Chocolate Cake

My hands were shaking as I walked up to the podium. Even after the hundreds of times I’d done it, from awards acceptances to guest lectures, speaking in public still made me nervous. I wanted so badly to do right by Ulli. She had always done right by me. I looked out at the mourners, dressed in bright colors (at her bequest) but with sad faces. Please don’t let me choke. I cleared my throat and began.

“She was eating cake the first time I saw her. The week before, I had been fired from my first (and thankfully only) finance job. After two days alone in my apartment, I decided to take my laptop to the bakery downstairs. It was crowded that morning and I didn’t realize there was nowhere to sit until after I had ordered my coffee. I stood there holding this big, ceramic mug scanning the room, about to turn around and ask the barista to put the coffee in a to-go cup when I saw her. She stood out so clearly that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed her before. Maybe it was because she was the only person not on a phone or a laptop. But it seemed to me that she was existing somewhere slightly different from the rest of us—like half a dimension away—close enough to touch but not quite of this world. I know now that it was just the magic of Ulli but to my 28-year-old self, it seemed weird. So there I was, with my backpack and my giant coffee mug, staring at this girl…”

“Woman!” someone in the audience called out.

I looked up from my notes as a few people laughed.

“Uh…” My heart started pounding. “Woman?”

And then a memory came to me, the sound of Ulli laughing after I referred to her as a girl once. I’m not a girl, she had said, I’m a woman!

“Oh yes, right! Woman! She would have kicked my butt for that so thank you.” Suddenly I wasn’t nervous anymore. No longer was I standing in front of a crowd of hundreds of people. It felt instead like I was in her living room, talking to our friends.

“Ulli was definitely a woman but she had this look about her, even at the end, that made it hard to tell if she was 20 or 40 or...” Faces in the crowd nodded in understanding. “Anyway, I’m looking at her and she raises her eyebrows at me and points her fork to the chair across from her. By now the barista is helping someone else and the line is getting longer and I don’t really want to sit with this strange woman who is eating a giant slice of chocolate cake at eight in the morning on a Wednesday. But what else can I do?

So I sit down across from her and fumble with my laptop thinking this woman is going to try to talk to me and inwardly rolling my eyes at the inconvenience of it all. But she doesn’t say anything. She just keeps eating her cake. Now I’m curious but I don’t want to start a conversation because I’m very busy pretending to do very important things. What I’m actually doing is sneaking glances at her. Finally, as she’s moving the fork around her plate to get the last of the frosting and crumbs, I say, ‘It’s a little early for cake, isn’t it?’ She licks the fork and then looks at me with those piercing, sea-glass eyes of hers—for so long, I think she’s not going to respond. And finally she says, in her Norwegian accent, ‘When is too early to have exactly what you want?’

That question just hits me like a punch to the gut. And I’m looking at my stupid resume with its blowhard Ivy League, Wall Street self-importance and I can’t breathe. I felt like an ant under a magnifying glass. It’s like what she said cut right through the insignificance of all I was pretending to be. The rest, as they say, is history. She left, I deleted my resume, and I started writing the screenplay for Chocolate Cake that morning.

Because we writers are a sentimental and superstitious lot, I went to the same bakery the morning after my agent told me they wanted a sequel to Chocolate Cake. What I didn’t know was that it was exactly two years to the date that I saw Ulli for the first time. I was behind her in line and if I hadn’t recognized her accent, I would have known her by her order. Chocolate cake at eight o’clock in the morning. It turns out it was her birthday. That August day, she let me sit with her again and I told her about how she had inspired me to go after exactly what I wanted, how she had changed my life forever.

When I stopped talking, she stared at me then laughed, covering her mouth with her hand. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t remember you at all. But dammit, man, I’ve been trying to sell my screenplay forever!’

That’s how we became writing partners and friends. Ulli experienced the world the way few people do. Fully and unapologetically.” My voice broke and I stopped to take a deep breath. “She taught me to do the same and by doing so, made me a better writer, a better friend, and a better person. Ulli showed me that the best writers aren’t the ones with their laptops out, showing everyone else how much they have to say. They’re the ones that are eating the chocolate cake, down to the last crumb, so completely engaged in experiencing life that they inspire the world around them.”