On Sandwiches, Self-Knowledge, and the Terrible Inconvenience of Nearby Men

We met at a restaurant that was trying too hard. This was Nora’s doing. She’d chosen it precisely because it was trying too hard — a new place on the Upper West Side where the menu described a hamburger as “a contemplation on ground beef” and the hostess wore the expression of someone who had just finished a graduate degree in hospitality. Nora was already seated when I arrived, studying the bread basket with the intensity of a woman deciding whether to be amused or offended.

“They’ve given us focaccia,” she said. “It’s a gesture of confidence. Restaurants that are worried about themselves give you sourdough. Sourdough says ‘we’re serious.’ Focaccia says ‘we’re relaxed enough to give you something with rosemary on it.’”

I sat down and began arranging my notes. I had printed out the combination formula and highlighted things in three colors, which now seemed desperate.

Jane arrived eight minutes late, which she immediately reframed. “I am not late. You are all simply here before the agreed-upon hour, which is not the same thing.” She looked at the restaurant’s exposed brick and Edison bulbs. “This is what passes for an assembly room in your century, I gather.”

“It’s what passes for a restaurant that will be closed in fourteen months,” Nora said. “But the bread is honest.”

Jane took a piece of focaccia, ate it without comment, and turned to me. “You have pages. I can see them. They are highlighted. What precisely have you decided before asking us anything?”

I hadn’t decided anything, but the highlights did suggest otherwise, so I put them away.

“The combination,” I said. “Your ironic narration” — I nodded at Jane — “and your observational wit” — I nodded at Nora. “Emma’s matchmaker who can’t see her own match. When Harry Met Sally’s friends who can’t see they’re in love. We’re writing a romantic comedy about a food critic who keeps setting up her best friend while —”

“While being wrong about herself,” Jane finished. “Yes. I wrote that book. The question is whether you understand what it actually was.”

“A comedy of self-deception,” I said.

“It was a novel about a woman who is right about everything except the one thing that matters most,” Jane said. “Emma is not stupid. She is not foolish. She reads people with extraordinary precision — everyone except herself. That is what makes it comedy rather than tragedy. A stupid woman deceiving herself is pathetic. A brilliant woman deceiving herself is hilarious, because you can see her intelligence working against her at every turn.”

“It’s also what makes it painful,” Nora said. “The smartest woman in the room is always the last to know. I’ve been at that dinner party. I’ve been that woman at that dinner party.”

I asked if that was autobiographical.

“Everything is autobiographical. The question is whether you’re lying about it to make yourself look better or lying about it to make yourself look worse. Both are dishonest, but one of them is funnier.”

Jane set down her water glass. “I take some issue with the word ‘lying.’ My heroines do not lie. They misperceive. There is a meaningful distinction. Emma truly believes she is arranging Harriet’s happiness. She is not performing generosity; she is enacting it, from within a framework of self-understanding that happens to be entirely wrong. A liar knows the truth and conceals it. Emma doesn’t know the truth. She has built an interior architecture that keeps it from her.”

“That’s what I mean,” Nora said. “That’s the lying I’m talking about. The kind where you’re so good at it you’ve convinced yourself.”

“Then we agree,” Jane said, in a tone that suggested agreement was the least interesting outcome.

I tried to steer. “So the food critic angle. She reviews restaurants. She has a co-critic, a sparring partner. Someone she’s been arguing with for years about everything — whether risotto should be al dente, whether the Zagat scale means anything, whether dessert menus are an insult to adults.”

Nora leaned forward. “Now we’re somewhere. Because the thing about food criticism is that it’s incredibly intimate. You are telling people what to put in their mouths. You are saying, ‘I have tasted this thing and I know whether it’s good.’ That’s an act of — I don’t want to say seduction, but it’s in that territory. You are sharing a sensory experience through words.”

“And a food critic who sets other people up,” I said. “She’s always telling her friends which restaurants to go to for their dates. She’s the one who says ‘take her to that little place on Bleecker, and order the cacio e pepe, and when the waiter asks about wine, say you’ll have whatever she’s having.’ She stages other people’s romantic evenings.”

“While eating pad Thai alone in her apartment and calling it research,” Nora added.

Jane was quiet for a moment. “The matchmaking must be compulsive. Not generous. Not kind. Compulsive. Emma matchmakes because it gives her a sense of control over a domain — human affection — that she cannot control in herself. She is, in a sense, directing plays because she is afraid to act in one.”

“Brillat-Savarin,” I said suddenly. “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are. What if the narrator actually believes that? What if she thinks she can read people through their food preferences — and she can, she genuinely can, she’s brilliant at it — but she can’t read herself?”

“Now I’m interested,” Nora said. “Because the unreliable narrator piece — she doesn’t know she’s unreliable. She thinks she’s the most reliable person in the room. She’ll tell you exactly what’s wrong with every couple she knows, exactly which restaurant will save which marriage, exactly what wine to order to communicate ‘I’m sorry’ versus ‘I’ve changed’ versus ‘please come home.’ But if you asked her about the man she’s been arguing with for six years about whether anchovies belong on pizza —”

“Seven years,” Jane corrected.

“Seven years?”

“It must be longer than either of them would admit. If you ask how long they’ve known each other, they both give slightly different numbers, and both numbers are wrong in the same direction. They’ve been undercounting. People who are not in love keep precise track of when friendships began. People who are in love have lost the beginning.”

That was so specific it startled me. I wrote it down. Nora was nodding.

“The food thing gives us the unreliable narration naturally,” I said. “She describes his reviews as ‘wrong’ but she quotes them from memory. She says she finds his taste in restaurants predictable, but she keeps going to the same ones. She’s the narrator. She controls what we see. And what we see is a woman who talks about this man constantly while insisting he is merely a professional annoyance.”

“The contradictions have to be small,” Jane said. “Not dramatic irony — not ‘she says she hates him while kissing him.’ The reader must do work. She says his review of a particular restaurant was ‘adequate,’ and then two pages later she mentions she read it three times. She calls his palate ‘limited’ and then asks for his opinion before filing her own review. The gaps between what she says and what she does should be narrow enough that a careless reader might miss them.”

“And New York,” Nora said. “The restaurants have to be real. Not real-real — you can’t use actual names — but they have to feel real. The kind of place where the chef is doing something pretentious with beets and the bathroom has hand lotion that costs more than the appetizer. New York restaurants are stages. Everyone in them is performing. The couple on a first date. The regulars who come every Thursday. The food critic who thinks she’s invisible but the entire staff knows her name.”

I asked about the ending. “When Harry Met Sally ends with a declaration. Emma ends with Knightley saying ‘If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.’ Both are grand statements. But if she’s an unreliable narrator who never fully acknowledges her own feelings —”

“No declaration,” Jane said immediately. “No speech. I dislike my own ending, if I am honest. Knightley’s speech is too tidy. Real feeling is not articulate. It stammers.”

Nora looked genuinely surprised. “You dislike the proposal scene?”

“I dislike how it resolves. The revelation should cost more. Emma’s recognition of her own feelings for Knightley happens too quickly in the text — a page, perhaps two — and then it’s settled. In life, that kind of self-knowledge comes in pieces. You see it and then you unsee it. You admit it at two in the morning and deny it by breakfast.”

“So the ending isn’t a declaration,” I said. “It’s a moment where she almost sees it.”

“Or where she sees it and immediately explains it away,” Nora said. “And the reader knows she’s going to stop explaining it away eventually, but we don’t get to see that. We get the moment right before the moment. Not the kiss. The breath before the kiss.”

“That is either brilliant or unsatisfying,” Jane said.

“It’s both,” Nora said. “All the best endings are.”

I was writing furiously. The restaurant had brought us small plates we hadn’t ordered — complimentary, the server said, though the word seemed to cause Jane physical discomfort — and Nora was eating olives with the focused pleasure of someone who believes every meal is an argument for living.

“There’s something else,” I said. “She sets up her best friend with three different men over the course of the story, and each setup is a disaster, and each disaster is actually a reflection of something she can’t face about herself. The friend she’s setting up doesn’t need setting up. The friend is fine. The matchmaking is —”

“Projection,” Nora said.

“Performance,” Jane said.

They looked at each other.

“Both,” I said, though I wasn’t sure.

“The friend should be patient about it,” Jane said. “Not angry. Not exasperated. Patient in the way that people are patient with someone they love who is being a fool. The friend sees everything. The friend has seen it for years. But the friend doesn’t say anything because the protagonist is the kind of woman who has to arrive at the truth herself, and any shortcut would be an insult.”

“In my version,” Nora said, “the friend has a line where she says something like, ‘You know you’re allowed to eat at your own restaurant, right?’ And the protagonist laughs and says ‘I don’t have a restaurant,’ and the friend says ‘You know what I mean,’ and the protagonist absolutely does know what she means and absolutely does not acknowledge it.”

“Yes,” Jane said. “That.”

We sat with that for a while. The restaurant was filling up around us — a couple at the next table having the kind of argument that pretends to be about where to go on vacation but is actually about whether they still like each other — and Nora was watching them with the professional attention of a woman who has never not been working.

“One more thing,” I said. “The co-critic. The man. He’s not oblivious. He knows. Knightley always knows. Harry figures it out before Sally does. This man knows, and he’s waiting, and the narrator can’t see that his patience is a form of —”

“Don’t say devotion,” Nora said. “Devotion is what dogs do. He’s waiting because he’s not willing to be the one who says it first if she’s not willing to hear it. That’s not devotion. That’s self-respect.”

“And fear,” Jane added quietly. “It is also fear. Mr. Knightley is the most self-possessed man in English literature and he is terrified of Emma’s answer. We tend to forget that. He has spent years loving a woman who treats him as a brother, and when he finally speaks, he cannot do it properly. ‘If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more’ is not eloquence. It is a man breaking.”

“So the co-critic doesn’t make speeches,” I said. “He just — stays. Keeps arguing about anchovies. Keeps showing up.”

“And the narrator tells us this is because he enjoys being contrary,” Nora said. “Which is so much easier to believe than the truth.”

I looked at my notes. They were a mess. Nothing was resolved. The three of us disagreed about the ending, about the friend, about whether the narrator’s self-deception was projection or performance or something else entirely. I had two good concepts from Brillat-Savarin and the phantom vibration thing I’d been thinking about — the idea that she keeps checking her phone for messages from him, interpreting muscle twitches as notifications, her body telling her something her mind won’t process — and I had the shape of something, though the shape kept shifting when I looked at it directly.

Nora was paying the check. She had taken it from the server before anyone could object, which Jane took as an act of aggression and I took as generosity, and neither of us was entirely right.

“The story will be funny,” Nora said, not as a question.

“The story will be true,” Jane said, also not as a question.

I said I would try for both, and Jane said that trying for both was how you ended up with neither, and Nora said that was exactly right but you had to try anyway, and we left the restaurant into October air that smelled like wet pavement and the last of the season’s sidewalk dining, and I still didn’t know how it