Four-fifty on a Thursday afternoon, deep in a shadowy bar at a H๏τel called the Nomad, downtown Manhattan, and Scarlett Johansson actually wants to write. I give her a little H๏τel pad, maybe four-by-six, which she grabs in her small, ringless fingers. She takes my pen eagerly.
“What do you want me to write?” she says. She will write what I tell her, she says.
I don’t know. “Don’t you have a little pᴀssage memorized?” I ask. “A little Shakespeare, maybe? ‘Oh, for a muse of fire,’ something like that?”
She clicks her tongue. “I think it should be neutral,” she says, shaking her head. “Shouldn’t involve any acting. I’m afraid I’ll emphasize the Oh or something.” As she thinks, she purses her lips, looks down, casting a little furtive charm. This one. She came in here — and this place is hung with velvet curtains and underlit by 40-watt bulbs; it’s seriously dark — with her sunglᴀsses on, walked six feet in front of me, at her publicist’s side, in her gray cotton tracksuit, half pointing at tables that might work for her. All movie star up in here. And I didn’t look at her ᴀss. I don’t know that she wanted me to. Probably not. Surely not. In any case, I didn’t.
At which point I break out a deck of cards and the board grabbed from my game shelf the day before.
“Oh, Milton Bradley!” she says, as if she were seeing an old friend through a car window. She picks it up pretty quickly, and not long after going over the rules we’re playing a live game. Still, it’s complicated. Second hand in, she raises her eyebrow, exasperated with her luck. “So you mean you guys play this — go round and round, throw cards down — and have normal everyday conversation? I thought you said it wasn’t frantic.”
It isn’t, not in my experience. You can talk during cribbage. Once she understands the game — even before that, really — she rambles. She can talk. Really talk. She is the Sєxiest rambler alive. Her words: lazy, light, no particular rush. Like any game in any gin joint, breakfast place, or lobster shack, it’s mostly chit-chat, general kidding around. No matter. She is to be listened to. Until the last hand, her voice sounds, as always, like she just woke up, wary, but delighted by the game she’s about to play.
