The Thieves of Manhattan - By Adam Langer Page 0,32

cherry pie at the Empire Diner. Conversation was effortless, as it always had been between us. But by now, it seemed as though we both had become different people to each other than we had been at the coffee shop—me, now a genuine writer with newfound confidence in his work; Faye, now a legitimate artist whose sarcastic veneer no longer concealed her talent. She told me more about her art than she ever had—drawing and painting had always come easily to her, she said, so she had never valued her skills, and neither had her parents, both of whom were gone now. As our conversation continued, we still talked in the same self-deprecating manner, but more out of habit than conviction. We weren’t coffee-shop slackers anymore; we were now New York artists, laughing and arguing, hands grazing each other’s, eyes locking on each other’s. When we left the diner and stepped out onto Tenth Avenue, neither of us asked where the other was headed; we both knew.

We kissed in the back of a taxicab for the whole fast ride up the West Side Highway to my apartment building, kept kissing when we got in the front door and when we reached the top of the stairs. In front of my apartment as I fumbled with keys, Faye suddenly pulled away from me.

“Just so you know, Sailor,” she said, “I don’t do sex on first dates.”

But when I told her that I’d just come to see her show, so the evening didn’t really count as a date, she stopped, then pretended to ponder. “Oh, right,” she said. “Then it’s no problem; let’s go.”

A TRAGYCAL INTERLUDE

Faye and I met in front of the KGB Bar sign on an unseasonably warm December Monday. On the Lit-Stim blackboard outside, my name was listed below that of the memoirist Hazel Chu. No, I hadn’t dreamed my conversation with Miri Lippman; I was a stimulating writer after all.

I must have been studying the blackboard for a full thirty seconds before Faye delivered a “Hey, did you notice I’m here too?” tap on the shoulder. She was wearing a denim jacket over a short black-and-white zebra-print dress, the fanciest outfit I’d ever seen her in, as if to tell me that she knew I thought this would be an important evening. But when I put my arms around her and kissed her, she backed away. I tried to hold her hand as we walked up the steps to the front door, but she wasn’t into that either.

“Enough of this phony boyfriend-girlfriend crap,” she said. “I’m about to yack.”

In the weeks that followed the first night Faye and I spent together, we saw a lot of each other. I don’t know if it represented some sad commentary on my poor perception of human behavior or some greater truth about the depths of human complexity that demure, brunette, Romanian beauty Anya Petrescu had been the incorrigible sex fiend who enjoyed raunchy chinaski, the more public the place the better, while redheaded, boot-clad, smart-ass Faye, who sported a tattoo of a twilight flower on a shoulder, eschewed displays of affection whenever anyone else was around and enjoyed quieter, more chaste moments in darkness underscored by “Dust in the Wind.” Still, Faye’s and my relationship deepened, and I kept writing at a furious pace. Her work was somehow inspiring me. When Faye slept over, I would get up the moment after she’d fallen asleep and start typing. We rarely made plans—sometimes, she’d come over after her coffee-shop shift or stop by on her way to the Van Meegeren, but she never slept over at my place two nights in a row. “I don’t like sequels, Sailor,” she told me.

I always felt when we were together that our relationship could go on like this forever. Spending time with her seemed almost too easy, as if we’d skipped all those first steps that couples are supposed to have, as if we had loved each other as kids, gone our separate ways, then returned to each other as adults who were through with games and already knew each other’s secrets.

Tonight, I would be reading a brand-new story, one I hadn’t sent to Miri Lippman. Like all the stories I had been writing, it had its basis in reality. The lovers in my story were a woman with more beauty and talent than she liked to admit and a man on the rebound, just beginning to trust his own voice. It was about how the