Free The Music of Chance by Paul Auster Page A

with the memory of a few laughs. When it came right down to it, even that was more than he had expected to accomplish when he woke up that morning in Saratoga.
    Pozzi started bitching the moment they entered the store. The men’s department was filled with faggot clothes, he said, and he’d rather walk around in his bath towels than be caught in any of this preppie vomit. It might be all right if your name was Dudley L. Dipshit the Third and you lived on Park Avenue, but he was Jack Pozzi from Irvington, New Jersey, and he was damned if he was going to wear one of those pink alligator shirts. Back where he came from, they’d kick your ass if you showed up in a thing like that. They’d tear you apart, and they’d flush the pieces down the toilet. As he rattled on with his abuse, Pozzi kept looking at the women who walked by, and if any of them happened to be young or attractive, he would stop talking and make a stab at eye contact, or twist his head around on his neck to watch the sway of their buttocks as they disappeared down the aisle. He winked at a couple of them, and another one who inadvertently brushed his arm he even managed to address. “Hey, babe,” he said. “Got any plans tonight?”
    “Stay calm, Jack,” Nashe warned him once or twice. “Just stay calm. They’ll throw you out of here if you keep it up.”
    “I’m calm,” Pozzi said. “Can’t a guy check out the local talent?”
    At bottom, it was almost as if Pozzi were carrying on because he knew that Nashe expected it of him. It was a self-conscious performance, a whirlwind of predictable antics that he was offering up as an expression of thanks to his new friend and benefactor, and if he had sensed that Nashe wanted him to stop, he would have stopped without another word. At least that was what Nashe concluded later, for once they began studying the clothes in earnest, the kid showed a surprising lack of resistance to his arguments. The implication was that Pozzi somehow understood that he was being given the opportunity to learn something, and that in turn implied that Nashe had already won his respect.
    “It’s like this, Jack,” Nashe said. “Two days from now, you’re going up against a couple of millionaires. And you won’t be playing in some ratty pool hall, you’ll be in their house as an invited guest. They’re probably planning to feed you and put you up for the night. You don’t want to make a bad impression, do you? You don’t want to walk in there looking like some ignorant hood. I saw the kinds of clothes you like to wear. They’re a tip-off, Jack, they give you away as a cheap know-nothing. You see a man in threads like that and you say to yourself, there’s a walking advertisement for Losers Anonymous. They’ve got no style, no class. When we were in the car, you told me you have to be an actor in your line of work. Well, an actor needs a costume. You might not like these clothes, but rich people wear them, and you want to show the world you’ve got some taste, that you’re a man of discretion. It’s time to grow up, Jack. It’s time to start taking yourself seriously.”
    Little by little, Nashe wore him down, and in the end they walked out of the store with five hundred dollars’ worth of bourgeois sobriety and restraint, an outfit of such conventionality as to make its wearer invisible in any crowd: navy blue blazer, light gray slacks, penny loafers, and a white cotton shirt. Since the weather was still warm, Nashe said, they could dispense with a tie, and Pozzi went along with that omission, saying that enough was enough. “I already feellike a creep,” he said. “There’s no point in trying to strangle me, too.”
    It was close to five o’clock when they returned to the Plaza. After depositing the packages on the seventh floor, they went back downstairs for a drink in the Oyster Bar. After one beer, Pozzi suddenly seemed crushed with fatigue, as if he were fighting to keep his eyes open. Nashe sensed