The microphone stand would not come down.
Nora had loosened the wrong part. She knew that as soon as she did it, but the knowledge didn't make her hands stop. The upper tube slid suddenly and struck the lower one with a clank that made three people in the front row wince.
“Well,” she said, “I've given you something to take home.”
A laugh from the back. Inez, maybe. Nora couldn't see her from here.
She took the microphone out. The stand, left to itself, settled into a lower position than she had wanted in the first place.
“I'm Nora.”
The host had said that. Nora smiled as if she had supplied new information.
“My best friend has always encouraged me to use my voice. Preferably in an email to her, by noon.”
The date woman laughed. Somebody else made an agreeable sound. Nora released a breath she shouldn't have been holding.
“I'm a writer. I write jokes. Sometimes people ask whether it's hard to come up with things, and I say, not really, you just wait for someone you love to do something unforgivable.”
Two laughs. The room was with her. She could feel the surprising warmth of it, a thing she had spent the whole afternoon remembering as an enemy.
“Then the hard part is invoicing.”
A smaller laugh.
She looked toward the back. The white light by Gloria's little booth was off. Good. There was time.
“For fifteen years I've written for Mae Bell.”
A man near the front straightened. The date woman turned to her companion and whispered something. Nora felt the room change. She could have followed that. She could have said something about the difference between people having heard of your work and people having heard of you. On the train, in the kitchen, driving to the room, she would have found the next thing.
Instead she said, “With permission, obviously. It's a paid arrangement.”
Silence.
“I'm paid. I mean it's not—I'm not claiming she doesn't pay writers.”
The man near the front took a drink. Nora could see the top of his head now, a white dividing line where his hair would have been if there had been more of it.
“Sometimes people think writing jokes is just sitting around saying funny things. It's actually sitting around saying funny things and watching somebody else get a house.”
A laugh, but not where she'd wanted it. A tired laugh, near the bar.
She went faster.
“The nice part is that if your friend takes something personal, you can both agree it isn't personal. Because she's been paying you. For something else. Which she did ask for.”
The date woman's companion checked his phone under the edge of the table. Nora could see the blue light on his shirt.
“Let me explain.”
Even as she said it, she heard what she'd done.
At the back Inez had stopped writing. She was sitting very still, face composed in the difficult, generous way people listened when they were trying not to make a bad thing worse.
Nora tried to go back. She found the line about keeping track of favors.
“I never hold a grudge. I hold the receipt. It's different. There's a date.”
A man smiled. Nora caught sight of it and turned the next line toward him, which meant the other half of the room watched her talk to one stranger as though they had become colleagues in an investigation.
She had to look at the notebook. She hadn't brought it onstage. It was in her bag, under a chair, fifteen feet away in another life where she might still have chosen to spend the evening doing something else.
She talked about divorce. The change was so abrupt that the man who'd smiled looked confused. She gave him more information, which was the last thing either of them needed.
The light came on.
She had wanted it to come on. Now she resented it. She had a minute. There were things she could do in a minute. She'd written a thirty-second introduction for Mae in the back of a car with the driver asking whether someone could please tell him which entrance. She could do this.
“I thought the hard part of divorce would be telling people,” she said. “But it's all the things that don't find out. You open a cabinet and the plates are still married.”
The date woman laughed. Really laughed.
Nora paused.
The woman was waiting for the next thing about the plates. Nora had a line about the small plate nobody chose unless there were no other dishes left. Daniel's plate. Her plate, really, because she would give him the bigger one without asking whether he wanted it and then feel injured if he didn't notice.
She could have gone there.
Instead she said, “So that's why when someone takes the things you wrote about it—”
The laugh died under the explanation.
Nora thanked them. The room applauded with the ordinary practical kindness of people willing to acknowledge that an event had ended.
She put the microphone back in the stand. It was now too low. She left it that way.
At her table, Inez moved a glass so Nora wouldn't knock it over.
“Those plates,” Inez said.
Nora began stuffing the notebook into her bag.
“You didn't have to stay.”
“I wanted to hear you.”
That was somehow worse.
Nora pulled out her phone. No messages she needed to answer. She looked at them anyway.
Inez waited a little, then said, “I'm going to get my bag.”
“Right. Of course.”
“I mean I'm not leaving because—”
“I know.” Nora looked up. “You have work.”
“Seven.”
“Thank you.”
Inez touched the back of the empty chair, a small aborted gesture, then went to collect her things.
Nora should have asked about her set. She had already offered unsolicited advice about it. Now she couldn't find one question to ask.
Gloria caught her at the bar.
“How long was it?” Nora asked.
“Five fifty.”
“It felt longer.”
“You stopped on time.”
Nora waited. Gloria stacked two clean glasses, considered them, took them apart again.
“Go on,” Nora said.
“What?”
“Whatever you were going to say.”
“You want something to take away?”
Nora nodded.
Gloria wrapped the remaining half of a lemon in plastic and set it under the bar.
“They liked the plates.”
“I know.”
“Then why'd you stop doing it?”
Nora looked at the room. The host had come back on. People were laughing. Not a roar; a normal room, people settling into the end of their night. The date woman's companion had put his phone away. The big birthday balloon moved gently above the bar, unaware it had participated in a professional disaster.
“Something happened,” Nora said.
Gloria kept looking at her.
“At work.”
“Sure.”
“And I was trying to—”
“I could tell.”
That was all. Gloria took somebody's empty bottle and put it in the bin.
Outside, Nora stood beside the car without unlocking it. Her cheeks burned. There were no bad reviews to read. Nothing to delete. About forty people had seen her be that version of herself, and most would have forgotten her name before they got home.
She took out the phone. Mae had called while she was performing, then sent a message. Not urgent. Call when you can.
Nora called.
“Where are you?” Mae asked.
“Outside Low Ceiling.”
Mae didn't immediately say anything.
“I did six.”
“Oh.”
“Five fifty, technically.”
“How was it?”
Nora put a hand on the roof of the car. “Don't.”
“Okay.”
“Just don't.”
She could hear Mae breathing at the other end, then the sound of a television being turned down.
“I was calling about tomorrow,” Mae said. “It can wait.”
“Nothing else ever waits.”
“This can.”
Nora watched a man on the opposite side of the street trying to persuade a dog to acknowledge the cold. The dog was having its own evening.
“You eat?” Mae asked.
“Yes.”
“A meal?”
Nora closed her eyes.
“I'm sorry,” Mae said. “Ignore me. I'll shut up.”
She did. It was the nicest thing she'd done all day.
They stayed on the call while Nora unlocked the car and got inside. Mae said nothing to fill the time, no encouragement, no suggestion for making the next performance better. Nora rested her forehead against the steering wheel.
“The plates worked,” she said at last.
“Good.”
“There was something about plates.”
“Okay.”
“I didn't keep doing it.”
Mae waited.
“I have to drive.”
“Text me when you're home?”
Nora wanted to refuse the little task and wanted someone to know she was home. “Fine,” she said.
After she hung up she remained in the parked car until the window began to mist.
Eight years earlier, in a hotel bathroom outside Milwaukee, it had been Mae sitting on a closed toilet seat, staring at her own shoes.
The corporate audience had eaten an enormous dinner and then spent her first ten minutes looking for the bar. Mae had gone harder. The person who hired her had leaned over to say they were all just very tired, and she'd heard it from the stage. Afterward she'd smiled through photographs beneath a banner about excellence.
Now the zipper of her dress had caught in its lining and she could not get it down.
“Pull it.”
“I am pulling it.”
“Harder.”
“If I pull harder you'll be wearing it until the cleaning staff discover you.”
Mae bent forward to give Nora a better angle. The top of the dress sagged. An expensive-looking strap inside it had come loose and hung down her back.
Nora had been tired, too. Her feet were hot. She had chosen the wrong shoes for the gig because someone had told them there would be a dinner first and she'd wanted to look like a person who belonged at it. She'd eaten half a dinner roll standing behind a pillar while Mae spoke to the client's wife.
“They were stupid,” Mae said.
“They were tired.”
“Don't tell me they were tired. Tell me they were stupid.”
Nora stopped working at the zipper. Mae was looking at her in the mirror. Half her stage face had come off on the tissue in her lap.
“You want the truth or a service?” Nora asked.
“A service. Obviously. I just spent an hour giving one.”
Nora had laughed. Mae watched until she joined her.
“All right. They were stupid.”
“Thank you.”
“A whole ballroom of stupid.”
“I could smell it.”
“That was the salmon.”
Mae made an awful little snorting sound. The zipper moved an inch. Nora bent closer, using the point of a hotel sewing-kit safety pin to ease the fabric out of the teeth.
“There,” she said. “Stand up.”
Mae stood. The dress fell open at the back. She drew her arms out, and Nora caught it before it hit the floor. Under it Mae wore shorts and a bra, the ordinary laundry of a woman who had recently tried to persuade two hundred strangers that she was worth the evening.
“Your foot,” Mae said.
“What?”
“You're standing on the side of it.”
“These shoes.”
“Take them off.”
“It's fine.”
Mae crouched before Nora could object. She worked the shoe off with the care of somebody removing a splinter from a dog. The heel had rubbed a raw patch. Mae swore at it as if it were a person, then searched the little wash bag by the sink.
“I have a thing. I had one. Don't move.”
She found two bandages, peeled one open and put it crookedly on Nora's heel.
“Professional,” Nora said.
“Union job.”
Mae stayed crouched, holding Nora's foot on her bare knee until the adhesive had warmed. Neither spoke for a while.
They ordered fries from room service. Nora was supposed to go back to her own room. She stayed. They ate on Mae's bed with a towel between them, watching a home renovation show without the sound. Mae gave the house buyers voices. Nora gave the house a list of demands. At one point Mae laughed so hard she pressed both hands over her mouth to keep from waking the room next door.
In her apartment now, Nora took off her shoes and set them by the door.
She texted Mae: Home.
Then she opened the recording app before she remembered there was no recording.