Once there was a wizard who was also a train conductor. He was not a
particularly powerful wizard; in fact, his main skill was detecting whether
or not someone had paid for their train ticket. His girlfriend wanted him
to be more ambitious. She didn’t have any magical powers and she was the
assistant to the human resources manager at her company—just from hard
work! Conducting was a dead end, she told him. Unless he wanted to conduct
an orchestra, perhaps, or a series of important scientific experiments.

So he started going to night school. He learned about management strategies
and PowerPoint and auditing and SWOT. He copied everything written on the
board down into grey spiral notebooks, then put each notebook into a drawer
in one of the many filing cabinets surrounding the large mahogany desk in
his home office. As a train conductor, he had not needed a home office; his
office had always been the railways of America. But he had been told in
class that it was required for a businessman, so he converted their rumpus
room. He also purchased a number of business-type suits, and practiced
shaking hands with himself, grasping until he heard the bones crunch. Soon
he had all the necessary skills to conduct executive seminars for
high-powered business people. He taught them the facts in his notebooks and
shook hands with each of them very forcefully. His girlfriend was proud.

She decided that they needed to become more cultured, now that they were
people of means. It was expected that they would know certain things. The
wizard had embarrassed her at a dinner party with some of their new friends
by not knowing the difference between Manet and Monet. So he paid for them
to go to Paris and she made him look at some paintings of flowers in a
pond.

Later, they went to see the orchestra. The show was delayed, and his
girlfriend was uncomfortable (she didn’t know how to conduct herself while
surrounded by the Parisian women, each with a scarf effortlessly angled to
accent the cheekbones). The conductor had suddenly fallen ill, they were
told. The performance would have to be cancelled. But the wizard remembered
his girlfriend’s words and advanced on the stage. “I am a conductor,” he
said, and they gave him the baton.

Never had Paris seen such a performance of Mahler’s fifth symphony. The
orchestra wept as it played, and the audience wept as they listened.
Afterwards, the wizard was swept away by his bouquet-bearing admirers and
could not find his girlfriend. He took up with a flautist who spoke very
little English but seemed to enjoy his company. They decided on a flat in
the 8th arrondissement, a compromise, and made a life for themselves there.
Each morning, they drank tiny cups of espresso on the balcony, then fought
through streams of businesspeople on the way to their practice spaces. Each
night, while she breathed her dreams softly beside him, he listened to the
low whistles of the trains leaving the Gare Saint-Lazare, and counted the
fares of the passengers.