The Thieves of Manhattan - By Adam Langer Page 0,47

you,” I said.

He liked that joke; cackled louder. “Bueno conocerte, ladrón,” he said.

Michael’s tablecloths were white, its chairs black leather with wooden frames and armrests, and the air was thick with talk of books and deals. Nearby, Olden informed me, the director of Knopf publicity was showing a new catalog to the nonfiction reviews editor of Publishers Weekly, who was taking notes on a pad. David Hirshey, executive editor at HarperCollins, was forking a chunk of salmon as he sat across from an author who wore a black T-shirt under a blue blazer and was muttering something about soccer. The ICM superagent Esther Newberg was dining with Patricia Cornwell.

As for me, I was wearing an old Ian Minot outfit—a wrinkled white shirt that was now a little small in the shoulders and too loose around the stomach, battered jeans, a flimsy belt, and scuffed boots. The only stylish touch was the franzens. Roth had said that either dressing up or down for Olden would be a waste of time—Geoff said that anyone who didn’t dress like him was a “fashion victim” no matter what they wore. But I liked dressing down; later, when I would wear my new gatsbys to meet Geoff, he could take credit for my transformation.

Olden didn’t talk about Thief during the first part of our lunch, and I didn’t talk much at all. Editors and industry reporters kept coming over to shake Olden’s hand and schmooze. He didn’t introduce me to anybody, though, just waited until they were out of earshot, then talked smack about them—which agent was sleeping with which editor, whose novel was tanking on Bookscan, whose wouldn’t “earn out,” whose magazine wouldn’t last, who was about to get fired. He pointed out to me the agent with the eating disorder, the one with a coke habit, the one who had been justly hit with sexual harassment charges, the one who was having an affair with the editor of The Stimulator. He gestured to each of the writers he spotted and explained why he’d been right to reject their work.

I nodded and smiled through Geoff’s bitter monologues, kept smiling through my beet-and-goat-cheese salad and my poached halibut and Geoff’s “El bistec, por favor,” but I could barely contain myself when he seemed to start talking smack about me. He said he’d just gotten back from a “SpeedFuck” in Key West. He took lots of free trips—he twirled a sea scallop on the end of a fork—free trips were viewed as perks in the industry, but he hated them. The moment you started getting something for free, you didn’t want it anymore. He loathed booksellers’ conventions and book fairs, all those slutty publicists getting drunk on expense accounts and getting fat on hors d’oeuvres, behaving as if publishing were a sorority rush; he hated all those lascivious foreign publishers acting as if every American thoroughfare were the Reeperbahn, cutting short meetings so they could return to their hotel rooms and watch pay-per-view porn. When the economy went down and took half the industry with it, he wouldn’t miss any of it. The worst part, he said, were the SpeedFucks—three-day weekends in resorts where writers paid hundreds of dollars for the privilege of having their work evaluated by “industry professionals,” meaning him. One had to try to find constructive things to say about manuscripts so that their authors would feel they had gotten their money’s worth. But Olden said he didn’t even need to read the pages an author had written in order to critique them; he needed only to look at the writer. He could instantly recognize the permed, overweight women with their romance novels; the doughy, middle-management men who thought they could write thrillers; most of all, he despised the scruffy young men who thought they were better than the others, fancying themselves literary authors as they droned on about tending bar or pouring coffee, as if such experiences were meaningful or unique.

“See, with you I knew right away you were a good writer,” Olden said.

“How?” I asked.

“Your glasses,” he said, then went on to tell me why he thought my book was special. But now I was listening with only half an ear. The other ear and a half was already replaying Olden’s diatribes as I thought of all the daisies but mostly the time I’d wasted on hoping to win over the likes of Geoff Olden, who disdained not just my stories but me. I thought of the literary seminars I’d attended