The Thieves of Manhattan (4 page)

“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.

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.

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 career 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.

I told Faye the grim story of my last few minutes with Anya—“So, what happened with you and your Hungarian?”
Faye had asked—and I felt surprisingly comfortable doing so. Faye’s laughter and caustic remarks made me feel far better than any commiseration or pity probably would have. She made me feel as though my stories were worth hearing, and that I might actually wind up better off without Anya. I could feel my headache beginning to lift, and I was starting to look forward to attending Faye’s gallery opening, it being the only solid item on my schedule save for jury duty. I was even considering asking Faye if she wanted to grab a beer at the 106 Bar tonight after we’d closed up the café.

But then I heard the front door swing open, saw Faye roll her eyes and smirk. I turned around, and there was the Confident Man, book in hand. Some wire inside of me sparked, and I exploded.