- The Museum Guest: I started heading towards my favorite record shop. I was probably intending to find a recording to replace one I'd lost. It could have been music by Chopin or Schumann. Or maybe it was something by Schubert or Shostakovich or Schoenberg. For some reason I have an interest only in composers whose names begin with a "sh" sound.
- The Museum Guest: Hey, is this some sort of lost and found?
- The Guard: What's on display depends on what you've lost. It's all about the person who walks in. Only one visitor can occupy a room at any given time, and the exhibition changes in accordance with each individual. The rooms, you might say, are customized. Don't ask me how it works. I haven't a clue and it's not my job to know.
- The Museum Guest: I started losing my hair since 30. You got a room for that?
- The Guard: That room isn't too far. But you won't, of course, be able to get any of it back.
- The Guard: What about this one? The room of lost opportunity.
- The Museum Guest: I don't think so.
- The Guard: You don't know what you're missing.
- The Museum Guest: This is all you have? You mean your museum didn't have enough funding to bring my lost lovers? Are there at least pictures of them in this folder?
- The Guard: Go have a look at it. But don't think you can take it with you. It belongs to the past.
- The Guard: You of all people should know that love is a story - one we like to tell each other. It's a story that changes over time. Undergoes lots of revisions. And most often the original story gets lost in the process. Never to be found again.
- The Guard: I get it. He wants his youth back but more than that, he wonders how many years he has left. He sees the affair as a chance at recapturing something not just sexual but vital. Your P longs for something else, something higher, spiritual, let's call it the poetry, the music of life.
- The Museum Guest: In the movie version Chopin's preludes will be playing in the background. I'm not even sure it would work as a film. It hardly works as a short story.
- The Museum Guest: He sees the whole history of the affair slowly being erased in front of his eyes. In front of his French onion soup.
- The Waitress: Sounds like he was groping for trout in a peculiar river!
- The Museum Guest: Excuse me?
- The Waitress: What? You don't know Shakespeare? Measure for measure?
- The Waitress: An affair!
- The Museum Guest: Oh. Right! It was an affair!