This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Jonathan Leatham read his story,

The Starlet Apartments, from the March 4th, 2019 issue of the magazine.

Leatham is the author of more than 15 books of fiction, including the novels The Fortress of Solitude,

A Gambler's Anatomy, and The Farrell Detective, which was published last year.

Now here's Jonathan Letham.

The Starlit Apartments The Starlit Apartments.

When Peter Todd Baum and I were 25 and three years clear of Yale, I lost track of him for a short while.

I had been living in New York City, working as an assistant at FSG and writing short stories that no one

wanted to publish when he got back in touch. He had acquired an agent and was going to Hollywood.

He wanted me with him. As co-writer on a stack of ideas, he promised me he'd already developed

and vetted with his representation, and which needed only my hand. Mine alone, I, Alexander DuPlesi, was the writer he needed, not Robert Town or Herman J.

Mancowicz.

I alone could grok and conjugate Todd Baum's sensibility, and besides, he had a place

picked out for us in Burbank.

We'd shack up together and bash out treatments, and it would

be a gas, gas, gas, like Yale, without all the pointless Yale stuff, and with a great deal more

cocaine. Hearing this, I was his. I was there in a heartbeat. I saw two birds in a bush and had not

one in my hand.

The place was the starlit apartments, a classic 30s, two-story complex, curled around a pool.

Monthly rentals with a motley assortment of long-term and short-term occupants, and plenty of empty apartments, too.

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