Aftermirth by Hillary Jordan Page A

audience was restless and scenting blood. I got off to a rocky start. I could feel them slipping out of my grasp, preparing to turn on me, when a woman in back laughed, startling me to momentary silence. It was a sound like nothing I’d ever heard: artless, weightless, utterly abandoned. I told another joke, and she laughed again, a bright, rippling arpeggio from the most joyful aria ever sung. I peered into the audience but couldn’t see her; as always, the stage lights turned everyone beyond the first few rows into an amorphous horde of humanity. I kept telling jokes, wanting only to keep hearing that glorious laugh, and before long I felt myself entering what I call the drop zone, becoming more audacious, inventing fresh material that was twice as good as the prepared stuff I’d walked onstage with. It was all for her, but the rest of them were laughing too, helplessly and uproariously, laughter like I’d only gotten a few times in my whole career, when the audience was packed with family and friends. I wasn’t just funny that night, I was the god of funny, and she was my angel.
    And then my run was over, and the audience was roaring as I took my bows and bounded off the stage into the wings, where I received a high five from Jimmy, the club’s manager, and a tight, go-fuck-yourself smile from Ethan Cohen, the headliner who was up after me. I was supposed to get the crowd nice and moist for him, not bring them off. I gave him an apologetic shrug. On any another night I might have enjoyed his irritation, but the crowd’s adulation made me magnanimous. I was Caesar and they were the mob, and for long moments I just stood there, sweaty and ebullient in my crown of laurel, bathing my swelling ego in the warm gush of their love. The laughing mystery woman may have kicked things off, I thought, but I was the one who’d made the ninety-nine-yard punt return. Still, I owed her a big thank-you, and I couldn’t wait to give it to her. I would go out front during Cohen’s act and listen for the sound of her laugh. It would lead me to her like a homing beacon.
    Unless.
    I felt a welling of panic. What if she didn’t find his big Jewish dick schtick funny? Which she very well might not; it didn’t exactly double me over. Or what if she had to be somewhere, had to work the night shift or take the dog out, and she didn’t even stay for his act? She could be walking out the door at this very second, and I didn’t even know what she looked like.
    Jimmy’s hand on my arm brought me back to the moment. He jerked his head in the direction of the stage. The crowd was shouting for an encore. I was so grateful and relieved I could have French-kissed each and every one of them. When I stepped back onstage they erupted. I waited for them to subside and then asked for the houselights to be turned up—something I normally only did when I was scrambling for laughs and needed some people in the audience to make fun of. I took a perfunctory swipe at a pudgy bald guy with a blonde half his age and another at a table of drunken twenty-somethings having a bachelorette party. I got some laughs, but not the one I wanted.
    I launched into my encore. It was one joke, a long lead-in to a big payoff, and as I told it I scanned the audience, searching for a face that could possibly belong to that laugh. I rejected one after the other. The brunette with dimples: too sorority-girl. The tall streaked blonde: impossible, my angel didn’t wear leopard-print halter tops. The redhead cozied up to the guy with twenty-inch biceps: please God, let that not be her.
    And then I spotted her: twinkling blue eyes set in a heart-shaped face framed by a mass of wavy, honey-brown hair. She smiled at me, a teasing, see-you-backstage smile, the kind I got from a handful of women at almost every show. Not because I’m some hunk—I bear an uncanny nonresemblance to Brad Pitt—but because women think that