube. A photograph of his parents in a small Lucite frame, smiling in fancy dress. Phoebe recognized them, though she couldn’t think from where. An antique pocket watch, pale heavy gold, elaborately engraved with someone’s three initials. The paucity and restraint of these objects were painful to Phoebe, as if Wolf had chosen to pare himself down to the minimum, inhabit a life as lean as his body.
On the last shelf sat a broad antique box, its top curved with age, inlaid with bits of mother-of-pearl. The box was too large to be opened without removing it from the shelf; Phoebe slid it out with a grunt and set it on the rug. It was a heavy box. She hesitated before opening it.
Two pink seashells greeted her eye, the kind Faith used to collect on the beach at Mirasol. Phoebe’s heart nearly stopped. She held the shells in her palm, so light, smooth and cool as porcelain. Of course they might not be Faith’s, shells were shells after all, every beach had them. Carefully she set them by her knee. Next came a diploma of some sort, pronged German calligraphy on yellowy parchment. It curled in a loose cylinder when Phoebe lifted it from the box. She began probing in earnest now, hands shaking with guilty fear, a beat of excitement in her chest. She was looking for something. A particular thing, Phoebe thought, a secret.
Awards, certificates, all in German. A miniature basset hound made from brown and white pipecleaners. Newspaper articles toasted with age, one giant front-page headline with several photographs of young people beneath it, two men, two women; Phoebe wondered if these were criminals, wished she could read what they’d done. Then a manila envelope, at the top of which Wolf had neatly printed, “Pictures.”
With trembling hands Phoebe opened it, removing a pile of snapshots that seemed in no particular order. The first was of Wolf—the old Wolf, Wolf as Phoebe still imagined him when his present incarnation was not directly before her. He was deeply tanned, hair hanging past his shoulders, a string of Indian beads encircling one bicep. He flung at the camera a knowing, arrogant grin Phoebe perfectly remembered, a white curve of teeth. He was leaning against his truck, shirtless, the muscles of his brown abdomen stacked like ice in a tray. Phoebe had grown used to the change in Wolf from those days, but only now did she feel it, an ache in her chest at the loss of that confidence, that cocksure swaggering joy she saw clearly in every detail of this picture. It was more than gone, it was impossible even to imagine, as if Wolf today were a pure rejection of that boy, recoiling from him with all his being.
The first picture of her sister produced in Phoebe an eerie, marvelous sensation, a prickling chill from the base of her spine to her neck. She’d grown up surrounded by pictures of Faith, but always inside their house. Now, thousands of miles from home, here was Faith, standing with Wolf knee-deep in a field of blue cornflowers, her face blurred with motion, Wolf approaching her with what looked like a pipe in his hand, or possibly a piece of bread. On the back he’d written in his
pinched hand, “Loire Valley, July 1970.”
Phoebe sank into a state of trancelike absorption. Faith in Paris, choosing oranges at a market; in an old-fashioned bathtub, her dark hair tumbling from a clip, breasts floating a little, like fish. Phoebe forgot where she was, drifting with Wolf and her sister among a shifting panoply of stoned-looking strangers who gazed deadpan from kitchens and parks and train compartments, blinking through clouds of opalescent smoke. The bleached colors lent a pale, celestial aspect to these pictures, as if starry white light were flooding from some hidden source, dazzling them all into blissful oblivion.
A single picture jerked Phoebe from her reverie.
She rose from the floor and held it under the light. It looked completely unlike the others, its colors stark and crisp as if a different camera had been used, though the effect was that of a strong, merciless light. In the picture Faith’s hands were knotted uncertainly at her waist, the smile wavering on her face as if it were a strain to hold. At first glimpse Phoebe thought her sister’s hair had been pulled back into a ponytail or a bun, the kind she’d used to make with a white porcupine quill. But Faith’s hair was not pulled back, it was short. Someone had cut it off, Phoebe thought, for the cutting seemed a thing inflicted upon her sister, blunt, uneven, as if she’d fought it, as if someone had held her down and done it by force. It made her look older, broken somehow. Or maybe it wasn’t the hair, for her eyes, too, seemed off, not stoned so much as bruised, narrowed against the light. Faith stood uneasily, a hand half raised to her face, surrounded by a formal garden not unlike the Hofgarten, where Wolf had taken Phoebe the day before. There was even some kind of domed building behind her. Phoebe flipped the picture over. “Munich,” it read. “Oct., 1970.”
Wait a minute, she thought. How can that be?
She examined the picture again, but closer inspection confirmed that the park where Faith stood was indeed the Hofgarten, its flowerbeds empty, trees bare of leaves, but the same dome, a fat black pearl in the sunlight. Yet hadn’t Wolf said clearly that Faith never came to Munich? Perhaps someone else had taken the picture, given it to Wolf later? But then he’d still know Faith had been here; why make such a point of saying she hadn’t? And something else, too—the longer Phoebe stared at the picture, the closer Faith’s location seemed to the place where she herself had been standing the day before, when Wolf dropped to one knee and seemed to leave himself.
The Invisible Circus Page 20