“Everything is harder than you think it’ll be,” Connor said.
“Breaking into voiceover can’t be much harder than rebuilding my voice,” I said.
Connor chuckled, holding his glass in front of his lips. “It might take about as long.” He took a sip of bourbon and shook his head as he swallowed. “But if anybody can do it—”
Connor drained the rest of the whiskey from his glass, leaving his halfhearted encouragement half-finished.
“And if I ever do voiceover,” Connor continued, “I won’t use my normal voice. You can have it.”
So there it was. Connor was not impressed with my life or prospects. As my determination rose on a tide of anger, I wondered if this was the reaction I had really wanted from Connor, if I’d known that his disdain would motivate me more than his encouragement ever could.
I took two more swallows of beer. “So how are things for you?”
“Good,” Connor said, playing with his empty glass.
“You’re doing shows?”
“Every night,” Connor said. “Tonight is my first night off in—” He squinted, calculating. “Three months?”
“Wow.”
“Trying to get as many reps as I can. That’s how you get better.”
I nodded coolly at what I took to be more unsolicited, condescending advice. Then I asked, “Who are you on with tomorrow?”
“Just some guys I know.”
“A group?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s the name?”
My brother stared at me for a moment through slightly narrowed eyes. “You did this last time I saw you.”
“What?”
“You asked me the name of the group.”
“I like hearing the names.”
“They’re never funny.”
I waggled and said, “That’s why I like hearing them.”
Connor shook his head. “I’m not saying.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “You don’t have to.”
I watched Connor try to decide if telling me the name was victory or surrender in the face of the little trap I’d set for him.
“The point is, these guys are really good. They’ve had a show running at this bar for two years. One of them was a finalist for a correspondent slot on The Daily Show.”
“So he didn’t get it.”
“No.”
“Are you playing with them full time?”
“No,” Connor said. “One of their guys is on an audition in L.A. and they asked me to fill in for him.”
“Oh.”
“They said they might want to make me a permanent member, though.” Connor glanced down at his empty glass, and then raised his eyes to mine again. “So, yeah. Things are pretty good.”
But things were not good for Connor. Sure, he was still handsome. A mess of curly brown hair spilled over his forehead, accentuating by contrast the pale green of his eyes, and a day’s beard growth darkened his strong, cleft chin. Even so, he looked worn from the inside out in a way that a good night’s sleep wouldn’t fix. And in the rundown of his life in comedy, he hadn’t mentioned New York even once. That told me everything I needed to know about how things were going for my brother.
New York was the place where Connor saw himself when he’d made it in comedy. His fixation had started with Saturday Night Live but, at some point, the lights of 30 Rockefeller Plaza glowed so intensely in Connor’s mind that they illumined the entire city. For the past four years, Connor had been working in Chicago to win the attention of New York, and New York had paid him no mind. The pleasure I took in my brother’s struggles was fleeting—it meant nothing for me to catch up with Connor if our evenness was measured in unhappiness—but I was secretly pleased that he’d claimed things were going well for him when they were not. It was the first time I could remember that my brother had deemed me peer enough—or threat enough—to tell me such a lie.
“Another drink?” I asked him.
“Sure.”
Connor held up his glass by the base. I grabbed it around the middle, accidentally covering his thumb with one of my fingers for just an instant. At this glancing contact, I realized that Connor and I had not so much as shaken hands when he arrived, and it seemed too late by then to do anything of the kind.
I pitched my empty beer bottle into the plastic garbage can in the kitchen. Pouring Connor’s whiskey, I took two waggles and vowed to drink my next beer more slowly. Going drink for drink with Connor was certain to bring the evening—or my participation in it—to a stuttering, premature, and potentially mortifying end.
Carrying a full bottle of beer and a glass of bourbon, I reached the open porch doors and stopped. Brittany and Connor were standing next to one another, smiling. It looked as if they had just shaken hands.
“You’re up,” I said.
Brittany turned to me, opened her eyes wide, and let her smile fall. “You sound exactly like him,” she said. “Exactly.”
I handed Connor his whiskey, feeling hurt and a little indignant that my girlfriend had said that I sound like my brother, instead of the other way around.
She turned back to Connor. “How did that happen?”
“Well,” Connor said, “I like to think that when Simon was teaching himself to talk, he had his pick of any voice he wanted and chose mine.”
Brittany laughed.
It seemed that her nap had lifted her out of the horror of her afternoon, at least for the moment. She had ironed her hair flat, except at the ends, which curved in and brushed against her jawbone. Her small, high-set breasts stretched the vertical ribbing of her pale green tank top, the tail of which hung over the waistband of her favorite pair of short nylon shorts. An open black hoodie hung loosely over her arms. I knew her well enough to know she had applied a little makeup to her eyes and considered each piece of clothing she was wearing, but Brittany always gave the impression that her beauty was effortless, which made her all the more beautiful.
For his part, with a second whiskey in hand and an attractive, one-woman audience to win over—with someone besides me around—Connor seemed more comfortable already.
I touched Brittany’s elbow and, as she turned to face me, she pulled it out of my fingertips.
“Drink?” I asked.
She looked over the edge of Connor’s glass. “Bourbon, please.”
A waggle delayed my reply. “Bourbon it is.”
“Thank you, baby.”
I set my beer bottle on the warped wood planks of the porch, sending a warm rush to my head. Then I went inside, pulled a second glass from a cabinet, and poured another bourbon, feeling buzzed and buoyed that Brittany was awake and feeling social, and that she and Connor were hitting it off. He was even flirting a little, which I took to be a harmless expression of our brotherly rivalry. Despite his tardiness and Brittany’s grief, my brother’s visit was beginning to take the shape that I had hoped it would.
I returned to the porch to find Connor seated and Brittany standing over him. I handed Brittany her glass and picked up my beer.
“This is easily three shots, Simon,” Brittany said, holding