On Mondays We Answer Your Letters
Recently I've been getting a lot of e-mails and other communiqués from readers of this journal who ask me, "Max, how did you lose your virginity?" I would like there to be a simple answer to this question, because it seems like a simple question, and I think that anyone who goes to the trouble of keeping up with this record of my Tormented Struggle with the Great American Novella deserves straight answers. If I could say simply that I was very young, and she was very much older, and what I did not know she taught me in those gentle afternoons I spent with her on the piano bench in her flat on the outskirts of Den Haag, while my father waited for me outside, convinced that I was a piano prodigy studying with one of Holland's greatest virtuosi-if I could sum it up so simply, I would. But it is not that simple. Things so rarely are that simple. For one thing, I was never entirely sure that she was much older that I: she showed me a birth certificate, but in retrospect I seem to remember it was printed on what appeared to be a sheet of Make-Your-Own-Birthday-Invitations ink jet paper with a race car/robot motif around the border. For another, I felt very young, but I have lately gleaned that 24 is, at least by modern standards, a rather advanced age at which to be losing it, even to one's piano teacher. And as for the gentle afternoons of learning together, fingers fumbling on the keys and all that, I must say that my memory of such sentimental touches is all but completely eclipsed by the more vivid, visceral memory of my teacher's yardstick, which she used to rap me soundly on the backs of whatever limbs or joints were offensive to her rather demanding standards. I recall a specific afternoon which will forever shade my understanding of hemidemiquavers-but that is neither here nor there (he said, aposiopesically).
In short, gentle reader, you shall have to content yourself with this: I do not have any regrets per se, but if I had it all to do over again, I would probably have taken up the oboe-I think the advantages of breath control over manual dexterity will be, upon a little consideration, obvious.
In short, gentle reader, you shall have to content yourself with this: I do not have any regrets per se, but if I had it all to do over again, I would probably have taken up the oboe-I think the advantages of breath control over manual dexterity will be, upon a little consideration, obvious.