The Music of Chance Read Online Free Page A

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, andmore 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 odometerticking 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