Gloria answered on the sixth ring.
“What?”
“It's Nora Moss.”
A door shut at the other end. Nora pictured Gloria holding the phone away from her ear, deciding whether this required glasses.
“Moss. All right.”
“I used to do your Thursday room.”
“I know who you are.”
That should have been reassuring.
“I'm doing some new work. I wondered if you had a spot.”
“Tonight?”
“If you've got something.”
“Come by seven. Don't bring a guest list.”
“I wasn't going to.”
“People say new work, then they bring twelve people. Six minutes if I can fit you in.”
“Six would be great.”
“Bring a clock.”
The call ended before Nora could explain what she was getting ready for. She stood in the kitchen holding the phone and experienced the odd relief of not having been invited to explain herself.
At eleven she started rehearsing. At eleven twelve she moved her phone to another shelf because the recording made her look as if she were seeking advice from a doorbell. At eleven twenty she stopped looking at the recording. By noon she had spoken the same beginning so many times that the words didn't mean anything, only sounds she was trying to get over a low fence.
She sat on the arm of the couch, where she never sat otherwise.
“My best friend has always encouraged me to use my voice.”
That was a good beginning. She could feel the pleasure in it. She kept trying it with a different word before best. Supposed best. Famous best. My best friend, who is famous, and if you don't know which famous person I'm friends with, don't worry, I'll explain the entire business arrangement until you wish someone more famous had come on.
She deleted the last sentence.
At two, Mae sent a note about the Friday production meeting. Nora replied with the work she'd completed that morning, attaching the revised transitions. There were four small fixes. Each had made her feel useful for a minute and then furious with herself for liking the feeling.
Mae wrote back: Got them. Thank you.
No kiss. No joke. Nora stared at the message until it would have been embarrassing if anyone else had been there.
Then she wrote, One of the transitions still needs the visual.
Mae sent a thumbs-up.
Nora put the phone in a drawer.
She had jeans that fit and a black jacket that didn't. The jacket belonged to the brief period in which she'd imagined performers should look like people who might be asked to sign a document. It had narrow shoulders and a fitted waist. When she raised her arms, it asked her to remain in the past.
She took it off and put on a green shirt. Then changed back to a plain gray one because the green looked like she expected something to happen.
At six thirty she got in the car. There was still time to circle the neighborhood and go home. She drove to the club instead.
Low Ceiling occupied the first floor of a narrow brick building between a dry cleaner and a place that repaired phones. The comedy sign in the window was lit on one side. The blue curtain was real. So was the boat painting, which from the street looked no happier to be afloat than it had online.
Inside, the smell of beer had not changed. The room was smaller than she remembered, though that was probably what happened when you returned to a place you had once expected to save you. Six tables, then six more, arranged so the first row couldn't get up without the second row participating. The little stage held a stool nobody sat on and a microphone stand adjusted for someone with a short torso and a confident chin.
Gloria stood at the bar using a calculator. She looked up, looked Nora over and went back to the numbers.
“You came.”
“You said seven.”
“I've said seven to a lot of people.” She pressed a button with an unnecessarily hard finger. “You're late at six fifty.”
“I'll work on it.”
“Don't. Order something. You're toward the end.”
Nora bought a club soda, then moved out of the bartender's way. It was too early to drink. It was too early to have a mouth this dry, too. She sipped carefully and looked at the wall by the bathrooms.
Photographs, flyers, a framed newspaper column in which three of the people mentioned had since quit. On one poster she recognized Mae's old red coat. It had been her only decent coat for two winters. Nora had held it behind the bar while Mae performed in a room heated almost entirely by the people in it.
Below the coat photograph, among small names in a small typeface, was NORA MOSS.
She had forgotten that bill. A Saturday show when somebody had canceled and Gloria had asked whether she could do more than six. She had done eight minutes, then another ninety seconds trying to get back a laugh she'd spoiled by explaining it. Mae had been in the back. Afterward Mae had bought her a hamburger even though Nora said she wasn't hungry. She'd eaten the whole thing in Mae's passenger seat, holding the wrapper under her chin.
Nora leaned closer to the poster. There was a little water stain across her surname.
“Did you die?” someone asked.
A woman carrying a tote bag stood behind her. Dark curls were caught in a clip too small for the job. She wore bright yellow sneakers and had a pen behind each ear.
“What?”
“You're looking at that like it's a memorial. I was going to ask whether they do them in advance.”
“I'm on it.”
“Oh, that's worse. Sorry.” The woman came to look. “Which one?”
“Nora.”
“I'm Inez. You're up tonight?”
“Late.”
“Good. I thought I was last. I have work at seven and I need several hours between doing this and being polite to someone.”
Nora looked at the two pens.
“One runs out,” Inez said. “I used to put a spare in my bag, but once I'm onstage my bag might as well be in another state.”
“Are you planning on taking notes during the set?”
“If something goes wrong in a way I haven't tried.”
She smiled, not waiting for Nora to know whether this was a joke, and went to the front table. A man in a Cubs cap shifted a chair to let her through. Inez set down her tote, took out a notebook and began talking to him with the immediate absorption of somebody who had not spent the afternoon selecting a shirt.
Nora envied her, then reminded herself that she knew approximately two things about this woman, one of which was her name.
She took a table near the back and opened her own notebook. Her first page looked like a list of charges. She had numbered the jokes, which was sensible, but underlined the word friend in three separate places, which seemed less sensible now.
Gloria came by.
“How do you want to be introduced?”
“Nora Moss is fine.”
“Anything else?”
Nora almost said she wrote for Mae. It was the credential she used without thinking. Restaurant tables, a doctor's impatient receptionist once, a stupid little moment at her nephew's school when someone asked whether she was a writer writer. It explained why she should be allowed to take up the next minute.
“Just my name.”
Gloria wrote it down. “Six. I give you the light at five.”
“I remember.”
“Good. Some people remember an imaginary extra two.”
She went away before Nora could make her remember being fond of her.
The room filled unevenly. Two people near the stage looked like a date on which one of them had chosen the activity and the other had decided to be a sport. A group in work clothes took three tables and moved the chairs into a shape Gloria silently moved back. Somebody brought in a birthday balloon and was required to leave it at the bar because it drifted in front of the light.
The host welcomed them. People clapped. Nora opened her notebook, shut it and set it on the empty chair beside her.
She remembered the first time she'd performed here, at twenty-five, wearing a skirt so formal she'd looked like she was about to explain a change to the dental plan. She had wanted the room to forgive her for being there before she'd started. Seventeen years later, she still caught herself smiling at people who hadn't said anything to her.
The first comic was twenty-three and angry at his father. The second was not good, but once he put both feet firmly on the stage, stopped apologizing and said something unexpected about the man ahead of him at the pharmacy, the room relaxed. Nora leaned forward. He had surprised himself. She could see it on his face. He tried to repeat the effect and lost it, but the moment had happened.
Then Inez went up.
She put one of the pens on the stool. The other remained behind her ear.
“I started taking a dance class because I work from home and I was afraid my legs were becoming decorative.”
A small laugh. She nodded as though they had provided useful information.
“Not a sexy dance class. It was called Fundamentals. That's how you know nobody's going to touch you. They say Fundamentals and the whole room puts on a clean sock.”
Nora smiled.
“The teacher told us to take up space. Which was good, because until then we'd all been trying to get under the same exit sign.” Inez made herself small without bending her knees, shoulders climbing, face pulled into a bright terrified attentiveness. “Then he said, ‘That's Cheryl's space.’ So there are limits. Don't discover your body at Cheryl.”
The woman on the date laughed hard enough to startle her companion. Inez didn't turn toward her for more. She was busy trying to move one hip without taking the rest of herself along.
“He kept saying, ‘It's just a weight transfer.’ I've been doing those in the bathroom for years. You don't have to put music on.”
She let the laugh happen while she studied an imaginary foot.
There was a longer run about instructions she understood individually but could not make her body obey in order. Inez spoke earnestly, almost too quickly, as if the funny part was still information everybody needed. She was willing to look stupid. Not coquettish stupid, not secretly excellent. She made a wrong step and then demonstrated how a whole adult woman could attempt to follow one knee out of a room.
Nora laughed with the couple in the front. She forgot to be worried for nearly a minute.
Then Inez ended on a line about putting Fundamentals on her résumé, and the final laugh was smaller than the one she'd already earned. She knew it. She took the pen off the stool and said good night without trying to get a better ending by force.
Nora watched her come down the side aisle. Inez was breathing hard. Her cheeks were bright.
“That knee thing,” Nora said when she passed. “Keep that.”
Inez stopped. “Yeah?”
“The word fundamental at the end, you don't need it.”
“I know. I put it back because the title of the class—”
“You said the title. We were there.”
Inez smiled slowly. “I always want people to know I know where I started.”
“They know.”
There was a pause. Nora heard the certainty in her own voice, the ease of having an opinion about somebody else's exit.
“Sorry,” she said. “You didn't ask.”
“No, I was going to. I just wasn't going to ask while I could still hear my pulse in my teeth.” Inez pulled out a chair. “Which part's your name?”
“Nora Moss.”
“I mean on the old thing. I tried to look when I went to the bathroom, but there's like forty names.”
“Second column. Near the water damage.”
“Okay. Good location. Historic.”
She opened her notebook and wrote down something Nora couldn't see. Then she looked up again.
“You write for Mae Bell, right?”
Nora felt the familiar small lift at being recognized and hated how grateful her body was for it.
“Yes.”
“I saw your name in a thing about that show she was doing. Not the TV show. Before that. The theater one.”
“The tour.”
“Right. I knew I'd seen it.”
Nora waited for a question about Mae. Inez only drew a line through something in her notebook.
The host was calling another name. Near the stage a server balanced glasses around the birthday balloon, which had escaped its weight and was now trying to conduct the show from the bar.
Inez said, “Do you want me to record yours?”
“No. Thank you.”
“Okay.”
It was that easy to decline. Nora had forgotten.
She took her notebook off the empty chair. Her thumb had left a damp mark on the edge. She put it in her bag, then took it out again.
Inez did not comment. She turned toward the stage, giving Nora the small mercy of somewhere else to look.