Aftermirth by Hillary Jordan Page B

if you’re funny you’ll be good in bed (and for the record, I always did my best to bear out this assumption).
    I’d received hundreds of smiles like that, and I’d come hither to my fair share of them, but none of them had ever made my heart lurch and my knees wobble like hers did. I stared straight at her as I delivered the punch line. She opened her mouth—and brayed, a piercing, nasal hee-haw that went on and on before culminating in a loud snort.
    It wasn’t her.
    My eyes moved further down her table, to the source of the sound I’d been listening for. There, producing gales of sublime, irresistible laughter, sat a plain-faced middle-aged woman wearing an oversized sweater that hung on her like a sack. That’s what I saw, and that’s all I saw, shallow bastard that I was then. This —this was my angel?
    Numbly, I thanked the audience and made my way offstage and toward the exit, ignoring kudos and back slaps and even half a dozen offers of free beers; that’s how stunned and disappointed I was. I didn’t look in her direction, but her laughter seemed to pursue me through the club, mocking me. And it didn’t stop at the door. It followed me home and took up residence, haunting my dreams and troubling my waking moments. I heard it at the gym, in restaurants, on the street, always behind me or off in the distance, a siren’s tease promising joy like I’d never known in my whole empty, pathetic life. Joy, I was painfully aware, that I’d walked away from like an adolescent fool.
    I heard her laughter everywhere except onstage. I listened for it after every joke and scoured every face in every audience in search of her, but she remained silent, absent. My act started to suffer. I stumbled through three gigs in a row and showed my hairy naked ass at the Improv like I hadn’t done since I was a baby comic doing fart jokes at airport Hiltons. There’s nothing more humiliating than the moment when your death throes become so anguished and unseemly that the crowd starts to feel sorry for you and the women let out embarrassed little titters that are worse than the deafening silence they’re meant to break.
    I had a big show coming up at the Downtown Comedy Club that I’d been looking forward to for weeks, but now I was dreading it. Scouts from The Daily Show were going to be there, and so was my agent, who’d called a couple of days after the Improv fiasco and let me know, ever so nonchalantly, that she was planning to drop by. No doubt she’d gotten an earful about my recent spate of unfunniness. I couldn’t afford to choke again.
    I was backstage waiting to go on, sweating like a margarita in Death Valley and kicking myself for not bringing a spare shirt, when I heard it: a brief, radiant trill like a shimmer of light on water. I went still and cocked my whole being to listen, praying it was her and not her ghost, silently beseeching the gay comic onstage to go somewhere funny with his endless rant about fat cells. And by some miracle he did, and my angel laughed again, and I was delivered. I don’t remember a thing about my act that night. Jess said I was brilliant, and I must have been pretty damn good because a week later I was in New York auditioning for Jon Stewart, but all I can recall is the sight of her face beaming up at me from the second row. How had I ever thought she was plain? She was beautiful, in the way that a mesa is beautiful, or a pine tree: perfectly unadorned, made just as it should and must be. And the more she laughed the more beautiful she became, until by the end of my act I could hardly stand to look at her, or not to. When I took my bows she stopped laughing and gazed straight back at me with wide, luminous eyes. Her face filled the frame, filled the universe.
    We were married six months later, which was about five months too long for me, but Jess wanted to wait; to be sure we were sure. She said it was