students and research assistants, an ex-con whom Iola had nurtured, but he’d suffered a severe head injury when a shelf at the Blom had collapsed on him. Even though he no longer spoke proper English, and recognized manuscripts only for the money they could fetch, he remained loyal to Iola, and still played the role of her research assistant, albeit in a very different context.
One of our biggest arguments came in regard to the fates of Iola Jaffe and Norbert Piels. “Roth” had shot them dead in his story, but though I was willing to put my name on a thief’s autobiography, I wasn’t about to say that I’d killed anyone, even a fictional character, even in self-defense. So Roth let me leave Iola’s and Norbert’s fates vague, but he advised me to hang on to his original draft; someday, I might find that his version worked better.
Midway through the third draft, the book became as much my obsession as it had once been Roth’s. A Thief in Manhattan haunted not only my waking hours but also my dreams, until I could almost see the Girl in the Library, could see flames rising, books in ashes; I could see the Hooligan Librarian and the Foul-Mouthed Manuscript Appraiser, I could hear the voices of “Norbert Piels” and “Iola Jaffe” and could now understand how they had gotten to be who they were. I could see the desolate field and the golden cross and The Tale of Genji buried beneath it. I could feel the thump of the approaching 8:13 train in my chest, feel my heart racing as I tried to catch it. I could feel myself becoming the author of A Thief in Manhattan, book in hand, leaping off a train, then running to find the Girl in the Library.
As winter drew on, I couldn’t find any time to work on my own stories. It seemed as if just about all I did was type, read, sleep, and run every morning and night back and forth between my place and Roth’s. On Sundays, my one day off, I went shopping. I bought slicker shoes, better gatsbys that Roth had shown me in catalogs. I moved out of my West Harlem studio and found a better apartment in Hamilton Heights, a two-bedroom on the top floor of a newly rehabbed condo building with good light on a secluded block that looked like the sort of place where a serious writer would live. I bought a desk with a good chair, bookshelves, which I filled with classics, and when I grew weary of staring at bare walls, I took a trip to the Van Meegeren Gallery. Even though Faye wasn’t there, I paid cash for my favorite of her paintings—the fake Wyeth that depicted a country house, a meadow, a graveyard, a white car on a distant road, and a little doodle of Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz. It reminded me a little of home, and I thought having it on my wall would inspire me.
Sometimes on the Riverside jogging path, women would smile at me or ask for directions. I was always polite but never broke stride long enough to begin a real conversation. I felt as if I was at the midway point between who I was and who I sensed myself becoming. How could I have described myself anyway? As a former barista in a scam with a confident man? Or as the author of A Thief in Manhattan, a novel that would pose as a memoir before I would reveal that it had been a novel after all? The man I really wanted to be was the one I would become after all that was done, the author of the short-story collection that had been written by a fake memoirist now finally telling the truth.
By the time I ran into Anya Petrescu again, on a Sunday in early spring, I was nearly done with my final draft of A Thief in Manhattan. The fourth rewrite was my idea; Roth had said it was good enough to start sending to agents, but I felt the book wasn’t ready. I wanted one more draft to make the writing tighter, the characters more vivid and sympathetic, the pace even faster.
I was in ABC Carpet & Home looking for a queen-size proust to replace my crappy pull-out couch, when I saw Anya with Blade; they were looking at prousts too. Blade had an arm draped over one of Anya’s shoulders