The first thing Nora saw of the Avalon was a man taking her name down.
He stood on the third rung of a ladder, lifting the paper from a display beside the doors. It was a temporary notice, not the lettering above the entrance, but Nora stopped anyway.
“Is that for Saturday?”
He looked down. “They're all for Saturday.”
“Why are you changing it?”
“Wrong time.”
He took a fresh sheet from the little stack on the ladder's paint tray. There was Nora's name again, below Mae's, in a line she'd approved on her phone. The time had changed by half an hour. Doors, not show. She had been about to defend a misprint's right to continue existing because her name was on it.
“Thank you,” she said.
“It's not me deciding it.”
He slid the new sheet into the frame. Nora waited until the glass was closed before walking around to the stage entrance.
Inside, the theater smelled of wood, dust and hot electrical things. Somebody was trying a low sound through the speakers. It began in Nora's stomach and moved toward her knees before it became audible enough to call music.
A woman at a folding table checked her name. Nora gave it too formally. The woman found the line, crossed something off and said she could leave her coat in the second room on the left.
“There's a rack. Anything on the chairs will get moved.”
Nora followed the corridor. She passed an open door where several bottles of water stood in a row, all their labels facing away. Another door had a piece of paper taped to it saying Do not use this one. She almost opened it before she read the paper properly.
The second room contained a mirror edged with ordinary bulbs and a chair whose seat had been repaired with black tape. There was a rack. Nora hung up her coat and watched the sleeve stop swinging.
Her photograph was taped beside the mirror. A name had been written underneath. Not the image from Monday's listing but the replacement she'd found, a picture Ben had taken at a lunch some time before the divorce. She'd cropped out the plate and her brother's hand. In the full picture she'd been laughing at Sam. Here it looked as though she'd selected a confident professional expression.
She took out the notebook and went looking for the stage.
Nobody introduced her to it. A man rolled a case past and asked her to keep left. She kept left and found herself beside a dark curtain looking at an expanse of scuffed floor. Beyond it the empty seats rose in a shape she hadn't adequately imagined from a photograph.
There were cameras, cables held down flat, a table where a table wouldn't be tomorrow. Two people at the far side were measuring something with a long strip of tape. The low sound stopped. Someone said it was good, then asked to hear it again.
Nora walked to a mark and stood there.
It wasn't her mark. She knew almost immediately. The microphone was somewhere else, the angle wrong. Nevertheless the room came toward her. Empty chairs, folds of fabric, a row of little lights near the back. She thought she might be sick and then found that she was simply breathing too high.
“You're ahead of me,” Miriam called.
Nora turned. Miriam was coming down the side aisle with a headset around her neck. It looked uncomfortable to wear, but it made sense on her in a way it hadn't on the screen of Nora's laptop.
“I know. Cal said early.”
“Good. Don't stand there. That's where the camera moves.”
Nora stepped away. Miriam pointed to a different mark.
“That's yours. We'll do the proper walk when sound's ready. Have you got the solo?”
“Yes.”
“Timed?”
“At home. Just under.”
“At home hasn't got laughs. We'll see.”
She asked about the closing piece. Nora said they had been working on it. Miriam looked at her until she added that it wasn't finished.
“I need a show by the end of today,” Miriam said. “Not a promise to be pleased with each other by tomorrow.”
She walked on. Nora watched her cross the stage without looking at any of the seats. Then she tried to find the route back to her bag without making somebody ask her to keep left again.
Cal caught her near the dressing rooms. He was holding a roll of tape and an envelope, neither of which seemed connected to whatever he'd come to say.
“Have you heard from Daryl?”
“I answered him.”
“About the advertisement.”
“Yes.”
“He sent the new version.”
Nora opened her phone. There it was, sent while she'd been with Inez. Her name filled the top of the image. No crossed-out photograph of Mae. A small line beneath her face said Behind the Smile, an evening with the writer who knows. There was a date and the name of the room.
“He wants to go with it at noon,” Cal said.
“Who knows what?”
Cal looked at the image. “It doesn't say.”
“That's the problem.”
“You can ask him to be more specific.”
She enlarged the photograph. The crop was good. The woman in it looked like a person who had a performance coming, not somebody holding up another woman's career from underneath.
“I don't want Mae's name bigger than mine.”
“It isn't.”
“I know.”
Cal leaned against the wall. A door opened behind him and he moved immediately, then stood in a less comfortable place without remarking on it.
“He's not asking to lie,” he said. “He saw a thing, he wants that thing in his room. If that's not the show you want to do, tell him. If it is, let him sell it.”
“You make everything sound like a sandwich.”
“A sandwich is useful. You know what you'll get.”
She almost smiled. He looked tired, with a little red line at the edge of one eye. She had spent much of their acquaintance thinking tiredness was a defense he put on when she wanted something. This morning it seemed to belong to him.
“He asked if there'll be a fresh clip from tomorrow,” Cal said. “Something he can use before next Friday. I told him that's yours to answer after the show.”
“Good.”
“He still wants the Mae material. He doesn't think that's unclear.”
Nora looked at the line about knowing. She typed, Approved with my name and picture as shown. No Mae photograph. We can discuss fresh footage after Saturday.
She sent it to Daryl, not Cal. The small check appeared beside her message.
“Done,” she said.
Cal nodded. He put the tape on a little table where someone had already left another roll.
“The other decision is ours.”
She knew which one he meant. She didn't want to have it in a corridor where people would keep asking them to move.
Cal seemed to understand. He pointed to the empty room across the hall.
They went in. There was a sofa with a cushion leaning against its own collapsed corner. A fruit bowl contained three bananas at distinct stages of defeat. Nora put her bag on the table and thought of Monday, the small joke she'd almost had before deciding she knew what the room should hear.
Cal handed her the envelope.
It contained the continued-work outline he'd said he would send. The existing retainer, the named joint stage work, the prospect of being head writer if the next venture was commissioned. Dates for a discussion after the special. Nothing had become larger since Tuesday. The possibilities were arranged more neatly on paper.
“I haven't had time to look,” she said.
“Now's time.”
He sat at the other end of the sofa, leaving the broken cushion between them.
Nora read the page. She had wanted to find something Mae had added, a demand so unreasonable that she could point to it and stop having to want the rest. There wasn't one. It said what they had said. That was worse in a quiet way she hadn't prepared for.
“The stage work is subject to us being able to do it,” she said.
“Yes.”
“As we currently can't.”
“We haven't got a completed close. That isn't the same as never doing another thing together.”
Nora looked at the phrase subject to agreement. Everything attractive on the page had an ordinary little qualification attached, while the familiar paid work sat beneath them without requiring imagination.
“The head-writer job isn't a job yet.”
“No. We told you that.”
“And if I don't do the joint act?”
“Then don't commit to it. We need to know what we can say next week. We don't need you agreeing to something you can't get through.”
She thought of all the times she'd wanted them to ask clearly. Now the clear question was on the page and she could not leave the room by explaining how it ought to have been asked.
“Does she need an answer now?”
“Before we leave today.”
“She has a show tomorrow.”
“Which is why we can't do this in a parking lot at midnight tomorrow.”
Nora folded the page along its old crease. She wanted to keep reading it, to stay a person considering several futures rather than the one who had to stand up in one.
Cal waited. Then he said he had to find Miriam.
“I'll talk to Mae,” Nora said.
“About this.”
“About this.”
He left. Nora sat on the sofa for another minute, then the corner gave a little beneath her and she got up.
Mae was in the next room, reading aloud.
Nora stopped outside the door. She didn't mean to listen. She had spent fifteen years listening for the exact place Mae needed her and recognized it before she could become somebody who hadn't.
“The casting person said they were looking for warmth,” Mae said. “I said I had some. She said they meant the kind you can keep.”
She paused. A page moved.
“No,” she said, to herself.
She tried another opening. This one was longer, putting a producer behind a desk and a bowl of wrapped candy between them. Nora thought of Lena's bowl, then heard the old anecdote they had been trying to close on Sunday. Mae's sentence arrived at the wrong person and asked the audience to be angry before it had shown them anything funny.
Nora knew the repair. Start with the chair, not the meeting. Mae had spent the whole audition trying to stay upright on furniture chosen to make people look relaxed. It was a bodily problem she could make hilarious. Nora heard the first line, then the second. She stood holding the folded page and didn't go in.
Mae saw her reflection in the mirror.
“You can come in.”
Nora went in. There were crackers on the table and a plastic tub of cheese, a little less elegant than anything a production might have laid out. Mae had brought it herself.
“They didn't have the other kind,” she said. “The ones you like.”
“These are fine.”
“They said the other ones changed the package. I couldn't find them.”
She sounded offended by the package. Nora took a cracker and got crumbs on the front of her shirt. Mae handed her a napkin. Nora looked at it a second before accepting.
“I haven't got the ending,” Mae said.
“Which ending?”
Mae put her hand on the page she'd been reading. “This one. I asked someone else. He sent jokes. They're good jokes. They aren't this.”
Nora nodded. The cracker was dry and salty. She ate another so the first wouldn't be the only thing in her mouth.
“Cal gave me the page,” she said.
“I saw him.”
Mae pulled a chair away from the table. Nora sat. For a minute they ate the cheese in the ordinary silence of women who knew what the other one would say about a hotel buffet and didn't need to make her say it.
From the stage came a voice asking for a microphone. Mae leaned her head toward the sound, listening until she was sure it wasn't her name.
“They're going to ask for me,” she said.
Nora looked at her.
“During your part. Maybe. Some of them.”
“I heard them last night.”
“I know. Cal said you went.”
“Does Cal have everybody in Chicago calling him?”
“The host sent him a picture. He was proud you'd come.”
Nora was quiet. Mae slid a cracker through a soft edge of the cheese, concentrating on not breaking it.
“If you need me, I can be there,” she said.
Nora knew the body. The little walk. Mae arriving to tell a person with a complaint that she was being heard. Toby laughing so hard he had to turn away from the equipment.
“It isn't a finished thing.”
“It doesn't need to be the whole close. If they shout, we could give them something. A few seconds. Get them back.”
She said it lightly, not as a proposition with money and a paper behind it. Nora could feel how easily it could work. The audience would recognize the shape, the two women would get through the little turn, and she would have a room she could keep speaking in.
“I can't have you just come out,” she said.
“I didn't mean that.”
“Miriam would have to know.”
“Of course.”
Mae had broken the cracker. Half of it stood in the cheese. She looked at it, annoyed, then took the other half and used it to retrieve the first. Nora laughed. Mae looked up, surprised and pleased enough to make Nora wish she hadn't been surprised.
“There,” Mae said. “I'm useful.”
“For a very narrow task.”
“I'm keeping the qualification off the poster.”
Nora put her napkin down. The offer remained between them without becoming a line on Cal's page. She didn't say yes or no to using it. She couldn't see Saturday from this room, with an empty cracker box and Mae trying not to sound frightened.
“We have to go through the solo,” she said.
“I know.”
“And the rest.”
Mae looked at the folded paper in Nora's hand. “I know.”
A knock came at the door. The woman from the entrance asked whether they could come to the stage for the walk-through. Mae stood and checked herself in the mirror. Nora put the page into her notebook. She brushed the last crumbs from her shirt.
They walked down the corridor. At the turn toward the stage, Mae went ahead to answer somebody calling her name. Nora stopped beside her own room and looked at the photograph by the mirror.
She touched the top edge, which had begun to lift, and pressed the tape flat. Then she went to see what the room would do with her actual twelve minutes.