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 of the night.” I stifled a sneering comment as she went on. “You choked a little at the end, but trust me, it wasn’t that big a deal.”
“Thanks, Coach,” I sneered. Then, suddenly, just like last time, my defenses came tumbling down without warning, and I found myself telling her the truth. “Look, I didn’t finish a joke. Even if the rest of the set killed, there’s no way the judges will let me through on that mess.” The danger of tears eased up as I explained the situation, but my next thought threatened to bring them back. “And even if by some miracle I did advance to the next round—” I broke off. I wasn’t going to come back to get judged by Neely again. I couldn’t stand in the spotlight and have him stare at me the way he’d stared at me in the back of the SUV. What if he came up to me after the show, tried to talk to me?
Amanda’s eyes narrowed. “Is this something to do with what happened to you in L.A.?” She saw my expression. “I know, I know, nothing happened in L.A., right? Absolutely nothing. Just like nothing happened in there.” She jerked her thumb back toward the neon sign in the distance. “Listen, I get it. You don’t want to tell anybody. But I’m not anybody, am I? Nobody important, anyway.”
It was so close to what I’d been thinking only a moment before—that Amanda was nothing to me, no one, and therefore it didn’t matter what I said to her—that it startled me.
She saw me waver. “Let’s just go somewhere and have a drink and talk.”
The adrenaline lessening, I felt exhaustion setting in. “It’s stupid,” I said. “It’s nothing to get this upset over.”
“But you are this upset.”
She was right. I was this upset, and there was nobody in my world to talk to about it. Who was I going to tell—Kim? Fash? I couldn’t even tell Jason right after it happened, and he’d been my best friend. He’d already been so mad that I took the meeting alone, I’d thought he might blame me. But even worse than that, on a level that was itself embarrassing to admit, I’d been afraid Jason would laugh—that anyone I told would laugh. Afraid everyone would see it like Neely did: a dirty joke with me as the punch line.
Looking at Amanda, I knew she wouldn’t laugh.
I unlocked the car door and gestured for her to come around to the passenger side. She opened the door and got in, and I slid behind the steering wheel. Once the doors were closed, the silence of dead air cocooned us. I glanced around anyway, just in case, looking into the darkened cars that seemed suddenly menacing. No one was around, and we were all the way across the parking lot from Bat City, where the last few comics were shredding their fingernails under the awning as they waited their turns.
So I told Amanda what happened in L.A.
“That’s disgusting,” she said. “He really did that?”
I nodded my head. “It got on my dress. I threw it away when I got home.” It had been my favorite audition outfit, an exceptionally flattering wrap dress. I almost gagged remembering how I’d gotten up in the middle of the night, worried that Jason might see, and stuffed it all the way to the bottom of the kitchen trash can, under used paper towels and greasy takeout containers and half a leftover rotisserie chicken that had been in the refrigerator for two weeks. Back in bed, I’d tossed and turned, and finally I got up a second time to dig it out and take it outside to the dumpster in the back alley.
“He assaulted you.”
“I don’t think it counts as assault. Does it?” I laughed weakly, but Amanda looked deadly serious. “Honestly, I think the reason he did—that—was because it’s so absurd,” I said. “I mean, who could I tell? The police? He jerked off in front of me. He didn’t steal my wallet.” I had wanted to see this exact look on Amanda’s face—the Guys like that look—but now that it was happening, I felt somewhat ridiculous. “I survived.”
“Surviving isn’t living,” she said shortly. “These guys—Aaron Neely, my shithead supervisor, my asshole ex-boyfriend—they’re living. Believe me. They’re not losing any sleep over it. They’re not wondering if it was assault or not, worrying about whether they’ll bump into you someday. They can go anywhere, do anything. That’s living.” She clenched a fist. “Neely may not even remember you. He’s probably done it to a lot of women.”
That
