Sometimes she chose what she did and didn’t understand.
Amanda was looking at me expectantly, waiting to hear the rest of the story, and with a large sip of my whiskey soda, I resigned myself to explaining further. “All I mean is, you get a knack for dealing with hecklers pretty early on. Otherwise you get derailed.”
“I can’t imagine thinking up an insult that fast.”
“It’s not really about the zinger. It’s about getting through the moment so you can move on with your set. Showing him”—I corrected myself—“no, showing the audience that he’s not getting to you.”
“Really? You didn’t enjoy it even a little? Smacking that guy around just now, making him feel small?” Her eyes narrowed and she smiled conspiratorially. “Come on.”
The whiskey warm in my stomach, I laughed. “Maybe a little,” I admitted. In the moment of zinging the nice-tits guy, there had been a tiny spark of pleasure in imagining him getting hurt. The thought made me uncomfortable. There was something indecent about it, though a lot of comics indulged the impulse. It was time for a change of subject. “You said you just moved here? Where from?”
“Los Angeles,” she said. “I was trying to be an actor.”
Rather than surprise, I felt a wave of recognition. Her combination of naiveté and poise reminded me of certain women I’d met in acting classes, frail women with striking features who’d been spotted in laundromats or plucked out of drugstore lines in their hometowns while waiting to buy cigarettes. Groomed for girl groups and minor roles on soap operas, they seldom made the cut. They had too little imagination and too much reality for acting, and they eventually slipped back into the beautiful scenery of L.A. or moved on.
“I lived out there for a while too,” I said. “Maybe we have mutual friends.”
“I was only there a year,” she said, swizzling her drink. “I hated it there.”
“Yeah, me too,” I lied, suddenly thinking of a pilot idea: Failed actress opens community theater in her hometown. Waiting for Guffman meets Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I fiddled with my napkin, wishing I’d brought my pen. “You probably got there right before I left. Let’s see . . .” I began running through an inventory of places we might have bumped into each other, listing improv theaters, acting workshops, networking events, even the Culver City diner where I’d waited tables. At every name, she shook her head. We’d just missed each other, although as I listed potential sources of connection, the familiar feeling strengthened rather than weakened. “Who did you hang out with there?” I asked.
“No one, really. I lost all my friends when I lost my job in tech.” She saw my questioning look and elaborated. “I was a programmer for Runnr.”
Even I, a borderline technophobe, had heard of the errand-running app that had pushed all the others out of business, though in this gig economy, more of my friends had worked as runners than used the service. My face must have betrayed some of the surprise I was feeling, tinged with shame over my assumptions—girl groups and soap operas!—because she gave me a wry grin. “Yeah, I know. I don’t look like a software engineer. Any more than you look like a standup.”
I flushed. It was true that my appearance—short and brown-skinned and shaped like my mother minus the control-top pantyhose—did not prepare most people for my extracurricular activities. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “Let’s just say none of the guys I worked with thought I looked like a programmer either. They made that abundantly clear.” She took another sip. “And that was before my supervisor started sending me dick pics.”
“Gross,” I said. Guys like that. “Is that how you lost your job?”
“Yeah.” She finished her drink, holding the straw to one side and draining it. “Like an idiot, I actually went to HR with it. Two years in the trenches of a sexual-harassment suit got me a little pile of settlement money, sure. But it also got me the cold shoulder from every startup in Silicon Valley. And then there were the trolls—someone on Reddit guessed my name from a news spot. It couldn’t have been hard to figure out. There weren’t tons of female programmers at Runnr.”
“So how’d you end up in L.A.?”
“It seemed like the best place to disappear.” She looked down into her empty drink. “One of them swatted me—you know what that means, right? They sent a SWAT team to my house. I woke up in the middle of the night to a bunch of dudes armed to the teeth pounding on my door. After that, I was a nervous wreck. I scrubbed my online profile so they couldn’t find me again, went to the dark side of the internet. And got out of town in a hurry.”
“Why acting?” I said.
She shrugged. “I was looking for something as far from the tech world as possible. I thought, Fine. Let’s see what it’s like being a pretty face.” I had to admire the way she owned it, plainly and without the standard self-deprecating gestures. “To tell you the truth, I sucked, but I kept getting auditions because of my looks.”
At this I couldn’t help feeling a twinge of bitterness. I raised my glass. “Must be nice.”
“It was okay,” she admitted. “Until I met my ex. He killed any chance I had at getting anywhere with acting. He was insanely jealous. Freaked out if I stayed late at a party or, God forbid, talked to a man. Which—everyone you need to know is a man, right? But that’s a whole other story.” She sighed and rattled the ice in her glass. “Once we moved in together, he started hiding my phone to keep me from going to auditions. Spying on me. Threatening me.” She watched me closely, almost challenging me to react. Her wide-set eyes were, I could see now, greenish gray, and what I had mistaken for frailty in them was something else, some hunger I couldn’t name.
Then she said, “He didn’t hit me, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
Unsure how to respond, I fell back on irony. “Sounds like a prince.”
“He did other things. Locked me in a soundproof room.” She shuddered. “He would have hurt me bad someday. If I’d stayed.”
“I’m glad you didn’t stay,” I said.
A burst of applause from the other room signaled that Toby had finished his set, more successfully than I had mine, it sounded like. The Other Girl was being introduced, and I couldn’t help wondering whether the nice-tits guy would turn up again. I pictured him lurking just outside, waiting for a woman’s voice to come over the PA system.
I held up my empty glass and said, “Why don’t I buy the next round?”
The next round blurred into the next one after that, and too late I realized I was getting hammered. What clued me in was when I started talking about the Funniest Person in Austin contest.
“It’s stupid,” I said. “Not to mention a total long shot.”
“I’m sure it’s not,” she said, elbows slipping drunkenly on the table.
It really was, though. I would never have brought it up this way—sloppy, hopeful—with my comedy friends, because we all wanted it and all felt stupid for wanting it. But comedy was a foreign country to Amanda, and I was her only guide. There was relief in spilling my pathetic dreams to someone who wouldn’t realize how far-fetched they were.
“It’s this big competition at Bat City Comedy Club every year. Every standup in town does it. There’s prize money.” The winner got five thousand dollars, enough to move back to L.A., maybe even with a little left over to shoot a comedy special on the cheap. Or a pilot, if I could just come up with the right idea. If I won, a small but insistent voice said in my head, maybe Jason would take me back as a writing partner, and we could write the pilot together. “I was too late to sign up last year,” I went on. “But this year—” Amanda’s face lit up, and I rushed to say, “It’s impossible. All the comics in town, everyone I know, is competing.” I gestured toward the other room, where