Mae was already in the room. That seemed unfair, although Nora couldn't have said which arrival would have been kind.
She had changed out of the sweatshirt. Her hair was clipped up, and a faint pale line ran down one side of her neck where she'd missed a patch with whatever she used to remove makeup. Nora noticed it before she noticed Cal beside the window or the fact that her own chair had been moved.
“There's coffee,” Mae said.
Nora put her bag on the empty chair.
“I'm all right.”
Miriam entered carrying her laptop and a plastic box containing a hard-boiled egg. She set both on the table.
“We've got forty minutes before I have to call Harbor.”
Cal pulled his chair in. Mae remained standing, one hand on its back. Nora sat and then wished she hadn't been the first to do it.
“I don't want an apology written for me,” Nora said.
Nobody had proposed one yet. She could feel the sentence standing in the space before the meeting.
Miriam opened the laptop. “Fine. What can you do?”
Mae drew out her chair. “I have something.”
She had written on paper. It was an ordinary notebook, not one of the thick folders Toby prepared, and there were three different kinds of crossing-out at the top. Nora recognized the impatience with which Mae had drawn over a word until it became a small black carpet.
“Not a statement,” Mae said. “Not two people at a table proving how spontaneous they are.”
“We're at a table,” Cal said.
“Yes, and we're doing very well so far.”
He looked down. Mae didn't try for another laugh.
“We make it about the two of us,” she said. “Not the clip. The actual working thing. Nora comes out, it's her name, it's her set. We show people what we do together as well.”
“That was already the show.”
“You were opening. There was nothing saying why you were there except me telling people. Now there's you telling people.”
Mae looked at Miriam, then back at Nora.
“We do the new thing. The service bit. A joint invitation this week, a piece at the end on Saturday. We don't pretend she isn't funny. We let everybody see how funny she is.”
Nora's hand moved on the table. She caught herself about to turn her own page toward Mae, as though there were a line to be fixed.
“And what are we saying happened?”
“We're saying you made me sound awful and I can stand next to you.”
“That's not all that happened.”
Miriam looked up. “What else do I need to know?”
Mae's fingers tightened around the notebook. Nora watched the nail of her thumb whiten.
“The set at Wednesday's workshop,” Nora said. “The dinner. The personal twelve. I wrote that for myself. I gave it to her for feedback. It wasn't an assignment.”
Cal sat back. Miriam stayed where she was.
“Are you telling me that's what the clip is about?”
“It's why I was angry.”
“You didn't say that on the clip.”
“I know.”
“Did you perform it anywhere else?”
“No.”
Miriam turned to Mae. “Are you planning to use it Saturday?”
Mae looked at Nora, not Miriam. “It's in the working version.”
“Then that is a separate decision I need made. What we're talking about now is the thing people have seen.”
“They aren't separate,” Nora said.
“They aren't the same problem for a video going out this week.” Miriam pushed the egg box away from the laptop. “I'm not asking you to say she didn't take your writing. I'm asking what the two of you are prepared to do in the same frame.”
Mae had been quiet for several seconds. It was long enough for Nora to feel the absence of the interjection she expected.
“I can say she writes,” Mae said.
Nora stared at her.
“That isn't what I meant.” Mae put the notebook down. “I can say it's work. That there are two people, and the other person has been the name nobody asks about. I can say I need her, without making that a compliment I'm giving her.”
Cal glanced at Miriam. Something had become usable.
“A shared presence,” he said. “No feud statement. A way to see both women.”
“They're seeing me now.”
“As the person who told them something about Mae.”
“I did tell them something about Mae.”
“Yes. And you can keep telling it. Or they can see you perform something else in front of the same audience.”
Nora heard Daryl saying Give them a show. On the table beside Cal's hand was a blank sheet headed with the production's name. Her own name wasn't there yet.
Mae shifted her chair closer. Not all the way to Nora, just enough that she no longer had to speak across Miriam's computer.
“Sunday was good,” she said.
“Yes.”
“We made that. Not me reading your page. You and me.”
“I remember.”
“Then let's do it where people can see it.”
For a moment Nora was back on the floor, hearing Toby fail to remain silent. Mae had made the little manager walk and Nora had been unable to speak. She wanted to hear the room do what Toby had done. It was such a simple want, so bodily, that the meeting briefly lost its edges.
“What happens to my twelve?” she asked.
“Your opening twelve stays,” Miriam said. “Provided you have twelve we can perform.”
“I do.”
“And then a closing piece together. Seven minutes is the space we have for it. We'd have to find a way in and an ending. What you've got isn't seven on camera yet.”
Mae nodded. She looked relieved to be talking about a thing that could be timed.
“I can do the announcement,” she said. “Not that I forgive her. Not a hug. Just—”
She put her hands flat on the table and thought.
“Two women. Two microphones. One very long week.”
Cal wrote it down.
Nora almost told him not to. She was still deciding whether she liked it, but he had already written it as something they had agreed.
“That's the promo?” Miriam asked.
“That's the last line of it. We do something before. Not the whole bit. We leave them wanting to see us.”
“We have to answer why we're standing there,” Nora said.
Mae turned toward her. “Then you say it.”
The room waited. Nora could hear the refrigerator in the little kitchen starting and failing to get past the same rattle.
She hadn't come to write an announcement. She had come prepared to be fired. It seemed unreasonable that she should now have to be good at something.
“Mae Bell,” she said slowly. “Still employing the woman who did that to her.”
Mae laughed once. Cal didn't.
“It starts with the fight,” Miriam said.
“They're going to start with the fight whether we do or not.”
“I don't want it to sound like I'm buying the silence,” Mae said.
Nora looked at her. Mae looked back. Neither supplied the next line.
Cal picked up his pen.
“We don't need exact wording today. We need what we're selling.”
“He's right,” Miriam said. “For this call. Tomorrow I need something I can actually send.”
The words for this call gave Nora somewhere to put the decision. She could agree to work on a piece without agreeing to every sentence which might be demanded of it. She could come to the rehearsal with a page and keep what was hers. She had done that on Sunday.
“And after?” she asked.
Mae's face changed, almost too quickly.
“After we keep doing this. Properly. Not the old way where you write and come to a hotel to see whether I used it. You stand there, too.”
“The special's a special.”
“I know. I'm talking about what comes next. We have the joint stage work. We have the writing. If the next production happens, you're the head writer. Named. Not something people have to find in the credits.”
Cal raised a finger, but Mae had seen him.
“If,” she repeated. “I said if.”
Nora looked at him. He nodded, once.
“The continued work is real,” he said. “The new production isn't ordered. Those are different conversations.”
“I'm having this one,” Mae said.
She pushed the notebook toward Nora. On the page was a heading Nora hadn't noticed before: Both.
“I don't want to go back to you not being in the room,” Mae said.
Nora felt the first foolish wetness behind her eyes and looked at the page instead. There were fragments she'd recognize anywhere. A woman trying to return an emotion after the closing date. Mae had crossed out grateful, substituted appropriately grateful, then circled the longer version. It was a good correction. Nora could hear it.
“There needs to be a way for you to say no,” she said.
“There is.”
“In the scene. To the request. Otherwise the manager's always there.”
Mae tilted her head. She heard the line as a working problem, too, and for a moment the two of them were alone on that side of the table.
“You can't say no at customer service,” she said. “You have to make the person so tired they go away.”
“Then why does she stay?”
“Because I've got her pen.”
Nora laughed. It escaped her before she could decide if it was safe.
Miriam moved the laptop around. “Can we put your names on this?”
On the screen was the announcement layout. Mae's name, the date, the theater. A place where a line could be changed. Cal supplied the spelling of Nora's surname as if she weren't there, then caught himself and asked her to look.
“That's right.”
“Same size?” the person on Miriam's speaker asked. Nora hadn't realized the call had connected.
“Not above the title,” Cal said. “Alongside in the response material.”
“Can I see?” Nora asked.
Miriam enlarged the image. Her photograph was the old writing-profile shot Inez had used. The photographer had coached Nora into looking mildly pleased with an unseen person. Beside Mae's face, that expression seemed to be waiting for permission.
“I have a better picture,” she lied.
“Send it by four,” Miriam said. “For now, can I confirm the joint promo for tomorrow?”
Nora looked at Mae. The pale line on her neck had begun to disappear as she rubbed it with her thumb.
“Yes,” Nora said.
“And you're both in Thursday's interview. We already had Mae booked; they're interested in you joining. We need to confirm.”
“Yes.”
The voice on the speaker read back the line. With Nora Moss. The two women behind the words.
“No,” Nora said.
“What?”
“Not behind. That isn't where we're saying we are.”
Miriam took it out. She replaced it with an ordinary listing of both names and the phrase Together, Live. The capitalization made it look like the name of something which had existed before this morning.
Nora watched the letters settle.
The meeting ended in small practical conversations. Cal wanted the photograph in a different size. Miriam asked Toby to set up for the next morning. Mae asked whether eleven would give Nora enough time, then stopped before saying for what. Nora said eleven was fine.
She waited until Miriam went to make the call before gathering her pages.
Cal had stayed by the door. “I've sent Daryl what you said about the billing. He'll send a mock-up.”
Mae looked up from her bag.
“Who's Daryl?”
“A club booker,” Nora said. “I have something next Friday.”
“Oh.”
There was time for Mae to say what kind of thing. Nora was waiting for it, already prepared to defend the choice. Instead Mae asked where.
Nora told her.
“Their microphone used to cut out if somebody opened the kitchen door,” Mae said. “If it's the same people, ask them to check it.”
“You've played there?”
“Years ago. The guy who ran it put me on after a saxophone. The saxophone didn't mind.”
She zipped the bag. Nora wanted to ask what Mae thought she would be doing in the room. Cal was looking at his phone.
“Do you need a ride?” Mae asked.
“I drove.”
“Right.”
They left separately. In the hall Nora stopped beside the wall of production photographs. People in headsets, empty stages being built into something, Mae with a different hairstyle grinning at a man Nora didn't recognize. There was one of Nora at a table, partly hidden by a laptop. She remembered that day. She had been writing a line for the photograph because she hadn't known what to do with her hands.
Now she had to supply a better picture by four.
Outside she walked past her car to the end of the block. She wanted somewhere to go before she went home. There was a shop selling good paper and calendars with no dates, and she stood in front of its window while a man inside tried several positions for a tiny wooden bird.
Mae called her name.
Nora turned. Mae was holding the notebook they'd left on the table.
“This was mine,” Nora said.
“I know.”
Mae gave it to her. For a second they each held a corner. Then Mae let go.
“Send the picture you want,” she said.
Nora looked down. The notebook had opened at the new page. Mae's thumb had been beside the date and the nine hundred. Nora couldn't know whether she'd read it. She closed the book.
“See you tomorrow.”
Mae went back toward the studio. Nora waited until she was gone, then took out her phone and looked at the announcement Miriam had sent for confirmation.
Her name was there. She turned the brightness up, although it was already easy to read.