Slow Motion

by Dani Shapiro

  “No. I don’t care if you’re sorry. I don’t give a shit. That’s not what this is about, Lenny.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “For the next seven days, I’m not going to see you, or talk to you. Don’t bother trying to call me,” I say. “When shiva’s over, we’ll talk.”

  He stands on the curb as I step into the street and hail a cab. I know he’s waiting for me to change my mind, to turn to him with a shrug and ask him to come home with me. But I don’t look back. I think of my father’s face the night he met Lenny and the way his eyes watered up as he stared into the distance. If the way he felt about me the last few years of his life could be summed up in a single word, it would most likely be disappointment. All I want in the world is to find a way now to make my father proud.

  I am in shul with my father on a bright Shabbos morning. The sun streams through stained-glass windows shaped like the ten commandments. My mother has stayed home; she thinks the rabbi is a buffoon. She usually wakes up with a headache on Saturday mornings and likes to sit quietly in her bathrobe, nursing a cup of coffee. Sometimes I keep her company, other times I go with my father. I love our walks to temple. We take the same route each week, up Revere Drive, across Nottingham Way, down Westminister Avenue, unless it’s raining or really cold. In bad weather we take a shortcut across the Pantirers’ tennis court that saves us five minutes. Our neighborhood streets all have British names, and the houses are a mishmash of New Jersey architecture: Georgian colonials next to Tudors next to split-levels. We know everybody—we’ve lived here since I was nine months old—and people wave to us as they pass us in their cars. Sometimes someone slows down to offer us a ride, but we don’t drive on Shabbos.

  We’ve already worked our way through the Orthodox temple on the other side of town. My mother had a huge fight with the rabbi of that temple, and it was so bad that we’ve never gone there again. So we find ourselves in this bastion of suburban Conservative Judaism, with its handwoven curtains, wall-to-wall carpets, and rabbi who makes golf jokes in his sermons.

  I am six or seven. Small enough so that my feet don’t quite reach the floor below the wooden bench where we sit. I play with the fringes of my father’s tallis, knotting and unknotting them. On holidays, he also wears tefillin, small leather boxes attached to long leather straps wrapped around his arms. He’s the only man in shul who wears tefillin on holidays, the only Orthodox man. If we were at the other shul, he’d be one of many—but here he sticks out. I lean my head into his shoulder, close my eyes, and listen to the murmur of Hebrew as it rises and falls like the tide. Every once in a while there’s a song I know, and I sing it along with my father, both of our voices loud and off-key.

  I don’t yet know what the words mean, but they move me, they transport me to a place where my father and I share our own language. My mother doesn’t have this language. She tries, but the words come out garbled. Hebrew is something that’s my father’s and mine alone. I watch his face as he’s singing. He’s big and tall, and has a soft stomach like a pillow. He has sad green eyes, but when we’re in shul his eyes light up. He sways and smiles and winks at me if he catches me looking at him.

  Services end right before lunchtime, and after a quick appearance at the kiddush in the basement, we head home. My father usually wears a hat instead of a yarmulke. I think this is because some of our neighbors don’t like Jews, and over the years they’ve thrown eggs at our house and driven their cars over our lawn. Where my mother loves nothing more than a good battle, my father craves peace. He takes it however he can get it: in the sanctuary of prayer, in the little yellow pills he swallows before lunch.

  My mother has set the dining room table formally, with three linen place mats gathered at one end. Cold brisket, cranberry sauce, iceberg lettuce. Her mood is as cold as the lunch she has prepared.

  “How was it?” she asks, looking at me.

  “Fine,” I say in a small voice. I have already noticed her eyes sliding away from my father’s. She thinks I’m too young to see what’s happening, but I am an only child and I have nothing better to do than to figure out my parents. I know my mother hates it when my father and I go to temple together—though she doesn’t hate it enough to join us. I know she gets angry when we do anything without her, though I don’t understand why. She needs to be the center of both of our lives, bobbing like a life raft in the middle of a pond, keeping us apart.

  There is a loaf of challah next to my father’s place, covered with an embroidered cloth. The challah knife was a gift from my grandparents. He says a quick hamotzi—the blessing over the bread—as he slices it, scattering crumbs across the linen placemat and onto the floor.

  “Goddammit, Paul!” My mother explodes.

  “What?”

  “How did I marry such a slob?”

  “Oh, stop it,” he says, and then, in Yiddish, “der kinder.”

  He speaks in Yiddish so I will not understand, but I know der kinder means “the child.”

  I crawl under the table and start picking up the crumbs. There is a small brass buzzer down there, near my mother’s foot. She recently installed it so that she can summon the maid during dinner parties without having to get out of her chair. I know I’m not supposed to touch it on Shabbos, and the maid isn’t even around today, but I can’t help myself. I press the buzzer and wait to be struck down by God. I hold my breath and count to ten—but nothing happens. I press it again.

  My father’s shoes are shiny like beetles. He has no idea what I am doing under the table; I imagine if he knew it would break his heart. He wants me to be a good little yeshiva girl. I went to temple with him, but now, in secret, I have aligned myself with my mother. I know she smokes cigarettes on Shabbos, that she probably eats traif when no one’s looking. I stare at her bare ankles, veiny and white above her sneakers, and press the buzzer once more. Something is taking hold inside our house, something so corrosive it eats itself up even as it happens, and leaves no trace.

  “Dani, get out from down there,” my mother says sharply.

  I emerge red-faced from under the table. My father smiles at me and gives my hand a squeeze. His gaze is crinkly and kind, and I feel like a traitor. I already know I can be either my father’s daughter or my mother’s. I am caught between them in a battle that will last longer than I can possibly imagine. Longer than life itself.

  After leaving Lenny standing on the curb in the pouring rain, I cannot imagine going home. The cab splatters him with muddy water as we pull away, and I can see his mouth moving. He’s probably cursing me. Where’s Lenny going to end up tonight? Maybe he’ll get into his car and drive home to Westchester, where he will tell his wife some fantastic story about how his London business trip got canceled. Maybe he’ll check into a hotel and order up a bottle of scotch from room service.

  I tell the driver to head toward the Upper West Side. I’ve recently moved out of the downtown apartment Lenny rented and into a small one-bedroom on Seventy-second Street. I’m afraid to go home. I’ve barely been in the apartment in weeks. I don’t want to face the newspapers piled up outside the door, the spoiled milk in the refrigerator, the dying plants. Besides, what if Lenny shows up? Even though we’re in one of our phases where he doesn’t have a key, it wouldn’t be the first time he’s banged on the door, screaming at me to let him in.

  “Lady, you know where you’re going?” the driver asks.

  We are heading uptown on Broadway.

  “Give me a minute,” I say.

  “You’ve gotta give me a destination,” says the driver.

  I feel my father all around me, in the gusts of wind so strong the traffic lights sway like pendulums, in the rain pummeling the cab’s windshield. I begin to realize that I will never see him again. I hug my knees to my chest.

  “Seventy-fifth between West End and Riverside,” I say, deciding to ring Annette’s buzzer, praying she’s home. I have very few options left in my life, almost no one to whom I’m close enough to show up in the middle
of the night. Annette and Diane are about it. My other college friends have disappeared—or rather, it is I who have done the disappearing. Not a day goes by without a thought of Jess. She is a constant, ghostlike presence, rising up inside me, shaming me, never letting me forget the terrible choice I made.

  We pull up to Annette’s brownstone in the middle of the block, and I pay the driver, then ask him to wait while I ring her.

  “Yes?” she calls down after a minute, her voice suspicious.

  “It’s me.”

  “Who?”

  “Dani.”

  “Well, God, come on up,” she says.

  Annette lives alone in a studio apartment with two cats. She sleeps on a futon on the floor, surrounded by scripts and Samuel French editions of plays she’s studying in acting class. Her black-and-white waitress uniform is flung over the back of a rocking chair, as is the corporate suit she wears for her legal temp job at Lenny’s firm. She’s trying to make extra money to pay for some decent head shots, which can cost up to a thousand dollars. Her apartment is a comfortable jumble, and I find myself comparing it with mine. My place is spare and weirdly furnished, with the baby grand piano Lenny bought me taking up half the living room, and a big brass bed with white iron bars dominating the bedroom. The closets are stuffed with designer clothes Lenny has bought me over the years, clothes I will one day stuff into giant trash bags and donate to the Salvation Army.

  Annette hands me a mug of tea. She’s wearing a pink flannel robe, and I want to be her. I want to have a life where robes and cats and mugs of tea are within the realm of possibility.

  “Can I spend the night?” I ask.

  “Well, it’ll be hard for you to stay here,” says Annette, “but my downstairs neighbor is in LA for pilot season. I have keys to her place. You can stay there as long as you like.”

  And so it happens that the night after my father’s funeral I am in the apartment of a stranger. Annette leaves me with my mug of tea and an extra blanket, and retires to study her Tennessee Williams monologue for tomorrow night’s class. I want to hold on to the sleeve of her robe and beg her not to leave, but instead I hug the blanket to my chest and nod when she asks if I’ll be okay. This is the first moment I have actually been by myself since my father’s death. My father is alone in the ground, my mother is alone in her hospital bed, and I am here in the home of someone named Leanne who is in LA for pilot season.

  I don’t know what to do to quiet my nerves. I pace the floor, roll my shoulders back and forth, shake out my arms and legs like a rag doll. I clear my throat, just to hear the sound of my own voice. I feel as if I’ve swallowed a grenade and I’m about to explode—in the morning, Annette will come downstairs and find me splattered all over the ceiling. I think about going out to buy a bottle of vodka—there’s a liquor store still open on Broadway—or I could beep my friend the cocaine dealer and ask her to make a house call. I’m tempted to do what I’ve always done, and find a way to short-circuit these feelings instead of actually living with them. But something tells me that what’s happening inside me is not about to go away, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

  Next to the bay window overlooking West Seventy-fifth Street there is an antique rolltop desk and an old wooden chair. I bend over the desk and start riffling through the papers, mail, and magazines lying around. I find an eight-by-ten of Leanne, who, it turns out, is a beautiful redheaded Juilliard graduate with a serious list of credits. She’s done everything from regional Ibsen to a small role in a Stallone movie. I picture her now, on the West Coast, where all good little actresses should be. It’s ten o’clock in New York, seven in LA. She’s probably just finishing up her nightly aerobics class after a day filled with auditions and callbacks.

  I pull open the file drawers and begin exploring the life of this woman in whose apartment I am spending my first fatherless night. I know I’m doing something wrong, something that would horrify Annette if she could peep through a hole in her floor and see me now, but I can’t help myself. I’m looking for a toehold on a slippery slope, and I think I might find it in this desk, as if buried in these drawers might be the secret to living life as a young woman.

  For the past few years, I have rummaged through Lenny’s briefcase whenever I’ve had the chance. In the side pocket, he kept one photograph, of his whole family standing in a semicircle on the beach outside his home in Martha’s Vineyard. Lenny is the only man in a crescent of women, and they are all holding hands. I have stared at this picture so often I have it memorized. The wide smile on his wife’s face, the way the wind whips her shiny black hair across one high cheekbone. Next to the wife is Jess, beautiful and barefoot in a pair of cutoffs and a tank top. The rest of Lenny’s clan—stepdaughters, daughters from his first marriage, and the two little ones he’s had with his wife—round out a vision, to my mind, of a perfect family. And in the center of it is Lenny. He’s wearing a sweatshirt and jeans, and is smirking at the camera like a man who has figured out the universe.

  As I yank Leanne’s file drawers open, once again I wonder where Lenny is right now. No matter how I try, I can’t get him out of my head. Has he driven back to that semicircle of women? I have often wondered what it must be like to be connected to that many people. I look around this stranger’s apartment and think, I could die here and no one would know.

  The first time Lenny kissed me I thought I was going to throw up. I had been kissed only by boys at that point—young, handsome boys with firm jaws and soft stubbled cheeks, whose hands roamed my body in fits and starts.

  We were in Lenny’s car. I hadn’t seen him since our dinner at the River Cafe several weeks earlier. The flowers he had sent every single day since that evening, a lost-looking delivery van pulling up outside my dorm for all the world to see—how did he have the nerve? Jess lived on the other side of campus, but she used to hang out in my room all the time. What if she had seen all those flowers? I kept throwing them away, but they kept coming.

  At first I didn’t tell Jess that I had stumbled into a date with her stepfather because I kept hoping the whole incident would just go away. I thought if I continued to ignore Lenny’s advances, eventually he’d grow tired and stop. I would see Jess in the cafeteria for lunch, and we’d sit together by a window and talk about boys and classes and parties. I would admire the elegant angles of her face, her dark flashing eyes, and the way she looked at me as if she knew more about me than I knew about myself. I would feel my cheeks flush, my gaze slide away from hers. I tried not to think about how hurt she would be if she knew the horrible thing I had done.

  So when Lenny showed up outside my dorm and sat there in his car until I came out on my way to the library, I panicked. I leaned into the open window.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. “What if Jess sees you?”

  He patted the passenger seat next to him.

  “Get in,” he said.

  Glancing quickly around, I jumped inside.

  “Lenny, you’ve got to get out of here,” I begged.

  “Jess knows,” he said quietly. “I told her we went out.”

  A feeling of unreality came over me. I couldn’t imagine I had heard him right.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Jess knows,” he repeated. “I didn’t want there to be any secrets.”

  I was stunned, speechless as we drove off campus. I didn’t try to stop him or get out of the car. Something inside me had begun to shift and crumble. When had he told her? What had he said? Was that why she looked at me the way she did, as if we shared some sort of unnamable secret?

  Lenny and I drove upstate. What I remember is in fragments, ragged bits and pieces left of an old puzzle: the way the wind whistled through my ears in the convertible, a jar of strawberry preserves he insisted on buying me at a country café somewhere in Westchester, sunlight splaying across a wooden table as he leaned forward and seemed to focus his attention, laser-like, on me. He never stopped telling me how beautiful I was, how special I was, ho
w he thought from the moment he first saw me that I was the most perfect creature he had ever laid eyes on. I told Jess then, he said. I said, that new little friend of yours, she looks like an angel. He told me about an old girlfriend of his, the actress Jacqueline Bisset, and how much I reminded him of her. His words had a narcotic effect. I thought of Jess, back at Sarah Lawrence, and couldn’t imagine facing her, ever again. College seemed light-years away. I became sleepy. I unfurled and stretched out like a cat in the sun.

  And when he pulled the car to the side of the road after lunch and kissed me, his tongue pushing deeply, immediately, into my mouth, at first I felt sick, but then I began to float away. I put my hand on the nape of his neck and felt a strange edge there, a piece of hairweave, stiff as a carpet. You’ve done it now, I thought to myself. Somehow it seemed impossible to go back, to stop. I felt myself spiraling downhill, to a place where friendship and honesty and loyalty did not exist.

  When I think of anything that’s ever harmed me—cigarettes, alcohol, cocaine, Lenny—they’ve all had one thing in common: the revulsion, the nausea that I’ve had to fight past before I could take them in. Lenny’s tongue in my mouth that day felt intensely similar to the first time I took a deep drag on a cigarette and felt smoke choking my lungs, or the way scotch tasted as it burned its way down my throat. As with all the rest, I told myself that I could handle it—that I had to handle it. It seemed to me, at the age of twenty, that I had already ruined myself.

  I spent the night after my father’s death thumbing through the file drawers of a young woman who seemed to be living a healthy, normal life. Carefully tucked into hanging folders were her xeroxed receipts, expense reports, correspondence with her agent. There was a manila envelope addressed to her from Ohio—three pairs of panty hose sent to her by her mother, along with a few clippings of interest from her hometown paper. I gazed longingly at her eight-by-ten and she smiled back at me, bright-eyed and confident.