Free I Remember Nothing by Nora Ephron Page B

about her life as a spy before World War II, and it became clear that Hellman had stolen her story. There was no Julia, and Lillian had never saved Europe with her little fur hat.
    I told myself I could never have gone on with the friendship because Lillian had turned out to be a pathological liar.
    Then Lillian sued Mary McCarthy for calling her a liar.
    And I told myself I could never have gone on withthe friendship because I could never respect someone who had turned against the First Amendment.
    I actually did. I actually told myself that.
    But the truth is that any excuse will do when this sort of romance comes to an end. The details are just details. And the story is always the same: the younger woman idolizes the older woman; she stalks her; the older woman takes her up; the younger woman finds out the older woman is only human; the story ends.
    If the younger woman is a writer, she eventually writes something about the older woman.
    And then years pass.
    And she herself gets older.
    And there are moments when she would like to apologize—at least for the way it ended.
    And this may be one of them.

My Life as a Meat Loaf
    A while back, my friend Graydon Carter mentioned that he was opening a restaurant in New York. I cautioned him against this, because it’s my theory that owning a restaurant is the kind of universal fantasy everyone ought to grow out of, sooner rather than later, or else you will be stuck with the restaurant. There are many problems that come with owning a restaurant, not the least of which is that you have to eat there all the time. Giving up the fantasy that you want to own a restaurant is probably the last Piaget stage.
    But Graydon cheerfully persisted, and the restauranthe opened downtown became a huge success. A year later, he told me he was going to open a second restaurant, this one uptown, in the old location of the Monkey Bar. He said he hoped it would be something like the Ivy in London, which is one of my favorite places, and did I have any suggestions for the menu? I immediately sent a long list. At the top of it was meat loaf. I love meat loaf. It feels like home.
    A few months before the restaurant opened, I was invited to a tasting. It included an unusual dish consisting of two thick slabs of meat loaf that had been sautéed slightly and were firm on the outside. This made for a nice combination of squishy and crispy and thus avoided the primary pitfall of meat loaf, which is that it’s so soft and mushy you can polish it off in under a minute. I would not say that this particular meat loaf felt like home exactly, but it was delicious nonetheless. It came covered with a lovely mushroom sauce, which made sense given the crisp exterior. Normally I would take a strong position against mushroom sauce, but this meat loaf seemed to cry out for it, and not in a bad way.
    I had no idea the Monkey Bar meat loaf was going to have my name on it, but when the restaurant opened, there it was, on the menu, Nora’s Meat Loaf. I felt that I had to order it, out of loyalty to myself, and it was exactly as good as it had been at the tasting. I was delighted. What’s more, I had the oddest sense of accomplishment. I somehow felt I’d created this meat loaf, even though I’d had nothing to do with it. I’dalways envied Nellie Melba for her peach, Princess Margherita for her pizza, and Reuben for his sandwich, and now I was sort of one of them. Nora’s Meat Loaf. It was something to remember me by. It wasn’t exactly what I was thinking of back in the day when we used to play a game called “If you could have something named after you, what would it be?” In that period, I’d hoped for a dance step, or a pair of pants. But I was older now, and I was willing to settle for a meat loaf.
    By the way, I was not the only person whose name was on the Monkey Bar menu. My friend Louise had a salad named after her. It’s called Louise’s Sunset Salad.
    In the next couple of weeks, I got five or six