furiously in a journal, her pen clawing and scratching the paper. As I watched her, I wished I could have her sense of purpose, her drive, that feeling that everything was at stake. And as I opened my eyes just a bit wider, I wished too that I hadn’t seen the second business card that Geoff Olden had given Anya marking a page in her book.
RETURN OF THE CONFIDENT MAN
I was getting ready to finish my shift and head out to meet Anya in front of Morningside Coffee when the Confident Man walked into the café, slipped off his cashmere gogol, and hung it on the rack by the door.
“Your buddy’s here again,” Faye said with a wink, but this time I didn’t make much of the guy’s presence until he approached the counter, where he ordered his usual hot tea. I had become pretty good about not paying him any mind when he came in with his copy of Blade by Blade—after all, he was the biggest tipper we had. I tried to ignore the book just as I usually did, but this time, Faye wouldn’t let me.
“Good read?” Faye asked the man, then flashed me a grin—she and I had been discussing the book, and I’d told her what I thought of it, but she was in one of her wise-ass moods tonight. She liked needling people, seeing what it took to make them burst. Usually, she left me alone and concentrated on Joseph. They kept up an ongoing repartee—“Sold any paintings?” he’d ask. “Hell, no,” she would reply; had Joseph been cast in any shows? “Hell, no,” Joseph would say. When I first started working at the café, they included me in their game (“Sell any stories, Minot?”), but since my answer was “hell, no” every single time, while for Joseph and Faye it was only 90 percent, they stopped. Tonight, though, Joseph had just gotten a call from his agent, who said she was dumping him as a client unless he lost weight. Whenever he got bad news, he ate more, so he was in a foul mood; he had already told Faye that he didn’t want to hear any of her jokes tonight, so I became the beneficiary of Faye’s wit.
“Have you in fact read the book?” the Confident Man asked Faye. It was the first time I’d heard him speak a full sentence, and his voice was as smooth and deep as that of a late-night DJ.
“Twice,” she said. “Ooh, it’s a real page-turner. Ian here digs it too.”
“Does he?” asked the man.
“Let it go,” I told Faye. I was feeling stressed out. Anya had told me that she’d have a “fonny sooprise” for me when we went out later, but I wasn’t in the mood for sooprises. Lately, I seemed to be getting more rejection slips in the mail than ever; the adjunct creative-writing lectureship positions I had applied for weren’t panning out; neither the New York Foundation for the Arts nor the NEA was going to give me a grant. Anya had recently been named one of American Review’s “31 Most Promising Writers Under 31”; this year, I was too old to qualify. Sure, I could survive for another few months on my meager savings and the few hundred bucks a week I was making at the café, but I needed another plan fast. And the fact that the only tangible plan I had involved secretly hoping Anya would sell her book already so she could buy an apartment and I could move in with her showed how desperate and pathetic I was becoming.
“Didn’t you know? Ian is Blade Markham’s biggest fan,” Faye told the Confident Man. He smiled patronizingly in my direction as if he thought I was the moron for liking Blade Markham, even though he was the one reading Blade’s book. Still, the man didn’t say anything else. He just slipped a twenty into the tip jar, the way he always did, went back to his table, and cracked open his book.
“Told you that guy craves ya,” Faye said, cocking her head in the direction of the new twenty-dollar bill atop the loose change in our jar. She raised an eyebrow. “Bet he’s gonna ask you out,” she said.
“Jesus Christ, Faye.” I was about to finally let her really have it, ask why she didn’t do some work instead of just busting my balls, doodling, working on her laptop, and using Joseph’s printer to make flyers and postcards for