Yesterday around seven I’d been sitting, reading, thinking that if Maud didn’t show up soon with her French boy and her DVD that I was going to just grab a fork and dig into the golden-brown-and-creamy-cream cheesecake just out of the oven earlier that afternoon. Like we share a quarter of a brain, she called right then to say they were downing piña coladas and would be over in a bit. In a bit, then, the night unrolled, first the fettuccine tossed with pancetta and chestnuts and sage, then the green salad in a figgy vinaigrette. We watched “Blade Runner”—too good the neon visions of a Los Angeles future; too good the crashing-through-windows death scene of the snake dancer replicant girl; too good Daryl Hannah’s violent, twitchy end; too good when Rutger Hauer’s time comes, and he bows his head, and the dove flies free; now that is a movie a girl can only love, even with the insane Vengalis musical accompaniment. We watched “Blade Runner,” then we watched it again. Well, we started to watch it again, ’cause Hector said something about Harrison Ford dreaming about a unicorn, and we were like, Hello, you were dreaming, there was so no unicorn in this movie, so then bets were made, hands were shaken, the video was cued up, and goddamit, there was the unicorn running through the trees in all its slow-mo white-maned glory. According to the terms of the bet, Maud and I will be making tarts this weekend, fine—and anyway there are worse ways to spend a weekend. Then we popped “La vie est un long fleuve tranquille” in the VCR, who knows what time it was by then, but I was sprawled out on the floor with a cushion, and we were attacking the entire cheesecake with our forks. “La vie est un long fleuve tranquille,” brilliant, hilarity, run-do-not-walk, do it for the riz du lait (“Chouette!”), do it for the “Happy Families” card-game scene, do it for “Jésus, reviens!”, do it for the polka-dot dresses and the kid who dances on the pier. And all of a sudden it was a quarter to four in the morning, I don’t know how we do it, and all of a sudden I was rolling over in bed waking up at half past noon.