He had more hair growing out of his ears than on his head. He wore sunglasses, and on his white shirt – somewhere near his belly button – there was a large coffee stain.
Just as I was about to get out of the car, Theodore Lopatin turned around and said, “Listen, I have an unusual request.” He gave me a penetrating look with his little brown eyes, and wrote the name and address of a cafeteria on a used envelope. “Tomorrow night, eight thirty,” Theodore said.
In the ten minutes we spent together, Theodore Lopatin had told me he was a Vietnam veteran, without ever having been in Vietnam.
“They couldn’t use people who weigh four hundred pounds in Vietnam,” he said. After that he laughed heartily for a good thirty seconds.
Now I was sitting opposite him in a deserted cafeteria and he was laughing again. This time, little bits of melon flew out of his mouth and landed on my sweater and on my arms. He was eating fruit salad.
“Don’t you think this is a waste?” I asked, in order to end the shower of food in a polite way. Using a spoon, I fished a chewed-up grape out of my glass of water. Theodore Lopatin was very fond of laughter. For a moment he tilted his sunglasses so he could get a better look at the grape. He just shook his head and said, ”I’m only human.”
“So what’s this unusual request?” I asked.
“First we eat,” he said. Only now, in the bright light of the cafeteria, did I see that the skin around his mouth was all mangy. When he was finished eating, he wiped his whole face with a napkin, and said, “And now listen carefully.” It had started raining again. The owner was staring out of the window, shaking his head. “One night, twenty-six years ago,” Theodore said, ”a man carrying a briefcase got into my cab. A good-looking guy. A guy with lots of money. You could tell right away. I wasn’t good-looking and I didn’t have much money, so then you pay attention to things like that. I had just started. I still did night shifts. The man sat next to me and said, ’Driver, I have an unusual request.’ I started laughing.” Theodore demonstrated how he had laughed, but this time no food escaped his mouth, only water.
‘“Let’s hear it, this request,’ I said. ‘Driver,’ the guy said. ‘You have to drive me around until seven in the morning.’ I shook my head and opened the door. ‘I’ll lose out on that,’ I said. ‘Driver,’ the guy said, ‘I’m not getting out of this cab before seven in the morning.’ I said, ‘All right. I charge fifty bucks an hour,’ thinking that would scare him off. But from his inside pocket he took five hundred-dollar bills, put them down in front of me, and said, ‘Will this cover it?’ “I started the car. ’Driver, what’s your name?’ the man asked.
‘“Theodore,’ I said, ‘and yours?’ ‘“My name doesn’t matter at the moment,’ he said, ‘What’s your sign, Theodore?’ “Oh my God, I thought. A psychopath. But I answered, ‘Libra.’” ‘“Very good,’ he said. ‘Theodore, I want you to pick me up for the next four nights exactly where you picked me up today, and drive me around until seven. I’ll give you five hundred dollars a night.’ “I lit a cigarette. Back then I was still a heavy smoker.
“’You’re nuts,’ I said, and I thought about my wife, who I was about to divorce, and about cigarettes, because I’d almost run out of them.
“’Theodore,’ he said, “I want to make a bet with you.’” The owner of the cafeteria came over to our table with a rag. He wiped away the pieces of fruit Lopatin had spit out.
“In the morning, when it got light,” Theodore said, “he took a backgammon board out of his attaché case and made me play backgammon with him in the parking lot of a gas station. He wasn’t very good at it. One time he asked me to stop playing for a minute, he had to take a pee. When he came back, he had bought this duck. ‘Tonight we’re going to eat duck, Theodore,’ he said. I said: ‘My upholstery will get all greasy.’ “He opened his attaché case and put that duck in it. Then the two of us ate the duck. The whole attaché case was covered in duck fat. I figured, I would have known better things to do with a nice attaché case like that.” He scratched his cheek. A few flakes fell off onto the blue tabletop. Like dandruff, but then bigger.
“So a couple of months later,’ Lopatin said, ‘I come across his picture in the paper. Maybe I should have talked to him more, or let him win once with backgammon. But hey, I’m only human. I cut out his picture. I was divorced by then, and I don’t know why, but I put the picture in my wallet, where I used to keep a picture of my wife. The bitch.” He pulled out his wallet and waved the picture under my nose. A yellowed picture from a newspaper. There wasn’t much to see.
“It’s gonna rain all night, Lopatin,” the owner of the cafeteria said. He was standing at the window again.
“He changed my life, the son-of-a-bitch,” Lopatin said and looked at the piece of newspaper in his wallet. He started to laugh again. When he laughed, his head turned red and round like a soccer ball. Only his little brown eyes stayed brown.
“I tell the story to everyone who gets in my cab, whether they want to hear it or not,” Lopatin said triumphantly.
But then his eyes began to shine. He poked my chest with his thick index finger and said, “But with you…” He choked and started coughing. “But with you,“ he repeated. “I want to make a bet.”