The Thieves of Manhattan (7 page)

Times were different in publishing fifteen years earlier, when he wrote his book, Roth said, and the smarmy, pretentious agents and publishers he approached felt
A Thief in Manhattan
wasn’t sufficiently literary. It was just a fun page-turner that didn’t aspire to be anything more. Roth told me that he supposed he could have tried to find some pulpy, less-esteemed publishing house, but after one literary agent’s particularly savage assessment, he just gave up.

“Which agent?” I asked.

“Geoffrey Olden,” said Roth.

“What did he tell you?” I wondered if Olden had been as nasty with Roth as he had been with me.

“Something characteristically imperious, unctuous, and snide,” said Roth.

When Jed Roth began sending his manuscript around, the Olden Literary Agency was brand-new, Geoff Olden having just left the venerable Sterling Lord Literistic to form his own agency. Olden was not yet thirty and had only half a dozen
clients but already had the attitude of someone who had been in the business for decades. Olden invited Roth to his Soho office, an invitation that Roth foolishly mistook to mean that Olden was interested in his work. Sitting behind his desk, Olden crossed his hands over Roth’s manuscript, studied Roth through his eckleburgs, and said that “no serious house in New York would ever consider publishing this in its current form,” and that there was only one way any publisher at all would consider doing so.

Which way was that? Roth asked.

“If every word of it was true,” said Olden. He smirked, then slid the manuscript across his desk back to Roth.

“Jackass,” I said.

Roth put the manuscript in a drawer, deciding that he had no future as a writer, that his ideas were too hackneyed and unliterary. He still loved books, but he would no longer fantasize about writing them. From time to time, he might think back to the Blom Library and those strange characters he had seen there, but when he did, he would no longer wonder
What if?
He’d leave that question to people with more talent and imagination.

Instead, he became an editor, worked his way up the ladder at Merrill Books, a fixture of New York publishing since the early 1950s when James Merrill, Sr., founded it. James Jr., who was in charge when Jed Roth started working there had been an undergraduate at Yale during Merrill Books’s early days, when it was primarily an old boys’ operation, redolent of bourbon, cigars, and exclusive East Side clubs where men swam naked and discussed Great Ideas in steam rooms. Younger, energetic editors toiled for aristocratic elder statesmen and the occasional
elder stateswoman. In the late 1970s, after Merrill Sr. stepped down and his son took over, the publisher maintained its prestige and also most of its previous editors. James Sr. kept an office where he penned his exceedingly honest and exceedingly uninteresting memoirs. The differences between Merrill Books, Sr., and Merrill Books, Jr., were predominantly ones of style. A somber, studious, and grubby downtown office became a slick midtown one located on a high floor of a steel-and-glass office building on Seventh Avenue.

Roth started at Merrill Books by opening mail, making coffee, answering phones, and getting called “Young Man” or “Boy” by Merrill Jr., who seemed to think that being called by name was a privilege his employees had to earn. Roth was passed over for promotions in favor of younger assistants, those with family connections or those who happened to be sleeping with one of Merrill’s editors. Still, Roth persisted with a furious intensity and certainty of purpose, dutifully carrying out tasks that the other assistants considered themselves above. After senior editor Ellen Curl performed her annual ritual of firing her assistant, Roth applied for the position, and when he got it, did absolutely everything asked of him without complaint, working nights and weekends; went without sleep so he could read manuscript submissions; wrote detailed coverages; offered recommendations for or against publication that were remarkably canny. He lasted longer at this position than any assistant Ellen Curl ever had. Of all his talents, most useful was knowing the sorts of manuscripts Merrill Books wanted, not always the most entertaining books, not usually the ones Roth enjoyed reading, but ones that maintained the publisher’s reputation. Soon, he
began to acquire his own books, and although few were great financial or literary successes, most made a modest amount of money, and Roth enjoyed the cachet that came with being a respected editor at a respectable publishing house.

But after James Merrill, Sr., died, and other veteran editors including Ellen Curl began retiring, James Merrill, Jr., became more concerned with maintaining a financial legacy for his own children, fuckups the lot of them, than the literary prestige of the company his father had built. He severely reduced the number of books Merrill was publishing and formed a more commercial imprint, JMJ Publishers. Jed Roth had thought that the further he rose in the company and the longer he stayed, the more freedom he would have. The opposite turned out to be true. He found himself questioned at every turn, burdened with thankless assignments—diet books, ghostwritten celebrity autobiographies—as Merrill Jr. paid greater attention to the highly profitable JMJ Publishers.

When a six-hundred-page memoir, written by a two-bit thug and music business hanger-on named Blade Markham, arrived at Merrill Books, Jed Roth had been working there for over ten years. He had a spacious office with a dramatic view, a list of about three dozen authors, and also a new assistant named Rowell Templen, who had been foisted upon him by James Merrill, Jr., who was either sleeping with Templen or owed Templen’s father a favor. Templen, an oily, sideburned twenty-four-year-old Princetonian, fond of velour blazers worn over V-neck sweaters and ties, had an obsequious air that, to Roth, rendered him immediately untrustworthy. Templen’s accommodating manner and his way of meekly knocking before entering
Roth’s office could not disguise his ruthless ambition any more than the bottles of Listerine he kept in his desk and in his sport-jacket pockets could disguise his penetrating halitosis.

Jed was sitting at his desk, working through a gossipy Hollywood memoir as fast as he could, when Templen knocked twice, then entered with an intimidating tolstoy of pages.

“Time to read today, Mr. Roth?” he asked.

Roth said that he didn’t, but asked what Templen had in mind. Templen showed him the title page of
Blade by Blade
. He said he knew that Roth didn’t like to be bothered with submissions before they had been summarized, but he hoped Roth would make an exception. This book was brilliant, Templen said, so raw and so true; when he had read one of Blade Markham’s prison scenes, he practically palahniuked all over his desk. Roth told Templen to put Markham’s manuscript in his box and he’d look at it someday when he had the chance, but Templen said, No, Mr. Roth, there wasn’t any time to wait—three other publishing houses were already considering the book, and he was sure it would sell by the end of the week.

Roth didn’t know whether to feel angered or amused by Templen’s presumption—in all his years as an assistant, he never told Ellen Curl to put aside her work—but his curiosity was piqued. So, after Templen closed the door to his office, Roth picked up Blade Markham’s manuscript and turned to the dedication page. And then he burst into hysterical laughter.

Jed Roth and I were walking up Amsterdam Avenue now, passing shuttered storefronts, restaurants with chairs up on tables, all-night groceries populated mostly by hard-luck men and women standing on line for lottery tickets. Drunk Columbia University students were laughing too loudly, trying to walk straight lines as they searched vainly for bars that were still open. Roth said he had something he wanted to show me at his apartment, and I was too drunk to be suspicious anymore.

“So, what happened next?” I asked.

As we headed west on 111th Street toward Riverside Drive, I was trying not to slur my words; Roth, who I thought had drunk as much beer as I had, was still as precise as ever in his speech, as if he had already memorized his lines. His slacks and gatsby were as smooth as when the night had begun.

Roth said that he supposed he could have stopped reading Blade Markham’s manuscript after a page or two, when it became clear to him that just about every word was “utter horseshit,” but he read the entire thing. He supposed, too, that he could have just told Rowell Templen that he had read
Blade by Blade
and that he wasn’t interested. Instead, he channeled all the frustration he felt at the ignominy of editing diet, exercise, and celebrity books, all his anger at the direction Merrill Books and JMJ Publishers were taking, into marking up just about every page Blade Markham had typed. He noted every grammatical flaw, every preposterous boast. He worked past midnight, insisting that Rowell Templen stay until he was done. And when
that time came, he called Templen into his office and proceeded to berate him for the better part of an hour, ostensibly to teach the punk a little bit about publishing and literature.

Everything about
Blade by Blade
was a lie, Roth told Templen, and if the young assistant couldn’t or didn’t care to sniff out the BS in Markham’s manuscript, well, then, why didn’t he either join the circus or go to business school? He didn’t know whether Templen was gullible or just cynical, but either way, he didn’t belong here.

The kid didn’t flinch, just stood there the whole time, hands folded in front of his portnoy, the same arrogant, pinched lips, the same bored slouch, the same empty stare, the same tosses of his oily, shoulder-length hair, while Roth became more and more agitated. When Roth finally ran out of insults, Templen merely took the manuscript from him, said “Thank you, Mr. Roth,” then walked out.

“The skill I had was one I hadn’t realized was a skill,” Roth told me as we turned north onto Riverside Drive. A faint halo rainbowed the half-moon overhead, and the neighborhood was silent save for the occasional whirring of a passing taxi or the footsteps of a doorman heading home at the end of a shift. Soon, Roth and I were the only ones on a long stretch of sidewalk.

“What skill?” I was walking with a jittery, drunken feeling; the streetlights were making crazy zigzags, as if I were looking through the viewfinder of a camera I couldn’t hold still.

“The ability to tell not only if something actually happened, but, also, whether the telling is true,” said Roth. “Because sometimes fiction lies too.”

As we walked into the lobby of his five-story building, with its marble floor and staircase, and its cathedral ceilings, Roth
flashed me a knowing look. In that look, I could see that he was trying to tell me that he and I shared this ability, this sense of knowing what was and wasn’t true. I didn’t know exactly how he sensed that about me other than remarks he’d perhaps overheard me making to Faye about
Blade by Blade
at Morningside Coffee. But if he could discern the truth of a manuscript by page two, maybe he could do the same thing with people.

“I was so sure everyone else would see what a fraud it was. It seemed so obvious to me,” Roth said as we entered his elevator and he pushed the number four button. “I soon learned I was wrong.”

Roth was working at his desk on a Friday afternoon, ready to head home, when his door swung open.

“Busy, Jed?” James Merrill, Jr., asked, and before Roth could respond, Merrill told him, “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

In all my years of reading at open mikes, working at the coffee shop, and at private publishing parties, I had never met James Merrill, Jr. I knew him only from pictures in the Sunday Styles section—a man with a sophisticated, John Steinbeck mustache and tailored Savile Row suits—and from the other night at the Blade Markham party, when I had seen him pop a grape into his mouth. I associated him with a golden era of publishing, a time when men spoke with the vaguely British inflection of 1940s Hollywood film stars. But to Roth, Merrill was a
dolt who had never edited a single manuscript on his own, perhaps had never even read a book of any length all the way through; he based his impressions of the books he published on their first and last pages and on the coverages his editors and their assistants provided for him.

Roth followed Merrill down the hall to the conference room, where Rowell Templen and Geoff Olden were already seated, drinking scotch with Blade Markham, who was boasting of having glugged slivovitz with snipers in Sarajevo and faced down fellow gangbangers in South Central LA.

“Tell it to ya’ straight, son,” Blade told Templen, who had asked him if he kept in touch with any of the people in his stories. “If I gave y’all the righteous answer to that, I’d have to waste all y’all, yo.”

Roth surveyed the convivial conference room. It didn’t take long for him to figure out that Jim Merrill and Rowell Templen had made a deal with Blade Markham behind his back. His mind reeling with thoughts of betrayal, he gritted his teeth. He shook hands with Blade, then seethed as Merrill told Roth that he had just signed a half-million-dollar contract to publish
Blade by Blade
. Apparently, Merrill said, “young Rowell” had discovered the manuscript on his own and had taken the initiative of bringing it directly to Merrill’s attention.

“Young Rowell will be working directly on the book, but I’d like you to look over his shoulder a bit during the process,” Merrill said to Roth, then added, as he always did, that the opening of
Blade by Blade
, probably the only part that he had troubled himself to read, was “a real knockout.”

This news would have been humiliating enough, but when Templen looked up at Jed with an oily, smug, and victorious
cheshire, and observed that he was sure he would “find Jed’s feedback invaluable,” Roth could not stand it anymore. “If you’ll excuse me, gentlemen,” he said, then walked fast out the door, letting it slam behind him.

Jim Merrill caught up with Roth when he was halfway down the hall and demanded to know the meaning of his behavior; exactly who did he think he was? Roth thought of trying to convince Merrill that Blade’s book was a fraud, but after Merrill informed Roth that he had outbid three other publishers for the book and was planning to make
Blade by Blade
his lead title for the following autumn, Roth just walked away.