The Thieves of Manhattan - By Adam Langer Page 0,11

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.

THE CONFIDENT MAN STRIKES AGAIN

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