By six, the crew is ready to order materials and begin construction, and Cate heads out. She gets a breakfasty dinner at a steel-sided diner. (Holding her cell under her newspaper, she takes a surreptitious picture of the grill, which appears to be from the beginning of the twentieth century. She shoots this to Dana. But, of course, why is she shooting anything to Dana?) She finds a cheap motel for the night before heading into New York tomorrow. Cheap hotel rooms in Manhattan are way too scary. What she finds on the outskirts of Moonachie is the Loch Lomond. Hers is the only car in the parking lot; all the other guests have trucks. Her room is both depressing and agitating—a pageant of plaid. Bedspread, drapes, and small, tragically decorative pillows on top of the real ones. All the plaids are different tartans. The walls are hung with prints of fox-and-hound events, and of Bonnie Prince Charlie, who does not appear to have really been all that bonnie. The carpet is clean, there’s that. No bugs scatter when she turns on the lights. In the corner across from the bed, there’s a full-size refrigerator. She’s not sure whether to count this as feature or flaw. A flat-screen TV is mounted high on the wall across from the bed. She opens all the windows to get a breeze going, to dilute the air in the room, which is thick with loneliness. There’s a ten-dollar deposit for the remote, which Cate declines; she has a copy of a good play with her, something she saw years ago, early in her career. Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. She remembers the set allowing a lot of agility on the part of the actors. Reading scripts, imagining (or remembering) them up and running, is one of her great free-time pleasures, a busman’s holiday.

She showers and gets into yoga pants and a long-sleeve T-shirt, crawls into bed.

This is their second design meeting, and so the initial butt-sniffing is over, and they are now going forward with a tacit agreement that they can work together. Dan Tennent, the lighting guy, like a lot of lighting directors, thinks the set is a corpse his lights can bring to life. He may be a problem, but Cate decides not to worry about that yet.

Saya Arai is doing costumes. She’s really good. Cate knows how good by the fact that the couple of times her name has come up, Maureen has had something negative to say about her. Saya is ethereal in her presence, thin in a way that implies an internal focus, a diet of lichen. She is extremely quiet. She didn’t talk much at the first meeting, only took furious notes in a slender gray notebook. Cate isn’t crazy about having notes taken on everybody else by someone who’s not putting out her own ideas.