The Music of Chance by Paul Auster Page A

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 corned 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