Slow Motion

by Dani Shapiro

  The bag rattles as I move through the master bedroom. There is a large picture window overlooking the swimming pool, bare-branched trees skeletal against a steel-gray sky. The configuration of my parents’ bed has not changed; two twins pushed together, according to the Orthodox custom that dictates that husbands may not sleep with their wives when they’re menstruating. Hasn’t my mother hit menopause? Wouldn’t that render the point moot?

  I pass the framed eight-by-ten once more. In it, my hair is tousled in an eighties shag, and I am smiling a smile fit to sell toothpaste. My skin is airbrushed, the whites of my eyes doctored to look brighter. In the bottom right-hand corner, almost obscured by the frame, my stage name is printed in bold black letters: Dani York. According to my agent, “Shapiro” just doesn’t cut it in the world of blond, blue-eyed California girls. I arrived at my stage name while on vacation in Maine with Lenny. We went through towns in Maine: Dani Portland, Dani Kennebunkport, Dani Ogunquit, until we arrived at York.

  On the first floor, I rest for a moment in the mustard-colored chair where my father used to sit, his neck in traction, before his spinal surgery. I close my eyes, remembering the way the contraption wrapped around his jaw and cheeks, squishing the loose skin together until he resembled one of those wrinkled Chinese dogs. He would sit there for hours watching Hogan’s Heroes and Gilligan’s Island reruns, a thick cord extending from the top of his head to a device on top of the doorframe to relieve the pressure on his spine.

  Next to the chair, on an old walnut end table, there is a telephone and a pile of Prevention magazines. Prevention may well be my father’s favorite publication, a hypochondriac’s version of Playboy. Eat garlic tablets and you won’t have a coronary! Papaya enzymes prevent ulcers! How to raise your “good” cholesterol! What did my father suppose were the health benefits of a shopping bag filled to the brim with a stunning array of half-empty bottles of tranquilizers and painkillers?

  I dial Lenny’s office in the city and get his voice mail. I check my watch and realize it’s lunchtime. Lenny’s probably at Smith & Wollensky’s, around the corner from his office, digging into a juicy porterhouse. He’s not worried about his cholesterol. Lenny is twenty pounds overweight, smokes fat Cuban cigars, drinks fine red wine and vintage brandy. He doesn’t go to temple on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and pray to be forgiven for his sins. I’ll bet he’s never even heard of Prevention, much less believed in it as a concept.

  “Lenny, it’s me,” I say. “I’m back. I’m at my parents’ house—oh, never mind, you can’t reach me. I’ll try you later.”

  I hang up the phone and stare at the wall. It’s a perfect wall, without a smudge or a missing chip of paint. An illuminated Hebrew manuscript page hangs in a gold frame, and below it there is a small, colorful weaving. On a leather chair across the room, there is a needlepoint pillow my mother made when she started her own tennis product business, of a yellow ball with a blue eye at its center. Underneath it, the motto reads Keep your eye on the ball.

  I pick up the phone and dial Lenny again.

  “It’s me again,” I say into his voice mail. “I need to see you tonight. This is a mess, this thing with my parents. A horrible, total, fucking mess.”

  Of course, seeing Lenny tonight is the last thing I ought to be doing. If I go back to the city at all, it should be to a cup of warm tea and the comfort of my own bed. But I’m terrified to be alone. A horrible, total, fucking mess. Well, it really is, isn’t it? So why do I feel that I’m lying? That I’m on some sort of drug trip, a hallucination? That I’m making all this up? I’ve been lying to myself for so long now that I don’t know what the truth might feel like. But now, ready or not, the truth is all around me. I hear it in the wind chimes clanging in the bitter February wind, the plastic bottles rattling like bones.

  I double-lock the back door to my parents’ house, punching in the alarm codes, making sure it’s safe and sound. I touch my fingers to the silver mezuzah on the outside doorframe, then lift my fingers to my lips: Bless this house.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  I am fourteen and my parents are fighting all the time. I hear their voices rise and fall behind their closed bedroom door. My mother’s voice is more insistent than my father’s. I can’t make out what she’s saying—only that she’s very angry—and I can barely hear my father at all, except for the occasional booms of rage, loud outbursts after which everything is quiet.

  I’m afraid for my father. He’s just returned home from a month-long stay in the hospital, where he had a spinal-fusion operation. The surgery has left him temporarily paralyzed down the right side of his body, so now he spends his time alternately in traction and doing his exercises to regain the use of his arm. He creeps his fingers up a wall, propping his useless elbow with his good hand, and his face is so haggard and angry that I’m afraid to go near him. He’s taking more pills than ever now—twenty-five milligrams of Valium at a time.

  One night, while I’m in my bedroom doing homework, I hear my mother shriek. She is shouting my father’s name over and over—Paul! Wake up, Paul!—and I bolt down the hallway. My father is lying on the pink tile of the master bathroom floor, his eyes open, pupils fixed on the ceiling. His bare feet are sticking straight up from the bottom of his robe. His face is the color of chalk. My mother is crouched over him, and when she sees me she screams to have me call Dr. Kogan. Kogan is a gastroenterologist who lives next door.

  I race down to the kitchen, find my mother’s phone book, and call Dr. Kogan. My heart is pounding. I think of the way I have seen my father press two fingers into the side of his neck and look at his watch, counting his pulse. I close my eyes tight and pray. Sh’ma Yisroel Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Echad. I don’t go to the yeshiva anymore, and I’ve started to sneak around and eat bacon and go out on dates with non-Jewish boys, but I’m hoping God will understand that the prayer is for my father, not for me.

  Dr. Kogan rings our doorbell two minutes later. He’s wearing sweatclothes and carrying a black bag. He follows me upstairs, through my parents’ bedroom and into the bathroom. My father is sitting up, hunched over on the bathroom tiles. His glasses are askew.

  “Hi, Eddie,” he says to Kogan weakly. “What’s up?”

  “I should be asking you that, buddy,” says Kogan.

  My father smiles sheepishly. His pupils are like pinpricks floating in his pale green eyes.

  “Got a little groggy, that’s all. Tripped and fell.”

  I’m on my way to meet Lenny for dinner at an Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side. I have been awake for thirty-six hours. I should go home and take a bath, maybe ask Lenny to come over and give me a back rub until I fall asleep, but conserving my strength is not part of my repertoire. Instead, as the car idles in bottlenecked traffic at the mouth of the Holland Tunnel, I call my friend who happens to be a cocaine dealer and ask if I can stop by her loft on my way uptown.

  Not doing coke has been one of my recent promises to myself. In the beginning of my 1986 journal, I have written this list of New Year’s resolutions:

  1. Start eating healthy

  2. Cut down on drinking

  3. No c.!

  4. Get back to acting class

  5. College courses?

  Thus far, I’ve managed to make a dent in only one resolution, by calling my old acting coach, Fred Kareman, and asking him if I can come back to class. Freddy is considered one of the great acting teachers in the city. I’ll never understand why he let me into his class in the first place. The competition for each slot is fierce; Freddy handpicks his class out of dozens of actors and actresses, and expects a serious commitment to “the work”—the Sanford Meisner technique—in return.

  But I find it impossible to be a student of acting and the mistress of Lenny Klein. When Lenny asks me to travel with him, which has been at least once a month, I never say no. Being Lenny’s girl is my full-time job, and everything else is a hobby. I have recently resolved to change this. But I have also sworn up and
down that I wouldn’t do cocaine anymore, and here I am, pulling up in front of a small loft building on Wooster Street and telling the driver I’ll only be a minute.

  I cannot face dinner with Lenny without a vial of cocaine in my handbag. My friend buzzes me in, and I run the five flights up to her loft, skimming my hand along the chipped wood banister. I ring her doorbell, and she opens it, holding a paper bag. I know what will be inside without even looking, and I hand her a check for one hundred dollars. She trusts me and always takes my checks—a nifty trait in a drug dealer. Behind her, a mirrored wall of closets is shattered by a single bullet hole; cracks in the mirror splay out from the center like crude rays of sunlight.

  Lenny is sitting in a corner banquette in the back room of a dimly lit Italian restaurant. As I follow the maître’d past tables covered with stiff white cloths, I hear his laugh rise above the dull clatter, and see that he is not alone. A gray-haired man and a young woman are with him. The woman has dark hair, and for a brief, insane moment I think it’s Jess, until I get a little closer and see that she’s in her early thirties, a decade older than Jess or me.

  I haven’t actually spoken with Lenny yet. He left me a message with a place and time to meet—but he didn’t say anything about people joining us. Tonight is hardly a good night to make new friends, and I feel a flash of anger, almost enough to make me spin on my heel and walk out of the restaurant. But where would I go? I don’t want to be alone. The vial of cocaine in my bag and the chilled bottle of Chardonnay on the table will get me through the night. And besides, Lenny will have a reason. Later, he’ll tell me he thought it would be a good distraction, or that these people are important out-of-town clients. Whatever. He grins when he spots me, half rises from behind the banquette, says, “There’s the Fox!”

  He kisses me full on the lips, lingering too long, then introduces me to our dinner companions. As I shake their hands, I recognize the gray-haired man as one of Lenny’s partners in the law firm, the guy who handles all the Hollywood business. I’ve met him before. I don’t know anything about the woman he’s with, except I’d lay odds that she isn’t his wife. I’ve never met the wives of any of Lenny’s friends or partners—but I have met the girlfriends. After almost three years, I’m beginning to get it: these men have parallel social lives that never intersect.

  “Dani’s had a hard day,” says Lenny.

  He flags the waiter, and I order a vodka martini, straight up with two olives.

  “What happened?” asks the brunette. She is wearing a large, round diamond dangling from a simple gold chain. It’s the kind of necklace no one who rides the subway would ever wear.

  “My parents were in a car accident,” I explain woodenly. I’m not feeling anything, except maybe that vague, weird sense I had earlier in the day, of lying through my teeth. Why else in the world would I be sitting with total strangers in a loud trendy restaurant? My relationship with Lenny is based on lies. I wonder, is there any chance he thinks I’ve made this up? I suppose, in the world according to Lenny, a lie of this magnitude would not be out of the question. I notice him watching me carefully, his eyes steady over his drink. Lenny prides himself on being a good judge of character. He is a trial lawyer, after all, and penetrating the defense is what he does best.

  “So, how are they doing?” he asks.

  I tell myself he’s concerned, that he really cares about me and my family.

  “Not so great,” I say. “They don’t know what’s wrong with my father—whether it was a stroke, or his head—”

  “I’ll call Burt Zuckerman,” says Lenny. “He’s the best neurologist in town. He’ll arrange to have your dad transferred to Mount Sinai.”

  “He can’t be moved.”

  Lenny shakes his head, as if he knows better.

  “Leave it to me. Burt and I are old buddies—our kids went to nursery school together.”

  “No, Lenny. I mean, the doctors say it’s dangerous to move him.”

  Lenny smiles at me condescendingly. He always knows better. He has convinced me that the real world operates on a certain level—above my head—and that I will be able to survive in this world only if I stick with him. My parents, according to Lenny, are as vulnerable as toddlers, with their religious beliefs and quaint customs. They have not prepared me for the wilderness out there, a dark place where men have wives and mistresses, where politics and friendship are indistinguishable, and money smooths it over like an analgesic.

  I excuse myself.

  There is a phone near the ladies’ room. I fish from my bag the matchbook on which I’ve scribbled the number of Overlook Hospital and call the ICU. The nurse who answers tells me that my father’s condition is still listed as critical, and my mother has been bumped down to serious. There are no phones by the beds in the ICU, so my mother has asked the nurse to be sure to tell me if I called that it’s going to be all right.

  I wonder if my mother would think it’s going to be all right if she saw my father lying on the opposite side of the unit, breathing through an oxygen mask, his eyes closed and sunken. I wonder if she’d think it’s all right that her daughter is shutting herself into a ladies’-room stall and unscrewing the small brown glass bottle half filled with cocaine and tapping a bit into the concave spoon of her pinkie nail and snorting it quickly up her nose.

  I sit on the toilet, fully clothed, and snort a few more pinkie nails’ worth—probably about an eighth of a gram. I want to save the rest for later. Later, Lenny and I will go back to my apartment. We’ll stumble into bed and claw at each other; he’ll whisper lies to me, and I’ll believe him.

  I’m not alone in the ladies’ room. I flush the toilet just for show, then open the stall. The brunette is standing by the sink, reapplying her lipstick. She has tiny lines around her mouth.

  “Hey there,” I say weakly.

  I splash cold water on my face, checking my nostrils in the mirror for caked white powder. Out of the corner of my eye, I see her look at me from head to toe.

  “Lenny’s cute,” she says.

  I try to smile, but my jaw feels wired shut from the coke, my eyes pinned open. As we leave the bathroom I notice that someone has carved a heart on the door, just above the knob. But there’s nothing inside it. Only empty space, waiting to be filled in.

  Here, in no particular order, are some lies Lenny has told me: that he and his wife don’t sleep in the same bed; that they haven’t had a “real marriage” in years; that she is mentally ill; that she is undergoing electroshock treatment in a clinic outside Philadelphia; that he has cancer, and has to fly to Houston three days a week for chemotherapy; that his youngest daughter, age three, has a rare form of childhood leukemia. Lenny cannot get a divorce for all of the above reasons. He is heartbroken that he cannot leave his wife and marry me.

  For a long time I believed him. With every bone in my body, I trusted that Lenny Klein was telling me the truth. After all, when we talked about it, his jaw tightened, and his big brown eyes filled with tears. His voice quavered with pent-up, complex feelings I couldn’t possibly begin to understand. Poor Lenny! I marveled that so many bad things could happen to one person, and I vowed to take care of him. Writing late at night in my extensive journals, I exhorted myself to be a real woman—one who could step up to the plate and be good to her man in his moment of crisis.

  Years from now, I will hold Lenny’s lies up to the sunlight and examine my own motivations for believing what, in retrospect, seems preposterous. I will reread my old journals and notice the way my girlish handwriting deteriorated into a scrawl as I wrote I have to be there for Lenny. He needs me, and He’s going through so much. I don’t know if I can handle it—but I have to be strong! I will try to remember that Lenny was a trial lawyer, that he built an international reputation based on his own pathology: he lied with an almost evangelical conviction. He prided himself on being able to convince anyone of anything.

  I will remember Paris, 1985. We are walking along the Boulevard Saint-Germain on a clou
dless spring day. The rooftops of the Left Bank are creamy against a rare blue sky, and the air outside Café de Flore smells of croissants and the acrid smoke of Gitanes, but I don’t notice. It is only years later, as a grown woman, that I will take in the rooftops of Paris, the extraordinary sky, and so I am supplying this scene with a collage of my own memory. In Paris, 1985, I see only what is within one square foot of me, too busy feeling the complicated stew of sensations being with Lenny provokes. I am hungover, floating on a wave of last night’s Puligny-Montrachet and a four-star dinner that wound up in the toilet of the Hôtel Ritz. Lenny’s arm is around me, thick and proprietary, and it reminds me of the sex we had that morning, the way he pinned me to the bed and didn’t let me move my arms until I came hard, fast, in spite of myself. In Paris, I am like an animal curled in a patch of sunlight, interested only in the beating of my own heart. Sex, wine, food, sleep. I am a physical being, living on the other side of a clear, thin membrane that separates me from anything having to do with the world.

  I have not read a newspaper or spoken to a soul other than Lenny for weeks now. We have been to London, Monte Carlo, the Côte d’Azur. I have played blackjack in private clubs with oil sheikhs who asked me to blow on their dice for good luck; I have driven a convertible around the hairpin turns of the Moyenne Corniche; I have eaten langoustine on a boat floating somewhere off the shores of Cap d’Antibes. I wear dark glasses and haute couture suits, a gold watch, and a long, thick strand of pearls. I have no idea who I am.

  Lenny steers us onto a narrow side street off the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and into a children’s clothing store filled with the embroidered little dresses my mother used to buy me as a child. He tells me he wants to buy a dress for his youngest daughter, the one with the rare form of childhood leukemia. I help him look through racks of tiny dresses suitable for a three-year-old, until we find one he deems perfect, a pale yellow silk smock with a Peter Pan collar. He holds it up to the sunlight, and his eyes fill with tears. She’ll never live to grow out of this dress, he whispers. My baby girl.