Thursday, September seventeenth.
I have fallen asleep for three years to the same woman, a voice on my phone called Sable, and I have never once heard her say eight. "In for four," with soft rain under everything. "Hold for seven." I go under on the hold. On bad nights I wake at three for the last thing she says: "Hush now."
It was a bad night. By six I'd given up on the bed and was standing at the kitchen counter in socks, with the Metra rattling the spoons in the drawer, playing a voicemail from New York.
"Darling. It's me. Triple. I said triple and they didn't even blink. Who doesn't blink? Check your email and call me before I die of curiosity."
Bettina Roux has been my agent for twelve years and has never left a voicemail under forty seconds. This one ran eleven. She was in a cab, and before the number she'd taken the little breath she saves for money, which is different from the one she saves for gossip. The money breath is high and quick, a woman stepping into a cold lake.
Triple of what, I thought, and then I opened the email.
It had come in at six exactly. Not six-oh-one. In my experience only two kinds of people send email on the stroke of the hour: robots and the very organized, and I've never been sure which frightens me more.
From N. Subject, Read It To Me. Body: "Ms. Quill. The agreement and part one are attached. The clock begins on receipt. N."
That was all. No logo. No phone number. A sender called Nightjar Audio, which I'd never heard of, and I've heard of everyone, because there are only about nine of us and we all owe each other drinks. I looked it up while the kettle went. A nightjar is a bird that hunts at dusk with its mouth open. I've worked for worse mascots. I once narrated three books for a company whose logo was a winking croissant.
I read contracts out loud. Paper lies to the eye; it can't lie to the ear. A bad clause sounds like a man clearing his throat before he asks you for a favor, and you can hear it coming a sentence away. So I stood in my kitchen at six-oh-four and read the terms to the refrigerator, in the warm, unhurried voice I use for dukes.
"Title: Read It To Me. Twelve parts. First person, female narrator."
Fine. I am one.
"Parts delivered Mondays and Thursdays at six a.m. Each part recorded alone."
I have recorded alone for eleven years. I have moaned on cue in a padded closet in Ravenswood with a mug of cold tea at my elbow and the dog across the courtyard barking along in four-four time. Alone is the only way I know how to do it.
"Within forty-eight hours of receipt."
The stove clock said six-oh-five. Forty-seven hours and fifty-five minutes. I am not a person who counts hours, as a rule. I am a person who counts breaths, which is worse.
"Exactly as written. No edits. No director. No proofer."
I read that one twice. A director is the person in your headphones who says, "Lovely, one more, but this time as if you mean it." A proofer is the person who listens afterward and catches you saying "unclothed" where the page said "unclouded." I have needed both of them on the same afternoon. "One continuous take," it went on. "Errors to remain in the recording." Which meant that if I sneezed in part four, somebody's grandmother in Sacramento was going to hear me sneeze in part four for the rest of her life.
"Bracketed pause marks to be honored as a full breath."
"Triple rate, wired on delivery."
I read that one slower. You would too.
"Return a signed original by mail." Then an address on Clark Street, a suite number with a pound sign in front of it, which in Chicago means a box in a store that also sells packing peanuts.
"Any attempt to identify the author voids this agreement."
"Noted," I told the refrigerator, in my own voice, the small one. I have never once in eleven years wanted to meet an author. Authors want to know why you breathed there, and whether the duke could sound a little more like them.
"Exclusive release on the Nightjar app."
I downloaded it while I stood there, to see what kind of shelf I'd be sitting on. A black screen, a small white bird, and one line of type: Coming soon. No other titles. No reviews. A storefront with one window and the shades down.
"Release date: Thursday, October twenty-ninth."
Then the signature line, empty, waiting for me like a chair pulled out.
I put the phone face down and did the math aloud, because the refrigerator had been such a good audience. "Twelve parts. Mondays and Thursdays." I counted on the calendar on the fridge door, the free one from the Jewel with a different casserole every month. "The last one lands on a Monday, three days before release. They'd put it up themselves." The casserole for October was a tuna thing with crushed chips on top. "Tight," I told it. "Possible."
Then the other math. My rate, tripled, is twelve hundred dollars an hour of finished audio. For a short novel that came to about nine thousand dollars, wired seven hundred and fifty at a time, every Monday and every Thursday through October, for reading out loud.
Nobody pays triple for nothing. No director and no proofer means nobody to tell me no and nobody to catch me. The anonymous are a whole economy; I once read for a cardiologist who had been writing the same erotic sea captain since dental school. They are always strange about the terms and always on time with the wire.
And I needed it. After the divorce I'd rebuilt the booth in the back closet by myself, every panel, the door twice, and I was still paying for the door. The Velvet Hours finale recorded in November and wouldn't pay until January, and between here and January lay a long thin autumn of royalty statements that arrived like postcards from a cousin: affectionate, irregular, small.
"No author on my shoulder," I said to the kitchen. "A script with good money. My favorite kind."
The kettle had boiled and gone quiet without my noticing. I made the tea anyway and opened part one.
It was short, eleven pages, in a serif font somebody had chosen on purpose. I don't pre-read much. I like to meet a book in the booth, cold, with the headphones on. But with a new author I look at the first page like a tailor sizing up a customer coming through the door, for the shoulders, for the walk. You can tell in a paragraph whether somebody writes for the eye or the ear.
Part one began:
> My name is Delphine, and I lend my voice to strangers the way some women lend their coats, carelessly, and then stand shivering in doorways wondering where the warmth went. Half the city sleeps on my vowels. They take me to bed in their ears and wake without me, and I let them, because a voice that belongs to everyone is a voice that never has to answer for itself. My consonants are silk; my silences are fog off the lake, pale and patient; and men who have never seen my face wear my voice like a scarf against the cold. At night I lie in my own dark rooms and listen for a sentence that is mine, and none comes, and so I listen to someone else's instead. Someone else's sentence is always waiting, warm and worn and not quite my size, and I slip into it as if it had been cut for me.
Half the city sleeps on my vowels.
I laughed. Once, out loud, alone in my kitchen at six-twenty in the morning, the kind that comes out before you've approved it. It was such a big, shameless, velvet-rope of a sentence, and I was going to have to say it about myself, in the first person, into a microphone, with a straight face. Somebody had written a narrator's dream part and mailed it to a narrator, and paid triple for the postage. I've been flattered by better and paid by worse, and almost never both at once.
I read the rest of the page with my lips moving, just to hear where the breaths fell. The author liked adjectives in pairs. The author liked weather, and fabric, and the word "and." Purple is easy to read aloud; you lean on the adjectives like a banister and don't look down. First person is the only tricky part, and it isn't hard, only intimate. In third person you're a guest at the party. In first person you're the hostess, and every "I" is yours until the take is over, and then you hand it back at the door like a borrowed coat.
At seven-forty I signed.
I printed the agreement, all four pages, and signed it in blue at the kitchen table with the good pen, Iris Quill, in the handwriting I only use for checks and condolence cards. I folded it in thirds, licked the envelope, which nobody does anymore, wrote the Clark Street address across the front, and stood it against the sugar bowl so I wouldn't forget it.
Then I called Bettina.
"Darling. You signed. I can hear it, you've got your signing voice on." The cab was gone; she was somewhere with a cappuccino machine screaming behind her. "Triple, Iris, and a release date before Halloween, go buy something with a zipper, I love you, goodbye."
She was off the line before I'd said a word, which is how I know she loves me. She doesn't waste my minutes. They're half hers.
Before I left the kitchen I wrote the due date on the Jewel calendar, Saturday, six a.m., and drew a box around it. Then I flipped to October and wrote one word on the twenty-ninth, under the tuna casserole: release. It looked like a dentist appointment.
I could have recorded part one by noon. The booth was ten steps down the hall, the Neumann in its cradle, the headphones hung on their hook like a stethoscope. I didn't. Seven hundred and fifty dollars sat on the other side of that closet door, being patient, and it could keep. Money is good at waiting. And it was Thursday. Thursday is the one day of the week I don't work and the only day I plan for, and I wasn't going to give it to a stranger with a bird for a logo, not even at triple.
So I gave the day to small things. I did laundry in the basement. I slept for two hours in the afternoon with the window open and the wind off the lake coming in two weeks ahead of itself, smelling of wet leaves and the bakery on Montrose. I took a long shower with the water hotter than it needed to be and stood there after, in the fog, with my palms flat on the tile, until my skin forgot about the contract. I did not put on perfume. I never do, on Thursdays. I rubbed the plain lotion into my arms, my shoulders, the backs of my knees, slowly, because there was time.
Every Thursday since May I have gone downtown to a room where nobody wants my voice. I pull on the gray hoodie with the cuffs gone soft, and I put the hood up at my own front door, not at the corner, not at the station, at the door. I ride the Brown Line into the Loop with my eyes on the floor of the car, on other people's shoes and the grooved rubber and a transfer someone dropped in August. There is a man at the end of the ride. That is as much as I say about him, even to myself, until I'm there. By Belmont I can hear my own pulse inside the hood. By the Merchandise Mart it's in my mouth. I have never told anyone.
At eight-twenty I zipped the hoodie to my chin and put the envelope in my bag between my keys and my wallet, so it would make a sound if I forgot it. I'd drop it in the blue box at the corner of Damen, on the way. My phone was in my back pocket, and somewhere in it part one was sitting in a folder, eleven pages of Delphine and her famous vowels and her borrowed coats, waiting for my mouth.
The stove clock said eight twenty-one. I turned off the kitchen light, and then the hall light, and stood a moment in my own dark apartment, listening to the Metra coming from the north, far off, like weather.
I had thirty-four hours left of the forty-eight, and I was going to spend the next few of them being nobody.