Another Saturday night at her uncle's Casablanca club, Sam mused, noting that there was a steady flow of traffic through the old worn doors of the place. The usual traffic, the usual suspects.
A smoky haze filled the air, along with the scent of liquor and beer. The decor was old-fashioned and pictures of the great movie stars of the forties hung on the wall. The club's twenty-foot bar was old, weathered and made to endure; fashioned from cherrywood, its red hues were hidden by the hazy atmosphere. Scars lined its surface, along with a thousand stories of heartbreak, depression, jealousy, hate and joy.
Sam loved this place, loved playing in it. The ambience was straight out of its namesake film, and it seemed to her that in the Casablanca club her music took on a quality of timelessness. There had been an age where a man was a man and a woman was a dame, and that man gave his life for his woman, if he loved her. It had been an age of beautiful women with fashionable, form-fitting clothes and elegant hairstyles.
Those women gave their all for their man, and loved passionately, were gloriously alive in their love even if it was foolish. When Sam played here, she couldn't help but resent that the forties were long gone.
Yes, even if lovers and moonlight would never go out of style, the old romances of the forties and fifties just didn't play in today's world. It might still be the same old love story, but the rules of the game were entirely different. In the twenty-first century, a girl was lucky to get a guy to buy her a cup of coffee without some kind of sexual overture, and most monsters nowadays ended their sentences with prepositional claws. A girl could forget chocolate candies and flowers, but a second date meant breakfast privileges. Respect seemed harder to gain than ever, and there were fewer men worth giving it to.
Sam supposed deeply passionate, romantic love had slipped away sometime in the eighties, when money, money and more money took precedence. Women had become as hard as men to survive. Being a mother, wife and provider took the romance right out of the soul, and females had become tired to death of the neverending realities of life. They'd seen life put paid to their fantasies.
Today when a woman met a man; she was lucky she didn't get mugged—either at gunpoint or sneakier means, where she'd end up supporting him. Women might have come a long way, baby, but they had lost something in the process. No one put them on a pedestal anymore; rather the world had knocked them off, and men weren't looking to pick them back up. No, self-reliance was the watch-word of the day, and old-fashioned romance was forgotten.
"Take Nic, the promiscuous impersonator," Sam muttered to herself. "All the good guys have gone and rode off into the sunset." They sure weren't returning to Dodge. Her heroes were dead, faded from sight. The age of innocence was gone, except for when her music touched a corner of it, and for a few minutes the feelings of the forties and fifties were coaxed back to life here. Ah, the smoke-filled Casablanca bar.
Leaning back on the piano bench, Sam stretched out her fingers. She'd been playing for half an hour, ever since she'd given that less-than-stellar performance at Prince Varinski's party—the real Prince Petroff Varinski and not the lying betraying snake named Nicolas Strakhov.
Although there wasn't a cowardly bone in her body, tonight's devastating drama had unnerved her, wounded her deeply. She felt like she'd gone ten rounds with a two-ton dragon. Not wanting to be alone tonight, she'd hightailed it over to her uncle's bar, got a hug from her uncle and Rick, the other owner, a stiff drink, and had sat down to play. At least in here there were others like her; all shared the dark, the pain, the solitude.
Playing the piano helped, although she felt her heart oozing red like a leaky catsup bottle. She hurt.
Her pride.
Her dignity.
Her heart.
As her fingers swept the keys, Sam squeezed her eyes closed, shutting out the tears, remembering Nic's kiss. She would always remember his kiss. The world might always welcome lovers, but it was the woman who paid the bill when all was said and done.
How could Pete, whom she now knew was Nicolas Petroff Strakhov, have done this to her? "Such a long, dumb name," she muttered as she played, her guts churning. How could a man who had made love so beautifully, so passionately, and who had taken her soul to a place in heaven, how could he turn out to be the jerk of the century? Not only had he tried to ruin her family business and steal her clients, the fiendish imposter had stolen a piece of her heart, ruining her for all other men.
Words—big, fat ugly words kept spinning in her brain so fast that she was worried she might snap. Those words beat against her brain, trying to escape. "Bamboozling betrayer… licentious liar… imposing imposter… depraved deceiver… fraudulent fake."
Sam closed her eyes, trying to keep the not so pleasant thoughts at bay, along with her tears. She never cried at sissy stuff like having her heart trampled on, or her pride ripped to tatters like an unpopular flag.
Again, her music filled the smoky haze over the general din of talking customers and the noise as they joked, quarreled and played pool, balls knocking together with a loud thump.
"As Time Goes By" sprang from the old piano as Sam forgot herself. The haunting music reached out into the smoky gloom of the bar, and many of the customers leaned back with drinks in hand and listened. At the mellow, sad sounds of the piano, pool players took a break and stood with hands on cues, listening and remembering a time long gone.
Eyes closed, intent on forgetting her troubles and woes, which all began and ended with the capitals "N. S."—that was how Nic first saw her in the bar.