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“Do you ever miss those times?” Phoebe asked.
“What times?”
“You know. The sixties.” The term sounded foolish.
Karl sucked at the pipe, eyes narrowed. “It was good,” he said, breathing smoke. “Like falling in love. Sure, you want the beginning. But you know already the end.”
Phoebe took the pipe. The smoke was soft as felt in her lungs. “What’s the end?” she asked.
Karl shrugged. “Same like everything,” he said. “Goes too far, becomes the opposite.”
Phoebe changed into her sleeping shirt, turned off the light and lay on the bed, arms folded. The ceiling was made of white squares that sparkled faintly. Her heart pounded in her ears. Something was wrong. She’d failed, Phoebe thought, but at what? Imagining herself in Europe, she’d always pictured someone else, physically even, a tall blonde with an answer for everything—as if, in the course of this journey, she would not only shed her former life but cease to exist as herself. Yes, she thought, to leave Phoebe O’Connor behind and be reborn as someone beautiful, mysterious. But the opposite had happened; her own narrow boundaries had hemmed her in, keeping everything real at a distance.
On the train they sat side by side, passing soft fields that leaned and shook as if water were pouring across them. Where the grain had been cut a sharp stubble remained, glinting like broken glass in the sunlight. Pietro’s clothes were clean but smudged, as if he owned few outfits and wore them often. Despite his physical slightness, there was a strength about him.
“I did,” she said in a dreamy, distant voice. “But it’s over now.”
“Is good you go to your sister,” Pietro said.
Phoebe nodded her agreement. She was floating like the priest, suspended in warm liquid.
“When you can go?” he persisted. “Maybe today. Perhaps we walk together to the station. You have there your bag?”
Phoebe turned, looking him full in the face. “I lied to you,” she said. “My sister is dead.”
She caught a faint reflexive action somewhere in Pietro’s eyes, an infinitesimal quickening. “You are alone?”
“Yes,” she said, smiling, for something had opened, the world was flooding inside her.
“We go outside, Phoebe,” Pietro said, standing, taking her by the hand. “Soon I take the train, I have already my ticket, but we must speak.”
Dear Mom, Phoebe and Barry, My French is the worst but luckily we have a friend who translates. Everyone in Paris keeps talking about the demonstrations of two years ago when they tore up cobblestones from the roads and threw them at the cops and they built barricades like the French Revolution. The whole country went on strike for a couple of weeks literally no one worked or studied they just wandered through the streets talking to each other. Nobody locked their doors people slept in strangers’ houses and fell in love and pulled the hands off the clocks outside because time was stopped. (Remember Mom?) Everyone says how it was the most incredible time of their life and how depressing it was when the whole thing finally ended and they were just students again, supposed to take exams and get jobs and all that. Some people say they almost wish it never happened so they wouldn’t know how things could be and they’d still be happy. Love, Faith
Dear Mom and Phoebe and Barry, Yesterday at a chateaux outside Paris Wolf and I jumped over those velvet ropes that block off where you aren’t supposed to go. And we walked through the rooms nobody ever sees they were so beautiful and quiet with silk furniture and little glass things you could pick up. We pretended like we really lived there and lay down on a canopy bed with carved posts but maybe some kind of silent alarm bell went off because a guard came running in and totally freaked and we got thrown out but still it was worth it (Wolf doesn’t think so). But sometimes I think those velvet ropes are all over the world you just cant see them. In Paris I keep thinking where is the best most intense part of Paris, where is the absolute center of Paris and I cant exactly tell, I’m stuck outside the velvet ropes and I just hate them, it makes me so furious when all I ever see is the same normal stuff everybody sees. I wish I could climb over like in the chateaux but the problem is, in Paris unlike a museum the ropes are invisible, you cant tell which way is in which way is out. So you just keep trying. Love, Faith.
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.”
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.
this actually reminds me of a moment in normal people
“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.”
“Don’t get me wrong, I was in love with her,” Wolf said. “Crazy about her, absolutely crazy. I don’t expect I’ll ever, ever feel that way about someone again. Jesus God, I hope not.”
He squatted at the water’s edge. Phoebe sat hunched on the grass, chin on her knees. “What about Carla?” she said.
“It’s night and day,” Wolf said with feeling. “You can be in love and still have a life, you know? You can build something. Faith and I were like thieves. Nothing belonged to us, it was one long spree.” After a moment he said, “On the other hand, we were kids.”