The only way I could block away the noise was by listening to my favorite radio program, The Chesterfield Hour, which was sponsored by the Chesterfield tobacco company. For the most part, it featured big bands. But that afternoon, the announcer opened with, “Today, for a change, we have something quite unusual: a classical piece, one that has the reputation of being one of the most technically challenging piano concertos in the classical repertoire: Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3.”
At the sound of his words I leapt off my bed and turned the volume up, which made the cook grumble, “Turn the damn thing off, right now!”
He followed that with a few choice words, which had little effect on me. Outside the kitchen, outside his domain, I didn’t care to play the slave, so I pretended not to hear a word of what he had to say.
Ever since that night when the redhead kid had entered my life—I mean, ever since she had decided, on a whim, to replace what she had intended to play with something else, something more suitable for GIs here, at Cape Upton—I had been growing curious to hear what I—what all of us—had missed.
The announcer went on to say, “Many experienced pianists dare not play this concerto. Some of them lament that they didn’t learn it in their younger days, when they were still too fresh to know fear. Well, fear will not stop this performer.”
By instinct I uttered her name even before he did. “Natasha Horowitz.”
For many days I had been agonizing over the memory of how I met her, what a lousy impression I must have left in her mind by leaping off the stage. I kept asking myself, “How did you dare do it, what devil made you think you can share the spotlight with this girl, even for a single minute? Oh what a spectacle, what a sorry spectacle you made of yourself! What came over you?”
If, by some lucky, unforeseen twist of events, I were to find myself in her presence ever again, which I doubted, I would probably freeze, not knowing what to say. I was a nobody, and she—a star. Unreachable. Glamorous. There could be no connection between us, except through her music. It would illuminate my life and at the same time, deepen its shadows, giving full meaning to what I felt, in joy and in pain. Such is the power of a muse.
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