The Thieves of Manhattan (2 page)

As always, KGB on Lit-Stim night was filled with a posse of authors, most of whom had published stories in magazines and journals that were still sending me form-letter rejections; agents, all of whom had sent my story manuscripts back to me in the self-addressed stamped envelopes I had provided; editors and publishers, all looking for the new Zadie Smith or Nick Hornby, all completely uninterested in Ian Minot. I couldn’t blame them; at that point, I was pretty bored with myself too.

After my dad finally died of the cancer that had been slowly gnawing away at him, and I moved from Indiana to New York with my pitifully small inheritance, I went to Lit-Stim every Monday night. Now, a little over five years later, with my bank balance sinking into the mid four figures, I never did. The only reason I was here instead of back in my West Harlem garret, staring at a blank computer monitor or lying on my lumpy proust, watching TV, was that it was Anya’s turn to appear at Miri’s podium. Three other writers were on the bill, and Anya was the only one without a book contract; I figured that would change before the week was out. When Anya had treated me to dinner at Londell’s to celebrate our six-month anniversary and
told me that Miri had chosen her for Lit-Stim, I could already feel her slipping away from me, could feel myself becoming the “old boyfriend” she’d soon discuss with her rich, talented new beau—
yes, but I vas yunk and fooleesh den, end eeven though he hedd no tellent, he vass allvays switt
, she would tell Malcolm Gladwell or Gary Shteyngart or whichever writer would next succumb to her charms.

“You are
lett
again as always, but I
forgeef
you,
Ee-yen,”
Anya said as she patted the barstool she had saved for me—even now, I still love the way she used to say my name.

I took the stool beside her, guiltily eyeing the Manhattan that she had already ordered for me. I could barely afford to buy the next round, but I knew that Anya would never expect me to buy her anything, not even a beer. Strangely, money never seemed to be an issue for this twenty-six-year-old woman who had left Romania with barely a
leu
to her name; Anya usually had cash and a nice, furnished place to stay—someone was always loaning her the keys to his or her apartment or summerhouse, hiring her for odd secretarial jobs with flexible hours, inviting her to this or that swanky party. When we first met, I obsessed about what she might be doing to win so many favors, but after a while I stopped worrying—Anya was the kind of woman you wanted to help without even considering what you might get in return.

At the bar, I sipped my Manhattan, hoping to make it last, while I pointed out to Anya all the agents in the crowd—Eric Simonoff and Bill Clegg of the William Morris Agency sipping club sodas; Faye Bender and Christy Fletcher talking shop; Joe Regal of Regal Literary handing out a business card; Geoff Olden from the Olden Literary Agency nursing a cocktail. I recognized
all of them from writing seminars I’d attended or from when I had served them drinks at private parties in Sonny Mehta’s or Nan Talese’s apartments, back in my naïve days when I thought that getting close to publishers would bring me closer to getting my stories published.

Sitting beside Anya, I caught only snatches of their conversations, but every phrase filled me with envy—
exclusive contract with Vanity Fair; boxed review in PW; a “significant” six-figure deal; optioned by Scott Rudin; adapted by Ron Bass; profiled by Chip McGrath; interviewed by Terry Gross; selected by Pam Layne; short-listed for the Booker; headlining at the 92nd Street Y; bidding war for the paperback rights; got a free box lunch at Yaddo
. I kept suggesting to Anya that she get up and introduce herself to somebody, but she said she thought everyone there was a
fekk
. She didn’t want to meet anyone, just to sit with me and make fun of them—I was the only person with whom she could ever really be herself.

“Good evening everybody, and welcome to another
stimulating
event,” Miri Lippman said from the podium, her monotone reverberating like a tuning fork held too close to my ear as she introduced the evening’s writers.

Anya would be last to read. The second round of Manhattans, which I bought for Anya and myself with the night’s tips from Morningside Coffee, helped get me through the first three readers, but only barely. If I hadn’t been waiting for Anya to take her turn, all the Manhattans in Manhattan wouldn’t have kept me at the bar. I wasn’t nearly drunk enough to tolerate listening to Avi Kamner, a weedy Jewish memoirist who read an essay from
Cold Cuts
, an anthology of purportedly humorous circumcision stories he had edited; or to Rupa Ganguly, author
of
Immigrant Song
, a collection of contemporary fiction about South Asians struggling to survive in America, loosely based on the struggles of her own brave parents, she said. Very loosely based—her grandparents had immigrated to the States in the 1950s, and her Connecticut-born mother and father were respectively chairs of the radiology and orthopedic surgery departments at Mount Sinai.

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.

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.