he give me the money so I could go up to the bar and order them just in case he’d been planning to slip anything into mine. I was tempted by his offer to let me keep the change from his twenty, but when I came back from the bar with the beers, I gave him the money—if he wanted to buy me another beer, maybe, but I wouldn’t take anything from him, at least not until I knew who he was, and how he knew my name and my work. Even then, I wouldn’t have compromised my principles for a lousy four bucks.
After I’d had a few sips of my Guinness and we’d chatted a bit, just small talk and pleasantries about some stories I’d written and he’d apparently read, I began to relax. My headache began to recede too. Something felt reassuring about the Confident Man’s presence, his nonchalance, his ability to anticipate anything I might say, the way he seemed to know me as well as I knew myself. His demeanor seemed as smooth as his Jay Gatsby jacket and slacks, his manner of speaking as clear as the lenses in those black-framed franzens.
His name was Jed Roth, he told me as he leaned back in his chair, and until recently, he’d worked as an editor for Merrill Books. I had, in fact, sent some of my stories there—supposedly, the publisher didn’t accept unagented submissions, but all it cost me to try was the stamps and the paper, and who knew, maybe if I wrote REQUESTED MANUSCRIPT in big block letters on my envelope, I would catch the attention of some panza going through the slush pile. The Requested Manuscript gambit never worked for me. Once, I tried submitting a story to Miri Lippman’s The Stimulator magazine and wrote REQUESTED MANUSCRIPT on it in marker; when the story was returned to me, someone, probably Miri herself, had scrawled NOT in front of REQUESTED.
For a moment, I thought that Roth might be offering to publish my work, but he said he didn’t work for Merrill anymore, hadn’t in more than a year, wasn’t working as an editor anywhere now.
“What happened?” I asked. Roth held up his copy of Blade by Blade, showing me the spine with the Merrill Books logo on it.
“This happened,” he said.
I chuckled when he showed me the book. I still hated it, sure, but said I doubted that it had much to do with why Roth was no longer working for James Merrill, Jr.
“Are you sure about that?” asked Roth.
“No.” I shrugged.
“Well, then maybe you should hear the story now,” Roth said.
I told him to go ahead.
THE CONFIDENT MAN’S STORY, PART II
Jed Roth said his story was probably fairly similar to mine, but other than the facts that we both loved books and had spent our early adulthoods in New York trying to write them, that didn’t really seem to be true. He was the son of a privileged family; his ancestors had come over on the Mayflower. I had grown up in a small town that nobody had ever heard of midway between Indianapolis and Terre Haute, Indiana, the son of a law student and a university librarian. Roth had been educated in literature and writing at some of the finest East Coast schools; twenty years after my mom died, I had dropped out of grad school to take care of my dad and had never completed my degree.
A little more than a decade earlier, when he was about my age, Roth intended to devote his life to books—writing them, reading them, selling them. He worked at bookstores, took internships at publishers. When he wasn’t working, he was reading in libraries, writing in cafés, submitting stories to journals and magazines, reading those stories aloud at open-mike nights. This part sounded fairly familiar to me, but even here, our life stories weren’t as similar as Roth seemed to think—I was always more interested in character than plot; Roth said he didn’t care much about developing characters, what was important to him was telling a good tale.
Roth had tried to work as much as possible in places that would inspire him to write, the older and more atmospheric the better—the Society Library, the Mercantile, the reading room of the main branch of the New York Public Library. At these and other locations, Roth read classic yarns, swashbuckling high-seas adventures, hard-boiled detective stories, Western shoot-’em-ups, stories of prospectors digging for gold. He read Robert Louis Stevenson,