The Voiceover Artist (11 page)

The waitress must have followed me to the booth. She stood between us, showing her crooked-toothed smile to Larry. Larry pointed at me.

“Vodka tonic with a lime,” I said.

“Two of those,” Larry said.

“You got it,” said the waitress.

“Is that the article?” I asked, taking my seat.

Larry picked up a folded section of a newspaper from under the small booth lamp and tossed it in front of me. The editors had used a headshot of Larry smiling like a troublemaking kid. The quote I'd given, in its entirety, was the last line of the first paragraph.

I skimmed down to Larry's discussion of his instrument and the care he took with his voice.

“‘My voice wasn't my livelihood yet,'” I said, reading Larry's quote aloud, ‘“but I always protected it. For example, I smoked, but didn't inhale. I still don't. Sinatra smokes the same way.'”

I looked up and dropped the paper back in front of him. “I guess that makes you Sinatra, then.”

Larry didn't say anything.

“More like Joey Bishop,” I added.

He watched his ice melt. Except to find out what I was drinking, Larry hadn't looked at me. I had another crack at the ready, one about this not being much of a party, but I skipped it.

“What's the deal, Larry?”

He smiled then, the way people smile at a funeral, which probably explains my first guess as to what was wrong: I thought one of Larry's parents had died.

“We've had a good run, Elaine,” he said.

Hearing those words, in that voice, chilled me.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean we've both done better than we could've imagined.”

I'd had it with the slow build-up. “What the fuck are you getting at?”

“I'm going with another agent.”

I snorted. “What?”

I'd heard the words—I wanted him to repeat them. But Larry just stared at his drink, and his words repeated themselves in the silence.

I leaned toward him, over the empty space on the table where my drink should have been.

“You've done national television spots for Ford, Aquafresh, and Old Spice,” I said. “You're still the national radio voice of Hertz and Maalox. I made your voice the sound of quality in Chicago, which is why advertisers will pay twice the running rate to get it.”

My eyes were locked on his face, but he was still looking down at his drink, as if he'd been expecting this reaction and was just waiting it out.

“Look at me, Larry,” I said, sharply.

He raised his eyes just a little.

“Name another agent in Chicago who could build you a better book of local and national work and keep it growing.”

He shook his head. “I can't.”

“You're goddamn right, you can't.”

I sat back, and the waitress put our drinks on the table. I took a swig of mine, still staring Larry down, feeling like a lawyer who'd just nailed her closing argument. Given the case I'd made—given what
I
had done for him—how could Larry work with anyone else?

“The agent works out of Los Angeles,” he said.

My confidence began to leave me in a slow, steady leak.

“She says that with my reel—with my voice—she can get me film work, audio books. More work. The kind of work I haven't done before.”

The kind of work I knew almost nothing about. The kind I couldn't get him if I tried.

“She wants to get me on camera, too.”

This woman was flattering Larry with Hollywood promises. Larry was good-looking, but he wasn't on-camera material. Taking him out from behind the microphone and putting him in front of a camera was no better an idea than sending Eric Clapton onstage without a guitar—sure, the guy can sing a little, but that's not what anybody pays to see. How many times had she pulled this same move with Midwestern talent? Why couldn't Larry see it for what it was? I started to picture this L.A. agent—younger than me, with long, blonde hair and perky little tits, sitting in an office above a boulevard lined with palm trees, on the phone with Larry, selling him a version of himself that doesn't exist—and for the first time, I felt upset about another woman in Larry's life.

Larry and I had a signed contract. I could've kept him for radio and television if I wanted. But I wouldn't do it. The freedom to come and go as we pleased, to turn down an offer to meet for drinks or leave while the other was still sleeping, had been the crux of our relationship, and our personal and professional lives seemed impossible to untangle. In that moment, I worried less about Larry leaving my agency than I did about him leaving Chicago.

“Will you work out of L.A.?” The smallness of my voice frightened me.

“Some of the time,” he said. “But most of my work is here, so I'll keep a place in Chicago.”

My
work is here.

My
work
is here.

I heard the remark both ways and felt doubly snubbed, first by the idea that Larry could so easily divorce his success from all I was still doing to help him achieve it, and then that I was nowhere to be found on Larry's short list of reasons to keep one foot in Chicago.

With some reason to believe that Larry wasn't moving to L.A. forever, I found the courage to leave the bar.

“I wish you a lot of luck,” I said, grabbing my coat and swinging my legs out of the booth. “You'll need it.”

I stood up and threw my coat over my arm.

“Elaine, let me take you home.”

In his tone—even drunk, Larry is a master of tone—I heard the suggestion that I was being unreasonable. That pissed me off. I took a quick step toward him and, to this day, I would swear he leaned away from me, afraid.

“You've fucked me once already tonight, Larry.”

 

•••

 

THE NEXT DAY,
I called everybody who owed me money for Larry's work and told them to pay up. When all of Larry's fees were in house, I had my comptroller cut his final check and put it in the mail.

“Any note?” the bean counter asked.

“No note.”

Then I purged my office of everything with Larry's name on it. I boxed up tapes of the spots he'd recorded and copies of the contracts I'd signed on his behalf and put them into storage. I would've chucked it all in the trash, but I knew that business break-ups like the one Larry had put in motion could be messy, and that these records were my proof that I'd made Larry money and paid him fairly. I wasn't about to find myself in a lawsuit, trying to explain why I'd thrown away every shred of evidence of my and Larry's work together. I'm a businesswoman. Not a schoolgirl.

The purge extended to mementos of time spent with Larry—room-service receipts, matchbooks from
4
a.m. bars, a menu I'd stuffed into my purse after a dinner celebrating Larry's Aquafresh booking, and a brochure for a Virgin Islands vacation we'd talked about a hundred times but never booked. I even threw out a placemat autographed, in
1986
at Larry's drunken request, by Tony Bennett, who had descended upon Miller's Pub with his entourage when we were having a nightcap.

“Elaine,” it read. “You're dynamite! And Larry ain't bad. Tony Bennett.”

It's not that I was through with Larry. I wasn't. It's just that I was sure that things between us would never be as good as they'd been when we were working together. I didn't want to be reminded of that fact every time I opened a drawer.

I thought I'd tossed out everything until a few weeks later, when I was looking for an invoice and found a framed photograph of Larry and me. We were at a table for two against a backdrop of knotty-pine paneling. It took me a moment to recognize the back room of the Twin Anchors restaurant in Old Town. The photo had survived my disposal of all things Larry, hidden behind the yellow-green fronds of a potted plant I kept on the file cabinet next to my office door and never remembered to water.

Holding the frame in my hand, it occurred to me that I hadn't thrown away any pictures of Larry and me. This was probably the only one I'd ever had. A relationship like ours didn't lend itself to photo opps. We'd never been to a wedding or a charity gala together—we'd never set up a date with more than a day's notice. I wouldn't have had any photos of Larry and me if the Twin Anchors hadn't allowed a photographer to walk around taking pictures and Larry hadn't bought one to make him go away. The purge had made artifacts of our relationship scarce, which made this image seem more precious. And there were some things about Larry and me, I decided, that I did want reminding of—like the fact that we'd once posed for and purchased this picture to get rid of a photographer and back to our conversation.

The plant that had been hiding it died soon after of not-so-benign neglect, but the photo of Larry and me is still on top of that cabinet, kept mostly out of sight behind the wilting, browning leaves of my latest victim.

 

•••

 

FOR MONTHS, THE
 only place I heard Larry's voice was on the radio. He had kept most of his old clients—Jewel Foods and Wendy's among them—but Hertz dropped him. His replacement was a guy who sounded a little like Larry but had only a pale shadow of Larry's vocal command. In Larry's hands, the Hertz work had been crisp and precise, like the driving of a champion road racer. The new guy was cruising wet city streets on bald tires. I wondered if some higher-ups in creative at the agency that handled the Hertz business had worried I might cut them off from Skyline's talent if they continued to work with Larry. That thought had me feeling like a big swinging dick in this business, a far cry from the quiet assistant I'd been when I started out, until I wrapped my head around its discouraging flipside: the agencies still working with Larry might have decided that, if they could have Larry Sellers, they could live without Elaine Vasner and her list.

In August of
'
96
, cabbing home to my apartment after visiting a sick girlfriend in the hospital and dining out alone, I heard the first spot Larry did for a client he hadn't booked through me. The advertiser was Connolly Auto, a family-owned trio of dealerships known for bottom feeding: buying up cheap airtime on the big AM stations, making a low-end spot, and running it for years. The spot opened and closed, as all Connolly Auto spots did, with the dealer's jingle, which lifted and twisted a Cole Porter melody and rhymed “Connolly” with “quality.” But this time, instead of some non-union, no-talent stooge, it was Larry sandwiched between the singing, his subtle vocal touches drowned out by a loud instrumental loop of the ridiculous jingle.

When the spot was over, I leaned my head against the cab window. This was not on-camera work in Hollywood. It was a bad local job I would never have allowed Larry to take. I knew there was no way Old Man Connolly had paid the rate I'd demanded for Larry. And while his voice may have been helping the Connolly Auto brand, the spot was poison to Larry's. Worst of all, everyone in the business would hear the spot eventually—Connolly's run-it-into-the-ground media strategy would make sure of that. I was still the top agent at Skyline—making almost as much money without Larry as I'd made with him—but hearing that spot gave me the feeling that everything I'd worked to build was being torn down around me.

 

•••

 

A FEW WEEKS
 after hearing Larry's Connolly spot, I was in my office when the receptionist, Lisa, showed up at my door.

“Excuse me, Elaine?”

That she had gotten off her ass instead of picking up the phone at her desk told me something was wrong. “Yes?”

“I have a call for you,” Lisa said. “It's Larry Sellers.”

She almost whispered his name, as if she were scared to say it to me.

I hadn't told her to screen Larry's calls. But there she was, standing just outside my doorway, asking for verbal permission to transfer Larry's call to my phone, a task she'd done without a second thought a hundred times before. I had the horrifying thought that, for months, without my noticing, everyone at Skyline Talent—even Lisa—had been seeing me as a jilted woman.

I turned her pity back on her. “Lisa,” I said, shaking my head.

“Yes?”

“What are you doing? Go back to your desk and transfer the call.”

“Okay.”

Ten seconds later, my phone trilled, I answered, and I heard Larry's voice say my name. He didn't sound sheepish or ashamed or chastened. He sounded as he always had.

We met for a drink that night at Trader Vic's. We were both a little stiff at first, and the jokes Larry made to loosen things up fell flat. But soon the Mai Tais were doing their work, and we were more comfortable. Larry mentioned a play he'd seen at the Goodman, and we discovered we'd seen it the same night. We hadn't run into each other, though, and if Larry had seen me with my date, an ad guy a few years younger than me, he didn't cop to it. I asked after the bartenders and regulars at the places we used to drink together, places I mostly stayed away from now, and Larry inquired about my girlfriend, Nancy, the one I'd been visiting in the hospital the night I heard his Connolly Auto spot. I told him that Nancy's cancer seemed to be heading into remission. This bit of good news about a woman he'd never met brought a warm, genuine smile to Larry's face, and the brief glimpse into his big, soft heart gave me a lift.