Last Woman Standing

by Amy Gentry

  My eyes dart around the room, looking for an escape route I know isn’t there. Instead I see Carl’s head reflected endlessly between the rows of facing mirrors, countless bearded Carls stretching to infinity in either direction. As the reflections multiply into the hazy distance, the faces blur and lose their definition, while their menacing mediocrity only grows.

  “What do you want, Carl?” I say simply.

  He relaxes back into the sofa, relieved not to have to do whatever he was thinking of doing. “I want a piece of the spotlight,” he says, made suddenly friendly by his relief. “You’ve got it. I want it. We can start by putting me on The Bestie Cast. I know you’re tight with Omari.” He gestures toward the door.

  I take a breath. “I can’t get you on The Bestie Cast. Cynthia is very choosy about her guest roster. Besides, it’s not the best place to start you.” I act as though I’m thinking, and he taps his foot impatiently until I suddenly hit on the answer. It’s perfect. Right in the kisser. “TV, though. I could get you on TV. Isn’t that even better?”

  He narrows his eyes in suspicion. “What show?”

  “Omari’s new show,” I say. “The one she and I are working on together. It’s so new it doesn’t have a name yet, but it’s going to be very hot. If I tell her about you, I’m sure you’ll get cast.” I put a finger up in warning. “Trust me, this is the role you were born to play.” I imagine his face when he sees the script. The provocatively posed Black Widow statuette with which my character will beat his character—not half to death but all the way this time. He’ll learn what triggered means. “It’s a dark comedy.”

  He nods eagerly, his greedy, stupid face reminding me of the greedy, stupid dreams I once spilled to Amanda on our first meeting, back when my highest aspiration was to be the Funniest Person in Austin.

  Keeping eye contact with him, I dial Cynthia’s number and show him the phone. The fact that she actually answers lifts my spirits considerably. That was a bit of a gamble, but it was worth it to show that my capital is not spent. Not by a long shot. I have more than enough to work with.

  “Listen, Cynthia? I have someone here who’d be absolutely perfect for the guy in the scene we’re punching up Wednesday morning. He’s a very funny guy, real up-and-comer. What do you think? As a favor to me?”

  Cynthia’s voice sounds only slightly put out, which I know means she wants me to repeat all this to her assistant so she won’t have to remember it herself. “Sure, if he reads okay.”

  “Thanks so much,” I say, smiling at Carl encouragingly to let him know it’s going well. His face is flushed red with nervous excitement. No doubt he thought this would be harder. “Later, Cyndi.” I hang up and we stand looking at each other for a moment.

  “Knock-knock.” Nisha, one of the crew members, opens the door and pokes her head in. “Dana, they’re looking for you. You’re on in five. You ready?”

  I nod, trying not to look flustered. “I’ll be right out.”

  “It’s all right. I think we’re done here,” Carl says with an ingratiating smile for Nisha. As she ducks out again, he stands up and holds his hand out.

  I rise from the couch, knocking my purse over in my haste. I need him gone. “We’ll be in touch,” I say brusquely, the taste of bile in my throat.

  When the door has fully closed behind Carl, I stoop to gather the contents of my purse, blinking back the tears so as not to ruin my mascara. Even as I fumble around in the mess disgorged from my purse, I’m already thinking of a bit. I wonder how many people die from mascara blindness every year? They should make this stuff illegal.

  My hand grabs something and I realize it’s Amanda’s non-letter, still in the envelope. I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away. The letter is askew, and as I’m stuffing it back in my purse, it falls out and flutters to the floor. I almost stoop to pick it up, then laugh at myself for saving a blank piece of paper. I give it a savage kick that sends it sliding under the sofa, but I hold the envelope for just a moment longer, looking at the handwritten address on it, undecided.

  And then I notice something. In front of the bright dressing-room-mirror lights, the envelope is semitransparent. And I can see—marks. I peer into the envelope. Four little horizontal lines, a few millimeters long, at random intervals on the inside back of the envelope, near the top:

  Amanda Dorn

  Central California Women’s Facility

  P. O. Box 1501

  Chowchilla , CA 93610

  I stare and stare at them. Then I smush the envelope flat again and hold it up to the light, staring at the return address. Faintly, through the thin, fancy stationery, I see the marks anew:

  Amanda Dorn

  Central California Women’s Facility

  P. O. Box 1501

  Chowchilla , CA 93610

  Ama-r-ill-0. Amarillo.

  Farther down, toward the middle of the envelope, there’s one more mark, this one longer than all the rest. It lines up with just one word in my address:

  Dana Diaz

  2990 Coburn Drive

  Los Angeles, CA 90239

  Drive.

  Amarillo. Drive.

  So Amanda has one last message for me after all. Is it a warning? A threat? Or is she just telling me to go back home? After all, I willed her to tell me what to do. I think of her smiling at my mother, looking at the prom pictures in my bedroom, and shudder. It has to be a threat or she wouldn’t have gone to the trouble to encrypt it.

  Amarillo. Drive. Go home, Dana. You don’t belong here, and you certainly don’t belong in L.A. But I knew that already. Drive home? Maybe I will. But for now I have a show to finish.

  I crumple up the envelope and throw it in the trash can by the door on my way out.

  Outside the greenroom, I spot Cynthia talking to the director in the wings and head over. “You’re still here?” I ask her.

  “Of course. Someone has to make sure this shoot comes in under budget.” The director glares at her, but she smiles serenely. “Besides, I wasn’t sure what the deal was with that guy who just left. Something about him seemed a little off. Do I know him?”

  Whether Cynthia knows him depends on how closely she watched the trial. I’ll have to tell him to use a stage name, just in case. “I don’t think so. Thanks for answering my call.”

  “Of course,” she says. “Like I said, I was a little worried. But if you say he’s going to be big—”

  “He could go far, all right,” I say matter-of-factly. “Listen, do you think you can get him under an exclusive contract? Something he can’t get out of. I don’t think he has representation yet, so it should be pretty easy.”

  She gives me a long look. “Oh. I see.”

  “Yeah. I’d like to look out for him. Supervise his career.” I add meaningfully, “I think we’d do well to keep an eye on him.”

  “Say no more.”

  Cynthia will know what to do. Under her thumb, Carl will have nothing to complain about. He’ll get parts. He’ll make enough to live on. He’ll be on TV. He’ll get just famous enough to be on the outskirts of Cynthia’s entourage. And no more famous than that.

  “Thanks Cyndi,” I say warmly. And then, thinking of Davis Q. Brown on TV and the wine-stained sofa, I add, as an afterthought: “I’ll find a way to get you back.”

  For as long as I am involved in the development and production of Cynthia’s show, I am contractually obligated to finish up my stage performances with a Betty monologue. I had representation when I signed that contract, so Cynthia made it worth my while. But she also made it clear that Betty was an essential part of the bargain. Like it or not, Betty is my brand.

  The two of us are stuck together.

  At some point during the second half of every show, I have a stagehand bring me the Betty wig, and I turn my back toward the audience, adjust the platinum thing on top of my now professionally styled brunette bob, and get into character. At first I did it because having the wig onstage the whole time was distracting—and not just to the aud
ience. But Betty’s entrance has become its own bit, something I do differently every time, so even fans who’ve seen me before feel like they’re getting something new. I’ve experimented with different ways of stylizing the moment; I’ve had the wig tossed at my face from offstage or slid along the floor toward my feet. I’ve had it brought out on various chairs and divans, next to a glass of wine or a bullwhip; once it came out on a tiny litter borne by stagehands in Egyptian robes. Another time I had it draped over a Frisbee and dangled on wires around my head while a theremin made UFO noises in the wings.

  For tonight’s taping, I wanted something special but not too gimmicky or distracting. This time, I wanted Betty to feel real.

  The North Door doesn’t have a sophisticated enough setup for wires, so I hired a puppeteer to mount the Betty wig on slender rods and manipulate her from a few feet away. We practiced this in rehearsals, and although Sharla’s puppetry is unimpeachable, I could never ignore her presence. But tonight is different. It’s something about the lighting, maybe, or the crowd’s energy, or perhaps what just happened to me in the greenroom, but Sharla’s black clothes and the black puppet rods fade magically into the black background, and all I can see is Betty, marching up the stairs stage right and floating toward me just a little bit above eye level. I say “floating,” but thanks to Sharla, who has watched me carefully when I’m in character, she seems to walk with Betty’s cocky, bouncy gait, vibrant and alive. Her footsteps don’t sync with Sharla’s—someone else is doing them as a sound effect from offstage—which adds to the illusion.

  When Betty first appears, the crowd cheers and claps obligingly. This is, after all, the moment they have been waiting for, the moment they are promised in every Dana Diaz show. It’s very on-brand. “Everyone, this is Betty,” I say. “Betty, everyone. Wave hello, Betty.” The wig moves just slightly, as if Betty is flipping her hair back from her face.

  But this time, coming off the Carl experience and with the creepily realistic Betty wig floating in front of me, something feels different. It feels like it’s Betty, but how obvious is projection when you’re doing it to a puppet? It’s me who’s different.

  I slow down, lower my voice, and go off script.

  “You probably know that Betty was inspired by someone I met about a year and a half ago.” There’s another round of drunken laughter; one person yells, “Free Amanda!” from the back, and there’s a tumultuous round of cheers and boos. I wait patiently for it all to die down. “I know, I know. Y’all are an awesome audience. Thank you. But I want to get serious for just a minute, because you probably know that the person I’m talking about is in prison right now for murdering her ex-boyfriend, who was my boyfriend and best friend, Jason Murphy.”

  Dead silence. As I open my mouth to say the next sentence, I find myself shaking, perilously close to tears. The aftershocks of what I’ve just said aloud are hitting me with renewed force. For the first time since I brought the mic stand down on Jason’s skull, I feel overwhelming anger for what I had to do, who I had to do it to, and how easy it was to pin on Amanda. Just on the other side of that anger is a grief so deep I can’t yet face it. It’s so much bigger than me. It’s grief for Jason, who I lost long before I bashed his skull in. It’s grief for me, for the me I could have been without a lifetime’s worth of garbage dragging me down, and also for my mother and Cynthia and Kim and Ruby and Becca. But most of all, it’s for Amanda, always Amanda, haunting my dreams at night, occupying the blank space just under the Betty wig, Amanda the true believer, the villain, the hero. My grief is too big, and I am going to spill.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, a sob hiccupping up through me despite myself. “Hang on a minute.”

  The audience waits, excruciatingly polite and pin-drop silent.

  “So, I just want to say, intimate-partner violence affects everyone—men and women—everyone. In a very real sense, it ruined my life. And if your life is being ruined by it right now, please get help. We’re going to put a phone number up after the show. And for those of you who may be standing next to your abuser right now—because it can be anyone—” I lose control again for a moment and take a breath. “I just want you to know, you’re not alone. In memory of my fallen friend, I’m donating the full proceeds of tonight’s show to organizations that work to end domestic and sexual violence.”

  Just like that, the silence transforms into a thunderous roar of applause. The audience members in the seated section rise, and the ones who are already standing begin stomping their feet and pumping their fists. Even the people dangling their legs through the staircase banister struggle to their feet. They believe they are clapping for Jason, and it’s certainly true that he was killed by his partner—me. But it’s Amanda’s tormented face when I first met her, fresh out of an abusive relationship and still reeling from its effects, that I see.

  Is this how Amanda felt after she got her hush money from Runnr? She had seen the machinery at last and manipulated it for her benefit. But then, when she was still figuring out how to be free, the wheel turned and brought another cog in the machine around to crush the life out of her. That cog was Jason. As she learned, and as I learned tonight, there will always be another Jason. You can move away and ignore him, or you can smash his head in with a microphone stand; it doesn’t matter. There will always be another Jason. I saw it in the long line of Carls in the dressing-room mirrors, the endlessly reflected faces of abuse next to the endlessly reflected Betty wig on her Styrofoam head next to the endlessly reflected me. Even with Jason and Amanda gone, it’s as if the three of us are still locked together in a struggle that will never end.

  Once you see that struggle, you can’t unsee it. You can profit by it or get crushed by it, but you can’t escape it. Even a terrorist like Amanda, who went crazy in the end and threw her body on the machine, was part of it. We all are.

  But was Amanda crazy?

  As the applause continues, wave after wave, I remember telling Jason, She only stores things online when she wants other people to find them. What she left online was the Neely video. Which incriminated her, not me. Even though the spyware recordings of me were useless at the trial, she could have uploaded them somewhere, left them to be found. But she didn’t.

  Amarillo. Drive. Flash drive.

  Where did she hide it? Behind a picture frame? Inside my old jewelry box, tucked into one of the pink velvet ring holders? Probably it was somewhere outside, where she could find it if she went back for it—under a flowerpot, maybe, like a spare house key. Or wrapped in plastic and buried in the shade under the elephant ears. Somewhere in my mother’s house or yard. It was right there, packed to the gills with incriminating evidence, the whole time I was recovering from the trial. She hadn’t sent it to Carl. She’d hidden it somewhere safe—safe for me. And she’d sent me a signal. She’d told me where to find it.

  I think if Amanda could have saved herself rather than me, she would have. But when she couldn’t, she made the decision not to drag me down with her. She got my back one last time, and she did it for a reason.

  As the heartfelt clapping subsides, I make my silent pledge to Amanda. I’ll do it, I tell her. I’ll keep fighting. I’ll do things differently than you would. I’m a standup, after all, and we’re realists. I’ll do it from the inside. I’ll use power, not fear. I’ll destroy them all, one at a time. The Carls. The Jasons. The Davis Q. Browns. I will listen, and I will destroy.

  It’s time to lighten the mood.

  “It’s hard to get back into dating when your last boyfriend got killed by a psychopath,” I crack, as a transition. The audience laughs obediently. “But you know what? Betty never has that problem.”

  I slowly walk over to invisible Betty, duck under the wig, and let it settle into place, transforming myself into her avatar. Then I step back to my spotlight.

  “Let me tell you about my weekend plans,” Betty barks, and because I no longer have to be diplomatic, the story she tells is bloody, and ragged, and true. I know it will end,
like all her stories do, with her taking matters into her own hands.

  Acknowledgments

  There are always many hands involved in guiding a book to publication, but this one required a small army. First and foremost, I’d like to thank my editor, Tim Mudie, for his patience, critical insight, and endless support during the writing and editing process. Without him there would be no Good as Gone and no Last Woman Standing. Thanks, as well, to my agent Sharon Pelletier for keeping me sane during the busiest two years of my life; to Lauren Abramo for supporting my books abroad; and to Helen Atsma at HMH for thoughtful commentary and encouragement.

  For assistance in meeting deadlines while I had a newborn, I am profoundly grateful to have had help from more friends and family members than I can thank here. Alissa Jones Zachary was particularly heroic when I thought I’d never sleep again, much less finish a book. In a perfect world we’d each be blessed with one person who understands our work and its goals, one critique partner whose writing inspires us, and one friend who comes through with support in times of need. Alissa is all three.

  During moments of doubt, early readers Dan Solomon, Paul Stinson, Victoria Rossi, and Linden Kueck came through with invaluable advice, cheerleading, snacks, and rubber duckies. Thanks to the talented Andie Flores for her insights into the Austin comedy scene, and to all the other comics who make Austin funny. To my husband, Curtis Luciani, the funniest and best person in my life, I owe endless thanks for his endurance during this marathon year. To my son, Hal: thanks for learning to sleep through the night.