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The maître d’ gestured with his hands to suggest it was the least he could do for a couple deeply in love, on the brink of their proposal. He led us to a table and pulled Connie’s chair out for her to sit. He bowed to me and smiled at Connie. “Enjoy your evening,” his voice was soft and smooth. “Your complimentary champagne will be brought right out. Hopefully, by the end of this night, you will both have something wonderful to celebrate.”
The maître d’ disappeared back into the gloom. Connie looked a question at me. “Are you a regular here?”
I shook my head.
Connie frowned. “Strange,” she mused. “The maître d’ spoke to you like he knew you. I thought he might have been a fan of your films, and that’s why we’re getting the complimentary champagne.”
I shook my head and shrugged with innocent wonder. “It’s a mystery.”
It was early evening, and many of the restaurant tables were empty, but reserved. I glanced past Connie’s shoulder and saw a dozen other couples leaning close together over the intimate candlelit settings of their tables. There was a confidential hum of whispered conversation around the room. I heard a woman behind me chuckle in that throaty, sexy way that women do when they are aroused – or drunk. A man at the table across from us reached out and rubbed the forearm of the woman he was sitting opposite like he was trying to soothe her temper. The woman didn’t respond.
“Have you ever watched people?” I asked Connie.
She frowned. “In what way?”
I flapped my hand. “Just watched them. Just sat somewhere and observed strangers – how they move, the gestures they make, the habits…”
Connie was still frowning. “I’m a journalist,” she said, as if that answer was enough.
“So?”
“I’m trained to observe,” she said. “I make a living writing about people, Rick. It has taught me to be a good observer.”
I sat back and thought about that. “Then you must have plenty of observations to make about me.”
“A notebook full,” she said dramatically.
I sucked in a breath through my teeth. It made a little hissing sound. “So tell me,” I invited. “Don’t hold back.”
Connie laughed lightly and glanced away for an instant. “You want me to tell you what I really think about you?”
“I do,” I nodded and made the brave kind of face a man makes when he’s being stood before a firing squad. “Blaze away.”
Connie shook her head. “I won’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because…” Connie’s voice dropped to a whisper so I could barely hear her.
I leaned forward across the table. “Because why?”
“Because you haven’t paid for dinner yet.”
(Beautiful and witty!)
“You can say whatever you feel, Connie,” I encouraged her. “You may not think so, but I actually am a gentleman and I’ve got a pretty thick skin. I asked for your honesty, so please, be honest. Do I need to change my name and go into hiding once your article is published? Or should I buy a set of those plastic spectacles with a big rubber nose and moustache attached?”
Connie smiled and the warmth of it reached all the way to her eyes. “My story in ‘Infinity’ won’t be published for another month,” she said.
“So?” I leaned across the table again.
“So by then, you could have a pair of breasts and go by the name of Gloria.”
(Okay, now she was just being evil).
Not funny.
Connie’s smile kept spreading. It turned up the corners of her mouth and became a playful grin. “Relax,” she reached out and patted my arm. It was the first time she’d ever deliberately touched me and I felt the chilled shock of it. Her fingers were warm and delicate. “I think you will be pleasantly surprised when you read the published article.”
I sat back, and I realized to the casual observer that all of my sudden leaning backwards and forwards probably made me look like I was in the grips of some uncontrollable spasm. “I’m shocked,” I said, meaning it. “I thought you thought I was an ass.”
“I do,” Connie said. “But you have some redeeming qualities, Rick Cassidy – even for an ass.”
A waiter arrived with an iron stand and a silver bucket. In the bucket was a bottle of champagne in a nest of ice. The waiter made an elaborate show of presenting the label to me and then popped the cork and missed the woman’s head beside us by just an inch.
The waiter filled both our glasses and then backed away from the table in smooth effortless actions – until he dropped to the floor and crawled around to retrieve the cork.
Connie snatched up her glass and sipped at the champagne. “It’s true,” she sounded surprised. “The bubbles really do tickle your nose.” She took another longer sip of champagne and set the glass down close by her hand. She looked at me and there was a glistening twinkle in her eye that hadn’t been there a few moments earlier. She frowned for an instant, as though trying to recall where the conversation had left off.
“You are brash and arrogant and egotistical,” Connie said without any venom at all. “Women treat you like you are some magnificent sex god. They throw themselves at you, and you love the adoration. But I understand that,” Connie took another sip of champagne before she went on. “I understand that because it’s part of the image you need to present for your work. But it’s not the real you. Beneath everything you show yourself to be is the real Rick Cassidy. Not the porn star, I mean Rick, the man.”
“Hell,” I said. “You’re starting to worry me.”
Connie shook her head, shaking off my concern. “I told you not to worry,” she said. “My article will be a glowing endorsement of your morals and ethics in an industry where so often those high standards you set are diminished or ignored completely. I intend to portray you as the dedicated professional that I believe you are.”
And then she added like she was pronouncing the sentence, “I promise, the true Rick Cassidy will not be revealed.”
“It sounds like you’ve got me all summed up,” I said.
“The exterior façade, yes.”
I looked intrigued. “You think there’s more to me?”
“Much more,” Connie said with feeling. She took another sip of champagne. The glass was almost empty. “I think you are a hopeless romantic,” Connie declared. “I didn’t think it was possible. When I first met you, I didn’t think you had a caring sensitive bone in
your big rippling body.” She paused for a moment and her eyes fixed onto mine. “And then you told me about Amelia, the girl you loved and lost in Italy. In that short conversation I realized the real you is nothing like the image you show the world. Deep down, you’re not happy because you’re not in love. Rick Cassidy isn’t ten foot tall and bulletproof. He is as vulnerable and as lonely and as lost in this life as the rest of us.”
Ouch!
I reached for my champagne and emptied the glass. I snatched the bottle from the bucket and refilled my glass, then splashed a little more into Connie’s glass. I sat there, stunned. I tried to keep my gaze expressionless, but I felt tiny cracks at the edges of my face. “You gained all that insight from one brief conversation we had about a girl I knew seven years ago?”
Connie said nothing. She just stared at me knowingly from over the rim of her champagne glass.
I caught sudden movement from the corner of my eye and the inept waiter who had almost decapitated the lady with the champagne cork came to the table, clutching two menus under his arms like they were the stone tablets Moses brought down from the mountain. He laid them out with great care on the table and stood there silently.
Maybe he was waiting for applause.
“I’ll have steak,” I said without looking at the menu.
“How would you like your steak cooked, sir?” the waiter asked in a sing-song voice.
“Burned,” I said. “Tell the chef to cook it until he gets the shits.”
The waiter looked confused. “Shits?”
I nodded. “It means I want the steak cooked until the chef is incensed about cremating a perfect piece of steak. Understand?”
The waiter nodded, but there was a grim look on his face like it was bad news he didn’t want to bear. He turned his attention to Connie. “Madam?”
Connie flipped open the menu and ran her eyes in quick appraisal down the two pages of elegant script. She looked up and smiled sweetly. “I’ll have the same,” she said.
“A steak, madam?”
