The Music of Chance

by Paul Auster

  “What can I do for you, boys?” he said. It was a neutral question, neither friendly nor hostile, as if it were the same question he asked every visitor who came to the house. As Nashe studied the man more closely, he was struck by the remarkable blueness of his eyes, a blue so pale that the eyes almost seemed to vanish when the light hit them.

  “We’re here to see Mr. Flower,” Pozzi said.

  “You the two from New York?” the man said, looking past them at the Saab idling on the dirt road.

  “You got it,” Pozzi said. “Straight from the Plaza Hotel.”

  “What about the car, then?” the man asked, running a set of thick, sturdy fingers through his sandy-gray hair.

  “What about it?” Pozzi said.

  “I was wondering,” the man said. “You come from New York, but the tags on the car say Minnesota, ‘land of ten thousand lakes.’ Seems to me like that’s somewhere in the opposite direction.”

  “You got a problem or something, chief?” Pozzi said. “What the fuck difference does it make where the car comes from?”

  “You don’t have to get huffy, fella,” the man replied. “I’m just doing my job. A lot of people come prowling around here, and we can’t have no uninvited guests sneaking through the gates.”

  “We’ve got an invitation,” Pozzi said, trying to control his temper. “We’re here to play cards. If you don’t believe me, go ask your boss. Flower or Stone, it doesn’t matter which. They’re both personal friends of mine.”

  “His name is Pozzi,” Nashe added. “Jack Pozzi. You must have been told he was expected.”

  The man stuck his hand into his shirt pocket, removed a small scrap of paper, cupped it in his palm, and studied it briefly at arm’s length. “Jack Pozzi,” he repeated. “And what about you, fella?” he said, looking at Nashe.

  “I’m Nashe,” Nashe said. “Jim Nashe.”

  The man put the scrap of paper back in his pocket and sighed. “Don’t let nobody in without a name,” he said. “That’s the rule. You shoulda told me straight off. There wouldn’t have been no problem then.”

  “You didn’t ask,” Pozzi said.

  “Yeah,” the man mumbled, almost talking to himself. “Well, maybe I forgot.”

  Without saying another word, he opened both doors of the gate, then gestured to the house behind him. Nashe and Pozzi returned to the car and drove on through.

  4

  The doorbell chimed with the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. They both grinned stupidly in surprise, but before either one of them could make a remark about it, the door was opened by a black maid dressed in a starched gray uniform and she was ushering them into the house. She led them across the black-and-white checkered floor of a large entrance hall that was cluttered with several pieces of broken statuary (a naked wood nymph missing her right arm, a headless hunter, a horse with no legs that floated above a stone plinth with an iron shaft connected to its belly), took them through a high-ceilinged dining room with an immense walnut table in its center, down a dimly lit corridor whose walls were decorated with a series of small landscape paintings, and then knocked on a heavy wooden door. A voice answered from within and the maid pushed the door open, stepping aside to allow Nashe and Pozzi to enter. “Your guests are here,” she said, barely looking into the room, and then she closed the door and made a quick, silent exit.

  It was a large, almost self-consciously masculine room. Standing on the threshold during those first instants, Nashe noticed the dark wood paneling on the walls, the billiard table, the worn Persian rug, the stone fireplace, the leather chairs, the ceiling fan turning overhead. More than anything else, it made him think of a movie set, a mock-up of a British men’s club in some turn-of-the-century colonial outpost. Pozzi had started it, he realized. All the talk about Laurel and Hardy had planted a suggestion of Hollywood in his mind, and now that Nashe was there, it was difficult for him not to think of the house as an illusion.

  Flower and Stone were both dressed in white summer suits. One was standing by the fireplace smoking a cigar, and the other was sitting in a leather chair holding a glass that could have contained either water or gin. The white suits no doubt contributed to the colonial atmosphere, but once Flower spoke, welcoming them into the room with his rough but not unpleasant American voice, the illusion was shattered. Yes, Nashe thought, one was fat and the other was thin, but that was as far as the similarity went. Stone had a taut, emaciated look to him that recalled Fred Astaire more insistently than the long-faced, weeping Laurel, and Flower was more burly than rotund, with a jowly face that resembled some ponderous figure like Edward Arnold or Eugene Pallette rather than the corpulent yet light-footed Hardy. But for all those quibbles, Nashe understood what Pozzi had meant.

  “Greetings, gentlemen,” Flower said, coming toward them with an outstretched hand. “Delighted you could make it.”

  “Hi, there, Bill,” Pozzi said. “Good to see you again. This here’s my big brother, Jim.”

  “Jim Nashe, isn’t it?” Flower said amiably.

  “That’s right,” Nashe said. “Jack and I are half-brothers. Same mother, different fathers.”

  “I don’t know who’s responsible for it,” Flower said, nodding in Pozzi’s direction, “but he’s one hell of a little poker player.”

  “I got him started when he was just a kid,” Nashe said, unable to resist the line. “When you see talent, there’s an obligation to encourage it.”

  “You bet,” Pozzi said. “Jim was my mentor. He taught me everything I know.”

  “But he beats the living daylights out of me now,” Nashe said. “I don’t even dare to sit down at the same table with him anymore.”

  By then, Stone had extricated himself from his chair and was walking toward them, drink still in hand. He introduced himself to Nashe, shook hands with Pozzi, and a moment later the four of them were sitting around the empty fireplace waiting for the refreshments to arrive. Since Flower did most of the talking, Nashe assumed that he was the dominant one of the pair, but for all the big man’s warmth and blustery humor, Nashe found himself more attracted to the silent, bashful Stone. The small man listened attentively to what the others said, and while he made few comments of his own (stumbling inarticulately when he did, acting almost embarrassed by the sound of his voice), there was a stillness and serenity in his eyes that Nashe found deeply sympathetic. Flower was all agitation and lunging goodwill, but there was something crude about him, Nashe felt, some edge of anxiety that made him appear to be at odds with himself. Stone, on the other hand, was a simpler and gentler sort of person, a man without airs who sat comfortably inside his own skin. But those were only first impressions, Nashe realized. As he continued to watch Stone sip away at the clear liquid in his glass, it occurred to him that the man might also be drunk.

  “Willie and I have always loved cards,” Flower was saying. “Back in Philadelphia, we used to play poker every Friday night. It was a ritual with us, and I don’t think we missed more than a handful of games in ten years. Some people go to church on Sunday, but for us it was Friday-night poker. God, how we used to love our weekends back then! Let me tell you, there’s no better medicine than a friendly card game for sloughing off the cares of the workaday world.”

  “It’s relaxing,” Stone said. “It helps to get your mind off things.”

  “Precisely,” Flower said. “It helps to open the spirit to other possibilities, to wipe the slate clean.” He paused for a moment to pick up the thread of his story. “Anyway,” he continued, “for many years Willie and I had our offices in the same building on Chestnut Street. He was an optometrist, you know, and I was an accountant, and every Friday we’d close up shop promptly at five. The game was always at seven, and week in and week out we always spent those two hours in precisely the same way. First, we’d swing around to the corner newsstand and buy a lottery ticket, and then we’d go across the street to Steinberg’s Deli. I would always order a pastrami on rye, and Willie would have the c
orned beef. We did that for a long time, didn’t we, Willie? Nine or ten years, I would say.”

  “At least nine or ten,” Stone said. “Maybe eleven or twelve.”

  “Maybe eleven or twelve,” Flower said with satisfaction. By now it was clear to Nashe that Flower had told this story many times in the past, but that did not prevent him from savoring the opportunity to do so again. Perhaps it was understandable. Good fortune is no less bewildering than bad, and if millions of dollars had literally tumbled down on you from the sky, perhaps you would have to go on telling the story in order to convince yourself it had really happened. “In any case,” Flower went on, “we stuck to this routine for a long time. Life continued, of course, but the Friday nights remained sacred, and in the end they proved stronger than anything else. Willie’s wife died; my wife left me; a host of disappointments threatened to break our hearts. But through it all, those poker sessions in Andy Dugan’s office on the fifth floor continued like clockwork. They never failed us, we could count on them through thick and thin.”

  “And then,” Nashe interrupted, “you suddenly struck it rich.”

  “Just like that,” Stone said. “A bolt from the blue.”

  “It was almost seven years ago,” Flower said, trying not to stray from the narrative. “October fourth, to be precise. No one had hit the winning number for several weeks, and the jackpot had grown to an all-time high. Over twenty million dollars, if you can believe it, a truly astonishing sum. Willie and I had been playing for years, and until then we hadn’t won so much as a penny, not one plug nickel for all the hundreds of dollars we had spent. Nor did we ever expect to. The odds are always the same, after all, no matter how many times you play. Millions and millions to one, the longest of long shots. If anything, I think we bought those tickets just so we could talk about what we would do with the money if we ever happened to win. That was one of our favorite pastimes: sitting in Steinberg’s Deli with our sandwiches and spinning out stories about how we would live if our luck suddenly turned. It was a harmless little game, and it made us happy to let our thoughts run free like that. You might even call it therapeutic. You imagine another life for yourself, and it keeps your heart pounding.”

  “It’s good for the circulation,” Stone said.

  “Precisely,” Flower said. “It puts some juice in the old ticker.”

  At that moment, there was a knock on the door, and the maid wheeled in a tray of iced drinks and tea sandwiches. Flower paused in his telling as the snacks were distributed, but once the four of them had settled back into their chairs, he immediately started up again.

  “Willie and I always went partners on a single ticket,” he said. “It was more enjoyable that way, since it didn’t put us in competition with each other. Imagine if one of us had won! It would have been unthinkable for him not to share the prize money with the other, and so rather than have to go through all that, we simply split the ticket half and half. One of us would choose the first number, the other would choose the second, and then we would go on taking turns until all the holes had been punched out. We came close a few times, missed the jackpot by only a digit or two. A loss was a loss, but I must say that we found those almosts rather exciting.”

  “They spurred us on,” Stone said. “They made us believe that anything was possible.”

  “On the day in question,” Flower continued, “seven years ago this October fourth, Willie and I punched out the holes a little more deliberately than usual. I can’t say why that was, but for some reason we actually discussed the numbers we were going to pick. I’ve dealt with numbers all my life, of course, and after a while you begin to feel that each number has a personality of its own. A twelve is very different from a thirteen, for example. Twelve is upright, conscientious, intelligent, whereas thirteen is a loner, a shady character who won’t think twice about breaking the law to get what he wants. Eleven is tough, an outdoorsman who likes tramping through woods and scaling mountains; ten is rather simpleminded, a bland figure who always does what he’s told; nine is deep and mystical, a Buddha of contemplation. I don’t want to bore you with this, but I’m sure you understand what I mean. It’s all very private, but every accountant I’ve ever talked to has always said the same thing. Numbers have souls, and you can’t help but get involved with them in a personal way.”

  “So there we were,” Stone said, “holding the lottery ticket in our hands, trying to decide which numbers to bet on.”

  “And I looked at Willie,” Flower said, “and I said ‘Primes.’ And Willie looked back at me and said ‘Of course.’ Because that was precisely what he was going to say to me. I got the word out of my mouth a split second faster than he did, but the same thought had also occurred to him. Prime numbers. It was all so neat and elegant. Numbers that refuse to cooperate, that don’t change or divide, numbers that remain themselves for all eternity. And so we picked out a sequence of primes and then walked across the street and had our sandwiches.”

  “Three, seven, thirteen, nineteen, twenty-three, thirty-one,” Stone said.

  “I’ll never forget it,” Flower said. “It was the magic combination, the key to the gates of heaven.”

  “But it shocked us just the same,” Stone said. “For the first week or two, we didn’t know what to think.”

  “It was chaos,” Flower said. “Television, newspapers, magazines. Everyone wanted to talk to us and take our pictures. It took a while for that to die down.”

  “We were celebrities,” Stone said. “Genuine folk heroes.”

  “Still,” Flower said, “we never came out with any of those ludicrous remarks you hear from other winners. The secretaries who say they’re going to keep their jobs, the plumbers who swear they’ll go on living in their tiny apartments. No, Willie and I were never so stupid. Money changes things, and the more money you have, the greater those changes are going to be. Besides, we already knew what we were going to do with our winnings. We had talked about it so much, it was hardly a mystery to us. Once the hubbub blew over, I sold my share of the firm, and Willie did the same with his business. At that point, we didn’t have to think about it. It was a foregone conclusion.”

  “But that was only the beginning,” Stone said.

  “True enough,” Flower said. “We didn’t rest on our laurels. With more than a million coming in every year, we could pretty much do whatever we wanted. Even after we bought this place, there was nothing to stop us from using the money to make more money.”

  “Bucks County!” Stone said, letting out a brief guffaw.

  “Bingo,” Flower said, “a perfect bull’s-eye. No sooner did we become rich than we started to become very rich. And once we were very rich, we became fabulously rich. I knew my way around investments, after all. I had been handling other people’s money for so many years, it was only natural that I should have learned a trick or two along the way. But to be honest with you, we never expected things to work out as well as they did. First it was silver. Then it was Eurodollars. Then it was the commodities market. Junk bonds, superconductors, real estate. You name it, and we’ve turned a profit on it.”

  “Bill has the Midas touch,” Stone said. “A green thumb to end all green thumbs.”

  “Winning the lottery was one thing,” Flower said, “but you’d think that would have been the end of it. A once-in-a-lifetime miracle. But good luck has continued to come our way. No matter what we do, everything seems to turn out right. So much money pours in now, we give half of it to charity—and still we have more than we know what to do with. It’s as though God has singled us out from other men. He’s showered us with good fortune and lifted us to the heights of happiness. I know this might sound presumptuous to you, but at times I feel that we’ve become immortal.”

  “You might be raking it in,” Pozzi said, finally entering the conversation, “but you didn’t do so hot when you played me at poker.”

  “That’s true,” Flower said. “Very true. In these past seven years, it’s the one time our luck ha
s failed us. Willie and I made many blunders that night, and you thrashed us soundly. That’s why I was so eager to arrange a rematch.”

  “What makes you think it’s going to be any different this time?” Pozzi said.

  “I’m glad you asked that question,” Flower said. “After you beat us last month, Willie and I felt humiliated. We had always thought of ourselves as fairly respectable poker players, but you proved to us that we were wrong. So, rather than roll over and give up, we decided to get better at it. We’ve been practicing day and night. We even took lessons from someone.”

  “Lessons?” Pozzi said.

  “From a man named Sid Zeno,” Flower said. “Have you ever heard of him?”

  “Sure, I’ve heard of Sid Zeno,” Pozzi said. “He lives out in Vegas. He’s getting on in years now, but he used to be one of the top half dozen players in the game.”

  “He still has an excellent reputation,” Flower said. “So we had him flown out here from Nevada, and he wound up spending a week with us. I think you’ll find our performance much improved this time, Jack.”