Lena Shaw had a bowl of individually wrapped candy beside the guest chairs. Nora took one because it was offered, then spent the five minutes before the interview trying to unwrap it without sounding hungry.
The paper wasn't paper. It was a hard clear plastic which snapped back into shape each time she folded it. Mae held out her hand.
Nora shook her head.
“Give it here,” Mae said.
“I'm doing it.”
Mae sat back. She wore a dark jacket, plain earrings and the expression she used when someone thought a question might surprise her. A woman with a small microphone asked Nora to lean forward so she could attach it. Nora stopped working on the candy and held still. The clear wrapper hung from one hand like evidence of a smaller struggle she wasn't allowed to finish.
The room was smaller than it looked on Lena's weekly conversations. Nora had watched several the night before, looking for ways a guest became trapped. Most of the time people simply finished saying something they should have stopped saying. Lena waited, friendly and quiet, until they did it.
Her producer, a young man in a gray sweatshirt, adjusted the light. There were no people beyond the cameras to laugh or refuse to. Nora found that worse than an audience. It seemed she might look ridiculous without anybody in the room getting anything out of it.
Lena came from the little office behind them with two cups of coffee and a mug she kept for herself. She had interviewed Mae before. She greeted her with a brief touch on the shoulder and greeted Nora with a handshake which felt more formal by comparison.
“I'm glad you're both here.”
“Me, too,” Mae said.
Nora said something a fraction later. She couldn't have repeated it.
Lena checked the pronunciation of Moss, not because it was difficult but because it was her habit, she explained, and the habit had saved her from some very long corrections. Nora liked her for saying that. She would have preferred not to.
“It's a conversation, not a tribunal,” Lena said. “I've sent the broad subjects. The clip, the work, Saturday. Are there things you can't talk about?”
“There are things we shouldn't,” Mae said.
Lena nodded. “That's usually true.”
She looked at Nora.
“I don't have a list,” Nora said.
It sounded brave. She had a list. It was in her notebook, which she had been told would be out of the shot. On it she'd written a few things she would not allow Mae to say without answering. Shared. Misunderstanding. We all borrow. There was no comparable list for herself.
Cal was outside the room. Miriam had asked him to send the link when it started and to call afterward about whatever they needed for Friday. Neither had provided Nora with an answer for this morning. Mae had texted, Let's not rehearse an interview as well. Nora had agreed, offended by how relieved she was.
The producer counted them in. Nora finally got the wrapper open on two. She held the candy in her fist while Lena welcomed the people watching.
There was a short introduction, Mae's career, the failed show described with a kindness no review had possessed at the time. Then Nora's name. Fifteen years as a writer, an appearance on Saturday, a small set at Low Ceiling which had traveled considerably farther than its room.
“It wasn't designed to be a trailer,” Nora said.
“No,” Lena said. “But it has become one.”
Mae glanced at Nora. Nora kept looking at Lena.
They began with the television show. Lena asked whether Mae was glad it was over, and Mae said glad was a strong word for somebody who still owned several pairs of the character's shoes.
“Do you really?”
“They let me take them. I was very dignified about the cancellation until they said I could keep things. Then I had a cardboard box and the moral strength of a woman at a yard sale.”
Lena laughed. Nora could see the producer smile without letting the smile move his hands.
“Were you sad to leave her?” Lena asked.
Mae shifted. The woman she'd played arrived in her shoulders, then in a dutiful little smile that reached her mouth before the rest of her face. Nora knew that smile. It had been on posters in bus shelters for a season.
“She was very tired,” Mae said, in her own voice. “I kept sending her into the kitchen to find a story. Nothing but people leaving dishes.”
She reached beside her as though opening an unseen cupboard, found another unseen dish and very gently placed it behind the chair. She turned back to Lena with a bright readiness to hear what the family wanted next. The producer had to look down.
It was better than the joke Mae had been trying to use about the reviews. Nora felt it happen. Her hand loosened around the candy.
“That's the part you couldn't do on the show,” Lena said.
“Put the dishes behind the furniture? They were very strict.”
“Be angry.”
Mae let the character fall away.
“Yes,” she said. “A little. I missed being able to choose what happened when I was angry.”
Nora watched Lena hear the answer. It was not a confession about Wednesday's workshop. It was still something Nora had heard Mae struggle toward for days, and Mae had said it without asking Nora for the sentence.
“Which brings us,” Lena said, turning slightly, “to the other angry woman.”
Nora opened her hand. The candy had left a pale indentation on her palm.
“I was hoping for a wider field.”
Lena smiled. “You had a very particular one on Monday.”
She summarized the clip without playing it. Nora was grateful for that until the summary reached the hotel line and she had to hear the words in a third person's mouth, no Mae voice, no laugh coming after.
“You were showing us something we didn't know about the work,” Lena said. “When did you decide you wanted to show it?”
“I didn't go there with a press kit. I went to do ten minutes.”
“But you'd written the part about the promotional line.”
Nora felt the small retreat she'd offered herself close.
“Some of it. Yes.”
“You wrote the invitation. Did you also mean it?”
“When I wrote it?”
“Yes.”
Nora glanced at Mae. It was a mistake. Mae was watching her with an attention that seemed much more intimate than the interview allowed.
“I meant it to work.”
“And does that make it false when somebody else says it?”
“It makes it written.”
“Which isn't quite what people took from the set.”
The producer moved a finger, very slightly, along the edge of the desk. Nora noticed it because there was nowhere else to look.
“People take different things from jokes.”
Lena waited. Nora could hear the additional sentence she shouldn't supply. I can't be responsible for every person who misunderstands a room. She kept it behind her teeth. It wasn't much like winning.
Mae leaned forward.
“You hire somebody because they can help you get to the thing you can't quite say,” she said. “Sometimes they tell you you're trying to say something stupid. That's part of it. I don't think the fact that another person helped means you never meant the thing.”
“Is that what you're saying happened here?”
“I'm saying that happened for a lot of years.”
Lena looked from one to the other.
“Then what changed?”
Nora set the candy on the little table beside her. It rolled against the wrapper and stopped. She watched it stop.
“I wrote something I wanted to say myself.”
Lena didn't interrupt.
“A personal set. Twelve minutes. About getting divorced. I sent it to Mae for feedback. I said that was what it was. It wasn't paid work.”
Mae's foot moved. Nora saw the toe of the shoe against the pale rug, then forced herself to look back at Lena.
“On Wednesday, last week, she did it at the first workshop for this show.”
The room had a small sound she hadn't noticed before, the air through a vent or the light working above them. It seemed to get louder once she'd said Wednesday.
“You mean she used a joke?” Lena asked.
“The set. Most of it. Not a word she overheard over dinner. A thing I wrote and gave her to read, for me.”
Lena turned to Mae.
“Did you perform it?”
Mae was quiet long enough for Nora to hear her own swallow.
“At the workshop, yes. Not on television. It was the first version we were trying.”
“Had she said it was for her?”
“We work on everything together. I know that sounds like a way of getting out of the question.”
Nora's fingers pressed into her knee.
“It is,” she said.
Mae turned toward her. “I'm trying to explain what the room is usually like.”
“It wasn't usual.”
“No.”
Lena waited for the rest of the answer. Mae adjusted the edge of her jacket.
“It wasn't a finished show. There was never an intention that Nora wouldn't have her own opening. That was why I asked her. I want her there.”
“Did the opening exist before you used the material?” Lena asked.
“The slot existed,” Mae said. “Asking Nora was my decision.”
Nora could feel herself becoming very exact.
“She introduced me as the opening act after she did my set.”
“That's true,” Mae said.
“In the same room.”
“Yes.”
Nora waited. It was dangerous how much she wanted Mae to continue. A room at Low Ceiling had given her the little sounds she wanted; this room gave her a silence with a camera in it. She could make an entire career of waiting for the next admission and never hear it.
Lena shifted forward.
“And is it still in the show?”
“We're working on the show,” Mae said. “There's a lot that isn't decided until we've put it on a stage. That includes what we do together.”
“That's not a no,” Lena said.
“It isn't a finished running order.”
Nora looked down. The wrapper was open beside the uneaten candy. She could no longer remember wanting it.
“You're both here promoting this as a joint event,” Lena said. “What am I meant to understand from that?”
“That I'm still performing,” Nora said.
“And working with Mae.”
“On the show. Yes.”
“Not that this is settled?”
Nora shook her head.
Mae said, “We haven't settled it by putting two names on a picture.”
Nora glanced at her. The answer had been good, and she hadn't written it. She hated that this was still a thing she had to notice.
Lena sat back. She was not smiling now, but she hadn't become stern. That was worse. She appeared interested in what they would say next.
“Was there more you wanted people to hear on Monday?” she asked Nora.
“I had other material.”
“I mean about this. Fifteen years is a long time. Is the hotel story typical?”
Nora could see how another answer would travel. There were so many rooms. A hotel in another city where Mae had been angry about the height of a table, then had spent an hour trying to get the driver to tell her who he would have put in the sitcom. An airport. A call at an hour Nora had later counted as if she'd been physically unable to put down the phone.
She could do the driver's voice. It was not one anyone would recognize. Mae would recognize it. The distance between those two recognitions was suddenly unbearable.
“I'm not going to do another private story,” she said.
Lena nodded.
“But you stand by the one you told?”
“Those were her words.”
Mae looked away. Nora had the unpleasant sense of having picked up something hot using another person's hand.
Lena let the silence last, then asked what Nora's Saturday material would be.
“Mine,” Nora said.
“About Mae?”
“Not all of it.”
She heard Daryl again. She had used the same answer with him, though they were asking for different things.
“Can you tell us something about it?”
Nora knew the plates. The potatoes. The groceries, which had been good in a small uneven way she had already almost forgotten. The airport favors from yesterday belonged to both of them. She had written lists of what not to say and brought very little to say instead.
“It's about thinking you're easy to live with because you don't say what you're thinking.”
“Is that you?”
“I used to think I was extremely considerate. My ex-husband used to ask why I was putting the mugs away as if they'd done something.”
Lena laughed. Mae lowered her eyes, smiling despite herself.
“He could hear me being fine from the other room,” Nora said. “He'd turn the television down.”
The producer laughed this time. Nora felt the sound and almost followed it with a different line, the one about finally giving a complaint a reference number. She stopped. She had to leave some of the act for the act.
“So you're writing again,” Lena said.
“I haven't stopped writing.”
“For yourself.”
“Yes.”
Mae looked at her. “She's good.”
Nora wanted Lena not to turn toward that. She wanted the compliment to remain in the air without becoming Mae's final word on what Nora could do.
Lena said, “We'll see her Saturday,” and gave the details of the broadcast.
They were finished. The producer counted something under his breath and then lifted a hand. Mae exhaled so slowly Nora could see how long she'd been holding herself upright.
“Thank you,” Lena said.
Nora nodded. Her mouth was dry. Somebody handed her water, and she drank it too quickly. The little microphone had to be unclipped from her shirt, making it impossible to leave immediately.
Mae stood beside her own chair while the young woman collected the wire. Without the small black microphone Mae's jacket seemed suddenly less like an outfit she'd selected for a reason.
Lena asked if they wanted the candy for the journey. It was such an ordinary, absurd offer that Nora looked up, expecting a joke. Lena was already lifting the bowl. Mae took two.
“For the handbag,” she said. “In case I get trapped.”
Lena smiled, not quite as easily as she had before.
In the corridor Cal had his phone in his hand. He looked at Nora, then at Mae, and said that Miriam had asked them both to call her separately when they could.
“Separately?” Mae asked.
“She's working.”
Mae went toward the stairs. Cal followed her far enough to ask about a time later in the day. Nora stood beside a framed photograph of Lena interviewing a man who had died several years before. The man was laughing so hard his head had tipped back. Nora wondered what he'd said before that photograph, then was annoyed with herself for wondering.
Lena came into the hall carrying the empty mugs.
“I didn't know about the workshop,” she said.
“I know.”
“If you send a written account, I'll read it. I'm not asking you to do that now.”
Nora nodded.
“People are already discussing it,” Lena said. “The part you said today.”
“I imagined they would.”
“I thought you should know before you opened anything.”
Nora looked at the phone in her hand. She had been waking the screen without reading it, allowing the numbers to appear and then disappear.
“Thank you.”
Lena went back into the room. Nora walked to the stairs. Mae was below her on the landing, looking up.
For a moment she thought Mae had waited to argue. Mae held out Nora's notebook instead.
“You left this on the little table.”
Nora went down. It was the second time in two days. She took it without saying anything funny about needing a person to follow her with her own possessions.
“Don't keep doing that,” she said.
Mae's hand was still raised from giving it to her. “What?”
“Calling me good before I've done anything.”
“You have done things.”
“In that room. Let me finish.”
Mae lowered her hand. Somebody opened the door above them and the two women moved aside together, making room before they saw who it was.
It was the producer with an equipment bag. He thanked them and went past. When the door closed, the stairwell seemed much emptier.
“I don't know how to be in a room with you right now,” Mae said.
Nora looked at the notebook. Her list was inside it. Three words Mae must not be allowed to say. She had said one of them. Nora had answered.
“Neither do I.”
Mae nodded. She went down the stairs, holding the rail, moving a little more slowly than she'd come.
Outside, Nora found the message which told her she'd finally told the truth. It was from a stranger. The word finally had nothing to do with how long that stranger had known her.
There were other messages. One accused her of changing the story because the original one hadn't been bad enough. One asked where the proof was. Several wanted the set. She read them standing beside her car, the notebook held against her ribs.
Somebody had already cut the interview. Nora's face looked up at her from the screen. I gave it to her for feedback.
She played that part once. Mae's acknowledgment came immediately after. At the workshop, yes. Not on television.
Nora played it again, waiting for it to sound like the answer she'd wanted.