The Voiceover Artist (4 page)

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
1970
s, 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.