The Voiceover Artist (16 page)

To walk at the woman's pace, I moved in a kind of slow motion, rolling each step heel to toe over several seconds. I guessed it took two minutes for us to pass the tavern and reach the corner. In the presence of the elderly stranger, I felt different than I had just minutes before—not better, necessarily, but different. I had been living in my head, with no outside conversation, for almost a week, and until this woman put her hand on my arm to steady herself, I had not been touched by anyone since shaking hands with Elaine at the end of our meeting.

“This way,” the woman said, giving my arm a weak tug.

We walked west on Huron Street, into the sun, which still hung above the residential towers at the end of the block. I lowered my eyes to the sidewalk, watching the woman's steps, matching mine to hers as best I could.

“You know,” she said, “your replacement wasn't very good.”

I had no idea what she was talking about.
My replacement?

I'd begun to worry that the heat and stress of her outing had made her delirious when another explanation dawned on me: she'd recognized me from St. Asella's, and my “replacement” was whoever they'd found to lector at the noon mass two days before.

I let the remark pass without comment, hoping to end an uncomfortable line of conversation.

“I asked Catherine where you were,” she said, “but she didn't know.”

Did anyone at St. Asella's,
I wondered,
experience even a moment's confusion without looking to Catherine for clarity?

Holding up my end of the conversation seemed to offer the best chance of ending it quickly. I waggled and said, “There was an illness in my family.”

“Oh,” the woman said. “I'm sorry to hear it. Anyone you'd like me to pray for?”

Answering “yes” would have required me to flesh out my lie with additional detail, and the thought of this woman praying for my false intention made me grimace.

“I appreciate that,” I said. “But my mother isn't sick anymore.”

“Oh, good,” the woman said. “Thank God for that.”

We passed a gated parking lot bordered by a tall, chain-link fence topped with razor wire. As we approached a restaurant just west of the parking lot, patrons enjoying an early dinner in sidewalk seating glanced up at us. A couple of women older than me, but much younger than the woman on my arm—women about Catherine's age—stared and smiled at what must have looked to them like a Norman Rockwell tableau come to life. Without deciding to, I smiled in the chaste, unthreatening way I imagined a young man in such a scene would smile.

We walked into the shade of an arched green awning, its white-trimmed fringe rippling in the wind, and the woman came to a stop.

“Here we are,” she said.

The doorman got out from behind his desk and opened the door.

“I was wondering when you'd be back,” he said to her, smiling.

“I made it,” she said.

“Yes, you did.” He reached for the cart handle. “Thank you, sir, I'll take this from you.”

“Sure,” I said.

The doorman was twice as broad as me at the shoulders. His voice alone, a booming bass, was overpowering.

“I'll bring the groceries to your door, Mrs. Landry,” he said. “Then I'll be back for you.”

“Thank you, Thomas,” she said.

“You're welcome.”

Thomas wheeled the cart inside. Bearing the weight of the cart and its contents with just two fingers, he walked up four steps and disappeared down a hallway.

“Thank you, too,” the woman—Mrs. Landry—said to me.

“It was no trouble.”

We stood stock-still under the awning, my hands folded in front of me and one of hers still clinging to my arm.

“Will you be reading on Sunday?”

Mrs. Landry raised her eyes to meet mine. The strain made her neck and head tremble.

“We need you now more than ever.”

All other things being equal, I would have gone back to lectoring at St. Asella's just because Mrs. Landry wanted me to. I would have stood in front of everyone and read for her alone. And at the words “we need you” I felt a flicker of excitement at the possibility of returning some sense of purpose to my days. But it would be weeks before I understood what Mrs. Landry meant when she said that I was needed now more than ever. I didn't ask her to explain, because no explanation would have changed my mind. I'd decided that returning to St. Asella's was tantamount to acknowledging that I was the misfit Catherine believed me to be. Under those circumstances, I was never going back to that church. And I didn't have the heart to lie to Mrs. Landry again.

“I don't think I'll be back,” I said.

Mrs. Landry smiled patiently and nodded, then returned her head to a resting position that aimed her gaze at the limestone base of her building.

Thomas pushed the front door open and offered Mrs. Landry his elbow. “Here we go,” he said.

Mrs. Landry removed her hand from my arm and placed the other on her doorman's.

“Thank you,” she said to Thomas.

“Of course.” Then, glancing over his shoulder at me, Thomas said, “Thank you, sir.”

I waved to Mrs. Landry as I backed away, but she didn't see the gesture. She went inside without saying goodbye.

I started the short walk back to my apartment, walking quickly because I finally could. Without Mrs. Landry on my arm, none of the women dining on the sidewalk looked up at me as I passed.

Only when I was standing inside my living room again, wondering what the hell to do next, did I realize that Mrs. Landry had extended—and I'd refused—an open-hearted welcome of the kind my mother would have offered me if she were still alive.

7

 

Catherine Ferrán

 

“TEN CUIDADO CON
 
los ricos.”

Be careful around the rich.

This was my father's warning to me, a caveat passed down to Eduardo Ferrán by generations of
campesinos
, his ancestors and mine. Coming of age in Franco's Spain only confirmed my father's suspicions of the wealthy. He carried these suspicions with him when, as a twenty-four- year-old man with a university education in engineering but very little English, he immigrated to the States in
1964
.

When my father told me to take care around the rich, he meant that I should stay away from them. It is no accident, then, that the services I provide as an interior designer are available only to people my father would have considered rich. Every American-born daughter of an immigrant father resents and opposes his advice.
My concerns are not your concerns,
I recall thinking to myself as I rode to junior high school in the taxi my father drove to make our living.
Your problems are not my problems.
But my father's words about the wealthy have stayed with me. They have saved my one-woman business who-knows-how-many times. A daughter of an immigrant father lives in this kind of tension: even as she dismisses it, she worries that some of her father's advice might be wise and never really lets it go. She holds his might-be wisdom in a dark corner of heart, just in case.

My father's advice about the rich rises to my attention when, on a Thursday evening in June
2009
, Daniel Shadid introduces himself to me at a charity gala in the cavernous Navy Pier ballroom. I've never met him before but already know all about him. Like me, he's a first-generation American on his father's side. Unlike me, he is of Lebanese descent and has made a fortune as an investment banker. He poured much of that fortune into Shadid.com, a suite of online number-crunching tools for day traders. After selling the site and its algorithms in late
2000
, he retired with a net worth in the nine figures. He was thirty-nine.

Since then, Shadid has applied his substantial energy and influence to the protection of human rights and the pursuit of famous friends. He visited Burmese refugees in Thailand with Angelina Jolie and her retinue and accompanied George Clooney on a trip to Darfur. Shadid seems to want to
be
Clooney—he's always in a suit but rarely wears a tie, his olive skin is perpetually tanned, and he's allowed his hair to go salt-and-pepper. Shadid has never married, but his serial romances last for months, rather than days. My theory on that: Shadid stays with a woman long enough to look more like the serious philanthropist than the multi-millionaire playboy.

Why do I know so much about Daniel Shadid? Interior designers who make their living in Chicago cannot help but absorb every detail of his life. Shadid's equivalent of Clooney's Lake Como retreat (where Shadid has spent several long weekends) is the ever-growing number of luxury condominiums he owns in Chicago. Shadid serves elaborate dinners at his North Michigan Avenue penthouse and then, for their privacy and his, sees that each of his guests and his or her date is taken by town car to one of his properties. In the pictorials published in the trades each time one of his new living spaces is unveiled, I've noticed a few consistent elements. His taste leans toward the modern, as if each room were styled not for George Clooney, but for Hitchcock's Cary Grant. To better impress guests who pack light and don't stay long, Shadid and his architects plan for wet bars and saunas where anyone else would put closets. And while the rest of us search one-of-a-kind shows and foreign bazaars for pieces that fit our clients' limited budgets, Shadid's designers ponder the problem of how to feature—or, in some cases, employ as mere accents—fine and modern art from Shadid's personal collection. My clients who know him—or know people who know him—tell me that Shadid never boards a guest in the same condo twice, preferring to give Hollywood's most famous do-gooders a progressive tour of the guesthouse
-cum
-museum he has built out across the most luxurious buildings in Chicago.

In the course of our conversation, which begins as I wait for a glass of cava at the ballroom bar, Shadid extracts three pieces of information from me: that my profession is interior design, that I know of his ongoing guesthouse project, and that I'm attending the gala not with a date, but a friend. I suppose he also notices that I'm not wearing a wedding band. I removed it a little more than a month ago, the night I discovered from our April
2009
mobile-phone bill that Richard, my husband of more than eight years, had been sleeping with both his paralegal and his personal trainer.
(“Ten cuidado con los ricos”—Ay, papá, tenías razón acerca de Ricardo.)
Even as I answer Shadid's question about how I like my River North neighborhood, my thumb swabs the underside of my naked ring finger.

The tickets to this gala were a last-minute gift from my best client, who was called to Copenhagen on business and did not want the two twenty-five hundred dollar meals she purchased with her donation going to waste. I do not have big money, like the people who bought their own way into this party, but any interior designer making a living in this city knows how to converse with rich people. This is the reason I offered the second gala ticket to my friend Nicola Hayes. Nicola runs her own interior-design firm, which, like mine, is small and successful in the sense that it employs only its owner but employs her well. Though we're both intent on making something big of our respective businesses, Nicola and I never compete for work.

“There's no need to compete,” Nicola said to me once while we shared tapas and a pitcher of white sangria. “We'll divide the city. Half for you, half for me.”

“How much of my half do I have right now?” I asked her.

“About one half of one percent.”

And we laughed as we clinked our glasses.

While Shadid tries to place me in his extensive network by naming interior designers and asking if and how I know them, I see Nicola over his shoulder. Hiding the gesture with the sleight of hand of a person practiced in the art of sipping cocktails, Nicola opens her eyes wide, as if to ask,
“Do you believe what is happening to you right now?”

“I'm close to closing on a penthouse space at Roosevelt and McCormick,” Shadid says, reclaiming my visual attention.

“I know the building,” I say.

“Have you seen the penthouse?” he asks.

“I haven't, no.”

“It's stunning,” he says. “Thirty-eight hundred square feet. Lake views in three directions.”

“All but a few of the building's units have lake views, I think.”

Shadid ignores my attempt to bring him back down to earth.

“I'm having the unit stripped and the walls knocked down,” he says. “I want a designer to help me reconceive the space. Perhaps you'd join me for the walkthrough?”

Shadid is the greatest patron of interior design in Chicago, but he almost never works with local designers. The pose he strikes—an elbow on the bar, one leg crossed in front of the other at the shin, the lip of his glass just inches from my own—reminds me that, at thirty-six years old, I am what passes for an age-appropriate object of the forty-eight-year-old Shadid's affections.

Ten cuidado con los ricos.

“Mr. Shadid—”

“Daniel.”

“Daniel, I've read enough about you to know that you don't book your designers yourself. Whoever joins you on that walkthrough will be vetted by Claire Weber.”

Claire Weber was one of the most successful independent interior designers in the city until she went in-house, full-time, with Shadid. Two of my best clients are former clients of Claire's.

“Who says you haven't been vetted already?”

“Well,” I say, smiling politely, “I haven't had a call from Claire or one of her people.”

“Don't be so sure that proves anything.”

He thinks he is being clever and mysterious, but the idea that this entire conversation has been some kind of charade, that Shadid already knew the answer to every question he has asked me, is more alarming than anything else. Regardless, I give him my card and tell him that I'd be pleased to talk more about how I can help him as a designer. He puts the card in the pocket of his tuxedo jacket and tells me to expect a call.

The call does not come. Nine months later, the March
2010
issue of
Chicago
magazine runs a photo spread of Daniel Shadid's Roosevelt Road penthouse, which features panoramic views of the skyline and Lake Michigan, unobstructed sightlines into the bowl of Soldier Field and, on the wall of an otherwise unremarkable anteroom, a Willem de Kooning canvas only recently discovered by the artist's estate and purchased at auction by Shadid himself.

 

•••

 

TO MARK THE
 beginning of my post-divorce life, I'll spend the month of June
2
010
in Morocco: three weeks purchasing decorative pieces for clients in the open-air
souks
of Marrakech, Tangier and Casablanca, and a week of rest and relaxation at a spa in Essaouira. The truth, though, is that my new life is already underway. It started on May
1
,
2009
, the day I moved out of the condo I'd shared with Richard. About a week later, on a Sunday I was determined not to spend moping around my new apartment, my life began to take a shape I would never have expected for it.

In Chicago, a person with any interest in Catholicism can curate her experience of it by shopping around for a community of like-minded people. My decision to attend a Catholic mass for the first time in ten years had nothing to do with community. When I met Richard back in
1998
, I decided to stop going through the motions at mass on Sunday mornings just to honor my father, who had been dead for four years by then. Instead, I'd spend Sundays doing things I actually
wanted
to do, like reading and working out and going to brunch with the man I was already imagining I would marry. With Richard out of my life, what I wanted was some reminder of my life before I met him, so the idea of going through the motions of the mass felt comforting. And as those motions would be basically the same at any Catholic church, I saw no reason why the parish nearest my apartment would not do.

When I walked through the doors of St. Asella's for the first time, I very nearly turned and walked out. The church was dark and humid, like the inside of a mausoleum, and the stained glass was covered in a dull film. There were only a few people in the church, sitting far apart from one another, as if they had reserved multiple rows for themselves. Worried that I might have misread the mass schedule, I looked for an usher, but no one was standing near the church doors. I decided that, having already made the short walk from my apartment, I'd try to say a few prayers.

I found a place in a pew near the back and knelt on the threadbare padded platform in front of me. But I didn't pray. I watched. Over the next ten minutes, about fifteen people came through the church doors. I guess I was half-expecting to see someone
like me
—a professional who lives in the neighborhood and happens to go to church, someone with some wounds in need of tending, maybe, or a nostalgia for tradition, but a life I would recognize. So far as I could tell from the messages they sent, consciously or not, with their dated hairstyles and ill-fitting clothes, none of the people in that church were anything like me. I recalled another lesson that my father had tried to teach me: “God sees differently,” he'd say, the words drowning in the thickness of his accent. “Talent, money, nice clothes, a beautiful face—these things don't matter after all.”

Kneeling in that depressing church, surrounded by strange, tasteless churchgoers, I decided that God and my father had been wrong about that one.

At noon, an organ started up in the choir loft and a heavy priest waddled down the center aisle. I remembered the opening song from childhood, but no one else was singing, so I didn't sing, either. On the altar, the priest started the mass with a blessing. The people in the pews mumbled their responses or made no response at all, and the priest went ahead with the prayer, expecting nothing of them and nothing of me. And as I settled into the ritual rhythms of sitting, standing, and sitting again, I began to enjoy the isolation, the sense of knowing no one there and no one knowing me. I enjoyed it so much that I came back to St. Asella's the following Sunday, and the Sunday after that, to enjoy it again. At the very beginning, my return to Catholicism was less of a move toward something than a weekly, hour-long retreat from the heartache and obligations of life as I knew it.

But after a few weeks, I began to feel like a scavenger feeding on the decay of what, according to the parish history published in the weekly bulletin I'd picked up, had once been an authentic community. St. Asella's was built by working people—immigrants, like my father, Italians, like my mother's parents—and I couldn't get past the sense that, by showing up on Sundays to stand, sit, kneel, and leave without saying a word to anyone, I dishonored the immigrants who'd poured their sweat and treasure into the construction of this church. Even if I could do no more than go through the motions, there were other motions to perform.