The Thieves of Manhattan

by Adam Langer

  I didn’t write about myself particularly, didn’t write about growing up in my little Midwestern town, the son of an Indiana State librarian and an Indiana University law student who died before her son had even learned to write his name. I didn’t write about escaping inside a father’s world of books and stories. I didn’t write about a boy who had been looking forward practically his entire life to moving out of Indiana, then getting the call from his father asking him to come back home. I didn’t write about a father dying too young or a young man saddled with too much responsibility, about selling a house and everything inside it, then moving to New York to fulfill a dream. In the stories I wrote, there were no sweet, ambitious Romanian writers with tragic life stories; there were no frustrated, overweight actors working as café managers; no wiseass baristas with paint-spattered jeans, concert jerseys, and work boots; no suave authors of unpublished adventure novels with nefarious schemes to scam the publishing world.

  But, though none of the stories I wrote was autobiographical, they all contained elements with which I was familiar: a kid and a dying parent; dreams of leaving a small town behind; a man and woman fighting to remain in love while their careers seemed headed in opposite directions. And there was a story about a man struggling with whether to give up what little artistic integrity he had left because he had met someone with a plan that sounded too good and evil to be true.

  In the past, writing had always seemed difficult, required pots of black coffee and extensive channel-surfing breaks, long walks to clear my head. Now I wrote for hours at a time, played music as loud as it would go—Bobby Womack, Beth Orton, Astor Piazzolla. My favorite was Charles Mingus, and I decided to name my collection of stories after one of his songs—“Myself When I Am Real.” My laptop began to feel like a musical instrument; Mingus tapped keys and so did I. I felt confident, not only in my ability to write stories and see them through to the end, but in my ability to do the same thing with my life. I could find another job, that wouldn’t be hard; I could make my rent, millions of other people did; I would fall in love with someone else, and someday I’d look back at this period as the one that had prepared me for the rest of my life.

  Whenever I finished a story, I would slide it into an envelope, send it to agents, publishers, and magazines, even to Miri Lippman’s The Stimulator. When I walked in or out of my apartment, I felt no trepidation when I saw my mailbox. If someone didn’t want my story, eventually someone else would. And when the phone rang and I heard Miri Lippman’s voice on the other end, I knew I was right. At first, I wasn’t sure that it was really Miri and not someone playing a joke, but when she introduced herself and said she didn’t believe she’d met me before, I knew, yep, that was Miri Lippman all right. She told me that she had an open slot for her Lit-Stim series—was I interested?

  If I’d gotten Miri’s call during my first years in New York, I would have celebrated all night. But I was newly disciplined, and took it all in stride. I scribbled the date on my calendar, the only item on that calendar save for Faye’s gallery show and jury duty, and then I got back to work. I finally felt like I was on my way.

  HOW IAN MINOT GOT KISSED, GOT WILD, AND GOT A LIFE

  When I got to the Van Meegeren Gallery for the opening night of Faye’s show, I immediately understood why she sent me home the night I’d tried to get her to linger with me at the top of the 116th Street subway steps. The reason wasn’t because she thought that I was some scummy humbert or that she was playing hard to get; it was just that the show explained what I needed to know about her a lot better than any conversation over soda pops could have. Faye must have known that after I’d seen her work, I wouldn’t see her the same way anymore.

  Back at the coffee shop, Faye was always up for hearing my stories, but she never seemed to like talking to me about herself or her art—“Let’s talk about you, champ, my life’s boring as a mofo.” I had no idea she was downplaying her talent. Back then, whenever I said my writing sucked or was going poorly, I meant it.

  I arrived at the gallery late. I’d been working on one of the stories I was thinking about reading at Lit-Stim and hadn’t wanted to stop in the middle, and after I got off the C train at Twenty-third, the walk to the gallery took longer than I’d expected. Heading west, I smiled, thinking of the last time I’d been in this neighborhood—for Blade Markham’s party. When I read at Lit-Stim, maybe Geoff Olden would come. “Good luck with all your future clients,” I’d say, then toss both his business cards right in the trash.

  It was opening night for about a dozen gallery shows in a gutted industrial building, and the Van Meegeren was located on the third floor. The crowds milling about in hallways or sneaking unfiltered vonneguts in stairwells were dressed a little more funkily than those I used to see at book parties when I’d worked in catering. Still, the behaviors and demeanors were familiar, every conversation characterized by its participants’ desire to find better conversations elsewhere. Heads bobbed and weaved; eyes scanned rooms and halls; whenever someone new entered, people whipped around to see who it was. Like the writers at any book party, the artists were easiest to find, self-consciously dressing down—ripped kowalskis and torn Levi’s—or dressing up, in gatsbys and ascots, all ironic. The whiff of high school was inescapable.

  The gallery where Faye was showing her work was a small, white, windowless box of a room with an office attached—in most of the galleries I passed, some officious panza was manning phones or handing price lists to prospective buyers, but in the Van Meegeren, nobody. The crowd was smaller than the ones in the other galleries I’d passed too; a few people would break their stride to glance at Faye’s work, but no one stopped to hang up their jacket. Faye’s snacks were grim—just a scattering of tired pastries from Morningside Coffee, and Joseph was the only one eating them; he had a turnover in his mouth as he slipped on his immense black gogol, congratulated Faye on his way out to a casting call, then glowered as he lumbered past me.

  Even in the most poorly attended galleries, artists adopted façades of preoccupation, turned their backs to the entrances, focused intense concentration on even their most trivial conversations, lest anyone think they were disappointed by the meager turnout. Not Faye. She didn’t do pretense. The moment Joseph was gone, she stepped into the gallery doorway, took a big swig from a bottle of wine, then cast her eyes skyward and demanded where the hell everyone was. When she glimpsed me approaching the gallery, she smiled. I was wearing a blazer and had shaved for the event, but Faye was wearing her usual boots, blue jeans, and concert jersey. No baseball cap tonight—that was the sole indication that opening night was a special occasion. Weren’t people supposed to dress up for gallery openings, I asked as I kissed her hello. Nah, she said, if people were looking at her instead of her art, that was a problem. Then she thrust the wine bottle into my hand and told me she had to leave to take a piss. She warned me not to drink all her wine, since she had only one bottle left.

  “Sell what you can, Sailor,” she said with a wink. “You couldn’t do any worse than me.”

  I stood alone in the gallery doorway, holding Faye’s wine bottle, and watched her red hair bounce as she stomped down the hallway. Up ahead, I could see a line for the bathroom, so I wandered into the gallery. I’ve never known much about visual art, can never figure out how long I’m supposed to look at a painting, and frequently count to sixty in my head when I’m in front of one, so it will look as if I’m actually getting something out of it. I planned to do the same with Faye’s work.

  The dozen framed pieces each measured about two feet square. They seemed to be copies of famous works with which I probably should have been familiar: a smoky portrait of some sullen, Dutch tradesman—maybe a Rembrandt?; overlapping disks of bright colors—Kandinsky?; a woman with a cloudy sky where there should have been a face—probably Magritte. The prettiest one looked like a Wyeth—a pastoral landscape, a little family graveyard behind an old country house, a long white car on a distant road. But each painting had been
violated, its frame broken or smashed and held together with wire, pipe cleaners, and Scotch tape; sections of paintings had been chipped or torn away. Visible underneath were crude sketches or cartoons, the sorts of drawings Faye tossed off while supposedly working at Morningside Coffee. In a corner of the landscape, there was a cartoon of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz with a thought bubble over her head (“There’s no place like home”).

  Forged in Ink was the title I’d given Faye’s exhibit, but now that I was seeing her work up close, I understood that it was a bad and pompous one; it totally missed her sense of playfulness. The works here encompassed her personality perfectly—irreverent, self-deprecating, honest in their own way.

  “Konbanwa,” said Faye by way of a greeting when she returned, then glanced at the bottle I was still holding.

  “You drink all of it?” she asked, and when I shook my head no, she raised an eyebrow, then grabbed the bottle and gulped down a third of it before handing it back. I took a swig, then gazed at her paintings, searching for something insightful to say.

  “So,” I began. My eyes had settled on a pointillist landscape, ducks and paddleboats operated by top-hatted men on a rippling pond, and a big hole in the center revealing polka-dot ducks drawn in crayon. “So, you take the copy of the old painting, tear it, and slap it over one of your drawings?”

  Faye shook her head. “Nah,” she said, “I do both. The old and the new.”

  It took some time for it to dawn on me that everything I was looking at was her original work—each exquisite brushstroke in each old master painting and each squiggle in each napkin doodle. Now I felt like a moron for having underestimated her work every bit as much as I had underestimated her—the more I looked, the more I wanted to keep looking. Her works were fakes, but at the same time, they were real. She seemed to be trying to fuse the two to create art that was more than either one or the other.

  “Yeah,” she said, “some of it sucks, some of it doesn’t; what else can you say? There’s nothing more boring than listening to people try to talk about art. It just is what it is; good or bad, it almost always fails.”

  “Fails at what?” I asked.

  “At becoming something real,” she said. “That’s what artists try to do—you copy and copy and copy, and someday maybe you finish faking it and you learn how to make something real.”

  The crowds in the hallway were thinning out; no one was in line for the bathroom anymore. “This party’s pretty much cashed,” Faye said as she finished the wine. “Wanna grab some grub?”

  We split a slice of cherry pie at the Empire Diner. Conversation was effortless, as it always had been between us. But by now, it seemed as though we both had become different people to each other than we had been at the coffee shop—me, now a genuine writer with newfound confidence in his work; Faye, now a legitimate artist whose sarcastic veneer no longer concealed her talent. She told me more about her art than she ever had—drawing and painting had always come easily to her, she said, so she had never valued her skills, and neither had her parents, both of whom were gone now. As our conversation continued, we still talked in the same self-deprecating manner, but more out of habit than conviction. We weren’t coffee-shop slackers anymore; we were now New York artists, laughing and arguing, hands grazing each other’s, eyes locking on each other’s. When we left the diner and stepped out onto Tenth Avenue, neither of us asked where the other was headed; we both knew.

  We kissed in the back of a taxicab for the whole fast ride up the West Side Highway to my apartment building, kept kissing when we got in the front door and when we reached the top of the stairs. In front of my apartment as I fumbled with keys, Faye suddenly pulled away from me.

  “Just so you know, Sailor,” she said, “I don’t do sex on first dates.”

  But when I told her that I’d just come to see her show, so the evening didn’t really count as a date, she stopped, then pretended to ponder. “Oh, right,” she said. “Then it’s no problem; let’s go.”

  A TRAGYCAL INTERLUDE

  Faye and I met in front of the KGB Bar sign on an unseasonably warm December Monday. On the Lit-Stim blackboard outside, my name was listed below that of the memoirist Hazel Chu. No, I hadn’t dreamed my conversation with Miri Lippman; I was a stimulating writer after all.

  I must have been studying the blackboard for a full thirty seconds before Faye delivered a “Hey, did you notice I’m here too?” tap on the shoulder. She was wearing a denim jacket over a short black-and-white zebra-print dress, the fanciest outfit I’d ever seen her in, as if to tell me that she knew I thought this would be an important evening. But when I put my arms around her and kissed her, she backed away. I tried to hold her hand as we walked up the steps to the front door, but she wasn’t into that either.

  “Enough of this phony boyfriend-girlfriend crap,” she said. “I’m about to yack.”

  In the weeks that followed the first night Faye and I spent together, we saw a lot of each other. I don’t know if it represented some sad commentary on my poor perception of human behavior or some greater truth about the depths of human complexity that demure, brunette, Romanian beauty Anya Petrescu had been the incorrigible sex fiend who enjoyed raunchy chinaski, the more public the place the better, while redheaded, boot-clad, smart-ass Faye, who sported a tattoo of a twilight flower on a shoulder, eschewed displays of affection whenever anyone else was around and enjoyed quieter, more chaste moments in darkness underscored by “Dust in the Wind.” Still, Faye’s and my relationship deepened, and I kept writing at a furious pace. Her work was somehow inspiring me. When Faye slept over, I would get up the moment after she’d fallen asleep and start typing. We rarely made plans—sometimes, she’d come over after her coffee-shop shift or stop by on her way to the Van Meegeren, but she never slept over at my place two nights in a row. “I don’t like sequels, Sailor,” she told me.

  I always felt when we were together that our relationship could go on like this forever. Spending time with her seemed almost too easy, as if we’d skipped all those first steps that couples are supposed to have, as if we had loved each other as kids, gone our separate ways, then returned to each other as adults who were through with games and already knew each other’s secrets.

  Tonight, I would be reading a brand-new story, one I hadn’t sent to Miri Lippman. Like all the stories I had been writing, it had its basis in reality. The lovers in my story were a woman with more beauty and talent than she liked to admit and a man on the rebound, just beginning to trust his own voice. It was about how the two of them could work together to make something real. I had titled the story “After Van Meegeren,” and dedicated it to Faye. Our plan was to celebrate after tonight’s reading; Faye said that for the first time, she would take me back to her place and she would show me more of her art, which I had been asking to see. She was almost done with a new project, and she said she thought I might appreciate it.

  Outside the KGB, as I walked beside Faye, I tried to lower my expectations for the night, to keep my mind from leaping ahead to agents and publishing contracts and six-figure fraziers. I tried not to think about who might be in the audience, the compliments they might offer about my work. I tried to stop thinking about how I would handle my fame—whether I would snub everyone who’d rejected me in the past or act with grace and humility. I tried not to speculate about what might happen between Faye and me if women at the KGB were interested in me—bibliophiles, author groupies, who knew? I tried to tell myself that being invited to read here was enough, a first step that I shouldn’t take for granted. I almost believed it as we entered the bar.

  The place was as packed as it always was on Lit-Stim Monday, but I sensed something different about the crowd, something I couldn’t quite identify. I practically tripped a half-dozen times as I searched the bar for familiar faces, then looked down to the ground so that nobody could see I had been searching. I tried to focus on the lit candles in the menorah in a south-facing window, looked away only when the imprint of the
flames began to dance before my eyes. I glanced over to Faye, then down at the manuscript pages in my hand, almost tripped again, thinking maybe I was just nervous about reading in public, something I hadn’t done since my first year in New York.

  “It’ll go fine, right?” I asked Faye, who was taking a seat at the bar. But Faye wasn’t someone to approach for reassurance. I wished I could act as cool and unconcerned as she had at her gallery opening when no one had bought any of her work.

  Oblivious or unsympathetic to my mounting trepidation, Faye was already trying to place an order with the bartender. She asked how much a draft cost, and when the bartender said nine bucks, Faye laughed, then asked for two waters. When she got them, she demonstratively poured them onto the floor, unzipped her bag, produced a bottle of cheap faulkner, and refilled our glasses.

  “Kanpai,” she said, and clinked her glass against mine.

  “Kanpai,” I said, but my hand was shaking.

  It was just nerves, I told myself as I kept looking for Geoff Olden, for Rowell Templen, for any Knopf editor, any Inkwell or ICM agent, any Harper publicity director I might recognize. But the only familiar sight was Miri Lippman’s head, her atwood bobbing as she spoke to a crowd of college students, all dressed better than the usual Lit-Stim crowd—clean-shaven guys wearing neckties and gatsbys; young women in stockings and golightlys. And as Miri Lippman turned to the bar and I waved at her, it dawned on me that, with the exception of Miri, Faye and I were just about the oldest geezers in the joint.

  “Ian Minot?” Miri asked as she approached us, and when I nodded, she “introduced” herself.