The Invisible Circus (18 page)

“A ton,” Phoebe said. “You wouldn’t believe it.”

“How? I mean, what are the changes?”

“You never go back?”

“Oh, I do,” he said. “Occasionally. But my parents live in Tiburon now. I never go to the old places.”

“There’s no point,” Phoebe said.

“What about our high school? What I hear, it sounds almost like the fifties again, cheerleading, football …”

“Disco music,” Phoebe said. “Everyone goes dancing in discos.”

“It sounds healthy,” Wolf said, half laughing. “It sounds … innocent.”

Phoebe turned to him, amazed. “I can’t believe you’re saying this.”

“Age,” Wolf said, and smiled.

They had entered the Hofgarten, a large formal park filled with red and white flowers in soft rectangular beds, thigh-high bushes clipped to look like walls. At the far end a square-columned building rose from inside a ring of trees. It was capped with a dark metal dome like a bronze helmet.

“But something must still be there,” Wolf said. “From before, just—even if it’s nothing.” And Phoebe was struck by the change in his voice, a wistfulness. She told him about Hippie Hill, the empty Panhandle, Haight Street full of junkies; and strangely, as Phoebe described these disappointments, her bitterness over what she’d missed was eclipsed by a sudden, painful yearning for all she’d left behind—for home.

They had slowed to a stop. Sunlight poured over the bronze dome, turning it gold. It looked like a mystical, curative sphere. Wolf took a step or two back and held up a hand, his eyes fixed on Phoebe. “Wait,” he said softly. “Stay there.”

She glanced at the dome behind her, a shimmering hump of black-gold. When she looked back at Wolf, he’d dropped to one knee. Phoebe nearly laughed, but the noise caught in her throat. Wolf looked as vulnerable, as empty-eyed as someone asleep. “What is it?” she asked softly.

He rose to his feet, slowly brushing dust from his jeans.

“Wolf, what?”

“Nothing,” he said absently. He seemed disoriented, as if he himself were unsure what had just happened. “Let’s get out of here.”

They left the park in silence. Phoebe didn’t ask again. As Wolf had gazed up at her from the path, she’d seen a kind of parting in his face, like a door swinging open and shut on a dark room. Phoebe had no idea what this meant. But she was glad, relieved in some way to have seen it.

They ate lunch at one of the oldest restaurants in Munich, businessmen inside glowing cocoons of smoke, smells of beer, salt, oiled wood. Diamond-shaped panes of glass filled the windows. Wolf and Phoebe climbed a narrow flight of steps and were seated at a scarred plank table. Wolf ordered beers, which arrived in bell-shaped glasses tall as wine bottles.

He raised his glass. “To the pleasure of drinking with you, Phoebe,” he said. “Legally, no less. Who would have thought?”

Phoebe sipped the sweet, malty beer, cloudy in her glass. The taste was whole, like a meal in itself. She hadn’t drunk alcohol since the champagne in Epernay with Pietro. It felt like a previous life.

Wolf watched her drink. “By the way,” he said, “my name is Sebastian.”

“Sebastian.” Phoebe burst out laughing. The beer seemed to flood her brain. “No way. Sebastian?”

Wolf laughed, too, reluctantly. It occurred to Phoebe that Carla was probably quite serious, being a doctor. She swallowed back her laughter.

“Right now I feel like Wolf,” he said. “I won’t deny it’s a pleasure.”

“So, should I call you Sebastian?”

They both smiled. The name hung there, ludicrous.

“Call me Wolf,” he said, “what the hell.” After a moment he said, “I’ll be thirty next year, can you believe it?” He seemed sobered by the thought, as if there were untold things he needed to accomplish before that day.

“Thirty isn’t so old. Sebastian,” Phoebe teased.

“Danke schön,”
Wolf said.

He ordered sausages, sauerkraut, stuffed cabbage. The food arrived on dented pewter plates, and Phoebe ate until she felt faint. She drank a second beer. Wolf drank two more. Drunk, Phoebe felt her hold on the present beginning to slip; it was less clear to her now what sort of person she was trying to be. The confusion made her quiet.

The restaurant emptied suddenly, as if an inaudible whistle had summoned the businessmen back to their offices. Pale light fell through the windows, cutting the smoky air into diamond-shaped bands. Wolf lit a cigarette.

“I’ve thought about you a lot, Phoebe,” he said, “all this time.”

Phoebe was touched, amazed that Wolf had thought of her at all. “Really?”

“I mean it,” he said. “Just, hoping you were okay.”

There was a pause. “I guess I am,” Phoebe said nervously.

“I know this sounds crazy but I have to say it,” Wolf said. “I hope you haven’t suffered too much.”

Phoebe felt herself go red. “I don’t know,” she said. “I mean—”

Wolf shook his head. “That was for me, not you, that question,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” she said, unnerved. The truth was, the effect of Faith’s death on her own life was something Phoebe rarely thought about. The very event was blurred in her mind; her mother’s white face in a doorway was all she remembered, and for some reason a blue plastic horse, just a plain blue horse, square-bodied, round white eyes, a toy she’d pulled from the Wishing Well at the shoe store. Holding that horse and trying to believe that her sister was dead.

“When was the last time you saw her?” Phoebe asked. “Faith.”

Again something flared in Wolf’s eyes, that pain or alarm she’d seen earlier, by the bronze dome. “August,” he said. “Nineteen seventy. We went to Berlin from Paris. I left in August, she died in November. As you know.”

He leaned across the table, adjusting himself as if to offset some pain in his stomach. “After Berlin I came here, to Munich. I thought she might come down, but she never did. I was still here when it happened; my parents called. I talked to your mom, told her everything I knew, but it wasn’t much.”

“I remember that,” Phoebe said. “You talking to her.”

“We stayed in touch for years,” Wolf said. “Four, five years. I’d check in occasionally. She was so great. Whenever I called, she’d say, ‘Wolf, it’s always wonderful to hear from you. And if a time comes when you don’t feel like calling anymore, I’ll understand that, too.’” He lifted his empty glass, then set it down. His olive skin looked gray without its tan.

“Faith didn’t want me around anymore, is the bottom line,” he said.

“I know.”

He looked startled.

“Her postcards,” Phoebe said. “I saved them.”

Wolf shifted in his chair. “What did she say?”

“Just, how she was glad when you left. How you’d been holding her back and now she was free.”

Something moved around Wolf’s mouth. Phoebe wished she hadn’t told him. He took a last pull on his cigarette and mashed it into the ashtray. “I’ve thought a lot about why it happened, needless to say,” he said. “But I don’t know. I honestly don’t know why.”

“Well, I want to know,” Phoebe said.

“Understandable.”

“That’s what I’m really doing over here,” she went on, unable to stem the surge of confession rising in her chest. “I’m going to every place she went, all the way to Italy, you know, to Corniglia. Where it happened.”

Wolf’s narrow eyes widened visibly. “Jesus,” he said. But Phoebe barely noticed; for the first time in days—weeks, it seemed—some confusion had lifted and she knew again why she’d come here. To find out what happened.

“What do you think you’ll learn, going down there?” Wolf said.

“I don’t know,” Phoebe said. She felt exhilarated.

Wolf shook his head. “Me either.”

Phoebe sensed from Wolf’s expression that she’d given something away, that he saw her differently now. But her impression of Wolf had shifted, too; he was a man who had nearly recovered from something. His diminished size seemed part of this evolution, as if growing older had been, for Wolf, a matter of scaling back.

“How come you never went home?” Phoebe said.

He took a long breath, drawing a cigarette from his pack but not lighting it. “I couldn’t,” he said. “Start up again, like nothing happened? How could I do that?” His face looked bare, stripped of something. “So I waited,” he said. “Years kept passing. This ended up being my life.”

He opened his hands and smiled his new, hesitant smile. Phoebe smiled back. An understanding passed between them, as if, for the second time that day, they’d turned in a stairwell and recognized each other.

It was late afternoon when they walked back to Wolf’s apartment. Carla’s shift at the hospital would end soon, and he wanted to meet her. Phoebe felt nearly comatose, done in by the beer and her lingering frailty. She would go to sleep at Wolf’s, they decided; he would stay at Carla’s that night and come back for Phoebe the next morning. He would take her to the countryside; they’d tour some castles.

Phoebe noticed Wolf looking at her often now, as if his wonderment at her presence had sharpened with the hours. “Goddamn, this life is strange,” he said when they reached the street where his building stood.

“But good,” Phoebe said. “Right?”

Overhead, the white trees spilled their blossoms heedlessly, like artificial snow.

fourteen

It wasn’t Wolfs old pickup truck, but it felt something like it to Phoebe: an orange Bug, top down, Janis Joplin rasping over the tape deck. Wolf drove as she remembered, sprawled languidly in his seat, one hand nudging the wheel as if it were a fan whose breeze on his face he was adjusting.

They were headed south, toward King Ludwig’s castles. Wolf had come back from Carla’s that morning with eggs and pears and dark bread, and fixed Phoebe breakfast. He’d made a careful sightseeing plan, a change from the old days, when Phoebe recalled him herding people indiscriminately into the back of his truck, then thundering into the hills without direction, scaring up clouds of silty dust.

Phoebe felt exceptionally clean. She’d showered for thirty minutes in that scalding white bathroom, scrubbed her feet and legs and elbows where it seemed an invisible layer of dead skin had collected. Finally she’d opened the bottle of Chanel No. 5 she had lugged all this way and dabbed some on, a rather too liberal dose it turned out (Wolf teased that his sinuses hadn’t been this clear in weeks). It was eerie how far she already felt from the bad time, the many bad times. Only yesterday there had seemed an active need to conceal her troubles from Wolf, but today Phoebe felt she might forget them altogether. The nervous, solitary girl of these past weeks was someone she wondered at, even pitied. But not herself.

The outskirts of Munich fell away, leaving countryside, sheep pressed like burrs into folds of green hill, towns like sunny children’s bedrooms filled with cheerful furniture of churches, barns, houses painted in bright pastels and white trim.

“Summertime time time time …” Janis sang, her voice like a piece of burlap slowly tearing in half.

Phoebe looked at Wolf. His eyes were narrowed against the sun. He seemed thoughtful today, brooding almost.

“Do you think about Faith very much anymore?” she asked.

There was a pause. “I resist it.”

“How come?”

He glanced at her as if the question were surprising.

“It makes you sad?”

“It does, yeah. And I don’t trust the sadness,” Wolf said slowly.

Phoebe sensed his reluctance to speak of the past and tried to quell her desire to make him. She couldn’t. “Remember the Invisible Circus?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“Could you—can you tell me what it actually was? I’ve tried looking it up in books but it’s never there.”

Wolf smiled. “That’s funny, that it’s not there.”

It had happened in a church, Glide Methodist Church in the Tenderloin. A Digger event, no publicity, no media, just the night itself with the right people there. The Diggers fixed the place up like a funhouse, all these trippy rooms and colored lights, shredded plastic on the floor, punch bowls full of Kool-Aid acid. The usual thing, in a way, except it wasn’t usual yet, and besides, this was a church, pews, altar, the whole bit. The idea was for everyone to live out their craziest fantasies at once. Meanwhile these “reporters” were taking notes on everything that happened, then Richard Brautigan—no joke, Brautigan himself—would type up the notes into “news bulletins” and mimeograph hundreds of copies that got passed around instantly, so not only were people doing all this crazy shit, but a lot of times they were reading about themselves doing it before they’d even finished.

“It sounds like a dream,” Phoebe said.

“It was,” Wolf said. “That’s exactly how it felt.” He smoked, gazing at the road. “It was all about watching ourselves happen,” he said. “This incredible feeling, standing outside, seeing the thing unfold. Like tripping. I remember thinking, Shit, this is going to be huge. Whatever it is.”

Phoebe wanted to ask what sort of things people did in the church, what Wolf and Faith had done, but felt timid. “What do you think it meant?” she said.

Wolf laughed. “The Invisible Circus?”

“No, all of it. The Be-In … that whole time.”

He laughed again, uneasy. “I don’t know. God, who knows?” He glanced at her. “I have no answers about that time, Phoebe, honestly. Only questions.”

“What questions?”

“The obvious ones, I guess: What happened? Why didn’t it work? Or did it work, but for some reason I can’t see it?”

“What do you mean, it didn’t work?”

Wolf sighed. Phoebe saw she was wearing him out.

“All I know,” he said, “is at one point it seemed clear that if we just kept pounding away like we were, some gigantic force would, like, lift us away. And today, the ones who pounded the hardest are pretty much all dead. So you’ve got to ask yourself: How well was that working?”

“Maybe they’re the ones who got lifted away.”

Wolf’s brows rose. “Possibly,” he said. “My guess is, they’d rather be alive.”

“Why?”

He turned to look at her, tension in his face. “Because my view of death is not romantic.”

There was a long silence. “Anyhow,” Wolf said, “I’m the last person on earth to ask about any of this. I was a bystander, beginning to end.”

“That’s what everyone says.”

“Well, that should tell you something.”

“Maybe I haven’t met the right people,” Phoebe mused.

Wolf burst out laughing. “Phoebe, you’re wonderful,” he said, easy again. “You’re so completely without irony—it’s like discovering one of those tribes untouched by civilization.”

Phoebe was taken aback. She thought of irony as a purely literary concept, an elusive one at that. “I’m even not sure what it is,” she said.

Wolf wiped his eyes on the back of his hand. “I think irony may be one of those things you either can’t see at all or can’t see anything but,” he said.

They began to climb, land cresting and falling beneath them. Silvery flashes of lake appeared, as if the car were upsetting pitchers of bright, mercuric liquid, spilling it on the roadside. Far off, Phoebe caught her first glimpse of mountains, magnificent beyond the foothills like a giant white stage above the burly shoulders of an audience. She remembered clattering into the dusty hills in Wolf’s truck, how once, on a hot deserted road, he’d walked tightrope across an electrical wire, holding a fallen branch to balance himself. “Don’t!” they’d all shrieked when he started climbing the pole toward the wire, dragging the limb behind him. Someone knew someone whose cousin got electrocuted. But Wolf continued up the pole, and when he reached the top, he grinned down at Faith—it was Faith he was showing off for—grinned down at all their worried faces and said, “Hey, come on. Nothing’s gonna happen to me.” And then he’d done it, cool and white-toothed, taking step after step across the wire with a lazy elegance that had seemed the very essence of Wolf.

“Do you think you used to be arrogant?” Phoebe asked.

Wolf laughed. “Probably,” he said. “Did I seem it?”

“I’m not sure.”

Wolf grew thoughtful. “When I think of that time,” he said, “what I remember most was feeling like nothing could ever go wrong for me.” He turned to Phoebe with a hard smile. “That’s arrogance.”

“So how does irony fit in with that?” she said.

Wolf smiled again. “Blows it to pieces.”

Panting tour buses filled the parking lot. Perhaps a mile off, above a staccato of pines, rose a castle whose dimensions were eerily familiar to Phoebe, like a vision from one of her dreams. Crenellated towers, white stone, spires slender and pointed as paintbrushes—it seemed the precise castle she’d spent hours of her childhood trying to crayon. “What is that?” she asked. “I know I’ve seen it.”

“You have,” Wolf said, raising the Volkswagen’s convertible top and clamping it. “Disney used it as Sleeping Beauty’s castle. In the movie.”

“Oh.” This was not what she’d expected. Phoebe turned away dismissively, then looked back in spite of herself, drawn to the castle by a pull she remembered from encounters with famous people at Jack’s cocktail parties. It was never their achievements so much as sheer recognizability that made Jane Fonda and Michael York so luminous across a room, as if, in a random and chaotic world, they alone were meant to be. “Can we actually go in it?” Phoebe asked.

“That’s the idea.”

They went first to a smaller castle nearer by—Hohenschwangau, where “Mad” King Ludwig II spent his childhood. Trailing their robotic guide, the group sifted past soup tureens, porcelain dishes, faded tapestries of hunt scenes. The walls of King Lud-wig’s bedroom were painted with tiny yellow stars, and at the foot of his bed a door opened onto a miniature flight of steps leading down to the room below, where his future queen would sleep. But Ludwig never married. There was a brief engagement, broken without explanation, followed by his removal from power and mysterious death.

Phoebe lost herself in the tale of the ill-fated king. Dreamily she followed the group up a curved flight of marble steps that resembled bars of soap, hollowed from a century of footsteps. Upstairs, narrow windows overlooked rollicking hills. Wolf remained at Phoebe’s side, steadying her once when she stumbled, so that she couldn’t resist stumbling again on purpose, inviting his protection. She was aware of someone watching them, a young girl with pale hair and a frail, birdcage face. Only days ago Phoebe had scrutinized couples herself, ravenous with envy at the tiny gestures they exchanged, the world they made between themselves. She moved nearer Wolf, tapping his shoulder, whispering into his ear, arranging herself for the eyes of this girl and, in moments, believing the picture herself. Her destiny seemed profoundly, irreversibly changed. The girl was alone. Phoebe felt guilty, playing on her solitude, but the small deceit was too sweet to relinquish.

Outside, they began the uphill walk to Neuschwanstein. Phoebe looked around for the blond girl, half hoping she would follow them up and watch them in this second castle, too, but the girl had vanished.

“Was he really crazy?” she asked Wolf. “King Ludwig?”

“Well, it was the middle of the Industrial Revolution and the guy was building King Arthur castles and galloping around in a medieval sleigh,” Wolf said. “Not to mention inviting his horse to the dinner table.”

King Ludwig had poured money into building Neuschwan-stein, Wolf said, his fairy-tale castle, adding wing upon tower upon phony grotto room until his kingdom went bankrupt and the panicked subjects revolted. They put him into custody by a lake, where a few days later both Ludwig and his doctor mysteriously drowned. “In two feet of water,” Wolf said. “Nobody’s ever figured that one out.”

Tourists wobbled past in horse-drawn buggies. A smell of pine filled the hot, clear air. “I think he wasn’t,” Phoebe said. “Crazy.”

“You nostalgies,” Wolf said.

Ludwig’s Neuschwanstein was the closest thing Phoebe had seen to Oz or Wonderland, lozenges of smooth bright marble in the walls, grotto rooms choked with fake stalactites. Over Ludwig’s throne hovered a fat mosaic Jesus made from what looked like broken candy. As Phoebe wandered the gleaming rooms, a swell of emotion rose in her, a sweet sorrow. She understood him, that was all. She understood this king.

At the tour’s end they filed down the massive staircase. “Poor Ludwig,” Phoebe said. “He was a tragedy.”

“Poor Bavaria,” Wolf said.

“But look what he made!”

Wolf glanced at the painted ceiling. “This?”

“Don’t you like it?”

“Sure, I like it fine. But was it worth the price?”

His knowing tone annoyed her. “I think it was worth any price,” Phoebe said.

Wolf stopped, turning to her. “You can’t be serious,” he said, and seemed to wait for her to admit she was not. “You honestly think this Disneyland was worth bankrupting a kingdom for?”

“Maybe,” Phoebe said sullenly.

Wolf made a dismissive noise. “Tell that to the folks who were killing themselves to put food on the table while old Ludwig was picking out curtains!”

They stared at each other. “There were no curtains,” Phoebe murmured.

Wolf left the castle ahead of her, boots
tocking
the marble floor. Outside, he ran his hands through his hair and looked at the sky. Timidly Phoebe approached him. “Why does it matter?” she said.

“It doesn’t.”

Chastened, they walked in silence through steep, wooded hills behind the castle. Phoebe moved off the path for a better view of Neuschwanstein, like a ghost ship lifted on swells of green sea. She imagined King Ludwig looking down from one of its baked-Alaska windows, promising her that she was right—it had all been worthwhile. Behind her hung the ravine. Phoebe felt its openness at her back, cool air rising from far below.

Wolf passed her on the path, boots crunching the gravel. “Phoebe?” he called. Impulsively she dropped to her knees, crouching among the leafy bushes. Let him search, she thought, let him worry she’d vanished. She waited for some time among the ants and flies and little branches, but Wolf did not call again. The sound of his boots faded away.

After several more minutes Phoebe crawled sheepishly from her hiding place. “Wolf?” she said, but heard nothing except the bustle of birds. “Wolf?” Fear seized her—suppose he’d left, just gone off and left her. Phoebe pictured herself alone again, alone like the girl in the castle, alone as she’d been for weeks, until yesterday. She crashed through the brush, scraping her shins, finally bursting onto the wide main path where Wolf leaned against a tree, smoking a cigarette. “There you are!” she cried, breathless.

Wolf gave her a quizzical look. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said.

They headed back down to the car. The sun was at an angle now; each tree made a cool bar of shadow on the path. Phoebe felt caught, punished for the whole charade of this day, for turning her back on the awful time she’d had, pretending to be someone else. The fantasy sickened her now, glutted her like long days at the carnival or amusement park—corn dogs, candy, bright spinning rides—excesses that had always left Phoebe longing for the more spartan ways of home. Faith was the opposite. Any sense of an ending had awakened in her a driving need to prolong whatever it was; Phoebe remembered her sister getting off one punishing dizzy ride and starting to vomit, their father lifting her over a trash can and holding her midair, muscles jumping in both his arms as he braced the spasms of her slender body heaving up a day’s worth of peanuts and snocones and cotton candy. Faith spent her last breath, then frantically sucked in air only to be sick again, more violently than the first time. It was terrible to watch. Faith was crying, tears running haplessly down both cheeks as their father gathered the long hair away from her face, holding it in his fist until at last she’d finished.