Slow Motion

by Dani Shapiro

  By the time my parents are in the Overlook Hospital ICU, I have known the truth about Lenny for quite a while. It takes one to know one, and I have so little regard for the truth in my own life that I have developed a sixth sense, radar for his deceit. He has layered his lies one on top of another until they have become opaque, an elaborate construction resembling reality. He is fond of quoting probably the only line he knows from Franz Kafka: White is black and black is white, he often says with a sigh. I don’t know exactly what he means by this, but it seems to have a lot to do with my current life.

  It started small, months ago: he called me from a business trip, told me he was in the Montreal airport to catch a flight to Calgary. I checked with the airline and found out that the flight should take approximately five hours. So when Lenny called an hour later to say he had landed in Calgary, I very calmly asked him where he really was.

  Calgary, he said.

  No, Lenny, really.

  He stuck to his story. In the time that I knew him, he never, ever, changed his story midstream. I hung up on him and called his family’s house in Westchester. When the maid answered the phone, I asked to speak with Mr. Klein. And when he picked up the extension and I heard his rough, craggy Hello? I screamed so hard into his ear that he dropped the receiver.

  He raced into the city. He let himself into my apartment and found me curled up in bed. He scooped me up and held me to his chest. His wife wasn’t home, he told me. She was having a shock treatment. And someone had to take care of his daughter. He hadn’t wanted to tell me because he wanted to spare me, to protect me from the horror of his life. Surely I understood. Ssshh, sweetheart, he murmured into the top of my head as I wept, my face beet-red like a little girl’s. So many people need me, but I love you best of all.

  After dinner with Lenny’s partner and his babe du jour, we go back to my apartment. We are in bed fucking when the phone rings. I move my hand to answer it, but Lenny grabs my wrist. I think it might be the hospital calling about my parents, but before I can articulate the thought, the machine picks up.

  “Dan, it’s Susie. Are you there?”

  I reach across my nightstand to the phone. The digital clock reads 2:37 A.M. Lenny is on top of me, deadweight, smelling like Speed Stick and traces of English Leather. I try to say hello into the receiver and realize that I’m dead drunk. The cocaine is wearing off, and the room is spinning.

  “The alarm has gone off in Tewksbury,” says Susie. “The police called me.”

  “Yeah, so is it a break-in?” I mumbled. I imagine some resourceful criminal finding out who’s in the hospital and burglarizing their empty house. What got set off? Radar, motion detector, panic buttons, hidden pads?

  “No, just some faulty wiring, I guess. You were there this afternoon, weren’t you?”

  God, was it only this afternoon? What is she saying? Did I screw up the locks somehow?

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I just thought you should know,” she says. “They’ve fixed the problem for now, but I gave them your number in case anything more goes wrong. I’m whipped, and I have a seven-fifteen patient.”

  Implicit in this is that I have all the time in the world, which, in fact, I do. Susie does something with her life, actually helps sick people. She’s busy being a shrink, and I’m busy needing one.

  “Susie, is everything going to be okay?” I ask her. Lenny is moving his tongue down my side, as if we’re on some sort of vacation. He moves his head between my legs, but I feel nothing.

  “I have no idea.”

  I push Lenny away, and he groans loud enough for Susie to hear him.

  “God, Dani, is that asshole there with you?”

  I don’t answer.

  My half sister says good night and hangs up the phone. I imagine her turning on her side, alone in her big bed in Greenwich Village, safer and less alone than I am with Lenny’s arm flung over me. He is snoring.

  The accident has supplied me with something I had been missing until now: structure. Before, my life revolved around auditions and Lenny. Sometimes I had nothing to do, and I sat in my darkened bedroom in my light blue terry-cloth bathrobe, smoking cigarettes and watching soaps, telling myself I was checking out the competition. After all, I auditioned for soap operas regularly: All My Children, One Life to Live, The Edge of Night. I had been seen for every young female role on the ABC lineup, from angelic blonde to vixen from hell. On those down days I would turn off the ringer on my phone, adjust the volume on my answering machine, and shut out the world. I would move only from my rocking chair in the corner of my bedroom to the bathroom, where I would pee, weigh myself, then stare into the mirror.

  But when I had calls for soaps or commercials, I had to pull myself together. I would curl my hair in hot rollers and carefully make up my face, using special products meant for the camera that looked heavy and cakey in broad daylight. I would make my way to casting directors’ offices or midtown advertising agencies, where I would wait in a brightly lit hallway with a half-dozen other girls who looked vaguely like me. I would read the xeroxed copy, looking for ways to recite such sentences as “Diet Seven-Up is the one” with my own unique inflection.

  Evenings, I would meet Lenny at a bar near his office where we would have a few scotches while deciding what to do for dinner. Often dinner was only a concept, something to give shape and direction to the evening. Certainly, I didn’t want to eat. Eating meant finding a bathroom and making myself throw up. And all Lenny really wanted to do was go somewhere where we could rip our clothes off. He didn’t care if that place was a $300-a-night hotel room or my apartment. In fact, he probably preferred hotel rooms, with their faint whiff of sex for money.

  Did I think this was romantic? A man and a girl in a bubble? Thwarted love, perhaps, or the pure, clean lines of obsessive lust? Time has a way of building a frame around those moments, leaving me not with a mental picture of how I felt back then, but only with a sense memory: the cold blast of air-conditioning on a humid August night, my legs scissored apart by Lenny’s thick hands, the sour slosh of white wine in my belly and my lips so numb from cocaine they don’t feel a thing. I am reduced to body parts: breasts, hips, stomach, cunt. Lenny tells me women are over the hill at thirty. It seems an age I will never reach.

  Now, in my new routinized life, I have a purpose, a reason to wake up in the morning. I am needed. The centerpiece of each day is a medical crisis. Yesterday my father had an operation to insert a pacemaker. The day before yesterday, my mother developed an infection near the metal pin that runs through her shin and needed a heavy dosage of antibiotics. I have learned the language of good, stable, serious, critical, and how it applies.

  Today, the fifth day, my father wakes up. When I walk into the ICU, I see him sitting up in bed, his glasses perched on his nose. My heart leaps, and my body follows. I am by his side in a flash, my arms wrapped around his neck, my lips pressed against his hot, stubbled cheek. Thank you, thank you, thank you, I whisper, smelling him, breathing him in. For the past several nights, before I’ve gone to sleep I’ve run through every prayer I know by heart, thinking that if my father can’t pray for himself, perhaps mine will do. For the first time since I received the phone call, I allow myself to imagine that maybe, just maybe, the God my father has believed in all his life will come through for him.

  “Hi,” my father says weakly. His voice is the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard. The minute I hear it, I realize I had thought I’d never hear it again.

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  I look at his face, sallow and sunken, his pale green eyes magnified by his wireless spectacles. The planes of his cheeks, the slope of his forehead, his bulbous nose, are my map of the world. When I was a little girl, he used to hug me too hard. He would clasp me in a bear hug and practically crush me in his grip, as if he could fold me into him and never let me go. When he’d finally release me, I felt his love in my aching bones. I would give anything for one of those hugs now.

  He smiles at me b
eatifically.

  “Where am I?” he asks, and in three small words it all collapses around me.

  “Where do you think you are?” I ask.

  My senses sharpen. I now see that my father’s eyes are kaleidoscopic, like a cartoon character’s. I hear the steady beeps of his EKG, and smell the antiseptic they use here, stronger than whatever it kills. I taste metal on my tongue, and touch my father’s forehead, a futile, maternal gesture, as if he were a toddler with a fever and I’m taking his temperature.

  “Stock exchange?” he asks, his eyes brightening.

  “No.”

  “Hotel?”

  “No.”

  “I give up.”

  My mind races with what to do. Where’s Susie? She’s the psychologist. She’s also the adult. I think of my mother, just across the semicircle of the ICU. Does love make her psychic? Does she know that her husband and daughter are only fifty feet away?

  “You’re in the hospital, Dad,” I say.

  He stares at me blankly.

  “No.”

  His voice has the inflection of a five-year-old about to throw a temper tantrum. Behind his eyes I see something, a flash of terror. Somewhere inside him, in some pocket untouched by the mangled, fluid-soaked part of his brain, he knows.

  I grab his hand.

  “You were in an accident,” I say softly, stroking his fingers.

  “No!”

  He looks at me wildly, shaking his head violently back and forth. His jaw is slack with fear. His mouth twists into a grimace.

  “Where is my wife?” he croaks.

  “Mom is here,” I answer.

  “Where?”

  “She … had to go out for a little while.”

  He glares at me as if I’m the enemy.

  “I don’t believe you,” he says flatly.

  Never in my life have I heard my father speak this way to me, or to anyone. It is as if all propriety, all gentleness has drained from him. He is a boy trapped in a sixty-four-year-old man’s body. I think of the sepia photographs of my father as a toddler, the round, innocently cruel, happy eyes of childhood emerging, ghostlike, in his green, haggard face.

  “I want to see my wife!”

  He tries to swing his legs over the side of his bed. I keep a grip on his hand, imagining that I will somehow be able to arm-wrestle my two-hundred-pound father and keep him in bed if I need to—but he falls back onto the pillows, sapped. He has been in a coma for five days.

  The nurse comes scurrying over to us, her white rubber-soled shoes squeaking against the linoleum. She’s one I haven’t seen before, and I find myself unreasonably mad at her, as if she somehow should have been able to prevent this.

  “Now, Mr. Shapiro, you’re not being a very good boy,” she says in a singsong, pulling the thin white sheet over his hospital gown, up to his chin.

  I look at her, stupefied. My father is an elegant man, and an imposing one. He wears navy-blue suits and silk ties, shiny black shoes and cashmere socks. He has his own seat on the New York Stock Exchange. His Wall Street colleagues have long referred to him as “rabbi” because he takes off Jewish holidays they’ve never even heard of. He has spent his life blending worlds: Orthodoxy and high finance, religion and culture. And now, a nurse is telling him he’s not being a very good boy.

  I take her aside.

  “Please don’t talk to my father that way,” I say, trying to smile, feeling my lips tremble.

  She looks at me with what appears to be pity.

  “It makes no difference to him,” she says.

  I look over at my father. He is holding his hand in front of his face, curling his fingers, staring at his cuticles with intense fascination. He has pushed off the sheet once again, hairy legs exposed. I have never seen my father naked, and don’t want to start now. He catches my eye and winks. It is an entirely uncharacteristic gesture; my father just isn’t a playful guy. I feel a wave of anger at him. Snap out of it! I want to scream.

  I go down to the hospital coffee shop and try to gather my thoughts. What am I going to tell my mother? She has wanted the truth all along, and I’ve given it to her. When she’s asked me if my father is “awake yet”—a euphemism for asking if he’s still in a coma—I’ve answered her truthfully. But now the rules have changed. My father is awake, all right, but he has woken into someone else. I guess my mother, Susie, and I all believed that he’d either stay in a coma and slip away from us, or that he’d miraculously come to and be the same man who was behind the wheel of that Audi 5000 in the moments before he passed out. This child-man, this stranger in my father’s body, may be more than my mother can bear.

  I drink two cups of dreggy coffee and force down a piece of whole wheat toast. I flip through the first few pages of the Metro section of the Times. Lenny is litigating a high-profile case, and sometimes there are updates in the news, along with photographs of him leaving the courtroom in his pin-striped suit and trademark raccoon coat. I flip through the paper looking for his picture, thinking it might bring me some comfort. Somewhere along the way I have grown to believe that comfort is to be found along the blade of a knife. What hurts me also stops me from thinking, from feeling. So when I see the photo of Lenny on the courthouse steps, when I am struck for the millionth time by the fact that I occupy a small, invisible corner of his life, everything around me grows a bit dim: the edge of the counter, the paper place mats with their local guide to Summit, the Muzak version of “Norwegian Wood” piped into the coffee shop.

  I chew the toast slowly, forcing myself to swallow. I even take a few sips of orange juice. In the past five days since the accident, it has begun to occur to me that I must conserve my strength. My father has Susie and me, but my mother has only me. If I fall apart, so will she. My mother told me that in the split second before the car hit the divider, she saw my face and was filled with an indescribable sadness. I couldn’t bear leaving you alone in the world, she whispered, her eyes black-and-blue. So I hung on. And now it is I who cannot bear to leave my mother alone in her little curtained world for even a moment, her husband lost to her, her stepdaughter filled with animosity. I have no choice. After a lifetime of rebelling against her, of trying so hard to separate I ripped myself up in the process, now it seems we are attached at the hip. I am her lifeline, supplier of love, support, and information. It’s not a role I could have imagined, but now that it’s here, it seems it could have turned out no other way.

  “My beautiful daughter,” she pronounces from her pillow when I part the curtains and poke my head in, half hoping she’ll be asleep. My mother looks worse each day, which the doctors assure me is to be expected. Her face is less swollen, but more deeply bruised. Everything is slightly askew, a Picasso portrait, nose and eyes jarred out of alignment.

  “Let me look at you,” she says.

  I walk to the side of the bed and crouch so we’re at eye level. Her gaze darts eagerly over my face. My mother has always loved to look at me, and I have never gotten used to it. I squirm under her examination. She often says things like Look at that perfect profile, as she turns my head from side to side, fingers cupping my chin. Or she’ll utter the only nonliturgical Hebrew phrase she knows: Eza bat yesh lee, which roughly translates into “What a daughter I have.” She means well. I’m sure she had no intention of raising me to crave this kind of attention, to the point where I feel something’s wrong if it’s not there.

  “Are you a little tired?” she asks. “You have rings under your eyes.”

  She must be getting better.

  “You’re not exactly looking rested yourself.”

  “Well, I must be doing okay, because they’re moving me to another floor,” she says.

  “Mom, that’s great!”

  I assume it’s great. After all, there isn’t anywhere to go but up from the ICU.

  “I asked them to see if they can put your father nearby.”

  She looks at me carefully as she says this. I’m sure she wouldn’t put it past me to lie to her a
bout how my father is doing. For all she knows, he might not even be alive, though I don’t think she has allowed herself to consider that possibility. She has suspended her disbelief, buoyed by the almost manic optimism with which she has gotten through life. How much should I tell her? Her condition is fragile, her emotional state in need of protection. With eighty broken bones, a broken heart is out of the question.

  “Daddy’s doing a little bit better,” I say. It’s not exactly a lie. What could be worse than a coma?

  Her eyes fill with tears.

  “See? I knew everything would be all right,” she says. She reaches for my hand, the same hand my father held only an hour ago.

  “I want to see him,” she says.

  My mind races. I wish there were someone with me right now—Susie, or Morton, anybody to help me out with what to say or do.

  “I’m not so sure that’s a good idea—”

  “Why not?”

  “It might upset him to see you like this,” I say, solving one problem and creating another. My mother has not yet seen herself in a mirror.

  “My purse is over there,” she points her chin at a small metal dresser, “in the top drawer.”

  “Mom, I—”

  “Bring me my compact.”

  She says this in her emphatic way that brooks no dissent. One of my mother’s favorite expressions is a line she misquotes from Plutarch: Caesar’s wife is above reproach, she is fond of saying when she feels in some way maligned. I’ve always hated that. I mean, what does Caesar have to do with a New Jersey housewife? And anyway, does that make my father a Roman emperor? My mother grew up on a chicken farm in southern New Jersey. Her father was a Russian immigrant. She went to college on a full scholarship, married and divorced an assistant genetics professor before she was thirty. But her favorite part of her history—the part she tells me again and again—has to do with her dating life before she married my father: the Chanel heir who drove a white Cadillac by day and a black Cadillac by night; the count she met on her first trip to Europe; the magnificent clothes her own mother sewed for her, straight from the pages of Vogue.