The Voiceover Artist (9 page)

When he was thirteen years old and in eighth grade, I pulled Simon away from his radio to see Connor perform as part of the choir in the junior high's Happy Holidays Concert. Frank was still in front of the television in his undershirt fifteen minutes before the performance was to begin, so I left without him. He arrived late and spent the concert frowning and fidgeting uncomfortably in the folding chair I had saved for him. Simon endured the singing with his arms folded and his head down. He might have feared that I'd take his paying attention as some hint he finally wanted music lessons. But during “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” Simon looked up to watch Connor get the night's only laughs by singing “five golden rings” eight different ways, each hammier than the one before.

After the concert, Connor rode home with Frank in his truck. Simon went with me. Whenever it was just the two of us in the car, Simon would sit in the front passenger seat and take control of the stereo, which must have had more powerful reception than his clock radio did, because Simon would bypass perfectly audible commercials to scan the AM dial for ads broadcast from far-off places. We were about a mile from home the night of the concert when a voice, calling out through a storm of static, told me to “come on down” to a restaurant in downtown Omaha for “eastern Nebraska's finest steaks” and one-dollar draft beers. Even in the December darkness on an unlit two-lane highway, I could see the open-mouthed amazement on Simon's face. At the beginning of a long day, I might have reminded myself that Simon didn't feel, as I did, that the radio voices were taunting him in his silence, and I might have wondered aloud at the modern miracle of invisible waves carrying speech across the prairie to our ears. But at the
 
end
 
of a long day, after twenty minutes of irritating electronic hisses and squeals had paid off only in a commercial for a restaurant four-hundred miles away, I said, “I've got to hand it to you, Simon. You've found a way to make radio even more boring.”

Two days later, on Saturday, I was at the kitchen table reading the
 
Peoria Journal Star
 
when I came across a profile of Larry Sellers, a voiceover artist who was born and raised in Sampere, Illinois, not far from Leyton. According to the paper, Sellers had done national television commercials for Maalox, Hertz, and Wendy's, and for the past ten years, he'd been the radio voice of Jewel Food Stores. In the words of his long-time agent, Larry Sellers was “one of the very few voiceover artists who can take a mediocre script and make a great radio commercial without changing a word.”

I read the entire profile, hoping to find the reason why my silent son listened to nothing but commercials. When I reached the end of the piece, though, I'd learned more than I wanted to know about Larry Sellers and nothing about Simon. Even so, I thought that Simon might find the article interesting. I hesitated to hand my silenced son a story about a man who had grown up nearby and made it on the radio, but I decided there was no more harm in Simon reading a profile of Larry Sellers than there was in a wheelchair-bound boy reading the sports page. So I folded the Lifestyle section into quarters, putting the Sellers profile in front, and walked to Simon's room.

He was lying on his bed with his clock radio, tuned to a commercial for a Monster Truck rally, in his lap.

I held up the newspaper and pointed to Sellers' photo. “This man is on the radio.”

As I handed it over, I made the profile, in my own mind, a kind of peace offering, a sign that I would let Simon enjoy his simplest pleasure without any more criticism from me.

Later that same day, when I stepped into his room, Simon shut me up with a wave before I could say anything.

“Hey!” I said, sharply.

Then Simon gestured toward the radio in his lap and, more politely but just as urgently—with his eyes, this time—insisted I be silent.

I listened, indignant at the idea that anything short of an emergency Presidential address could justify Simon's shushing me this way. What I heard was a man telling me about a sale on bananas and a two-for-one deal on cans of Campbell's Soup. It was a commercial for Jewel Food Stores. The voice belonged to Larry Sellers.

I stayed silent until the commercial was over. Then I said, “Dinner's ready.”

Simon nodded, turned off his radio, and rolled off the bed onto his feet. As he passed me in the doorway, he put his arm around my back and leaned his head against my arm, a kind of half hug that offered more affection than I'd gotten from Simon since he entered junior high.

As he walked away, I smiled at the possibility that, by introducing Simon to Larry Sellers, I'd done what few mothers who'd so poorly chosen a husband ever did: given my son a hero
.

I began to listen to Larry Sellers' voice as closely as Simon did. I asked him questions about the voiceover artist's style and technique, and Simon answered them as best he could with headshakes and nods. But my questions weren't about Larry Sellers, really. They were about Simon. I came to treat the voice of Larry Sellers as a kind of surrogate for my son's, as if the much older man's speech—not what he said, but how he said it—could give me some idea of how Simon might sound if he could talk. The only voice I remembered as Simon's was that of a little boy. And as Simon grew into a young man with acne on his shoulders and hair sprouting out of his Adam's apple, my memory of that little voice faded until, when I lay awake in bed at night, with Frank snoring a few inches and a million miles away from me, I was no longer certain that the voice I heard so faintly in my mind's ear had ever belonged to Simon.

 

•••

 

THE DAY AFTER
 Connor left for college, I left Frank.

I moved out of the house to a one-bedroom apartment on the town square in Sampere. I offered Simon, who was twenty by then, my pullout couch and some space for his clothes, but he declined. The reason he gave me when I finally asked the right yes-no question was that he wanted to stay close to the Tippecanoe restaurant, in Leyton, where he'd worked for four years as a busboy. It's just as likely that Simon believed moving in with me would look too much like surrendering to his father, and more likely still that Simon had come to depend on having Frank around to hate. It gave him a kind of energy. I had seen Simon silently stoke his hatred to get himself out of the house and off to work on the coldest, wettest days. For my part, I was tired of spending my days and nights hating Frank. I hoped Simon would tire of it, too. If he didn't, his life would be a poorer version of his father's.

I sat in my Ford with the keys between my legs and my bulging suitcases in the back seats where my sons used to sit. As I steadied myself to leave Simon behind in the house where I'd raised him, I couldn't reconcile these two ideas:
 
1
) that I hadn't failed Simon, and
 
2
) that so many of my attempts to help Simon had failed.

 

•••

 

I'D BEEN LIVING
 on my own in Sampere for nearly three years when I came down with what my doctor suspected was a case of walking pneumonia. She drew some blood just to be sure and sent me on my way. A few days after that appointment, she asked me to come in for follow-up tests, which led to more tests and evidence that my walking pneumonia, which turned out to be cancer, had spread from my lungs to my lymph nodes, liver and bones. It was not long before I wasn't walking at all anymore, but lying in a hospital bed in my apartment's tiny living room.

The morphine haze made me feel like I was dead already. The hospice nurse had given me a beige plastic cylinder with a button I could press to dose myself. To stave off the cloudy-headedness, I would wait as long as I could, pushing the limits of my endurance, before plunging the button and releasing the morphine into my blood. The first time I watched the clock, I lasted an hour before the pain became too much. Then, fifty minutes. Two days later, I could manage only twenty minutes. Fighting the tide, I tried, in the middle of the night, to go from twenty minutes back up to twenty-five by dropping the device over the edge of the bed, but at eighteen minutes, I was wailing, begging the nurse to return the cylinder to my trembling, outstretched hand.

The day I awoke to what I guessed would be ten minutes of barely tolerable clarity, I asked for my boys. I had a vague awareness that Connor was home from school and that he and Simon had been sleeping at my apartment. I had no memory of Frank coming to visit me and no desire to see him.

Connor appeared at my bedside. He covered the back of my free hand with his and smiled down on me, trying to give me some of the confidence he had in surplus. Simon hung back behind Connor. I could not see his face.

“Simon,” I said. I'd tried to call him, but what came out was a hoarse whisper.

Connor turned his head to him and said, with some impatience, “Mom wants you over here.”

When they were standing side by side, I said, in a voice I knew they'd one day forget, just as I'd forgotten Simon's, what I'd called them in to hear.

“It's impossible—” I said. I took a shallow, wheezing breath. “How much I love you—” Another breath. “Both.”

“We love you, too, Mom,” Connor said, answering for himself and Simon. “We love you tons.”

A faulty wire crackled and a light flickered in the frosted light fixture above us. The heart-rate monitor beeped, counting up to some number I couldn't guess before the many short beeps were answered by a single long one. I tried to focus on my sons, to drink them in, as if they could do what morphine did, only better.

“How's your breathing, Mom?” Connor asked.

Something in my throat was clicking with each little inhalation.

“I'm going to go check in with the nurse, okay?” Connor said. “I'll be back in a minute.”

I nodded once, slowly. Connor leaned over and kissed me gently on the forehead. Then he glanced at Simon and walked out of the room.

Simon didn't take Connor's place at the head of my bed. He stayed where he was, near my right leg, its femur close to bursting with tumors. Since the day a doctor told me I had only a few months to live, I'd been picturing my last moments with Simon. I'd imagined him wanting to say goodbye and hating that he could not.

Simon kept his eyes on mine as tears pooled in their bottom lids. He gave me three deep, slow nods, a gesture I imagined spoke as clearly to me as any voice could have:
 
I know you love me,
 
it said.
 
I love you, too.

Then Simon stooped to lay his head on my bony breast, and he held my head in his hand, leaving nothing worth saying unsaid.

 4

 

Frank Davies

 

CONNOR CAME HOME
 for his mother, not for me.

He stayed at her apartment until she passed. He called the funeral home. He met with the priest. He sent the death notice to the newspaper. He stood beside her casket throughout the seven-hour wake, accepting condolences from May's cousins and old friends and the church ladies who read the obituaries for something better to do than wait for their own funerals. Connor did everything May would have wanted—right down to seeing that her favorite prayer, the
Memorare
, was printed on the mass card—and he did it all himself. Neither Simon nor I were any help, for our own different reasons.

They buried May on a Thursday, in a plot within spitting distance of her parents' headstones. The priest flung holy water on the casket while Connor and Simon stood front and center on an electric-green carpet and May's friends wept and sniffed, their shoe heels sinking into ground still wet with rain. I stood off to the side, unsure where you're supposed to stand when the person being buried is only your wife in a legal sense. A few people shook my hand or smiled sadly at me. Others, the ones who imagined they had loved May better than anyone had—or, at least, better than I had—gave me the old Simon treatment: they avoided me except to claw at my eyes with the spite in their own.

The night of the funeral, I turned on the White Sox pre-game show and pulled three beers—two for me, one for Connor, who was taking a nap in his room—out of the refrigerator. I set one of the beers on the carpet, leaning it up against the couch in front of what had been Connor's usual spot for watching ballgames with me.

But when he came out of his bedroom just before the opening pitch, Connor had his jacket on and the straps of his packed duffel bag in his hand.

“Wh— wh— where y— you going?” I asked.

“Back to school.”

“T— tomorrow's f— f— Friday, for Christ's s— sake.”

“I've got class on Friday, Dad. And I've missed a week already.”

I tried to act disgusted with him so that I wouldn't seem what I was: hurt, and embarrassed to be.

“Take y— your beer, at— at least,” I said.

Connor glanced down and noticed the sweating beer can on the floor. He stared at it a moment. Then he walked over to it, bent over at the waist, lifting one foot off the floor for balance, and picked up the can with his free hand. He didn't crack it open, though.

The ballgame's first batter was in the box with a one-and-two count. Standing there with the unopened beer and his bag still in hand, Connor watched the next pitch. Ball two. The pitcher wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve, got the sign, and threw again. Strike three. One down.

“Okay,” Connor said, sighing as if he were sad to leave. “Take care of yourself, all right? I'm home again in a few weeks. Let's hope the Sox are in the playoffs.”

I said nothing.

“See ya,” he said, heading for the back door.

I reckon Connor was around eight when he realized that his staying up past his bedtime to watch the end of the ballgame wasn't me doing him a favor, but the other way around. Another father might have held Connor's interest into junior high, but I'm not sure any father could have kept him in Leyton. A boy with Connor's gifts leaves home. Period.

But Simon stayed.

 

•••

 

MAY HAD ASKED
 me time and again if I knew why Simon wouldn't speak, and I'd put her off every time. Even the story's basics—that I'd had my young son in a bar on a Saturday morning, for one thing—would have made trouble for me. So I wagered that Simon would be speaking again soon enough, which would make telling the story behind his silence unnecessary. That turned out to be a bad bet, and when I lost it, Simon lost pretty much everything.

Only Simon and I knew that he had gone quiet because I'd sat silently by while Artie Schoen and his buddies made fun of him. But I knew something that Simon didn't: the cost of standing up to Artie Schoen.

Artie used to give me shit in high school. He'd see me in the Leyton High hallways and grip his arm tight around my neck. Then he'd say something like, “Hey, sing with me, Frankie! ‘P—people try to p— p— put us d— down . . . .'”

His buddies would laugh and I'd force myself to smile, as if I were in on the joke instead of the butt of it. I never complained to anyone—if all Artie did was rib you and rough you up a little, you were getting off easy.

The autumn of my senior year, I missed a week and a half of school with the flu. On my first day back, I had to stay late after school to make up a test I'd missed. Greg Gibbons, a starter at tight end on the Leyton High football team, must have missed the test, too, because he was in the desk next to mine, waiting for the teacher to show.

Our seats, which were near the windows, gave Gibbons and me a clear view of the school's front steps with nothing better to do than watch the other kids leave for the day. Artie and his buddies, wearing their black leather jackets with every zipper and buckle undone, were in their usual spot, leaning up against the wall where the stairs met the sidewalk, trying to scandalize girls with catcalls and one-liners. Then, for what I'm sure was no good reason, Artie shoved some guy to the ground. Artie's buddies broke up laughing at the sight of the kid sprawled out on the concrete. The steady stream of students parted around the kid, but nobody stopped to help him. For his part, the kid collected his books and his glasses and hurried away without even a backward glance at Artie, checking his elbow for blood.

A minute later, when he was sure that nobody coming out the school doors had any idea what had happened and what was coming, Artie knocked another kid down the last few stairs.

I heard Gibbons snort and looked over at him. He was shaking his head.

“Some tough guy,” he said.

“Y— yeah.”

I finished the test before Gibbons did and left the classroom, walking the empty hallways to the school's front doors. When I went outside, Artie and his pals were still there. He was shouting at a white Chevy as a girl, hugging her books to her chest, got in on the passenger side.

“Looking good, mom!” Artie said.

The girl's mother started pulling away before her daughter had closed the door.

With my head bowed, I hustled down the far side of the steps, putting a steel railing between me and Artie's crew.

“Frankie!”

Artie sounded almost happy to see me, as if he couldn't believe his luck.

I waved to him without slowing down. Before I reached the bottom, Artie had swung his feet over the railing and corralled me against the stairway wall, blocking my escape in both directions with his arms. He needn't have bothered. Once Artie had you, there was no use trying to run away.

“Where ya headed, Frankie?”

“Ho— ho— home,” I said.

“And a Merry Christmas to you, too!” he said.

His buddies laughed. I wondered if they really found Artie that funny or if this were simply their agreement: Artie tells a joke, and they laugh, whether they want to or not.

“Before you go,” Artie said, “I want you to do me a favor.”

I didn't agree, and I didn't refuse. I just waited.

“Say my name.”

My eyes were glued to the flags in front of the gymnasium, three banners blown almost flat in a gust that whipped across the schoolyard.

“Look at me,” Artie said.

So I did.

“Say my name before you go.”

He opened his eyes wide and made the shape of an “a” sound with his mouth, as if I were a child who needed a hint.

I didn't want to say Artie's name. There was something about the request I didn't like—something sexual in it—but I didn't see that I had a choice. Even if I ducked away from Artie, his buddies would grab me. And then Artie would be pissed.

So I started in, fighting my stutter and the nervousness that egged it on. “Ar— ar— ar—”

“That's it.”

“—ar— ar—”

“Articulate, Frankie.”

“—ar— ar— Artie.”

“There!” Artie said, his arms still keeping me prisoner. “That wasn't so hard, was it?”

Then a deep voice said, “Hey!”

All four of us looked up to the top of the stairs and saw Greg Gibbons standing there. Artie dropped his arms to his side. With Greg there, he forgot all about me.

I left the moment I was free, not running away, but walking pretty damn fast. I never looked back. I hadn't asked Gibbons to help me. I hadn't needed help, really—Artie had been about to let me go. And Gibbons had problems with Artie that had nothing at all to do with me. Anyway, those are the things I told myself when I heard that Greg Gibbons would miss the rest of his senior season, and his chances at a football scholarship, with a broken eye socket and shattered cheekbone.

There was a reason Artie forgot about me when Greg Gibbons showed up. Artie had little use for the people he was picking on. They were bait for guys who thought they were heroes. In Artie's world, there were no heroes—there were bad guys and the rest of us—and the bad guys, if they were smart like Artie was, always won. When he went after Simon that day, Artie taught my son a twist on what he'd already taught the rest of us:
There are no heroes, kid. Not even your old man is a hero.

If there were any heroes, I already knew I wasn't one. I didn't want what had happened to Greg Gibbons to happen to me. Did it burn me up that Artie was teaching my kid the hard ways of the world, and making me look bad to do it? You're goddamn right it did. But what was I going to do? I could have gotten my ass kicked in front of my kid and been put out of work for weeks. But how would that have served Simon or Connor or May?

What I did was keep my seat. And that was brave enough. I could have led Simon right out of the bar when Artie started into us, and that might've been the end of it. But that lesson—that you leave when somebody starts poking fun at you—was one I couldn't allow Simon to learn. Simon was a stutterer. He was going to take shit worse than Artie was giving to him. So that day, I tried to show Simon that you go about your business—you do what you were planning to do. You don't let anybody's teasing stop you. We went into that bar to watch football, and that's what we were going to do.

Whether or not you give any of that shit-talk back or put up your fists is up to you, once you're full-grown. I gambled that Artie would get bored with us and lay off if I kept my mouth shut, and that Simon would just be glad when it was all over. I was dead right about Artie. He left after a while, popping me in the shoulder as he passed and tousling Simon's hair with his thick, greasy hand. But I guessed wrong about Simon. He wasn't glad when it was over. He was irate. And the lesson I'd tried to teach him—that you go about your business no matter what anybody has to say about it—wasn't what he took from that day. I gathered from Simon's going silent that, the way he saw it, his own father would not defend him, and if I wasn't going to love him all the way, he wasn't going to love me at all.

How do you explain to a seven-year-old that hanging him out to dry like that had been my attempt to teach him something he could use? I could have spit out the words to say so, but they wouldn't have done any good. Once Simon decided he'd been wrong about me all along, no explanation could have have changed his mind.

But as it turned out, Simon didn't want an explanation. He wanted an apology.

 

•••

 

AFTER HE'D BEEN
 silent a good long while, May started harping on me to make Simon speak. I didn't blame her for asking. She was worried sick about him. But I knew it was useless, my telling Simon to talk. So far as Simon was concerned, I'd lost any right to boss him around when I didn't stand up to Artie.

When he'd been silent for six months, May put Simon in front of me for the kind of father-son chat that he and I were never much good at. It started with Simon wrinkling up his forehead and cussing me out with his eyes. Then I raised my hand to him, and May rushed him out of the room before I could bring the hand down.

So far as May ever knew, that was my only attempt to get Simon to speak up before his voice went dead. But two days later, I tried again.

He got scared when I came into his room—part of me was glad I could still scare him a little. I sat down on the edge of his bed and nodded in the direction of his radio.

“Tur— turn that off, p— please.”

Simon stared at me, deciding whether or not to defy me from the get-go. Then he spun the dial toward him until it clicked, shutting up whatever goddamned gabbing huckster he'd been listening to.

I took a deep breath and rubbed my face with my palms, dragging the calluses over a three-day beard.

“I— I— think I m— might have t— taught you a l— lesson I n— never meant to.”

I didn't look at him. I was afraid I'd see that look in his eyes, get as fired up as he seemed to be, and end this one-way chat the way I'd tried to end our first one.