The Voiceover Artist (34 page)

The early arrivals continued at a slow trickle, but almost without interruption. Everyone was dressed, stains and dated fashions notwithstanding, in his or her Sunday best. I wondered if this was the feast day of a minor saint important here and nowhere else—perhaps St. Asella herself—or the anniversary of Fr. Dunne's ordination. Or perhaps Fr. Dunne had dedicated a recent homily to that old summer stand-by of the priest who is out of ideas: chiding churchgoers for their inappropriately casual warm-weather clothing. All I knew for sure was that something had changed. Given how static and stale St. Asella's and its people had seemed to me, any change at all was unsettling.

By twenty minutes to twelve, the church was already half full—as full as I'd ever seen it—and people were still coming through the main doors. But none of them was the person I wanted to see most: Mrs. Landry. There was little for us to say to each other, but I wanted Mrs. Landry to witness that I'd returned, as she'd asked me to, and that I was finally able to accept some of the fellowship she'd offered me when I walked her home. I worried that, in the nearly four weeks since last I'd seen her, Mrs. Landry or her husband had suffered some grave illness or serious fall. Even standing on the outside of it, I understood that the St. Asella's community would be greatly diminished without her. Her tenacious grace seemed irreplaceable.

Ten minutes later, Catherine appeared at the front of the church. She wore a gray dress with a belt that accentuated her hourglass figure, and a stylish necklace of amber pieces strung in a cascade. As she passed through the sanctuary, I waggled twice and waited for her to start down the usual route of her Sunday-morning parade of mutual appreciation. But the appreciation never materialized. Though crowding in the front pews had pushed people to the very edge of the side aisle, only one woman reached out to grasp Catherine's hand. Catherine took the hand for a second and released it without slowing her progress toward the back of the church.

There was a dignified reserve in Catherine's perfect posture and the stillness of her head. She looked older than I remembered. The word “handsome” came to mind. I wondered if what I perceived to be changes in Catherine were actually changes in me.

When she turned the corner around the last pew, Catherine's closed lips spread into a smile. She seemed entirely unsurprised to see me.

“Hello, Simon,” she said.

“Good morning.”

We stood there with our backs to the wall, saying nothing. It was not an awkward silence so much as an ordinary one, as if I had not been absent from St. Asella's for weeks, as if our last conversation had been all politeness and pleasantries, as if dozens of people were not still streaming through the church doors and packing into pews, dressed for a wedding or a funeral.

After almost a minute, I waggled, turned to Catherine, and asked, “What's going on here today?”

She studied my face for a moment. “Didn't Mrs. Landry tell you?”

“I haven't seen her yet.”

My answer seemed to confuse Catherine, but she didn't voice her confusion. “The Archdiocese is sending a representative today,” she said. “Monsignor someone-or-other.”

“Why?”

Catherine shook her head and raised her eyes to the distant ceiling. She was smiling, but seemed mildly put out.

“Sorry,” I said. “Too many questions.”

“No, no,” she said, “it isn't you. It's this place. No one tells anyone anything.” She turned to me. “St. Asella's is closing. The Archdiocese is shutting it down.”

“Wait, what?”

“A diocesan official is visiting every parish on the closings list to explain the decision,” she said. “The people of the parish are taking this mass as their chance to show the Cardinal that St. Asella's should be kept open.”

“That's why it's so crowded.”

“Yes.”

“How did you do it?” I asked Catherine.

“Do what?”

“How did you get all these people here?”

“I didn't,” Catherine said. “Mrs. Landry did.
She
called
me
.”

I felt stung that neither Mrs. Landry, nor anyone else, had called me. Then I remembered that, as we stood in front of her condo building, Mrs. Landry had personally invited me to return to St. Asella's, and I'd turned her down.

“So, Mrs. Landry knew the monsignor was coming before you did?”

I looked to the church doors again, expecting to see the four-footed platform of Mrs. Landry's cane crossing the threshold, but saw no sign of her.

Where is she?

Keeping her eyes forward, Catherine reassumed the reserve she'd displayed coming down the side aisle. “I haven't been coming to mass,” she said. “I wouldn't have known about any of this if Mrs. Landry hadn't told me.”

“Why haven't you been coming to mass?”

“It just isn't for me.”

Her sharp tone made it clear that I shouldn't press the issue any further. Of the many changes I encountered at St. Asella's that day, this was the most disorienting: Catherine and I were
both
standing outside the community that she had given so much of herself to create, and I was the only one of us who wanted in.

Two altar boys in yellowed, ill-fitting albs hurried down the near side aisle with their heads down and their hair in their eyes. As they slipped past people scanning hopelessly for an open seat in the pews, the boys looked embarrassed, as if they were wearing Halloween costumes their mothers had chosen for them. When they reached the back of the church, the altar boys leaned against the wall alongside a wooden box labeled “Offerings for the Poor” and tried to disappear.

Fr. Dunne stepped into the sanctuary and turned back to the sacristy door to watch the aged monsignor follow him out. The monsignor was dressed just like Fr. Dunne except for a black cassock, the hem of which was visible beneath his green vestments. Slowing his usual frenetic pace to match that of the older man, Fr. Dunne led his distinguished concelebrant to the side aisle. The monsignor smiled and drew small, tasteful crosses in the air with his hand as he passed people seated in the pews. The action looked less like a blessing than it did the glad-handing of a politician.

“Do you think any of this will keep them from closing the place?” I asked Catherine.

“No,” she said.

As gently as I could, I asked, “Then why did you come back?”

“Because Mrs. Landry asked me to, I guess. It was one last thing I could do.” Then she looked at me. “Why did
you
come?”

I took a waggle without hiding it. “I didn't do things right the first time. I'm trying again.”

Catherine nodded and, in her kindness, she didn't say what we both understood: that my first chance with the people of St. Asella's would be my only chance. We were witnessing the last, heaving gasp of a community that would not survive the closing of its parish. Those with cars, bus passes, or the time, energy and ability to walk a few extra blocks would find another parish. But their misfitting would follow these people wherever they went, and few would warm to their brokenness. They'd be outsiders in their adopted parishes, even more so than at St. Asella's. I wondered how many of them would lose forever the meager human connections they'd found at church.

As Fr. Dunne and the monsignor reached the back pew, the altar boys reluctantly took their position in the center aisle at the head of the still unformed procession.

“Well,” Catherine said over a sigh, “here we go.”

She moved toward the center aisle, giving the two priests a wide berth as they made their approach. I was supposed to be standing right in front of Catherine, and I knew it, but did not step forward. This mass was a death knell for St. Asella's, and the best I could do, as an outsider, was delay its tolling.

A bass note from the organ rumbled in my chest. A piercing treble chord followed. The congregation came to its feet. The altar boys started up the aisle. Even as Catherine, then Fr. Dunne, and then the monsignor turned to ask with their eyes what the hell I thought I was doing, I stayed on the wall, staring into the crowd of heads bowed over hymnals.

I'd stalled for only a few uncomfortable moments when the soft, cool skin of an open hand slid into my sweaty palm. Mrs. Landry was standing just inside the church doors, her smiling face raised with great effort on the end of her curved spine. Her husband stood behind her, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. And as she squeezed the meat of my hand with her arthritic fingers, accepting me into a community that was hers as much as anyone's, I mourned the passing of St. Asella's and marveled again at Mrs. Landry, who was broken in so many ways she did not try to hide yet utterly undefeated by her brokenness.

14

 

Larry Sellers

 

I'M ALONE, READING
 a magazine article in the waiting room of Don Biel's studio, when I feel a tickle high in my chest. I can't go into the session with a tickle. That's asking for trouble. I try to cough it away gently, but the dainty throat-clearing just makes the tickle worse, so I take a deep, crackling breath and cough hard, sending a wad of wet-cement phlegm into my mouth. That puts an end to the tickle, but the cough doesn't stop. Spasms sputter against my pursed lips, making it almost impossible to get air.

I barrel into the too-small bathroom, close the door, and spit the yellow mess—Sinatra would have called it “a clam”—into the rust-stained porcelain sink. Then I force in a breath and let loose with a coughing fit that sounds more like retching. As my gut clenches and my eyes water behind my bifocals, I worry that the ad people and their clients have come out of the elevator and are standing in front of the studio's unoccupied reception desk, alarmed and disgusted by the noises coming from the bathroom.

When the coughing is over, I stand with my hands on either side of the sink, drawing shallow breaths. I look in the mirror for specific things: globs in my goatee, sweat on my brow, any sign of blood in my nostrils. This is no time for how-did-it-come-to-this soul searching. I have work to do. And thank God for that.

I remove my glasses and rinse my face with a handful of cold water. I take a few paper towels from a stack on the toilet tank and press them to my forehead, cheeks and mouth. Then I return the nose pads of my glasses to the red divots they've pressed into my skin and apply a snappy tug to the lapels of my mustard-colored sport coat. The coat is an old one. I haven't been able to button it in years. But it still fits in the shoulders. Checking it in the mirror for any mucus I might have missed, I recall what Elaine Vasner said about the jacket the first time I wore it out: “Nice coat, Larry. Does it come in catsup, too?”

I take one more deep breath through my nose, just to be sure the coughing won't start up again, and open the bathroom door, scaring the shit out of a skinny, straight-haired kid standing at the front desk. It's the noise of the bathroom door opening that scares him at first, but he seems to jump again when he sees me. I wipe my hand over my mouth to make doubly sure that no flotsam from my coughing fit is glistening around it.

The kid is dressed conservatively for an advertising type. Wearing a long-sleeve collared shirt and navy blue slacks, he looks more like a kid heading off to Catholic school. But what the hell do I know about how young ad people are dressing this month? Maybe the schoolboy look is in.

“Are you with Ogilvy & Mather?” I ask.

The kid shakes his head. “No.”

“Oh. Then who are you with?”

The kid shakes his head back and forth, as if considering whether or not to tell me the truth. Then he says, “Skyline Talent.”

My old agency.

Elaine's agency.

Immediately, I am sure I have fucked everything up—that I jotted down the wrong day or the wrong time or the wrong studio—and that sorting out the confusion will discredit me in front of Don Biel, my only remaining connection to good voiceover work. What terrifies me, though, is my irrational but unshakable certainty that Elaine Vasner has sent this kid to edge me out of the voiceover business, once and for all.

“My name is Simon Davies,” the kid says.

I couldn't give two shits what his name is. “You're booked for a session?”

“Yes.”

“For Sears.”

“Yes.”

“At eleven?”

The kid nods.

“You're sure.”

“Pretty sure.”

I stand there, nodding at him. Then I pick up the September
2010
issue of
Sound Mixing
magazine and reclaim my seat in the studio's waiting area without another word. I'm in no position to chase the grim reaper out of here, but I'll be damned before I show him in.

 

•••

 

WHEN I TOLD
 Elaine I was leaving Skyline—leaving Chicago, leaving her—to work in Los Angeles, she sneered and said, “Good luck out there, Larry. You'll need it.”

She was dead right about that, as it turned out. I didn't have much luck in Hollywood. Casting directors kept telling me I didn't have the right look, and would you believe that two guys—just two!—had all but cornered the market for male-voiced movie trailers? I tried so many different combinations of guttural tones and tempos to deliver the phrase “In a world . . . .” I never did find a combo that won me much work.

Once her anger at my leaving had blown over, Elaine and I started seeing each other socially again when I was in Chicago for the commercial sessions that kept me solvent. But the word “social” doesn't quite capture the nature of our relationship. It had the
look
of something social. We met for drinks, and the sex, when we had it, was dynamite. Elaine knew what she wanted in bed and made sure she got it. Then she would make it all about me, and, well, I've made love to women more beautiful than Elaine, but no woman has ever made love to me so well as Elaine did. All that said, I could have had (and did have) cocktails and sex with other women. The real pleasure of seeing Elaine had more to do with business than romance. We talked about things—the best microphones, the worst scripts, the feel of the words in the mouth, vocal warm-ups, the merits of a dry run, how to handle bad directors, ad-agency radio budgets, the going rate for residuals—that none of our other dates would have understood or cared about. By the time she was no longer my agent, though, Elaine didn't see our get-togethers as business meetings, and I knew it. But I didn't do a damn thing about it.

While I was still out in L.A., chasing work and women who weren't Elaine, she started seeing a wealthy guy. James, the Miller's Pub bartender who had mixed hundreds of cocktails for Elaine and me over the years, told me that this new guy—a lawyer, if I remember right—was crazy about her. I couldn't bring myself to stand in the way of Elaine's relationship, not when what I really wanted was work and, on the days I didn't have it, some shoptalk and a nightcap and maybe a roll in the hay. I thought Elaine might call to tell me she'd found somebody, or that she was marrying this guy, but she never did. I didn't call her, either. Without a word, we went from seeing each other a few times a month for twenty-three years to not speaking for ten. And counting.

Just a couple of months ago, though—around the Fourth of July—I was sitting at my kitchen table with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, holding its smoky heat deep in my lungs and ignoring the droning of the TV in the other room, when the phone rang. I leaned over to see the caller ID and stared, like the confused old drunk I was getting to be, at blocky, digital letters that read, “SKYLINE TALENT.”

I was unable to move until the ringing stopped. I checked ten times that night for a message, but nobody left one, and without a message, I couldn't even be sure it was Elaine who'd placed the call. So I poured another drink, and then another, telling myself that Elaine and I were still better off leaving not quite well enough alone.

 

•••

 

SIMON DAVIES IS
sitting with his hands in his lap. And that's all he's doing.

Read a magazine, kid. Act like this isn't your first session, for Christ's sake.

It occurs to me then that this may be his very first session, and the thought that I am losing my place in this business to a rookie gives me another reason to hate him. But the cold spite I harbor for Simon Davies is nothing compared to my fresh, throbbing regret that I ever left Elaine and her agency.

The day I moved back to Chicago after six years of scuffling in L.A. was my best chance to tell Elaine what a fool I had been and beg her to take me back at Skyline. But I didn't call Elaine. She was with the new guy by then, and we weren't talking. Besides, I had other ways of getting work.

I asked Don Biel, who'd produced the demo I sent to Elaine back in '
77
, to cut together a reel of my greatest hits. The title I gave it—“Larry Sellers: The Voice”— borrowed Sinatra's crown and put it on my oversized head. I figured that Ol' Blue Eyes wouldn't mind Ol' Mustard Coat helping himself in a time of need. Once the big Chicago agencies heard the reel, work started pouring in again, and I did something Elaine would never have allowed me do: I took every job I could get.

Elaine had built my career by making my voice a premium product. She set a high price for my services and increased demand by limiting supply. In other words, she forced me to turn down work.

“I don't see why I shouldn't do this one,” I'd say, referring to a job offer made by an agency perfectly willing to pay my exorbitant hourly rate plus Elaine's ten percent.

“You just did a national campaign for another one of their clients,” Elaine would say. “They'll start to think of you as their house guy, and then they'll feel entitled to get you at a discount.”

“But it's good work,” I would protest. “I want to do it.”

“Think Nancy Reagan, Larry. Just say no.”

With no agent representing me, I fielded every job offer directly, and because I wanted to work more than I wanted to make top dollar, I said yes. To everything. If it got me in a studio with a chance to make copy walk and talk, I took it. For three years, I worked at least three days a week, doing commercials, industrials, educational narrations, even
pro bono
public service announcements. If I wasn't recording, I was resting my pipes for the next session. My packed schedule kept the screw top on the vodka bottle. In those three years, I came the closest I've ever come to being happy.

The problem was this: I had it wrong, and Elaine had it right. My rate, which used to be two times scale, plus ten percent, started coming down in late
2004
. That didn't bother me at the time, as I had more than enough volume to make up for the pay cut, and the work meant more to me than the money, anyway. Then the work started drying up. It went down to two days a week. Then one day. Then three weeks without a phone call.

Then, in February
2005
, I lost Jewel Foods, a gig that had been my bread and butter for twenty years.

Therese Riggins, the long-time director of the Jewel account over at DDB Needham and a smart, tough woman—like Elaine—leveled with me.

“You've saturated the market, Larry,” she said. “Your voice can't mean Jewel Foods if it means every other brand, too.”

I was silent, beginning the grueling task of accepting that I'd done this damage to myself. I'd worked my way out of work.

“Do you do any other voices?” Therese asked.

“No. I don't.”

“Well,” she said. “I don't know what else to say. You'll have to wait this out.”

What I did instead of wait was quit the union. Once off the books with SAG/AFTRA, I could start taking the non-union voiceover work that paid like shit but was plentiful in Chicago. And when word got out I was available for non-union sessions, I feasted. The little agencies handling their tiny budgets loved the idea of getting Larry Sellers for their voice projects. But the sheen of my novelty dulled with the non-union crowd in less than a year. Even in the minds of these small-time ad guys, I wasn't the voice of Maalox or Hertz or even Jewel Foods anymore. I was the guy who did spots for strip clubs in the south suburbs and “Call now!” bumpers for ambulance-chasing lawyers. I was nothing special.

Only then did I seriously consider calling Elaine and asking for help. But I couldn't persuade myself it would do any good. I'd rotted out my career so completely that even Elaine Vasner, even if she were willing, could work no magic with it.

 

•••

 

THESE DAYS, BEGINNING
 my thirty-fourth year in what's supposed to be an older man's business, work is infrequent. I might have a session every couple of months for a six-month stretch, then wait another six months for the next one. And if the person hiring me isn't a burnt-out copywriter on a nostalgia trip, I know I have Don Biel to thank for the job. Don still engineers most of the sessions that take place in his little studio, which he built and wired with his own hands. If a young creative director mentions between takes that she's looking for talent she hasn't heard before, or says she's having a hard time finding the right male voice for a campaign, Don gives her my name and writes down the address of the website he had his son build for me. I assume that my getting this Sears job—the job I
believed
I was here to do before encountering this angel of death Simon Davies—was a result of Don's unpaid work on my behalf, which means that my fucking up the particulars of this session may do more than get me blacklisted at Ogilvy. It might make it impossible, even if he still wants to, for Don Biel to recommend me to any of the agencies that keep his studio lights on.

The thought of walking out of here without Don in my corner makes me sick to my stomach. I used to complain to Elaine that the long stretches without work—and by “long,” I meant a few days—were killing me. It was whiny exaggeration then. Now, it's closer to the truth.