Last Woman Standing. Amy Gentry

felt so safe that I ad-libbed a few extra lines, teasing it out fifteen or thirty seconds longer than usual, buoyed by laughter all the way. This was going to be easier than I’d thought.

      The blue light on the back wall came on, piercing the veil of the stage lights and bringing me a message: One minute to go. One minute of coasting downhill into the applause that would send me to the semifinals, which could send me to the finals, which might even send me, I was beginning to think, back to L.A. I silently thanked Austin, the so-called “velvet coffin,” for having been there when I needed a soft landing place. Even as I wrapped up my set—forty-five seconds; I could feel the rhythm of the time draining down—I was thinking about getting a subletter to cover the rest of my lease, just as I’d covered someone else’s when I first moved in. Goodbye, Austin. Behind the curtain of stage lights, I could almost feel the walls of the comedy club dissolve and transform into a vista of palm trees and smog. Thirty seconds to go.

      It must have been thoughts of L.A. that made me glance involuntarily toward the judges. Perched behind a long table to the left of the audience, they were far from the spotlight’s glare, and at first I could only see silhouettes. Then something in one of the silhouettes caught my eye—a tuft of beard sticking out just under the ear in a way that made me look again, a fraction of a second longer this time. Long enough to notice the shape of the part and the glisten of sweat on a high, round forehead.

      It was him. Aaron Neely was at the judges’ table.

      The lights turned ice cold. Then they turned red, then black. I stopped my last joke midsentence. In the darkness, I heard my lips open and close, amplified by the mic. A wave of dizziness passed over me, and for a moment the floor felt as if it were pressing up hard against my feet. I blinked furiously to clear the black fog and said, “Um.”

      The lights came back with a rushing sound. I blinked again.

      The joke, the joke! I reached for it, but it was gone. So, I saw, was the audience. Chairs were creaking impatiently. Blood in the water. “Thank you,” I said and left the stage to uncertain applause.

      I made my way up the aisle and through the bar, past the other comics. On the way out, I hit the panic bar on the double doors as hard as I could, hoping the chuh-kung! noise was loud enough to make Fash spill his drink.

      Of course Neely was in Austin. Of course he’d followed me to the place I felt safest, the place I felt sure he was too much of a big shot to ever grace with his presence. The irony being, of course, that while I was in L.A., Austin had become just the kind of scene a guy like Neely liked.

      What Neely liked. I shuddered. What he’d liked was humiliating me in the back of his SUV, showing me how small and insignificant and utterly disposable I was to a man like him and, by extension, to the industry whose highest ranks he represented. He’d shown me, in a stretch of time that felt like an eternity but probably took no more than five minutes, that I would never be in a position to make jokes, not for men like him. Because I was the joke. Setup: me, woozy and sick from whatever I’d come down with at the smoothie bar, laughing nervously as he unzipped his pants because I didn’t realize, at first, what I was seeing. Heightening: still me, now frozen in shock against the safety-locked car door as understanding dawned. Punch line: me again, blood rushing to my face, a visceral, writhing discomfort intensifying in the near silence until it felt like actual physical pain.

      I was the joke, and I wasn’t even a good one. I was just something to do for fifteen minutes, a way to kill time in the back seat of his car between appointments. He hadn’t touched me while he did it, just the edge of my dress. I’d dropped my eyes, confused, and waited for him to finish, which took long enough for tears to start rolling down my cheeks and falling onto my lap.

      The tears were falling again now as I stalked across the parking lot to my car, and I felt the surge of shame take me over and shake me from the inside. Why hadn’t I said something? Why had I just sat and cried, like an idiot, like a moron? It was just what he’d wanted me to do. And now I knew it wasn’t the stomach bug that had kept me riveted quietly in place, weeping, while he jerked himself off. After all, I hadn’t been sick tonight, and I’d reacted the same dumb way, with frozen, self-sabotaging terror, like a deer in the headlights. For all my bravado, in the end all it took to shut me down and drive me out of town was one obscene man I’d mistaken for a mentor when he didn’t even think I was funny—at least, not funny enough to outweigh the temptation of jacking off to my double Ds.

      And didn’t that prove he was right—the fact that I couldn’t take it, that I’d run away, that I was back here in Austin instead of in a writers’ room in L.A.? For the millionth time, I thought, Nothing happened, he didn’t even touch me, words that had first echoed through my head in the half hour after he’d finished as we sat side by side in L.A. traffic—him, unbelievably, making small talk. I’d repeated the words like a mantra to myself to drown out his insipid chatting until I was home safe. And after all, it was the truth. It wasn’t as if he’d attacked me. It wasn’t rape. I, of all people, knew the difference. What was it, to cause me such shame?

      When his car finally stopped in front of my house and the automatic door lock clicked, Neely himself told me what it was, with the unanswerable authority of someone who could take a joke, who was, in fact, in charge of deciding what constituted a joke in the first place. As I scrabbled at the door handle and stepped down to the curb, the last words I heard him say were: “Come on. This is a funny story. You’ll be able to use it someday.”

      There was someone following me across the dark parking lot. Someone tall, because the footsteps behind me—how long had they been there?—punctuated by the rhythmic creak of boots suggested a lengthy stride. Passing under a lamp, I watched my shadow spring out ahead of me, and in the few feet before the circle of light faded completely, I could see another shadow trembling just under my right heel. I squeezed my eyes shut for a millisecond to clear them of tears and tried to push down the thought of Neely. He couldn’t have left the judges’ table early—could he? I strained to catch a glimpse of my car in the narrow alleys between Suburbans and jacked-up pickup trucks. Without slackening my pace, I fumbled in my purse for the keys. When I found them, I slotted each jagged key between my fingers, then squeezed the key ring until it bit my palm. My Honda emerged into view. I increased my pace and heard the footsteps speed up behind me. I was almost there.

      Just as I was reaching to unlock the door, I felt a hand on my shoulder and whirled around. A tall woman stood in front of me, her shock of hair backlit by the long-necked street lamp: Amanda.

      “Jesus, you scared me to death!”

      “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I was just trying to catch up. I wasn’t trying to freak you out.”

      “Mission not accomplished!” My heart was racing, the tension of the past few minutes releasing all at once. “What is it this time?” Snapping at someone, anyone, felt amazingly good. My rage at what had happened onstage was almost overpowering, and I was coldly aware that Amanda was the perfect person to take it out on. A random stranger I’d only just met, new in town, she existed completely apart from the rest of my life, was barely a person to me. I remembered Ruby’s “number-one fan” remark and felt a new surge of irritation. “Why are you suddenly everywhere I look? What are you, pumpkin spice?”

      She fell back half a step, stunned into silence. “I—I’m sorry,” she said again. “I just saw your name in the paper, in the listings for—”

      “And, what, you want to tell me some more sob stories?” I said nastily. But it was me who was on the verge of tears.

      Amanda noticed. She had regained her composure, that eerie, wide-eyed stillness, as if she were waiting for my next move. “You’ve been crying,” she said. “What happened in there? You think you messed up?”

      “I did terrific, thanks,” I said reflexively. “A regular king of comedy. Anyway, learn your terms. It’s called bombing.”

      “You didn’t bomb,” she said. “You were the best