The Thieves of Manhattan

by Adam Langer

  Geoff Olden’s townhouse was as opulently appointed as ever; yet on the night I was the guest of honor, it seemed smaller than the last time I was there, when Blade Markham had threatened to take my life but took my girl instead. Jim Merrill, Jr., was popping hors d’oeuvres into his mouth; Rowell Templen was on the back deck, drinking a fitzgerald and holding forth to a pair of editorial assistants, both of whom were awaiting the right time to tell Rowell that they had story collections they were looking to sell; Isabelle DuPom had moved on to form her own literary agency, and Geoff Olden had replaced her with another black-clad knockout with an accent. Olden was holding court and cackling; Pam Layne and her assistant, Mabel Foy, were pretending to keep a low profile as they spoke to me quietly and told me to expect an important phone call soon. Joseph, who had lost weight as he prepared to take a role in the film of The Thieves of Manhattan, was chatting up a pair of ICM agents, trying to interest them in a diet-and-recipe book that he said he wanted to write for JMJ Publishers. Perhaps Olden’s place seemed smaller because Blade Markham wasn’t here—even though I now wore a trust cross around my neck and black boots just like his, my personality seemed to occupy less space than his did. Jens Von Bretzel was here too, flipping through a copy of Thieves, snorting at it; I could have threatened to roll him—Something funny ’bout what yer readin’, Barista Boy?—but that still wasn’t my style.

  My role here was completely reversed from the one I had played at Blade’s party—and yet I felt nearly as out of place as I had then. Before, I hadn’t been able to tell anybody who I was or what I did because I didn’t feel myself worthy of anyone’s attention; now I couldn’t tell the whole truth because I wouldn’t have wanted anyone to know it. I had grown so tired of my spiel—“With a story like this, you don’t really write it, man; you gotta live it”—and yet I had no new spiel to offer. I wandered from room to room, snacking on appetizers, drinking cocktails, greeting fans, cutting off conversations early, and listening to snippets of other people’s grim dialogue—film got stuck in turnaround; failed to earn out; defaulted on the mortgage; got slammed by Michiko; canceled the paperback shut down its books section; got gonged by the NEA; had to buy my own lunch at Yaddo; thinking about going back to business school. I was considering asking Joseph if he wanted to leave and get a drink somewhere else when I heard a voice cry out:

  Ee-yen!

  I hadn’t realized how much I missed Anya Petrescu until that moment; when she smiled, dropped the accent, and called me Ian, I was struck by how ordinary my name sounded, how dull both of our own lives must have seemed to us before we started making up stories. Her name was Anna now, and she was holding a bottle of Budweiser and a copy of Thieves as she ran from the bar to embrace me, kiss my cheek, and tell me how happy she was for me, how much she loved my book, how much she admired my ability to keep my real life secret from her for so long.

  She wasn’t wearing one of her usual slim, elegant golightlys, just a black T-shirt, jeans, and boots. I didn’t mind the new look; what I truly missed was the way she used to say my name.

  “Is that how you really talk?” I asked.

  She kept smiling but looked as though she might burst into tears. She said she didn’t know; she had spent so much time being Anya, she had forgotten who Anna was. Everything she used to be and wear seemed fake to her now. Anya Petrescu’s life, one she had invented from stories she had heard from her friends and relatives, and even from stories I had told her about my parents, seemed too ridiculous to be true, while Anna’s seemed too dull to commit to print. Her memoir was going poorly, she added; she hadn’t written a word in months.

  As I kept listening to Anya, I noticed that she was no longer wearing the engagement ring Blade had given her. When she saw me looking at her left hand, she rubbed the spot where the ring had been.

  “He dumped me,” she said.

  Blade had ended the relationship in the greenroom backstage at The Pam Layne Show, just minutes after he learned that she was a fraud, Anna said. He was crushed, couldn’t stop crying, kept saying that he couldn’t understand why anyone would make up a life she never had, said he would’ve paid a whole pile of dough to have had an ordinary life like hers. Anya told him she didn’t understand why he was so upset; hadn’t he invented some parts of his life? Changed some things around? Wasn’t that what writers did, what he had done in Blade by Blade? Blade had stared at her in disbelief. How could she even think that, he asked. And then he lost it, called her a “low-ass hoodrat,” said it was bad enough that she had made up her own life, but what kind of lying buster did she think he was?

  That was the last time Anna had seen Blade, she said. Now Anna stepped closer to me and confided that she had never felt as real as she had when she had been with me—being Anya had freed her, made her feel less inhibited, more like who she really was. She sighed and took a breath, reminded me of what she’d said on our last night together: that we should have met earlier, when both of us were different pipples.

  I felt a pang in my heart as Anna took me by the hand and led me to the back deck, where she told me that she was single and hadn’t dated anyone since Blade. For a moment, I thought about pulling her to me, then asking her to sneak upstairs. But I knew that I couldn’t trust Jersey Anna any more than I could trust Bucharest Anya, and besides, I didn’t want Faye to have been right when she said that my Ukrainian and I deserved each other. So before I went back inside to find Joseph, I just kissed Anna on the cheek, and for the first time in my life, I wished her goot lock; I figured that now she could probably use some.

  GIRL, YOU KNOW IT’S TRUE

  I had promised Jed Roth that I would never publish Zero Ninety-eight. I didn’t think I would have any trouble keeping my word. I didn’t need the money—The Thieves of Manhattan was still on the Times and IndieBound hardcover bestseller lists; the paperback hadn’t even been released yet. Myself When I Am Real, my collection of stories, probably wouldn’t do as well, but breaking my promise to Jed to bolster my book sales seemed too mercenary, particularly since Geoff Olden had assured me that I could choose just about any topic for my third book and get a whopping frazier for it.

  But I still hadn’t seen any trace of Faye, no matter how many notes I left at Morningside Coffee with Joseph, who always told me he hadn’t seen her, no matter how many letters I sent to the London auction house that had sold The Tale of Genji to an anonymous collector for $8.13 million. And the more I thought about it, the more I figured that Faye had meant it when she said I wouldn’t see her until “after the last page,” until after I’d written the rest of Zero Ninety-eight and recounted everything that had happened to me after Norbert and Iola had caught up to me at the coffee shop. I kept wondering if Faye would stay with Roth, or if she would come back to me; if she liked me better or only my stories; if she had truly been the one who had helped to save me as I had suspected or whether I had made all that up. Finishing the book was the only way I could think of to find out.

  I spent almost a year writing the rest of Zero Ninety-eight while sitting at a window table at Morningside Coffee, drinking tea, and chatting with Joseph, who was usually in far better spirits than he had ever been when I’d worked there. At that table, I wrote about my trip to Manhattan, Kansas, about the desolate field, the fire at Big Box Books, the ride aboard an eastbound train, the night I met Anya again. I suppose I could have left Jed’s and Faye’s names out of the story, could have written that Faye had forged some book other than The Tale of Genji. But I wanted to tell my tale as honestly as I knew how, because I thought Faye would never come back to me if she read my story and saw that I was still telling lies. I figured that any future I might have with her depended on my telling the truth. Jed Roth had told me that a time would come when I would reveal that The Thieves of Manhattan was a lie so that he could have his revenge, and now I was revealing the story just as he told me I would. But he hadn’t wanted me to tell the whole truth, so I doubted that this book I was writing was what he had in mind.
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br />   Completing Zero Ninety-eight took far longer than I anticipated, for I wanted to get every detail right. I was writing for different reasons than I ever had—not to escape my loneliness as I used to; not to try to make my rent; not to save my skin; not to play a trick or get revenge or draw attention to my fiction. I was writing to explain to another person who I was now and how much I had come to realize she meant to me; she had given me not only this story, but the chance to tell it and make it true. And as I wrote, I vowed to myself that this would be why I always would write—to tell another human being a story, one that felt meaningful to me, whether it actually happened or I had just made it up—and I sensed that, now that I had lived a true adventure, I knew how to make one up pretty well.

  Thieves had ended just as Roth had wanted it to—with a romantic embrace between the hero and the Girl in the Library, who takes the manuscript that he has brought her and melodramatically tells him that true love never has to end, that it should live on “even after the last page.” But, though Roth was a decent storyteller, he didn’t know too much about how people spoke and acted in real life; he’d read too much, lived too little. I had no priceless manuscript to give the woman I loved, just a story that was as true as I knew how to write it. On the autumn day that I sat in the café with my laptop and approached the end of my story, no one leaped into my arms for a passionate embrace; instead, I just felt a hand on my shoulder. And after I started writing my last page and I heard a woman’s voice behind me, it didn’t say anything profound or romantic; it just said, “I thought you’d never finish, Sailor.” When I looked up, and saw Faye standing there, a cheshire on her face, the moment felt so perfect that I wished it could really be happening. And then I realized it was.

  GLOSSARY OF SELECTED TERMS

  atwood n. A mane of curls as sported by the author Margaret Atwood.

  canino n. A gun, from Lash Canino, the gambler Eddie Mars’s menacing hired hit man in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.

  capote n. A broad-brimmed hat of the sort favored by the author Truman Capote. The hat is often worn to best effect at a rakish angle.

  chabon n. A wavy mane like the one worn by the author Michael Chabon.

  cheshire n. A gleeful, mischievous smile that seems to conceal a secret, from the grinning Cheshire Cat in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

  chinaski n. The sex act, usually divorced from any pretense of romance, from Charles Bukowski’s alter ego Henry Chinaski, who observes in Notes of a Dirty Old Man, “Love is a way with some meaning; sex is meaning enough.” Vulgar.

  daisies n. Dollars, from Daisy Buchanan, a character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, about whom Jay Gatsby remarks, “Her voice is full of money.”

  droog n. A friend or henchman, taken from the Nadsat language invented by the author Anthony Burgess in his novel A Clockwork Orange.

  eckleburgs n. Yellow-framed eyeglasses reminiscent of those that appear on an advertising billboard for the oculist T. J. Eckleburg in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

  faulkner n. Whiskey, from the author William Faulkner, who once observed, “There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others.”

  fitzgerald n. A gin rickey, which was said to be F. Scott Fitzgerald’s favorite drink.

  franzens n. The sort of stylish eyeglasses favored by the author Jonathan Franzen.

  frazier n. A particularly large advance for a book, from Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain, who was rumored to have received a healthy seven-figure advance for his follow-up novel, Thirteen Moons.

  gatsby n. A stylish men’s sport coat or suit jacket that might have been worn by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby.

  ginsberg n. A somewhat unruly beard of the sort favored by the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg.

  galumph v. To move in a decidedly ungraceful manner, coined by Lewis Carroll in his poem “Jabberwocky” in Through the Looking-Glass.

  gogol n. An overcoat, from Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat.”

  golightly n. A slim, elegant cocktail dress of the sort favored by the character Holly Golightly in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

  hammett n. A bullet, from the crime writer Dashiell Hammett, in whose books it is frequently featured, e.g., Red Harvest: “The bullet smacked blondy under the right eye, spun him around, and dropped him backwards …”

  hemingway n. A particularly well-constructed and honest sentence, from the author Ernest Hemingway, who once advised himself, “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.”

  highsmith n. A train, the sort of vehicle that plays key roles in novels such as Ripley’s Game and Strangers on a Train, both by Patricia Highsmith.

  humbert n. A sexual deviant, from the character of Humbert Humbert, who embarks upon an obsessive sexual relationship with his fourteen-year-old stepdaughter, Dolores Haze, in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

  kerouac v. To take a cross-country road trip, from Jack Kerouac, whose alter ego Sal Paradise journeys from the East Coast to the West and back again in On the Road.

  kowalski n. A sleeveless white T-shirt of the sort favored by the character Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, in which he is depicted by the playwright in one instance as wearing “an undershirt and grease-stained seersucker pants.”

  lish v. To savagely and mercilessly edit, from Gordon Lish, the legendary editor at Esquire and Knopf, who is particularly known for the influence he had on the unadorned style of Raymond Carver.

  marple n. A sensible and decidedly unstylish felt hat of the sort worn by the detective Jane Marple in the works of Agatha Christie.

  murasaki n. A kimono such as the one worn by the character Murasaki in Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji.

  palahniuk v. To vomit, taken from the name of the author Chuck Palahniuk, whose works are often said to have a particularly visceral effect on sensitive readers.

  panza n. An underling, named after the subservient character of Sancho Panza, who plays servant to Don Quixote in the epic by Miguel de Cervantes.

  poppins n. A graceful, and occasionally parrot-headed, umbrella that seems as if it might possess the ability to fly, the sort favored by the character of Mary Poppins, P. L. Travers’s eponymous heroine.

  portnoy n. The male sex organ, from the titular character in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, who is rather obsessed with this body part. Vulgar.

  proust n. A bed, particularly when used as the locus of inspiration, taken from the favored location of the author Marcel Proust.

  Rusty James n. A leather jacket of the type worn by Rusty James, narrator of Rumble Fish, by S. E. Hinton.

  salinger v. To live in seclusion, after the reclusive author J. D. Salinger.

  saramago dog n. A stray mongrel of the sort featured in just about every novel José Saramago has written, particularly in Blindness and The Cave.

  scheherazade n. A cliff-hanger so suspenseful that it will keep the reader involved in a story until the next night, from The Arabian Nights’ Scheherazade, who manages to prevent her execution by telling King Shahryar stories night after night.

  steinbeck n. A well-groomed mustache like the one sported by the author John Steinbeck.

  tolstoy n. A particularly large pile, usually of manuscript pages, from Leo Tolstoy, whose Anna Karenina and War and Peace run around 800 and 1,200 pages, respectively.

  vonnegut n. A cigarette, after the author Kurt Vonnegut, noted smoker of Pall Malls, who was once quoted as saying that cigarettes were “a classy way to commit suicide.”

  woolf v. To move as rapidly as the speed of thought, from the author Virginia Woolf, who perfected the art of converting her own fast-moving consciousness into prose in such novels as Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My utmost thanks to Jerome Kramer for proposing a challenge, without which this book would not have been written. Thanks also to Cin
dy Spiegel and Marly Rusoff for their continued support. Thanks to Christopher Cartmill, Bill DeMerritt, David Engel, Barbara Hammond, Virginia Lowery, Hemmendy Nelson, and Andrew Oswald for participating in the first reading of The Thieves of Manhattan. And thanks for many and various reasons to Masako and Rich Aloia, Beth Blickers, Maria Braeckel, Jennifer Gilmore, Richard Green, Mary Herczog, Hana Landes, Bradley Langer, Esther Langer, Kazoo, Val and Claudia Paraskiv, Mihai Radelescu, Wendy Salinger, Trixie the cat, and the staff of the Hungarian Pastry Shop and Café. Thanks always to Beate Sissenich, and to Nora and Solveig Langer Sissenich, the latter of whom entered the world less than three hours after the final draft of this book was completed. And, finally, thanks to all the fake memoirists, fictional poets, literary forgers, and hoaxers who have provided such great inspiration.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ADAM LANGER is the author of the novels Crossing California, The Washington Story, and Ellington Boulevard, and the memoir My Father’s Bonus March. He lives in New York City with his wife, Beate; his daughters, Nora and Solveig; and his dog, Kazoo. Depending on your definition, this is either his fourth novel or his second memoir.