Slow Motion

by Dani Shapiro

  She presses a tiny envelope into my hand under the table. I’ve sworn off cocaine for the past couple of months because I know I can’t handle it, but tonight my resolve has weakened. Champagne, soft jazz, caviar spooned onto toast points—none of it is taking away the dull, empty ache I seem to always carry with me these days, but maybe a few lines of blow will do the trick.

  I go down a flight of carpeted stairs and find the ladies’ room, which is the size of my whole apartment. The lights in the bathroom are dim as well, and there is a tray with an assortment of hair sprays, colognes, and Q-tips on a long marble vanity. I enter a stall, do a few quick lines off the metal toilet-paper dispenser, then check my face in the mirror. I look pale. I pull a dark red lipstick from my bag, and try to apply it, but it’s like putting on lipstick after visiting the dentist. I can barely feel my lips.

  I head back upstairs, move quickly past the table of men, and settle back into the purple banquette with Diane. She has ordered another bottle of Cristal. The band starts a second set after a long break—it’s one in the morning—and I notice that the sax player is cute. He’s a skinny, dark-haired guy, and I find myself wondering what his life is like. He catches me looking at him, and winks. I flush and look away. I have been playing the part of the femme fatale for so long now that I have all but forgotten my true nature. I’m a good girl at heart—a girl for whom rebellion once constituted driving on Shabbos. The fact that I’m sitting here in a jazz club at one in the morning, stoned and drunk, flirting with the sax player—it’s as if somewhere along the way there was a fork in the road and it would be an understatement to say I took the wrong one. Retracing my steps back to where I started seems impossible.

  “I want some more cookies,” I whisper.

  Cookies is our code for blow. We have reduced it to something sweet and wholesome in our minds. I pocket Diane’s little envelope again and head back to the ladies’ room. That’s the thing about cocaine: I never want just a few lines. Once it’s in my system, I crave more. There is no enough. I turn to smile at the sax player as I leave the floor and catch him staring at my legs. What does he see? On nights like this, I feel transparent. People can see right through me. My real life is in the hospital with my mother. There, I am flesh and bone.

  I pour twice as much coke onto the toilet-paper dispenser as I did the first time, cutting four fat lines with the edge of my American Express card. I snort it quickly, and my head begins to swim. I can barely find my way back to the banquette in the darkness, and my heart starts pounding. My fingers tingle, and my eyes are dry. I can’t blink. Something is closing in on me, and all I want to do is flee. The inside of my head feels as if it’s shrinking against itself, shutting down.

  I find Diane and collapse into the banquette next to her.

  “Let’s go,” I manage to say.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Her eyes are glassy.

  “I don’t know … I don’t feel so good …” I moan.

  She dips the corner of a cloth napkin into a glass of ice water and dabs at my forehead. A cold trickle runs down between my eyebrows. I try to take a deep breath, but I can’t get in enough air. Nothing’s working. Not the champagne, certainly not the coke. I want to take it back, redo the last five minutes, but I can’t. Something bad is happening inside me, and I’m terrified.

  Diane must have paid our bill, though I have no memory of this, and I hold on to her arm as we stand up. I feel light-headed and for a moment I can’t move; I just weave back and forth, watching the prisms of light thrown around the room by the mirrored ball. All this motion is making me nauseated, and I’m afraid I’m going to be sick all over the three men next to us. I feel a hand on my back, and when I turn around the sax player is behind me, and he’s offering me a scrap of paper with something scribbled on it. Up close, he’s not nearly as cute.

  “Later,” he says, “we’ll be at this after-hours club, if you ladies care to join us.”

  The street is deserted. This isn’t a busy part of town in the first place, but at this time of night not a soul is out walking. The cool air hits my face as soon as we part the club’s velvet curtains, and for an instant I feel better. I take a few steps forward, my legs rubbery as a toddler’s. My high heel catches a crack in the sidewalk, and I fall into the gutter, tearing a hole through my stockings, skinning my knee.

  “Jesus, Dani—how much did you do?” Diane asks.

  “Too much,” I mutter.

  I can’t get up. I am sitting on the curb with my head between my knees, and I’m afraid I’m going to vomit all over the street.

  Diane stands behind me, reaches under my armpits and yanks me to my feet. She holds on to me, and I feel her breasts pressed into my back. She turns me around and scrutinizes me. She seems to have sobered up fast. Then again, I was the one making all the trips to the ladies’ room.

  “Let’s get you something to eat,” she says firmly.

  We walk to the corner of Sixth Avenue, where there’s an all-night joint called Lox Around the Clock. At this hour it’s not exactly hopping. It’s a brightly lit room with neon accents, linoleum tables, and the kind of chairs I remember from school lunchrooms. A couple of cops sit in a corner table, hunched over plates of bagels and eggs.

  “I don’t want to do this—I want to go home,” I groan.

  “You need to eat,” says Diane, who has suddenly turned into Florence Nightingale.

  A waitress appears at our table.

  “She’ll have a bagel and cream cheese, and we’ll have two cups of coffee,” Diane says in her best Sarah Lawrence Girl voice. I know she’s trying not to slur her words.

  I’m seeing sparks of light in the corners of my eyes. The world has gone kaleidoscopic. I try to close my eyes, but it gets worse. I blink them open and look across the restaurant at a middle-aged man in a suit and fedora sitting alone at the counter. I think he’s my father, and I gasp.

  Diane reaches across the table and grabs my hand. “Poor baby,” she murmurs. “You’ll be okay—I promise.”

  But I know enough to know that there’s no reason to believe her. I have not been okay in so long I have no memory of what it might feel like. I look over at the counter again, and the middle-aged man is gone.

  The waitress dumps two cups of coffee on the table so hard they slosh all over the paper place mats.

  “Was that necessary?” Diane calls after her.

  The waitress hates us—and why wouldn’t she? We are eminently hateable. Two drunk spoiled babies. I lean my head into my forearms and begin to cry, even as I tell myself to stop, just stop, because I know if I start there will be no end to it.

  My whole body shakes with sobs. In the neon light of Lox Around the Clock, I understand for the first time that I will never see my father again. Time stretches and bends, and becomes something more infinite than my sodden mind can comprehend. Someday I will be thirty, forty even. I will get married, I will have children, and my father won’t see any of it. I can’t stand the thought that he died worried about me.

  Diane comes over to my side of the table and crouches next to me. She wraps her arms around me, her hair falling into my lap. She smells like champagne and coffee.

  “Ssshhh,” she murmurs. “Breathe.”

  But I can’t breathe, and I can’t seem to get a grip on myself. Trying to stop only makes it worse. No matter how much of a mess I’ve ever been in, there has always been a small piece of me I’ve held in reserve. That piece is gone.

  “Honey, what do you want to do?” Diane asks. She is rubbing circles against my back. I think she’s probably scared, too. The other diners are glancing in our direction, and I overhear someone ask if I’m okay.

  “I—”

  I can’t even get a sentence out.

  “Do you want to go home?”

  I nod. My whole face is wet, and my insides feel hollowed out. I think about my mother, who is probably asleep in her hospital bed, and that provokes a whole new torrent of tears. I have to live
, and, at this moment, that seems like the worst possible thing. What would Lenny do if he was here right now? He would scoop me into his arms and carry me to the car waiting by the curb. He would give me a Valium—which, on top of everything else in my system, would probably land me in the hospital.

  “Okay, let’s go.” Diane leads me out of the diner, carrying my bagel in a brown paper bag. I hold on to her arm like an old woman, and I keep my head down, tears dripping straight to the floor.

  She hails a cab on Sixth Avenue and gets in with me.

  “I’m taking you home,” she says.

  It is three in the morning. We don’t hit a single light as we ride all the way uptown to my apartment building. Central Park West is dark. Families are asleep, tucked in. This makes me sob harder. My doorman opens the door for us, looking as if he just woke up. Diane takes me upstairs, fishes for keys in my handbag, and fiddles with the two locks on my door. I lean against the wall, still weeping. I think I will weep for the rest of my life.

  Once inside, Diane switches on a lamp, then rummages through my dresser drawers until she finds a pair of flannel pajamas.

  “Here we go,” she says.

  She sits me on the bed, kneels in front of me, and removes my shoes. Then she peels off my ripped stockings, skirt, sweater, and bra. She helps me into the pajamas, all the while making little soothing noises, as a mother might to an infant. When she’s finished undressing me, she pulls down the bedcovers, plumps the pillows, and tucks me into bed.

  I’m never drinking again, I think to myself as Diane sits next to me and strokes my hand. No drinking, no drugs. It seems the choice is getting pretty stark. I can’t keep going this way. I feel as if my father might be up there somewhere, a pair of eyes in the sky, watching all this. I feel his steady gaze on me.

  Diane wipes my cheeks with the sheet.

  “Try to sleep,” she whispers, but I’m afraid to sleep. If I allow myself to drift off, I might never come back. So I keep my eyes open. I stare at the ceiling, counting backward, reciting the Hebrew alphabet in my head, remembering the faces of my grade-school teachers.

  She holds me until the sun comes up.

  Lenny will not leave me alone. He calls ten, twelve times a day and leaves messages on my answering machine. Hello? His voice fills the shadows of my bedroom. Fox? Are you there? Sometimes he doesn’t even bother to say a word, but I’m sure it’s him. He stays on the line for as long as five minutes, breathing. I know he thinks he can get to me again. As for me, I am trying harder than I ever have before to stay away from him. Sometimes he calls in the middle of the night and wakes me out of a deep sleep, and my hand reaches reflexively for the phone, but I’ve always snapped out of it just enough to stop myself before it’s too late. I’m scared and horribly lonely, but I keep telling myself that anything is better than being with Lenny.

  He’s in the middle of litigating a famous case, and there’s front-page coverage in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. In these pieces he’s referred to as “flamboyant” and “feisty.” One reporter likened him to a bulldog, and another referred to his fleet of Ferraris and his trademark raccoon coat. Some people might not want to call attention to this kind of coverage, but Lenny loves it. Just in case I miss any articles and accompanying photographs, Lenny has a messenger drop off clips each evening with my doorman. He’s never taken a case he couldn’t win—and I guess he thinks he can win me too, if only he’s persistent enough.

  After all, in the face of the most tangible possible proof that Lenny has been lying to me all these years, I have remained with him. The simple facts about Lenny—who, what, when, where—have always been elusive to me, impossible to grasp as he slipped and slid his way around the truth with all the ease of a snake in a river. My little girl is dying, he would say whenever I questioned any discrepancies in his stories, or I have to go to Houston for a chemotherapy treatment. A year before my parents’ accident, when I couldn’t take my own confusion anymore (Was Lenny lying to me? Was I going crazy?), I decided to hire a detective to get to the bottom of it.

  When I think back to my younger self riffling through the New York City Yellow Pages in search of a private investigator, I feel that I’m watching a movie about someone else, a girl so clueless that she really didn’t know that her desire to hire a detective was all the answer she needed. I chose a detective agency based on nothing more than its good address, in the East Sixties—a neighborhood filled with private schools and shrinks. Most other agencies listed were in the Times Square area or in the Bronx.

  It was a cool, crystal-clear spring day when I rang the ground-floor buzzer of a brownstone. A burly, middle-aged man in a sports coat and polyester pants opened the door and ushered me inside. He had a thick head of sandy hair and fleshy pockets under his eyes. He looked exactly like my idea of a detective. I even noticed a trench coat hanging on a standing rack by the door. He pointed me to a small office furnished with a big library desk and two wooden chairs. The desk was covered with papers, half-opened manila folders, the edges of photographs peeking out. An old-fashioned phone, the kind with the dial instead of push buttons, sat on a pile of magazines.

  “Mrs. Shapiro?”

  “Ms.,” I replied faintly.

  He blinked.

  “I’m John Feeny,” he said. “We spoke on the phone.”

  For this occasion I had dressed as conservatively as I knew how, as if I were playing a role: pants suit, heels, and the pearls Lenny gave me for my twenty-first birthday. My hair was pulled back into a ponytail, around which I had wrapped a silk scarf.

  “What can I do for you?” Feeny asked not unkindly.

  “You said on the phone that you sometimes deal with … personal business,” I said. “I have a sort of weird situation.”

  He leaned back and rested his head in his hands, smiling at me as if to assure me that no situation could possibly be too weird.

  “Ms. Shapiro,” he said. “I was a detective on the New York City police force for twenty-five years before I opened my own shop. And I’ve been at this here thing”—he waved his hand around the room—“for a decade. So whatever it is, I’m sure I can deal with it.”

  I suddenly became afraid. Lenny’s face floated before me, his eyes bulging with rage, and I remembered a story he liked to tell about how he picked up a broken bottle from the street and slashed a would-be mugger’s face. Lenny was sort of a public person. More public all the time. I wondered if I was about to get myself into a whole lot of trouble. But still, I didn’t get up, thank Feeny for his time, and head for the door. I stumbled forward like someone trying to escape from a fire. I wasn’t sure if I was headed in the right direction, but I knew to keep moving.

  “This isn’t what you think,” I said. “I’m in a relationship with a married man. And I want you to find out if my boyfriend is cheating on me with his wife.”

  At this, Feeny’s eyebrows shot up.

  “Come again?”

  “He claims his wife is in a mental hospital,” I continued. “He told me he hasn’t been with her in years.”

  “And you think he might be lying,” said Feeny. Did I see the suspicion of hysteria building behind his eyes, or is my memory supplying it now, because I simply cannot imagine a middle-aged man listening to an earnest, overdressed twenty-two-year-old girl tell him that she thinks her married boyfriend might still be sleeping with his wife?

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What’s your boyfriend’s name?”

  “I’m a bit nervous telling you that.”

  “Ms. Shapiro, if you don’t tell me his name I can’t possibly help you. What, is he some kind of famous guy?”

  “Well, sort of,” I said.

  We stared at each other for a moment.

  “His name is Leonard Klein, he’s—”

  “I know who he is,” Feeny responded dryly. “The lawyer guy.”

  I nodded, then sat there, my hands folded in my lap.

  “So what do you want? You want him fo
llowed?”

  “I don’t know,” I faltered.

  “You want pictures? Video? Tape? You want his phone bugged?”

  I actually began to get excited. After years of trying to figure Lenny out myself, here, finally, was someone who was going to really do it.

  “Everything,” I answered giddily. “I want everything.”

  “It’s going to cost you.”

  “How much?”

  Feeny pulled a pocket calculator out from somewhere beneath the mess on his desk.

  “Where does Klein live?”

  “Upper Westchester.”

  “So there’ll be some travel. You want us to stake out his house?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.” He peered at the calculator. “I’ll need a retainer. And I’m going to have to put a few guys on this. So why don’t we say five grand?”

  Inwardly I panicked. That amount was about the total I had saved of my own money. Everything else was what Lenny had given me: jewelry, a car, clothes, even cash from time to time. He had gotten me a credit card by lying to the bank and telling them I worked for his law firm. I had steadily been making less and less over the last couple of years, and my parents figured Lenny was supporting me.

  “Fine,” I said quickly.

  I had no sense of whether it was a fair price for what Feeny was going to do for me, or even how I’d survive once I paid him. But I needed to know the truth about Lenny as if my life depended on it.

  “Where’s Klein now?” Feeny asked as he took the check.

  “In Europe,” I answered, “on a business trip. He’s due back tomorrow on the Concorde from Paris.”

  “Fine,” he said. “We’ll start there.”

  Two days later, Feeny called to tell me that the passenger list for the Air France Concorde—no easy score, he assured me—showed a Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Klein traveling together. And the guy he sent to Kennedy Airport had spotted Lenny and his wife at the baggage claim. The photos were being developed.