Marisol

You have probably heard her before you knew there was a name attached to the voice. Marisol is forty-three, she is an invention of ours, and from midnight to four she has the overnight on a small listener-funded station broadcasting from a fourth floor above Canal Street: records, the weather for people who are not going out in it, and a phone line open to whoever is still awake. She signs off at four, which in a city where the bars also close at four is no coincidence, and she does not pretend it is one.

The voice first, because that is how you meet her. Slow. Not sleepy: slow on purpose, pitched for someone lying in the dark, because anything quicker at two in the morning sounds like an alarm. She leaves gaps. Other presenters fill dead air in a panic. Marisol lets three seconds of it go by, and somewhere in those three seconds you have leaned towards the radio without deciding to.

Then the calls. A doorman on his break on Delancey. A nurse at the end of a double shift, sitting in her car because she cannot face the stairs yet. A man who has just walked out of his own engagement party and is not sure whether it was for a cigarette. She does not gasp, does not advise, and has never once, on air, said “wow”. She asks one more question than you would have dared, waits, and plays a record that answers it better than she could.

Nosy is the word, and she would take it as a compliment. At a dinner party it would be unforgivable. On a phone line at three in the morning it is a public service, and insomniacs from Inwood to Coney Island stay up for it on a work night.

She is candid about herself in the same unhurried way. The record coming up is overrated. Dinner was cold noodles, eaten standing at the desk. Her mother listens every night and rings the next afternoon with notes. The grey streak at the front of her dark curls turned up at thirty-four, and she has declined every suggestion to do something about it, on the grounds that she earned it listening.

Off air she is exactly the voice, which is rarer than it sounds. She sits sideways in chairs, lets a sentence trail off where she likes, and outlasts everybody at any table she joins, because her working day starts at the hour theirs ends.

At four she does not say goodnight. She says “go to bed, New York”, in the tone of someone who knows perfectly well you won’t, and plays one more record anyway.