by Paul Auster
He spent four nights with her, and little by little he discovered that she was much braver and smarter than he had imagined. “Don’t think I didn’t want this to happen,” she said to him on the last night. “I know you don’t love me, but that doesn’t mean I’m the wrong girl for you. You’re a head case, Nashe, and if you’ve got to go away, then fine, you’ve got to go away. But just remember that I’m here. If you ever get the itch to crawl into someone’s pants again, think about my pants first.”
He could not help feeling sorry for her, but this feeling was also tinged with admiration—perhaps even something more than that: a suspicion that she might be someone he could love, after all. For a brief moment, he was tempted to ask her to marry him, suddenly imagining a life of wisecracks and tender sex with Fiona, of Juliette growing up with brothers and sisters, but he couldn’t manage to get the words out of his mouth. “I’ll just be gone for a little while,” he said at last. “It’s time for my visit to Northfield. You’re welcome to come along if you want to, Fiona.”
“Sure. And what am I supposed to do about my job? Three sick days in a row is pushing it a bit far, don’t you think?”
“I’ve got to be there for Juliette, you know that. It’s important.”
“Lots of things are important. Just don’t disappear forever, that’s all.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be back. I’m a free man now, and I can do whatever I bloody want.”
“This is America, Nashe. The home of the goddamn free, remember? We can all do what we want.”
“I didn’t know you were so patriotic.”
“You bet your bottom dollar, friend. My country right or wrong. That’s why I’m going to wait for you to turn up again. Because I’m free to make a fool of myself.”
“I told you I’ll be back. I just made a promise.”
“I know you did. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to keep it.”
There had been other women before that, a series of short flings and one-night stands, but no one he had made any promises to. The divorced woman in Florida, for example, and the schoolteacher Donna had tried to set him up with in Northfield, and the young waitress in Reno—they had all vanished. Fiona was the only one who meant anything to him, and from their first chance meeting in January to the end of July, he rarely went longer than three weeks without visiting her. Sometimes he would call her from the road, and when she wasn’t in, he would leave funny messages on her answering machine—just to remind her that he was thinking about her. As the months went by, Fiona’s plump, rather awkward body became more and more precious to him: the large, almost unwieldy breasts; the slightly crooked front teeth; the excessive blond hair flowing crazily in a multitude of ringlets and curls. Pre-Raphaelite hair, she called it once, and even though Nashe had not understood the reference, the phrase seemed to capture something about her, to pinpoint some inner quality that turned her ungainliness into a form of beauty. She was so different from Thérèse—the dark and languid Thérèse, the young Thérèse with her flat belly and long, exquisite limbs—but Fiona’s imperfections continued to excite him, since they made him feel their lovemaking as something more than just sex, something more than just the random coupling of two bodies. It became harder for him to end his visits, and the first hours back on the road were always filled with doubts. Where was he going, after all, and what was he trying to prove? It felt absurd that he should be traveling away from her—all for the purpose of spending the night in some lumpy motel bed at the edge of nowhere.
Still, he kept going, relentlessly moving around the continent, feeling more and more at peace with himself as time rolled on. If there was any drawback, it was simply that it would have to end, that he could not go on living this life forever. At first, the money had seemed inexhaustible to him, but after he had been traveling for five or six months, more than half of it had been spent. Slowly but surely, the adventure was turning into a paradox. The money was responsible for his freedom, but each time he used it to buy another portion of that freedom, he was denying himself an equal portion of it as well. The money kept him going, but it was also an engine of loss, inexorably leading him back to the place where he had begun. By the middle of spring, Nashe finally understood that the problem could no longer be ignored. His future was precarious, and unless he made some decision about when to stop, he would barely have a future at all.
He had spent most rashly in the beginning, indulging himself with visits to any number of first-class restaurants and hotels, drinking good wines and buying elaborate toys for Juliette and her cousins, but the truth was that Nashe did not have any pronounced craving for luxuries. He had always lived too close to the bone to think much about them, and once the novelty of the inheritance had worn off, he reverted to his old modest habits: eating simple food, sleeping in budget motels, spending next to nothing in the way of clothes. Occasionally he would splurge on music cassettes or books, but that was the extent of it. The real advantage of the money was not that it had bought him things: it was the fact that it had allowed him to stop thinking about money. Now that he was being forced to think about it again, he decided to make a bargain with himself. He would keep on going until there were twenty thousand dollars left, and then he would go back to Berkeley and ask Fiona to marry him. He wouldn’t hesitate; this time he would really do it.
He managed to stretch it out until late July. Just when everything had fallen into place, however, his luck began to desert him. Fiona’s ex-boyfriend, who had walked out of her life a few months before Nashe entered it, had apparently returned after a change of heart, and instead of jumping at Nashe’s proposal, Fiona wept steadily for over an hour as she explained why he had to stop seeing her. I can’t count on you, Jim, she kept saying. I just can’t count on you.
At bottom, he knew that she was right, but that did not make it any easier to absorb the blow. After he left Berkeley, he was stunned by the bitterness and anger that took hold of him. Those fires burned for many days, and even when they began to diminish, he did not recover so much as lose ground, lapsing into a second, more prolonged period of suffering. Melancholy supplanted rage, and he could no longer feel much beyond a dull, indeterminate sadness, as if everything he saw were slowly being robbed of its color. Very briefly, he toyed with the idea of moving to Minnesota and looking for work there. He even considered going to Boston and asking for his old job back, but his heart wasn’t in it, and he soon abandoned those thoughts. For the rest of July he continued to wander, spending as much time in the car as ever before, on some days even daring himself to push on past the point of exhaustion: going for sixteen or seventeen straight hours, acting as though he meant to punish himself into conquering new barriers of endurance. He was gradually coming to the realization that he was stuck, that if something did not happen soon, he was going to keep on driving until the money ran out. On his visit to Northfield in early August, he went to the bank and withdrew what remained of the inheritance, converting the entire balance into cash—a neat little stack of hundred-dollar bills that he stored in the glove compartment of his car. It made him feel more in control of the crisis, as if the dwindling pile of money were an exact replica of his inner state. For the next two weeks he slept in the car, forcing the most stringent economies on himself, but the savings were finally negligible, and he wound up feeling grubby and depressed. It was no good giving in like that, he decided, it was the wrong approach. Determined to improve his spirits, Nashe drove to Saratoga and checked into a room at the Adelphi Hotel. It was the racing season, and for an entire week he spent every afternoon at the track, gambling on horses in an effort to build up his bankroll again. He felt sure that luck would be with him, but aside from a few dazzling successes with long shots, he lost more often than he won, and by the time he managed to tear himself away from the place, another chunk of his fortune was gone. He had been on the road for a year and two days, and he had just over fourteen thousand dollars left.
Nashe was not quite desperate, but he sen
sed that he was getting there, that another month or two would be enough to push him into a full-blown panic. He decided to go to New York, but instead of traveling down the Thruway, he opted to take his time and wander along the back-country roads. Nerves were the real problem, he told himself, and he wanted to see if going slowly might not help him to relax. He set off after an early breakfast at the Spa City Diner, and by ten o’clock he was somewhere in the middle of Dutchess County. He had been lost for much of the time until then, but since it didn’t seem to matter where he was, he hadn’t bothered to consult a map. Not far from the village of Millbrook, he slowed down to twenty-eight or thirty. He was on a narrow two-lane road flanked by horse farms and meadows, and he had not seen another car for more than ten minutes. Coming to the top of a slight incline, with a clear view for several hundred yards ahead, he suddenly spotted a figure moving along the side of the road. It was a jarring sight in that bucolic setting: a thin, bedraggled man lurching forward in spasms, buckling and wobbling as if he were about to fall on his face. At first, Nashe took him for a drunk, but then he realized it was too early in the morning for anyone to be in that condition. Although he generally refused to stop for hitchhikers, he could not resist slowing down to have a better look. The noise of the shifting gears alerted the stranger to his presence, and when Nashe saw him turn around, he immediately understood that the man was in trouble. He was much younger than he had appeared from the back, no more than twenty-two or twenty-three, and there was little doubt that he had been beaten. His clothes were torn, his face was covered with welts and bruises, and from the way he stood there as the car approached, he scarcely seemed to know where he was. Nashe’s instincts told him to keep on driving, but he could not bring himself to ignore the young man’s distress. Before he was aware of what he was doing, he had already stopped the car, had rolled down the window on the passenger side, and was leaning over to ask the stranger if he needed help. That was how Jack Pozzi stepped into Nashe’s life. For better or worse, that was how the whole business started, one fine morning at the end of the summer.
2
Pozzi accepted the ride without saying a word, just nodded his head when Nashe told him he was going to New York, and scrambled in. From the way his body collapsed when it touched the seat, it was obvious that he would have gone anywhere, that the only thing that mattered to him was getting away from where he was. He had been hurt, but he also looked scared, and he behaved as though he were expecting some new catastrophe, some further attack from the people who were after him. Pozzi closed his eyes and groaned as Nashe put his foot on the accelerator, but even after they were traveling at fifty or fifty-five, he still did not say a word, had barely seemed to notice that Nashe was there. Nashe assumed he was in shock and did not press him, but it was a strange silence for all that, a disconcerting way for things to begin. Nashe wanted to know who this person was, but without some hint to go on, it was impossible to draw any conclusions. The evidence was contradictory, full of elements that did not add up. The clothes, for example, made little sense: powder blue leisure suit, Hawaiian shirt open at the collar, white loafers and thin white socks. It was garish, synthetic stuff, and even when such outfits had been in fashion (ten years ago? twenty years ago?), no one had worn them but middle-aged men. The idea was to look young and sporty, but on a young kid the effect was fairly ludicrous—as if he were trying to impersonate an older man who dressed to look younger than he was. Given the cheapness of the clothes, it seemed right that the kid should also be wearing a ring, but as far as Nashe could tell, the sapphire looked genuine, which didn’t seem right at all. Somewhere along the line the kid must have had the money to pay for it. Unless he hadn’t paid for it—which meant that someone had given it to him, or else that he had stolen it. Pozzi was no more than five-six or five-seven, and Nashe doubted that he weighed more than a hundred and twenty pounds. He was a wiry little runt with delicate hands and a thin, pointy face, and he could have been anything from a traveling salesman to a small-time crook. With blood dribbling out of his nose and his left temple gashed and swollen, it was hard to tell what kind of impression he normally made on the world. Nashe felt a certain intelligence emanating from him, but he couldn’t be sure. For the moment, nothing was sure but the man’s silence. That and the fact that he had been beaten to within several inches of his life.
After they had gone three or four miles, Nashe pulled into a Texaco station and eased the car to a halt. “I have to get some gas,” he said. “If you’d like to clean up in the men’s room, this would be a good time to do it. It might make you feel a little better.”
There was no response. Nashe assumed that the stranger hadn’t heard him, but just as he was about to repeat his suggestion, the man gave a slight, almost imperceptible nod. “Yeah,” Pozzi said. “I probably don’t look too good, do I?”
“No,” Nashe said, “not too good. You look like you’ve just crawled out of a cement mixer.”
“That’s pretty much what I feel like, too.”
“If you can’t make it on your own, I’ll be happy to lend you a hand.”
“Naw, that’s all right, buddy, I can do it. Just watch. Ain’t nothing I can’t do when I put my mind to it.”
Pozzi opened the door and began to extricate himself from the seat, grunting as he tried to move, clearly flabbergasted by the sharpness of the pain. Nashe came around to steady him, but the kid waved him off, shuffling toward the men’s room with slow, cautious steps, as if willing himself not to fall down. In the meantime, Nashe filled the gas tank and checked the oil, and when his passenger still had not returned, he went into the garage and bought a couple of cups of coffee from the vending machine. A good five minutes elapsed, and Nashe began to wonder if the kid hadn’t blacked out in the bathroom. He finished his coffee, stepped outside onto the tarmac, and was about to go knock on the door when he caught sight of him. Pozzi was moving in the direction of the car, looking somewhat more presentable after his session at the sink. At least the blood had been washed from his face, and with his hair slicked back and the torn jacket discarded, Nashe realized that he would probably mend on his own, that there would be no need to take him to a doctor.
He handed the second cup of coffee to the kid and said, “My name is Jim. Jim Nashe. Just in case you were wondering.”
Pozzi took a sip of the now tepid drink and winced with displeasure. Then he offered his right hand to Nashe. “I’m Jack Pozzi,” he said. “My friends call me Jackpot.”
“I guess you hit the jackpot, all right. But maybe not the one you were counting on.”
“You’ve got your best of times, and you’ve got your worst of times. Last night was one of the worst.”
“At least you’re still breathing.”
“Yeah. Maybe I got lucky, after all. Now I get a chance to see how many more dumb things can happen to me.”
Pozzi smiled at the remark, and Nashe smiled back, encouraged to know that the kid had a sense of humor. “If you want my advice,” Nashe said, “I’d get rid of that shirt, too. I think its best days are behind it.”
Pozzi looked down at the dirty, blood-stained material and fingered it wistfully, almost with affection. “I would if I had another one. But I figured this was better than showing off my beautiful body to the world. Common decency, you know what I mean? People are supposed to wear clothes.”
Without saying a word, Nashe walked to the back of the car, opened the trunk, and started looking through one of his bags. A moment later, he extracted a Boston Red Sox T-shirt and tossed it to Pozzi, who caught it with his free hand. “You can wear this,” Nashe said. “It’s way too big for you, but at least it’s clean.”
Pozzi put his coffee cup on the roof of the car and examined the shirt at arm’s length. “The Boston Red Sox,” he said. “What are you, a champion of lost causes or something?”
“That’s right. I can’t get interested in things unless they’re hopeless. Now shut up and put it on. I don’t want you smearing blood all
over my goddamn car.”
Pozzi unbuttoned the torn Hawaiian shirt and let it drop to his feet. His naked torso was white, skinny, and pathetic, as if his body hadn’t been out in the sun for years. Then he pulled the T-shirt over his head and opened his hands, palms up, presenting himself for inspection. “How’s that?” he asked. “Any better?”
“Much better,” Nashe said. “You’re beginning to resemble something human now.”
The shirt was so large on Pozzi that he almost drowned in it. The cloth dangled halfway down his legs, the short sleeves hung over his elbows, and for a moment or two it looked as if he had been turned into a scrawny twelve-year-old boy. For reasons that were not quite clear to him, Nashe felt moved by that.
They headed south on the Taconic State Parkway, figuring to make it down to the city in two or two and a half hours. As Nashe soon learned, Pozzi’s initial silence had been an aberration. Now that the kid was out of danger, he began to show his true colors, and it wasn’t long before he was talking his head off. Nashe didn’t ask for the story, but Pozzi told it to him anyway, acting as though the words were a form of repayment. You rescue a man from a difficult situation, and you’ve earned the right to hear how he got himself into it.
“Not one dime,” he said. “They didn’t leave us with a single fucking dime.” Pozzi let that cryptic remark hang in the air for a moment, and when Nashe said nothing, he started again, scarcely pausing to catch his breath for the next ten or fifteen minutes. “It’s four o’clock in the morning,” he continued, “and we’ve been sitting at the table for seven straight hours. There’s six of us in the room, and the other five are your basic chumps, chipsters of the first water. You give your right arm to get into a game with monkeys like that—the rich boys from New York who play for a little weekend excitement. Lawyers, stockbrokers, corporate hot shots. Losing doesn’t bother them as long as they get their thrills. Good game, they say to you after you’ve won, good game, and then they shake your hand and offer you a drink. Give me a steady dose of guys like that and I could retire before I’m thirty. They’re the best. Solid Republicans, with their Wall Street jokes and goddamn dry martinis. The old boys with the five-dollar cigars. True-blue American assholes.