The Voiceover Artist (22 page)

“Do Mr. Lucas!”

Connor shot Ken a look. In a decision that coincided roughly with his starting high school, my brother had begun denying all requests, at home and in public, for routines and impressions he had once done the moment he was asked.

“I'm not a trained monkey,” he'd say. And when he was feeling particularly justified in his refusal, he'd add, “I'm not doing any of this for you, anyway. I do it for me.”

Ken and Miro knew Connor's stance on command performances—Connor had turned them down before. But, perhaps having already decided to imitate Mr. Lucas, Connor glanced in all directions for any sign of the loud, little man who taught my history class, and then became him.

“We're running out of time,” Connor's Mr. Lucas said, “so I'm going to go Pentangelo here. Mr. Pentangelo, which president made the call to drop the first atomic bomb on Japan?”

“Roosevelt,” said Connor's Pentangelo.

“No!” answered Connor's Mr. Lucas. “No! No! Pentangelo! I went to you because we were short on time! We needed the right answer, Pentangelo! Now the period is almost over and your classmates are under the impression that Franklin Delano Roosevelt green-lit the first atomic bomb! The man was rotting in his grave, Pentangelo!
Truman
, Pentangelo! Truman dropped the bomb!”

Midway through the routine, Ken and Miro had fallen onto their backs, laughing with the abandon of much younger boys, but Connor saw it through to the finish, showing no mercy as his still new friends gasped for air between paroxysms of delight.

I was more awed than amused. I had witnessed Mr. Lucas' memorable dressing down of Giuseppe Pentangelo, one of the best students in my junior class, and knew for a fact that Connor hadn't been there to see it. I guessed he had heard it through the open door of his own history class, which met in the classroom across from Mr. Lucas' during the same period, but that didn't explain how Connor had so completely captured the physical reality of the exchange. He had even stood over Ken and Miro in the same way Mr. Lucas had loomed over the sheepish Pentangelo. Somehow, my television-obsessed little brother had mastered a radio listener's trick: He had seen Mr. Lucas with his ears.

Ken and Miro lay on their backs for a minute or so after Connor relented. As they caught their breath, the boys spouted laughs that deteriorated into sighs of exhaustion. Miro was the first to sit up again.

“Who is that?” he asked.

Ken propped himself up on his locked arms, and each one of us followed the path of Miro's gaze with his own.

“That's Candace Andersen,” Ken said.

That a freshman such as Ken Hyde knew the name and face of a junior after only a few weeks at school would have been surprising if the junior had been anyone other than Candace Andersen.

Candace was an academic star who didn't flaunt her intelligence—she did her homework at home and rarely discussed grades. She was kind and well liked. And beautiful. That afternoon, she was sitting on the concrete base of the school's flagpole with an open paperback in hand, her brown hair moussed into a thick bouquet of curls flecked with golden blond.

By coincidences of class schedule, classroom layout, and alphabetical order, my assigned seat in Mr. Lucas' history class was next to Candace's, and I had occupied the desk behind hers in Mrs. Vallort's English class the year before. We didn't know each other well—I couldn't speak, so no one knew me well—but when we passed in the hallway or arrived at class, Candace would say hello. I'd respond with a polite, close-lipped smile intended to hide the following truths: that Candace Andersen enthralled me, that whenever I imagined speaking again, I imagined my first words would be “Hi” and “Candace,” and that once, in a moment of the hopeful delirium that was an occasional symptom of my solitude, I'd envisioned Candace inviting me on a walk after school. I imagined her telling me that she knew how I felt about her, that she felt the same way about me, and that I could hide all I wanted from everyone else but didn't have to hide myself from her anymore. And we would kiss long enough for me to forget that I didn't know how to kiss, long enough for me to learn how, maybe. Then Candace would pull her lips from mine, smile, and kiss me again.

“Dude,” Miro said to Connor, keeping his vocal volume low, “you should do those impressions for her.”

As she waited for her ride home, Candace crossed her long legs beneath her pleated skirt, keeping her eyes locked on her book. Connor squinted at Candace, seeming to contemplate Miro's challenge. Then Connor started out across the small, green patch of lawn between himself and Candace.

Over his shoulder, he said, “Don't let the bus leave without me.”

I think he was talking to me.

Miro and Ken looked at each other, their eyes open wide with anticipation.

“Oh shit!” Ken whispered to Miro, smiling.

The boys were surely imagining themselves, as I was imagining myself, in Connor's shoes. From a short but safe distance, and from the far side of a wide gulf of charm and talent, the three of us experienced the nervous thrill of recklessly approaching an uncommonly pretty girl.

As he neared her, Connor circled in front of Candace and waved. Candace hadn't met Connor, so far as I knew, but she smiled and said hello. The afternoon wind was gusting, and the rush of it in my ears had the effect of static in a weak radio signal, clipping some words and drowning others. But I did hear Connor say our last name.

And I heard the gorgeous ring of Candace's voice when she said, “Simon's brother?”

Connor claimed me minimally, with a nod, hedging his bet as to whether his being my brother was a good or bad thing in Candace's eyes. Then, as the wind kicked up again, Candace must have said her own name, because Connor stepped up to her and shook her hand. Something in the way he did that made her laugh.

That Connor could make Candace laugh with a handshake threatened me so deeply that I couldn't help but look away. For a few moments, I watched the wind thrash the slender branches of a hulking willow. Then I heard Candace laugh again, and my eyes followed the sound. Candace had closed her book, and Connor was doing Mr. Remacher's walk. When he finished, Candace tucked her book between her thigh and the concrete, freeing her hands to applaud Connor with false formality. Connor took a profound bow. And Candace laughed again.

Then Connor became Ms. Gorski. Over the gusts, I made out “stinky feets” and “let's go!” Candace threw her head back, raising her smiling face to the sky.

“She's loving it,” Miro said.

Connor skipped his bow and went straight into his Mr. Lucas. He paced and pointed to the invisible Pentangelo, then became him just long enough to give the damning wrong answer.

“No!” Connor shouted. “No, Pentangelo!”

As Connor gesticulated above the invisible Pentangelo, Candace, who'd had a ringside seat for the original Lucas-Pentangelo exchange, watched my brother with her smiling mouth agape.

When the scene was finished, she didn't laugh, and she didn't applaud. Staring at Connor and shaking her head, Candace Andersen said, “Unbelievable!”

She went on praising Connor in lilting words I couldn't make out. Like me, Candace had found my brother's performance even more amazing than it was amusing.

Connor kept his eyes on Candace, guzzling from the fire hose of her admiration without spilling a drop. When she was finished speaking, he held up his index finger, as if to say, I've got one more. And he just stood there. He slouched, but he didn't move a muscle and he didn't say a word. He stared off toward the state highway that marked the eastern border of the campus. He dropped his eyes to his feet, put his hands in his pockets, and swayed back and forth, slowly.

I strained to hear over the weakening breeze, waiting for Connor to speak in one of his thousand voices, but he said nothing.

“I give up,” Candace said, shaking her head. “Who is it?”

Connor shrugged and lifted his palms. I recognized that gesture. It was one of mine. He was asking her,
pretty please
, to guess.

Candace sat rigidly on the concrete block. “I really don't know.”

“Seriously?” Connor shouted, himself again. He sounded annoyed, even hurt.

“Who was it?”

“You couldn't tell that was Simon?”

Candace stared at Connor for a moment. Then she turned her face and squinted into the afternoon sun. It was at least a second before I realized she was looking at me. My face went red, and I stared into the distance, just as Connor had done in his impression of me.

“I'm only kidding,” I heard Connor say.

Candace said something I didn't hear.

“Really,” Connor insisted, “it was a joke.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that Candace had picked up her book again. Then, with her customary kindness, Candace said, “I'll see you around, Connor.”

Connor held up his hands in protest for a moment before dropping them. “All right,” he said. “See you around.”

She hadn't stuck up for me, really—not with the same fervor with which she'd praised Connor the moment before. But Candace hadn't enjoyed—hadn't
allowed herself
to enjoy—a laugh at my expense. Now, more than ten years after the incident, I know that Candace's refusal to laugh had more to do with her bedrock decency than anything else. But that day, wallowing neck deep in my silent self-loathing, I could only understand her non-laugh and the squinting glance that followed it to mean that Candace Andersen, the girl of my daydreams, pitied me.

Having sent their champion into the arena, Miro and Ken absorbed some of the embarrassment Connor had suffered and the humiliation he had doled out. Ken repeatedly zipped and unzipped the small pocket of his backpack while Miro uprooted individual blades of grass and tore them apart between his finger and thumbnails. For my part, as Connor made his way back across the lawn with his head down, I envisioned sprinting at him, pouncing on him like a predator, and beating him bloody, but I did no such thing. I knew that Connor was probably obsessing over the one laugh he'd gone for and failed to get, that he would replay his impression of me for days, dissecting it for flaws in character and timing, discounting the praise he'd received for his Mr. Lucas impression. The punishment Connor would inflict on himself was sure to be worse than any beating I could have meted out. So I left him untouched. That was my revenge.

I've since wondered if any of Connor's suffering over the next few days was rooted in some feeling that having done that impression of me, for Candace and right before my eyes, was wrong. My guess is that comedy, except insofar as doing it well was a kind of moral imperative, was not a matter of conscience for Connor, but I can't be sure. The fact that he didn't apologize to me doesn't settle things one way or another. Except for the meaningless apologies our mother had forced us to make, Connor and I had never apologized to one another. Every fight, every petty tattle, every humiliation that one of us perpetrated against the other was flung without comment onto the smoldering pile of wrongs we had done one another over the years. This was how it was between my brother and me: we went on with things, to the next right or the next wrong. I never thought to ask Connor why the men in our family didn't apologize to each other. I assumed he'd learned this unspoken maxim the same way I had: by watching our father.

The bus arrived as the sun began to sink beneath the leafy tops of the tall oaks west of campus. As Connor and I were driven home, sitting as far apart from one another as was possible, I found myself admiring him even before my shame had cooled. Someone just out for laughs, or to impress a pretty girl, might have been satisfied with Candace's astonished response to the impression of Mr. Lucas and quit while he was ahead. But for Connor, even the big stage that an audience with Candace Andersen provided was little more than a workshop. In his own mind, Connor wasn't performing. He was preparing for bigger performances to come. And in his ruthless determination to understand, by the time his golden opportunity arrived, what was funny and what wasn't and why, Connor was willing to make his mute older brother the butt of a joke, even as I watched. Slouched against the vinyl backrest of a bus bench, lost in my silence, I imagined what seemed impossible—a world in which I had a voice like the voices on the radio—and understood that, even if the impossible came true, I stood no chance of pulling even with someone as ambitious and cutthroat as my brother.

 

•••

 

FIFTEEN MINUTES AFTER
 Elaine and I hung up, a new message appeared in my e-mail inbox. The subject line read, “FW: Red Bull Comedy Tour Radio – The Pitch Man.”

The embedded chain of correspondence between Elaine and someone from the ad agency consisted mainly of logistic and administrative information—the date, time and location of the session, my hourly rate, and my union status. At the end of one of her notes, the ad-agency representative, who did not seem to be the creative director Elaine had known for years, wrote, “PLEASE make sure your client arrives at the session ON TIME, which is to say a few minutes BEFORE the session's official start time.”