The Thieves of Manhattan - By Adam Langer Page 0,10
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.
THE GREAT CRACK-UP
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.