The Thieves of Manhattan (11 page)

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.

“I’m just jazzed we got an audience; weather’s been so good lately. Plus, with the holidays and all,” she said.

The word
holidays
didn’t register at first; then the menorah in the KGB window took on new significance, made me look again at the crowd of college kids. And before I could fully process the fact that it was the first night of Chanukah, which meant that half the publishing world was on vacation while the
other half was lying low, knowing no serious business in publishing was ever conducted before the first of the year, Miri was telling me that she, too, would be on her way home soon to light candles with her nephews. She said she hoped she would be able to hear my story, but that depended on how long Hazel Chu wanted to read. Hazel taught at Columbia and she was giving her students extra credit for attending. Plus, her parents were in town, and they’d never heard her read in public before.

My shakiness gave way to a sick empty feeling, as if I no longer had to anticipate the worst; it was already happening. I had been invited to read at what I thought was one of the most influential literary venues in New York, but on a night when it wouldn’t matter; I felt like Crash Davis in
Bull Durham
, breaking the record for home runs, but in the minor leagues, where nobody gave a damn.

Still, I told myself, at least Miri had chosen my work, might even select one of my stories for inclusion in
The Stimulator
, might put my photograph on her “Stimulating Events” page. Searching for more hopeful signs amid my gathering sense of doom, I asked if Miri would mind if I read a new story tonight.

No, Miri said, she trusted my judgment. And when I pointed out that I was glad she trusted me even though she had only just met me, Miri said, well, if she didn’t trust my judgment, she certainly trusted Anya’s.

I flinched. “Which Anya?”

“Petrescu,” Miri said. “When I told her we had an open slot, she suggested I call you.” Miri asked if I’d heard which publisher had won the auction for
We Never Talked About Ceauşescu
. And after I said I hadn’t, Miri said she’d love to chat more, but she wanted to start on time, so she could get home.

I downed my drink in one gulp, and then Faye poured me another. “Thanks for the introduction,” she snapped. I considered apologizing but was too involved in my own thoughts. From that moment forward, I walked through the evening in a daze, half-deaf to the applause that crackled through the bar after Miri introduced Hazel Chu, who stepped to the podium and began to read.

Several weeks and a dozen lifetimes ago, I would have come here with Anya and we would have mercilessly mocked Hazel Chu—her declamatory, pause-laden style peculiar to the literary reading form, all diction and no drama, her Roget’s vocabulary, describing clouds as “cruciferous” against an “oleaginous blue sky.” We would have giggled at her tortured metaphors, obviously flogged in some workshop; we would have kicked each other every time Hazel used the word
sinuous
.

Tonight, I found no humor in Hazel’s reading. She may have read for an hour or just a few minutes; to me, it was all one endless stream of words and laughter, then applause. Hazel may have written something brilliant or dreadful—I had no idea. All I knew was that one moment, KGB was full and the crowd was alive and Faye and I were at the bar and Hazel was at the podium; the next moment, I was at the podium, and the bar was just about empty. Hazel had taken the audience with her, save for the few stragglers who didn’t seem to realize they were allowed to leave before both authors had read. Even Miri exited noisily while I was thanking her for her “generous” introduction: “Although I don’t know his work, I know people who do.”

My recollection of standing at podiums in the glare of spotlights during open mikes was of being unable to see individual
audience members, just blackness and glare. But tonight, I could see everything, as if I were appearing on a stage after a show was over and the houselights had been turned up. I could see Faye, and I could see the bartender; mostly, I saw empty chairs. One seat at the end of the bar was occupied by a man in a dark gogol and a broad-brimmed capote who didn’t even look up when I stepped to the microphone.

I smiled in Faye’s direction as I prepared to read the dedication of “After Van Meegeren.” But before I got the words out, I heard a clattering. The bar’s door swung open, and I heard a loud, whispered
saw-ree, saw-ree
as Anya Petrescu made her way past the empty chairs. Her beautiful, ruthless eyes sparkled as she took a seat in the previously empty front row. She put her bag on the floor, then looked up at me, smiling. I smiled back at her, then looked over to Faye, who was regarding me with an increasingly contemptuous glare. I could almost see the warmth and trust she had begun to show me evaporating. Veronica had arrived; Betty was throwing back hooch.

I skipped the dedication.

I read my story more quickly than I had rehearsed it, skipped over parts I now saw were repetitive, glanced at Anya, then at Faye, before returning to the manuscript, where I struggled to find my place. The story was less polished than I remembered, its insights less profound, and I took solace only in the fact that neither Miri Lippman nor anyone with apparent influence in the literary world was here. As I read, I found myself feeling both hatred and affection for Anya, wondering if her recommendation to Miri was a peace offering, an invitation to start over, a farewell gift, or just a reminder that I would
never be her equal. I wondered too about Faye, whether she would be flattered, amused, or revolted by the fact that I had written a story that was, in a way, about us. I wondered also whether she could guess that Anya’s entrance caused me to omit my dedication.

The final sentence of “After Van Meegeren” was meant to be a laugh line—outside a man’s apartment, a woman says she doesn’t have sex on first dates, but when the man reminds her that this hasn’t even been a date, she smiles and says, “Oh, right, then it’s no problem.” But I rushed the line, so much so that no one in the audience realized the story was over, and not until I mumbled “Thank you” did Anya begin to applaud, and then the rest of the half-dozen or so spectators followed suit. Faye clapped too, though she didn’t put down her whiskey to do it.

And then the bartender stepped out from behind his bar, unplugged the mike, and began shoving the podium into a corner, and someone turned up the music on the sound system. The candles in the menorah had already burned down to their wicks—the evening was over before I had even decided whether I would speak first to Anya or to Faye, hoping against hope some editor or agent would step between us.

I began walking toward Faye, but Anya intercepted me—oh, how
byootiful
my story had been,
Ee-yen
, she said, how
luffly
, how
gledd
she was to see I was writing again. And as she hugged me and I felt her body against mine, as I saw the sparkle in her eyes, I thought of how much I missed her effusive compliments, how much I missed our relationship’s drama, how much I wanted to grab her hand, run for the john, and lock the door
behind us, just like old times. Faye was always so honest and direct, never offered a compliment I didn’t deserve, and something was still so narcotic about Anya’s presence. Even if her enthusiasm was phony, I needed it now.

“Heard you sold your book,” I said, but Anya said she didn’t want to talk about that. She was nothing more than a
“fekk,”
a “one-
heet
wonder.” The true joy was to be found in writing, she said; everything else was
deestrection
.

I asked if she’d sold her story collection to Merrill Books, and she responded quickly, as she always did when she was relating ostensibly unimportant information. No, those
chip besterds
hadn’t offered enough
mah-nee;
she’d sold it to
Dotton
. And, though I didn’t ask how much
Dotton
had paid, she allowed that the
mah-nee
was
complittly rideekyouluss
and, don’t tell
ennybody
, but she would have taken
heff
of what they ultimately wound up
payink
. But all that sort of talk was so
borink
, what she really wanted to talk about was me, how
goot
I looked, how healthy, had I
poot
on some
wett?
Was I
seeink ennybody?

I looked over to Faye, wondered whether she could hear us, assumed she couldn’t. I looked at the few people still in the KGB, the man in the capote at the end of the bar, a few of Hazel Chu’s students, still drinking beers, probably under twenty-one and amazed they hadn’t gotten carded. Anya had come alone, seemed to be in no rush. I needed affection, reassurance, and she was flirting with me the way she used to on our first dates. Was I
seeink ennybody?

“Not seriously,” I mumbled to Anya, adding that I still thought about her a lot. What about her?

“But of course I’m
seeink
someone,” Anya said with a sigh,
she couldn’t
stend
to be alone. She joked that she was
mono-phobeek
, but her new relationship wouldn’t
lest
long
eezer;
her
new luffer
was too
eentense
.

At the bar, Faye hopped off her seat and slung her red vinyl bag over a shoulder as if she’d heard exactly what I had said to Anya about my relationship with her not being serious and she now knew I was a phony and a jackass. She took one long look toward the end of the bar, pulled a baseball cap out of her bag, put it on, then started walking fast to the exit without looking back. When I called her name, she didn’t turn around.

Anya sauntered alongside me, unaware of my predicament. I was trying to walk with her and catch up to Faye at the same time, but when Faye shouldered open the back door and started heading downstairs, I quickly whispered goodbye to Anya, kissed her cheek, then scampered out the door and down the stairs, yelling, “Faye! Faye, wait a second! Faye, would you hold on?” I practically slammed into Blade Markham, who was entering the building.

“Easy there,
compadre,”
Blade said with a laugh, either not remembering who I was or not caring anymore.