The Voiceover Artist

by Dave Reidy

  Even in the moonless darkness, I found my way to the track beaten and packed by years of daily walks—most of them my mother’s—from the back door to the mailbox. The toe of my shoe clipped an empty aluminum can, and I envisioned my father finishing a beer in his truck and rebelling pointlessly against the no-littering rule of a woman who left him once by moving out and again by dying.

  The door was unlocked. I pushed it open and stepped into the kitchen. With the lights off, it was the smells I noticed first. Some of them were odors of stagnation and rot not dissimilar to those in my own apartment when I returned from New York. But behind and beneath these were more subtle scents, a potpourri that could not be duplicated outside this house. The wood-paneled walls were still slowly releasing the pine cleanser they had absorbed during my mother’s weekly cleanings. Petrochemicals leached out of the thick, waffled soles of my father’s Caterpillar-issue steel-toe boots, which he shed at the back door each day after work. I even caught a hint of my mother’s inexpensive, drug-store perfume, which Connor and I had bought her every year for Mother’s Day and she’d dabbed on her neck and wrists on special occasions. When I recognized the signature scent of a woman who’d been dead for years, I leapt to no conclusions about the supernatural or even the power of memory. I imagined my father, already drunk as he searched for socks to wear to the Four Corners, finding a bottle of my mother’s perfume at the bottom of a drawer, holding it up in front of his eyes, and pinching the bulb of the atomizer to cover the stench he’d made and remind himself of all he has lost.

  I was no taller and no heavier than I’d been when I left home two and a half years ago, but the kitchen and everything in it were smaller than I remembered. This place and its objects—the chairs at the table, the Formica table itself—loomed large in my recollection as the set for so many of the scenes that had defined my life.

  And the man who’d played opposite me in those scenes was sitting in front of the television on the other side of the wall. I shoved my shaking hands into my pockets and took three slow waggles, trying to fortify my voice against the fear, nerves and bad memories that would beat down the gates before my stutter. Then I walked to the open doorway and leaned my head into the living room.

  The person I found sitting in my father’s chair was not my father. It was Connor.

  We said nothing at first. I’d played out so many versions of our next meeting—another fistfight, a cold-shoulder shutout, everything but a tearful embrace—that I didn’t know which version to enact when the moment came.

  “What are you doing here?” Connor asked.

  I needed a waggle. I took two. “Dad asked me to come down.”

  Connor nodded. Then he returned his attention to the old television set my father had bought when we were kids. “Me, too.”

  My first thought at hearing that my father had asked both of his sons to come home was that he must be sick, that the cancer I’d invented for him had found its mark.

  “Do you think there’s something wrong with him?” I asked.

  Connor kept his eyes on a televised boxing match. “No more than usual.”

  “But he asked us both to come down here.”

  I was hard-pressed to recall another time my father had invited the two of us anywhere. He’d always wanted Connor to himself.

  Connor’s curiosity won his attention away from the TV. “When did he call you?”

  “Monday night.”

  “Did you tell him you were coming?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But I didn’t tell him when until this morning. I left a message on the machine.”

  “He called me yesterday,” Connor said. “Friday. I’m pretty sure he was calling from the bar. He asked me to come down to see him, and I told him I’d be there the next day. But when I showed up this afternoon, he was wasn’t expecting me at all.”

  Connor let his eyes drift back to the boxing match.

  “There’s no master plan here,” he said. “Just a lonely drunk making phone calls and forgetting them.”

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “You get one guess.”

  “The bar.”

  “Bingo.”

  I waggled again. “But the truck is here.”

  Annoyed at having to clear up more of my confusion, Connor adjusted his position in the soiled nest of upholstered foam.

  “He disappeared into his room around five,” Connor said, “and he came out with his hair slicked back and announced we were going down to the Four Corners. He doesn’t have any food in this place, so I figured I might as well go. We sat at the bar for a while. I ate a couple of cheese sandwiches and had a few bourbons, and we watched the start of a football game. After a couple of hours of overhearing the assholes at the other end of the bar give each other advice about how to get out of paying child support, I was ready to leave. I paid our tab, but when I stood up to go, he told me he was staying. He asked me to stay, too, but I don’t think he really wanted me to.”

  Connor let this statement sit for a moment, as if he was still trying to get his head around the idea that our father would rather drink alone at the bar than at home with the son who had traveled 175 miles to see him. My most recent phone conversation with my father had given me a way to understand that choice. He was splitting the evening. He had spent the first part of it with Connor. Now that he was good and drunk, he’d spend the rest of it with the malignant memory of the last time he was at the Four Corners with me.

  “Anyway,” Connor continued, “there was no fucking way I was spending all night in that bar, watching him get shitfaced. I told him I’d take the truck home and swing by to pick him up a little before closing time.”

  He drew a short, horizontal arc in the air with his finger, inviting me to look around the dark living room.

  “So here I am,” he said. “Waiting.”

  With our immediate questions answered, the conversation petered out, and in the silence that followed, Connor and I resumed our long, cold war. I went to the back door for my duffel bag and carried it through the living room without even glancing in his direction. We were on our own again.

  The door to my old bedroom was closed, just as it always had been when I was home. I’d been so insistent that people knock on this door before entering that I very nearly rapped the particleboard myself before twisting the brass-yellow plastic handle.

  I dropped my bag inside the door and flipped the light switch. One of the bulbs in the frosted-glass fixture on the ceiling still worked. The doorless closet on the far wall was empty but for a few hangers on the untreated wooden rod. The mattress and box spring were stripped of sheets and blankets. The drawers of my dresser were closed. I opened one of them, and then another. They were empty, too. Except for a thick, even layer of dust on the surfaces, everything was exactly as I had left it the day I moved out. It seemed that my father hadn’t opened my bedroom door since I closed it almost three years before.

  I walked around to the other side of my bed and picked up the radio that had been my only portal to the world of beautiful voices. To commemorate my move to Carbondale, I’d purchased a new, digital clock radio—the same radio now atop my bedside table in Chicago. I had taken some pride in leaving behind the talisman I’d clutched in my speechless isolation. But as I held the plastic box of wires and circuits for the first time since leaving home without it, I realized that its significance to me had changed entirely. This radio was no longer my only way in to a big city of recording studios I would never see. I was living in Radioland, and my voice was being heard on radios like this one. I was no longer on the outside, listening in, but on the inside, speaking out.

  But I was not speaking out in the sense of saying something brave or important—not on the radio and not in life. Not often enough, anyway. Just minutes before, with Connor, I’d allowed myself to fall silent while a moment of truth passed into oblivion. Even standing in the house in which I’d reclaimed it, I had been unwilling to use my voice to upend the unlivable status
quo of things between my brother and me.

  With my old radio in my hands, I could see that my relationship with Connor awaited a transfiguration that only my voice could provide. I’d have to forgive my brother for Brittany. I’d have to say so—and mean it.

  I understood, too, that I should be the first of us to forgive the other. It was my father, with his pride in the face of my silence, who’d taught his sons not to apologize. But it was I, with my refusal to pardon my father, who had taught Connor not to forgive. And the first step in my forgiving Connor wasn’t an apology from him, but an apology from me.

  Forehead sweating, I walked back into the living room and stood within Connor’s line of sight to the television. He didn’t look at me. With the side of his index finger across his upper lip and the rest of his hand forming a canopy over his mouth, he watched a prize fight that was clearly boring him.

  “Connor,” I said. “I want to say—”

  What I would have given, in that moment, for a printed script. I had the voice I needed, but no fluency in the language of apology.

  “—I’m very sorry for what happened at the comedy club.”

  No good. No responsibility.

  “I mean,” I said, waggling freely while my brother ignored me, “I’m sorry for what I did. To Erika. And to you.”

  Connor made no response.

  “There’s no excuse for it,” I said.

  And then I almost did something that would have turned my apology into an attack. I nearly said, What I did is about the worst thing a guy can do to his brother.

  “I apologize,” I said instead. “And if you give me the chance, I’ll apologize to Erika. I want to, I mean. I owe her that.”

  Keeping his eyes on the television, Connor lifted his lips above his hand just long enough to say, “Forget it.”

  Forget it.

  Forgetting was not forgiveness. Connor was doing what we’d always done: ignoring the wrong that one of us has done the other and moving on to do the next one. I couldn’t blame him. I was the one who’d taught him not to forgive.

  I rallied myself with the idea that Connor’s failure to forgive me changed nothing, that what mattered more—what would change things—was my forgiving Connor.

  I took two long, loose waggles. Then I said, “I saw Brittany.”

  Connor’s didn’t move a muscle, but his cheeks darkened to a red made violet in the blue light of the televised boxing ring.

  I took another waggle. “She told me what happened.”

  I had used that phrase—“what happened”—on purpose, offering Connor the passivity and unaccountability I’d refused myself.

  Connor picked up the remote from the snack tray to the right of my father’s chair and turned off the television. The tube sizzled with static electricity and cast a dull gray light that faded slowly.

  I didn’t know if Connor was getting ready to say something, or if the act of turning off the television and plunging us into darkness was his answer. Then I heard the voice that sounded so much like mine but was not.

  “Erika told me a hundred times that I should be the one to tell you,” he said. “But I couldn’t even imagine telling you.”

  Connor seemed confounded that his imagination, the source of his great virtuosity, could fail him. But I understood that Connor had been unable to envision a confession that didn’t also require him to say he was sorry, and apologizing to me had proven impossible for him to imagine. What astonished me is that Connor had found a way to tell Erika what he and Brittany had done. In his position, I’m not sure I ever would have.

  “But now that you know,” Connor continued, “and now that I know how you found out—”

  He stopped there.

  Then he said, “Erika was right.”

  I figured that this admission, permeated with audible regret, was as close as Connor would come to making an apology. And close was close enough.

  I was still searching for the right words to use in accepting Connor’s near apology when he said, “I’m sorry, Simon.”

  In a darkness that made a radio—no faces, just voices—of my father’s living room, I could hear that Connor meant what he was saying.

  I rushed through the three waggles I needed, conscious that each second I delayed increased my brother’s uncertainty in unfamiliar territory.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  But I immediately worried that “okay” didn’t go far enough, so I uttered the foreign-feeling phrase: “I forgive you.”

  “Erika said you would.” Two sharp exhalations—Connor’s rueful laughing at himself—whistled in his nose. “She was right about that, too.”

  It was done. I’d apologized to Connor. He’d apologized to me. And I had forgiven him.

  There was no sense that the earth had shifted on its axis. Even in an unlit room, in the house in which Connor and I had grown up, our exchange of apologies and my granting of forgiveness felt more transactional than transcendent. At best, it seemed that Connor and I had found a tool to use in the superficial upkeep of a relationship that remained in disrepair.

  In the silence, I put unspoken words to my anxiety: Why don’t I feel any different?

  The image, when it came, seemed to deepen the room’s darkness. Covering the ground around the crumbling foundation and rotting structure of my relationship with Connor, piled in waist-high mounds like discarded shingles, were the uncountable, still-unaccounted-for wrongs—punches and lies and public humiliations—we’d inflicted on one another over the years. Each of us had apologized, but only for the two most devastating injuries among so many sustained.

  “What is it?” Connor asked.

  I waggled. “There’s so much more to apologize for.”

  Working backward chronologically, I picked the time I stood in a fieldhouse near Lake Michigan, with rain pouring down all around us, and discounted Connor’s success in Chicago by reminding him that none of it had won him any work in New York. Having made one apology and accepted another, I could scarcely wait to apologize again.

  I took a waggle and found I needed another one. Then another. Then another. An attempt to force out a word ended in a silent dry heave. I let my jaw hang loose and started a series of deep, slow rotations, waiting for any sign that my stutter was weakening, but its stranglehold only tightened.

  “Look at me, Simon.”

  Through tears of strain, my eyes distinguished the outline of Connor’s head and torso as he leaned forward in my father’s recliner.

  “We’re even.”

  And with those two words, my brother gave me all the apology, forgiveness, and validation I’d ever wanted from him.

  •••

  IT WAS A little before one in the morning when I steered my father’s truck into Leyton’s town square. The restaurant where I had worked as a busboy was closed for the night, its windows dark and the parking spaces in front of it empty. At the center of the square, a limestone obelisk, monument to the war dead who’d attended Leyton High, reflected feebly the light of a single flood lamp.

  I parked across the street from a vacant storefront that had been a candy store when I was a kid and stepped out of the truck. The wind blew unbridled across the surrounding farmland. I hunched my shoulders up toward my ears.

  I passed the unlit window displays of the stationery store and hardware store. The stationer’s featured an array of hardback journals, scrapbooking kits, and letterpress greeting cards on a three-tiered landscape of red and green satin, each item carefully arranged on a dusting of artificial snow. The hardware-store owners had pinned their hopes for foot traffic on a narrow plot of matted artificial grass and the merchandise—two rakes, three spades, and a snow shovel—hanging from brackets on whitewashed pegboard.

  Two trucks and a car were parked in front of the Four Corners. The hood of the nearer truck reflected the red light of the neon sign in one of the bar’s high windows. My mind raced through fantasies I’d nursed since I was a kid—that I’d walk into the bar wi
th the baseball bat we kept in our shed and club the man who had taunted my father and me; that I’d throw an angry cottonmouth into the man’s lap as payback for his asking if I were part snake; that I’d stand between the tables and bar, staring in brave, stony silence at anyone who dared to speak to me until one or more of the patrons picked me up by the shirt collar and threw me into the street. Even as I neared thirty years of age, these unlived reprisals were still immediate enough to make me sweat. I took three waggles and reminded myself that things were different than they’d been when I was seven. Now, I could speak for myself.

  I pulled open the door and walked in. A couple of guys sat near the back with their arms crossed on the table and their heads over their cocktail glasses. They couldn’t have been the men my father and I had encountered the last time I was here. They looked closer to my age than my father’s. A woman stared down into the fluorescent glow of the jukebox while a tall young man leaned unsteadily to whisper in her ear, repeatedly bumping the side of her head with the brim of his ball cap.

  My father was sitting alone. Years of evenings spent hunched on a barstool seemed to have made him squat, and the hair at the back of his head was grayer and greasier than I remembered. So thick was the air of isolation around my father that I wondered if the bartender—another man I didn’t recognize—was rewashing perfectly clean pint glasses at the far end of the bar to avoid standing anywhere near him.

  I took a few steps toward the bar. I wanted to see my father’s face. His lips were thin, and his mouth hung open as he stared up at the television. I watched his eyelids close slowly—I thought he might be falling asleep—but they opened up again at the same sluggish pace. The man I’d fought for years in silence had been worn down by time, liquor, and a loneliness that was, at least in part, of my making.

  I pulled out the stool next to my father’s and sat down, fixing my gaze on the TV. He turned his head to look at me and, from the corner of my eye, I watched him try to decide if I was real. Then my father returned his attention to the television and waited for me to tell him why I’d come here and what I wanted from him. But I didn’t say anything. I kept my seat on the stool next to his, and we watched two football teams from universities out west play to an outcome that didn’t matter to either of us. That we did these things at the Four Corners made them a reconciliation of the only kind my father and I could have achieved: the kind that didn’t require either of us to say a word.