They went out for food because neither had a plan for going home.
Mae offered to drive. Nora said she'd follow, which meant she spent the short journey separately imagining how the next conversation might go while watching Mae fail to signal a turn.
At the restaurant they took a booth against the wall. It was early for dinner. A server was laying silverware at a long table in the middle of the room while two children argued about who had spilled nothing on purpose. The television above the bar was muted. Somebody's game went on without them.
Mae took the side of the booth facing the room. She always did. She liked to see people come in, and Nora liked not having to notice who was noticing Mae. They had never discussed the arrangement.
“We're getting old,” Mae said, rubbing the back of her thigh.
“You spent an hour walking like an anxious refrigerator.”
“A very skilled refrigerator.”
“You were good.”
Mae looked up. Nora had not meant the compliment to sound as serious as it did.
“So were you.”
“I was a customer.”
“Yes. You wanted something. It's useful.”
Nora opened the menu. She was not going to start writing notes in the restaurant. Then Mae took out her phone and said, “The little look when I bring you the pen,” and Nora took out hers, too.
They made sure neither forgot the wrong pen, the premature apology, the way Nora tried to get out of signing. They did it quietly enough not to give the restaurant a free version. Once Mae made the manager's smile and Nora shook her head because it was funny again, even reduced to the top half of a face above a menu.
The server arrived. Mae put the phone down immediately. Nora had to finish a sentence before she could look up.
They ordered too much, then added a vegetable so it would appear to have been a thoughtful decision.
Mae turned her phone facedown, then turned it back.
“Look at this before I forget.”
Nora expected the recording. Instead Mae slid across a photograph of a staircase which divided halfway up. One side went toward a landing. The other disappeared into what appeared to be a large cupboard.
“Where does that go?” Nora asked.
“Keep looking.”
The next photograph showed a bedroom with a door beside the headboard. The next showed the same staircase from above, ending at that door.
“You can get into bed from downstairs.”
“I know.” Mae's face had opened. “Without going past the bathroom. Look at the bathroom.”
They liked houses neither had any intention of buying. Not the newly finished ones, where every room had been emptied of anything a person might have wanted. Houses somebody had kept altering until the original builder would have been unable to find the kitchen. Nora usually sent the links late, when she couldn't sleep. Mae was less reliable about answering, but would sometimes return three days later with a single photograph of a sink.
This bathroom was pink. Not a faint polite pink. The bathtub, toilet and sink had been chosen in the conviction that nothing bad could happen to a family which washed in that color.
“Keep,” Nora said.
“Absolutely not.”
“You keep the stairs to the pillow but not the pink?”
“The stairs are useful. I could lie down and still be in the hall.”
Nora enlarged the sink. It had little ridges on each side for the soap, dark with age in the grooves.
“I like it.”
“You have a bathroom the color of nothing.”
“I'm renting.”
“You could have a pink towel.”
Nora looked up. Mae was waiting, genuinely wanting the towel question answered. She had lost patience with the way Nora admired color in rooms she wouldn't have to clean.
“A towel isn't the same.”
“I know. It's considerably less expensive than a toilet.”
The server brought their drinks. Mae moved the phone without turning off the photograph. When he had gone, Nora pulled it back.
“What's this door?”
Mae leaned over. They went backward through the pictures, trying to find the little glass door from the other side. There were twenty-eight photographs and only two of the kitchen. Somebody had taken six of a dining room which contained one small table and an enormous clock. The clock appeared in the background of two more, catching them each time they thought they'd escaped it.
“It goes outside,” Mae said.
“There isn't an outside there.”
“Maybe the person taking these is in a bush.”
Nora held the phone toward the window to get the reflection off it. Mae shifted around the booth until she was beside her. They bumped elbows. Nora moved the glass before Mae could knock it, and Mae took the phone, found the floor plan and put it between them.
The little glass door opened into a porch. The porch had no other entrance. To get to the yard you would have to go back through the house and leave by the kitchen.
“I love that,” Mae said.
“You'd have to carry everything around.”
“I don't want to carry everything. I want to sit there.”
She had stopped being funny about it. Nora studied the little room again. A chair had been pushed beside the window, its cushion faded on the edge nearest the glass. There were three plants in mismatched pots. The photograph had caught a piece of someone's sock at the bottom.
“They forgot to get out,” Nora said.
“Good.”
Mae enlarged the picture until the chair filled most of the screen. It wasn't a beautiful chair. Nora could imagine getting out of it with the arm pressing into her hip.
“You don't think it looks damp?”
“I think you want to put a desk in it.”
“I didn't say anything about a desk.”
“I know where you were going.”
Nora looked again. She had been measuring the space under the window without admitting it. Mae took a drink and waited for the room to be left alone.
“I'd keep the chair,” she said.
“It looks uncomfortable.”
“You don't have to sit in it.”
“I haven't been invited.”
Mae laughed. Nora laughed, too, then began looking for the yard. It turned out to be a long strip almost entirely occupied by a clothesline. There was a patio chair at one end with a plastic bag tied over its seat.
“That one's yours,” Mae said.
“I get the outdoor chair.”
“You've got more room. You've got all the room.”
Nora pinched the screen. The tied bag became larger, then too large, a blurry white shape above two thin chair legs. She made it small again. Mae took the phone out of her hand and shut the listing.
“Don't read the description.”
“I wasn't.”
“You were going to find out it needed work.”
“Every house needs work.”
“It's not my house.”
Mae put the phone facedown. For a little while they sat on the same side of the booth, both looking at the two empty places opposite. Nora could see the room from Mae's angle now, the door, the people settling at the long table, the server waiting for a child to name a drink without her brother naming it for her.
“I'd keep the pink,” Nora said.
Mae shook her head. “Of course you would.”
Nora took the phone again and found the listing in its history. She sent it to herself, then closed it before Mae could object. The picture of the porch stayed in her mind with its sock and wrong chair.
Mae went back to her side when the server came to bring extra napkins. Nora watched her settle into the place she'd been taking for years. There was a pale oval on the table where her glass had stood beside Nora's. Nora put her own glass over it.
“That isn't yours alone,” Nora said after the server left.
Mae looked at her.
“The duet. I mean it's not a thing for the headline act with someone else doing my part.”
“I know.”
“I'm saying it now.”
“I heard you.”
Nora watched her fold the extra napkin. She had wanted Mae to understand the distinction, and now she wanted the understanding to spread backward through Wednesday and make that different, too.
“It's new material,” she said. “It's good. You have something else to build from.”
Mae's eyes moved toward the television. A man in a helmet fell and got up again. The children at the center table had stopped arguing and were sharing a phone.
“I know what you're asking.”
“Then I don't have to ask.”
Mae was quiet.
“Let me use the set I wrote for myself,” Nora said.
The server came to check whether the table needed the extra napkins. Nora said yes to stop him taking them away.
Mae waited until he was out of hearing.
“I still need that part.”
“Why?”
“You saw the rest.”
“The rest is good.”
“Some of it.”
“You're good.”
Mae looked at her sharply. “Don't do the thing where I'm good so I don't need anything.”
Nora sat back.
Mae ran a finger down the condensation on her glass. “I spent months playing that woman on television. Standing in her kitchen, asking where the husband was, waiting for the teenager to walk in with the line. I keep starting my own material and hearing her. You heard it in the first version of the pharmacy bit.”
“So keep doing it until it's you.”
“I am. And this afternoon was good. But I can't walk out there and do both people.”
“I didn't say you could.”
“The pharmacy, the casting office—I'm still the woman waiting for somebody to call her name. Your dinner starts and the marriage is already over. Nobody's coming in with my next line. I get to sit in the chair and be the person it happened to.”
“You want to be me.”
“No.” Mae rubbed the wet ring her glass had left. “I want to stop being somebody's wife for twelve minutes.”
“Not with my divorce.”
“My divorce wasn't an artistic performance, either.”
“I didn't say it was.”
“You wrote things I'd have said if I'd been able to say them properly.”
“For me.”
Mae closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them she looked tired, and Nora did not want her to be tired. She wanted something simpler to push against.
“All right,” Mae said. “That's not an answer. I know.”
Nora waited.
Mae took a breath. “I need to get through this show with something that doesn't sound like the leftovers of the last one. That isn't your problem. It has been your job, but this part wasn't. I know what you said.”
She stopped. The acknowledgment was almost the thing Nora had wanted, and still not the thing itself.
“Then stop doing it.”
Mae looked down at the table.
Nora could hear a knife being sharpened in the kitchen. The television changed to an advertisement. A very young man at the bar laughed at something on his phone, then held it sideways for the person beside him.
She had imagined that after the good afternoon Mae might be able to give something back without feeling that the whole room would vanish with it. She had let herself imagine being easy together, tired and pleased, arguing about who had invented the manager.
Now their food arrived and she couldn't remember which dishes she'd chosen.
Mae moved one toward her. Nora said she could reach. Mae put it down.
They ate without performing the fact that they weren't talking. The food was hot and good. Nora wanted the pleasure of it and the pleasure of their afternoon, and she did not want either of those things to count as a concession.
After a while Mae said, “There is a separate job, if you want it.”
Nora almost laughed.
“No.”
“You haven't heard it.”
“I heard there is a job.”
“It's not the ordinary work. It's extra. Cal would put it through separately.”
“What is it?”
Mae described a defined punch-up pass on a section she hadn't found a way to close. Not the personal set. Older material about the short-lived television job, the people in suits who assured her there was a place for her, then kept moving her to a smaller part of it. Mae had stories she hadn't been able to make into an act. She wanted two ways in and a way out, a pass on the whole run by Monday before lunch so she could rehearse it that afternoon.
Nora knew how to do it. She could already hear the error in the third anecdote. It began with the person whose approval Mae wanted instead of the ridiculous thing that person asked her to do.
“Don't start with the meeting,” she said.
Mae looked at her.
Nora stopped herself. “That's what happens. You ask and I'm doing it before I've said yes.”
“I asked because you're good at it.”
“I know.”
“Not because I think you'll do it for nothing.”
“I know that, too.”
Mae reached for her glass, then left it where it was. “Can you?”
Nora pictured the night. She'd go home, make a document and read the notes Mae sent. She'd start with the easier part. At some point she'd think of a line for her own Monday set and put it in a different file. She'd finish Mae's, because someone was waiting for it. Hers would still be there. It was always still there.
“I'm working on my ten minutes.”
“You have tomorrow afternoon.”
“I have tonight.”
“I'm not taking it off you.”
Nora let that sit between them.
Mae's face changed. “I hear how that sounds.”
“Then don't keep saying it.”
It was the sharpest thing Nora had said since Wednesday. She couldn't put a joke around it. She was glad of that and ashamed of the satisfaction she took in seeing Mae flinch.
“I can't do the job,” she said. “Ask somebody else.”
Mae nodded, too quickly.
“I will.”
“Okay.”
“Don't be angry that I asked.”
“I'm angry that I want to say yes.”
Mae looked at her then, really looked, without trying to make the answer useful. Nora wished they could remain there for a moment. The server came by to ask whether everything was all right. They both answered him.
The bill arrived in a little black folder. There was no screen. Nora and Mae looked at it and then at each other, and a laugh escaped Mae that was almost a sob.
“Don't,” Nora said, smiling despite herself.
“I didn't.”
“You're going to.”
Mae folded her hands on the table and became the manager waiting to intervene in a perfectly ordinary dinner.
Nora put her face in her hands. She could still laugh. It did not feel like forgiveness. It felt like a thing her body knew how to do with this woman and did not intend to surrender just because the rest of her had finally objected.
Outside they walked to their separate cars. Mae had to cross in front of Nora to get to hers. For a moment neither knew whether to hug. They had been able to do the practical parts of each other's lives for fifteen years without announcing that they loved each other, and now an ordinary goodbye required a choice.
Mae touched Nora's upper arm.
“I'll see you tomorrow?”
“At the studio?”
“I mean if you want to run it before the club.”
Nora could picture that, too. The pages becoming a room, the room becoming a way Mae would do it, Nora agreeing because that way got the better laugh.
“I'll let you know.”
Mae took her hand away.
“Good luck.”
She meant it. Nora could tell. That was another thing she didn't know what to do with.
At home she put the paid-work folder somewhere she couldn't see from the desk.
Inez had sent the finished listing. Nora's photograph sat below Inez's, with the true credential in a smaller line beneath it. Writer for Mae Bell. New work, Monday, eight thirty.
Two people had already commented that they'd seen Mae live and loved her. One asked whether Mae would be there.
Nora wrote, No. Just us.
Then she looked at us and left it. Inez was doing a show, too. This wasn't a room that existed only because Nora needed somewhere to be heard.
She took out the pages from that afternoon. Plates, the man eating a potato, the funny unreasonableness of requiring an unrequested act to be noticed in exactly the right way. She stood in the kitchen and tried it. It was better than it had been on Thursday. She could feel the difference.
For a while she worked on that.
Later, when she was too tired to stand, she opened a second page and wrote down things Mae had said about the people who loved her. Some were simply tired after-show remarks. Some were funny. Some would be uglier if Nora left off what had come immediately before.
She didn't write the hotel bathroom. Not yet. She wrote the paid promotional line, the one about bringing a terrible week, then beneath it tried an answer in her own voice.
Please have your terrible week ready. We cannot process a vague sense of disappointment.
Nora smiled. She wrote another line. This one came easily.