Why I Am Not a Musician

for William Logan In the decently opulent lobby of the Curtis Institute of Music, I waited to meet a friend for lunch. Amid the dark wood paneling and hot radiators, under the gaze of a young woman in an oil painting with wings growing out of her back, I listened with a vague contentment that did not need to be more specific to a quartet rehearsing Brahms somewhere, brass working a section of Carmen and, not two weeks before Christmas, continuo passages from Messiah: all the promiscuous beautiful cross-talk musicians are so good at, meaning nothing, addressed to no one. And I found myself remembering how once, at the age of nineteen, with no previous musical training, I decided I would become a violist. I appeared before those who had devoted their lives to its strict discipline with my cheap student instrument in a case I had chosen, for some reason, to carry in the monogrammed laundry bag I once had at summer camp. No, I know why I did that: because the instrument seemed too beautiful to touch, though my girlfriend, who was a musician, was not too beautiful to touch. And what I remembered best of all was the savage amusement of the master and everyone in his studio at this holy fool who was wearing his own initials like a doom for everyone to see, and who had so completely misunderstood the nature of beauty that he thought it could be written out in words. A flush of shame made me look at my watch and discover I had been waiting an hour. No sign of my friend, so I nodded to Euterpe and went out for a sandwich.