Free I Remember Nothing by Nora Ephron Page A

“his daughter.” “Maybe,” I said, my shoulder alive. When she returned with the knockwurst, she said, “His daughter, some fine
writer, eh?” I said I didn’t know, my shoulder now healed. She said, “What kind of talk is that? You don’t know a fine writer when you hear a fine writer?” “Where does Mr. Aarons live?” I said, hoping to get things going in a better direction. “Do I go there?” She said, “He comes here.” Well, in the next twenty minutes, by the time I had indigestion, it turned out it was your father she was talking about who, by coincidence, two hours later, called me to say that he had seen
Julia.
    I don’t know why I tell you this, but somewhere, of course, I must wish to make you feel guilty
.
    It’s a delightful letter, isn’t it? I have a pile of her letters. When I look through them, it all comes back to me—how much I’d loved the early letters, how charmed I’d been, how flattered, how much less charming they began to seem, how burdensome they became, and then, finally, how boring.
    The story of love.
    Here was a thing Lillian liked to do: the T.L. Most people nowadays don’t know what a T.L. is, but my mother had taught us the expression, although I can’t imagine why.
    T.L. stands for Trade Last, and here’s how it works: you call someone up and tell her you have a T.L. for her. This means you’ve heard a compliment about her—and you will repeat it—but only if she first tells you a complimentsomeone has said about you. In other words, you will pass along a compliment, but only if you trade it last.
    This, needless to say, is a strange, ungenerous, and seriously narcissistic way to tell someone a nice thing that has been said about them.
    “Miss Ephron,” she would say when she called, “it’s Miss Hellman. I have a T.L. for you.”
    The first few times this happened, I was happy to play—the air was full of nice things about Lillian. She was the girl of the year. But as time passed, the calls became practically nightmarish. Everything was starting to catch up with her. She’d written another book,
Scoundrel Time
, a self-aggrandizing work about her decision not to testify before HUAC, and followed it with her somewhat problematical decision to pose for a Blackglama mink ad. People were talking about her, but not in any way that gave me something to trade. Not that I was hearing much of it—I was living in Washington, and people in Washington don’t talk about anyone who doesn’t live in Washington, and that’s the truth.
    But there she was, on the other end of phone, waiting for me to come up with my end of the T.L. My brain would desperately race trying to think of something I could say, anything. I had to be careful, because I didn’t want to get caught in a lie. And if I made up a story, I had to be sure I was quoting a man, because despite her warmth to me, Lillian didn’t care about nice things women said about her. And I couldn’t say, “I’m in Washington,no one here is talking about you.” So I would eventually make something up, usually about how much my husband adored her (which was true). But it never really satisfied her. Because what Lillian really wanted to hear, T.L.-wise, was that I’d just spent the evening with someone like Robert Redford (to pick an imaginary episode out of the air) and that he’d confessed that he desperately wanted to sleep with her.
    When my marriage ended and I moved back to New York, Lillian was shocked. She couldn’t imagine why I’d left him. She called and asked me to reconsider. She said I ought to forgive him.
    Neither my husband nor I had the remotest interest in our getting back together, but Lillian was determined, and she kept pressing me. Can’t you forgive him? I took the moment to slip out of her life.
    I told myself that I could never have gone on with the friendship because of the way Lillian had reacted to the divorce.
    Then, about a year later, a woman named Muriel Gardiner wrote a book