The Thieves of Manhattan - By Adam Langer Page 0,3

but only barely. If I hadn’t been waiting for Anya to take her turn, all the Manhattans in Manhattan wouldn’t have kept me at the bar. I wasn’t nearly drunk enough to tolerate listening to Avi Kamner, a weedy Jewish memoirist who read an essay from Cold Cuts, an anthology of purportedly humorous circumcision stories he had edited; or to Rupa Ganguly, author of Immigrant Song, a collection of contemporary fiction about South Asians struggling to survive in America, loosely based on the struggles of her own brave parents, she said. Very loosely based—her grandparents had immigrated to the States in the 1950s, and her Connecticut-born mother and father were respectively chairs of the radiology and orthopedic surgery departments at Mount Sinai.

Worst of all was Jens Von Bretzel, a slim, unkempt guy with an army jacket, a luxuriant chabon of black hair, and a “to hell with this crap” demeanor that he barely concealed as he read from The Counter Life, his debut novel about a barista with a girlfriend who was too good for him, a future that was drifting toward oblivion, and a lousy attitude that kept getting him into trouble. The novel was based on the decade Von Bretzel had spent working at a Starbucks in Williamsburg. Von Bretzel’s work was so much like the stories I was writing that I half suspected he had hacked into my computer and plagiarized my life. Except that Von Bretzel’s work was more confident than mine, as if he considered his life worthy of committing to print, while to me, just about every aspect of my own existence seemed wholly unliterary—how often had agents told me that my protagonists never did anything, that they always waited for things to happen to them?

“I’m so jazzed we got an audience; weather’s been so bad lately. You ready to do this, Anya?”

I was staring at a giant atwood of auburn frizz, the back of Miri Lippman’s head. Miri had positioned herself between Anya and me. I didn’t even bother introducing myself, just kept my eyes focused on the ever-dwindling fluid in my glass while Miri fawned over Anya’s stories—how she envied the life Anya had lived as an orphan on the streets of Bucharest, such wondrous material.

“Weesh me lokk,” Anya said to me. I kissed Anya as if she were about to take a journey far longer than the three yards between the barstool and the KGB podium. But I didn’t weesh her lokk; she didn’t need it.

The story that Anya chose to read was like every one I had listened to her whisper while she snuggled next to me on my proust. It was the title selection from We Never Talked About Ceauşescu, the collection of stories she’d been working on ever since I’d met her, and this story, in which a Romanian girl on the cusp of becoming both an adult and an orphan attempts to cope with her father’s terminal illness, was heartbreaking and beautiful and self-effacing and charming and hilarious and, most of all, true. Even though the whole story took place in a country thousands of miles away from the tiny Indiana town in which I’d grown up, Anya’s tale resonated with me, reminding me of the late nights I’d spent at my father’s bedside, reading him stories, helping him to bring his teacup to his lips, turning out his light when he had finally fallen asleep. I couldn’t help but feel jealous that the raptors and poseurs at the KGB were being invited to experience these moments that had felt so personal when Anya had first read the story to me, that night when I had told her it was perfect, and she had called me a liar and told me to shot my trepp.

But what was most amazing and moving about the story as I heard it tonight was how Anya read it. In a mere ten minutes, she transformed from a nervous beginner to a confident professional, much like the heroine of her own story. At first, Anya leaned in too close to the microphone, giggled when she realized her pages were in the wrong order. Her hands shook while she read her opening sentence (“When I was leetle, eff’ryone who shoult heff luffed me left me”); after she finished page one, they were still.

“Luff is nussink but a lie,” she read. “In my house, we neffer talked about eet.” Two people in the audience gasped. Anya was like the pool shark who muffs her