The Music of Chance Read online

  He drove for seven straight hours, paused momentarily to fill up the tank with gas, and then continued for another six hours until exhaustion finally got the better of him. He was in north-central Wyoming by then, and dawn was just beginning to lift over the horizon. He checked into a motel, slept solidly for eight or nine hours, and then walked over to the diner next door and put away a meal of steak and eggs from the twenty-four-hour breakfast menu. By late afternoon, he was back in the car, and once again he drove clear through the night, not stopping until he had gone halfway through New Mexico. After that second night, Nashe realized that he was no longer in control of himself, that he had fallen into the grip of some baffling, overpowering force. He was like a crazed animal, careening blindly from one nowhere to the next, but no matter how many resolutions he made to stop, he could not bring himself to do it. Every morning he would go to sleep telling himself that he had had enough, that there would be no more of it, and every afternoon he would wake up with the same desire, the same irresistible urge to crawl back into the car. He wanted that solitude again, that nightlong rush through the emptiness, that rumbling of the road along his skin. He kept it up for the whole two weeks, and each day he pushed himself a little farther, each day he tried to go a little longer than the day before. He covered the entire western part of the country, zigzagging back and forth from Oregon to Texas, charging down the enormous, vacant highways that cut through Arizona, Montana, and Utah, but it wasn’t as though he looked at anything or cared where he was, and except for the odd sentence that he was compelled to speak when buying gas or ordering food, he did not utter a single word. When Nashe finally returned to Boston, he told himself that he was on the verge of a mental breakdown, but that was only because he couldn’t think of anything else to account for what he had done. As he eventually discovered, the truth was far less dramatic. He was simply ashamed of himself for having enjoyed it so much.

  Nashe assumed that it would stop there, that he had managed to work out the odd little bug that had been caught in his system, and now he would slip back into his old life. At first, everything seemed to go well. On the day of his return, they teased him at the fire house for not showing up with a tan (“What did you do, Nashe, spend your vacation in a cave?”), and by midmorning he was laughing at the usual wisecracks and dirty jokes. There was a big fire in Roxbury that night, and when the alarm came for a couple of backup engines, Nashe even went so far as to tell someone that he was glad to be home, that he had missed being away from all the action. But those feelings did not continue, and by the end of the week he found that he was growing restless, that he could not close his eyes at night without remembering the car. On his day off, he drove up to Maine and back, but that only seemed to make it worse, for it left him unsatisfied, itching for more time behind the wheel. He struggled to settle down again, but his mind kept wandering back to the road, to the exhilaration he had felt for those two weeks, and little by little he began to give himself up for lost. It wasn’t that he wanted to quit his job, but with no more time coming to him, what else was he supposed to do? Nashe had been with the fire department for seven years, and it struck him as perverse that he should even consider such a possibility—to throw it away on the strength of an impulse, because of some nameless agitation. It was the only job that had ever meant anything to him, and he had always felt lucky to have stumbled into it. After quitting college, he had knocked around at a number of things for the next few years—bookstore salesman, furniture mover, bartender, taxi driver—and he had only taken the fire exam on a whim, because someone he had met in his cab one night was about to do it and he talked Nashe into giving it a try. That man was turned down, but Nashe wound up receiving the highest grade given that year, and all of a sudden he was being offered a job that he had last thought about when he was four years old. Donna laughed when he called and told her the news, but he went ahead and took the training anyway. There was no question that it was a curious choice, but the work absorbed him and continued to make him happy, and he had never second-guessed himself for sticking with it. Just a few months earlier, it would have been impossible for him to imagine leaving the department, but that was before his life had turned into a soap opera, before the earth had opened around him and swallowed him up. Maybe it was time for a change. He still had over sixty thousand dollars in the bank, and maybe he should use it to get out while he still could.

  He told the captain that he was moving to Minnesota. It seemed like a plausible story, and Nashe did his best to make it sound convincing, going on at some length about how he had received an offer to go into business with one of his brother-in-law’s friends (a partnership in a hardware store, of all things) and why he thought it would be a decent environment for his daughter to grow up in. The captain fell for it, but that did not prevent him from calling Nashe an asshole. “It’s that bimbo wife of yours,” he said. “Ever since she moved her pussy out of town, your brain’s been fucked up, Nashe. There’s nothing more pathetic than that. To see a good man go under because of pussy problems. Get a grip on yourself, fella. Forget those dimwit plans and do your job.”

  “Sorry, captain,” Nashe said, “but I’ve already made up my mind.”

  “Mind? What mind? As far as I can tell, you don’t have one anymore.”

  “You’re just jealous, that’s all. You’d give your right arm to trade places with me.”

  “And move to Minnesota? Forget it, pal. I can think of ten thousand things I’d rather do than live under a snowdrift nine months a year.”

  “Well, if you’re ever passing through, be sure to stop by and say hello. I’ll sell you a screwdriver or something.”

  “Make it a hammer, Nashe. Maybe I could use it to pound some sense into you.”

  Now that he had taken the first step, it wasn’t difficult for him to push on to the end. For the next five days, he took care of business, calling up his landlord and telling him to look for a new tenant, donating furniture to the Salvation Army, cutting off his gas and electric service, disconnecting his phone. There was a recklessness and violence to these gestures that deeply satisfied him, but nothing could match the pleasure of simply throwing things away. On the first night, he spent several hours gathering up Thérèse’s belongings and loading them into trash bags, finally getting rid of her in a systematic purge, a mass burial of each and every object that bore the slightest trace of her presence. He swooped through her closet and dumped out her coats and sweaters and dresses; he emptied her drawers of underwear, stockings, and jewelry; he removed all her pictures from the photo album; he threw out her makeup kits and fashion magazines; he disposed of her books, her records, her alarm clock, her bathing suits, her letters. That broke the ice, so to speak, and when he began to consider his own possessions the following afternoon, Nashe acted with the same brutal thoroughness, treating his past as if it were so much junk to be carted away. The entire contents of the kitchen went to a shelter for homeless people in South Boston. His books went to the high school girl upstairs; his baseball glove went to the little boy across the street; his record collection was sold off to a secondhand music store in Cambridge. There was a certain pain involved in these transactions, but Nashe almost began to welcome that pain, to feel ennobled by it, as if the farther he took himself away from the person he had been, the better off he would be in the future. He felt like a man who had finally found the courage to put a bullet through his head—but in this case the bullet was not death, it was life, it was the explosion that triggers the birth of new worlds.

  He knew that the piano would have to go as well, but he let it wait until the end, not wanting to give it up until the last possible moment. It was a Baldwin upright that his mother had bought for him on his thirteenth birthday, and he had always been grateful to her for that, knowing what a struggle it had been for her to come up with the money. Nashe had no illusions about his playing, but he generally managed to put in a few hours at the instrument every week, sitting down to muddle through some of t
he old pieces he had learned as a boy. It always had a calming effect on him, as if the music helped him to see the world more clearly, to understand his place in the invisible order of things. Now that the house was empty and he was ready to go, he held back for an extra day to give a long farewell recital to the bare walls. One by one, he went through several dozen of his favorite pieces, beginning with The Mysterious Barricades by Couperin and ending with Fats Waller’s Jitterbug Waltz, hammering away at the keyboard until his fingers grew numb and he had to give up. Then he called his piano tuner of the past six years (a blind man named Antonelli) and arranged to sell the Baldwin to him for four hundred and fifty dollars. By the time the movers came the next morning, Nashe had already spent the money on tapes for the cassette machine in his car. It was a fitting gesture, he felt—to turn one form of music into another—and the economy of the exchange pleased him. After that, there was nothing to hold him back anymore. He stayed around long enough to watch Antonelli’s men wrestle the piano out of the house, and then, without bothering to say good-bye to anyone, he was gone. He just walked out, climbed into his car, and was gone.

  Nashe did not have any definite plan. At most, the idea was to let himself drift for a while, to travel around from place to place and see what happened. He figured he would grow tired of it after a couple of months, and at that point he would sit down and worry about what to do next. But two months passed, and he still was not ready to give up. Little by little, he had fallen in love with his new life of freedom and irresponsibility, and once that happened, there were no longer any reasons to stop.

  Speed was of the essence, the joy of sitting in the car and hurtling himself forward through space. That became a good beyond all others, a hunger to be fed at any price. Nothing around him lasted for more than a moment, and as one moment followed another, it was as though he alone continued to exist. He was a fixed point in a whirl of changes, a body poised in utter stillness as the world rushed through him and disappeared. The car became a sanctum of invulnerability, a refuge in which nothing could hurt him anymore. As long as he was driving, he carried no burdens, was unencumbered by even the slightest particle of his former life. That is not to say that memories did not rise up in him, but they no longer seemed to bring any of the old anguish. Perhaps the music had something to do with that, the endless tapes of Bach and Mozart and Verdi that he listened to while sitting behind the wheel, as if the sounds were somehow emanating from him and drenching the landscape, turning the visible world into a reflection of his own thoughts. After three or four months, he had only to enter the car to feel that he was coming loose from his body, that once he put his foot down on the gas and started driving, the music would carry him into a realm of weightlessness.

  Empty roads were always preferable to crowded roads. They demanded fewer slackenings and decelerations, and because he did not have to pay attention to other cars, he could drive with the assurance that his thoughts would not be interrupted. He therefore tended to avoid large population centers, restricting himself to open, unsettled areas: northern New York and New England, the flat farm country of the heartland, the Western deserts. Bad weather was also to be shunned, for that interfered with driving as much as traffic did, and when winter came with its storms and inclemencies, he headed south, and with few exceptions stayed there until spring. Still, even under the best of conditions, Nashe knew that no road was entirely free of danger. There were constant perils to watch out for, and anything could happen at any moment. Swerves and potholes, sudden blowouts, drunken drivers, the briefest lapse of attention—any one of those things could kill you in an instant. Nashe saw a number of fatal accidents during his months on the road, and once or twice he came within a hair’s breadth of crackups himself. He welcomed these close calls, however. They added an element of risk to what he was doing, and more than anything else, that was what he was looking for: to feel that he had taken his life into his own hands.

  He would check into a motel somewhere, have dinner, and then go back to his room and read for two or three hours. Before turning in, he would sit down with his road atlas and plan out the next day’s itinerary, choosing a destination and carefully charting his course. He knew that it was no more than a pretext, that the places had no meaning in themselves, but he followed this system until the end—if only as a way to punctuate his movements, to give himself a reason to stop before going on again. In September, he visited his father’s grave in California, traveling to the town of Riggs one blistering afternoon just to see it with his own eyes. He wanted to flesh out his feelings with an image of some kind, even if that image was no more than a few words and numbers carved into a stone slab. The lawyer who had called about the money accepted his invitation to lunch, and afterward he showed Nashe the house where his father had lived and the hardware store he had run for those twenty-six years. Nashe bought some tools for his car there (a wrench, a flashlight, an air-pressure gauge), but he could never bring himself to use them, and for the rest of the year the package lay unopened in a remote corner of the trunk. On another occasion, he suddenly found himself weary of driving, and rather than push on for no purpose, he took a room at a small hotel in Miami Beach and spent nine straight days sitting by the pool and reading books. In November, he went on a gambling jag in Las Vegas, miraculously breaking even after four days of blackjack and roulette, and not long after that, he spent half a month inching through the deep South, stopping off in a number of Louisiana Delta towns, visiting a friend who had moved to Atlanta, and taking a boat ride through the Everglades. Some of these stops were unavoidable, but once Nashe found himself somewhere, he generally tried to take advantage of it and do some poking around. The Saab had to be cared for, after all, and with the odometer ticking off several hundred miles a day, there was much to be done: oil changes, lube jobs, wheel alignments, all the fine tunings and repairs that were necessary to keep him going. He sometimes felt frustrated at having to make these stops, but with the car placed in the hands of a mechanic for twenty-four or forty-eight hours, he had no choice but to sit tight until it was ready to roll again.

  Early on, he had rented a mailbox in the Northfield post office, and at the beginning of every month Nashe passed through town to collect his credit-card bills and spend a few days with his daughter. That was the only part of his life that did not change, the one commitment he adhered to. He made a special visit for Juliette’s birthday in mid-October (arriving with an armful of presents), and Christmas turned out to be a boisterous, three-day affair during which Nashe dressed up as Santa Claus and entertained everyone by playing the piano and singing songs. Less than a month after that, a second door unexpectedly opened to him. That was in Berkeley, California, and like most of the things that happened to him that year, it came about purely by chance. He had gone into a bookstore one afternoon to buy books for the next leg of his journey, and just like that he ran into a woman he had once known in Boston. Her name was Fiona Wells, and she found him standing in front of the Shakespeare shelf struggling to decide which one-volume edition he should take with him. They hadn’t seen each other for a couple of years, but rather than greet him in any conventional way, she sidled up next to him, tapped her finger against one of the Shakespeares, and said, “Get this one, Jim. It has the best notes and the most readable print.”

  Fiona was a journalist who had once written a feature article about him for the Globe, “A Week in the Life of a Boston Fireman.” It was the usual Sunday supplement claptrap, complete with photos and comments from his friends, but Nashe had been amused by her, had in fact liked her very much, and after she had been following him around for two or three days, he had sensed that she was beginning to feel attracted to him. Certain glances were given, certain accidental brushes of the fingers took place with increasing frequency—but Nashe had been a married man back then, and what might have happened between them did not. A few months after the article was published, Fiona took a job with the AP in San Francisco, and since then he had lost track of h
er.

  She lived in a little house not far from the bookstore, and when she invited him there to talk about the old days in Boston, Nashe understood that she was still unattached. It was not quite four o’clock when they arrived, but they settled down immediately to hard drinks, breaking open a fresh bottle of Jack Daniel’s to accompany their conversation in the living room. Within an hour, Nashe had moved next to Fiona on the couch, and not long after that he was putting his hand inside her skirt. There was a strange inevitability to it, he felt, as if their fluke encounter called for an extravagant response, a spirit of anarchy and celebration. They were not creating an event so much as trying to keep up with one, and by the time Nashe wrapped his arms around Fiona’s naked body, his desire for her was so powerful that it was already verging on a feeling of loss—for he knew that he was bound to disappoint her in the end, that sooner or later a moment would come when he would want to be back in the car.