Читать книгу The Voiceover Artist - Dave Reidy - Страница 7
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Simon
I HAD NEVER done a studio session. I didn’t have an agent. I’d started speaking again only three years before. But I already thought of myself as a voiceover artist. Five months after croaking the word that broke my lengthy silence, I decided that telling myself I am something more—and then working to make a truth of that lie—gave me my only hope of ever pulling even with my brother.
In an attempt to nudge my self-conception closer to reality, I volunteered, a couple of weeks after moving (alone) to Chicago in early June 2010, to serve as a lector at St. Asella’s, a church a few blocks from my apartment. I supposed that reading scripture aloud before strangers, with no opportunity for a re-take and no engineer to touch up my mistakes, would help to prepare me for the first time I’d step into a sound booth in a professional studio. And St. Asella’s, in its summertime desperation for able-voiced volunteers, required no audition, only a stand-here-sit-there training session with a weary liturgical minister and a signed (though unenforceable) commitment to lector weekly through Christmas. So it was that I first found myself lifting a Book of Gospels above my head of straight, dull brown hair and following two altar servers down a church’s center aisle to provoke in public the stutter that had prolonged, by many years, the silence I’d chosen as a seven-year-old boy.
The enormous pipe organ boomed in the church’s choir loft, which was empty except for the organist. Sunday mass at a thriving parish might have featured a cantor, who would lead the assembled in song. It seemed that someone at St. Asella’s had decided to drown out the few singing voices in its anemic congregation. As I walked, I took a waggle: four noiseless, almost imperceptible, lateral shakes of the head where it meets the neck. While rebuilding my voice three years before, I’d discovered that a waggle could ward off the tension that incessantly besieged my vocal folds. In large part because I took waggles whenever I needed them, hiding them, when I could, in a glance at a clock or behind the thoughtful expression of a person solving an equation in his head, I had not suffered a stuttering fit since May 25, 2008—two years, one month and two days before this first attempt at lectoring. I marked the time from my most recent fit as a recovering alcoholic counted the days from her last drink. Why shouldn’t I? Stuttering, like alcoholism, is a disease—my father suffered from both conditions—and neither has a sure-fire cure. And just as the urge to drink might clamor a little louder in a stressful situation, so my stutter’s grip tightens when I become even a little anxious. As I marched toward the front of that church, the prospect of reading aloud in front of people was only the second most upsetting thing on my mind, so my stutter was giving my waggles all they could handle.
The day before—the last Saturday in June—a pale yellow envelope with a Brooklyn return address had arrived in the mail. Enclosed with a note on heavy, artisanal card stock was a check for $748, the amount I had loaned to Brittany, my (former) girlfriend, to pay for the emergency extraction of her wisdom teeth.
Brittany and I had made plans to move to Chicago together after we left Southern Illinois University as undistinguished members of the 2010 graduating class. Then, at the end of April, just a month before graduation, Brittany told me that she had changed her mind: she would not be moving with me.
I had not seen this coming.
My career prospects—a voiceover artist with a stutter: it doesn’t look promising—were one of about thirty potential reasons Brittany would not join me in relocating from downstate Carbondale to Chicago. But the reasons she gave me that day were about Chicago itself: the cold winters, the city’s distance from her mother’s home in Delaware, and the limited market for rare books, the treasures it was her dream to buy and sell for a living. When I asked where she wanted to go instead, she said she didn’t know. Eventually, I understood that wherever Brittany Case was going, I was not welcome.
For the better part of a month, I’d been holding out hope that Brittany would find her new city of residence, Brooklyn, as lonely as I’d found Chicago and change her mind again. Unless she’d found a job or sold a very rare book, the check suggested that Brittany had decided it was worth the financial and emotional cost of dipping further into her trust fund—the same fund her father was doing time in a federal penitentiary for having nearly emptied—to sever the final tie between us.
The note said only, “Hope you’re doing well, Simon. Britt.”
I had never called her Britt. Not once. The note’s signature hurt more than the check did.
As I relived this moment from the day before—the moment I realized Brittany was never moving to Chicago—just minutes before I was to read Bible stories to the parishioners of St. Asella’s, I felt the slipknot around my vocal folds drawing tighter.
At the edge of the sanctuary, I bowed from the waist before the altar, sneaking a waggle on the way down. Then I walked around to the altar’s congregation-facing side and placed the tall, red Book of Gospels on the wooden table. I stepped back to accommodate the heft of Fr. James Dunne, the parish’s pastor and only priest. As he leaned forward to kiss the altar, I passed through the sanctuary and took the seat reserved for the lector, in the front pew on the left-hand side of the center aisle.
The organist held the final chord of the opening song for several measures and cut it abruptly. Fr. Dunne blessed and greeted the assembled. With my body angled toward the center of the altar, I stole glances at the people around and behind me. Near the front of the dimly lit nave, but not sitting together, were two African-American women dressed in skirt suits and broad-rimmed summer hats. In the front two rows of the narrower pews on the far right side stood six Filipina women of middle age. One of the women held her hands to her chin, the beaded string of a rosary interlaced with her fingers. There were a few older couples whose wealth was visible in their health-club vigor and the quality of their casual weekend clothes. A handful of younger adults, most of them women, sat further back, no closer than the middle rows. I counted five people who looked to be homeless in the last few pews, far behind the Filipinas. Despite the summer heat, one of the homeless women wore a heavy overcoat, and a navy stocking cap pulled low over her eyes. Her cheeks had baked to a deep, brick red in the sun.
The cover of the weekly bulletin I had scanned at the back of the church noted, alongside a faded illustration of a porcelain-complected, heaven-gazing girl I assumed to be St. Asella, that the parish had been founded in 1907 by a small group of nuns dedicated to serving the local Italian immigrants. If the people of St. Asella’s had once had everything in common, from homeland to employment prospects to holiday traditions, they did not seem to have much in common anymore.
As Fr. Dunne continued the opening prayer, an aged woman walked slowly up the right side aisle with a four-footed cane in her left hand. At first, I assumed that her gentle, close-lipped smile was a mask intended to conceal the aching pain in her hip or knee, or both. But I understood almost immediately after having it that my first impression was wrong. The woman’s smile, I remember thinking, seemed to emanate from within her, an authentic expression of a grace and self-possession I had never possessed. Her husband—they both wore thin wedding bands of dull gold—trailed her. Taking short, unsteady steps, he careened more than he walked, but covered ground no faster than his wife did. He held her elbow with his right hand until they reached the third-row pew. I guessed that this habit had been modified as age took its toll on the man’s independence. He was still escorting his wife, but she was leading him.
Also among the assembled were the wraiths that had haunted almost every mass I had ever attended: solitary older men whose loneliness was visible in their wispy, unkempt hair, ill-fitting eyeglasses and ratty windbreakers. I wondered if the men had any family to visit or friends to meet at a diner or corner bar, or if the walk to Sunday mass was their only regular foray out of tiny, dirty apartments. Either way, I wished they had stayed home. They were what I would have been if I had never reclaimed my voice, and they reminded me that a person without relationships is alone, no matter how many people stand around him, no matter how trusty the radio in his bedroom. But forging a friendship with any of the strangers at St. Asella’s seemed a remote and distasteful possibility. Only my belief that lectoring would prepare me to make the most of my first voiceover session compelled me to spend an hour in their presence.
At least they were strangers, though. There’s something horrible in facing, when you’re suffering, someone who really knows you. For a few moments a day, you might fool strangers and yourself that you’re feeling better than you are—maybe even doing well, considering the circumstances—until you speak with someone who knows you and you hear the truth of your condition in their voice or see it in their eyes: you are not doing well. Not at all. What I wanted that Sunday was the comfort of being around someone who really knew me, without the aching pain of seeing myself as I was. I wanted the impossible. So it was just as well that my brother Connor, younger than me by two years and more charming and self-assured than I would ever be, had not returned the voice message I’d left more than a week before to tell him that I had made the move to Chicago but Brittany had not. Nothing he could have said or done would have helped much, anyway.
“Lord have mercy,” Fr. Dunne said.
The order of the liturgy—somehow, I still knew it by heart from years of attending mass with my family—called for communal repetition of the invocation, but the people of St. Asella’s managed only an inarticulate murmur. I made no response at all.
“Christ have mercy,” said Fr. Dunne.
Without waiting for a reply he must have known would not come, Fr. Dunne finished the petition—“Lord have mercy,” he said—and moved on.
“Glory to God in the Highest.”
In response to the priest’s prompt, a few voices rose above the congregation’s murmuring, but each recited the Gloria at its own pace, creating the effect of a tuneless song performed in an arrhythmic round.
I, too, said the words of the Gloria, but I wasn’t praying. I was preparing—tightly controlling the rate of my exhalation, using just enough breath to power my voice at what I guessed was the ideal volume for amplified public speaking, making it halfway through the prayer before inhaling again and waggling as I did so. Left unchecked by my waggles, the tension creeping around my vocal folds would paralyze them. But the paralysis would not become a full-blown fit unless I acted on the powerful but self-defeating instinct to force the folds open. If I did, my eyelids would flutter, and my chin would nod as if I were emphatically agreeing with something. These histrionics would pull my vocal folds apart for just a moment—long enough to let out one gagging syllable—before the offending tension, fed by the stress and vigor of my effort, slammed them shut again.
Once a fit had started, no combination of mental and corporeal strength could budge the folds. They would remain fused together, despite my nodding and straining, until the tension receded of its own accord or the muscles of my esophagus were exhausted. Managing my stutter was a struggle not only with its symptoms, but against the fit-inducing quack cure I reflexively wanted to provide. The waggles, for their part, were merely an as-needed preventative regimen—generally efficacious, but unpredictably impotent. I lived with the awareness that every word I uttered had the potential to bring me to a sudden, humiliating halt.
At the conclusion of the Gloria, Fr. Dunne read a prayer with his palms turned up to a painted ceiling discolored by a century of incense and candle smoke, an image of Jesus being raised bodily to heaven while his disciples, emboldened by their awe, dared to look on. When the prayer was over, the focus of the mass would shift from the priest to me. I swallowed hard, a habit born of my childhood assumption that my stutter was triggered by mucus stuck in my windpipe.
“We ask this through Christ our Lord,” Fr. Dunne said.
“Amen.”
As everyone else sat down on the hard, lacquered pews, I stepped into the center aisle and approached the altar. I stopped in front of it and bowed my head, as the liturgical coordinator had instructed, then entered the sanctuary and climbed three steps to the ambo. I found the lectionary as I’d left it twenty minutes before: open to the first passage, a red ribbon draped across the page as a bulwark against the movement of machine-chilled air. Lifting the ribbon and laying it on the facing page, I tried once more to repel the encroaching tension with a waggle. Then, taking in a breath, I began.
•••
DURING THE EIGHTEEN years I was unable to speak, I was certain that I’d need a voice to make myself understood. My mother had tried to get me to learn sign language along with her, but I wasn’t having it. No one I knew spoke sign language. What good is it to speak a language that no one you know understands? I had gestures, of course—furrowed brows and puppy-dog eyes, headshakes and nods—but these were blunt instruments. I would need a voice, and the colors and tones my voiceover heroes gave to their words, to show the world who I really was and find my place in it.
My mother died one month after my twenty-third birthday, and Connor moved out of the house and three hours away to Chicago less than a year later. These events—and the horrifying prospect of a life that was little more than an unspeaking stalemate with my father—led to my enrollment in my hometown’s junior college, Leyton Community, and to my tortured daily attempts to revive the atrophied tissue of my vocal folds with stutter-induced spasms. Six months of provoking my stutter gave me the strength to gasp a few syllables, but it was seven more months of learning to tame the stutter before I could voice a complete sentence—“My name is Simon”—without shattering it into jagged shards.
With an associate’s degree and tenuous control of my stutter, I left the father I blamed for my long silence and moved four hours south to Carbondale to attend Southern Illinois University. That’s where I found Brittany. She was beautiful. She was smart. She wasn’t much for chitchat, and my quiet way appealed to her. She was also contrary by nature, and I knew that at least part of the reason she chose me was because I was the last guy on earth her born-rich, smooth-talking father would have chosen for her.
Brittany and I were walking back to my place from a coffee shop, having just broached, for the first time, the subject of life after graduation—where we might live, what we might do for a living. Just the idea of making plans like these with Brittany was making me heady, but some part of me must have sensed Brittany’s hesitation to envision a time when the credit hours we needed, the school calendar that dictated our time off, and the college-town boredom we’d endured were no longer pushing us together. Because, after all the forward-looking talk that had put such a charge into me, what I told her—what I really believed—was this: “Just because we graduate doesn’t mean we have to leave. We know we’re happy here. We can stay here and be happy.”
Brittany looked at me and, in the weak light thrown by a streetlamp half a block in front of us, she smirked and shook her head.
“What?” I asked.
“That’s bullshit,” she said.
“What is?”
“What you just said.”
It was as if Brittany had waved away a smokescreen of my own making. The truth was, I wanted things that Carbondale couldn’t give me. To become a voiceover artist, I’d have to live in some version of Radioland, the big city I’d imagined as a boy, home to the Great Voices and the powerful antennas—like birthday candles, their red flames pulsing atop skyscraper cakes—that beamed their sixty-second masterworks to my radio. My line about being happy in Carbondale revealed little more than a safe-seeming untruth I’d sold myself and wanted Brittany to buy, too.
Brittany had understood me beyond my power to make myself understood. My mother had, too. And Connor still did, whether he wanted to or not. Whether I wanted him to or not.
When we were together, Brittany discussed the details of her father’s crime only once. He had stolen from her and lied to her, she said. He’d looted a trust that Brittany’s grandfather, the last good son of an old Carolinian family, had funded for her. When Brittany came to him as a seventeen-year-old with statements in hand to ask about the plummeting balance, he assured her it was the stock market fluctuating, that she had nothing to worry about, that time and the free market would right the whole thing. Eventually, she might have allowed her father’s circumstances to mitigate her anger over the theft. By the time he stole from Brittany, he’d lost almost all of the money he’d misappropriated from investors, the Feds had started sniffing around, and he owed his lawyer three years of back pay. But the lies, Brittany said, she’d never forgive. During her freshman year, Brittany’s father was convicted of twenty-seven counts of interstate securities fraud. And the verdict suited Brittany just fine.
In the midst of the same monologue about her father, Brittany told me that she’d rebuked her mother for marrying a man who would defraud his own daughter, for not seeing through her husband’s lies, for seeing him, for so long, as something other than what he was. But she also blamed herself.
“Why didn’t I see it happening?” she asked. “How could I have missed all this?”
I understood at that moment that part of the reason Brittany was with me was because I was incapable of deceiving her as her father had. I wasn’t a practiced liar who always had the right word at the ready with a wink and a smile. Just seven months before, I’d spoken my first full sentence in eighteen years. Brittany’s need to never again be less cunning and cruel than the people she loved should have worried me, but I buried any worry beneath the pleasure I took in listening to Brittany reveal her innermost self. My voice had delivered me to that moment, but as Brittany made herself understood, I kept my eyes on hers, I nodded at the right times, and I didn’t say a word.
I wished I could go back and tell the boy I’d been, the kid who’d yearned for the kind of human connection made impossible by his refusal—and then inability—to speak, that he’d been right about needing a voice, but wrong about connection. How could I have known—alone in my room, daring to believe I might speak again one day—that I’d experience my life’s most exhilarating moment of closeness in silence?
•••
ON A SUNDAY morning in the August before our senior year, Brittany and I lay in bed, relishing the languor of half-sleep.
Brittany broke the silence by saying, “When we first met, I thought you had Asperger’s.”
I’d heard of Asperger’s syndrome, but I didn’t know exactly what it was. Even so, my face reddened with new embarrassment at whatever I’d done when I met Brittany to make her think I was strange.
“You’re offended now,” she said.
“I’m not offended.”
Staring at the ceiling, I replayed our first meeting in my mind. We were sitting in our adjacent, assigned seats in the back row of a nearly empty lecture hall, a few minutes before the second class session of a course, “Mathematics 139: Finite Math,” we were both taking to fulfill a requirement, when I felt a mobile phone’s rhythmic, intermittent vibration in my feet. The vibration came from Brittany’s bag, which lay on the floor between us.
Brittany made no move to answer or silence the phone. As the heels of her sandaled feet were tucked up onto the front edge of her chair, making a platform of her bare knees as she examined her nails, I thought it was at least possible that she could not feel the vibration.
So I waggled, leaned toward her, and said, “Your phone is ringing.”
The look she gave me communicated, in not so many words, that no one had ever told her anything more obvious and less helpful.
“Thanks,” she said, leaving her phone where it was.
The sting of the exchange stayed with me throughout the hour-long lecture. By the time the professor dismissed us, I’d decided I could either say something to this woman before she left, or sit next to her in uncomfortable silence, twice a week, for the next fifteen weeks. So I hid a waggle in a glance at the floor and said, “See you next week, then.”
Brittany, already heading for the exit, responded with only one word: “Yep.”
But all-importantly, she smiled just a little as she said it.
Looking back, I could see that I’d been awkward, but I couldn’t recall that I’d done anything pathological, or even strange, which made me feel worse. Maybe everything I did was strange, and I just couldn’t see it.
I waited another moment before I said, “What made you think I had Asperger’s?”
“Well, I thought your little headshakes were a tic or something.”
That was reasonable. I couldn’t conceal every waggle I needed, and most people needed no waggles at all.
“And I thought you were, you know, missing social cues,” she said.
I groaned at the thought that I was giving this impression to everyone I met. “It’s not that I miss them,” I said. “It’s just that, sometimes, I don’t know what to say when I see them.”
“I get that now.”
“I know what other people might say,” I said, “but I didn’t speak for almost two decades. I haven’t had enough conversations to know what I should say.”
“I know.”
“Or I know what I should say, but I really want to say something else, and I’m trying to figure out if what I want to say will make trouble.”
“Simon,” she said. “I know.”
I waggled and tried again. “It’s like, I get the cues, but I’m still learning my lines.”
I turned my head to look at Brittany. She rolled her eyes and threw off the covers.
“What?” I asked.
“Your metaphor melted down, Simon,” she said, getting out of bed.
“Where are you going?”
“To the bathroom,” she said. “You should’ve come on to me a half hour ago. You missed that cue.”
•••
THE FOLLOWING APRIL, on the night before Connor made his only visit to Carbondale, Brittany was watching television on the couch in my apartment, a one-bedroom on the first floor of an old home long since divided into rental units. Her bare legs were hugged to her chest and swaddled in a thin fleece blanket. I was sitting alongside her, but only the hem of her blanket touched me. Brittany didn’t like to be touched while she watched television. “I can’t concentrate if there’s touching,” she’d say.
On the old Panasonic box I’d purchased at a Carbondale garage sale, a woman in an orange jumpsuit was bemoaning her imprisonment for a capital crime—the murder of her former lover—that she swore she hadn’t committed. The frizzy ends of the woman’s ponytail whipped back and forth, punctuating her denial. Brittany leaned her head over her knees, hanging on the woman’s every word.
I had decided in the show’s first five minutes that I agreed with its producers: this woman had killed her boyfriend. But I kept watching and kept my seat. Near the end of a dinner of spaghetti and jarred tomato sauce, I’d agreed to put off until after the show a conversation about Connor’s visit to Carbondale the next day. I knew that Brittany’s doing what I planned to ask of her became less likely with each passing minute, so I wanted to be with her when the credits rolled. And even without touching her, sitting close to her made me excited for what lay ahead for us in Chicago.
After some difficult conversations on the matter, Brittany had finally decided to move to Chicago with me. We would share an apartment and try to turn our longtime professional dreams into careers. I’d look for representation as a voiceover artist, and Brittany would scour estate sales and auctions to build her stock of the rare books she hoped to buy and sell for a living.
We had money saved, though Brittany had much less than she’d expected. By the time her father was indicted, the balance in her trust, once more than four hundred thousand dollars, had been reduced to nine thousand. To preserve what capital remained for her entry into the rare-books business, she’d forsaken the heavy financial burden of a private-college education for the low tuition and renowned rare-volumes collection of Southern Illinois University.
Both of us blamed our fathers for the fact that our lives were less than what they might have been. But Brittany had started out at a higher station than I and fallen further—if her father hadn’t defrauded her, Brittany and I never would have met.
My radio-ready voice and years of experience as a busboy had helped me land a job as a server at The Nile, Carbondale’s finest restaurant, a white-tablecloth establishment frequented by local professionals and visiting university trustees. For almost two years, I’d worked five dinner shifts per week and, with scholarships and grants covering most of my tuition and fees, had saved almost $11,000. I offered my savings for our living expenses so that Brittany could use what remained of her inheritance to buy the right rare books. I wanted her to have her dream job, despite the damage her father had done. I wanted the same for myself.
As the woman on TV attempted to express to the unseen television interviewer how much her murdered lover meant to her, and convince the audience she never could have harmed him, she sucked her lips into her mouth and shook her head, trembling.
“Oh, Jesus,” Brittany said, sitting back. “She had me until the fake crying.”
“She did it,” I said.
“Yeah,” Brittany said over a sigh. “She did.”
As the prisoner pinched the bridge of her nose in tearful silence, Brittany found the remote in a blanket fold and turned off the television. She leaned against me and pressed her lips to mine as consolation for the touching we’d forgone while the prisoner told her lies.
Then Brittany laid her head on the far arm of the couch and stretched out her long legs, putting her feet in my lap.
“So why did your brother wait until a month before graduation to visit you?” she asked.
“He doesn’t have many free nights,” I said. “He’s always doing some kind of show.”
“He’s not doing a show tomorrow night?”
I waggled. “I guess he’s taking a night off.”
I understood that Brittany, in her way, had given me a chance to tell her something meaningful about my relationship with my brother. I could have confessed that our longstanding refusal to apologize to each other for anything made things between us difficult. I could have admitted that I hadn’t invited Connor to visit me in Carbondale until a week before, that I’d withheld the invitation until I was certain that Brittany and I were moving to Chicago and that my brother’s one-night stay would give me every occasion to unveil to him a life that was already better—and more promising—than either of us had imagined my life could ever be. I could have told Brittany I loved my brother but was plagued every day by my fear that his dazzling talent for improvisation and comedy, and the success his gifts stood to bring him, would put him beyond the reach of my ambition and my love. But I didn’t say any of these things. I answered Brittany’s question as if what she really wanted to understand were the scheduling challenges of the working comic actor, and she didn’t push me for more.
“So what’s he like?” Brittany asked, sliding her hand under the blanket and scratching her bare thigh with the crescent-moon whites of her fingernails.
At that question, my mind generated a cloud of adjectives that described my brother: talented, charismatic, dedicated, pained, ambitious, impatient, selfish, determined, unflappable, amazing. Getting a little uncomfortable with my silence, I waggled and picked one.
“He’s amazing.”
Brittany laughed at me. “He’s amazing?”
I shrugged again. “He is.”
“How is he amazing?”
“Well, for one thing, he creates characters and they’re real. Like, believable.”
“What else?”
She was daring me to make her care about Connor’s visit.
“He can make almost anyone laugh,” I said.
“Amazing!” Brittany said, mocking me with her smile, which was somehow made even sexier by her sarcasm. “What else?”
“He knows me better than anyone.”
The wide, brown eyes Brittany had inherited from her Laotian mother narrowed and darkened.
I waggled again and made a weak attempt to undo my mistake. “But not as well as you know me.”
Pulling her feet away, Brittany rolled onto her side and wrapped the blanket tightly around her. I recognized a pattern it had taken me months to identify and understand: when she was hurt even a little, Brittany became furious with herself, incredulous that after all she had been through and how little she expected of anyone, she could still be negatively affected by another person’s words or actions. The pain surprised her every time. I’d stopped wondering why Brittany couldn’t see that her vulnerability, like my stutter, could be chased away but never banished. This was another lesson about personal connections that I’d learned the hard way: that my seeing Brittany as she was—and loving her—could never guarantee that she’d see and accept herself.
I put my hand on the bump in the blanket that was her ankle.
“Don’t,” she said, kicking me.
I sat in purposeful silence, letting her anger burn off. To scatter the tension surrounding my vocal folds, I took one waggle, and another, and then a third.
Then I said, “Connor knew me when I couldn’t talk.”
This was where I should have started. Connor had seen me struggle and stew in my long silence. He had witnessed my constant, soundless screaming match with our father. No one, except our mother, had known the silent me—for eighteen years, the only me—better than Connor had.
“He knew me then, and you know me now,” I continued. “Now, nobody knows me better than you do.”
It was true. Insofar as my being able to speak had changed me, Connor hardly knew me anymore.
Brittany’s body seemed to soften a little, but she said nothing. Her eyes were pointed somewhere beneath the dark television set, her lower jaw thrust out. There was no talking her out of her inward-aimed fury. She would take it to bed with her.
Because of my gaffe, the last reasonable moment I had to ask Brittany to change her plans for the following afternoon, so that we could make the most of Connor’s brief visit, was also the least favorable. But I tried anyway.
“Connor gets here around four tomorrow,” I said, softly.
“I’m at the hospital then.”
I knew this, of course. Brittany volunteered every Tuesday afternoon in the neo-natal intensive care unit of the university hospital—in the two years I had known her, she had missed one shift, on account of stomach flu. Her job was to hold and feed incompatible-with-life newborns whose parents were gone, already mourning an imminent death that simply hadn’t happened yet. It was an unlikely fit for a woman who sought daily refuge from human interaction in the windowless, climate-controlled rooms that housed the leather-bound books she studied. Brittany did not stop to coo over babies in strollers and, outside of my apartment, did not so much as stroke my head or hold my hand. I’d always wanted to watch Brittany cradling the infants, to see that soft part of her even through glass, but she would not allow it—the hospital would not allow it, she said—so I was left with imagined glimpses of her standing stiff-legged, holding other people’s dying children, loving them as she loved me: as much and as little as she could.
“As it stands, we’ll be asleep about half the time Connor is here.” Feeling my throat tighten, I waggled twice. “So could you find a substitute for your shift tomorrow?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“It’s still almost a full day’s notice. I can make the calls for you.”
Brittany met my eyes. “No.”
“We can say you’re sick.”
“No, Simon!”
She stared at me, driving home her refusal with her cold gaze, then turned her face toward the television again. I said nothing more.
She had never admitted as much to me, but Brittany seemed to bear the burden of a responsibility to me that was similar to her sense of responsibility to them, as if she was certain that I—like the babies—would have no one if not for her. As I sat silently beside her, I reminded myself that even if Brittany were to leave me—and the thought of her leaving made me sick to my stomach—I would still have someone the other motherless children did not: I would have Connor.
•••
WHEN CONNOR CALLED from the road and said he’d be later than expected, I was relieved that Brittany hadn’t missed her shift at the hospital just to wait around for my brother. My relief evaporated when she returned home crying.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
There were pouches beneath her eyes, and her cheeks were bright red. She stalked past me without a word and shut herself in the bedroom.
I walked slowly to the bedroom door and cracked it. Brittany was in bed, everything but the crown of her head buried under the covers.
“What is it?” I whispered.
Her only reply was a sniffle. But I couldn’t bring myself to leave her alone—not without knowing why she was crying.
“What happened?”
Brittany made a guttural sound from beneath the blankets and rolled over to face the far wall.
Taking a waggle, I pushed the door and let the heavy brass handle hit the wall. “I’m trying to help!”
Brittany threw the covers down to her waist and yelled, “You can’t help!”
She waited another minute for me to leave. I didn’t. I couldn’t. I still had no idea why she was crying.
With her back to me, Brittany wiped her eyes with her palms. Then she closed a nostril with her wrist and sniffed. “I was holding a baby girl today,” she said.
I waggled again and whispered, “Yeah.”
“And she died.”
So far as I knew, this was the first time, in the hundreds of hours Brittany had spent holding doomed infants, that a child had died in her arms.
I wanted to crawl into the bed and hold her but knew it was the wrong thing to do.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
I watched her, trying to come up with some comfort apart from the loving words she would not accept. I waited another moment in the hopes that she would roll toward me and wave me into the bed beside her. But Brittany’s only movements were the still irregular swelling and shrinking of her rib cage.
So I backed out of the bedroom and pulled the door closed, watching her for any last-second change of heart even as I admitted to myself that the most helpful thing I could do for Brittany was leave her alone.
•••
SHE WAS ASLEEP—or still in bed, anyway—when Connor arrived that day.
I met my brother at the back door with an index finger over my lips, led him out the French doors that opened from the living room onto my unit’s section of the wraparound porch and asked him to wait there. I returned to the kitchen to pour my brother his drink of choice, bourbon neat, and opened a bottle of light beer for myself. Drinking, like high emotion, hindered my management of my stutter, so I was determined to drink slowly that night. I wasn’t about to risk having a fit in front of Connor.
I handed the glass of bourbon to Connor and closed the French doors.
“Should I come back later?” Connor whispered.
“No, you’re fine,” I said. “Brittany is sleeping. She volunteers at the hospital in the neo-natal intensive care unit, and a baby died while she was holding it.”
“Today?”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus,” Connor said. “Is she in trouble?”
“No, no. None of the babies she works with have more than a few weeks to live.”
“Oh,” Connor said, seeming baffled. “Okay.”
“She’ll be up soon,” I said. “If she isn’t, you’ll meet her in the morning.”
I unfolded an aluminum lawn chair for him, not so much hiding the little waggle I took as drawing attention away from it, like a magician showing an empty palm during a card trick.
“How was the drive?”
“Long,” Connor said. “Longer than it had to be. I got a late start.”
“Did you have an audition or something?”
Connor shook his head and swallowed a mouthful of my cheap bourbon without wincing. “I went on for a friend of mine in a late show last night. The pay was free drinks, and I was very well paid.”
I smiled and took a sip of my beer.
“Then I overslept and got caught in some rush-hour traffic south of Chicago,” he said.
“How long were you driving?”
“What is it? Ten?”
“Almost.”
“Six and a half hours.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah.”
I waggled. “If you want to stay another night to make it worth the drive, you’re welcome to.”
Connor shook his head and sat up in his seat. “Nah. I want to be back onstage tomorrow night.”
He took a deep sip of his bourbon and swallowed, and I poured more beer between my lips.
“So you’re moving to Chicago,” Connor said.
“Yeah.”
“And your girlfriend is coming with you?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re living together?”
“Yes.”
Connor nodded, the edges of his lips curled downward and his eyes smiling.
“You think that’s a bad idea.”
“No, no,” Connor said. “It sounds fantastic.”
By which he meant it sounded terrible. Though Brittany’s agreeing to join me in Chicago was the signature success of my life to date, for Connor, sharing a small apartment with one woman, day after day, would have been unbearable. Onstage, he could make an audience believe he was a caring husband or an attentive boyfriend. Offstage, Connor wanted no part of intimacy. Even the questions he asked me were electrified prods he waved to keep me from getting too close.
“What’ll you do for work?” Connor asked.
I settled into the fabric straps of my folding chair and waggled. “Voiceover.”
Connor laughed.
“What.”
“What do you mean, ‘what?’ It’s at least a little funny, Simon. If I played a character who spent eighteen years in a hospital bed and decided to try out for the Olympic team after a jog in the park, I’d get laughs. Even on an off night. Fuck, that’s a good idea. I’d write it down except that improvisers don’t write anything down.”
I let a barking dog in the neighbor’s yard fill the space where Connor was expecting a laugh. You don’t go two speechless decades without learning to use silence the way Connor used humor: as a weapon.
“Look,” Connor said, “you should definitely try it. You’ve got a great voice—you’ve got my voice, actually.”
Connor wasn’t wrong. He and I had both been surprised to find, after my eighteen-year silence, that my voice sounded just like his.
“But, so you know, it’s tough to break into voiceover,” he said. “My agent said it’s easier to get on-camera work in a national TV spot than to get a local radio commercial in Chicago. Most of that work goes to the old guys who’ve been doing it for years.”
Part of me was warmed by the thought of the radio voices of my youth—especially my hero, Larry Sellers—holding their ground.
“Everything is harder than you think it’ll be,” Connor said.
“Breaking into voiceover can’t be much harder than rebuilding my voice,” I said.
Connor chuckled, holding his glass in front of his lips. “It might take about as long.” He took a sip of bourbon and shook his head as he swallowed. “But if anybody can do it—”
Connor drained the rest of the whiskey from his glass, leaving his halfhearted encouragement half-finished.
“And if I ever do voiceover,” Connor continued, “I won’t use my normal voice. You can have it.”
So there it was. Connor was not impressed with my life or prospects. As my determination rose on a tide of anger, I wondered if this was the reaction I had really wanted from Connor, if I’d known that his disdain would motivate me more than his encouragement ever could.
I took two more swallows of beer. “So how are things for you?”
“Good,” Connor said, playing with his empty glass.
“You’re doing shows?”
“Every night,” Connor said. “Tonight is my first night off in—” He squinted, calculating. “Three months?”
“Wow.”
“Trying to get as many reps as I can. That’s how you get better.”
I nodded coolly at what I took to be more unsolicited, condescending advice. Then I asked, “Who are you on with tomorrow?”
“Just some guys I know.”
“A group?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s the name?”
My brother stared at me for a moment through slightly narrowed eyes. “You did this last time I saw you.”
“What?”
“You asked me the name of the group.”
“I like hearing the names.”
“They’re never funny.”
I waggled and said, “That’s why I like hearing them.”
Connor shook his head. “I’m not saying.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “You don’t have to.”
I watched Connor try to decide if telling me the name was victory or surrender in the face of the little trap I’d set for him.
“The point is, these guys are really good. They’ve had a show running at this bar for two years. One of them was a finalist for a correspondent slot on The Daily Show.”
“So he didn’t get it.”
“No.”
“Are you playing with them full time?”
“No,” Connor said. “One of their guys is on an audition in L.A. and they asked me to fill in for him.”
“Oh.”
“They said they might want to make me a permanent member, though.” Connor glanced down at his empty glass, and then raised his eyes to mine again. “So, yeah. Things are pretty good.”
But things were not good for Connor. Sure, he was still handsome. A mess of curly brown hair spilled over his forehead, accentuating by contrast the pale green of his eyes, and a day’s beard growth darkened his strong, cleft chin. Even so, he looked worn from the inside out in a way that a good night’s sleep wouldn’t fix. And in the rundown of his life in comedy, he hadn’t mentioned New York even once. That told me everything I needed to know about how things were going for my brother.
New York was the place where Connor saw himself when he’d made it in comedy. His fixation had started with Saturday Night Live but, at some point, the lights of 30 Rockefeller Plaza glowed so intensely in Connor’s mind that they illumined the entire city. For the past four years, Connor had been working in Chicago to win the attention of New York, and New York had paid him no mind. The pleasure I took in my brother’s struggles was fleeting—it meant nothing for me to catch up with Connor if our evenness was measured in unhappiness—but I was secretly pleased that he’d claimed things were going well for him when they were not. It was the first time I could remember that my brother had deemed me peer enough—or threat enough—to tell me such a lie.
“Another drink?” I asked him.
“Sure.”
Connor held up his glass by the base. I grabbed it around the middle, accidentally covering his thumb with one of my fingers for just an instant. At this glancing contact, I realized that Connor and I had not so much as shaken hands when he arrived, and it seemed too late by then to do anything of the kind.
I pitched my empty beer bottle into the plastic garbage can in the kitchen. Pouring Connor’s whiskey, I took two waggles and vowed to drink my next beer more slowly. Going drink for drink with Connor was certain to bring the evening—or my participation in it—to a stuttering, premature, and potentially mortifying end.
Carrying a full bottle of beer and a glass of bourbon, I reached the open porch doors and stopped. Brittany and Connor were standing next to one another, smiling. It looked as if they had just shaken hands.
“You’re up,” I said.
Brittany turned to me, opened her eyes wide, and let her smile fall. “You sound exactly like him,” she said. “Exactly.”
I handed Connor his whiskey, feeling hurt and a little indignant that my girlfriend had said that I sound like my brother, instead of the other way around.
She turned back to Connor. “How did that happen?”
“Well,” Connor said, “I like to think that when Simon was teaching himself to talk, he had his pick of any voice he wanted and chose mine.”
Brittany laughed.
It seemed that her nap had lifted her out of the horror of her afternoon, at least for the moment. She had ironed her hair flat, except at the ends, which curved in and brushed against her jawbone. Her small, high-set breasts stretched the vertical ribbing of her pale green tank top, the tail of which hung over the waistband of her favorite pair of short nylon shorts. An open black hoodie hung loosely over her arms. I knew her well enough to know she had applied a little makeup to her eyes and considered each piece of clothing she was wearing, but Brittany always gave the impression that her beauty was effortless, which made her all the more beautiful.
For his part, with a second whiskey in hand and an attractive, one-woman audience to win over—with someone besides me around—Connor seemed more comfortable already.
I touched Brittany’s elbow and, as she turned to face me, she pulled it out of my fingertips.
“Drink?” I asked.
She looked over the edge of Connor’s glass. “Bourbon, please.”
A waggle delayed my reply. “Bourbon it is.”
“Thank you, baby.”
I set my beer bottle on the warped wood planks of the porch, sending a warm rush to my head. Then I went inside, pulled a second glass from a cabinet, and poured another bourbon, feeling buzzed and buoyed that Brittany was awake and feeling social, and that she and Connor were hitting it off. He was even flirting a little, which I took to be a harmless expression of our brotherly rivalry. Despite his tardiness and Brittany’s grief, my brother’s visit was beginning to take the shape that I had hoped it would.
I returned to the porch to find Connor seated and Brittany standing over him. I handed Brittany her glass and picked up my beer.
“This is easily three shots, Simon,” Brittany said, holding up her glass and smiling.
I waggled. “I figured I’d save myself a trip.”
“Next time in, you’ll have to carry her,” Connor said.
Brittany flashed Connor a hard look that softened when she read the hint of a smile on his face. “We’ll see who’s carrying who.”
She took a swig of bourbon, held it in her mouth for a moment, swallowed and coughed. Connor laughed, letting his head fall back against the aluminum frame of his chair.
I held my beer bottle in the air. “I’d like to make a toast.”
Connor stared at me. Then, with an amused look on his face, he stood up and raised his glass.
I waggled, suddenly embarrassed by the formality of my gesture. I had never given a toast before. I stood there between the two people who knew me best, awash in feelings that were too predictable, too revealing, or too sentimental to be given words and voice. As Brittany and Connor waited and tension mounted in my neck, I waggled again and said, “To the Windy City!”
Connor laughed. “He sounds like a radio commercial already.”
I angled my bottle toward Connor’s tumbler and made contact with it just as Brittany’s did. Then I chased Brittany’s retreating hand hungrily, as if the tapping of my bottleneck against her glass would somehow make binding our spoken plans and promises. The bottle caught only her knuckle, a flesh-muted tap that made no sound. I would have tried again, but Brittany was already drinking the toast, so I put the mouth of the bottle to my lips, tipped it back, and gulped.
•••
THE MONDAY AFTER my debut as a lector at St. Asella’s, I started pursuing the part of my Chicago dream that still stood a chance: the part that had nothing to do with Brittany.
I plugged a gently used microphone into my computer and recorded the radio commercials I had been rehearsing for weeks: one for the Chicago Blackhawks, another for Arc Home Electronics, and a spot for the Ulysses S. Grant Museum in Galena, Illinois. Then I cut together a one-minute medley that demonstrated high-quality performance across my wide range of energies, tempos, volumes and tones. My deliveries extended from whispered to stentorian and from gentle to aggressive, but I did only one voice—my own—and played only one role: myself. The kind of voiceover work I wanted to do was the kind I’d always appreciated most, the kind Larry Sellers did: straight announcement, which relied upon the artist’s virtuosic vocal ability and won the listener’s attention with a subconscious appeal to her innate desire for perfection. In a commercial that called for straight announcement, the meaning of the words mattered less than how the words were said. And characters didn’t matter at all.
If the voiceover agents want someone who creates characters, I thought, they’ll have to find Connor.
Early Tuesday morning, I burned my demo onto seven CDs and scrawled my name and phone number on their non-writable sides in permanent marker. I stuffed the CDs into envelopes along with folded copies of my cover letter, the characters of which bore the white striations left behind by a nearly empty ink cartridge. With the envelopes in my otherwise empty messenger bag, I headed out on foot.
The first agency I visited was Skyline Talent, the organization that had represented Larry Sellers for much of his long career. Sellers had grown up in Sampere, a small, Central Illinois township near my hometown of Leyton. Since coming to Chicago in the 1970s, he’d done national radio commercials and had been, for almost two decades, the voice of Jewel Food Stores. I’d studied Larry Sellers’ work since I was thirteen years old, and it was while listening to one of Larry’s performances that I selected the word I’d use to induce the seizures, spasms and fits that brought back my vocal muscles from atrophy. “Financing.” Because of the agency’s connection to Larry Sellers, and the inseparability, in my own mind, of the sound of his voice from the existence of mine, the four-block walk from my apartment to the offices of Skyline Talent was more pilgrimage than errand.
I walked through the front door and left my demo in the hands of the receptionist. Then I turned around and walked out. I didn’t introduce myself or ask to speak to any agents—not at Skyline, not at any agency. I wasn’t interested in, or good at, making small talk. Besides, I saw no reason to put a face to my voice. My demo was my good side, and I wanted the agents to see it before they knew anything else about me.
By noon on Tuesday, back at my apartment, all the momentum I’d felt while making and delivering my demo was gone. In its place was a gloomy understanding that simply seeing myself as a voiceover artist did not make me one. I hadn’t considered, until just then, the sheer number of things that had to happen before an agent would call with an offer to represent me. A receptionist would have to put my demo in the hands of an agent. That agent would have to decide the demo was worth listening to, with nothing more to go on than a cover letter. Any agent who did decide, against her better judgment, to give my demo a chance would have to find the time and attention to listen to it. And even if she found the time, there was no telling if she’d like my work. If having talent wasn’t enough to ensure Connor’s success, how could it guarantee my own? I began to see each of my morning deliveries as a missed opportunity. With a chance to do any of them again, I would have gladly initiated and endured small talk to increase, by even a fraction of a percentage, the likelihood that an agent would give my demo a fair listen.
Whenever I find myself waiting, I look for a way to prepare for what I’m waiting for. That’s how I now understand all the hours I spent as a kid sitting on my bed with a radio in my lap, listening to commercials: I was preparing, even when I could not speak, to be a voiceover artist. I picked up my lector’s workbook and turned to the scripture readings I was scheduled to deliver this coming Sunday in my second outing as a lector at St. Asella’s. Maybe, I thought, it is preparation that will separate me, in a way that talent alone cannot, from other voiceover artists with a range and timbre like mine.
So I dug into the text. Over more than ten recitations, I sought out the natural rhythm of each passage and gave voice to it. I practiced the multi-syllabic Hebrew and Canaanite names in the first reading until they sounded as natural on my lips as my mother’s name, and repeated the Greek names of the cities mentioned in the second reading until their pronunciations were as familiar to me as those of Leyton and Peoria. When I’d honed my delivery of each reading, I closed the workbook. Part of preparing effectively, it seemed to me, was knowing when you were doing more harm than good to your voice and performance. All told, my preparation for Sunday had eaten up only ninety minutes. It was still Tuesday, and only two in the afternoon.
Connor still hadn’t called me back. The prospect of calling him again, conceding my need of him even as I waited helplessly for some share of success that might rival his, seemed doubly debasing. I held my phone, waiting another minute for it to come to life in my hand and for Connor’s name to appear on the pale blue screen. Then I opened the phone’s address book, arrowed down to my brother’s name, and selected it. Connor did not answer. I imagined him in active pursuit of his own dream, at work without waiting, his phone ringing silently in the small pocket of a backpack he’d thrown in the corner of a rehearsal space somewhere on Chicago’s North Side. I listened to his voice—my voice, but steeped in confidence—in the outgoing message and hung up.
I lay down on the dusty upholstery of my couch, trying to persuade myself that an afternoon with good work already done and nothing left to do was a luxury I should enjoy. I could take a nap. I could read a book. I could get out and explore my new neighborhood. But what I did instead was think of Brittany. With equal parts imagining and recollection, I felt her breath on my neck as she rubbed herself against me, acting out the closeness we’d made with our voices and our attentiveness. Alone in my apartment, I acted out my present deprivation with a hand down the front of pants still buttoned, as if I might finish before I realized what I was doing.
