The Thieves of Manhattan - By Adam Langer Page 0,33
two of them could work together to make something real. I had titled the story “After Van Meegeren,” and dedicated it to Faye. Our plan was to celebrate after tonight’s reading; Faye said that for the first time, she would take me back to her place and she would show me more of her art, which I had been asking to see. She was almost done with a new project, and she said she thought I might appreciate it.
Outside the KGB, as I walked beside Faye, I tried to lower my expectations for the night, to keep my mind from leaping ahead to agents and publishing contracts and six-figure fraziers. I tried not to think about who might be in the audience, the compliments they might offer about my work. I tried to stop thinking about how I would handle my fame—whether I would snub everyone who’d rejected me in the past or act with grace and humility. I tried not to speculate about what might happen between Faye and me if women at the KGB were interested in me—bibliophiles, author groupies, who knew? I tried to tell myself that being invited to read here was enough, a first step that I shouldn’t take for granted. I almost believed it as we entered the bar.
The place was as packed as it always was on Lit-Stim Monday, but I sensed something different about the crowd, something I couldn’t quite identify. I practically tripped a half-dozen times as I searched the bar for familiar faces, then looked down to the ground so that nobody could see I had been searching. I tried to focus on the lit candles in the menorah in a south-facing window, looked away only when the imprint of the flames began to dance before my eyes. I glanced over to Faye, then down at the manuscript pages in my hand, almost tripped again, thinking maybe I was just nervous about reading in public, something I hadn’t done since my first year in New York.
“It’ll go fine, right?” I asked Faye, who was taking a seat at the bar. But Faye wasn’t someone to approach for reassurance. I wished I could act as cool and unconcerned as she had at her gallery opening when no one had bought any of her work.
Oblivious or unsympathetic to my mounting trepidation, Faye was already trying to place an order with the bartender. She asked how much a draft cost, and when the bartender said nine bucks, Faye laughed, then asked for two waters. When she got them, she demonstratively poured them onto the floor, unzipped her bag, produced a bottle of cheap faulkner, and refilled our glasses.
“Kanpai,” she said, and clinked her glass against mine.
“Kanpai,” I said, but my hand was shaking.
It was just nerves, I told myself as I kept looking for Geoff Olden, for Rowell Templen, for any Knopf editor, any Inkwell or ICM agent, any Harper publicity director I might recognize. But the only familiar sight was Miri Lippman’s head, her atwood bobbing as she spoke to a crowd of college students, all dressed better than the usual Lit-Stim crowd—clean-shaven guys wearing neckties and gatsbys; young women in stockings and golightlys. And as Miri Lippman turned to the bar and I waved at her, it dawned on me that, with the exception of Miri, Faye and I were just about the oldest geezers in the joint.
“Ian Minot?” Miri asked as she approached us, and when I nodded, she “introduced” herself.
“I’m just jazzed we got an audience; weather’s been so good lately. Plus, with the holidays and all,” she said.
The word holidays didn’t register at first; then the menorah in the KGB window took on new significance, made me look again at the crowd of college kids. And before I could fully process the fact that it was the first night of Chanukah, which meant that half the publishing world was on vacation while the other half was lying low, knowing no serious business in publishing was ever conducted before the first of the year, Miri was telling me that she, too, would be on her way home soon to light candles with her nephews. She said she hoped she would be able to hear my story, but that depended on how long Hazel Chu wanted to read. Hazel taught at Columbia and she was giving her students extra credit for attending. Plus, her parents were in town, and they’d never heard her read in public before.