by Dani Shapiro
“So what do we think?” she asks.
Silence.
I stare at my hands, which are folded in my lap so no one can see them shaking. I pick at a hangnail on my thumb until it bleeds.
“Anyone?”
Someone clears her throat, but no one says a word. It’s all I can do to stay in my seat. I want to bolt out the door, run through the building and down the hill, all the way to the parking lot. I never should have turned in this story. It’s too personal, too revealing.
I glance at the professor, and she gives me an encouraging smile, but she’s not going to bail me out. It’s her policy that the students speak first.
“Come on, people,” she says, losing patience.
I’m about to cry, when finally Katie, the best writer in the class, starts to speak.
“It’s beautiful,” she says.
I think I’ve misheard her.
“That’s why no one’s saying anything. We don’t know what to say.”
The professor sits back as the students finally start speaking. Until now, I have been the quiet one in the class, too insecure and frightened to say a word. But today, something begins to shift. I see that there might be some way I can take the raw material of my life and transform it into something that transcends my own experience. I can organize the noise in my head into something that has order and structure. I can make sense of what, until now, has been senseless.
At the end of class, the professor pulls me aside. “There’s a graduate writing program here,” she says. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about it.”
I drive home from school in a state of dazed ecstasy. The moment the professor mentioned graduate school, I knew it was the right thing to do. One of the few gifts of spending so many years doing the wrong thing is the clarity with which I can see when something is right. Slowly, my life is gaining a sense of direction. By the time I walk into the lobby of my building, I’m breathless, euphoric. It’s eight o’clock at night, and I have hours of work ahead of me: at least a hundred pages of Anna Karenina to read for tomorrow’s seminar.
I say hi to Ernie, my doorman, as I head for the elevator.
“Hold on a minute, Dani, I’ve got something for you,” Ernie says, rummaging in the drawer of his stand.
“Here it is.” He hands me a small business card.
“This guy was here to see you. He asked you to call him as soon as you get in.”
I look at the card: “Special Agent Richard Flagg, Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
My heart starts to pound. There must be some mistake.
“Did he say what he wanted, Ernie?” I ask.
“No, but he did start asking some questions.”
“Like what?”
I feel as if I’m hallucinating.
“Oh, how long you’ve lived here, and whether you live alone—stuff like that.”
Ernie is looking at me with a curiosity indigenous to New York City doormen. He knows there’s a juicy story here.
I walk to the elevator. I feel Ernie’s eyes on my back. It must be a mistake—it must! What could the FBI possibly want with me? I’ve never even gotten a speeding ticket.
As soon as I unlock the door to my apartment, I flick on the lights and go straight to the phone. I don’t even take off my jacket. I sit on the edge of my rocking chair and dial the number on the card.
“Flagg,” a voice barks.
“This is Dani Shapiro,” I say as evenly as I can. Why am I so nervous? I haven’t done anything wrong.
“Hi, Dani,” he responds, as if he knows me.
I don’t say anything.
“Do you know what this is about?” he asks.
“I have no idea,” I answer.
“None at all?”
“No,” I say. I’m beginning to get pissed. Maybe this is a crank. Maybe I should call a lawyer.
“Lenny,” he says.
A single name, and the world disappears.
CHAPTER
NINE
“Don’t talk to them,” my lawyer snaps when I call her the next morning. “Let them subpoena you.”
“Subpoena?” I repeat. What the hell has Lenny done? And what does the FBI want with me?
“How did they find me?” I ask.
My lawyer laughs.
“Give me a break,” she says.
My lawyer, like every other lawyer in America, is aware of Lenny Klein. In the past couple of years he has become notorious for being responsible for the demise of the largest firm in New York. His raccoon coat and white Rolls-Royce have been written about in the press, emblematic of the high-flying eighties, which are about to be over. There is nothing Lenny feels he can’t get away with. This is the kind of news that, in the past, would have made me run for the nearest drink.
“This really scares me,” I tell my lawyer.
“I’ll call them and try to get the lowdown,” she says.
When I hang up the phone, I try to get some work done. I’ve begun to turn those short stories into a coming-of-age novel about a young Orthodox Jewish girl—but I can’t concentrate. Ever since my father’s death, I’ve felt like a convalescent: I go to AA meetings almost every day, therapy twice a week, sleep nine hours a night—a hard, dreamless sleep from which I am jolted by the alarm clock’s early-morning ring. I feel constantly raw, as if the years of drinking coated my nerve endings, and now that the coating is gone I feel everything: fear, panic, rage, anxiety, all in one big stew. I find it unbearable. It seems to me that my emotions have the power to kill me, that they will seize me by the throat and never let me go.
I’m in the second year of the master’s program at Sarah Lawrence, and I’ve just turned in a long section of my novel. It seems the class is having a problem finding the Lenny character believable. I’ve written him as he is (or at least how I think he is) and the other students keep telling me that he just doesn’t ring true: no young girl with as much going for her as my narrator does would ever find herself in the thrall of such an unappealing man. At least make him more physically attractive, someone said. Yeah, or make the narrator more of a loser so we understand why she’s with him.
I stare at my computer screen.
The phone rings. Usually I turn off the ringer when I’m working, but today real life, or at least real history, is intruding.
“Okay,” my lawyer says. “You’re not going to believe this.”
She tells me that the U.S. attorney’s office is seeking grand jury indictments against Lenny for various counts of racketeering, conspiracy, mail fraud, and obstruction of justice. Apparently Lenny has lied not only to me but also to his clients, such as Shearson Lehman and Home Insurance. Even Donald Trump is angry at Lenny. I feel a weird surge of joy at this news, because for an instant it makes me feel less like an idiot for believing Lenny’s lies for as long as I did.
“So I think they’re going to subpoena you,” my lawyer is saying.
The room swims. All my life I’ve felt as if I’ve done something wrong. When I see a police car on the highway, even if I’m not speeding I think I’ll be pulled over. And when walking through metal detectors in airports, I imagine that the alarm will sound and a gun or a bomb will be pulled out of my luggage.
“Am I in trouble?” I ask.
“I don’t think so,” she says. “They just want to talk to you—find out if you know anything.”
“Why?”
“They won’t say, exactly. But let me ask you this, Dani. Do you know anything you want to tell me right now?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you have any idea that this was going on?”
“No!” I blurt out. “Of course not!”
“Don’t get upset,” my lawyer soothes. “I just had to ask.”
In the two years since my father’s death, the following people have died: Harvey dropped dead of a heart attack; Hy died of pancreatic cancer; my paternal grandmother finally expired after twenty bedridden years; Susie’s mother died of breast ca
ncer. I have grown accustomed to funerals, burials, weeks of sitting shiva. I know the way to the Brooklyn cemetery, and no longer get lost when walking through the maze of tombstones, looking for the family plot. Sometimes I drive there and just sit on the low stone bench for a while, surrounded by new graves. I keep telling myself this will end, that the odds have it that the people I love will stop dying so rapidly—that a phone call in the middle of the night will not always bring bad news.
In the midst of it all, I am trying to build a life for myself, but my mother isn’t making it easy. She graduated from wheelchair to walker to cane, and now strides down Broadway, arms swinging, a miracle of medical science. The only clue that her legs were shattered is the fact that she has to take one step at a time when climbing stairs. She looks a decade younger—she is sixty-five—and she is incandescent, lit from within by a rage she has carried all her life, and which, at the moment of the crash, became her life source.
My mother’s rage has been her ticket to survival. She has used it to lift her arm weights, do her leg exercises, fight legal battles with Susie, Shirley, Harvey, and the insurance company. She has even contemplated a medical malpractice suit against my father’s internist for not foreseeing that he would pass out behind the wheel. The cause of the accident, no matter how it’s picked over, will never become clear. Did my father have a stroke that caused him to pass out at the wheel? An arrhythmia that could have been prevented? Had he taken one too many tranquilizers that day? Now that her legs and arms are strengthening and her lawsuits are being settled one by one, my mother is letting go of some of these questions, and has turned her attention to me.
“Why haven’t you called?” she asks, two days after we had lunch. “My friends can’t believe it. A daughter who doesn’t call.”
“Mom—”
“Am I being paranoid? Do you not want to spend time with me?”
“I’m busy with schoolwork,” I tell her. “I’m trying to write this novel.”
“And that means you can’t find five minutes to talk to your mother?”
Her voice, over the phone line, is stretched tight. She has accepted this as her due. Children take care of parents. Sacrifice is the name of the game. She was middle-aged before she had to take care of her own ailing mother, but still she compares her situation to mine. I went to the old-age home every week, she says to me. And I did it cheerfully.
A little knot inside my head unravels.
“You know, we saw each other Tuesday,” I say. “We had lunch.”
“Tuesday! Today is Thursday and I haven’t heard a word from you,” she responds triumphantly, as if I’ve just made her point for her.
“Mom, you may find this hard to believe, but a lot of my friends only talk to their parents once a week, if that,” I say.
Don’t try to explain, I tell myself. It’s not worth it.
“And my friends tell me their grown children invite them to spend whole weekends at their houses,” she says, referring, I can only assume, to people a decade older than myself, who live in Scarsdale and have already produced grandchildren.
“I’m sorry I’m not the daughter you wish you had,” I snap.
There is silence on the other end of the phone. I twist the wire hard around one finger like a tourniquet.
“How dare you!” my mother shrieks. “I almost died!”
Now rage is bubbling through my own veins.
“Give me some room!” I shout at my mother. “I’m just trying to put my life together!”
“At least you have a life,” she cries. “I have nothing.”
I close my eyes and my hand goes slack around the receiver. She’s done it again—pulled out the big one, the nuclear bomb in her arsenal. The words echo in my ears—I have nothing—and I feel them enter me, twisting themselves around my ribs until they are a part of my very bones.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
I am a terrible daughter and deserve to be punished, I think. My mother has nothing, and I have so much.
My mother doesn’t say a word.
“I’ll do better,” I say.
Still nothing.
“Do you want to have coffee this afternoon?” I ask. “I’ll come by around three.”
“Sure,” she says, and I can almost see her shrug. “If you’d like.”
My lawyer’s office on lower Fifth Avenue is located in the same building as the offices of a casting director I used to regularly audition for, and when the elevator door opens to reveal a bench of cross-legged blondes wearing miniskirts and reading television commercial scripts, for a split second I think about getting off the elevator and blending in. But then I remember: I have gained ten pounds since starting graduate school, and just last week I cut all my hair off.
The elevator door slides shut and my heart skips a beat, reminding me of the exact nature of the trouble I’m in. Upstairs, in my lawyer’s office, two FBI agents are waiting for me, and they want me to tell them everything I know about Lenny Klein.
My lawyer is waiting for me in the receptionist’s area. The fact that I have a lawyer at the age of twenty-five is a direct result of what has happened in my family: Susie suing my mother, my mother countersuing Susie, my mother trying to remove Harv and Shirl from their position overseeing a family trust, my mother trying to have my grandmother declared incompetent.
And now this.
“Hi, kiddo,” she says, kissing me on the cheek.
She smells like rose water and oatmeal. She’s a wife and a mom and a lawyer—someone who would never be called into question by the FBI. She’s wearing a knee-length skirt and shoes with stacked, sensible heels, a gold wedding ring. Her black hair, flecked with gray, is brushed back from her face in a simple, short style. I would do anything right now to switch lives with her.
“They’re waiting in the conference room,” she says.
“How do they seem?”
“Like feds,” she says, as if that might provide me with a mental picture.
She ushers me into the conference room. I see myself reflected in the glass door. I look like the graduate student I am: jeans, boots, sweatshirt, newly cropped hair. Whatever a rich guy’s mistress looks like, I am no longer it.
“This is Dani Shapiro,” she announces, and two men in dark suits swivel around in their seats to look at me.
“Agent Flagg”—one of them shakes my hand limply—“we spoke on the phone.”
I nod once—what I hope is a don’t-fuck-with-me nod—and sit.
“And this here’s Agent Anderson.” He gestures to the guy next to him.
I nod again. I am determined to speak only if spoken to.
“Coffee?” my lawyer asks.
“Thanks,” replies Anderson, even though she wasn’t addressing him.
Flagg folds his fingers under his chin, elbows on the conference table.
“So.”
That’s all he says. So. Just like that. As if I’m going to sit here and start talking. He has a yellow legal pad in front of him, and a Bic pen poised in his fingers. A microcassette recorder is next to the pad, spools turning.
I raise my eyebrows and meet his gaze. I probably look cool and calm to him, but if he could see what’s going on inside me, he’d see another story. I am buffeted by anger and shame; anger that I have to be here, that Lenny Klein has infiltrated my new life—and horrible shame that I ever was with him.
“Let’s get on with it, gentlemen,” my lawyer says crisply.
Flagg glances down at the blank page on his legal pad, then back up to me.
“Lenny,” he says, “is in big trouble.”
The way he says it, Lenny, the way his mouth forms the syllables, is almost lewd. It connotes an intimacy of sorts—or at least a knowledge that he’s dealing with someone who has been on intimate terms with Lenny Klein.
“What does that have to do with my client?” asks my lawyer.
“As I explained to you over the phone, your client hasn’t done anything wrong,” Flagg s
ays. “We just want to see if maybe she knows something she doesn’t even know she knows.”
“Like what?” I blurt out. This is getting to be too much for me. I feel as if I’ve stumbled onto the set of the wrong movie.
“For instance, you and Lenny traveled,” Anderson says in a statement, not a question.
“Yes,” I reply faintly.
“Did you travel within the continental United States?”
“Yes.”
“Did he purchase your tickets for you?”
“Sometimes.”
“Were they always under your own name?”
The questions are coming faster and faster. I feel dizzy. I don’t understand the significance of this line of questioning. But I promised myself before I got here that I would answer any questions honestly.
I think about whether Lenny always bought me tickets in my own name. When we flew to Europe I used my passport. But what about other trips? Suddenly, I flash on trips to LA, and the names of various associates in his law firm on tickets I used.
“No,” I answer slowly.
A shadow of a smile crosses Flagg’s face.
“And whose names were they in?”
“Associates of his,” I answer.
“Bingo,” murmurs Anderson.
“I don’t get it.” I turn to my lawyer.
“He was charging clients for your airfare,” she responds.
I take a deep breath. I remember the way Lenny used to hold our tickets as we were boarding—these were the days before airlines asked to see identification for domestic travel—and how we would often check into hotel rooms under the names of his associates or even sometimes clients. To the extent that I was aware of this at all, I imagined it was so that his wife wouldn’t be able to find us. It never occurred to me that he might be doing something illegal.