The Music of Chance Read Free Page B

maybe he should use it to get out while he still could.
    He told the captain that he was moving to Minnesota. It seemedlike 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, finallygetting 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 the old pieces he had learned as a boy. It always had a