There was applause on a recording for the beginning. Miriam stopped it after two seconds and said they didn't need it again until the proper run.
Nora was glad. Walking toward applause nobody was making was like being welcomed by an automatic door. It opened because she was close enough, not because anyone had decided to let her in.
She stood at the wing entrance with a woman whose name she had already been told twice and still couldn't retrieve. The woman held up a finger while someone on the stage moved a cable. Nora's pages were on a chair behind her. She'd been allowed to put them there for the rehearsal. Tomorrow they wouldn't be there.
“You okay?”
“Yes.”
The woman nodded, and Nora remembered her name. Jo. The small recovery was so relieving she almost said it aloud.
“Go,” Jo said.
Nora walked.
The light was much brighter than at home. The room didn't vanish in it; it broke into patches she could see and patches she couldn't. A man near the rear aisle had a little lamp clipped to his page. The two rows beside him seemed completely empty. Nora began her first line to the dark place where she expected a person to be.
“I got divorced. That's the part with the paperwork finished.”
There was no laugh. She knew there wouldn't be one. Her body hadn't received the message. It began carrying her too quickly toward the next sentence.
She stopped, took a breath and continued.
The plates held. At the dishes, Nora gave the mugs a careful little shove and the woman in the front row laughed despite the page she was marking. Nora let the sound finish.
She cut the cabbage, kept the single-woman freezer and went into the emergency contact. The woman at the front looked up. This part was new to her.
“It says relationship,” Nora said. “I wanted to put Answers phone. That's the kind of intimacy I'm qualified to maintain.”
The woman laughed. Nora drew the little box for the answer and tried to fit the words inside it. Her finger reached the edge of the imaginary paper before she was done. She held it there, unwilling to start another line.
Halfway through, a camera moved.
Nora turned toward it. Not her head, her whole body. Suddenly she was speaking to a piece of equipment instead of the room she'd been trying to build out of the empty seats.
“Keep going,” Miriam called.
She did. She found the mark again. The favor material was waiting, the old little hope that a person who hadn't asked for an errand might thank her at the right level afterward. Nora set the imaginary lampshade on the invisible counter. Her own hand made it awkward. She didn't need a second body to tell the room that she had made a difficult thing of a small task.
“I've brought the email, the bag, the thing from the bag. I've brought the face I use when I know you're only doing your job. I practiced it in the car.”
She waited. The silence was a useful length and then an uncomfortable one.
“No, don't call anybody. I've explained it to you. I haven't got another person in me.”
The last words were new. She saw Miriam look up from the page. Nora went on without trying to take them back.
She wanted a person at the counter to look upset at a level she could leave. The woman in the front row laughed again. Nora held the moment, then ruined it by glancing toward the wing.
Mae was there. Not waiting to enter. She had been listening, standing outside the marked space with a page held loose in one hand.
Nora looked back. For a second the whole performance shrank into an answer she was giving Mae about the afternoon. She heard herself sound wounded and disliked it. She put the invisible bag down.
“I don't even like the lampshade,” she said. “That's the thing. It's ugly. I don't need compensation. I need somebody to respect how far I've driven with something ugly on the passenger seat.”
The laugh was small. It was enough to move her into the end.
She reached the last line and did not add a better one. She thanked the empty room.
“Eleven nineteen,” someone said.
Miriam came up the side steps. Nora stayed on the mark as if moving before being told would invalidate the time.
“Without a crowd,” Miriam said. “Which means you need room. The shopping can be shorter.”
“I can take the emergency contact out.”
“Do you want to?”
Nora looked at the woman in the front row, who was already writing something and not waiting to be identified as the audience that liked her best.
“No.”
“Then don't take it out because you're nervous. Show me where you can cut.”
They looked at the page together. Nora found two qualifying sentences in the groceries and the little apology she made before the lampshade. She could cut them without unmaking the route. Miriam asked her to run only those joins, and Nora did, hearing for the first time how often she had been warning a person she was about to change the subject.
The camera operator asked her to keep the imagined counter farther forward. “When you turn away, we can't see what your hands are doing.”
“I'm not turning away on purpose.”
“I know. That's why I'm telling you.”
They tried it. Nora held the invisible thing where the lens could find it without letting the lens become the person who'd denied her request. She knew what she was looking at now: the assistant who could only do so much, slightly shorter than herself, not the camera, not Mae, not whoever had refused to watch her fifteen years ago.
She put the notebook on the stool when they finished. There was no victory in the time. There was a workable set and something like a floor beneath it.
Mae came onto the stage.
“You don't need the cabbage,” she said.
Nora laughed once. “It's gone.”
“Good.”
Mae looked down at her own pages. The next thing was hers. Nora stepped away so the room could stop being arranged around the little marks her shoes had made.
They worked on Mae's sound for several minutes. Nora sat in an aisle seat far enough back to see the whole body. Mae didn't begin with the dinner. She started with the audition chair, but not the way Nora had heard it in her head. In this version she became a woman trying to look natural by obeying every casual instruction too carefully. Make yourself comfortable. Mae sat on a chair so physically unsuitable for comfort that the words became an accusation.
She put one foot under herself, then discovered she was too relaxed to reach the audition page. She leaned toward the imaginary casting person while trying to preserve a posture somebody else had suggested. It was ungainly and too broad for the camera on the first run. Miriam said so. Mae made it smaller. The second version was better.
Nora heard a missing turn. The joke wanted to stop before the casting director spoke again. She wrote nothing. Mae stopped half a sentence later, shook her head and found a place of her own to leave it.
Then the old pharmacy sequence. Some legitimate older work, tightened, a small passage from a live act Nora remembered in a different theater. Not everything was new. It didn't have to be. Mae could stand inside an old line and make the waiting look as if it had never been timed before.
The new section after it was less sure. Mae rushed. She stopped herself, asked to take it from a line nobody could immediately find and had to say three sentences before someone recognized the place. Nora felt the familiar heat behind her ribs. She wanted to hold up the right page.
She remained in the seat.
Mae completed the sequence. A few people laughed. A few were watching their equipment. When she asked whether the last transition was visible, Miriam answered the practical question, not the question Nora knew was inside it.
“We can see you. Give the turn a beat.”
Mae gave it a beat. The room moved on.
Afterward, at the edge of the stage, Mae found Nora with her notebook still closed.
“I took it out,” she said.
Nora looked at the pages.
“The dinner.”
For a second she heard the first line again from Wednesday's workshop. Her own dinner happening in Mae's voice, the device swiveling toward the other diner, her own laughter arriving before she could stop it.
“You're not doing it.”
“I'm not doing it.”
Nora wanted a much larger sentence to come after that. Mae tucked the pages against her side.
“You can use it,” she said.
“I could use it before.”
Mae looked at her. “I know.”
The words were small. Nora could no longer tell whether she hated hearing them because they were too easy or because she hadn't found another answer which would make them sufficient.
“Why now?” she asked.
Mae looked toward the seats. Miriam was talking to the camera team, one hand on the back of a chair. Nobody was looking at them.
“I don't want to stand out there waiting for people to find it in my mouth.”
Nora didn't look away.
“And I shouldn't have put it there,” Mae said.
She sounded tired, irritated at herself for having to say the sentence aloud, not like a woman offering a clean piece of remorse to be accepted. Nora had wanted that sentence for nine days. Hearing it in this form didn't give the nine days back.
“No,” she said. “You shouldn't.”
Mae nodded. She rubbed the edge of the page against her thumb.
“There's enough without it. Some of it's old. They'll have heard some.”
“They're coming to hear you.”
Mae smiled without looking pleased.
“Some of them.”
Miriam called them. Nora picked up her notebook. The women walked back together because there was only one way onto that part of the stage.
The closing piece had a different kind of failure in the theater. In the studio they could stop whenever they needed the thing to be fine. Here the camera kept a shape around them. Nora could see the monitor at the edge of the room, the space between their bodies, the look which would have to travel through it.
They began with the favor transaction. Mae got a laugh from the little manager's return. Nora found her line and held the irritation instead of hurrying it. They had done the difficult middle better than on Wednesday. Then Mae arrived at the last thank-you and Nora found herself needing to give an answer no customer in a shop had ever needed to give.
The old look wasn't there. A different look came, something guarded and ugly enough that Nora didn't want it enlarged.
“Again from the pen,” Mae said.
Miriam let them try. At the pen Nora's hand went out before Mae was ready. Mae adjusted, Nora adjusted to the adjustment, and suddenly they were both holding a nonexistent object as carefully as a dish they expected to break.
Somebody in the seats coughed. The silence went on.
“Stop,” Miriam said.
Nora let her hand drop.
Miriam came to the steps but didn't climb them.
“I'm taking the joint close out.”
Mae started to speak. Miriam held up a hand.
“We have tried it. We don't have a version I can run. I'm not using tomorrow to find out if you'll discover one in front of people who bought a ticket.”
Nora looked at Mae. Mae was staring at the place between them where they'd held the pen.
“My slot?” Nora asked.
“You've got a solo opening that works, your attendance is promoted, and I need a show I can deliver. Your twelve stays. The close goes. Mae takes that space in her headline section.”
Mae looked up.
“You have the material,” Miriam said. “We need the transitions settled. You don't need all new material just because you said comeback. You need something you can do.”
Mae nodded once. Nora could see the calculation behind her eyes, a set rearranging while somebody else was still talking.
“I have it,” Mae said.
Miriam gave the change to the person beside her and asked for a revised run order to be sent to the carrier contacts. A line went through the closing piece.
“There is one thing,” Mae said.
Miriam looked back.
“If the audience asks for me. In her set. We have a little thing we can do. Not the close.”
Nora held the notebook against her leg.
“We talked about a response,” she said. “We haven't agreed to do it.”
“Then let's agree what it is,” Miriam said. “I'm not having anybody think an argument is an entrance.”
They moved off the main stage while someone came to change the microphone height. Mae described the manager. Not the whole sequence. A brief arrival, the pen, the customer declining the form, an exit. Nora could feel the actual comic mechanism inside the description. It was simple enough to be called back by a room which wanted the familiar face.
Miriam asked how long.
“Half a minute,” Mae said.
“Forty-five seconds maximum,” Miriam said. “Inside Nora's twelve. Not on top. If you use it, something else gets cut.”
Nora showed the place in her pages where she could lose the final lampshade return without leaving a sentence unfinished. Miriam looked at it, asked whether she would know the time from the visible signal and waited until Nora said yes.
“The cue?”
“Would you like to speak to the manager?” Mae said.
“And I turn,” Nora said. “Open hand. Toward her. We worked it that way.”
She kept her own hand on the notebook. She wasn't doing it now.
Miriam looked at Mae. “Only on both. The whole sentence and her invitation. She could say manager a dozen other ways. It means nothing unless she hands you the space.”
“I know.”
“Jo needs to know. Camera needs to know. You need a place to wait where you're not getting in the way or being accidentally found.”
They marked it. A little piece of tape in the wing, visible to Nora if she looked toward it and not to most of the seats. Mae stood on it while Jo checked the sightline. Nora remained where her solo would end, the notebook still in both hands.
The distance was short. It would take Mae only a few seconds to cross it. A slight turn from Nora, a hand opening, the full familiar question. Then the room could belong to both of them, for long enough to make the uncomfortable part manageable.
“You haven't got to use it,” Jo said.
“I know.”
“I'm saying it for them.” She indicated the crew member writing the note. “It's optional. Nobody's chasing a missed cue. Nothing happens if you don't give it.”
The note was read back. Miriam asked Nora whether she wanted the option kept. Nora looked across at Mae.
She had not forgiven her. She had refused the continued work. The stolen dinner was gone from the running order, which should have made standing here simpler. It had not made the people beyond the empty seats disappear, the ones waiting for a quarrel, or an embrace, or whatever would let them decide who had been right.
“Keep it,” she said.
Mae didn't smile. She nodded to Jo and stepped away from the mark.
They ran the final transitions without doing the optional entrance. Nora walked the route once more, put the microphone in the stand where it belonged and left by the agreed side. The first time she turned the wrong way. Jo brought her back and showed her the clearer path, past a case which would have moved by tomorrow. Nora asked them to leave the case where it would actually be so she could learn the right route instead of hoping it would be obvious when she needed it.
At the other side Mae was sorting the extra pages into her headline set. She had a pen between her teeth and a line of tape stuck to one pant leg. Nora wanted to go and pull it off before she stepped onstage. Mae looked down, saw it herself and peeled it away.
Nora went to her room. Her phone contained Daryl's advertisement, now posted, with several people saying they had bought tickets. One had written that they wanted to hear what she couldn't say on the big show.
She read that line until the screen dimmed. Then she put the phone away and found the part of her set which could be cut in forty-five seconds.