The Music of Chance

by Paul Auster

  “Honest. She was Dolores from the day she was born until the day she died.”

  “If she didn’t like being Dolores, why didn’t she change it?”

  “She did. Not in a big way like you, but she used to go by a nickname. In fact, I never knew her real name was Dolores until I was about ten years old.”

  “What did she call herself?”

  “Dolly.”

  “Yeah, I tried that for a while, too, but it wasn’t much better. It only works if you’re fat. Dolly. It’s a name for a fat woman.”

  “Well, my mother was pretty fat, now that you mention it. Not always, but in the last few years of her life, she put on a lot of weight. Too much booze. It does that to some people. It has something to do with how the alcohol metabolizes in your blood.”

  “My old man drank like a fish for years, but he was always a skinny bastard. The only way you could tell was by looking at the veins around his nose.”

  The conversation went back and forth like that for a while, and when the tape ran out, they sat down on the sofa and opened a bottle of Scotch. Almost predictably, Nashe imagined that he was falling for her, and now that the ice had been broken, he began to ask her all sorts of questions about herself, trying to create an intimacy that would somehow mask the nature of their transaction and turn her into someone real. But the talk was part of the transaction, too, and even though she went on at great length about herself, at bottom he understood that she was only doing her job, talking because he was one of those customers who liked to talk. Everything she said seemed plausible, but at the same time he felt that she had been through it all before, that her words were not false so much as untrue, a delusion that she had little by little convinced herself to believe in, much as Pozzi had deluded himself with his dreams about the World Series of Poker. At one point, she even told him that hooking was only a temporary solution for her. “Once I get enough cash together,” she said, “I’m going to quit the life and go into show business.” It was impossible not to feel sorry for her, impossible not to feel saddened by her childish banality, but Nashe was too far gone by then to let that stand in his way.

  “I think you’ll make a wonderful actress,” he said. “The minute I started dancing with you, I could tell you were the real thing. You move like an angel.”

  “Fucking keeps you in shape,” she said seriously, announcing it as though it were a medical fact. “It’s good for the pelvis. And if there’s one thing I’ve done a lot of in the past couple of years, it’s fuck. I must be as limber as a goddamn contortionist by now.”

  “It so happens that I know a few agents in New York,” Nashe said, unable to stop himself anymore. “One of them has a big operation, and I’m sure he’d be interested in taking a look at you. A fellow by the name of Sid Zeno. If you like, I can call him tomorrow and set up an appointment.”

  “We’re not talking about skin flicks, are we?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. Zeno’s strictly on the up-and-up. He handles some of the best young talent in the movies today.”

  “It’s not that I wouldn’t do it, you understand. But once you get into that biz, it’s hard to get out. They typecast you, and then you never get a chance to play any parts with your clothes on. I mean, my bod’s okay, but it’s nothing to get worked up about. I’d rather do something where I can really act. You know, land a part in one of the daytime soaps, or maybe even try out for a sitcom. It might not be obvious to you, but once I get going, I can be pretty funny.”

  “No problem. Sid has good contacts with television, too. That’s how he got started in fact. Back in the fifties, he was one of the first agents to work exclusively in television.”

  Nashe hardly knew what he was saying anymore. Filled with desire, and yet half dreading what would come of that desire, he blathered on as if he thought the girl might actually believe the nonsense he was telling her. But once they adjourned to the bedroom, she did not disappoint him. She began by letting him kiss her on the mouth, and because Nashe hadn’t dared to hope for such a thing, he instantly imagined that he was falling in love with her. It was true that her naked body was less than beautiful, but now that he understood that she wasn’t going to rush him through it or humiliate him by acting bored, he didn’t care what she looked like. It had been so long, after all, and once they moved onto the bed, she demonstrated the talents of her overworked pelvis with such pride and abandon, it never occurred to him that the pleasure he seemed to be giving her could be anything but authentic. After a while, his brains became so scrambled that he lost his head, and he wound up saying a number of idiotic things to her, things so stupid and inappropriate, in fact, that if he hadn’t been the one who was saying them, he would have thought he was insane.

  What he proposed was that she stay there and live with him while he worked on the wall. He would take care of her, he said, and once the work was finished, they would go to New York together and he would manage her career. Forget Sid Zeno. He would do a better job because he believed in her, because he was crazy about her. They wouldn’t be in the trailer more than a month or two, and she wouldn’t have to do anything but rest and take it easy. He would do all the cooking, all the household chores, and it would be like a vacation for her, a way of getting the past two years out of her system. It wasn’t a bad life in the meadow. It was calm and simple and good for the soul. He just needed to share it with someone now. He had been alone for too long, and he didn’t think he could go on by himself anymore. It was too much to ask of anyone, he said, and the loneliness was beginning to drive him crazy. Just last week, he had almost killed someone, an innocent little boy, and he was afraid that worse things would happen to him if he didn’t make some changes in his life very soon. If she agreed to stay there with him, he would do anything for her. He would give her anything she wanted. He would love her until she exploded with happiness.

  Fortunately, he delivered this speech with such passion and sincerity that he left her with no alternative but to think it was a joke. No one could say such things with a straight face and expect to be believed, and the very foolishness of Nashe’s confession was what saved him from total embarrassment. The girl took him for a prankster, an oddball with a gift for making up wild stories, and instead of telling him to drop dead (which she might have done if she had taken him seriously), she smiled at the trembling supplication in his voice and played along as if it were the funniest thing he had said all night. “I’ll be happy to live here with you, honey,” she said. “All you have to do is take care of Regis, and I’ll move in with you first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “Regis?” he said.

  “You know, the guy who handles my appointments. My pimp.”

  Hearing that response, Nashe understood how ridiculous he must have sounded. But her sarcasm had given him a second chance, an escape from impending disaster, and rather than let his feelings show (the hurt, the wretchedness, the misery her words had caused), he bounced up naked from the bed and clapped his hands together in mock exuberance. “Great!” he said. “I’ll kill the bastard tonight, and then you’ll be mine forever.”

  She started laughing then, as though a part of her actually enjoyed hearing him say those things, and the moment he became conscious of what that laughter meant, he felt a strange and powerful bitterness surge up inside him. He started laughing himself, joining in with her to keep the taste of that bitterness in his mouth, to revel in the comedy of his own abjection. Then, out of nowhere, he suddenly remembered Pozzi. It came like an electric shock, and the jolt of it nearly threw him to the floor. He hadn’t given Jack a single thought in the past two hours, and the selfishness of that neglect mortified him. He stopped laughing with almost terrifying abruptness, and then he started climbing into his clothes, yanking on his pants as if a bell had just sounded in his head.

  “There’s only one problem,” the girl said through her subsiding laughter, still bent on prolonging the game. “What happens when Jack comes back from his trip? I mean, it coul
d get a little crowded around here, don’t you think? He’s a cute guy, too, you know, and maybe there’ll be nights when I feel like sleeping with him. What would you do then? Would you be jealous or what?”

  “That’s just it,” Nashe said, his voice suddenly grim and hard. “Jack’s not coming back. He disappeared almost a month ago.”

  “What do you mean? I thought you said he was in Texas.”

  “I was just making that up. There’s no job in Texas, there’s no oilman, there’s no nothing. The day after you came here for the party, Jack tried to escape. I found him lying outside the trailer the next morning. His skull was bashed in, and he was unconscious—just lying there in a pool of his own blood. Chances are he’s dead by now, but I’m not sure. That’s what I want you to find out for me.”

  He told her everything then, going through the whole story about Pozzi and the card game and the wall, but he had already told her so many lies that night, it was hard to make her believe a word he said. She just looked at him as though he were mad, a lunatic foaming at the mouth with tales of little purple men in flying saucers. But Nashe kept hammering away, and after a while his vehemence began to frighten her. If she hadn’t been sitting naked on the bed, she probably would have made a run for it, but as it was she was trapped, and eventually Nashe managed to wear her down, describing the results of Pozzi’s beating in such ugly and elaborate detail that the full horror of it finally sank in, and by the time that happened, she was sobbing there on the bed, her face buried in her hands and her thin back shaking in fierce, uncontrollable spasms.

  Yes, she said. She would call the hospital. She promised she would. Poor Jack. Of course she would call the hospital. Jesus Christ poor Jack. Jesus Christ poor Jack sweet mother of God. She would call the hospital, and then she would write him a letter.

  Goddamn them. Of course she would do it. Poor Jack. Goddamn them to hell. Sweet Jack oh Jesus poor Jesus poor mother of God. Yes, she would do it. She promised she would. The moment she got home, she would pick up the phone and do it. Yes, he could count on her. God God God God God. She promised. She promised she would do it.

  9

  Crazy with loneliness. Every time Nashe thought of the girl, those were the first words that entered his head: crazy with loneliness. Eventually, he repeated that phrase so often to himself, it began to lose its meaning.

  He never held it against her that the letter did not come. He knew that she had kept her promise, and because he continued to believe that, he did not despair. If anything, he began to feel encouraged. He was at a loss to explain this change of heart, but the fact was that he was growing optimistic, perhaps more optimistic than at any time since the first day in the meadow.

  There was no point in asking Murks what he had done with the girl’s letter. He only would have lied to him, and Nashe didn’t want to expose his suspicions if nothing could be gained by it. Eventually, he was going to learn the truth. He knew that now, and the certainty of that knowledge comforted him, kept him going from one day to the next. “Things happen in their own sweet time,” he told himself. Before you could learn the truth, you had to learn patience.

  Meanwhile, work on the wall advanced. After the third row was completed, Murks built a wooden platform for him, and Nashe now had to mount the steps of this little structure each time he put another stone in place. It slowed his progress somewhat, but that meant nothing compared to the pleasure he felt in being able to work off the ground. Once he started on the fourth row, the wall began to change for him. It was taller than a man now, taller even than a big man like himself, and the fact that he could no longer see past it, that it blocked his view to the other side, made him feel as though something important had begun to happen. All of a sudden, the stones were turning into a wall, and in spite of the pain it had cost him, he could not help admiring it. Whenever he stopped and looked at it now, he felt awed by what he had done.

  For several weeks he read almost nothing. Then one night in late November he picked up a book by William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury), opened it at random, and came across these words in the middle of a sentence: “… until someday in very disgust he risks everything on the single blind turn of a card …”

  Sparrows, cardinals, chickadees, blue jays. Those were the only birds left in the woods now. And crows. Those best of all, Nashe felt. Every now and then, they would come swooping down over the meadow, letting out their strange, throttled cries, and he would interrupt what he was doing to watch them pass overhead. He loved the suddenness of their comings and goings, the way they would appear and disappear, as if for no reason at all.

  Standing out by his trailer in the early morning, he could look through the bare trees and see the outlines of Flower and Stone’s house. On some mornings, however, the fog was too thick for him to see that far. Even the wall could vanish then, and he would have to scan the meadow a long time before he could tell the difference between the gray stones and the gray air around them.

  He had never thought of himself as a man destined for great things. All his life, he had assumed that he was just like everyone else. Now, little by little, he was beginning to suspect that he had been wrong.

  Those were the days when he thought most about Flower’s collection of objects: the handkerchiefs, the spectacles, the rings, the mountains of absurd memorabilia. Every couple of hours, it seemed, another one of them would appear in his head. He was not disturbed by this, however, merely astonished.

  Every night before going to bed, he would write down the number of stones he had added to the wall that day. The figures themselves were unimportant to him, but once the list had grown to ten or twelve entries, he began to take pleasure in the simple accumulation, studying the results in the same way he had once read the box scores in the morning paper. At first, he imagined it was a purely statistical pleasure, but after a while he sensed that it was fulfilling some inner need, some compulsion to keep track of himself and not lose sight of where he was. By early December, he began to think of it as a journal, a logbook in which the numbers stood for his most intimate thoughts.

  Listening to The Marriage of Figaro in the trailer at night. Sometimes, when a particularly beautiful aria came on, he would imagine that Juliette was singing to him, that it was her voice he was hearing.

  The cold weather bothered him less than he thought it would. Even on the bitterest days, he would shed his jacket within an hour of starting work, and by midafternoon he would often be down to his shirtsleeves. Murks would stand there in his heavy coat, shivering against the wind, and yet Nashe would feel almost nothing. It made so little sense to him, he wondered if his body hadn’t caught fire.

  One day, Murks suggested that they begin using the jeep to cart the stones. They could increase the loads that way, he said, and the wall could go up more quickly. But Nashe turned him down. The noise of the engine would distract him, he said. And besides, he was used to the old way of doing things. He liked the slowness of the wagon, the long walks across the meadow, the odd little rumbling sound of the wheels. “If it ain’t broke,” he said, “why fix it?”

  Some time in the third week of November, Nashe realized that it would be possible to bring himself back to zero on his birthday, which fell on December thirteenth. It would mean making several small adjustments in his habits (spending a bit less on food, for example, cutting out newspapers and cigars), but the symmetry of the plan appealed to him, and he decided it would be worth the effort. If all went well, he would win back his freedom on the day he turned thirty-four. It was an arbitrary ambition, but once he put his mind to it, he found that it helped him to organize his thoughts, to concentrate on what had to be done.

  He went over his calculations with Murks every morning, toting up the pluses and minuses to make sure there were no discrepancies, checking and rechecking until their figures matched. On the night of the twelfth, therefore, he knew for certain that the debt would be paid off by three o’clock the next day. He wasn’t planning to stop, then, howeve
r. He had already told Murks that he wanted to make use of the contract rider to earn some traveling money, and since he knew exactly how much he was going to need (enough to pay for cabs, a plane ticket to Minnesota, and Christmas presents for Juliette and her cousins), he had resigned himself to staying on for another week. That would take him up to the twentieth. The first thing he would do after that was get a cab to drive him to the hospital in Doylestown, and once he found out that Pozzi had never been there, he would call another cab and go to the police. He would probably have to hang around for a while to help with the investigation, but no more than a few days, he thought, perhaps only one or two. If he was lucky, he might even get back to Minnesota in time for Christmas Eve.

  He didn’t tell Murks it was his birthday. He felt oddly out of sorts that morning, and even as the day wore on and three o’clock approached, an overwhelming sadness continued to drag down his spirits. Until then, Nashe had assumed that he would want to celebrate—to light up an imaginary cigar, perhaps, or merely to shake Murks’s hand—but the memory of Pozzi weighed too heavily on him, and he couldn’t rouse himself into the proper mood. Each time he picked up another stone, he felt as if he were carrying Pozzi in his arms again, lifting him off the ground and looking into his poor, annihilated face, and when two o’clock came round and the time had dwindled to a matter of minutes, he suddenly found himself thinking back to that day in October when he and the kid had reached this point together, working their heads off in a manic burst of happiness. He missed him so much, he realized. He missed him so much, it ached just to think about him.

  The best way to handle it was to do nothing, he decided, just go on working and ignore the whole business, but at three o’clock he was jolted by a strange piercing noise—a whoop or a shriek or a cry of distress—and when Nashe looked up to see what the trouble was, he saw Murks waving his hat at him from across the meadow. You did it! Nashe heard him say. You’re a free man now! Nashe stopped for a moment and waved back with a casual flip of his hand, and then he immediately bent down over his work again, fixing his attention on the wheelbarrow in which he was stirring cement. Very briefly, he fought off an impulse to start crying, but it didn’t last more than a couple of seconds, and by the time Murks had walked over to congratulate him, he was fully in control of himself again.