The Voiceover Artist Read online

  I, too, said the words of the Gloria, but I wasn’t praying. I was preparing—tightly controlling the rate of my exhalation, using just enough breath to power my voice at what I guessed was the ideal volume for amplified public speaking, making it halfway through the prayer before inhaling again and waggling as I did so. Left unchecked by my waggles, the tension creeping around my vocal folds would paralyze them. But the paralysis would not become a full-blown fit unless I acted on the powerful but self-defeating instinct to force the folds open. If I did, my eyelids would flutter, and my chin would nod as if I were emphatically agreeing with something. These histrionics would pull my vocal folds apart for just a moment—long enough to let out one gagging syllable—before the offending tension, fed by the stress and vigor of my effort, slammed them shut again.

  Once a fit had started, no combination of mental and corporeal strength could budge the folds. They would remain fused together, despite my nodding and straining, until the tension receded of its own accord or the muscles of my esophagus were exhausted. Managing my stutter was a struggle not only with its symptoms, but against the fit-inducing quack cure I reflexively wanted to provide. The waggles, for their part, were merely an as-needed preventative regimen—generally efficacious, but unpredictably impotent. I lived with the awareness that every word I uttered had the potential to bring me to a sudden, humiliating halt.

  At the conclusion of the Gloria, Fr. Dunne read a prayer with his palms turned up to a painted ceiling discolored by a century of incense and candle smoke, an image of Jesus being raised bodily to heaven while his disciples, emboldened by their awe, dared to look on. When the prayer was over, the focus of the mass would shift from the priest to me. I swallowed hard, a habit born of my childhood assumption that my stutter was triggered by mucus stuck in my windpipe.

  “We ask this through Christ our Lord,” Fr. Dunne said.

  “Amen.”

  As everyone else sat down on the hard, lacquered pews, I stepped into the center aisle and approached the altar. I stopped in front of it and bowed my head, as the liturgical coordinator had instructed, then entered the sanctuary and climbed three steps to the ambo. I found the lectionary as I’d left it twenty minutes before: open to the first passage, a red ribbon draped across the page as a bulwark against the movement of machine-chilled air. Lifting the ribbon and laying it on the facing page, I tried once more to repel the encroaching tension with a waggle. Then, taking in a breath, I began.

  •••

  DURING THE EIGHTEEN years I was unable to speak, I was certain that I’d need a voice to make myself understood. My mother had tried to get me to learn sign language along with her, but I wasn’t having it. No one I knew spoke sign language. What good is it to speak a language that no one you know understands? I had gestures, of course—furrowed brows and puppy-dog eyes, headshakes and nods—but these were blunt instruments. I would need a voice, and the colors and tones my voiceover heroes gave to their words, to show the world who I really was and find my place in it.

  My mother died one month after my twenty-third birthday, and Connor moved out of the house and three hours away to Chicago less than a year later. These events—and the horrifying prospect of a life that was little more than an unspeaking stalemate with my father—led to my enrollment in my hometown’s junior college, Leyton Community, and to my tortured daily attempts to revive the atrophied tissue of my vocal folds with stutter-induced spasms. Six months of provoking my stutter gave me the strength to gasp a few syllables, but it was seven more months of learning to tame the stutter before I could voice a complete sentence—“My name is Simon”—without shattering it into jagged shards.

  With an associate’s degree and tenuous control of my stutter, I left the father I blamed for my long silence and moved four hours south to Carbondale to attend Southern Illinois University. That’s where I found Brittany. She was beautiful. She was smart. She wasn’t much for chitchat, and my quiet way appealed to her. She was also contrary by nature, and I knew that at least part of the reason she chose me was because I was the last guy on earth her born-rich, smooth-talking father would have chosen for her.

  Brittany and I were walking back to my place from a coffee shop, having just broached, for the first time, the subject of life after graduation—where we might live, what we might do for a living. Just the idea of making plans like these with Brittany was making me heady, but some part of me must have sensed Brittany’s hesitation to envision a time when the credit hours we needed, the school calendar that dictated our time off, and the college-town boredom we’d endured were no longer pushing us together. Because, after all the forward-looking talk that had put such a charge into me, what I told her—what I really believed—was this: “Just because we graduate doesn’t mean we have to leave. We know we’re happy here. We can stay here and be happy.”

  Brittany looked at me and, in the weak light thrown by a streetlamp half a block in front of us, she smirked and shook her head.

  “What?” I asked.

  “That’s bullshit,” she said.

  “What is?”

  “What you just said.”

  It was as if Brittany had waved away a smokescreen of my own making. The truth was, I wanted things that Carbondale couldn’t give me. To become a voiceover artist, I’d have to live in some version of Radioland, the big city I’d imagined as a boy, home to the Great Voices and the powerful antennas—like birthday candles, their red flames pulsing atop skyscraper cakes—that beamed their sixty-second masterworks to my radio. My line about being happy in Carbondale revealed little more than a safe-seeming untruth I’d sold myself and wanted Brittany to buy, too.

  Brittany had understood me beyond my power to make myself understood. My mother had, too. And Connor still did, whether he wanted to or not. Whether I wanted him to or not.

  When we were together, Brittany discussed the details of her father’s crime only once. He had stolen from her and lied to her, she said. He’d looted a trust that Brittany’s grandfather, the last good son of an old Carolinian family, had funded for her. When Brittany came to him as a seventeen-year-old with statements in hand to ask about the plummeting balance, he assured her it was the stock market fluctuating, that she had nothing to worry about, that time and the free market would right the whole thing. Eventually, she might have allowed her father’s circumstances to mitigate her anger over the theft. By the time he stole from Brittany, he’d lost almost all of the money he’d misappropriated from investors, the Feds had started sniffing around, and he owed his lawyer three years of back pay. But the lies, Brittany said, she’d never forgive. During her freshman year, Brittany’s father was convicted of twenty-seven counts of interstate securities fraud. And the verdict suited Brittany just fine.

  In the midst of the same monologue about her father, Brittany told me that she’d rebuked her mother for marrying a man who would defraud his own daughter, for not seeing through her husband’s lies, for seeing him, for so long, as something other than what he was. But she also blamed herself.

  “Why didn’t I see it happening?” she asked. “How could I have missed all this?”

  I understood at that moment that part of the reason Brittany was with me was because I was incapable of deceiving her as her father had. I wasn’t a practiced liar who always had the right word at the ready with a wink and a smile. Just seven months before, I’d spoken my first full sentence in eighteen years. Brittany’s need to never again be less cunning and cruel than the people she loved should have worried me, but I buried any worry beneath the pleasure I took in listening to Brittany reveal her innermost self. My voice had delivered me to that moment, but as Brittany made herself understood, I kept my eyes on hers, I nodded at the right times, and I didn’t say a word.

  I wished I could go back and tell the boy I’d been, the kid who’d yearned for the kind of human connection made impossible by his refusal—and then inability—to speak, that he’d been right about needing a voice, but wrong about connecti
on. How could I have known—alone in my room, daring to believe I might speak again one day—that I’d experience my life’s most exhilarating moment of closeness in silence?

  •••

  ON A SUNDAY morning in the August before our senior year, Brittany and I lay in bed, relishing the languor of half-sleep.

  Brittany broke the silence by saying, “When we first met, I thought you had Asperger’s.”

  I’d heard of Asperger’s syndrome, but I didn’t know exactly what it was. Even so, my face reddened with new embarrassment at whatever I’d done when I met Brittany to make her think I was strange.

  “You’re offended now,” she said.

  “I’m not offended.”

  Staring at the ceiling, I replayed our first meeting in my mind. We were sitting in our adjacent, assigned seats in the back row of a nearly empty lecture hall, a few minutes before the second class session of a course, “Mathematics 139: Finite Math,” we were both taking to fulfill a requirement, when I felt a mobile phone’s rhythmic, intermittent vibration in my feet. The vibration came from Brittany’s bag, which lay on the floor between us.

  Brittany made no move to answer or silence the phone. As the heels of her sandaled feet were tucked up onto the front edge of her chair, making a platform of her bare knees as she examined her nails, I thought it was at least possible that she could not feel the vibration.

  So I waggled, leaned toward her, and said, “Your phone is ringing.”

  The look she gave me communicated, in not so many words, that no one had ever told her anything more obvious and less helpful.

  “Thanks,” she said, leaving her phone where it was.

  The sting of the exchange stayed with me throughout the hour-long lecture. By the time the professor dismissed us, I’d decided I could either say something to this woman before she left, or sit next to her in uncomfortable silence, twice a week, for the next fifteen weeks. So I hid a waggle in a glance at the floor and said, “See you next week, then.”

  Brittany, already heading for the exit, responded with only one word: “Yep.”

  But all-importantly, she smiled just a little as she said it.

  Looking back, I could see that I’d been awkward, but I couldn’t recall that I’d done anything pathological, or even strange, which made me feel worse. Maybe everything I did was strange, and I just couldn’t see it.

  I waited another moment before I said, “What made you think I had Asperger’s?”

  “Well, I thought your little headshakes were a tic or something.”

  That was reasonable. I couldn’t conceal every waggle I needed, and most people needed no waggles at all.

  “And I thought you were, you know, missing social cues,” she said.

  I groaned at the thought that I was giving this impression to everyone I met. “It’s not that I miss them,” I said. “It’s just that, sometimes, I don’t know what to say when I see them.”

  “I get that now.”

  “I know what other people might say,” I said, “but I didn’t speak for almost two decades. I haven’t had enough conversations to know what I should say.”

  “I know.”

  “Or I know what I should say, but I really want to say something else, and I’m trying to figure out if what I want to say will make trouble.”

  “Simon,” she said. “I know.”

  I waggled and tried again. “It’s like, I get the cues, but I’m still learning my lines.”

  I turned my head to look at Brittany. She rolled her eyes and threw off the covers.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Your metaphor melted down, Simon,” she said, getting out of bed.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To the bathroom,” she said. “You should’ve come on to me a half hour ago. You missed that cue.”

  •••

  THE FOLLOWING APRIL, on the night before Connor made his only visit to Carbondale, Brittany was watching television on the couch in my apartment, a one-bedroom on the first floor of an old home long since divided into rental units. Her bare legs were hugged to her chest and swaddled in a thin fleece blanket. I was sitting alongside her, but only the hem of her blanket touched me. Brittany didn’t like to be touched while she watched television. “I can’t concentrate if there’s touching,” she’d say.

  On the old Panasonic box I’d purchased at a Carbondale garage sale, a woman in an orange jumpsuit was bemoaning her imprisonment for a capital crime—the murder of her former lover—that she swore she hadn’t committed. The frizzy ends of the woman’s ponytail whipped back and forth, punctuating her denial. Brittany leaned her head over her knees, hanging on the woman’s every word.

  I had decided in the show’s first five minutes that I agreed with its producers: this woman had killed her boyfriend. But I kept watching and kept my seat. Near the end of a dinner of spaghetti and jarred tomato sauce, I’d agreed to put off until after the show a conversation about Connor’s visit to Carbondale the next day. I knew that Brittany’s doing what I planned to ask of her became less likely with each passing minute, so I wanted to be with her when the credits rolled. And even without touching her, sitting close to her made me excited for what lay ahead for us in Chicago.

  After some difficult conversations on the matter, Brittany had finally decided to move to Chicago with me. We would share an apartment and try to turn our longtime professional dreams into careers. I’d look for representation as a voiceover artist, and Brittany would scour estate sales and auctions to build her stock of the rare books she hoped to buy and sell for a living.

  We had money saved, though Brittany had much less than she’d expected. By the time her father was indicted, the balance in her trust, once more than four hundred thousand dollars, had been reduced to nine thousand. To preserve what capital remained for her entry into the rare-books business, she’d forsaken the heavy financial burden of a private-college education for the low tuition and renowned rare-volumes collection of Southern Illinois University.

  Both of us blamed our fathers for the fact that our lives were less than what they might have been. But Brittany had started out at a higher station than I and fallen further—if her father hadn’t defrauded her, Brittany and I never would have met.

  My radio-ready voice and years of experience as a busboy had helped me land a job as a server at The Nile, Carbondale’s finest restaurant, a white-tablecloth establishment frequented by local professionals and visiting university trustees. For almost two years, I’d worked five dinner shifts per week and, with scholarships and grants covering most of my tuition and fees, had saved almost $11,000. I offered my savings for our living expenses so that Brittany could use what remained of her inheritance to buy the right rare books. I wanted her to have her dream job, despite the damage her father had done. I wanted the same for myself.

  As the woman on TV attempted to express to the unseen television interviewer how much her murdered lover meant to her, and convince the audience she never could have harmed him, she sucked her lips into her mouth and shook her head, trembling.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Brittany said, sitting back. “She had me until the fake crying.”

  “She did it,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Brittany said over a sigh. “She did.”

  As the prisoner pinched the bridge of her nose in tearful silence, Brittany found the remote in a blanket fold and turned off the television. She leaned against me and pressed her lips to mine as consolation for the touching we’d forgone while the prisoner told her lies.

  Then Brittany laid her head on the far arm of the couch and stretched out her long legs, putting her feet in my lap.

  “So why did your brother wait until a month before graduation to visit you?” she asked.

  “He doesn’t have many free nights,” I said. “He’s always doing some kind of show.”

  “He’s not doing a show tomorrow night?”

  I waggled. “I guess he’s taking a night off.”

  I unders
tood that Brittany, in her way, had given me a chance to tell her something meaningful about my relationship with my brother. I could have confessed that our longstanding refusal to apologize to each other for anything made things between us difficult. I could have admitted that I hadn’t invited Connor to visit me in Carbondale until a week before, that I’d withheld the invitation until I was certain that Brittany and I were moving to Chicago and that my brother’s one-night stay would give me every occasion to unveil to him a life that was already better—and more promising—than either of us had imagined my life could ever be. I could have told Brittany I loved my brother but was plagued every day by my fear that his dazzling talent for improvisation and comedy, and the success his gifts stood to bring him, would put him beyond the reach of my ambition and my love. But I didn’t say any of these things. I answered Brittany’s question as if what she really wanted to understand were the scheduling challenges of the working comic actor, and she didn’t push me for more.

  “So what’s he like?” Brittany asked, sliding her hand under the blanket and scratching her bare thigh with the crescent-moon whites of her fingernails.

  At that question, my mind generated a cloud of adjectives that described my brother: talented, charismatic, dedicated, pained, ambitious, impatient, selfish, determined, unflappable, amazing. Getting a little uncomfortable with my silence, I waggled and picked one.

  “He’s amazing.”

  Brittany laughed at me. “He’s amazing?”

  I shrugged again. “He is.”

  “How is he amazing?”

  “Well, for one thing, he creates characters and they’re real. Like, believable.”

  “What else?”

  She was daring me to make her care about Connor’s visit.

  “He can make almost anyone laugh,” I said.

  “Amazing!” Brittany said, mocking me with her smile, which was somehow made even sexier by her sarcasm. “What else?”

  “He knows me better than anyone.”