The Voiceover Artist

by Dave Reidy

  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 bab
ies?”

  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.

  “Leaving you wasn’t easy,” I said.

  “It wasn’t? You came into my living room, told me you were leaving, and left.”

  I said nothing.

  “You can’t lie to me,” he said. “I know you.”

  I came to a sudden halt and shoved Simon in the chest. “You know me! You don’t know me like you think you do! I stayed with you months longer than I should have. I couldn’t leave you. I was so sure the next guy would make me even worse than I was.”

  People streamed past us in both directions. I was crying by then, and Simon’s eyes were wet. Neither thing stopped what I’d started.

  “Then that baby died in my arms. And I couldn’t let go of her. After twenty minutes, the nurses had to pry her out of my arms. The feeling of holding that body and being afraid to let it go was awful, Simon, and what made it so awful was how familiar it was. So I did something I knew would make it impossible for me to be with you. The night your brother came to visit, I fucked him. While you were asleep.”

  Simon shook his head and opened his mouth, but no words came out.

  “I knew what I was doing,” I said. “I knew what your brother meant to you. And when it was over, as hateful as I felt, I had what I needed to leave you. I had something that would make a lie of everything we did if we stayed together.”

  I made a sound—one of those sad, not-a-laugh laughs—and wiped my nose.

  “Leaving you wasn’t easy, Simon. It was really fucking hard.”

  I heard in that statement an authority I’d lacked just moments before.

  Leaving you wasn’t easy.

  I’d paid my last debt to the past tense. I’d finished the work of leaving Simon.

  Simon looked at me as if I were a stranger. I guess he was seeing the whole of me as I was. Without another word—his stutter may have made it impossible for him to say anything—Simon walked away. He didn’t look back. I watched him out of the corner of my eye to be s
ure.

  When he disappeared around a corner, I took off my sunglasses and dabbed my eyes with a tissue. Then I returned the mirrored lenses to my face and hurried to the subway with my head down, hoping to escape the notice of everyone around me. By the time the train made its first stop in Brooklyn, I was okay—better than okay, even.

  I was finally free of Simon Davies.

  13

  Simon

  I SPENT $150 of my own money—half of what I’d earned in New York—to move up my return flight to the first one out of LaGuardia on Sunday morning, the day after I saw Brittany. I was on the ground at O’Hare at 8 a.m. and in my apartment on Bartlett Street before nine.

  I opened the door to three days of trapped August heat. The smell of the apartment recalled my least favorite duty as a busboy: running food waste out to a full dumpster on a humid day. The heat and the smell and three days away opened my eyes to the way I’d been living. The place was a mess. There were two open garbage bags near the back door, dishes unevenly stacked in a sink holding inches of fetid water, three plates smeared with ketchup on the table next to the couch. I took out the trash, washed the dishes, and scrubbed the kitchen sink, bathtub and toilet. Then I threw open a couple of windows, imagining that, on a Sunday morning, a Lake Michigan breeze might not carry a cloud of diesel exhaust into the living room.

  The chemical lemon scents and the sight of dirty water swirling down drains gave me energy and motivation to keep cleaning—I’d surveyed the dust and grit on my floors and the funky-smelling pile of bedding on my mattress—but I was out of time. The plan I’d made required that I be early.

  I took a quick shower and dressed in my least wrinkled pants and a white, button-down shirt that smelled clean, at least. I hung my blue blazer on the knob of the front door. Then I found my lector’s workbook buried under unopened mail on my desk. With the windows open and the ancient air conditioner humming ineffectually in my bedroom, I sat on the couch to prepare the day’s readings. I was going back to St. Asella’s, if anyone there would have me.