The Thieves of Manhattan Read online

  Save for the waiters, the bartenders, the coat checkers, and me, the Blade Markham party was an anybody-who’s-anybody sort of affair—there was Henry Louis Gates, Jr., toting a walking stick and wearing a tuxedo, having just returned from The Rake’s Progress at the Met. There was a trio of drunk writers, all named Jonathan, each of whom was complaining that the Times critic Michiko Kakutani had written that she’d liked their earlier books better. The publisher James Merrill, Jr., was popping a grape into his mouth; Pam Layne was in a corner with one of her assistants, Mabel Foy, both trying far too hard to keep a low profile; the writer Francine Prose smiled at me and waved, then frowned when she realized that she had me confused with someone else.

  Anya stuck to my side during our first half hour at the party, when she said she didn’t recognize anybody, and spent all that time joking with me, squeezing my ass, and pushing me to the dining room to score appetizers that she claimed she was too shy to snag for herself. We had fun laughing at the whole scene. It was like a swingers’ party for celibates, I said—everyone checking one another out, leading one another into private rooms, whipping out their contracts and client lists to measure whose was bigger.

  But after Olden showed up with Blade Markham and his posse of droogs and cornered Anya, I barely saw her at all. Instead, I drifted from room to room, getting free drinks and eavesdropping. Publicity, marketing, and editorial assistants were in full effect, but I didn’t recognize many of them—they were a transient lot, all waiting to score their first book contract, after which they would give their bosses two weeks’ notice. A pair of these overeager types was chatting up Blade Markham’s moist, officious editor, Rowell Templen of Merrill Books, and I didn’t know what irritated me more—their sense of desperation or mine of abject futility.

  I kept drinking and drifting, feeling more and more aimless as time wore on. If this were really a swingers’ party, I would have been the one creepy humbert who couldn’t have gotten laid even here. I tried starting conversations but never knew how to finish them. Elsewhere, when people asked what I did, I said I was a writer. Saying it in a room full of authors, agents, and editors seemed ridiculous, but saying I worked in a café and wrote stories without finishing them wasn’t much of an icebreaker either. I contemplated inventing an autobiography, but I wasn’t good at lying. I finally decided to say I was living in New York on my inheritance; this had the advantage of being easy to remember because it was true—no one needed to know that barely four thousand dollars remained of the money my father had left me—but by the time I settled on this story, I couldn’t find anyone who seemed interested in hearing it.

  Anya was in the main ballroom, her back framed by a cathedral window that gave out onto Twenty-first Street. She was smiling at Geoff Olden, who was letting loose with his nasal cackles as he introduced her to his assistants and underlings, all dolled up in their black golightlys, all depressingly plain beside Anya.

  The library seemed to be the only unoccupied room on Geoff’s first floor, so I passed some time there, browsing through all the books he had represented. I flipped through first editions by his famous friends and acquaintances, who had written loving dedications—“To a heavyweight of literature, with much love, Muhammad Ali”; “To Geoff, Thanks for all the corrections, Jon Franzen.” The only qualified remark came from one Phil Roth—“To Geoffrey, a true human stain.” I wondered how much I could sell the books for on eBay if I absconded with an armful.

  In the library, on a small, antique mahogany table between two black leather armchairs illuminated by a Tiffany lamp, was a stack of copies of Blade by Blade. Stacks like this were scattered throughout the apartment, and as I inspected the book’s canary yellow cover, I realized that I had never actually tried to read Blade Markham’s book, had based my opinions about it mostly on reviews I had read, appearances Blade had made on talk shows, and remarks Faye had made about the book at work. Maybe I hadn’t given it a chance. As loathsome as Blade seemed on subway posters or on The Pam Layne Show, it seemed harder to despise him when he was in the same apartment with me, life-size—I have always been too suspicious of people in theory, too trusting of them in practice. The more time I spend with people, the more I find myself liking them.

  But after I cracked open the book, I almost burst out laughing at the dedication—“To All My Homies Still Livin’ Under the Gun Right Here in Amerikkka. You Know Who You Are. Keep Runnin’, Keep Gunnin’.” I turned to a random page. No, the book was ludicrous, the grammar and punctuation awful, no sentence lasted longer than ten words and half of them ended with yo, as if Blade had dictated the book, not written it. I picked another page; on it, Blade opined about the merits of prison sex—“There’s worse things than playin’ catcher upriver in Rikers, yo.” I couldn’t help myself. This time, I actually laughed out loud. But when I sensed someone else’s presence, I stopped.

  “What you chortlin’ ’bout, bro?”

  Blade was standing in the library doorway, holding a half-full martini glass and wearing scuffed black boots, a white Stanley Kowalski undershirt under a black suit jacket, a lot of bling, too. Around his neck was that gold cross—it ain’t a cross for Christ; it’s a T for Tool, yo, I felt like saying. Blade ripped the book out of my hands, looked to see if I’d done anything to it, then placed it back neatly on the pile.

  “Ain’t no browsin’ privileges here, bro,” he told me. “Y’all gotta pay some shit if y’all wanna read my shit, compadre.” On paper, his hip-hop patois might have seemed laughable; in person, it was scary as hell. I thought all Blade’s prison stories were made up, sure, but I didn’t doubt that he’d gotten into some scuffles in his life. I pushed my way past Blade and walked toward the main ballroom, not looking back to see if he was following.

  Anya was in the same place where I had last seen her, standing with her back to the windows, hypnotizing Geoff and everyone around her with some sad story about the life she had left behind in Bucharest—“neffer confuse my life weeth my feection; feection is not nearly so tredjic.” The spell she was casting on all the junior agents and editors was a mirror image of the one Blade had cast on his audience at Symphony Space. Here, all the women seemed to want to be Anya; all the men seemed to want to screw her. Save for Geoff—he didn’t want to screw or be anyone else in his apartment, just to represent them and screw over everybody else.

  “Anya?” I had to say it three times loudly before anyone noticed, and Geoff appeared to hear me before Anya did. He regarded me through his eckleburgs as if I were some stain on his tie that he wanted to rub out fast. I stepped between him and my girlfriend, who smiled and told me that she had been lookink for me all night—vhere had I bean? I leaned in to tell her I was going to spleet, but I was interrupted by a low, spiteful “Yo.”

  Blade, still holding his martini, was walking fast toward me. But when he saw that I was standing beside his agent and our host, he relented, even flashed a cocky smile of surrender, like a movie cop who stops running when he sees a thief jump onto a train, realizing he can’t catch him this time. Blade looked past me, clapped Geoff on the shoulder, called him “Bruthafucka,” and when Geoff introduced him to Anya, Blade started acting even more polite, as if he were the son of some Sunday school preacher—“a pleasure to meet you, ma’am.” He offered to fetch Anya a drink, opining that “G-Dub’s martinis” were “off the hook.” I smirked, mouthed “off the hook” at Anya. She didn’t notice, but Blade did. And now when he looked at me, his unspoken, momentary offer of détente had apparently been nullified; his nostrils flared, his cheeks flushed.

  “Hey,” he said, “don’t you need a plugger to get in here, bro?”

  “A plugger?”

  “An invite,” Blade explained. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you y’all need an invite to get into this bash?”

  I could have kept my mouth shut, but now I hated this guy so much that I didn’t care whose apartment we were in, whose guest I was, or whose book deal I might be sabotaging.

  “Yo,�
� I said, staring right back at Blade, “didn’t anyone ever tell you y’all need to try telling the truth and not making up a bunch of jive if y’all are gonna call your book a ‘memoir,’ bro?”

  For a moment, Blade said nothing. And when he did speak, his voice, though fierce, was soft, clear, and composed.

  “Then, I’ll ask you something, compadre,” Blade said. “Which window?”

  My heartbeat was getting stronger, faster, but I didn’t move and I tried not to blink.

  “Window?”

  “Do you want me to throw you out of, bro?” And now Blade was done being quiet; he was throwing off his jacket, tugging twice at the bulge of his portnoy. His truth cross thumped against his chest as he backed me up against the windows, grabbed me by the shirt collar, then held my throat.

  “Which window, dickweed?”

  “Easy,” I said, struggling to get his hands off me.

  “Which motherfucking window?” he demanded. “You wanna tussle? You wanna throw? ’Cause I’ll throw right now, you disrespectful motherfucker.”

  I was looking for a friend, a way out, wondering should I throw the first punch, let him do it, where to throw it, face, chest, solar plexus?

  “Disrespectin’ me?” Blade was shouting in my face, but the only people actually paying attention seemed to find my predicament extremely entertaining. For I was nobody and Blade was just being Blade; he probably did this at every party: Oh, there’s Blade again, throwin’ another chump out the window. Norman Mailer was gone; someone had to take his place, had to start fights at book parties; someone had to wield hammers, bite off ears, or defenestrate disrespectful gate-crashers.

  “Anya!” I yelled; she looked over to me and Blade, then erupted into laughter. I didn’t know if she was laughing because she wanted to break the moment and save me, because she was drunk, or because the image of Blade, fist raised, profanity spewing from his lips as he pinned me against a window of one of the most beautiful apartments in Chelsea, was truly funny. But Blade heard Anya’s laughter, and he let me go. “Yeah, you can kick my ass if you want, but you’re still a fake,” I muttered as I shoved past him.

  “Let’s roll, Anya,” I said, but when I got to the front door and turned around, I saw she wasn’t coming with me.

  THE GREAT CRACK-UP

  I figured I wouldn’t have to wait long for Anya to emerge from Geoff Olden’s building and join me, if only to say that I should head home by myself. But after twenty minutes of pacing back and forth along the sidewalk, I gave up. I got a Coke and a bag of M&M’s from a corner deli, and drank and ate them fast. I had planned to walk back toward Olden’s apartment to keep waiting for Anya, but I walked straight to the subway.

  I spent the ride on the uptown train unspooling a film of the future in my mind, one in which Anya kept rising while I kept falling. As my train rumbled along, in my mind I could hear our uncomfortable silences—me bitter about Anya’s success; Anya embarrassed by my failures. I could imagine the arguments—Anya telling me to snap out of it already; me saying that maybe if I were a beautiful Romanian orphan, I’d write better fiction too. I could see the guilt on Anya’s face as she contemplated telling me to leave our new apartment she’d bought with the zillion-dollar frazier she’d surely get for We Never Talked About Ceauşescu. I saw us agreeing to split the apartment down the middle, putting a divider between her proust and mine. I could hear her having wild chinaski in the next room with all of her new boyfriends, madly scrawling in her notebook, furiously typing on her laptop, while I sat alone with my hand on my portnoy. I could see myself finally with new inspiration: a story of a man thwarted by his successful ex-girlfriend, who lives in the very next room. And then I imagined what people would say about it—they’d call my hero cynical and unlikable, a reactor not an actor. “Good luck placing this elsewhere, sucka,” the rejection letters would read. One day, I’d walk into the 3B bookstore on Broadway, and discover that Jens Von Bretzel had written a story just like mine, only better.

  I maintained a small hope that Anya would be out in front of my building after I’d emerged from the subway at 135th Street, but all that awaited was a mailbox with two rejection letters in it, my credit card bill, a copy of Writer’s Digest, and a summons for jury duty, the best piece of mail I’d gotten in weeks—I found myself hoping I would be impaneled for a long, difficult case, one that would provide me with forty-dollar-a-day compensation and inspire me to write some blockbuster legal thriller.

  At home, I contemplated vacuuming my apartment, washing my dishes, making coffee, or getting some writing done. But I just flipped channels. Pam Layne was on TV again, a rebroadcast of the morning’s show, on which she’d interviewed an author who’d written a raunchy memoir about minor league baseball; its title was Balls Out. I flipped off Pam’s show, then watched the last half of a documentary about the Sex Pistols. Johnny Rotten was on the stage of the Winter Garden, asking his audience, “Ever feel like you’ve been cheated?” That sounded just about right.

  It was near dawn when Anya finally tiptoed into my apartment, and I still hadn’t accomplished anything or gotten any sleep. In the innumerable imaginary conversations I’d had with Anya over the course of the night, I had prepared myself for nearly any exchange. If she were angry, I’d defend myself; if she apologized, I’d accept. But the pitying glance and the “Ohhhh, Ee-yen” she emitted shortly after entering surprised me. Apparently, I looked worse than I imagined; I felt like a drunk who had been discovered by his AA partner on a curb after a bender.

  “Well, should we do this now?” I asked Anya as she sat beside me on the couch and put an arm around me. She’d been drinking martinis and smoking vonneguts all night, and yet she still smelled beautiful to me.

  In the conversation I was now imagining, Anya would ask what I meant by “should we do this now?” and I would selflessly explain that we had to end our relationship when we still loved each other, before our divergent career paths led us apart. But Anya didn’t need my explanation. Yes, she seemed to be thinking as she regarded me with pitying eyes, yes, we should break up now. She started to cry those cathartic tears you shed before you leave something behind and move on to the next, more exciting phase of your life: small-town Indiana for Manhattan; Bucharest for Broadway; Ee-yen for Ennybody Else. We kissed for a half minute or so, both of us probably feeling that it would be the last time this would ever happen.

  “Ve should heff met earlier, Ee-yen,” Anya said as she held me close. “Vhen ve both vere different pipples.”

  Then she got up and gathered all of her belongings that were still in my apartment—a couple of golightlys, some pens, books, a journal, and a necklace—put them into her gym bag, and walked to the door. I probably should have gone downstairs with her and waited for a cab, but I couldn’t muster the energy or the chivalry. In my mind, like Anya, I had already started moving on to the next phase of my life. But I was certain I was heading in the opposite direction.

  THE CONFIDENT MAN STRIKES AGAIN

  I still hadn’t slept, and as I tried to concentrate on my work behind the counter of Morningside Coffee, my head was thrumming with what I probably would have diagnosed as a migraine had I ever experienced one before. Faye, on the other hand, was in particularly cheerful form; her gallery opening was only a few weeks away, and, while Joseph, seemingly more depressed than ever, was downstairs dealing with inventory and letting the two of us run the place, Faye was trading jokes with customers, bopping from table to table, placing flyers for her show on every one. Her postcards were stacked near the register.

  Faye’s upcoming exhibit at the Van Meegeren Gallery was called Forged in Ink. The title didn’t really fit her art, she said, but then again, she wasn’t to blame; I was. “You’re a writer; you’re good with titles, aren’t ya?” she’d asked on one particularly slow evening. After she’d described her work—copies of old master paintings paired with crude ink drawings—I’d proposed the title, but hadn’t given it any more thought. I didn’t take her car
eer as an artist very seriously; she didn’t seem to give her work any more respect than I gave mine.

  “Check out my exhibit,” she’d tell a customer after handing him a flyer. “Might be good, might suck, ya never know.”

  “Come on, pops, you’ll check it out, won’t you?” she’d asked the Confident Man a few days earlier. “At least the refreshments will be free.”

  Faye was always cheerful in her self-deprecating remarks; mine usually sounded bitter and nasty, even though they seemed to amuse Faye. She always pressed for more details whenever I told a story—“You’re one of those messed-up dudes who’s more fun to hang with when he’s depressed,” she once told me—and tonight I was ranting more than usual.

  “Everything out of that guy’s mouth, it’s all a bunch of jive,” I said as I recounted for her the previous night’s debacle at Geoff Olden’s, and she cracked up at every Blade Markham line I delivered, laughed so hard she snorted when I told her about Blade grabbing me and demanding I choose a window.

  I already missed Anya desperately, had begun dialing her number more than a dozen times over the course of the evening before shutting off my phone so I wouldn’t feel tempted to try again; still, having Faye listen to and laugh at my stories felt good. The fact that Faye was American and came from Manhattan meant that she could relate more easily than Anya to my Blade stories. Faye knew all the pop culture trivia that eluded Anya; she knew all about music and movies, all about slang, could pinpoint the exact year when “off the hook” entered common usage and identify why Blade was saying it wrong.