The Thieves of Manhattan

by Adam Langer

  Worst of all was Jens Von Bretzel, a slim, unkempt guy with an army jacket, a luxuriant chabon of black hair, and a “to hell with this crap” demeanor that he barely concealed as he read from The Counter Life, his debut novel about a barista with a girlfriend who was too good for him, a future that was drifting toward oblivion, and a lousy attitude that kept getting him into trouble. The novel was based on the decade Von Bretzel had spent working at a Starbucks in Williamsburg. Von Bretzel’s work was so much like the stories I was writing that I half suspected he had hacked into my computer and plagiarized my life. Except that Von Bretzel’s work was more confident than mine, as if he considered his life worthy of committing to print, while to me, just about every aspect of my own existence seemed wholly unliterary—how often had agents told me that my protagonists never did anything, that they always waited for things to happen to them?

  “I’m so jazzed we got an audience; weather’s been so bad lately. You ready to do this, Anya?”

  I was staring at a giant atwood of auburn frizz, the back of Miri Lippman’s head. Miri had positioned herself between Anya and me. I didn’t even bother introducing myself, just kept my eyes focused on the ever-dwindling fluid in my glass while Miri fawned over Anya’s stories—how she envied the life Anya had lived as an orphan on the streets of Bucharest, such wondrous material.

  “Weesh me lokk,” Anya said to me. I kissed Anya as if she were about to take a journey far longer than the three yards between the barstool and the KGB podium. But I didn’t weesh her lokk; she didn’t need it.

  The story that Anya chose to read was like every one I had listened to her whisper while she snuggled next to me on my proust. It was the title selection from We Never Talked About Ceauşescu, the collection of stories she’d been working on ever since I’d met her, and this story, in which a Romanian girl on the cusp of becoming both an adult and an orphan attempts to cope with her father’s terminal illness, was heartbreaking and beautiful and self-effacing and charming and hilarious and, most of all, true. Even though the whole story took place in a country thousands of miles away from the tiny Indiana town in which I’d grown up, Anya’s tale resonated with me, reminding me of the late nights I’d spent at my father’s bedside, reading him stories, helping him to bring his teacup to his lips, turning out his light when he had finally fallen asleep. I couldn’t help but feel jealous that the raptors and poseurs at the KGB were being invited to experience these moments that had felt so personal when Anya had first read the story to me, that night when I had told her it was perfect, and she had called me a liar and told me to shot my trepp.

  But what was most amazing and moving about the story as I heard it tonight was how Anya read it. In a mere ten minutes, she transformed from a nervous beginner to a confident professional, much like the heroine of her own story. At first, Anya leaned in too close to the microphone, giggled when she realized her pages were in the wrong order. Her hands shook while she read her opening sentence (“When I was leetle, eff’ryone who shoult heff luffed me left me”); after she finished page one, they were still.

  “Luff is nussink but a lie,” she read. “In my house, we neffer talked about eet.” Two people in the audience gasped. Anya was like the pool shark who muffs her first game, gets everyone to put their money on the table, then runs every ball.

  Once Anya was done reading and applause thundered through the bar, her endearing neuroses returned. She laughed too loudly, apologized too much, clunked the microphone when she returned it to its holder, tripped over its cord as she walked back to take her place beside me at the bar. But it didn’t matter anymore. For a second, I looked down into my drink to see if anything was left; by the time I looked up again, Geoff Olden was there.

  “Suntory?” he asked, jutting his chin toward Anya’s glass.

  That night, Geoff Olden wouldn’t be the only agent who would swoop down upon Anya, offer to buy her drinks, then hand her business cards. But he was the first, and for me, his was the presence that rankled most. Yes, he was Blade Markham’s agent, but Olden was also the man whose literary agency had sent me the most perfunctory, condescending, and offensive rejection letter I had ever received.

  “Good luck placing this and all your future submissions elsewhere,” the letter’s author wrote, thus shutting the mailbox door on any story I might ever write in my life.

  “Señor?”

  Olden was holding a twenty in one hand as he rapped his fingers against the bar—who knew why he was speaking Spanish to the poor bartender, who was no more Spanish than Geoff Olden was. But everything about Olden seemed calculated to draw distinction between himself and whomever he happened to be speaking with—the round yellow frames of his eckleburgs, his white turtleneck, his cuffed blue jeans, his black velvet jacket, the watches he wore, one on each wrist. Olden’s brushed-back hair had the fullness and the shade of premature silver-gray that I recall only ever seeing in Park Avenue apartments when I’d worked for a caterer during my first summer in New York.

  But Geoff Olden wasn’t merely a confident man; no, he was imperious, unctuous, and snide—even when he laughed his loud, self-possessed, metrosexual cackle, you were always aware of whom he was laughing with and whom he was laughing at. And when he held up two fingers and bought a round of fitzgeralds for Anya and me—“Dos, por favor”—I was thoroughly aware of the category in which Olden had placed me. The moment after he handed me my fitzgerald, I became invisible. Drinking too fast and thinking about how I might wreak revenge upon Olden, if only I had the opportunity, helped to pass some time before I was once again staring at random points in space and contemplating stories I might try to write, before deciding that Jens Von Bretzel had probably already written them.

  “Exquisite work, truly. Mucho mucho bueno.” Geoff handed Anya two of his business cards. He said he always gave two—“keep the other in case you meet someone else with a great story to tell.”

  The evening proceeded with more compliments from editors, publishers, and agents; more of Anya’s inscrutable smiles; more fitzgeralds—lots more fitzgeralds. Before Anya had read her story, I was her boyfriend; afterward, I became her roadie. The only thing that prevented me from bolting for the door was the fact that Anya kept making fun of all the people who approached her. She rolled her eyes at me, made yakkety-yak gestures with her hands, mouthed the sycophantic words she was enduring.

  “What a bonch of kripps,” Anya said when we finally emerged from the KGB and started walking quickly along Fourth Street. She was taking the business cards she had received, ripping them into quarters and eighths, flinging the scraps of paper behind her.

  “You know who that guy represents?” I asked Anya when I saw her starting to rip Geoff Olden’s business card, but she kept ripping it.

  “Who he represent? A bonch of kripps,” Anya said. She started running south toward the subway station, laughing all the way as I tried to keep up.

  Some of the happiest memories of my time with Anya come from those brief hours just after we started running to the subway but before we fell asleep—even now, I still recall those hours as one unbroken journey of laughter and giddiness and love. But after I’d been sleeping for some time, I dreamed that someone I knew was walled up in a prison, trying to claw and scratch her way out. The more I listened to the scratching, though, the more I realized that I wasn’t dreaming those sounds. When I opened my eyes, I saw Anya beside me, writing furiously in a journal, her pen clawing and scratching the paper. As I watched her, I wished I could have her sense of purpose, her drive, that feeling that everything was at stake. And as I opened my eyes just a bit wider, I wished too that I hadn’t seen the second business card that Geoff Olden had given Anya marking a page in her book.

  RETURN OF THE CONFIDENT MAN

  I was getting ready to finish my shift and head out to meet Anya in front of Morningside Coffee when the Confident Man walked into the café, slipped off his cashmere gogol, and hung it on the rack by the door.

  “Your buddy�
��s here again,” Faye said with a wink, but this time I didn’t make much of the guy’s presence until he approached the counter, where he ordered his usual hot tea. I had become pretty good about not paying him any mind when he came in with his copy of Blade by Blade—after all, he was the biggest tipper we had. I tried to ignore the book just as I usually did, but this time, Faye wouldn’t let me.

  “Good read?” Faye asked the man, then flashed me a grin—she and I had been discussing the book, and I’d told her what I thought of it, but she was in one of her wise-ass moods tonight. She liked needling people, seeing what it took to make them burst. Usually, she left me alone and concentrated on Joseph. They kept up an ongoing repartee—“Sold any paintings?” he’d ask. “Hell, no,” she would reply; had Joseph been cast in any shows? “Hell, no,” Joseph would say. When I first started working at the café, they included me in their game (“Sell any stories, Minot?”), but since my answer was “hell, no” every single time, while for Joseph and Faye it was only 90 percent, they stopped. Tonight, though, Joseph had just gotten a call from his agent, who said she was dumping him as a client unless he lost weight. Whenever he got bad news, he ate more, so he was in a foul mood; he had already told Faye that he didn’t want to hear any of her jokes tonight, so I became the beneficiary of Faye’s wit.

  “Have you in fact read the book?” the Confident Man asked Faye. It was the first time I’d heard him speak a full sentence, and his voice was as smooth and deep as that of a late-night DJ.

  “Twice,” she said. “Ooh, it’s a real page-turner. Ian here digs it too.”

  “Does he?” asked the man.

  “Let it go,” I told Faye. I was feeling stressed out. Anya had told me that she’d have a “fonny sooprise” for me when we went out later, but I wasn’t in the mood for sooprises. Lately, I seemed to be getting more rejection slips in the mail than ever; the adjunct creative-writing lectureship positions I had applied for weren’t panning out; neither the New York Foundation for the Arts nor the NEA was going to give me a grant. Anya had recently been named one of American Review’s “31 Most Promising Writers Under 31”; this year, I was too old to qualify. Sure, I could survive for another few months on my meager savings and the few hundred bucks a week I was making at the café, but I needed another plan fast. And the fact that the only tangible plan I had involved secretly hoping Anya would sell her book already so she could buy an apartment and I could move in with her showed how desperate and pathetic I was becoming.

  “Didn’t you know? Ian is Blade Markham’s biggest fan,” Faye told the Confident Man. He smiled patronizingly in my direction as if he thought I was the moron for liking Blade Markham, even though he was the one reading Blade’s book. Still, the man didn’t say anything else. He just slipped a twenty into the tip jar, the way he always did, went back to his table, and cracked open his book.

  “Told you that guy craves ya,” Faye said, cocking her head in the direction of the new twenty-dollar bill atop the loose change in our jar. She raised an eyebrow. “Bet he’s gonna ask you out,” she said.

  “Jesus Christ, Faye.” I was about to finally let her really have it, ask why she didn’t do some work instead of just busting my balls, doodling, working on her laptop, and using Joseph’s printer to make flyers and postcards for her gallery opening—Joseph always let Faye get away with shit he would have fired me for on the spot. But then I heard someone rap on the front window: Anya.

  “Ee-yen!”

  My elation at seeing Anya was followed closely by a sense of impending doom as I noted her snappy, black Holly Golightly cocktail dress. I didn’t know where she and I might be going, but I was sure that wherever it was, I would be underdressed.

  “Your Ukrainian’s here for ya,” Faye said and smiled—she always acted as if she thought Anya was a pain in her ass. It never occurred to me that she might have been jealous.

  “Romanian,” I corrected. I took off my Morningside Coffee smock and visor, hung them up in back, and started to head out.

  “Have it your way,” said Faye, but then she reached into the tip jar, pulled out the twenty that the Confident Man had put there, and handed it to me.

  “Shouldn’t we split it three ways?” I asked.

  “Nah, take it, you earned it tonight,” said Faye. I feared she was mocking me, but then I realized she was telling the truth—she’d come in late and had been working on her computer ever since she’d arrived, while Joseph had been binge-eating and moping. I’d been the only one doing any work, and besides, wherever Anya was taking me tonight, I was sure I could use at least a twenty.

  I thanked Faye, and told her that was probably the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me at a job. She smiled at me and said, “Sayonara, tomodachi,” as I walked outside onto Broadway where Anya was waiting, a guilty Cheshire-cat grin on her face.

  “Where’re we going?” I asked, and when she didn’t answer immediately, I asked if I might hate her after we were done with whatever we would be doing.

  “Only for leetle while,” Anya said.

  BLADE BY BLADE

  The Blade Markham reading and Q and A at Big Box Books’s flagship Upper West Side store had been moved to Symphony Space to accommodate the overflow crowd, and you needed a pink wristband to get in. Anya and I were fifteen minutes late, and I felt a surge of hope when I saw the NO MORE TICKETS AVAILABLE sign in the box office window, but Anya already had two wristbands in her shoulder bag, and by the time I had completely processed where we were and what I was about to endure, she had already affixed one around my wrist. As I looked at all the posters of Blade Markham, all the stacks of his books, all the people here to buy them for Blade to sign, I kept thinking of that scene in Taxi Driver, when Robert De Niro takes Cybill Shepherd on a date to a skin flick.

  “It weel be fon,” Anya said. “Let’s seet.”

  But there was no place to seet. The chairs were filled with Blade fans—scruffy, denim or khaki-clad bankers and traders, all of whom looked like they wanted to be Blade; women in black who looked like they wanted to screw Blade, at least for a night before they’d return to their boyfriends or husbands, all of whom I assumed were employed by Lehman Brothers, Citigroup, or Goldman-Sachs. The talk was moderated by a host from the public radio station WNYC who sported a three-day growth of salt-and-pepper ginsberg. “Any advice for a writer just starting out, Blade?” the moderator asked. “Yeah, carry a gauge, a shiv, and a gat, and all you fellas, you stay away from those hoodrats, and make sure all y’all got a mad sexy shorty to roll with too, yo,” Blade replied. Applause and whoops of laughter from the crowd.

  I kept puzzling over why Anya had asked me to come here. She told me that she just found Blade fonny, but I wondered if maybe she really did want to get me to hate her so I would end our relationship, thus saving her the trouble of doing it herself. Looking back, I think she might just have wanted my company, but at the time I was sure there was something more to it, and when I saw Geoff Olden approaching us with two fitzgeralds in plastic cups, I figured I was right.

  “Bienvenida,” he said, and this time, Anya didn’t roll her eyes or mouth his Spanish BS back to me when he wasn’t looking.

  Up on stage, Blade was discussing his craft. He told the moderator he approached writing as if he were a DJ—he didn’t “write words down on paper”; he “laid down mad beats.” As for the accusation from one spectator that Blade had plagiarized a prison conversion scene from The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Blade said he didn’t believe plagiarism existed. “I just like to call it a remix, yo,” he said.

  Geoff Olden peered at Anya through his eckleburgs and his voice went lower as he said something to her about an email exchange the two had had on the subject of “representation.”

  “Comprendes?” he whispered.

  I excused myself to go to the john, and then left it when I saw some beefy trader at one of the sinks with the words BLADE BY BLADE tattooed in script on his arm. When I returned to the auditorium, Olden was gone, and Bl
ade was standing in front of a microphone, taking questions from the audience and answering them in his falsely humble mode (“That’s a righteous point yer makin’, sistuh”; “I truly appreciate you askin’ me that question, brutha”). Anya was holding a slip of paper that she was tucking into a zippered pocket of her shoulder bag. The paper had an address on West Twenty-first Street scribbled on it.

  “Olden invite you to some after-party?” I asked.

  Anya smiled, a little embarrassed, it seemed, but she quickly recovered.

  “You vant we should tekk kebb or sobway?” she asked.

  I wanted to ask her “whatcha mean we?” then walk out and head home, tell her I’d meet her back at my place whenever she was done being wooed. But after I’d groused in the lobby for a moment or two, I lost heart. I couldn’t say no to her.

  “Kebb or sobway,” she asked again.

  “Sobway,” I said gloomily.

  THE BASH AT OLDEN’S

  Anya said we’d stay at Geoff Olden’s apartment only for ten minutes, and after that we could do anything my leetle heart desired, but I wasn’t surprised when that ten minutes stretched past an hour. Actually, apartment isn’t the right word to describe the Chelsea townhouse where Geoff Olden hosted his Blade by Blade bash. His was the sort of New York dwelling I only ever saw in movies. On screen, it would have served as an embassy, a ballroom for some costume drama starring Daniel Day-Lewis, or maybe as Woody Allen’s apartment. There was a spiral staircase, an enormous, built-in library with books alphabetized and organized by subject, a kitchen that was bigger than my apartment, three bathrooms, a billiard table, a back deck with a hot tub. That was only the first floor, and Olden owned all three. Mind you, none of this had been purchased with the money he made as a literary agent; that career paid for the summer home in Rhinebeck, the wardrobe, and the eckleburgs. This Chelsea place had been in the Olden family since 1909, when Henry Olden made his first million in textiles. I liked to think that Geoff was sole heir to a jockstrap fortune, but I have no idea what was manufactured in the Olden Textile Mills, only that whatever it was must have generated lots of dough.