Slow Motion

by Dani Shapiro

  “I didn’t know,” I mumble.

  “Okay.” Flagg squints out the window at the building across the street. “Let’s move on.”

  “What about gifts?” Anderson asks. “Lenny buy you any big items?”

  “Yes,” I say softly.

  “Such as?”

  “Jewelry, furs, cars,” I answer. My resolve to look him in the eye is fading fast.

  “Jewelry, furs, cars,” Anderson repeats like a mantra. He seems to be stifling a laugh. “Would you care to elaborate?”

  “A mink coat,” I say, “a watch, a diamond ring—”

  “A diamond ring? Were you engaged?”

  “Hardly,” I say, and I hear an edge creeping into my voice.

  “Keep going,” says Flagg. “Any other jewelry?”

  “Pearls,” I say. “He bought me a strand of pearls in San Francisco.”

  “And what would you say is the approximate value of all the jewelry?” asks Anderson.

  I make a mental tally. Lenny always let me know the prices of the things he bought me. That was part of the game. He enjoyed my knowing how much money he was spending on me. I used to tell him to stop buying me things, that I didn’t want or need more jewelry and that I felt silly wearing fur coats, but he just kept going. After all, what was a mistress for, if not to drape in luxury like a mannequin?

  “I guess about fifty thousand dollars,” I say.

  Anderson lets out a low whistle.

  “How did he pay for these items?” he asks. “Check? Plastic?”

  “Plastic, usually.”

  “Do you remember if he used his own personal card or an expense account card?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. Probably both,” I say.

  “And what about the vehicle he purchased for you?” he asks.

  “First he leased me a Ferrari,” I say. “Then he bought me an Alfa Romeo”—I pause for a second, flashing on how on earth I could have ignored what was so obvious—“then a Mercedes.”

  “Sedan or convertible?” Flagg asks.

  “What difference could that possibly make?” my lawyer snaps.

  “Just asking,” he shrugs.

  I stare out the glass door of the conference room, flooded with self-hatred. These men think I was with Lenny for his money—of course they do. Their follow-the-money detective-school training allows for no other possibility. I feel like telling them that if I had been with Lenny for his money, I would have let him buy me the million-dollar apartment he begged me to take on Central Park. I thought I was in love with him, I want to tell them, but why would they believe me?

  “Did you keep these items when you ended your relationship?” Anderson asks.

  “Some of them,” I say, omitting the fact that I sold the Mercedes to pay for graduate school.

  “Has Lenny been in touch with you?” Flagg asks.

  “He’s called, but I haven’t spoken with him,” I say.

  “When was the last time?”

  “About three months ago,” I say.

  Anderson turns to Flagg.

  “It’s interesting,” he murmurs. “The pattern is quite different than with the other girls.”

  “Other girls?” I repeat.

  “Oh sure,” he says.

  “So are we about wrapped up here?” my lawyer interjects.

  “What other girls?” I ask.

  For the rest of my life, Lenny Klein will be an eternal question I will try to answer. I will struggle to accept the fact that I spent nearly four years—four formative years—with a man I never knew.

  “Six,” Flagg says without a blink. “There were six, including you.”

  “Have you talked to all of them, or are you planning to torture only my client?” my lawyer asks.

  “Oh, we’re talking to everybody,” answers Anderson. “But with Dani, here, it seems Lenny was more … open … than usual. He seemed to almost be trying to set up a life with her. The others were more like … the usual fare.”

  “You know,” Flagg says, “you should be prepared for some phone calls from the press when this breaks.”

  “What the hell do you mean?” my lawyer snaps.

  “There have been some leaks,” Anderson says. “Some of the other girls have already been contacted. A few of them have agreed to appear on news shows.”

  “And where did those leaks come from?” my lawyer asks. “You guys are disgusting.”

  With this, Anderson and Flagg begin to pack away their apparatus.

  “We may need to speak with you again,” Flagg says.

  I glance pleadingly at my lawyer. Will this never be over? I feel as if I’ve clawed my way out of a pitch-dark pit only to reach the top and have my fingers pried off, one by one. I am flailing, falling. Jess was wrong—I will never be able to escape. There’s no way out.

  “Give her a break, guys,” she tells them.

  “We’ll try not to call her to testify,” Flagg responds. “But I can’t make any promises.”

  Years later, I am at a party filled with famous writers: a beautiful Irish woman, a burly, hard-hitting reporter, a young guy who just got a big advance for his new novel. I am sure no one knows who I am, and I am sipping seltzer near the bar, making conversation with the bartender, whom I know from AA, when a man I recognize approaches me.

  “Are you Dani Shapiro?” he asks.

  I can’t believe he knows who I am. He is a well-known journalist who regularly pops up in the society pages, and I’m a young writer with one book published.

  I nod and shake his hand.

  “We know someone in common,” he says.

  “Who’s that?” I ask with a smile. I am flattered, delighted.

  “Lenny Klein,” he says.

  His inquisitive gaze focuses itself, laserlike, on my expression as he watches me blanch.

  “He’s no friend of mine,” I manage to stammer.

  “Oh, really? I’m writing a piece on the trial for Esquire,” says the journalist. “I thought you knew him pretty well.”

  It has been four years since I’ve seen Lenny Klein, almost two years since the FBI subpoenaed me. My lawyer has warned me of the possibility of paparazzi outside my building, and phone calls from reporters have been left unreturned. I have narrowly averted becoming a sideshow in Lenny’s very public trial. And now, sipping seltzer in a book-lined parlor, here I am again.

  “I don’t want to talk about this,” I say. Beneath my sundress I am turning red and blotchy, heat spreading up my neck and across my face.

  “He’s going to jail, you know,” says the journalist. His breath smells like white wine gone sour. “He was sentenced this morning.”

  I walk away and feel his eyes on my back.

  “Have a nice day!” he calls after me.

  I stride through the parlor, out the front door of the brownstone and down the steps. I try to imagine Lenny in jail. Will they let him keep his hairweave? Will his wife make conjugal visits? Will his kids still be able to go to prep school?

  I occupy myself with questions of this nature; they flip quickly through my mind like flash cards. I walk faster, until I practically break into a run. A man I spent four years of my life with has been convicted and sent to jail, and I feel empty inside. I might feel a surge of sick joy or I might pity him. Instead, I feel nothing but relief that it’s over.

  The sun is unseasonably strong on graduation day. It beats against the yellow-and-green-striped tent pitched on the Westlands Lawn of Sarah Lawrence. The air is humid and still, and bees hover low to the ground. My hair is sticking to the back of my neck, and I feel sweat gathering in the creases behind my knees as I sit with the dozen other graduate students waiting to receive our Master of Fine Arts degrees.

  As I listen to the keynote address my mind drifts to my mother, who is in the audience. For her—for both of us, really—this day is about my father’s absence. Could he have imagined this for me? Would he have chosen it for me, if he had a choice in the matter? Six weeks ago, the novel
I began while still in college was sold to a major publisher. I just gave my first interview, in which I was called precocious at the age of twenty-seven. When I read the piece, I barely recognized myself. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt young or precocious.

  The president of Sarah Lawrence is calling out my name and I rise, my heels sinking into the soft, damp earth as I walk to the podium and shake her hand. There is a smattering of applause from the few friends I have made here. I’m sure some of my classmates aren’t clapping at all. I have done the unforgivable: secured a publishing contract before graduation. If you’re going to envy me, envy all of me, I want to say to them. Envy losing half your family in a year. Clutching my diploma, I scan the crowd for my mother. She is sitting on the aisle about halfway back, wearing a white blazer and sunglasses. She is applauding wildly—I could swear she shouts Bravo!—and her brother, Morton, is sitting next to her, holding a video camera. She leans over and whispers something in his ear.

  Eza bat yesh lee, I imagine she’s saying.

  After the ceremony there’s a reception on the great lawn. I see Professor Ilja Wachs across the way, chatting with some parents, and wonder if he has any idea of the hand he had in changing my life for the better. My first writing teacher ambles over and gives me a kiss on the cheek.

  “You did it,” she whispers. “Now you just have to keep doing it.” She tells it to me as if it were an anagram, a message it will take me a lifetime to decipher: doing it and keeping on doing it are two different things. I will never be out of the woods.

  “Dan-o,” Morton finds me and crushes me into a hug, grinning the megawatt grin indigenous to my mother and her siblings. “Whatta girl.”

  My mother holds me at arm’s length, staring intensely into my eyes. I don’t know what she thinks she sees there. Now that there is no question about my mother’s recovery, now that she is solidly on her own two feet, I find myself mired in our shared history. Why didn’t she try to stop me from being with Lenny? Why didn’t she intervene somehow, when I weighed one hundred pounds and lived on white wine and vodka? Sometimes I want to hurl at her the very same accusation she hurls at me: I almost died, I want to cry accusingly. Where were you?

  Now, she kisses the tip of my nose.

  “My beautiful daughter,” she announces.

  I try to smile, and we hug stiffly. I feel the bones of her back, the new strength in her arms. I am her only child, and she has survived for me. The least I can do is spend the rest of my life trying to make her happy. What she doesn’t realize is that I have survived for her as well—and only now am I beginning to survive for myself.

  “Gotta go,” I mumble. I know I should stick around and let my mother kvell with motherly pride on my graduation day, but I just can’t take another minute.

  “Have lunch with us, darling,” she says.

  “Let’s make it dinner,” I say, unbuttoning my graduation gown.

  I throw my diploma into the trunk of my car and head back to the city. I blare Bonnie Raitt on the tape deck and keep the windows rolled down as I pass through two tolls and onto the West Side Highway. The George Washington Bridge is suspended across the Hudson River, and whitecaps sparkle in the midday sun. The curves of the Upper West Side unfurl like a banner.

  Instead of getting off the highway at the Seventy-ninth Street boat basin, I keep going. I turn off Bonnie Raitt and listen, instead, to the strains of a Hebrew melody so familiar I might have heard it in the womb. My father’s voice drifts through me—loud and off-key—singing “Havdalah,” the song that marks the end of Shabbos. I see his open mouth, smell the spices as he shakes the ceremonial spice box, hot wax dripping from the braided candle onto the kitchen counter. I feel his hand resting on my shoulder. I should pull off the road—tears are blurring my eyes—but I keep driving downtown. I don’t know where I’m going until I’m halfway there.

  There are rumors of wild dogs who roam the cemetery. I usually carry a baseball bat when I visit, but today I am empty-handed. I park my car as close to the family plot as I can, unhook the chain, and sink to my knees at the foot of my father’s grave. I know he’s not here. Here, there is only a tangle of bones. But still, I can talk to him in this place without second-guessing myself, without wondering if he really hears me.

  “I wrote a book, Dad,” I whisper at the ground.

  No kidding, I can almost hear him say.

  “I just got a graduate degree.”

  How about that.

  “I’ll be good to Mom.”

  I know you will.

  The sun is hot against the back of my bowed head, and my bare knees are damp and grass-stained. I am surrounded by the remains of my father’s family, here in the bowels of Brooklyn with the el train rumbling overhead.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper. “You never got to be proud of me.”

  Silence. I have lost his voice, and his face is fading from my memory, slowly, like an old photograph. A bird pecks at the earth near his grave. I stand up, brush myself off, and look around the family plot for loose rocks to place on top of each headstone. I place pebbles on my grandfather’s grave, then my grandmother’s, then Harvey’s. Finally, I take the biggest one I can find and rest it above my father’s name.

  IN MEMORY

  Paul H. Shapiro, Hyman B. Copleman, Harvey Z. Shapiro, Beatrice E. Shapiro, Anna R. Rosenberg

  And for my mother,

  who taught me something about survival

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would never have come into being if not for the goodness of the people who were there for me when I was not able to be there for myself: Anstiss Agnew, the late Jerome Badanes, Loretta Barrett, HGWB, Diane Brandis, E. M. Broner, Rob Brownstein, Annette Gartrell, Roberta Golubock, Elizabeth Morris Krinick, the late Alexander Lipsky, Emily Klein McGrath, Rollene Saal, Laura Van Wormer, Ilja Wachs, and friends of Bill W. everywhere.

  Jill Bialosky, Betsy Carter, Jill Ciment, Elizabeth Fagan, Donna Masini, Jan Meissner, Mary Morris, Helen Schulman, and Melanie Thernstrom read early drafts and offered invaluable insights.

  I thank Dr. Richard Zimmer for his talent and wisdom.

  My family deserves a special debt of gratitude: it can’t be easy to have a writer in their midst—particularly one who has written about them.

  Thanks to the Corporation of Yaddo, where a portion of this book was written.

  I am truly blessed by the dream team of Deb Futter and Esther Newberg.

  Most of all, my husband, Michael Maren, helped me feel safe enough, read every word, and made me believe in happily ever after.

  ALSO BY DANI SHAPIRO

  Playing with Fire

  Fugitive Blue

  Picturing the Wreck

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Dani Shapiro is the author of three acclaimed novels, Playing with Fire, Fugitive Blue, and Picturing the Wreck. She has an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and teaches creative writing at Columbia University and in the graduate program at the New School. She is married and lives in New York City.