The Voiceover Artist (28 page)

With hard feelings hanging in the air between us, Andre and I stopped talking. I located Erika and Simon. They were sitting on the same side of a booth, and each of them was drinking a cocktail. Both of these things struck me as strange, but I could see Erika's face, and she was talking and smiling between the sips she took through her stirring straw. If Simon knew about Brittany and me, he hadn't told Erika yet.

“Do you think they're gone already?” Andre asked.

“Who knows.”

Andre and I watched the bar crowd thin out for what must have been another twenty minutes. That's how long it took me to decide that the only thing left to do was to walk out on the
SNL
writers before it was completely obvious to everyone that they had walked out on me. I was about to tell Andre I was leaving when I heard someone shout my name.

I turned to find Marcus Reiser hurrying down the ramp that led from the lobby. His hair was clumped into thin, sweaty strands, exposing the liver-spotted skin of his scalp.

“Hey, Marcus,” I said.

“They didn't make it.”

I made myself say something. “You're shitting me.”

Marcus shook his head. “They were supposed to fly in this afternoon, but the storms here grounded them. They tried for a later flight and couldn't get on it. They never left LaGuardia.”

I stood there, nodding, with my jaw clenched. There was nothing more to say.

“We'll get them here,” Marcus said. “Soon.”

Marcus and I both knew that he couldn't get the
SNL
writers here. They would come when they were sent again.
If
they were sent again. No sooner.

He excused himself and walked away.

I never give a shit who is in the audience. I'd improvise in an empty room just for a chance to do it the right way. But when I learned that the
SNL
writers hadn't seen me perform, what I thought was,
Everything I made tonight was wasted.

“Fucking unbelievable,” Andre said, shaking his head.

All I could think to do was lay eyes on Erika. I stepped back, finding a sightline past a tall guy who had moved between us. When I saw Erika, she looked worried. And Simon was talking a mile a minute.

What the fuck is he saying?
I wondered.

Then, while I watched without either of them knowing, Simon put down his empty glass, reached his hand slowly toward Erika's face, and leaned in to kiss her.

I plowed through a cluster of people I should have gone around and toppled a cocktail table, shattering two glasses on the ground. As I neared the booth, Erika swatted at Simon's reaching hand and said, “What are you doing?”

I grabbed Simon under the arms and pulled him out of the booth.

Erika yelped and called after me, but I didn't listen.

Backpedaling, I dragged Simon past two more booths to the club's fire door and pressed my ass against its push-bar handle. When I had him in the alley, I threw him to the ground. He broke the fall with his right hand—I saw the wrist bend—and rolled once before landing in the thistle growing against a tall wooden fence.

After what he'd done, and all that hadn't happened for me that night, I was craving an old-fashioned win. I wanted to kneel on Simon's chest and punch him in the mouth. But I had already won, in the oldest of old-fashioned ways, the game that Simon, whether or not he knew what I'd done in Carbondale, had restarted that night: I had fucked his girlfriend in his own apartment, and Simon hadn't even touched his lips to Erika's.

Game over.

I was finished with Simon. I yanked on the handle of the fire door. It was locked. So I headed for the long, narrow gangway that led out to Clark Street.

I was still in the alley, passing under the bright light of a security lamp, when I heard footsteps on the loose asphalt behind me. What he threw was no sucker punch. Simon let me see it was coming. I ducked, but not far enough, and it landed at the hinge of my jaw.

When I looked up, dabbing at the blood oozing from the skin of my ear, Simon was heaving air through his nose, and every sinew in his neck was pulled taut. He was having what my father used to call a fit. With his stutter choking him, Simon held up his fists just below his shoulders, leaving his face exposed.

Simon wanted me to hit him back. He wanted everything to be equal between us. More than anything, he wanted us to fight because fighting would say that we mean something to each other.

Brothers fight. Simon and I are brothers.

While he stood there, waiting for me to make us brothers again, I looked Simon in the eyes until I was certain he could see that I understood
exactly
what he was asking me to do.

Then I walked away.

Walking toward Clark Street in the darkness of the gangway, I imagined that Simon was where I had left him, his bawling smothered by a silence he couldn't break.

And that was fine with me.

10

 

Simon

 

WHEN MY PHONE
 lit up the Monday after I saw Connor perform at Improviso, and I saw it was Elaine, I figured she was calling to fire me.

I had already played out two plausible scenarios. In the first, Connor has outed me to Erika in the aftermath of our melee, calling me “a fucking stutterer” or something of that ilk, and Erika, disgusted with me, has notified Skyline Talent of the career-killing disability I'd hidden from everyone.

In the second, Erika has informed Elaine that she met another voiceover artist represented by the agency and that he had behaved inappropriately toward her. Elaine was running a business. She wouldn't care to hear me explain that I'd gotten carried away after Erika and I swapped our stories of signing with Skyline and after sharing, with a woman who knew how to listen and seemed to value every detail I divulged, my account of my mother's grace and courage in the face of cancer. If she believed my behavior posed a risk to her agency, Elaine Vasner would cut me loose without a second thought. Elaine didn't need me. There were other voices out there.

Staring at the vibrating phone in my hand, I experienced a calming sense that I was living a moment I had known would come to pass. I had believed since my first meeting with her that Elaine would eventually decide—just as Brittany had—that I lacked something. That I was not enough.

I flipped open the phone and waggled. “Hello, Elaine.”

“Hi, Simon.”

No small talk.
“What can I do for you?”

I heard Elaine's desk chair creak, and she let out a breath I hadn't realized she'd been holding. “I got a very strange call about an hour ago.”

I almost said,
From Erika.
“You did.”

“Yeah. From Leo Burnett's New York office. To book you for a job.”

What?

I waggled. “What?”

“Apparently, they handle the advertising for a soccer team. The New York Red Bulls. They want you for a radio campaign.”

Elaine had always given me the impression that, in her business, she had seen it all. Now, she sounded as mystified as I was.

“I don't even know how they heard you,” she said. “I asked the kid on the phone—somebody's intern—but he was no help.”

She snorted and, in her disdain for the intern, Elaine was recognizable as herself again.

“I'd be surprised if they were on the web auditioning Chicago voices,” she added.

“Why?” I asked.

“There's no need,” she said. “New York is lousy with talent.”

She meant voiceover talent, but my first thought was of Connor. “It must be.”

“Red Bull is the soccer team's sponsor,” Elaine continued, thinking aloud. “Maybe Burnett's New York office has final approval on all Red Bull creative, and someone there heard your Comedy Tour spot.”

“Could be.”

I had no idea. I was still getting my head around the idea I wasn't being fired.

“Anyway,” Elaine said, “they want you in New York at the end of this week.”

“They want me to
go
there?”

“That's what I asked the intern,” Elaine said. “He assured me they do.”

I'd assumed the ad people would record me remotely, relaying their direction over the phone to an engineer in a Chicago studio. The idea of traveling to do voiceover had never occurred to me. Then again, traveling, in my mind, was something other people did. I'd never even been on an airplane before.

“You'll fly out Thursday afternoon,” Elaine continued. “You'll stay the night in a hotel and do the session Friday morning at eleven sharp. They'll fly you back Friday night if you want, or Saturday or Sunday if you want to spend some time in New York.”

“Did they send a script?” I asked.

“No.”

“Did they describe it at all?”

I wanted to rehearse, of course, but what I really wanted was to hear that the job was straight announcing work: say the name of the team, deliver the names of its star players as if they were heroes of Greek epics, read the website address and the phone number, and say the team name again. This kind of work was all vocal technique, and I could do it as well as anyone. On the other hand, if the spot called for character work, I'd need to imagine how Connor would do it just to fake my way through the session. After what I'd done at Improviso, appropriating anything from Connor, even if only for work that was rightly mine, seemed more complicated. We weren't kids trying to get Candace Andersen's attention anymore. We were adults with much more to lose.

“The intern didn't say anything about the script,” Elaine said. “But I'll forward whatever comes through, Simon, don't worry. Get back to me by tomorrow about how you want to handle your return flight.”

“I will.”

“This is a gift, Simon. You're good, but you can't earn this kind of thing.”

I nodded and waggled. “I know.”

She sighed, as if to say that dealing with me was exhausting. “Congratulations, Simon.”

I heard a smile in her voice.

“You, too, Elaine.”

I flipped the phone shut. I realized then that I had envisioned this sequence—a call from New York, a job that could launch a career—many times, but I had always imagined it happening for Connor. New York was the landscape of my brother's dreams.

And the landscape of Brittany's
life
! She was there, navigating crowded sidewalks and climbing the stairs of old walk-up buildings in pursuit of musty, valuable books. I had fantasized, of course, about seeing Brittany again and showing her, somehow, that I was more than she'd thought I was. Now, my voiceover work, work that Brittany may never have believed I'd get, was taking me right to her.

But making it to New York wasn't my fantasy; it was Connor's. And he was living in Chicago in a relationship with a woman who was a voiceover artist.

Nothing was happening the way it was supposed to.

That day, I gave up on my quest to match Connor's success. Life, in its messiness, would dole out parity on its own terms, or not at all.

 

•••

 

BICYCLISTS SLIPPED THROUGH
 narrow gaps between cars, and people on the sidewalk moved at speed, as if they'd heard that rain were about to pour down from the cloudless sky over Manhattan.

Traffic, though, was at a standstill. The man driving my taxi slammed his open palm on the steering wheel and gesticulated at the congestion before him, muttering something in a language I didn't understand. A block ahead of us, an enormous green truck with spinning yellow lights on top of its cab backed into the intersection. The vehicle's standard, metronomic warning beeps were barely audible over the low roar of idling engines and drowned out completely by car horns bleated in vain.

A policeman wearing sunglasses and a short-brimmed hat with a badge on the crown strolled into view between lanes, his hands tucked into the armpits of his bulletproof vest. As he moved, he shouted, “We got a water-main break! Street is closed! We're going to be here for a few minutes, so be patient!”

The policeman's message was met with a chorus of honks, which he answered with a sarcastic smile as he moved up the street.

The taxi driver, seeming to suffer from a traffic-induced claustrophobia, looked in every direction for a way out. Through the rear window and the scratched, tempered plastic that separated him from me, the driver saw that cars half a block behind us were turning off the closed street onto an open one. I counted five cars between the cab and its only escape valve. We were stuck.

“You go now,” the driver said.

The doors unlocked. I turned around in time to see him stop the meter.

“You go,” he repeated, shooing me out of the cab.

“But we're not at the hotel.”

“Two blocks east. You go.”

He glanced down at the driver's side door, and the lid of the trunk released with a thud.

I had a vague recollection that cab drivers weren't allowed to eject their passengers without good reason, but I had no way to hold the driver accountable. So I got my wallet out.

“Can I have a receipt, please?”

With an upper lip curled in against yellow teeth, the driver tore a piece of paper from a pad and thrust his hand through an opening in the transparent barrier between us. I handed over twenty-eight dollars, only twenty cents over the fare. The driver didn't complain.

I opened the door on the sidewalk side and stepped onto hot pavement. The air was clogged with an invisible cloud of exhaust disgorged by the trapped cars. Breathing shallowly, my own lips curled in a version of the snarl I'd seen on the driver's face, I pulled my bag from the trunk and closed the lid harder than necessary.

The taxi's taillights flickered, and its engine dropped into gear. I worried that the driver was about to crush my legs against the bumper of the car behind me as punishment for my display of displeasure. But as I dashed onto the sidewalk with my bag in hand, the driver pulled
forward
to within a few inches of the car in front of him. Then he threw the car into reverse and popped his back wheel up and over the curb. I jumped back as his bumper caught and toppled a metal box that, when upright, dispensed free copies of
The Onion
. With the two right tires on the sidewalk and the two left in the gutter, the driver steered his cab back toward the side street that other cars had been using to make their escape. A woman in a skirt and high heels, carrying a briefcase over her shoulder, screamed and hurried down the stairs of a garden-level convenience store. Seeing the woman take cover, a man wearing headphones glanced over his shoulder and jumped ass-first onto the sill of a restaurant's open front window.

He shouted, “What the
fuck
, man?”

People honked and yelled at the yellow sedan, but the taxi driver kept backing up until his rear wheels reached the far side of the open street, where he cut off a car making a legal right turn. The commotion caught the attention of the cop who'd made the water-main announcement. He pinched the walkie-talkie on his left breast and tucked his chin to it as the driver, his tires squealing, accelerated through the sharpest turn his vehicle was capable of making and sped out of my sight.

I stood there, waiting for someone to meet my eye and ask,
Can you believe that?
But the drivers quickly re-fixed their attention on the water-main break up ahead, and the woman and man who'd shared my experience of being nearly mowed down by the cab walked on without saying a word. Someone coming around the corner at that moment would've had no idea that, half a minute before, pedestrians had been dodging a car on the sidewalk.

I circled the intersection two blocks east three times before I found my hotel. The budget chain's logo, usually emblazoned prominently in green script, was subtly set in steel against the building's gray stone base, as if the home office had made an ill-considered attempt to capture for the chain's Manhattan franchise the underground appeal of a nightclub that had no sign.

The hotel lobby was furnished only with a few tall potted plants and four modern, cubic armchairs arranged around a narrow glass table. At reception, I was told that my room was still being cleaned.

“Oh.” I waggled and asked, “When will it be ready?”

The desk clerk, a short woman who spoke in kind, quiet tones and an English gently accented with the sounds and rhythms of her first language—Spanish, maybe—clicked a few keys on her keyboard and narrowed her eyes at the monitor in front of her.

“Ummmm, I can't say for certain. It could be another two hours. Or more.”

“Or more?” It was already late afternoon.

“I do apologize for the inconvenience,” the woman said, sliding audibly into a rehearsed customer-service spiel triggered by my suggestion of impatience. “If you like, I can hold your bag for you.”

I looked at my duffel, which contained my laptop, clothes, and what liquid toiletries were in bottles small enough to avoid seizure during the screening to which I'd submitted at O'Hare International. I was reluctant to give up the bag—traveling alone to a strange city and seeing my shampoo and deodorant confiscated at the airport had awakened an attachment to my possessions—but my shoulder and forearm were tired from lugging it, and the idea of waiting idly and indefinitely in a hotel lobby, as I'd done so many days in my Chicago apartment, made me feel ill in the gut and the head. I hoisted the bag onto the counter. The woman wrapped a tag around one of the straps, tore off a ticket with the number forty-three on it, and handed the ticket to me.

“Thanks,” I said, without meaning it.

“You're welcome, sir. And again, I'm sorry for the inconvenience.”

 

•••

 

OUT ON THE
 sidewalk, I pressed my back up against the hotel's stone façade to keep out of the way of people who, unlike me, had somewhere to go and knew where they were going. My unease with my aimlessness was exacerbated by the unshakable feeling that I didn't belong in New York, and Connor did. I was still consumed by the possibility that the script I'd be handed the next day—a script no one had bothered to send me yet—would make me an impostor in my own shot at the big time by calling for a character that only Connor could create. Having traveled this far, what choice would I have but to guess what character Connor would have made and deliver a counterfeit?