Last Woman Standing

But I didn’t have Amanda’s number, and she didn’t call or text, so I kept polishing brass bowls and folding linen napkins at Laurel’s, and then it was the weekend before semifinals. I began to feel less worried about Amanda than about the upcoming competition. Would I be able to perform or not? Could I even trust myself to walk onto the stage at Bat City, much less make it through an entire set without glancing Neely’s way? A stray thought about him while I was on the mic could bring on another embarrassing stutter at best, total silence at worst. Whenever I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t go back to sleep, I anxiously tested myself, rehearsing the situation mentally again and again with my eyes squeezed shut. I’d imagine myself making my way through the parking lot, running the gauntlet of the other comics, checking the list by the door, settling down to a drink at the bar. But when the emcee called my name to go onstage, I’d always blank out and fall back into a deep, black sleep.

The answer hit me during a busier-than-usual Saturday shift. I’d just sold a three-hundred-dollar antlered recipe stand and was dusting the essential-oil display while Becca took over with customers. I remembered what Ruby had said about Becca’s arms and noticed that today, as always, they were sheathed in long sleeves despite the fair weather. I wondered if she, too, had a secret. If so, it seemed like a stupid and destructive secret to keep.

But wasn’t I being just as stubborn?

Telling Amanda had brought instant relief. But Amanda didn’t matter—even she knew that. Once she’d faded into the background, the relief had faded with her, and I was left alone to anticipate another confrontation with Neely. What if I just needed to tell someone else? Not my mom, who would freak out, or Ruby, who would gossip about it, but someone closer to my world, who would understand?

Kim, for instance. After prelims, Kim had checked in with me to ask after my imaginary illness. She’d even offered to bring me soup and Gatorade. It wasn’t the first time she’d made friendly advances, and I wasn’t quite sure why I’d never responded to them before. Okay, it annoyed me that she played up the sexy-baby thing onstage, and maybe she really would laugh at the idea of Aaron Neely, the Aaron Neely, masturbating furiously at me in the back of an SUV. Maybe I needed someone to laugh, to break the spell of it, at least for long enough to get me through the semifinals. Anyway, hanging out with Kim would give me something to do other than dread Neely and wonder about Amanda.

I finished up the oil display and got back to my phone, which was tucked under the counter in my purse. I had just enough time to send a text to Kim—Ran out of puke, all better now. Hang out before shows?—before the next wave of customers. I heard the buzz of a text, but I didn’t get a chance to look until the shift was nearly over. Kim had replied, Meet me at the lake @6?

I’d been thinking more along the lines of happy hour than exercise, but since I was supposedly recovering from food poisoning, it wouldn’t hurt me to play along. See you there, I texted back, trying to remember if I owned a single pair of walking shoes.

“The lake” was Ladybird Lake, which I still thought of as Town Lake, the homelier name it had worn when I first moved to Austin. By either name, it wasn’t a lake at all but a fat stretch of the Colorado River running through the heart of the city just south of downtown, flanked on both shores by hike-and-bike trails and kayak-rental places. Since coming back to Austin, I’d spent more time sitting in my car in traffic on the bridges over the river than down among the annoyingly healthy trail runners and dog walkers. But no matter how backed up the bridges were, the broad, rippling surface of the water, glinting at rush hour in the slanting sun and dotted with paddleboarders like gondoliers, made for a pleasant view.

That said, parking by the river was a bitch. Already late from having stopped by my apartment to change into a more walkable outfit, I maneuvered the car up and down the clogged one-way streets and cursed the no-left-turn signs until I found a spot a quarter of a mile away. I texted Kim I was on my way and hustled toward the trail under the powerful six o’clock sun, marshaling the last vestiges of bounce in a pair of ancient tennis shoes I’d found buried in the piles of heels in my closet. I was already pouring sweat when I got to our agreed-upon meeting place, where Kim, clad in a threadbare Eagles T-shirt over a lime-green sports bra, was executing an isosceles downward-dog in a sunlit patch of grass. She sprang up when she spotted me, her cheeks perfectly flushed, like an actress in a movie about working out. Panting, I waved in lieu of saying hello.

“Hey, late-ass bitch,” she said.

“Namaste, slut,” I said, still catching my breath. “You’re looking very white-lady today.” The snarky greetings among comics used to throw me before I accepted them as just part of the job. Remembering that I was supposed to be convalescing, I added, “You’re lucky I came at all. If I die out here, I’m suing you.”

“You want to walk or run?”

“Did I stutter?”

“What, you mean at prelims?” she said with a nasty grin, and I bowed sarcastically. “No, seriously. Congrats, though.” She steered us toward the path, at this hour a slow-moving river of people and bicycles and dogs swathed in a low cloud of reddish dust.

“You too,” I said. Kim had placed in her preliminary round the week before mine. “But the prelims are old hat to you, right?”

“Yeah, this is my third year,” she said with a quick sidelong glance at me, like I’d touched a nerve. She’d never placed at finals.

“Third time’s the charm, they say,” I said, to make nice.

“It’s so fucking exhausting.”

“Skip it,” I suggested. “Go sailing.”

“Are we even allowed to do that?” I knew what she meant. Since Funniest Person had gotten so big, standups in Austin referred to it as the “comedy tax.” It ate up months every year. “Let’s just bitch about it and pretend we don’t care who wins instead.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“I mean, it’s going to be the same dudes who place every year.”

“And the Funniest Person in Austin goes to . . . a guy with a handlebar mustache!” I said in my announcer voice.

“Second place . . . a guy with a slightly smaller handlebar mustache—and a neck tattoo!”

“Third . . . some woman, so nobody can accuse us of sexism!”

“I’ll take it,” Kim said. “I’m your token, right here.” I wondered if I should make the next joke but Kim took the words out of my mouth, cocking an eyebrow at me. “Maybe they’ll double their money and put a Latina comic in third.”

“I fully endorse that idea, since I’m the only one in town.”

“May the best token win . . . third, that is. If they even throw us a bone this year. I mean, last year it was three white dudes.” She smirked. “Speaking of that, I want to buy a drink for whoever gave Fash firsties last week. He nearly pissed his pants when he saw the order.”

“May the first slot always go to a white man.” I cast my eyes heavenward.

“Amen.”

We walked for a little while in silence. I watched the dogs trotting along the path and imagined what they were thinking. A golden-haired collie: I’m trying to spend less time on Instagram and more time really living. A pit bull running next to a septuagenarian in butterfly shorts: I love this man, and when he dies, I am going to love eating him. A chow chow: Sometimes I pretend I’m a cat. What, you don’t have any kinks?

“Someone told me if you don’t get to L.A. by twenty-six, you’re never going,” Kim said suddenly.

“I heard it was twenty-three,” I said, not asking Kim’s age. I didn’t feel like reminding her I was two years past the expiration date. “But then, I also hear you have to spend six years out there to make it. So if you do the math, it’s really seventeen.”

We had reached a shaded part of the path bent around a stagnant outcropping of the river. The overgrowth blocked out the sun, but it also shut out the breeze so completely that it felt like an airless room. We weren’t walking fast, but I was drenched, and Kim’s forehead was beading up at the hairline. She pulled a strand of sweat-darkened gold off her temple and fanned her cheeks with her hand. “Sometimes I think I’d rather off myself than keep slogging through it year after year.”

I didn’t know what to say except “Yeah.”

“Well, anyway,” she said with a short laugh. “I said the same thing last April, and the April before that. But it’s April again and I guess I’m still alive, so.” She shrugged. “April, man. Funniest Person, South by Southwest, Moontower . . . all those festivals. It’s just fucking . . .” She trailed off.

“The cruelest month?” I said. I’d had one good class in college, and it was modern poetry.

“Totally. The fucking cruelest.”

We emerged from the overgrowth and shared a moment of silent enjoyment as the breeze dried the sweat off our skin.

“Anyway,” Kim continued, putting her game face back on. “I got to talk to Aaron Neely after prelims.”

My blood froze in the full sunshine. Surrounded by people on every side and distracted by the exercise, I had almost forgotten why I was there and what I’d wanted to talk about.

“Oh, really?” I said cautiously.

“Yeah, he was great,” she said. “I’ve heard he has some weird thing with female comics, but who doesn’t? Anyway, he liked my set, and he said he wanted to talk shop sometime.”

A panicky feeling started up in my gut. I had to tell her. At the same time, an equal and opposite force was telling me to keep my mouth shut, not to insult her by suggesting that she and I were in the same category, that what Neely had done to me, he was planning to do to her. Maybe he really did like Kim’s set. And even if he did give her the Aaron Neely special on the car ride home—would she care? Kim was one of the cool girls. Half her set was about awkward stuff that happened during sex. Maybe men did this type of thing to her all the time, and she knew how to laugh it off. Maybe I really was the only one who couldn’t take the joke.

We stepped onto a large pedestrian bridge that hugged the underbelly of the street bridge, a shaded breezeway suspended by concrete pillars like massive tree trunks over the glistening river. From here, even the noise of cars passing overhead felt calm, a soothing whoosh of white noise that complemented the sounds of rustling branches from the riverbanks. I struggled with what to say until we reached the very center of the double-decker bridge. The long, low sun stretched all the way across the bridge between the twin layers of concrete. From this vantage point, we could see up and down the whole pewter-and-gold span of the river, crisscrossed with graffitied railroad tunnels, pedestrian walkways, and log-jammed traffic bridges. The hoods and windshields of the cars suspended over the river looked like they were on fire in the slanting sun. We both paused involuntarily and then drifted to the railing, taking in the view.

Kim had stopped talking and was staring out over the water. It was now or never.

“Kim,” I said.

“Don’t get too jealous.” She sighed. “It’s not actually going to happen.”

“I’m sure he liked your set,” I said, and I was drawing a breath to say But when she cut me off.

“Yeah, well. He’s gone now, so it doesn’t matter.”

“What?” I swiveled to face Kim, whose forehead was crinkled up in the glare.

“Neely took off all of a sudden. Nobody knows why. Family emergency or something? Or maybe he just got bored with Austin. God knows I am.” She plucked a leaf out of her hair and threw it over the railing.

My eyes went wide. Neely was really gone, and not because of any family emergency. I felt certain that Amanda had done what she’d set out to do. A tidal wave of relief hit me. Neely was gone, and I was free.

I saw Kim’s face and checked myself. “That’s—wow, bad luck,” I said, trying to sound normal.

She turned toward me, still dejected. “It just sucks to feel like you’re so close to something, you know? And then have it yanked away.”

In my giddy state, I had to stifle a laugh. Yanked was the appropriate word in my case. “Yeah, I know what that feels like.”

“He gave me his card, though. With his direct line. Maybe I’ll get out to L.A. this year after all, while he still remembers who I am.” She laughed shortly.

I didn’t trust myself to answer. The urgency of warning Kim and unburdening myself had passed, and I was now consumed by the desire to see Amanda. Maybe I would still tell Kim about Neely—but later, after I found out what was really going on. In the meantime, she was in no danger of being trapped in a back seat by him any time soon.

And me? I was going to the ball.

5

I begged off shows for the evening and stayed home to watch TV and monitor my cell phone obsessively, waiting for Amanda to contact me. Around one o’clock in the morning, just as I was drifting off, a text woke me up.

Come over. With an address.

Before I was fully awake, my thumbs started moving in a reply. Then I glanced at the address again and stopped typing. It was somewhere downtown—not exactly where I would have expected Amanda to want to meet at one in the morning on a Saturday. Maybe a degree of caution was in order. I typed, Just checking, who’s this?

It’s me. I have something to show you.

Show me?

A link to a video appeared in the next text. If this was some creep from Tinder or a heckler stalking me . . . but I was getting paranoid. I checked out the thumbnail, squinting and bringing the screen close to my eyes. Most of the picture was covered by the play arrow, but behind the triangular icon, I could just make out a familiar face.

I followed the link.

At first it was hard to tell what was going on. The screen was a grainy blur of bad lighting and beige walls. There was a knock and a lot of rustling and thumping, and then the beige went the color of a bruise as a door opened. The dark outline of a bald guy appeared in the doorway, backlit by a ceiling fixture that temporarily flooded the frame with white glare before receding again behind the figure’s head.

“Come in, come in,” the silhouette said in a muffled but familiar voice, and there was more rustling as he stepped back into what appeared to be a hotel room. He was wearing a bathrobe.

Next came a woman’s voice that I recognized as Amanda’s, much louder, presumably because it was closer to the mic. “Where would you like me to set up the table, Mr. Neely?” The camera moved forward into a spacious hotel suite, and Neely disappeared from the frame temporarily.

“Let me get the—” Sound of a door closing. “Next to the bed, please. Thank you. Do you need any help with that?”

The camera moved jerkily through the suite toward the king-size bed. Amanda’s voice came through her heavy breathing, as if she was carrying something large. “No, thanks, I’ve got lots of practice.”

“Of course.” Neely’s voice sounded nervous and tinny off camera. “It’s a big table, ha-ha.” The screen went black for a moment and there was a clacking sound. Neely’s voice in the background said, “You sure you don’t need anything? How about a glass of water?”

“A glass of water would be nice,” Amanda said. The picture came back, veered wildly for a moment, then settled into an angle and stayed there. A strip of white appeared at the bottom of the frame, out of focus, as if the camera was sitting on a bedspread. In the middle of the frame, a thin, tall woman in a red polo shirt was visible from the shoulders down setting up a massage table. When she bent over to tuck in the sheets and adjust the legs, she was careful to turn her face away from the camera, revealing the back of a red baseball cap and a flash of wavy blond hair.

Neely came back into the frame, also cut off from the shoulders up, carrying a glass of water, which he handed to Amanda. “Thank you,” she said. “And now I’ll just step into the other room, Mr. Neely, and if you could just disrobe and lie face-down under the sheet. I’ll knock when I’m coming back in to make sure you’re ready.” As she spoke, she walked out of the frame with the water, her voice growing fainter until the last few words were swallowed by the click of a door closing.

“Great,” Neely called in a loud, somewhat strangled voice. He fumbled with his bathrobe, still headless and partially blocked by the massage table, and the robe opened, revealing a massive, hairy chest flushed nearly brick red. Letting the robe fall open but not taking it off completely, he swung one hammy thigh up on the massage table, then the other, something unmistakable flopping between them.

Even I, who had seen Neely’s fat red worm of a penis in uncomfortably close quarters, couldn’t suppress an involuntary gasp at the intimacy of all that naked flesh. The left robe flap rode farther up as he wriggled into position, exposing one fleshy white buttock squished flat on the table and a deeply creased overhang of white side belly covered with straggling hairs. He reclined back, leaned onto his left elbow, bent his right leg into a triangle for stability, and tilted his lap a few degrees toward the camera, almost as if posing for it, though it was obvious he didn’t know it was there. Last of all, his face appeared: a giant moon shape, dappled and flushed, with an expression that was at once anxious, eager, and revoltingly childlike.

My stomach flipped over as his features became fully visible to the camera eye, surreally recognizable, like all celebrity faces. Once that face was onscreen, juxtaposed with that body—all in dramatic close-up and lit with improbable artistry by a bedside lamp—I could almost feel the shock waves rippling through some invisible crowd, as if the video had already gone viral and I was only a single viewer among millions.

From the background came a quiet knock. “I’m coming in, Mr. Neely,” said Amanda from offscreen in her gentle, breathy massage-therapist voice. “Are you ready?”

“Ready,” he replied, dick in hand.

The video ended. It was less than three minutes long. I stared in shock. I had almost forgotten where I was and that I was alone.

A text came, reminding me that I wasn’t alone at all. Not anymore.

You can probably guess where it goes after that.

Then: Trust me now?

I grabbed my keys.

Downtown on a Saturday night at last call was never my favorite place to be, and tonight was no exception. The days of stumbling down a piss-soaked stretch of Sixth Street with Jason and a couple of comedy buddies drunkenly mocking the drunk girls in platform heels and micro-minis who tripped over the curbs were long past. Now I felt that anyone who chose Austin’s miniature version of the French Quarter, cordoned off on weekends to create a dreamscape of hammered pedestrians, tour buses, and Bible-wagging street preachers, was equally perverse. After paying what I felt to be sufficient dues at the notoriously rough open-mic at Fondue Freddy’s, I’d avoided downtown clubs whenever possible.

The dreamscape was in full effect tonight. Though the Red River venues had quieted after midnight, per city ordinance, the bar bands and jukeboxes of Sixth Street still sent out a soup of clashing beats audible several blocks away. Taxis, their windows rolled down to air out the sodden drunks inside, blared world music at every stoplight; even the loaded pedicabs emitted strains of jam bands and hair metal, rhythms to keep their stoned drivers mashing the bicycle pedals. I had no trouble finding a place to park; there were never enough cabs and always plenty of drunks vacating their parking spots at this time of night. Eager to avoid sharing the streets with them, I took the first open spot I saw and walked toward the address Amanda had given me.

As I approached, I recognized the area, an urban living district whose paved pedestrian walkways were lined with olive oil boutiques and manicure places I could afford only with a gift card. Just a few blocks from the squalid circus of Sixth Street, it looked like a different world. Amanda’s building had gone up before I left, during the first big tech boom. Its copper siding had at first been visible from almost any part of town, a blinding pinkish-gold beacon in daylight. In the five years I had been away, the siding had tarnished to the respectable auburn of a Lincoln penny, but it still looked like money to me. The single people I knew lived in rundown student apartments—mine was a converted nudist compound from the sixties whose walls always felt uncomfortably moist—or divvied up dilapidated cottages in the five-year floodplain. I wondered just how Amanda paid the rent here, her own tech job more than a year gone. The security guard buzzed me in without looking up, and I took the elevator to the eighth floor and knocked.

Amanda opened the door in a T-shirt the mottled-gray color of botched laundry, looking not just wide awake, but wired. Without a word, she waved me in, and I stepped past a narrow kitchen with a granite bar. The living room, half swallowed by the black night outside the curtainless floor-to-ceiling glass windows, was just large enough to hold an entertainment system and an L-shaped sectional sofa. Everything was in perfect order, from the coordinating throw pillows to the perfectly straight rows of Blu-rays on the shelf above the TV—mostly rom-coms and action movies, to my surprise. Outside, a wraparound balcony glowed with a ghostly concrete pallor, and the pale pink limestone of the capitol’s dome reared up in the distance.

She shut the door behind me. “Amanda—” I said, but she was already talking.

“Shall we celebrate?” she said. “I have some nice wine I’ve been saving. I wish I had champagne.”

“But how—”

“Neely’s gone for good.” Her back to me, she rummaged through the cabinets in the narrow kitchen, calling over her shoulder, “I knew he’d go slithering back to L.A., but I wanted to wait until I was sure before I contacted you.”

“How did you know?”

“I have my ways.” She produced two wineglasses from the back of a cabinet, blew into them to clear the dust, and set them down on the bar in triumph. “Anyway, it was only a matter of time, once he saw what I had on him.” She closed the cabinet. “What we had.”

“The video? How did you—” I was still standing awkwardly in the middle of the room, unwilling to take my seat until she came out of the kitchen.

“Isn’t it perfect? Once I figured out that he likes to order up a massage whenever he’s in a hotel . . . I just knew he would try something. I knew his MO, you know?” She reached up to a wine rack on top of the refrigerator, pulled out a bottle of red, checked the label, and put it back. “As a matter of fact, a lot of people do. You just have to be in the right online forums, understand the coded language. Nobody wants to call him out in public because he’s so universally adored.” She rolled her eyes. “But this guy, trust me, he does this all the time. Like, every chance he gets. And service workers are less motivated to keep it quiet than comics are.” Having pulled out a few more bottles of wine, she finally located one that pleased her and set it on the countertop next to the glasses. Then she said, “Corkscrew, where are you?” and started opening and closing drawers with the same jittery energy.

She eventually found one. “Give it to me,” I said to get her out of the kitchen faster. I opened the wine and poured it, then swiftly grabbed both glasses so she’d follow me to the sofa. “Now sit down and tell me everything. From the beginning.”

“Okay.” She perched on the short side of the L as I took a seat on the long side. “But first—” She leaned forward, brandishing the wineglass. “To having each other’s backs.”

“To having each other’s backs,” I said, trying not to betray my impatience as I clinked my glass to hers and drank. “So . . . entrapment. I’m more of a lead-pipe woman myself. In the study.” I laughed nervously at my own joke.