Slow Motion

by Dani Shapiro

  “Oh, Jess, I can’t possibly go,” I told her.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t think I should see Lenny.”

  “Lenny won’t be there,” she replied. “He’s going to be away on business.”

  The night of Jess’s birthday party I drove alone to the estate in upper Westchester. I pulled into the long driveway, parked, and made my way up the front walk to the warmly lit white-brick house that, despite my having grown up in a neighborhood of beautiful homes, impressed me with its sprawling elegance. I peeked through the open front door, and saw Lenny standing there, his back to me.

  I could have run back to my car. No one had seen me. But instead, shivering, I pushed the door open and walked inside. Jess rushed over to me, drink in hand. She looked particularly beautiful, her hair gleaming in the candlelit foyer.

  “Try this,” she said, handing me the glass. “It’s a negroni.”

  “What are you doing?” I whispered. “You told me he wouldn’t be here.”

  She smiled at me and wafted away, leaving me standing there.

  I got drunker that night than I ever had before. The negroni tasted delicious; it was a pinkish-red drink, and I didn’t know it consisted of three different kinds of alcohol. I quickly downed the first one, then asked the bartender for another. I kept circling the room, staying at a distance from Lenny. I knew he was staring at me, but I wouldn’t look back. I drifted in and out of conversations with other guests but all I could think about was Jess. Clearly, she had tricked me into coming to this party. She had known Lenny would be here all along. But why? I felt like a pawn in some elaborate game, and it infuriated me.

  Close to midnight, Lenny gathered everyone together and made an announcement.

  “If you’ll all follow me,” he said, “I have something to show you.”

  The whole crowd moved outside, around the back of the house, to the former horse stable that had been converted into a four-car garage. With a flourish, Lenny opened the nearest garage door. A shiny black Alfa Romeo was parked inside.

  “For the incomparable Jessica, on her twenty-first birthday,” he announced. Jess clapped her hands and laughed with delight.

  She looked at me then, out of the corner of her eye. What did she want? Was she testing me? I felt like slapping her.

  Lenny caught up with me as everyone trooped back into the house. It was the first time he and I had spoken since he dropped me off at Sarah Lawrence that afternoon almost a month earlier. His wife was walking just ahead of us, in a group. She was even more beautiful than Jess, and seemed, at forty, young and glamorous.

  He bent down and whispered in my ear.

  “What do you have on under that dress?”

  I felt my legs wobble, a wave of heat. In my drunken, confused state, Lenny was suddenly appealing. He was Lord of the Manor, bestower of Alfa Romeos, a benign patriarchal figure.

  “If you call me, I will call you back,” I said, turning to him. In the dark of the night, I saw his eyes shining, and a flash of white teeth.

  “Well now, that’s good news,” he replied.

  That night, I was too drunk to drive back to school, and Jess insisted I sleep over. I told her we had to talk, but I was slurring my words, and when I tried to focus my eyes, I felt nauseated. She made up the bed in the family room, and as soon as my head hit the pillow, I passed out. I dreamt terrible dreams—dreams unlike any I’d had before or since. I dreamt Lenny Klein was standing over me, legs spread, a steady stream of urine splashing over my face. When I awoke with a start, he was walking through the family room in the dim shadows of dawn, wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. I pretended to be asleep until I was sure he was gone.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  Sheldon is sending me out on auditions again. He’s an agent who just won’t quit. He decided a long time ago that he was going to make me a star, even though I haven’t exactly cooperated. My last job was months before the crash. (I have begun to think of my life as b.c. and a.c.—before crash and after crash.) It was a Coke commercial broadcast during the Superbowl. In it, I play the girlfriend of a guy who has just gotten his driver’s license. I toss him a Coke, and there’s a close-up of me leaning my head back, guzzling.

  I seem to have lost whatever small spark I had to begin with. I can tell that casting directors are disappointed the minute they look at my face on their video monitors. I’m about to turn twenty-four, and I can no longer play teenagers. There’s something behind my eyes now, a shadow that will never go away. A film actress might be able to get away with this kind of darkness, but not me. Sheldon is starting to get feedback about my “low energy.” I don’t know what to tell him. It seems the life has gone out of me. I can’t bounce back from the booze anymore. It’s showing in my face.

  He calls me one morning, and starts talking excitedly into my machine. He knows I’m there, and that if he talks long enough I’ll probably pick up. It’s a good thing he can’t see me. I’m sitting in a rocking chair in a ratty blue bathrobe, pressing wet tea bags on my eyelids. Without Lenny around to distract and torture me, I’ve been crying myself to sleep every night. I’m on my fifth cigarette of the day.

  “Dani, listen. I’ve got something fabulous. You wanted serious? You got it, babe. Jay Binder is casting the new Horton Foote play. Off-Broadway. Great playwright. And get this: they want an actress who can play classical piano. Really.”

  I pick up the phone.

  “Hah! I knew that would get you,” Sheldon says.

  “When’s the audition?” I ask.

  “Well, that’s the thing. There’s a piece of music they want you to learn. Chopin’s something-or-other. Where is it—” I hear him flipping through some papers. “Yeah, here it is—the Revolutionary Étude. Know it?”

  I laugh.

  “Sheldon, it’s incredibly difficult,” I say.

  “Well, just learn the first page,” he says.

  “By when?”

  “Tomorrow, one o’clock.”

  I sit down at the piano for the first time in at least a year. Stashed inside my piano bench are the complete Chopin Études, because when I played, I was in the habit of buying pieces of music that were over my head. I look down at my fingernails—chipped red ovals—and remind myself to clip them before tomorrow. As I stare at what seems an impossible piece of music, I tell myself I can do it. For some reason, it seems a worthy challenge.

  I begin to pick my way through the first bars of the Revolutionary Étude, which consist of a series of strong treble chords followed by great rushes of scales. I think of Mr. Lipsky, my old piano teacher. Thank God he can’t hear me butchering this. But I focus—it is perhaps the first time I’ve focused on anything outside of my family for months—and before I know it, hours have passed, and the western sun is shining through my windows.

  The following afternoon, I show up at a small theater in the West Forties. The casting director is there, and the director, and the playwright. As usual, there’s an assistant sitting slumped on a metal folding chair onstage; it’s his job to read with me—he’s been reading with actress after actress all day. By now, he’s tossing back his lines in a bored monotone, not even looking up from his script. I struggle my way through two scenes I’ve only had a chance to skim. It turns out I’m supposed to play a small-town Southern girl who discovers she has musical talent. I know I can’t do a Southern accent to save my life. By the time they ask me to sit down at the piano, I’m drenched with perspiration.

  My back is to them. I arrange the sheet music in front of me, then take a deep breath and strike the first chord. My fingers have memorized the broken scales that follow, and they fly over the keyboard until they fly right off the piano. Five bars into the Revolutionary Étude, I have run out of keys.

  I turn around, confused.

  “What’s the matter, love?” one of them calls out from the darkness of the seats below the stage.

  “This isn’t a piano,” I say.

  “No, act
ually, it’s a pianoforte,” the voice says.

  “But—there aren’t enough keys. I can’t keep going.”

  “That’s all right, love. Thanks for coming by.”

  Maybe dropping out of college wasn’t such a good idea. I walk out of the theater and find myself wandering slowly downtown. I am dressed in my usual I’m-an-actress garb. Something short, something young. I walk past a construction site, and a group of workers sitting on the sidewalk during their lunch break whistle and make sucking sounds. I lower my head and walk faster. Whatsa matter, baby, can’t you smile?

  I head south on Broadway, jostled by the lunchtime and matinee crowds. There’s still time to visit my mother, but it’s two months since the accident, and I’m trying not to go out to the hospital every single day. I’m trying to get on with my life, as people have suggested. Problem is, I don’t quite know what life I’m supposed to be getting on with. I list my attributes in my head: I’m a college dropout, a joke of an actress, an ex-mistress, and I have no money in my checking account. For all I know, I’m in big trouble: I’ve never paid taxes, barely pay bills, don’t balance my checkbook. No one has ever told me these are more than annoying little tasks but are, in fact, a necessary part of living. I have skipped a developmental stage—late adolescence, early adulthood—during which most people learn these survival skills. I’ve made some of my own money, but my years with Lenny have thrown my sense of financial reality out the window. I know I’m supposed to be getting a check sometime soon from the New York Stock Exchange: a $25,000 stipend to the children of members who have died.

  I walk until the sky begins to fade, and I find myself on the cobblestoned streets of the West Village, near the place Lenny and I had a couple of years ago. I plop myself on a stoop and feel through my jacket pockets for a cigarette and matches. Some kids are playing kickball in the street. The ball rolls near my foot, and I kick it back to them.

  What’s Lenny doing right now? Canvassing the ranks of the under-twenty-five set for a new girlfriend? I blow smoke rings into the air, and watch as they fade to nothing. I feel as if I’ve been living under a rock for these past four years and life has gone on without me. There isn’t a part of this city that I don’t associate with Lenny. I have to reduce it all to rubble in my mind and build something from scratch. I don’t know where to begin.

  Most days now, when I show up at the hospital, my mother already has guests. Men with slicked-back hair and shiny briefcases sit by her bedside, taking notes. The lawyers (there are now a battery of lawyers: malpractice, insurance, trusts and estates) call her Mrs. Shapiro. They call me Dani. I don’t trust them, and they know it. I think they’re all ambulance chasers, that they’re here to make some money off my mother. But she clearly wants them here. She has summoned them to her throne. As far as my mother is concerned, my father’s doctors screwed up; they should have seen this coming. That or his brokerage firm should pay damages, since he was on his way home from a business trip when they had the accident. And if all else fails, there’s always the possibility of a class action suit against Audi for faulty brakes. My father has died, and it seems she fully expects someone—anyone—to pay for it.

  My mother is on a roll. From her bed, she has turned into a miniconglomerate. Her phone rings nonstop, and the bouquets of flowers on her windowsill have been replaced by piles of papers and folders. She is being propelled through the weeks and months by a terrible rage. This rage does my mother good. It brings a flush to her cheeks and makes her sit up straighter. It is the fuel in her blood, the fire that welds her bones back together. The crash has made her tough, invincible. She has survived eighty broken bones and the loss of her husband.

  “Guess what?” she says one morning as I walked through the door of her room, carrying a box of gourmet pizza. I know by the way her pupils are jiggling that something’s up.

  “What?” I respond, lowering the bags to the floor.

  “Your sister is contesting your father’s will.”

  This is one of those sentences I imagined I would live my whole life without hearing. For a moment, it does not compute.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look at this.”

  My mother hands me a letter on a law firm’s stationery. I skim it, my mind buzzing with a feeling I don’t have a name for. I can barely focus on what the letter says. The words swim on the page.

  “Your sister,” my mother says, omitting the half, “has no idea what she’s doing.”

  “When did you get this?”

  “This morning.”

  My mother’s voice is ice. She is drumming her fingers against the rail of her bed. I look over at Angie, who is sitting in her usual spot in the corner, knitting. Angie’s house must be filled with needlepoint pillows and intricately knitted throws. I imagine she plops down on her couch every night and thanks God she isn’t part of our family.

  “It seems your sister doesn’t think the terms of your father’s will are fair.”

  “Well, are they?”

  My mother glares at me, as if I should have known better than to ask such a question.

  “Of course they are. You know your father—he was meticulous.”

  It is precisely because I know my father that I asked the question, but I decide not to pursue this line of reasoning. There’s no point arguing with my mother; there never has been.

  “So what happens now?”

  “What happens now?” my mother repeats shrilly. “What happens now? Now, the will will be held up for God knows how long, which means the estate’s assets will be frozen.”

  “What does Susie want?” I ask.

  “God knows what she wants.”

  I have begun to notice that my mother often invokes God when she’s in a rage. In her anger, she believes she’s on the side of the righteous.

  “Susie doesn’t like a certain phrase in the will.”

  “What’s the phrase?”

  “As you know, Daddy left half of everything outright to me, and half in trust to you and Susie, which you get when I die.”

  “Right,” I say hollowly. Whenever we start talking about legal specifics, my mind goes numb, as if I’m missing a certain gene my mother and sister both clearly possess.

  “There’s something in there, just legal language really, which says that I’m allowed to invade that trust five percent a year.”

  Even I can do the math on this. If my mother takes five percent a year out of the trust, in twenty years it will be seriously depleted. No wonder Susie’s upset. It’s safe to say she’s being screwed. Like everything else in his life, my meticulous father managed not to think this through. The man who imagined his own death every minute of every day left a ticking time bomb of a will that could do nothing but rip his family apart.

  “… did you hear me?”

  My mother’s voice comes at me from a distance, and I realize I’ve been spacing out.

  “Sorry, Mom.”

  “I asked if you think you can talk to your sister.”

  “You mean talk her out of it?”

  She looks at me.

  “Never mind,” my mother mutters. “I don’t want to involve you. This is terrible.”

  She sits up straighter in her bed and tosses her head back defiantly.

  “Hand me the phone, honey, would you?” she asks.

  I begin to take the pizza out of its box, trying to block out my mother’s voice as she gets one of her lawyers on the phone. My stepdaughter, I hear, and frozen assets, and countersue. I’d like to rail against my father, who should have foreseen this, but he’s dead. I’d like to talk sense into my mother but I just don’t have what it takes to reach her. And while I understand why Susie’s doing what she’s doing, still I wish she wouldn’t do it.

  Though I don’t know this today, I am making a choice. I am choosing not to choose. My mind has gone numb precisely so that I won’t understand that somewhere buried deep in this mess there’s a right and a wrong. Someone is the villain here. I just
have no idea who it is, and I don’t want to know—because knowing will mean I will have to choose my mother over my sister, or my sister over my mother. I’ve already lost so much I can’t bring myself to lose any more. For the rest of my life, I will become stupid around this subject. I will shrug my shoulders when people ask me why my sister and mother don’t speak. My sister contested my father’s will, I will say, as if this is the end of the story—or the beginning.

  It’s a Saturday night, and my friend Diane and I are out at a jazz club—a plush, dimly lit place dotted with purple sofas and mirrored cocktail tables. We’re in the dead center of the 1980s, and clubs like this are thriving. At the table next to us, there are three swarthy guys in suits, their faces flecked with light cast from a mirrored ball slowly revolving on the ceiling; they keep trying to send us drinks, but the last thing we want to do is meet men. I have not spoken with Lenny in two months now, and as far as I’m concerned, men are nothing but heartache. They lie to you, they leave you, or they die.

  Diane has ordered a bottle of champagne, not because we have anything to celebrate, but because champagne is her drink of choice. We don’t stop to consider the fact that we don’t have real jobs, and that sixty-dollar bottles of champagne are perhaps a bit excessive. I have been taking my American Express bills as they arrive each month and shoving them into the bottom drawer of my desk. I receive messages on my answering machine on a regular basis now, demanding that I call the toll-free numbers of collection agencies.

  Diane clinks her glass against mine and grins at me as if we’re partners in crime and we’ve just gotten away with something. She is my closest friend now; we are bound by the fact that we have both lost a parent. No one else understands. That she is also a girl who likes to drink—that she can, in fact, drink me under the table—is perhaps an even greater reason to hang out. We get together a couple of times a week, always choosing pretty places where the wineglasses are big and the waiters don’t blink when we order a second bottle. We pretend we are doing something other than getting shit-faced. We chain-smoke Marlboros and order only dessert. By the end of these nights, our table is usually littered with lipstick-stained napkins, overflowing ashtrays, empty bottles, and half-finished crème brûlée.