The Thieves of Manhattan (3 page)

“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.

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 Blade 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.

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.

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.