I was looking over the questions on the notecards Mary had selected, but I was tempted to look at just one of the notecards in the pile of discarded questions. Although Fred was trying to conceal his telephone conversation, his pissiness was audible to us. When Mary came out of the washroom, she caught me sneaking a look at the topmost notecard among the whack jobs.

“Don’t read those questions, Adam—there are questions you’ll never get out of your head,” Mary told me. I instantly regretted reading the one question I took from the discards. It wasn’t a question I would have answered onstage; it definitely belonged among the whack jobs. When I went onstage, the question was resounding in my head. I saw Mary take a second look at the question I’d read before we left the greenroom. “Like that one,” Mary said to me.

“Like you, I’m a fiction writer. Are you depressed all the time, too?” That was the question. To distract myself from thinking about it, I read over the questions that were about my mother. Mary wanted me to pick the best question about my mother and answer that one. We left all the questions concerning “Where do you get your ideas?” in the greenroom, where we’d heard Fred yelling on the phone as we were leaving.

“I know the potential troublemaker is just a woman, but it’s not my job to be the security personnel, is it?” Fred was screaming at someone.

“When it comes to Jasmine, Fred, you better let Em and me deal with the subway-station pussy—we’re the best security personnel you can get,” Nora was telling Fred. I didn’t need to see Em to know she would be nodding her head.

“I don’t suppose your cousin Nora would harm Jasmine physically, would she?” Mary asked me.

“Not very much,” I answered, or I said something along those lines.

“I see,” Mary Marinelli said, leaving me in the wings. I’ve since grown to love that moment in the wings. You can find a strangely solitary peace in the sides of a theater stage, where you’re out of view of the audience. At least for me, in those few minutes before I’ve gone onstage, time stops. I’ve had lifelong reflections backstage—soon gone, of course, but I’ve had those moments nevertheless. Not that time—my first time at the 92nd Street Y. Jasmine’s unlikely but possible presence unnerved me; I wanted Nora to harm Jasmine, physically.

All the mother questions were unsettling. “The mother in your most recent novel is a radical feminist who is assassinated by a misogynist. Is she your mother? If not, what does your mother think of the mother in your novel?” Of the ten or twelve mother questions, this one didn’t have the most dulcet tone, but it was the most clear.