It was not the present that stumbled my words but the unpredictability, that she who ate only seeds and a sparing salad would order wild extravagant sweets into her freezer just to watch me trip and numb over them.
I wrestled the tub of stuif from the refrigerator to the kitchen counter, pulled off the top. Full to the edges. Chocolate-chip ice cream. "I hope you got a spoon for you," I said severely, pushing my hog-spoon into the creamy snow. "You have done an unthinkable act, but now it is done and there is nothing for us to do but get rid of the evidence. Come. Eat."
She picked a miniature spoon from a drawer in the kitchen. "Don't you want your hot fudge? Don't you like hot fudge anymore?"
"Crazy about it. But after today, neither you nor I will ever want to see the letters 'hot fudge' so long as we might live."
No one does anything uncharacteristic of who they are, I thought, spooning the mass of fudge into a pan to heat. Could it be that she is characteristically unpredictable? How foolish of me to begin to think that I knew her!
I turned and she was looking at me, spoon in hand, smiling. "Can you really walk on water?" she said. "The way you did in the book with Donald Shimoda?"
"Of course. So can you. I haven't done it yet on my own, in this spacetime. In this my present belief of spacetime. You see, it gets complicated. But I'm working on it."
I stirred the fudge, stuck to the spoon in a half-pound lump. "Have you ever been out of your body?"
She didn't blink at the question or ask me to explain. "Twice. Once in Mexico. Once in Death Valley, on a hilltop at night under the stars. I leaned back to look and I fell up into the stars. ..." There were sudden tears in her eyes.
I spoke quietly. "Do you remember, when you were in the stars, how easy it was, how natural, simple, right, real-as-coming-home it was, to be free of your body?"
"Yes."
"Walking on the water is the same. It's a power that's ours . . . it's a by-product of a power that's ours. Easy, natural. We have to study hard and remember not to use that power, or else the limitations of earth-life get all jangly and undependable, and we're distracted from our lessons. The trouble is that we get so good at telling ourselves we
won't use our real powers that after a while we think we can't Out there with Shimoda, there were no questions asked. When he wasn't around anymore, I stopped practicing. Little taste of that goes a long way, I guess."
"Like hot fudge."
I looked at her sharply. Was she mocking me?
The chocolate was beginning to bubble in the pan. "No. Hot fudge goes a lot longer than remembering basic spiritual realities. Hot fudge is HERE! Hot fudge does not threaten our comfortable worldview. Hot fudge is NOW! You about ready for some hot fudge?"
"Just a little teeny bit," she said.
By the time we had finished our dessert, we were late, and had to stand in a line two blocks long to buy our movie-tickets.
The wind was from the sea, cooling the night, and not wishing her to feel a chill, I put my arm around her. "Thank you," she said. "I didn't think we'd be outside so long. Are you cold?"
"Not at all," I said, "not cold at all."
We talked about the film we waited to see; mostly she talked and I listened; what to look for, how to notice where money is wasted in a film, and where it's saved. She hated wasting money. In the line we began to talk of other things, too.
"What's it like to be an actress, Leslie? I've never known, always wondered."
"Ah, Mary Moviestar," she said, laughing at herself. "Are you really interested?"
"Yes. It's a mystery to me, what sort of life it is."
"Depends, It's wonderful, sometimes, with a good script, good people who really want to do something worthwhile.
That's rare. The rest is just work. Most of it doesn't make much contribution to the human race, I'm afraid." She looked a question at me. "Don't you know what it's like? Haven't you ever been on a set?"
"Only outdoors, on location. Never on a sound-stage."
"Next time I'm shooting, would you like to come and see?"
"I would! Thank you!"
How much there is to know from her, I thought. What has she learned from celebrityhood