Seven years later, she is the obvious choice once again. This time, even Sexier. Four-fifty on a Thursday afternoon, deep in a shadowy bar at a H๏tel called the Nomad, downtown Manhattan, and Scarlett Johansson actually wants to write. I give her a little H๏tel 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 passage memorized?” I ask. “A little Shakespeare, maybe? ‘Oh, for a muse of fire,’ something like that?”

She bites the inside of her cheek when she thinks. There is an extremely large platter of cut vegetables on the table. “Crudités,” I say it out loud, a word no one used ten years ago. “My God,” she says when it arrives. “So many vegetables.”

Her voice has a raspy frequency in the air. Legitimately as pertinent and defining a component of her physical makeup as her lips, her cheekbones, and her legs. When you’re with her, you feel that voice. This bar is loud with a cocktail hour.

“I wish I could write a parable,” she says. “Or maybe just an adage. I could write that one where I never know what the hell it means. Well, I guess if I thought about it — I mean, I have thought about it, of course, and figured it out. But it eludes me the first time I hear it. Every time. It’s not logical. At first, I mean.”