The Voiceover Artist

by Dave Reidy

  “We’re about to get soaked,” I said.

  It was a weather prediction even I could get right, and as soon as I’d made it, the rain started coming down, and hard. Simon and I stood up and looked around. A cluster of tall oaks was the only cover nearby, and they made better lightning bait than shelter.

  Sidestepping in its direction, I shouted to Simon, “There’s a fieldhouse between the softball fields and the golf course.”

  Simon nodded and wiped his wet hair out of his eyes.

  I started to run, and Simon followed. We stayed on the concrete bike path at first, dodging the already overflowing puddles. Then a man, a jogger headed in our direction, was nearly blown down onto the concrete barrier’s second level by a gust of wind. He caught his balance at the last moment and, when he headed inland, Simon and I did, too.

  We cut across the softball fields, the green of the outfield almost fluorescent against the gray light all around it. It had been a long time since I’d run anywhere, and even longer since Simon and I were crossing a wide-open stretch of land together, running as fast as we could. What carried my feet over and into the mud puddles was my sudden confidence that a mistake I’d made more than three months before would not undo every good thing that had happened since.

  We cut through a row of young trees between the softball fields and the golf course, and I saw the fieldhouse. I called for Simon’s attention and pointed it out. A few seconds later, he passed me. Now that he knew where we were going, Simon was trying to get there first. I let him: I didn’t need this win. Simon could have it.

  I ran through the water spilling in sheets from the eaves of the old fieldhouse and came to a stop in the narrow, covered courtyard between its two wings. Simon was doubled over with his head down and his hands on his knees, breathing heavily and spitting frothy saliva from his mouth. I pulled off my t-shirt and wrung it out. Vapor rose from my bare arms in the cool, humid air. I wiped some of the water from my eyes with my hands and peeked up and out from under the eaves. It was still raining, but not quite as hard as it had been, and the western sky, behind the storm front, was a bright, milky white. Catching my breath, I watched the rain spill over the fields and had a moment of good feeling, the kind usually killed by any reminder that my comedy hadn’t taken me to New York yet. But this moment seemed to spread out in time and even in space, wrapping itself around the fieldhouse and the softball fields and the oak trees. Erika seemed to have done the impossible: carved out a place for some happiness alongside my ambition.

  Then I felt Simon’s eyes on me. He was standing a few yards away, his waterlogged t-shirt stretched unevenly across his bony shoulders, giving me the cold, hard look I remembered from the days I’d invaded his bedroom to mock him. But I wasn’t making fun of him as we stood in the fieldhouse. I wasn’t saying anything.

  “What about you?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  There were a couple of headshakes before he said, “How’re things going with your comedy?”

  I had almost forgotten this part. Simon’s success and failure couldn’t be measured on their own terms. He needed to hold them up next to mine.

  “Things are going pretty well, I guess,” I said. “I’m in a two-man show at the Improviso Theatre. It’s a good gig. I’m glad to have it.”

  That was all I wanted to say. But Simon wasn’t finished with me.

  “Have you done a show yet?”

  With Simon back in his measuring mode, I found I could read him again. And what I read was him asking, How real is this gig?

  “We opened a month ago,” I said.

  “How are the houses?”

  Is anyone making any money on this show?

  “Good.” I stopped short of saying the houses were sold out. Offering that detail felt like taking Simon’s bait.

  “Nice,” Simon said, nodding. “When is the show?”

  “Thursdays at 10.”

  That’s primetime, I thought, but I kept my mouth shut.

  “Where is it, again?”

  This question was Simon’s way of telling me he’d never heard of the Improviso.

  “The Improviso Theatre,” I said, enunciating the words clearly. I nearly added, Did I stutter?

  “What’s the name of the show?”

  I smiled. Simon knew that I’d been in shows with terrible titles like “Cirrhosis, Where Art Thou?” and “Cubs and Bulls and Bears: Oh My!” He might have been banking on the answer to this question undercutting everything else I’d said. I had long admired Raam Kersati’s righteous hatred of goofball comedy shit like silly names for shows, but I’d never appreciated it as fully as I did in this moment.

  “Raam and Connor,” I said.

  “Raam?”

  “It’s a guy’s name. Raam. And Connor. That’s the name of the show.”

  Simon smiled then, too. The expression looked genuine to me, as if the part of him that wanted good things for both of us had fought through to his face.

  “You’re a marquee name,” he said.

  “It’s a very small marquee.”

  Simon laughed, startling me. His voice was my baritone, but Simon’s laugh—a high-pitched, clipped eruption—was all his own. I wasn’t used to the sound, but I liked it. I wondered if I would’ve spent less energy antagonizing my brother and more trying to entertain him if Simon, in his muteness all those years ago, had found some way to laugh.

  The smile faded, though. Now that Simon had his voice and an agent and a national radio commercial on his reel, tying with me wasn’t good enough. He wanted to win now, just as I always had. He needed to see that I was jealous of him, or threatened by him­. That’s how he’d know he was winning. By the time we’d made it to the fieldhouse, Simon must have realized that, though the point tallies were as close as they had ever been, he’d lost this round of the fight he’d started years before. And it wasn’t my success in comedy that had decided things, really. It was my happiness—my ability to be happy for him—that told Simon he was losing. Thanks to Erika, I’d defended my title exactly how I liked to: without throwing a punch.

  When you win that way, you don’t rub it in. I gave Simon what privacy I could without stepping out into the rain, which was still coming down in a steady, soaking drizzle. I walked in front of the east wing of the fieldhouse, staying under the building’s long eaves. With my back to my brother, I twisted my t-shirt into a thick cord, wringing the water out of its fibers. Then I unfurled the shirt and slapped it against the wall, leaving a wet mark on the masonry.

  “Any of this stuff getting you any closer to Saturday Night Live?”

  Simon was standing at the mouth of the courtyard, looking at me and leaning forward a little, demanding an answer with his body.

  That kicked up an anger I hadn’t felt in years, the kind you reserve for the people who know where you’re weak and aim for that spot. It was one thing for Simon to ask me how my comedy career was going so he could run the numbers on his own worth. It was another for him to dare me to admit I wasn’t where I wanted to be, just moments after giving him a glimpse—I know he saw it—of the happiness I’d finally found.

  I could have let it go. I could have left. Nothing Simon had said had changed anything about my life with Erika or my show with Raam or my chances of getting a shot at SNL. I didn’t need to say another damn word to him. But Simon had ignited my desire to win the old-fashioned way.

  “Raam got an offer from SNL years ago,” I said, “and he turned it down.”

  Simon shrugged.

  “They’re scouting talent for the season after next,” I said. “They’ll see me in this show.”

  “When?” Simon asked. What he meant was, What makes you so sure?

  “I don’t control when,” I said. “What the fuck do you know about it? Do you know when you’ll get another voiceover job? Or if?”

  That shut him the fuck up, but I kept going.

  “No,” I said. “You don’t.”

  As we stood there,
I swear I was glad that I was the guy who’d fucked Simon’s girlfriend. That’s what told me it was time to leave.

  “I’m going,” I said.

  I started out into the rain without cutting the distance between Simon and me. We’d started with a handshake, but finishing with one would have come too close to an apology neither one of us would be making.

  “Thanks for meeting me,” Simon said.

  I stopped and turned around to look at Simon, and when I saw his face, I laughed because I could see that he was being sincere. After saying all of that hurtful shit, Simon was thanking me for the chance to say it.

  I turned my back on him and shouted over my shoulder, “Good luck, Simon.”

  Coming out of my mouth, they sounded like the last words you might say to someone you were finished with. That was no accident. But the mindfucking thing is, I did wish good things for Simon, even then. I didn’t want them to arrive that day or that year, not after all his shit-talking, but I still wanted his life to work out, eventually. I guess I was becoming the better person Erika already believed I was.

  The rain stopped as I approached Lake Shore Drive. When I came out from under the viaduct, the sun broke through the clouds in shafts of light. With a damp shirt over my bare shoulder, I walked home to the apartment I was sharing with the woman I loved.

  •••

  AS THE DRINKING went on that night in Carbondale last April, Simon got quiet. He sat in his folding chair, sipping his beer, his closed mouth spread out in a smile. Occasionally, he’d do a few headshakes and answer a direct question, but most of the talking he did was done with nods and shrugs. Maybe I should have found his return to silence and gestures comforting, but I didn’t. I found it irritating.

  If he can talk, I thought, he should say something, instead of making me carry the conversation with his girlfriend at his own goddamn apartment.

  I shot him a couple of looks, but he missed them. He stared with smiling eyes at the rods of the porch railing or the ratty evergreen branches poking through it. It would’ve been one thing if Simon were just enjoying being drunk. But I got the idea that Simon was letting his happiness fill him in a way that left Brittany and me on the outside, watching. If I’d been happier myself, and less drunk, I might have decided that Simon hadn’t experienced enough happy moments to know they should be aimed outward. Instead, I wound myself up into believing that Simon might as well have been jerking off in front of me while, not knowing what else to do, I tried to make his girlfriend laugh.

  Eventually, Simon stood up and gave us a wave that meant, Good night.

  “It’s not even midnight,” I said. I wasn’t trying to get him to stay. I was trying to make him feel bad for leaving.

  Simon shrugged.

  “He can’t manage his stutter very well when he drinks,” Brittany said. “You’ve probably noticed he hasn’t said much in a while.”

  “Oh.”

  That took the edge off my anger, but didn’t erase it. It wasn’t Simon’s silence that had bothered me. It was the way he’d indulged himself in it.

  Simon took a step toward me and extended his hand. I shook it without getting up. “G’night, brother.”

  He gave me a nod that meant, Thanks for coming.

  I felt like a fucking chump for having driven all the way from Chicago for this.

  Brittany stood up, knocking her folding chair back against the railing. “I’m going, too,” she said. “There are some sheets, a blanket and a pillow on the couch for you. Stay up as long as you like. Bourbon’s in the kitchen.”

  “Thanks.”

  She took my hand and pulled it until I stood up. I wobbled onto one foot before righting myself.

  “It was great to finally meet you,” she said.

  Then she gave me a hug, pushing her breasts into my chest and standing on the tips of her toes to put her cheek against my ear. For the first time in a long time, I had spent my evening talking to a woman I wouldn’t be taking to bed, and the feel of her in my arms gave me a taste of what I’d be missing.

  Brittany went inside, and Simon gave me one more goodnight wave. I waved back, lazily. He closed the porch doors, leaving me to my whiskey and the early-spring night silence of his neighborhood.

  I had a couple more drinks. Around two in the morning, I put my sticky glass in the kitchen sink and took a long piss. Then I spread the sheet out on the couch, got under the blanket, and rolled onto my right side, facing the television. As I lay there, I enjoyed a little fantasy, something to fill in for the orgasm I wasn’t having. I was on a New York stage playing some character—a garden gnome, I think—opposite an actress playing a schoolgirl. The words I heard in my head made no sense strung together, but we were getting big laughs from the audience. Even when they were silent, I could feel them smiling. Before the nonsense scene was over, I was asleep.

  The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was Brittany standing over me in the darkness. Her hair hung forward, shrouding her face. She was naked from the waist down.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” I whispered.

  She pressed her hand to my mouth firmly.

  She shook her head. Don’t talk.

  Then, gently, she dragged her hand over my lips, down my chin and my chest to my belt buckle.

  When she had my pants undone, she pulled off her top, revealing her taut torso in the weak streetlight coming through the picture window behind the couch. She took my hands and put them on her chest. I was still drunk but knew what I was doing. I mashed her tiny breasts together and took the nipples between my fingers. That was all it took to get hard. I threw off the sheet and pulled down my pants. She unwrapped a condom and rolled it down over the shaft. Then I grabbed Brittany by the hips, pulled her onto me, and found my way inside her.

  All evening, I had resented Simon’s happiness. In my own silent moments of self-indulgence, I’d imagined his contentment dissolving into the tears I’d sometimes found on his face when I’d barged into his childhood bedroom. But I don’t think I would have fucked Simon’s girlfriend if I hadn’t allowed myself to believe for a split second that Simon, in his insane desperation to make things even between us, had begged her to do this.

  •••

  I WASN'T SURE how long we’d been onstage that last Thursday in July, but it must have been long enough. I could feel Raam guiding our scene toward an ending.

  Then, because he’s a fucking pro and generous as hell, Raam gave me one more perfect set-up, and I laid down the royal flush of improvised callbacks: fully in character, in the flow of the story we had invented on the spot, I closed the scene with the very same audience-suggested word we’d used to start it.

  The lights went down. The music came up. And once the stage lights were blazing again, Raam and I were greeted with whooping so loud it barreled over the raucous applause and rang my eardrums.

  But delivering the closing laugh line wasn’t my biggest achievement in a show I still consider one of my best ever. For the time that Raam and I were in scene, I lost myself so completely in my characters that I managed to forget two staff writers from Saturday Night Live were sitting in the audience.

  Marcus Reiser, the artistic director at Improviso, had called me the day before.

  “SNL is coming to see the show,” he said. “Tomorrow night.”

  My heart rate jumped, but I couldn’t piece together the details.

  “I don’t get it,” I asked. “I thought they were fully cast.”

  “One of the featured players said something in the press about the show not being funny, and they let him go.”

  “Oh.”

  “They’re sending teams all over to find a replacement. Two guys are coming to Improviso.”

  “To see me.” Something in me needed to hear him say it.

  “Well, they’re not coming to see Raam,” Marcus said. “They’re finished going round and round with him. Which reminds me, don’t mention any of this to Raam.”

  “I don’t understand
. Raam doesn’t want to be on SNL.”

  “Jesus, I know that,” Marcus said. “I’m worried he’ll get pissed that the industry—and SNL in particular—is treating his show like a farm team.”

  Marcus had a lot to gain from the big boys’ raiding his club for talent. Stories of unknowns being discovered drew students into the training program that was Improviso’s cash cow. But I didn’t like the idea of putting Raam in a bad spot. Marcus must have guessed this.

  “Don’t worry about Raam,” he said. “If he says anything to you, tell him to see me. Just do the show like you’ve been doing it. Go out there and kill.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  And that’s what we did.

  Between bows, I shielded my eyes from the stage lights and scanned the crowd—a sellout, despite the thunderstorms that had lashed Chicago that afternoon and evening—for two people who looked like SNL writers. Call it stereotype or playing the percentages, but I assumed they would be white, male, and in their thirties. About half the audience fit that description, though, and I couldn’t make out any of the people sitting in the booths at the back of the room. So I stopped looking for the writers and looked for Erika. I spotted her standing between the seats and the bar, clapping for us. Her open, loving smile warmed me in a way that even the audience’s extended appreciation did not. Then Raam thanked the audience again, applauded its members like an athlete thanking the home crowd, and took a final bow.

  I followed him to the back of the stage, under the frame of the short stage door he opened, and into the narrow passage that led to the club’s tiny green room. Raam surprised me by stopping in the passageway and turning to face me.

  “Good show,” he said, wiping sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt.

  “You, too. Thanks for that last line.”

  He waved me off. “All I did was set it up.”

  “Yeah, well, we both know that’s the hard part.”