The Voiceover Artist (26 page)

Then she gave me a hug, pushing her breasts into my chest and standing on the tips of her toes to put her cheek against my ear. For the first time in a long time, I had spent my evening talking to a woman I wouldn't be taking to bed, and the feel of her in my arms gave me a taste of what I'd be missing.

Brittany went inside, and Simon gave me one more goodnight wave. I waved back, lazily. He closed the porch doors, leaving me to my whiskey and the early-spring night silence of his neighborhood.

I had a couple more drinks. Around two in the morning, I put my sticky glass in the kitchen sink and took a long piss. Then I spread the sheet out on the couch, got under the blanket, and rolled onto my right side, facing the television. As I lay there, I enjoyed a little fantasy, something to fill in for the orgasm I wasn't having. I was on a New York stage playing some character—a garden gnome, I think—opposite an actress playing a schoolgirl. The words I heard in my head made no sense strung together, but we were getting big laughs from the audience. Even when they were silent, I could feel them smiling. Before the nonsense scene was over, I was asleep.

The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was Brittany standing over me in the darkness. Her hair hung forward, shrouding her face. She was naked from the waist down.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I whispered.

She pressed her hand to my mouth firmly.

She shook her head.
Don't talk.

Then, gently, she dragged her hand over my lips, down my chin and my chest to my belt buckle.

When she had my pants undone, she pulled off her top, revealing her taut torso in the weak streetlight coming through the picture window behind the couch. She took my hands and put them on her chest. I was still drunk but knew what I was doing. I mashed her tiny breasts together and took the nipples between my fingers. That was all it took to get hard. I threw off the sheet and pulled down my pants. She unwrapped a condom and rolled it down over the shaft. Then I grabbed Brittany by the hips, pulled her onto me, and found my way inside her.

All evening, I had resented Simon's happiness. In my own silent moments of self-indulgence, I'd imagined his contentment dissolving into the tears I'd sometimes found on his face when I'd barged into his childhood bedroom. But I don't think I would have fucked Simon's girlfriend if I hadn't allowed myself to believe for a split second that Simon, in his insane desperation to make things even between us, had begged her to do this.

 

•••

 

I WASN'T SURE
 how long we'd been onstage that last Thursday in July, but it must have been long enough. I could feel Raam guiding our scene toward an ending.

Then, because he's a fucking pro and generous as hell, Raam gave me one more perfect set-up, and I laid down the royal flush of improvised callbacks: fully in character, in the flow of the story we had invented on the spot, I closed the scene with the very same audience-suggested word we'd used to start it.

The lights went down. The music came up. And once the stage lights were blazing again, Raam and I were greeted with whooping so loud it barreled over the raucous applause and rang my eardrums.

But delivering the closing laugh line wasn't my biggest achievement in a show I still consider one of my best ever. For the time that Raam and I were in scene, I lost myself so completely in my characters that I managed to forget two staff writers from
Saturday Night Live
were sitting in the audience.

Marcus Reiser, the artistic director at Improviso, had called me the day before.

“
SNL
is coming to see the show,” he said. “Tomorrow night.”

My heart rate jumped, but I couldn't piece together the details.

“I don't get it,” I asked. “I thought they were fully cast.”

“One of the featured players said something in the press about the show not being funny, and they let him go.”

“Oh.”

“They're sending teams all over to find a replacement. Two guys are coming to Improviso.”

“To see me.” Something in me needed to hear him say it.

“Well, they're not coming to see Raam,” Marcus said. “They're finished going round and round with him. Which reminds me, don't mention any of this to Raam.”

“I don't understand. Raam doesn't want to be on
SNL
.”

“Jesus, I know that,” Marcus said. “I'm worried he'll get pissed that the industry—and
SNL
in particular—is treating his show like a farm team.”

Marcus had a lot to gain from the big boys' raiding his club for talent. Stories of unknowns being discovered drew students into the training program that was Improviso's cash cow. But I didn't like the idea of putting Raam in a bad spot. Marcus must have guessed this.

“Don't worry about Raam,” he said. “If he says anything to you, tell him to see me. Just do the show like you've been doing it. Go out there and kill.”

“Okay,” I said.

And that's what we did.

Between bows, I shielded my eyes from the stage lights and scanned the crowd—a sellout, despite the thunderstorms that had lashed Chicago that afternoon and evening—for two people who looked like
SNL
writers. Call it stereotype or playing the percentages, but I assumed they would be white, male, and in their thirties. About half the audience fit that description, though, and I couldn't make out any of the people sitting in the booths at the back of the room. So I stopped looking for the writers and looked for Erika. I spotted her standing between the seats and the bar, clapping for us. Her open, loving smile warmed me in a way that even the audience's extended appreciation did not. Then Raam thanked the audience again, applauded its members like an athlete thanking the home crowd, and took a final bow.

I followed him to the back of the stage, under the frame of the short stage door he opened, and into the narrow passage that led to the club's tiny green room. Raam surprised me by stopping in the passageway and turning to face me.

“Good show,” he said, wiping sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt.

“You, too. Thanks for that last line.”

He waved me off. “All I did was set it up.”

“Yeah, well, we both know that's the hard part.”

“We know.” Still catching his breath, he leaned back against the plywood wall of the passageway. “But the morons who run Saturday
Night Live
might not.”

I should have known that nothing that happened at Improviso could be kept from Raam. The club was
his
—it belonged to him more than it belonged to Marcus or the owner. I started to explain, but Raam interrupted me.

“You knew they'd be here?” he asked.

I thought he was going to tell me I should have told him, that hiding this kind of thing was a crime against improv as Raam practiced the art.

“I knew, yeah, but—”

“It doesn't matter,” he said, waving me off again. “It doesn't. What matters is that I had no fucking idea whether you knew they were here or not. You made your characters, and you stuck to them. You didn't sell out the scene for cheap laughs. You were no different out there tonight than you are when we do this in an empty room.”

To this day, I'm not sure I've been paid a better compliment.

“You won't get
SNL
this time,” Raam said, unrolling his shirtsleeve from a cuff at the elbow. “They saw me three times before they made an offer. They saw Sandra”—the woman I'd replaced in Raam's show—“twice, and she decided to take a film job rather than wait around for Lorne Michaels to tap her. But you'll get an offer eventually. You have TV good looks, and your comedy is plenty good enough.”

“Look,” I said, “I know what you think of the show—”

“Those are
my
hang-ups. If you want the job, I hope you get it. Until then—”

Raam popped me on the shoulder and headed toward the green room.

“—let's keep doing what we're doing.” Shouting over the hum of the crowd on the other side of the wall, he said, “I think people like it.”

In the green room, I toweled off my face, changed into a dry shirt, and grabbed my backpack. Improviso audiences hung around to drink after the show, and performers were expected to mingle. “People want access to the talent,” Marcus had told me. “It's part of what they're paying for.”

Raam was exempt from the mingling rule. He exited through a back door and took the El home to his partner. That left only me to field meaningless, over-the-top praise from drunks and improv-scene hangers-on and to look like I was fishing for compliments by standing around near the bar. Most nights, I just did my time: twenty minutes or two bourbons, whichever came first. But that night, given how well the show had gone and that Erika was there, I figured it was worth spending an extra ten minutes at Improviso to see if the
SNL
writers had anything to say to me.

When I came out from backstage, the seats around the cocktail tables were empty, but the bar was packed seven- or eight-deep. Waiting at the edge of the stage with a bourbon for me was Andre Rebrov. Andre was a native of Chicago's Ukrainian Village—there were traces of his parents' accents in his
R
s—and a solid, experienced improviser. I'd sat in with his team at Improviso a couple of times, and he'd been a regular in the audience at Raam's Thursday-night shows for years. Andre was a schmoozer. He dove into the gossip and politics of the comedy scene in a way I did not. He talked about who was fucking who, who Second City was scouting, and which improv team you'd never heard of was lighting up the small stages. But as after-show mingling went, drinking with Andre was easy time. I was glad to see him.

“Hey, Dre,” I said, stepping off the stage.

“Good show, my friend,” he said, handing me the glass.

“Thanks. And thanks for the drink.”

“Thank Donna. I told her it was for you, and she gave it to me.”

I assumed that Donna was the bartender. Andre always knew the bartender's name.

“I'm going to remember that trick the next time I see this show and don't feel like paying for a drink,” he said.

I stared at the mass of people around the bar as if it were an outdoor pool on a cold, cloudy morning. Even the possibility of meeting the
SNL
writers wasn't enough to make me want to dive in. Andre must have read the distaste on my face.

“It's not that bad,” he said.

“It's close.”

“I'll put it another way,” he said. “You don't have a choice.”

Andre was right about that.

“It's not like you have to hear their life stories,” he said. “Just get to the edge of the crowd. We'll keep talking. And Marcus won't have anything to say about it.”

We slipped past a few people on the outskirts and stood on the railing of the shallow ramp that led up to the club's small lobby. It was as good a place as any I could have hoped to stake out. The people on the perimeter of the bar crowd were standing with their backs to us, and the
SNL
writers would have to walk right past me when they left, if they hadn't left already.

I spotted Erika sitting at the bar. She said something to Donna that made the bartender laugh while pouring two drinks at once. Erika and Donna had never met, so far as I knew, but a stranger might have guessed they had known each other for years. I already understood, of course, that Erika had an uncommon power to put people at ease. What surprised me was that she had any of that power in reserve after expending whatever energy it took, day after day, to make me so comfortable with her. I wondered if I had reached the point at which I was doing most of that work myself. Maybe it wasn't work for either of us anymore.

“The show got off to an interesting start,” Andre said.

“How do you mean?”

“With you kicking a guy in the audience.”

I had forgotten about this. When Raam and I came out to start the show, a lanky guy in the front row, wearing long cargo shorts and a baggy white t-shirt, was splayed out in his chair, cooling the heel of a big, blindingly white hi-top shoe on the stage. In my book, this is a pretty serious violation. The audience should stay the fuck off the stage. I'd had to compromise that principle working in the back rooms of bars, where people cut across stages that weren't really stages to get to the bathroom, but I wasn't about to let some guy rest his foot on the Improviso stage while Raam and I tried to create the most important scene of my life out of a single word. As Raam described the format of the show to the audience, I glared at the guy. He noticed me glaring and stared right back, but he didn't move. So I stepped to the front of the stage and kicked the guy in the sole. He put his feet on the floor then, and I smiled down on him with false friendliness.