He sees you staring at the tie.
“Isn’t this the ugliest tie you’ve seen in your life?” he says.
You can’t help it: you let out a laugh.
“You were thinking that, weren’t you? You were wondering why a handsome man like me would wear a tie like this. It is a tie for idiots.”
You weren’t thinking that he was handsome, but you don’t correct him on this point.
“Yes,” you say. “As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what I was thinking.”
“She sent it to me from Japan. From that movie she was doing there. The one with the montage of her eating fifty different bowls of rice.”
You know which film he’s talking about. You chose not to see it.
“My guess is it wasn’t her who picked it out but the secretary,” you venture. “She has this very practical secretary who handles her life. She’s maybe twenty years older and smiling for her is a considerable challenge.”
“Are you trying to make me feel better?” Leopoldi says. “Is that supposed to make me feel better? That she had her secretary pick out a romantic present for me?” He seems incensed and his face pinkens as though the tie is choking him.
You apologize. You are thinking that you should leave before the drinks are finished; you have made a colossal error.
“Reeves! I’m just messing with you. Of course that makes me feel better. I was going around thinking that she had the worst taste in the world picking out this tie with these toads on it. I mean, who would pick out such a thing?”
His laugh is uproarious. He laughs like a larger man than he is. Maybe it’s the money, you think. Maybe when you have that much money in the bank you can laugh uproariously like a very large man at things that aren’t that funny.
Soon you’ve both had two gin and tonics. You need the food to come to absorb what you have had to drink. You turn slightly, your eyes searching for the waiter. The restaurant is starting to fill up with wealthy Moroccans and tourists. People sit at tables in strange configurations of four or seven or three, like they’re stars in constellations that will never be named. A man with pale skin and hair that used to be strawberry blond but has faded to a strange yellow gray, like a polluted sunset, is sitting by himself, drinking a beer and eating scallops. He’s in his forties. His table faces your table, and it’s a little disconcerting. You try not to look in his direction. The gin and tonics are getting into your head. You need the food to come.
When it arrives you dig into the black bass. The salad is sad-looking with leaky tomatoes and lettuce so pale it’s white. But the bass is fresh.
“I like a woman with an appetite,” Leopoldi says to you.
You smile with your mouth full.
You realize the conversation is bound to turn more personal. You don’t want him to ask you about yourself. You will need to ask him about him, about his business; you will need to act riveted by his responses.
“What do you do?” you ask. “It must be wonderful.”
“Which business are you talking about?” he says, again laughing and finding this overly entertaining. “I own many companies.”
You ask him what his favorite is.
“My favorite company,” he says. “That’s like asking a man who is favorite child is.”
You ask if he has children.
“Not a good topic right now,” he tells you. “There’s some paternity testing going on.”
He seems upset with you. He focuses on his food. You want to remind him that he’s the one who brought up children.
But then a bottle of wine arrives and his mood brightens. The waiter pours you each a glass of Chardonnay.
“You were asking about my favorite business,” he says. “It’s a cosmetic laser. A better one than what’s out there right now. For scars, acne,” he explains. He’s looking at your face. He leans over and softly takes your chin in his large hand, and tilts your head to the side. With the fingers of his left hand he brushes the bangs of the wig out of your face so that he can see you more clearly.
It’s an intimate gesture — one that takes you surprise. He studies your face so intently that for a moment you think you might cry. You don’t think your husband ever examined your features so closely, that he ever moved your hair out of your face. This was in large part why you married him. You liked the fact that he never stole glances at you, that he turned off the lights before you kissed. You thought that with him you could be invisible, until you realized that wasn’t at all what you wanted.
“May I ask what happened to your skin?” Leopoldi says. Tiny tears are forming in the corner of your eyes, but he doesn’t wish to embarrass you by asking about them. Instead he says: “Despite your makeup I can see. .”
“Teenage acne,” you explain.
He nods, and lets go of your chin gently. You would not have expected him to be so careful with his touch.
“And you,” you say, emboldened by his question, by his caress. “May I ask about your scar?”
He puts down his fork and knife. This is going to be a story. “I wasn’t always so wealthy,” he tells you. “I grew up poor in a little town between Moscow and St. Petersburg. On a farm. I was helping my father with the fence one day, a new barbed-wire fence to keep the sheep from getting away. My brother was driving a tractor and I was attaching the wire to the fence, when it sprung out of my hand and slashed across my face.”
You have this in common — the marks of the past on your skin. You both look out the window, as though wanting to focus on the beauty of the outside world. But the sun has set now and you see only your own reflections.
“I have a plan!” he says, both boisterously and boastfully, turning back from the window to you. “I made a reservation at Rick’s Café for a nightcap,” he says. “Of course that’s when I thought she was coming, and not you, but it’s a great place. Have you been?”
You ask if he means the same Rick’s Café from Casablanca.
“Not the same one, that was just a stage set in, I believe, Culver City,” he says.
You are surprised he knows about Culver City.
“But,” he continues, “the woman who owns this one is American and she fixed it up so it looks like the one in the movie. There’s even a piano player.”
It does sound appealing. And you don’t have much choice but to go. You promised the famous American actress you’d make sure he had a good evening. And you have no other ride back to the hotel.
A driver in a town car waits for the two of you in the parking lot. The driver opens the door for you on one side, and then goes around to the other side to open it for Leopoldi. You thank Leopoldi for dinner and he seems touched that you thanked him.
In the distance you can hear the music from Jazzablanca. “I called ahead and asked for a special table,” he says. “I said we needed discretion because of who she was.”
This of course means that when you arrive at Rick’s Café Americain — which has the exact neon sign outside that you remember from the film — there’s no discretion at all. The hostess is overly polite to you as she walks you, slowly, through the main dining area, which is spanned by arches. The tablecloths and cushions are white, the walls and arches are white. The restaurant is crowded with diners speaking English, Spanish, and French, and there is indeed a piano player rushing through “As Time Goes By.” A few tourists smoke cigars at the bar; you can tell by the way they’re holding them that they don’t usually smoke cigars, but they want to act like they’re in another time period. You see a few heads turn as you pass by. You’re wearing the wig so your hair is like hers; you’re wearing her dress. You know what they are all thinking: In real life she’s not as beautiful.