The first laugh belonged to Nora.
It came out of her before she recognized the joke. Mae had made a little turn with her shoulder, shutting out an imaginary waiter so she could finish speaking to her imaginary husband, and the turn was so exactly a woman trying to save face over an uneaten dinner that Nora laughed through her nose.
Then Mae said, “We told the waiter we were separating, and he said, ‘Together or on separate checks?’”
Nora's pen stopped.
Six people were scattered across the rented rehearsal room. Miriam had taken the chair nearest the outlet. An assistant named Toby sat on the floor, sorting lengths of cable that did not need sorting yet. Cal stood at the coffee table looking at his phone. Two production people Nora had met that morning were sharing a banana, which somehow made the whole undertaking seem less expensive.
Mae waited for the laugh to finish. She could do that in a room of six. She stood without fidgeting while the rest of them completed the transaction, as if the silence afterward were a separate thing she had ordered.
“Very fair question. We'd announced a major change in our organization. He needed to know who was authorized to expense the calamari.”
That was Nora's, too.
Not the shoulder. The shoulder was Mae. Nora had imagined this bit sitting down, with the tiny stiff dignity she remembered from the actual meal. Mae was doing it standing, already half becoming the waiter, somehow making a room with folding chairs feel as though the dinner were happening in front of them.
Nora looked down at her notebook. Above a list of things she was meant to listen for, she'd written WEDNESDAY. She had underlined it twice. Beneath that: ten days.
She turned back a page. There was the beginning of the new set, the one she'd asked Mae to read. No, not asked her to read. Asked what she thought. Nora had said, out loud, sitting at Mae's kitchen counter on Monday, “This one's for me.”
Mae had said, “Then let me see it.”
On the makeshift stage, Mae picked up an invisible payment terminal.
“The marriage is over, but the restaurant still wants feedback.”
Toby made a pleased sound from the floor.
Mae was holding the device too low, Nora thought automatically. Nobody could see it. Nora's right hand lifted an inch, the familiar signal to bring something up, and then she caught herself and put the hand on her knee.
Mae raised the imaginary screen.
“‘How was everything?’ Well, Scott, you're going to have to narrow that down.”
Nora hadn't named the waiter. That was good. Scott was good. Scott had a mortgage and no interest in being the temporary custodian of two people's private failure.
“‘Would you recommend us to a friend?’ I wouldn't recommend him to a friend. You were fine.”
Miriam laughed and tried to disguise it as a cough. This made one of the banana people laugh harder.
Mae had reached the part Nora still hadn't solved. The tip options. On the page, it was ordinary: the screen asking a newly separated woman to judge the evening by selecting one of three cheerful percentages. Nora had written four possible endings and put a question mark next to all of them.
Mae took one quick look over her shoulder at the imaginary husband, then tilted the invisible tablet toward him, protecting its contents from the wife. She leaned in to see what he'd pressed. Her smile became professional sympathy. Slowly, slowly, she swiveled back to Nora's side of the table.
She didn't say anything.
She didn't need to.
Her whole upper body was the screen now, smiling, waiting for a better answer.
Nora laughed again.
She actually had to press her lips together. The anger was there and the pleasure was there and, humiliatingly, neither stopped the other. Mae glanced at her in the middle of the laugh. Just a flicker. A little recognition between them, the way they had always passed a discovery back and forth.
Then she turned away and kept going.
Nora could say her name. A workshop was a workshop. There were no tickets, no audience beyond these people whose work involved deciding where people should stand. She could lift a hand and say, “Actually, Mae, that's the other file.”
The other file. A small, polite clerical error. That was the version of the sentence she could imagine saying.
But Mae had not opened the wrong file. There were no files in her hands. She had learned it.
Cal had stopped looking at his phone.
Mae moved into the next section, the one about how you divide the ordinary things when the furniture has more confidence in the relationship than either of you. The couch was too long for Nora's new apartment. Daniel's mother had given them a ceramic bowl shaped like a cabbage, which had become the object on which their remaining courtesy rested. Neither wanted it. Neither wanted to be the one to say so.
On the page Nora had written, I offered him the cabbage as though I were granting coastal access.
Mae said, “I let him have the ugly bowl. I wanted him to know I'd always think of him when I didn't see it.”
Different. Worse on the page, Nora would have said. Better in Mae's mouth. Mae did a small, resentful bow toward the imaginary bowl, a woman making a sacrifice of something she had hated for years.
The banana woman put down her half to applaud.
Nora had not expected that part to hurt. She had expected the first obvious theft to be the injury, followed by a period in which she knew where she stood. Instead she kept finding places inside it that hurt differently. The hours of work. The actual dinner. The cabbage bowl, which was in a box in her closet because neither she nor Daniel had taken it when they packed the kitchen, and then she'd gone back for the box and not opened it.
The private possibility of being good at something in front of people.
She crossed out one of her listening notes so hard the pen went through the paper.
“That's a useful twelve,” Cal said when Mae finally let the room settle.
It was shorter than twelve. Mae had skipped two sections, including the part about standing alone in the grocery store buying food according to what you could finish before it accused you. Nora knew the timing because she'd spoken the set into her phone three times on Sunday. Twelve minutes and seventeen seconds, twelve minutes and four, eleven fifty-eight when she stopped explaining the cabbage.
Mae looked flushed. Alive. She wore soft rehearsal clothes, an old gray sweatshirt over black leggings, but the effort had changed the way she occupied them. Nora knew that feeling in Mae, the beautiful practical happiness of having found a room.
Miriam checked something on her laptop. “Don't marry the length yet. We're just finding the material.”
“Too soon for a wedding,” Mae said.
Miriam gave her the sort of look people gave stars when they did not have time to be an audience.
Mae grinned at her. “You can't say marry in this economy and expect me to leave it alone.”
Nora took a drink of coffee. It was cold. She had bought it for herself on the way in and then bought the extra one Mae liked because Mae would forget to eat until someone put food in her hands. The second cup sat on the table beside Mae's script, still warm in its cardboard sleeve.
“There's something there,” Cal said. He was looking at Nora now. Not warmly, exactly. Expectantly.
For a moment she wondered if he knew.
Of course he'd know some of it was hers. She had written for Mae for fifteen years. She'd written the opening of the last tour, the story about the school auction, half the dinner-party material the sitcom had tried to turn into a whole character. She had been paid for that work. Sometimes very well. Cal had sent the payments. It wasn't a revelation that he had heard Nora's sentences come out of Mae's mouth.
He could not know the distinction unless she made it.
Mae took a folded tissue out of the pocket of her sweatshirt and dabbed the edge of her nose. Nora had a brief, insane wish to tell her she was about to smear concealer onto the gray cotton.
Instead she closed the notebook.
“Before we go on—”
“Oh,” Mae said. She held up one finger, not to Nora, to everyone. “I forgot. I have news.”
Nora went still.
Mae looked pleased with herself. There was something almost girlish in it, the impatience to give a present before the person had finished complaining about the wrapping.
“We've been talking about the opening.”
Miriam looked over from her laptop.
“Mae,” she said.
“No, I know. I know the words provisional and subject and terrifyingly expensive. But I'm telling her.” Mae spread one hand toward Nora. “Meet your opening act.”
Toby clapped before anybody else. One of the banana people followed. Cal was smiling now, though whether at Mae or the situation Nora couldn't tell.
Nora felt her face change. She could not have described what it did. She hoped it was something people could mistake for surprise.
“She'll do twelve,” Mae said. “We've got plenty to work with.”
Twelve.
The set Mae had just performed was twelve minutes long.
Nora's hand was still on her closed notebook. She pressed her hand harder against the closed cover.
“I thought we were meeting about it Friday,” she said.
“We are,” Miriam said at once. “We still are. We need to talk through the slot and what you're delivering.”
“But you want to, don't you?” Mae asked.
The room waited. That was what Mae could do, too. She could make a question into an occasion before the other person had decided whether there was a question.
Nora had imagined being introduced as a performer again. Not constantly. She was forty-two, not twelve, and had a job that paid her rent. Still, there had been train rides. There had been moments after watching Mae go on when Nora stood by the curtain and moved a line silently inside her mouth, not improving it for Mae, just trying the shape herself.
Lately there had been the new set. Her new set.
She looked at Miriam. Miriam's face offered nothing except a practical willingness to wait for a real answer.
“Yes,” Nora said.
It was the truth. That was the irritating thing.
Mae beamed. “Excellent. Don't look so frightened. We'll do it together.”
Not the performance, she meant. The work. The panic. The part where Nora said what she needed and Mae made the sentence large enough for a room.
Nora had not decided what she meant.
Toby stood to move a chair and caught a cable under his shoe. He stumbled, saved himself with both hands and looked so mortified that Nora said, “Strong entrance.”
“I'm available Saturday,” he said.
Mae laughed. A real laugh, short and ugly. Nora felt herself smile back. Then she was angry about the smile.
Miriam called a break. People moved with the relief of being permitted to need the bathroom. The banana couple turned out not to be a couple. The man asked where she had put the rest of his breakfast, and the woman said, “In me, as discussed.” Cal took his phone outside.
Mae came toward Nora, reaching for the coffee.
“You got the good one.”
“It was on my way.”
It had not been on her way. Mae's coffee place was two blocks in the wrong direction, and Nora had stood in a line behind a man buying a complicated drink for someone he did not love enough to write the instructions down. She had rehearsed being annoyed with Mae for making that necessary, though Mae hadn't asked.
Mae drank, burned her tongue and said, “Fuck. Perfect.”
She leaned against the table. Up close, Nora could see the tiredness the performance had hidden. A little puffiness below Mae's eyes. A pinched place at the corner of her mouth. They had spent enough hotel mornings together for Nora to know the difference between Mae without makeup and Mae who had spent the previous night trying things that had stopped being funny.
“Did you like the turn with the screen?” Mae asked.
Nora stared at her.
“The little—” Mae demonstrated, shoulder and wrist, a miniature of the thing that had made the room laugh. “I couldn't get out of it sitting down.”
“I saw.”
“You laughed.”
“Yes.”
Mae watched her. The expression arrived slowly. Not understanding; something less innocent than that. Recognition that Nora would make this difficult now instead of later.
From the hallway came Cal's cheerful professional voice. Somebody laughed at a joke he probably hadn't made. A door banged. The rehearsal room, without people in it, was cheaper-looking. Scuffed boards. A stack of tables. A water stain near the vent.
Nora put her notebook in her bag, then took it out again. She did not want her hands empty.
“Can you ask them to give us a minute?”
Mae looked at the coffee, then back at her.
“They're on break.”
“A real minute.”
For the first time that afternoon, Mae had no quick answer.