Last Woman Standing

by Amy Gentry

  I ran with the bit, grateful for the shift in tone. “Debate trophies? God, I was really a geek.”

  “That’s why we used to give you so many swirlies, kiddo.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Sure. I’ll stay.”

  We walked down the corridor, and Jason cleared his throat apologetically as I looked inside. I knew he had been joking about not having changed things, but I hadn’t expected quite this much change. The room was entirely black, the walls lined with black paneling, the windows covered with plastic sheeting, electronic equipment stacked in the corners. “I thought I was supposed to be a geek, not a goth.”

  “After you left, I decided to turn it into a recording studio,” he said sheepishly. “I thought I might try doing my own podcast. I mean, as long as I’m not getting any gigs. I’ve heard it works out for some people.” He glanced sideways at me. “But don’t worry, the mattress is still in the closet.”

  “Does this make me your first podcast guest?”

  Jason, who had already disappeared into the closet, grunted as he reemerged pulling the bare mattress out behind him. “Split the rent, and you can be my cohost,” he said, tipping the mattress onto the floor. “Now I just have to remember where I put the sheets.”

  In a few minutes I was lying on the mattress on the floor, staring up at the light fixture I’d never thought I’d see again, letting sleep pull me under.

  I woke only once in the night, when I dreamed of missing a step on a staircase and falling with a lurch. As I struggled awake, the sensation in the pit of my stomach merged with a vague awareness of being in the wrong time, as if I’d slipped through a wormhole into the past. A tall, dark figure loomed over me, and for a moment I thought it was Jason. Then I saw Carl’s bloodied face bearing down on me, his teeth chattering with an awful, rhythmic kind of moan.

  I jerked fully awake, forcing my eyes all the way open. The dark form reshaped itself into a cluster of music stands, and I pressed my hand over my heart, feeling silly.

  The teeth-chattering sound, however, continued. After a moment, I saw that my phone screen had flickered on and was vibrating rhythmically from its place on the floor by the mattress. I picked it up and saw a stream of texts from a series of unknown numbers, all different but unmistakably from the same person:

  We need to talk. It’s an emergency!!

  Do NOT freeze me out, D

  I thought we were friends

  “Damn it.” I turned the phone off. I felt wide-awake, but I couldn’t have been, because it took only a few moments to fall back asleep to dreams in which past and present were all mixed up in places that seemed both familiar and strange: a children’s museum, a cruise ship, a furniture store where Henry babbled on and on about honest coffee tables and purposeful futons. After that, I slept heavily until morning.

  Too heavily. My phone wasn’t on, so my alarm didn’t go off, and when I woke up, the sunbeams coming through the curtains were suspiciously short on the floor. My body remembered before my brain what that meant: ten o’clock, at least. I groaned and rolled out of bed.

  Jason was already up, finishing a cup of coffee at the breakfast table while he scrolled through the news on his laptop. “I was just wondering whether I should wake you up,” he said. “You seemed really tired, so I let you sleep.” He didn’t meet my eyes.

  “Thanks. I’m going to go ahead and take a shower and get out the door.”

  He nodded, and I hustled through my shortened morning routine, trying not to be late. I slipped on my interview outfit, which, ever since the tragicomic loss of my wrap dress, had consisted of dark jeans with heels, a loose top, and a statement necklace for extra coverage above the neckline. As I walked out the door, heels clicking on the linoleum entryway, Jason wished me luck curtly, no doubt thinking of the last meeting I’d gone off to without him.

  As I pulled into the parking lot at the studio cantina where I was meeting Cynthia, I, too, was comparing my current situation to the one just over a year ago. Then, as now, I’d been alone, preparing for a meeting with someone considerably more important than me, fully aware that my career hung on the outcome. But this time, there was no question of my having stolen the opportunity from Jason. I’d earned it strictly on my own—though I didn’t like to think about exactly how.

  I took a deep breath and walked into the cantina. Cynthia spotted me from across the room and waved me over. When I reached her table in the corner, she stood up and leaned over to give me a hug. With my heels on, I came up to her nostrils.

  “Dana!” She seemed sincerely delighted to see me, as if we really were friends. “Sit down, sit down. I’ve already ordered some snacks for us, they’re on the way. Do you want anything to drink? They have great smoothies here.”

  My stomach roiled, but I managed to smile as I shook my head. “No, thanks, I’m not a smoothie fan. Thank you so much for taking the time to meet me on such short notice. You must be insanely busy.”

  “Oh, please, I’m just thrilled that you made it out here.” She sat down. “But you’re right, I am busy, so let me cut to the chase, Dana. What are you first, a writer or a performer?”

  I opened my mouth, then shut it again. It wasn’t the question I was expecting. But before I could even begin to process my response, she continued. “I know, I know, you’re both. You just want to make people laugh, right? But you’ve got to know, in this business, what it is you’re selling. You’ve got to know your brand.”

  What was my brand? I nodded eagerly to signify that I was on the point of delivering the answer. But I was saved from having to decide on the spot what it was because she wasn’t finished.

  “Now, I’m putting together a little pitch for a sitcom.” I abandoned my search for my brand as rapidly as I’d adopted it. “Look, I’m going to level with you, we don’t even have a script for the pilot yet. I mean, it’s early. But I’m looking for talent like you.”

  Like me. I didn’t even know what that meant, but she had finally paused, so I mustered the best response I could. “Really? Like me?”

  “Bright, motivated, not too attached to the past. You know? Not bound by ideas of what a show like this should look like.” She hadn’t yet dropped a hint of what the show was about, but I wasn’t about to interrupt her to ask. “I’m working with some really stellar people on the pilot right now. And we think if we could get you in the room, maybe even give you a character on the show—”

  “A character?” The wind was almost completely knocked out of me or I would never have cut her off before finding out who “we” was. “On your—”

  “We start you out small in the pilot. The receptionist, maybe, if we end up setting it in the dermatologist’s office. Or the intern, if we go with the magazine idea. Just let you play with the character, see how you work in the writers’ room, develop some chemistry, and see where it goes from there.”

  “Wow. I can’t even—wow.” My brand was turning out to be stammering idiot. I tried to collect myself enough to ask a relevant question. “Would I be—”

  “Don’t say yes or no,” she interrupted. “I know you don’t have your agent with you. You need to talk to your money people.” As a matter of fact, I didn’t technically have an agent yet, but I resolved to get the contract she had sent me over e-mail signed and returned by the end of the day. As for money people, no one in my life had earned that distinction thus far. “But here’s the deal, Dana.” Her voice dropped, and I leaned as far forward as I could across the table. “I need to know that you’re as committed to performing as you are to writing.” Trying to look as if I were really thinking this over, as befit her tone of gravitas, I wrinkled my forehead and nodded slowly. “And that if the series gets successful, you’re not going to use that success to take off in the middle of it to do a standup tour, like that asshole from My Peeps did last year.”

  I opened my mouth to deny that such a thought would ever cross my mind, but she waved her hand to stop me. “Don’t promise anything. This is all hypothetical. I’m
just gauging your interest level.”

  “My interest level?” The waitress showed up with a few small dishes, her patter about house-made cornichons and free-range ox-liver pâté giving me a merciful moment to reflect on what I would say next.

  Cynthia popped a cornichon into her mouth and chewed, waiting.

  “My interest level is high.” I felt a little dizzy with the effort of finding words that wouldn’t necessitate another interruption.

  “The minute I saw Betty up there onstage, I knew you had commitment,” she said. “And I knew that was exactly what I wanted for the show.”

  “Commitment?”

  “Betty,” she said, spreading pâté on a piece of house-made Melba toast. “I want Betty.”

  She wanted Betty.

  The Betty wig was still crumpled under the sofa where I’d kicked it after the Carl hit, and I’d done my best to avoid thinking about it since then. I wished, suddenly, that I’d thrown the wig in the dumpster that night along with the gloves. I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t. If I had, I could truthfully claim that Betty, or at least this version of her, was gone for good.

  As it was, I had to say something. Cynthia was watching me with uncharacteristic silence. Perhaps I had misunderstood or taken her too literally. “It’s just Betty you want?”

  “Do you have any other characters I haven’t seen?” She raised her index finger, cutting me off before I had even opened my mouth. “Good ones, I mean.” I shook my head slowly, and she laughed. “Well, listen, you don’t need any. Betty is the perfect wacky neighbor for this kind of show. She’d be great as a terrible receptionist, a weird waitress at the local diner, or, if I wind up just playing myself, an obsessed fan. She could be anything, really.”

  “I can definitely write that type of character,” I said carefully. “Something like Betty.”

  Cynthia frowned. “I guess the name could change. As long as she still had the wig, the attitude, the violence—probably not the profanity, depending on the network—”

  “What about something fresh?” I said. “If I were, you know, kind of done with Betty. If I were thinking of retiring her, I could try something else out?”

  “Of course you could.” She finished crunching up another cornichon and swallowed it, reaching for a thin slice of radish. “On another show.”

  I took a bite of something pickled, not noticing what, and chewed mechanically during the endless seconds of silence that followed.

  Then Cynthia’s eyes lit up.

  “Irina! Irina, over here!” She refocused on me for a moment. “Just one minute, Dana, sit tight. I’m just going to go say hi to my very best friend, Iriiiina!” Midsentence, she rose, her voice changing from a halfhearted apology to a squeal of excitement directed at a woman who was rapidly approaching. Cynthia edged out from behind the table and gave Irina a hug. Then the two stood next to my chair, talking at a rapid clip about some project whose name I couldn’t quite catch, for almost half an hour.

  It took me twenty minutes, taking tiny bites and chewing as slowly as I could, to finish all the pickles and pâté on the table. Another five to crunch up every piece of ice in my water glass and drain the last drops. Another five to twist my napkin into an unusable paper turd. I became aware that I had to go to the bathroom.

  Just as I was shifting in my chair, deciding whether to go or not, Cynthia said, still talking into the air above my head: “Oh, shoot. Look at the time.”

  “I’d better be going too,” said the woman named Irina.

  Cynthia looked down at me as if rediscovering my presence by her elbow.

  “Oh my gosh, Dana, I am so sorry. How rude. I can’t believe this but I have to rush off to another meeting. I might actually be late already. I feel really good about this, though, don’t you? I feel like there’s a partnership here waiting to happen.” She looked me straight in the eye, and I felt the enveloping warmth of her gaze. “You are ready for this, Dana. I know you don’t feel it yet, but you are so ready.”

  Acutely conscious of the napkin turd on the table next to the crumbs of the lunch I’d eaten almost entirely by myself, I stood to better meet her gaze, but she still towered over me. “Thank you so much for your time,” I said. It came out a little weak.

  “Irina, wait a minute, I’ll walk you out,” she sang. Then she turned back to me, put her hand on my shoulder, and gave me a little pat, wearing a sympathetic smile. “You had me all to yourself for fifteen minutes. That’s really good for your first L.A. lunch!” I felt two air kisses, one on either cheek, and she was gone.

  Still standing awkwardly in front of the table, I pulled out my cell phone and turned it on. It vibrated in my hand immediately as messages from Amanda began filling up the screen. I called Jason. “Hey, are you heading into work any time soon?” His current day job was a bartending gig at a seafood restaurant.

  “I’m supposed to go in at five.” He paused, as if registering the tone in my voice. “But I was thinking of calling in sick today, if you want to hang out.”

  I made a point of forcing myself to go by the Days Inn where I had a reservation and check in first. I didn’t want to take anything for granted. I printed out the agent contract in the motel’s business center, which consisted of a storage closet with an antiquated desktop computer and an Epson, and used my phone to scan and send the signed document. All the way to Jason’s house, I kept replaying Cynthia’s last line. It wasn’t my first L.A. lunch, not by a long shot. But I had to admit, it wasn’t my worst either.

  14

  When I walked in the door, Jason was waiting with a big grin on his face. “It’s happy-hour o’clock.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  I looked down at my audition outfit. “Is this okay to wear?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Hang on, I brought one dress.” I ran to the room where I’d slept the night before, rifled through my gym bag, and pulled out a strappy black dress I’d packed, though I couldn’t have said why.

  Jason smiled when he saw me in it. “That’s perfect.” He was so keyed up that I let him put me in his car and drive us downtown without pressing him further regarding our destination. He hadn’t yet asked me about the meeting with Cynthia, and I was relieved. He didn’t have to ask. He knew I didn’t want to talk about it, and he was happy to create a diversion so I wouldn’t have to. This was Jason and I at our best, communicating wordlessly, distracting each other from disaster. We pulled into a valet lot, and Jason handed the keys to one of those preternaturally attractive service workers you see everywhere in Los Angeles while another one opened my door and helped me out.

  I cocked an eyebrow at Jason. “Fancy.”

  “Shut up, you like it.” He herded me through glass doors and into a hotel lobby. “Look up.”

  I looked up and gasped. The lobby was illuminated by hundreds of vintage lamps strung upside down at different heights from a mirrored ceiling.

  “We’re taking the escalator to the second floor,” Jason said. “There’s a special elevator to the roof on the mezzanine.”

  “Of course there is.” But it was working; I was starting to thrill to the fun of it, no longer focused on my lingering feelings of humiliation about the Cynthia lunch. As we ascended, the escalator moving diagonally through a flock of taxidermied birds in flight, I began to see the meeting with Cynthia for what it had been: a massive success. Cynthia had offered me a place in her writers’ room. She had told me she wanted me on her show. It would be nearly impossible to explain to Jason how this was anything but a win. If he had heard me on that podcast, he knew about Betty, but he wouldn’t have any idea why I wanted to retire her. No one who’d been following my career would—with the exception of one person, of course, the one whose dozens of phone messages I didn’t intend to listen to. And now that I didn’t need to keep my phone on to stay in touch with Cynthia or Jason, I didn’t have to think about her either.

  We waited for a few minutes by a specia
l elevator guarded by a hotel clerk who sent only a few people up at a time. I rolled my eyes at Jason behind the clerk’s back, enjoying every minute of it.

  “Trust me,” Jason said.

  “Always.”

  Waved in by the attendant, we stepped into the carpeted elevator, me carefully avoiding getting my spindly heels caught in the trench between the carriage and shaft. Four tall, thin girls in various shades of tan got in after us, strapped into outfits nearly indistinguishable, by length and coverage, from bathing suits.

  “I hope we get one of the waterbed sofas,” Jason said.

  “I hope they’re heated.” A rooftop in Los Angeles could get cold, even in the summer.

  “Wuss.” Jason elbowed me, then gestured toward the scantily clad model types in front of us.

  “I don’t see you wearing a halter top.”

  “I’m saving it for a special occasion.”

  As the elevator rose, a thumping beat, at first only faintly audible, grew louder. We stopped and the doors slid open on an electronic dance mix with a jaw-rattling bass, oddly incongruous in the still-glaring daylight. The serpentine girls in front of us decanted onto a strip of crimson carpet, and I saw a row of topiary animals looming against a skyline suffused with the tender, rosy glow of an early sunset. It was smog, not sunset, and the topiary animals were fake, but it still looked like something out of a movie. I stepped out of the elevator.

  “Impressive,” I yelled into his ear over the music.

  “I’m just trying to lure you out here again,” he yelled back. “Me alone in L.A. is a disaster.”

  We moved through the seating area, which seethed with young, attractive people perched on the edges of white cubes and shout-chatting over the music, and toward the bar. Amid the happy-hour hustlers were people in actual bathing suits, and Jason pointed to a pool at one end of the rooftop. I noticed yellow tape cordoning off one seating area and gave him a questioning look.