The Thieves of Manhattan - By Adam Langer Page 0,36

serious and she now knew I was a phony and a jackass. She took one long look toward the end of the bar, pulled a baseball cap out of her bag, put it on, then started walking fast to the exit without looking back. When I called her name, she didn’t turn around.

Anya sauntered alongside me, unaware of my predicament. I was trying to walk with her and catch up to Faye at the same time, but when Faye shouldered open the back door and started heading downstairs, I quickly whispered goodbye to Anya, kissed her cheek, then scampered out the door and down the stairs, yelling, “Faye! Faye, wait a second! Faye, would you hold on?” I practically slammed into Blade Markham, who was entering the building.

“Easy there, compadre,” Blade said with a laugh, either not remembering who I was or not caring anymore.

As Faye walked outside onto Fourth Street, on which a light rain had begun to fall, I froze on the stairs. Blade walked past me, taking two steps at a time, boots clacking, truth cross beating against his chest. I turned to see him look up at Anya and greet her with a smile, a peace sign, and a gruff “What up, dawg?”

Anya laughed. I wasn’t sure if she was laughing with or at Blade, until I saw the two of them making out on the stairs. Over Blade’s shoulder, Anya smiled at me, rolled her eyes, just as she had after Geoff Olden had introduced himself to her at the KGB and given her a pair of business cards. But I took no comfort; Olden was now her edgint, Blade was her luffer, and I was complittly alone. I could hear Blade tell Anya that their “peeps was waitin’, yo” as I ran out into the rain.

Faye was already waiting at a bus stop, and once I caught up to her there, the M15 was approaching. Faye’s facial expression was sullen, more tired than angry, and it didn’t change when her eyes met mine.

“What’s the matter, Arch?” she asked. “Veronica split town?”

I smiled, but Faye didn’t smile back.

I desperately tried to explain, to apologize, to say that the night hadn’t gone as I had anticipated and what I really wanted to do was forget about it and start over. I said I knew I was a heel, but Faye wouldn’t even give me the satisfaction of acting angry. She just seemed disappointed, as if she now knew that I was no different from all the liars and cheaters she must have known before me. She’d dated guys like me, she said, guys who said they cared more about her than about getting famous, more about their art than about making money, but I was lying, maybe even to myself.

No, I told her, she had me figured all wrong. I did care about her, was still looking forward to seeing more of her art. I was searching for the one thing I could say that would break through to her, make her believe me, but in her eyes I could see that she had already boarded the bus, its doors had closed, and it was pulling away fast.

“Faye,” I said, looking at her pleadingly.

“Jigoku ni icchimae!” she said, then called me usotsuki. But when the M15’s doors opened, she didn’t deem it worth the trouble to speak to me in any language, not even English. She just slipped her MetroCard into the reader and walked to the back of the bus. When it began to move again, I could see her red hair and her baseball cap framed in a window. For a moment, it looked as though she might have been crying, but I figured it must have been the rain.

I could say that I felt as if I had just lost everything, but that wouldn’t be quite right, for it would imply I had something to lose. Instead, I now understood that I had had nothing in the first place—the stories I had been writing weren’t worth a damn. If someone on the street had come up to me and asked who I was and what I did, I wouldn’t have known what to say. There was a person I wanted to be, and a person I had been, but in between those two, I felt as if I were nobody at all.

The rain was beginning to fall harder. As I walked slowly back to Fourth Street, I took out my cellphone, removed a