The Voiceover Artist (32 page)

“It's funny you should mention the Yankees.”

Still smiling, Earley walks to the backside of the recording console so that all of us can see his face. He's in complete control of the room. I can do nothing but watch.

“You know how many seats there are in the new Yankee Stadium, kid?” he says, twisting at the hips to face Michael.

Michael is nervously sliding his thumbnail between his two front teeth. He shrugs. “Forty thousand?”

“Fifty-thousand, two-hundred ninety-one,” Earley answers. “It's fucking huge. And from at least a few thousand of those seats, the game is basically unwatchable. A bad angle or obstructed view or both. Yankees' ticket prices are the highest in baseball, in a shitty economy, and more than half the home games are against losing, no-profile teams. Despite
all
that,” he says, clearing invisible smoke from the air in front of his eyes, “the Yankees led the American League in attendance last year. You know how they did it?”

The question isn't rhetorical. Earley is waiting for an answer.

“I don't know, man,” Derrion says, sitting on his little rolling chair. “Yankee tickets sell themselves.”

“Bullshit,” Earley says. “Not for a weekday game against Minnesota, they don't.”

He looks around at each of us—Michael, Simon, then me—waiting for someone else to venture a guess. No one says anything.

“People who know sports marketing know how the Yankees fill their seats, even against bad teams. The Yankees have Terri Schorr.”

I want to throw up. I don't know how Earley found out—by stalking Terri online, maybe, or over lunch with someone in the Yankees front office who knew our family growing up—and I have no idea how long he's been waiting to tear off my mask.

“Terri Schorr is the best woman in sports marketing.”

The way Earley hits
woman
makes me want to scream. Earley and men like him aren't good enough to carry my sister's briefcase.

Then Earley looks at me and pays my sister a compliment: “She could sell out a Red Bulls game.”

And you can't, Lily.
Earley doesn't say the words, but everyone in the control room hears them.

“I'd kill to work with Terri Schorr,” Earley says, still looking at me. “I've been trying to get a meeting with her or her boss for years. But where am I?” He raises his palms and looks around with disgust at the analog soundboard, the unfashionable recessed lighting and worn carpet. “I'm stuck in fucking soccer. With Terri's little sister.”

Michael's eyes dart to me. “But your last name is Eisenberg.”

I'm not sure Michael knows my
first
name. I've never heard him use it. Later, when I can think straight, I'll find it interesting that the surname that pegs me as a Jew was right on the tip of his tongue.

Simon is sweating from the forehead and the upper lip, and his jaw muscles are flexing beneath the skin. He wants out of here, I can see that, but I can only let him go as far as the sound booth. I don't remember the last time I needed rescuing, but I need Simon to save me now.

“We should get started, Simon,” I say.

Simon clears his throat again—audibly, this time. “Okay,” he says.

The two syllables sound clipped, as if he can't quite get enough air.

I worry that Earley will try to stop Simon—
Stick around, guy, there's more to tell!
—but he lets him leave for the sound booth. Earley picks up an open folding chair, carries it past Michael, and plops it down, backwards, between my seat and Derrion's. He straddles the chair's built-in cushion and props his forearms on the aluminum backrest, like a kid trying to act cool in a Molly Ringwald movie, or a copy of a copy of James Dean. I'm sure Earley has used the same stance when he sits down next to a woman in a low-cut shirt and offers to buy a round of drinks for her and her girlfriends. As he stares at me, daring me meet his eye, all I can feel is his menace.

The moment Simon puts on his headphones, I am in his ear.

“When you're ready, Simon, do a read-through so Derrion can get some levels.”

Simon nods, then he nods again, and only then does it hit me that he isn't nodding. He is loosening up his neck, maybe, or indulging a tic he cannot control any longer. He starts to read. His voice is raspy and tight, as if the air in his lungs isn't air at all, but hot tobacco smoke. I steal a glance at Derrion. His hand is on the mouse, but it isn't moving. He is staring through the glass, wincing at Simon.

“Why don't you give us another one,” I say to Simon.

Simon rolls his head around and around, as if he's trying to induce vertigo, and then he speaks. In the first sentence, he interrupts himself twice to swallow.

“All the times you heard me say I wanted to work for the Yankees,” Earley says.

His blood is up, but his volume is down. I'm the only audience Earley needs now.

“I must have sounded pathetic,” Earley says, goosing the word pathetic with a hiss.

Simon is looking at me through the glass, his eyebrows arched, as if he's waiting for me to say that his last reading was good enough and he can go home now. I decide against another read-through. I gamble that, for Simon, rehearsals are meaningless because they can't generate the pressure of a real take.

“Okay, Simon, we're going do to one for real now,” I say, pressing the mic button. “Do you need water or anything?”

Or hot tea? Or whiskey? Anything to let out the voice I heard in Bill Albert's office.

Simon shakes his head. He isn't speaking unless he has to.

“Okay, then.”

“Take one,” Derrion says.

“When you're ready, Simon.”

Simon begins another anaphylactic non-performance of my script, and Earley picks up his monologue where he left it.

“I asked myself why you never put me in touch with your sister,” he says. “At first, I figured you thought I wasn't good enough—not good enough for the Yankees, not good enough for Terri.” A laugh escapes from his nose. “Now I know different.”

“Let's try another take, Simon,” I say.

“Take two,” Derrion says.

Simon sounds as if he's being garroted from behind. He does neck rolls between each throttled sentence.

“This isn't about what you think of me,” Earley says. “It's all about what your sister thinks of you.”

“Stop it, Kevin,” I say, quietly. “Please.” Then, over the mic, I say, “We're ready for another one, Simon. Try to relax, okay?”

“Take three,” Derrion says.

Simon begins again. I close my eyes and listen to the asphyxiation of my commercial and my career.

“Your sister doesn't think
you're
good enough for the Yankees,” Earley says.

I say nothing.

“If she did, you wouldn't be fucking around in this minor-league sport. You'd be in the big leagues already!”

When I open my eyes, Simon Davies is staring at me, helpless.

Save me.

“It's a good thing you never mentioned me to your sister,” Earley says. “I don't want your stink on me.”

I stand up suddenly, sending my wheeled chair into the wall of hard drives and tape decks behind me.

“Yo,” Derrion says.

He is scolding me for my carelessness with his equipment, but I don't apologize. I jerk open the control-room door.

“That's it,” Earley yells after me. “Run out of here! Prove your sister right!”

I cover the fifteen feet to the sound-booth door with quick, choppy steps, fighting back the oncoming wetness in my eyes. I try to get angry—
Fuck Kevin Earley, fuck the Red Bulls, fuck that fucking intern
—but when the anger comes, it's useless. Empty.

As air rushes past the open sound-booth door and into the hallway, Simon whips his head around. He looks like a terrified child.

“Come out here, Simon,” I say, holding the door open. “Please.”

Simon takes off his headphones and carefully hangs them over the top edge of the music stand. I get the idea he is certain he is being fired. I
would
fire him if I could replace him in the next fifteen minutes, but I can't. My options are Simon or nothing.

I let the door close and we stand face to face in the weird, soundproof silence of the hallway.

“Look,” I say to Simon. “When I told you the script was just about soccer, I lied. It's about me. I imagined myself as a fan in the stands, I saw the game I've played all my life, and I wrote down everything there is to love about it. The
love
in it”—I mean the script, but I point at the sound booth—“is mine. I'm the human being in the script.”

I could go on. I could tell him that the language is borrowed from baseball and why that matters, that this spot is my only chance at the dream I've been chasing for years, that if this commercial doesn't happen, the detour I've taken around my sister's success will become something else—a permanent rerouting away from the life I want and my opportunity to measure up, on my own terms, to the great Terri Schorr. But I don't say any of these things.

What I do say is vague and incomplete, but the moment I say it is the closest I've come to standing naked in front of a strange man. “I need this to work.”

Simon's eyes stay locked on mine, but his rigid neck relaxes. He drops his chin just slightly and lifts it, then makes the same pair of movements two more times—a perfectly normal nodding of the head.

“Me, too,” he says.

They're just two words, but he got them out, and they give me the feeling that Simon understands me.

“Okay,” I say.

Simon nods—normally, again—and turns to the door. With his hand on the stained balsa wood, he rotates his head slowly through his neck's full range of motion. Then he pushes the door open and disappears into the booth. The ritualism of Simon's movement is chilling. Standing alone in the hallway, I'm confronted again with the possibility that I have rented damaged goods.

When I return to the control room, Earley is on his feet and holding court again.

“You get ahold of your sister?” he asks me. “Is she stopping by to save your ass?”

I ignore Earley and meet Derrion's eye. “Do another take.”

Derrion's silence and stillness are his way of asking me why anyone would waste the time and server space recording another unusable take from Mr. Tourette's in there. I stare down at my script, pretending not to understand Derrion's question. Eventually, he spins around in his four-wheeled chair to face the console, clicks his mouse twice, and holds down the mic button at his station.

“Take four,” he says.

When Simon opens his mouth, the voice that fills the control room has the same tone and tenor as the voice I heard coming from Bill Albert's office, but it isn't Simon's voice. It's
mine.
Simon has become the fan I imagined when I wrote this spot and the person I hope it will make me. In his humble, hopeful delivery of the words, I hear my own aspirations. And as he begins his rich rendition of the second to last sentence of my script, I pull my eyes away from Simon—my ears and my heart he won't let go—and find that everyone in the control room—even Michael, even Earley—is absorbed in his performance.

Simon Davies has saved my ass. We have saved each other.

12

 

Brittany Case

 

I KNEW THAT Simon would call some day. I didn't know if he would be mad, heartbroken or just confused, but I knew he'd call. So when his number came up on my phone that Saturday morning, I wasn't surprised. I was relieved. What needed to happen was happening.

I started trying to disentangle myself from Simon long before I actually broke up with him. I worked slowly, at first, snipping the strings between us with cold shoulders and sharp words. Then life handed me a machete and I swung it. Simon's brother, Connor, came to visit us in Carbondale, and I slept with him. That act gave me the emotional wiggle-room I needed to rent an apartment, sight unseen, in Brooklyn, and to tell Simon I'd be moving on without him.

It wasn't until after repaying the money I'd borrowed from Simon that I realized I wasn't as free as I thought. Cheating on Simon had kept me tethered to him. Walking to work, or sitting on my couch with a book and a mug of chai, I would lose minutes wondering how and when—to my mind, these were the only unknowns—Simon would find out what had happened. Would Connor drop it on him during an argument? Or would Simon, poring over the last days of our relationship, looking for any explanation for our break-up but the simplest one—that I couldn't love him anymore—stumble upon some telling detail? A missing condom in the box under our bed, maybe, or a sleep memory of the smell of sex on a night we didn't have it? It might have been better for both of us, in the long run, if I'd admitted everything while breaking up with him. But I hadn't—I hadn't seen the need—and I was afraid that calling up Simon any time after that, just to tell him I'd slept with his brother, would make me the kind of crazy ex-girlfriend I'd always detested. Simon would have to find out without my help, and when he did, he'd call me. And I believed that when I'd let him say whatever he had to say about my sleeping with Connor, the last thread between Simon and me would be cut.

But when Simon called, he didn't mention his brother. He asked me to meet him for coffee.

Simon doesn't have the guile to set up an ambush.

He doesn't know,
I thought.
Fuck.

I didn't want to meet Simon for coffee. I had no interest in giving him the chance to prove to either one of us that he's over me, and if there was something he wished he'd said the day I told him we were finished, I didn't want to hear it. But I took the gamble that I'd find some way, short of telling him about Connor and me, to make this coffee chat our last meeting.

He offered to come to Brooklyn, but I said I'd meet him in Manhattan. Part of what I liked about Brooklyn is that it seemed impossible that Simon could exist there. I told him to meet me at a Starbucks just over the bridge from my apartment.

When I arrived, Simon was already at a table for two. He stood up when he saw me. I went straight for the coffee line.

“Do you need anything?” I said.

Seeing his head shake before he spoke, I felt a slight twinge, the same sensation I'd experienced when I was cleaning out my grandfather's closet after his funeral and caught a whiff of his living scent.

“No,” Simon said, pointing to the paper cup sleeved in cardboard on the table in front of him. “I'm good.”

When my iced coffee was ready, I walked quickly to the table and sat down across from Simon, keeping my sunglasses on. When we were together, Simon had been able to intuit—not always, but often—what I was feeling just by looking at me. I never liked that.

“How are you?” Simon asked.

“I'm fine,” I said. “How are you?”

“Pretty good.”

He seemed pretty good. He had showered and mussed his hair around with some kind of product, which I knew he did only in advance of what he called, in his sickeningly precious, provincial way, “special occasions.” He was skinnier than I remembered but, then again, I was skinnier, too. Living on very little money was easier to do cohabiting in Carbondale than it was living alone in Brooklyn. I guessed the same was true of living alone in Chicago. And I was certain that Simon was living alone. His hair and good posture couldn't hide his hangdog loneliness.

“So you're here for work?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “An agency flew me in for a voiceover session.”

“They
flew
you in!” I said. “Impressive.”

I couldn't let that slide.
Flew me in?
As if they would have made him take the bus from Chicago?

Simon closed his eyes and nodded, embarrassed by his grandstanding and, I'm sure, a little hurt by my calling him on it.

“How'd it go?” I asked.

“Not bad,” he said. “Getting through security was a little—”

“I meant the job, Simon.”

“Oh,” he said, embarrassed again, but trying not to be. “It got off to a rough start. But we got there. Eventually.”

By then, I understood that part of the reason Simon had invited me out was to show me that he had dragged himself up from mute to voiceover artist, just like he'd said he would. I saw a chance to cross off one more item on the list of things Simon might resurface to ask of me.

“You really made it happen, Simon,” I said. “Congratulations.”

“It's just one job.”

“I'm sure you'll get other jobs.”

I believed that, too. Sitting across from him in New York, I had the disturbing feeling that Simon could be my equal in something other than our fathers having fucked us around.

“How's the rare books business?” he asked, smiling kindly.

“Good.”

“Had any sales?”

“A few, yeah.”

“That's great!”

He waited for me to elaborate, but I did not.

“So it's going well,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“That's great,” Simon said again. “I'm happy for you.”

“Thanks.”

The truth was, I had sold zero books. I hadn't even built an inventory. For months, I'd been scouring estate sales and collection liquidations and coming away empty-handed. Long-time dealers with brick-and-mortar storefronts on the Upper East Side and climate-controlled storerooms in the Bronx appraised the collections, bought up the bargains for themselves, and overpriced what they left behind, shutting out the small-time competition. I was not in the rare-books business yet—I was working at the enormous Barnes and Noble on Court Street—but I was not about to let the narrative of this get-together become:
Simon is living his dream, and Brittany isn't.
The lie wasn't all about pride, though. I was making sure that Simon wouldn't decide I needed help and try to help me.

“Are you still volunteering?” Simon asked. “With the babies?”

Jesus,
I thought.
This again.

While we were together, Simon had started a couple of times to discuss his concern that my feelings for him were too much like my feelings for the inconsolable, unviable infants I held every week as a NICU volunteer. I'd never allowed him to finish that thought. Now, I recognized that Simon's question about the babies was his roundabout way of asking about my feelings for him.

“I don't do that anymore.”

“Why not?”

“It finally dawned on me that those babies aren't my responsibility.”

I stared at him from behind my sunglasses until he dropped his eyes to the cup in his hands.

Then Simon shook some of the tension from his neck, looked up at me, and did something he'd never done before.

“How are things with your father?” he said.

“My
father
?”

“Yeah.”

It had been a stated rule of our relationship that Simon was not to mention my father, under any circumstances. Except to say that my father could rot in prison and
then
in hell for all I cared, I'd discussed him with Simon only once. In that conversation—it was more of a monologue, really; once I got going, Simon didn't say anything—I was as honest as I'd ever been with anyone, even my mother, about how badly my father's stealing from me and lying to me had fucked me up, which made it the best and worst conversation I'd ever had. I was wiping my eyes with the heel of my hands when I said, “I don't want to talk about this any more. Don't ever bring it up.”

And while we were together, Simon never said a word to me about my father.

Which means that Simon knew the risk he was taking when he asked after my father that Saturday afternoon. There was nothing to stop me from standing up and storming out. He must have realized by then that I was scorching the earth between us and decided he had nothing to lose.

On any other day, I would have told Simon to fuck off. That day, I couldn't.

“I got a letter from him,” I said.

Simon needed two of his headshakes. “You did?”

I nodded. “Yesterday.”

Another headshake. “What did it say?”

The letter was still in my purse, where I'd stuffed it the moment that reading it became too much for me, but I remembered everything I'd seen.

“He described a typical day,” I said. “He gets up, he showers, he eats. He trades sob stories in the prison yard. The guards pace back and forth in front of the fence, half-listening to them. Then he eats again and does some reading. Then dinner. Then bed.”

Simon didn't say anything. I kept going.

“He told me my mom is divorcing him. I've been on her to do it for years, and I guess she's finally going through with it—unless he's just lying for sympathy.”

I was angry with myself for saying these things—for saying anything at all about my father—but I took some pleasure in how well Simon was listening. No one had been listening much to me lately.

“He's getting out a few months early, apparently,” I said. “For good behavior.”

Simon let the silence billow up and around us. Then he said, “What does he want?”

I smiled at how well Simon understood a man he'd never met. My father always wants something.

“Forgiveness,” I said.

“How do you know he wants forgiveness?”

“He asked me for it,” I said. “He used the word.”

Simon looked away, seeming to weigh what he was learning about my father against what he already knew. “Did he apologize?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Has he ever apologized?”

“No.”

The confused expression on his face told me that Simon was asking himself a question I'd already answered for myself:
How can he expect to be forgiven if he doesn't apologize first?

I hoped my father would apologize some day. When he did, I'd know that I'd broken him. Whether he apologized or not, I would deny my father everything he hadn't managed to steal from me.

“I'm sorry, Brittany.”

These profoundly unhelpful words meant that Simon wouldn't try to fix something he never could.

Here's the thing: Simon had me then. If he'd kept pulling away, if he'd said, “Well, I've got to go,” I would've invited Simon to Brooklyn and, after a few drinks, into my bed. That's the sickness you deal with as the daughter of a father like mine. A man with more cunning than Simon had—a man more like my father—would've had me for one more night, at least.

But what Simon did was try to pull me closer.

“When was the last time you had a conversation like this?” he said.

I leaned away, repulsed. “Don't.”

“I mean it. Have you ever had a conversation like this with anyone else?”

“Conversation isn't the end-all, Simon.”

“Yes!” he said, as if I'd finally realized something he'd known all along. “It's the means to an end!
We
are the end!”

Just like that, I was sick of him again. I wasn't sure I'd done enough to make this my last conversation with Simon, but I couldn't take another minute of it.

“Goodbye, Simon.”

The legs of my chair groaned as they skidded back across the ceramic tiles. I picked up my purse and walked out, leaving my coffee on the table.

I was halfway to the subway station when Simon shouted in my ear.

“You know why you always leave?”

“Jesus!” I said, startled.

“Because leaving is easy.” Simon took three headshakes. “Being with someone is hard. Some people can't even do it. You
can
do it, though—with me, you can—but you won't, because it makes you vulnerable. And it's just so
easy
to stand up and leave.”

I was too self-conscious to stop walking. We were that couple you see having an argument on the street, giving every passerby a two-second glimpse into the dysfunction of a relationship, and I didn't want to be any kind of couple with Simon.