The Invisible Circus (6 page)

“C’mere, beautiful,” Wolf said, pulling a chair to the stove. “Come help the chef.”

Shyly Phoebe approached him. In the candlelight Wolf looked like a warrior chief, deeply tanned even to his hands. His skin had a wonderful smell, like her father’s leather boots when he’d left them out in the sun. Wolf lifted Phoebe onto the chair, his warm hands on her ribs. Phoebe noticed a tiny gold hoop in his earlobe.

The eggs were warm, as if they’d just been laid. Phoebe cracked a luminous shell, letting the yolk and white slide into a glass bowl. Wolf added vegetables to the buttered pan, and the blend of smells became intoxicating: sweet cigarette smoke, buttery vegetables, a rich, oily scent of the candles. The White Witch rose from her chair and began to dance, floating in the music as if it were liquid. The sunburned Hatter snored gently, his top hat upright beside his head on the kitchen table. The Queen of Spades perched on the lap of a man in a harlequin shirt, a Joker from the same pack of cards she was queen of.

“Who are they?” Phoebe whispered to Faith.

Faith shook her head, gazing into the room. “I don’t know,” she said.

“But where did they come from? How did you find them?”

“They found us,” Faith said. “Or we found each other, I guess. At the Invisible Circus. We were all at the Invisible Circus.”

It made perfect sense—these costumes, the crazy good humor of everyone. Phoebe loved the circus, and was crestfallen that her sister would go to one and not bring her. “A three-ring circus?” she asked.

Faith smiled, turning to Wolf. “Was it?”

“Bigger,” Wolf said. “Four-ring, I’d say. Maybe five.”

“Five rings!” Phoebe turned away in fury.

“Oh no,” Faith said. “She thinks—no, Phoebe, it wasn’t—they called it a circus, but it was just a party, a big party in a church. Then it got closed down.”

“No animals?” Phoebe said warily.

“No, nothing like that at all,” Faith said. “More like a grownups’ funhouse.”

Phoebe thought of Playland, an old funhouse out by the ruined Sutro Baths where their father used to take them: a revolving tunnel you couldn’t walk through without falling and bruising your knees, the blasts of air that shot up through tiny holes in the floor. There were long, perilous slides of polished wood that you descended on potato sacks, getting raw white welts where your skin touched the wood. Faith and their father had loved going to Playland, but beneath its smiling good cheer Phoebe sensed a grimacing, sinister core.

Faith took Phoebe’s hands in her own. “Something is happening,” she said softly. “Can you feel it?”

“What?”

“I don’t know, but I feel it. Like this vibration underground.” Her voice trembled, as if the vibration were running through her body.

“What are you talking about?” Phoebe said.

“Everything’s changing,” Faith said. “Everything’s going to be different.”

Things had already changed—too much. “I like how it is,” Phoebe said.

“No, this is better,” Faith said. “This is history. You can’t stop it.”

“What? What is it?” Phoebe asked, frightened now.

Faith ran shaking fingers through her hair. “I don’t know,” she said. “But it’s going to be huge.”

“Don’t try and tell it,” Wolf said gendy, stirring the vegetables. “She’ll know when she knows.”

“It’s here,” Faith said, shutting her eyes and holding both hands suspended near her breasts. “Phoebe. Can you feel it?”

Phoebe turned to look at the room. The White Witch, the Queen of Spades and the Joker were all dancing now, moving their arms like swimmers. Phoebe tried to imagine what they felt, suspended in the warm, silky music—it seemed a pleasure she’d known herself, once, a long time ago. The music came faster, cymbals, voices, laughter. Candles dashed their light against the walls.

“Something happened,” Faith said. “I don’t know what it was.”

Phoebe found herself smiling. She was happy, a delicious warmth beginning in her stomach and seeping out through her limbs like the taste of a candy. “In the court of the Crimson King …” chanted the radio singers, the scene like something from an old book, Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere, Aladdin. The dancers’ bodies rippled like flames. Where am I? Phoebe thought, remembering nights at the amusement park in Mirasol, bathed in colored light, riding her father’s shoulders so high she could touch the paper Chinese lanterns with her fingers. Where am I? Wondering felt so much better than knowing the answer.

“I can,” Phoebe said, extending her arms as if to cross a tightrope. She was Alice, downing the potion, waiting to see what would happen. “I feel it.”

“Daddy would love this, wouldn’t he, Pheeb? He’d love it,” Faith said, and Phoebe knew instantly that Faith was right; whatever this was, their father would approve wholeheartedly. She pictured him leaning back against a counter, arms crossed, a look of hungry pleasure on his face. Phoebe stood on her toes, lifted from her chair by a swell of joy and comprehension: her sister knew the way, she always had.

There were footsteps on the back stairs. Barry appeared in the doorway, fully dressed. He stood a moment, taking in the candles, the strangers, the unrecognizable kitchen. Phoebe glimpsed the scene through her brother’s eyes and saw how strange and fragile it was, how it might whirl away as suddenly as those children stepping back through the wardrobe out of Narnia, into their real lives.

“Bear,” Faith said. “We’re making breakfast.”

Barry glanced at his watch. “Six-thirty A.M.,” he said, flicking on the overhead light. The bright, empty glare startled them, making everyone blink. Someone lowered the music, and the dancers fell still.

“All Mom’s Christmas candles,” Barry said. “All used up.”

“But we can buy more,” Faith said. “Christmas isn’t for almost a year.”

Barry eyed her grimly. “I think these people should leave.”

Wolf turned off the stove and went to him, slinging an arm around Barry’s slight shoulders. “Come on, man,” he said, “this is once in a blue moon.”

Phoebe watched the struggle in her brother’s face. Barry admired Wolf, wanted badly to be liked by him. But he hated giving in to Faith. “It’s not my blue moon,” he said, pulling away from Wolf. “Or Phoebe’s. We were just sleeping.”

“But you can be part of it, Bear,” Faith said. “Look, Phoebe’s helping us cook—you can join in, too, why not?” It seemed less an invitation than a plea.

Wolf tried to touch him again, but Barry withdrew, glancing fearfully at the strangers. “What’s going on, Faith?” he said. “Did you take drugs?”

“Aw Christ,” said the Queen of Spades, hoisting herself on a counter and crossing her legs in disgust.

Barry flinched. Then he stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked at the floor. “I want everyone to leave,” he said. “Now. Or I’m calling the police.”

Wolf shook his head. “That’s not the way.”

“Barry, please,” Faith implored.

But at the mention of police the group roused itself, the White Witch pulling a macramé bag from under the table, the sunburned Hatter smoothing his hair and restoring his top hat. Faith smiled beseechingly at everyone. She looked frantic. Phoebe felt her sister’s desperation, her fear that the one good thing she’d found was about to be taken away. The Invisible Circus, Phoebe thought, the Invisible Circus, chanting the words to herself like a spell. But the group was standing now, ready to go.

“Phoebe,” Barry said from the doorway.

Her own name startled her; she’d forgotten that she herself was a presence in the room. She was standing barefoot on a kitchen chair. From the doorway Barry held out his hand. “Come on, Pheeb,” he said. “Let’s wait upstairs.”

Phoebe turned helplessly to Faith, but all expression had dropped from her sister’s face like a pillowcase sliding to the floor. She looked as she had for months, indifferent.

“Come on, Pheeb,” Barry said. “It’s okay now.”

He spoke as if they were alone, but Phoebe felt the eyes of everyone but Faith upon her and stood paralyzed, anxious to please all of them, to rid herself of this unfamiliar power. She pictured herself imprisoned among Barry’s locks and drawers and keys—that wretched sound machine, their father’s forgotten sketches—while the Invisible Circus sailed away without her.

Barry dropped his hand, uneasy. “Phoebe?”

“I’ll come up later, Bear.”

Something sagged in Barry’s face. He stepped backward through the doorway and hovered outside it. Phoebe stared at her bare feet, aware of having made an irreparable move. When Barry turned and bolted upstairs, she felt relief.

Now the group went hysterical, giddy. The light flashed off, someone turned up the music, and a frenzy of dancing overcame them. The candles had never gone out; now they flung their honey light with rebellious zeal. Clutching the Mad Hatter’s hot, sunburned fingers, Phoebe danced without shame, music rocking her limbs like the bubbles moving the plants in Barry’s fishtank. She felt a breathless, manic joy. “Hurry,” Faith cried as light streaked the sky. “Hurry, let’s get outside.”

They blew out the candles and scrambled upstairs with their plates of eggs, three flights, then a last narrow flight to the roof. Bursting into the open air, they threw themselves down on the pebbled tar and ate ravenously, tearing bread from two enormous loaves that Wolf had bought off a bakery truck. The roof was flat, and from its height a spectacular view arrayed itself, the scalloped shores of Sausalito and Tiburon, glassed-in houses flashing like ore. The Golden Gate Bridge was a slender red skeleton. The magician walked on his hands, cape dragging behind him. The sky seemed nearer than usual. Phoebe felt as if she could catch the gassy pink clouds with her hands.

The wind blew up through her nightgown, chilling her bare skin. Wolf set down his plate and lifted Phoebe into his lap, rubbing her arms to warm her. She felt very small, as if Wolf’s body were a hand, she a leaf or an acorn clutched within it. “Poor Phoebe,” Wolf said, holding her tightly. Phoebe didn’t know why he’d said that, but did not contradict him. If Wolf knew how happy she was, he might let go.

Faith darted around the roof, arranging piles of torn bread for the seagulls. Wind shook the jeans on her skinny legs, lifting her dark, tangled hair above her head. When the loaves were gone, she stood apart from the group and began jumping in place, facing the bay and just leaping, arms stretched to the sky, feet pounding the gravel. Everyone watched her at first, nodding, smiling at this overflow of spirits. Phoebe’s gaze remained on her sister long after the others’ had wandered. She couldn’t look away.

Eventually Faith stopped jumping. Flushed, she lowered herself to the roof beside Phoebe and Wolf, a calm over her like a veil. The others were drifting to sleep, tangled together like cats. The Queen of Spades sang “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.”

“Maybe Dad can see us,” Faith said softly, looking at the sky. “Maybe he’s watching.”

Phoebe looked up. And yes, the sky and sunlight seemed fuller than on the other days, alive with their father’s watchful, humorous gaze. Phoebe stared into the fresh white sun and offered herself. Not alone—alone she was nothing—but as part of Faith, a small shape included within her sister’s outline. It hurt. Her whole body ached as if it were dissolving. Phoebe kept her eyes open as long as she could, then shut them. The darkness relieved her. “Poor thing,” Wolf said, rocking her to sleep.

five

Phoebe’s mother had worked for Jack Lamont since 1965. He was a film producer, best known for
White Angel
, which won Best Picture in 1960. Phoebe had never seen the movie.

She found Jack impossible to like, handsome though he was with his deep tan and pale blue eyes. A terrible chill seeped from beneath his warm-looking skin. “Hiya, Pheebs,” he’d say when she came in the office, then the pale eyes flicked away and that was it, her moment had passed. She would always be his secretary’s daughter. “He’s shy, that’s all it is,” her mother said, but that wasn’t all. Jack was a man in complete control of his life.

Her mother had started as a part-time typist for Jack when their father was first diagnosed. Later she became his full-time assistant and now, thirteen years later, effectively ran his life. No decision he made was too sublime or mundane not to warrant her involvement: cutting partners from a deal, choosing restaurants on the Riviera (where she’d never been), Mexican golf resorts, birthday and Christmas gifts for his far-flung children. It filled Phoebe with pride that a man as cool and self-possessed as Jack could depend on her mother so heedlessly, as if her very touch ensured good fortune. Yet she resented the way his life loomed over theirs, his emergencies wiping out long-held plans in an instant. Barry claimed their mother had all the disadvantages of being Jack’s wife, without the benefits. “Benefits!” their mother snorted when he aired this theory. “There are no benefits to marrying Jack.” He was thrice-divorced, still engaged in legal skirmishes with his last ex-wife. “On the payroll” was his term for the fractured array of steps and exes and halves whom he still supported; if nothing else, their mother said, you had to admit the man was generous. (“Guilt” was Barry’s dour construction.) As for the wives, Phoebe’s mother still lunched with all but the third, who was keeping her distance until the legal matters were settled. Jack married interesting women, her mother said, although the throes of divorce sent him reeling into the soothing embraces of sweet, empty-headed starlets.

Phoebe’s mother complained about her boss, but Phoebe knew she loved the job. She was co-producing a film with Jack—her first—a documentary on the life of one of Faith’s heroes, Che Guevara.

Monday morning was drenched in fog, as if the city itself were still dreaming. Her mother drove, Phoebe sitting uselessly beside her, as always. She still hadn’t learned to drive. Her mother discouraged it, citing their solitary car, but Phoebe knew the true reason was fear for her safety. Not driving embarrassed her. Like all her mother’s restrictions it divided Phoebe from her peers, but she accepted it as she did not smoking, watching enviously as friends mouthed perfect silky rings, gulping down luscious French inhales like whipped cream.

“I’ve been thinking,” Phoebe said, “about maybe going somewhere.”

Her mother glanced at her. “Like where?”

“Europe.”

“What for?”

“Just, I don’t know. Just travel. Maybe start college a year late.”

There was a long pause. “This seems a little out of left field,” her mother said.

“I know it,” Phoebe said bitterly. “Because I never do anything.”

“Sweetheart, you’re about to start college,” her mother said, brushing Phoebe’s hair from her eyes. “That’s something.”

“Everyone does it.”

“So?”

“So I don’t want it,” Phoebe said, startled by her own vehemence. “I want something real to happen to me. I feel like a zombie, I swear to God. Like I can’t wake up.”

There was a long silence. “I’m relieved you’re saying this, Phoebe,” her mother finally said. “Frankly, I’ve been worried about you.”

Phoebe was caught off-guard. “Why?”

“Just, lately you seem so cut off,” her mother said, almost timidly. “Since school ended, you hardly seem to call anyone, even when they call you.”

“But I saw people last week—”

“What about Celeste? You used to see so much of her. Then not going to graduation—”

“You said you understood!”

“I know it,” her mother said, thoughtful. “I’ve been a big part of the problem, looking back.”

“What problem?” Phoebe cried.

“I was always afraid you’d run wild and something would happen …” her mother said in a thin, quiet voice. “I’ve held you back.”

Phoebe had lost her bearings. She sat in silence.

“You know, I hadn’t planned on telling you this quite yet,” her mother said, “but lately I’ve been giving some serious thought to selling the house.”

“Really?” Phoebe said, uncomprehending.

“Just, it’s so big, and soon I’ll be the only one living there. I’ve been dreading telling you, frankly,” she said with an odd laugh.

Phoebe jerked upright in her seat. “What do you mean?” she said. “You mean sell our house?”

Her mother turned to her in alarm. “It’s just a thought.”

“How could you even think that? Sell the house?” Phoebe’s voice filled the car.

“I haven’t sold it. Honestly,” her mother said, flustered. “I was thinking aloud.”

They’d been idling at a curb, but now her mother reentered traffic as if to flee the subject. Phoebe felt wild. Selling the house was the wrong thing, the worst possible thing. “So I guess I can go,” she said, incredulous.

Her mother looked blank.

“To Europe.”

“No, sweetheart. No. I meant that I understood the impulse.”

“You can sell the house but I can’t go to Europe?”

Her mother shook her head, clearly puzzled. “It’s a bad idea, Phoebe, isn’t that obvious? Of all things—that?”

It was like yesterday, with the silver necklace. The hidden world was there, but suddenly her mother couldn’t see it.

“You let Faith,” Phoebe said.

Her mother glanced at her. It was a bad thing to say. A long silence fell while they pulled over at Oak and Masonic, where Phoebe got out each morning for work. Her mother wore a silk blouse with a bow at the neck, her Diane Feinstein blouse, she called it. In the Panhandle, purple-clad figures performed Tai Chi on the wet grass.

Her mother rested her elbows on the steering wheel. “Just getting her out of this city seemed like a godsend.”

Phoebe nodded, anxious to agree.

“I thought Wolf could take care of her,” her mother went on. “But that was too much to ask, even of him.”

Phoebe kept nodding, a jack-in-the-box. “That makes sense.”

“Does it?”

Her mother turned to her. In the bare morning light her face looked slightly swollen, large-pored, as if it had been bruised at one time and never quite healed. Phoebe felt the weight of her response.

“It does,” she said, shaken. “Mom, it totally does.”

The fog was beginning to thin. Houses emerged with colors replenished. Phoebe left the car, waving as her mother pulled into traffic. She watched the back of her pale head until the Fiat disappeared, then walked to work full of vague foreboding.

The Haight-Ashbury intersection had vanished.

Nostalgies were to blame, their zealous removal of the street signs having finally persuaded the city to stop installing new ones. From inside the café where she worked Phoebe often saw tourists traversing Haight Street with maps aloft, aware that they were close, so close, but unable to find the dead center they sought.

Much remained of the sixties: whole-food stores with their bins of knobby fruit, head shops, an occult store full of shrunken heads and tinted crystal balls. But Milk and Honey, where Phoebe worked, had nothing in common with these places. It was a new café full of red neon hearts and white tile, owned and run by gay men. Being neither gay nor male, Phoebe of course was on the outside, but the feeling of this was easier, somehow, than being on the outside where she should have belonged. She listened with passionate interest to her colleagues’ tales of growing up in strait-laced American towns where they’d dated cheerleaders and made faggot jokes, bluffing their way through one life while they dreamed of another. And here it was. They’d found that promised life and nothing could take it away from them now, or so it seemed.

A new guy was starting today, and Phoebe would be training him. She’d worked at Milk and Honey for over a year, finishing high school at noon, then riding the bus to the Haight. Except for the manager, Art, she’d been here longer than anyone.

The new guy was good-looking, which explained Art’s more than usually high spirits. “This is Phoebe O’Connor,” he said, introducing them. “Phoebe, Patrick Finley. I suggest you talk about your Irish roots.”

Phoebe and Patrick exchanged forced smiles. Patrick was tall, dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt. Phoebe wouldn’t have guessed he was gay, but he must be—she’d never known a straight guy to work here.

“Phoebe is training you,” Art explained to Patrick. “She’s our paragon of virtue, aren’t you, dear?”

Phoebe blushed. “Not exactly.”

“Well, no, not if you count all the bodies buried under your house,” Art said merrily.

“They’re deep,” Phoebe said, trying to get into the spirit of it.

But Art’s attention was entirely on Patrick. “She’s never smoked a cigarette,” he said. “Can you imagine?”

“Not once?” the stranger said softly, meeting Phoebe’s gaze. She shook her head, feeling more than usually shy. His eyes were a bright, hungry green.

“She’s training to be a nun,” Art went on. “Although I will say I’ve seen her drunk.”

Phoebe looked at him in alarm. At the Haight Street Fair a few weeks before, she’d gulped down several glasses of sangria in the bright sun and started to cry while watching the motley parade of hippies—their worn-out faces and eyes that seemed bleached from one too many blinding sunrises. Art had put his arms around Phoebe and hugged her. “It’s a long life, kiddo,” she remembered him saying.

“But why am I surprised? All Catholics are drunks,” Art went on, winking at her. “Even the priests.”

“Especially the priests,” Patrick murmured.

“What makes you think I’m a Catholic?” Phoebe said, relieved that her drunken tears had been kept a secret.

“It’s written all over you, dear,” Art said, kissing her cheek.

The morning rush began. Phoebe felt sorry for new employees, that bumbling, incompetent phase, but Patrick seemed used to it. She guessed he was in his mid-twenties. Phoebe taught him her forte, caffè latte, which she made with such consummate skill that the coffee and milk formed separate shifting layers inside the glass mug. Often these efforts went unnoticed by customers, who stirred her masterpieces without so much as pausing to admire their perfect layers.

When the crowd ebbed, Patrick retreated to a nook outside the view of customers. He took a Camel from his pack and tapped one end against the counter. “Can I?” he asked.

“Sure. Everyone does.”

He lit up, eyes falling shut an instant as the smoke met his lungs. “You’re smart not to,” he said, exhaling. “It’s ugly.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Phoebe said with feeling. “I love to watch people smoke.”

Patrick burst out laughing. “Are you serious?”

Phoebe nodded uncertainly. She hadn’t meant to be funny.

Patrick took a deep pull on his cigarette, rolling the smoke from his mouth back into his nostrils. “I’m surprised you don’t just do it, then,” he said. “It’s not like there’s a waiting list.”

“I promised someone I wouldn’t.” This was her usual line.

Patrick stubbed out his cigarette, running both hands through his dark hair. “Well, they did you a favor,” he said.

At two o’clock Phoebe hung up her apron, brushed her hair and left the café for her lunch break. On the corner a guitarist was strumming “Gimme Shelter” on a threadbare electric, an amplifier sputtering beside him. He wore a black leather coat tied at the waist, yellow bell-bottoms and grubby platforms. The clothing looked older than he did.

Clustered at his feet were the vagabond kids who populated Haight Street. Now and then one of them would appear inside Milk and Honey asking for a lemon slice, which Phoebe had learned only recently they used to dilute heroin before shooting it into their veins. These kids were younger than she, far too young to have witnessed the sixties, yet Phoebe felt they were linked with that time in a way she was not, and envied them for it. She still gave them lemons whenever they asked, though Art had forbidden it.

Phoebe continued walking to Hippie Hill, a hump of coarse grass just inside Golden Gate Park. She climbed to the top and sat cross-legged, unwrapping her bran muffin and coffee. Normally she read during lunch—she loved to read and did so quite uncritically, taking each book as a prescription of sorts, an argument for a certain kind of life. But today she ate mechanically, staring down at the trees. Sell the house? Now, after so many years? It was crazy.

And she wasn’t “cut off.” She’d gone with a group of people last week to
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
, where a piece of bread landed in her hair, then on to a Broadway disco where an eel-like man plied her with watery cocktails in exchange for the dubious privilege of wriggling opposite her on the seething dance floor. She wasn’t “cut off.” But try as Phoebe might to blend with her peers, it felt like bluffing, mouthing the words to a song she’d never been taught, always a beat late. At best, she fooled them. But the chance to distinguish herself, impress them in the smallest way, was lost. At her vast public high school Phoebe had felt reduced to a pidgin version of herself, as during “conversations” in French class—Where is the cat? Have you seen the cat? Look! Pierre gives the cat a bath—such was her level of fluency while discussing bongs or bands or how fucked-up someone was at a party.

She was not a presence at high school. If someone thought to include her, Phoebe was included, but if she stood up and left mid-party, as often she had, phoning a taxi home among the bright potholders and fruit-shaped magnets of someone’s kitchen, few people noticed. Handed a hit of acid once, she’d slipped it into her pocket (kept it to this day), but nobody caught the move. “Hey, were you okay with that?” they’d asked days later, for apparently it was powerful, someone had flipped out. Phoebe pictured herself in the eyes of her peers as half ghostly, a transparent outline whose precise movements were impossible to follow. During free periods she had no place to go. Often she simply wandered the halls, feigning distraction and hurry, afraid even to pause for fear that her essential solitude would be exposed. A glass case full of old trophies stood near the school’s front doors, shallow silver dishes from state swim meets, faded ribbons; they were dusty, inconsequential, no one looked at them. As an excuse to stop walking, Phoebe sometimes would pause before that case, pretending a trophy had caught her attention—I’m nothing, she would think, I could disappear and no one would notice—her face reddening in shame as she stared at the meaningless trophies and waited for the bell to class.