The Autograph Man (22 page)

Alex snapped his fingers.

“Oh! Marvin, before I forget—I won’t be needing any milk until next week. I’m going to New York.”

Marvin returned his order book to the pocket of his uniform.

“Going to New York. No milk. Hold the phone. Be still, my beating et cetera.”

Now he reached into a bag on his shoulder and brought out a medium-sized package.

“Before
I
forget, you got another one of these. Gary Fitz—I know him from way back,
way
back—he does the MailEx round here, but he can’t be arsed with this street—too out of his way and up a hill and the rest of it—so he’s started giving them to me when he gets ’em. ’Member? I gave you that one las’ week, back whenever.”

“Gave me?” said Alex absently, taking the spongy packet in his hands and ripping along the red thread. He looked over at his dead car, musing whether he should pop in on Hollywood Alphabet, apologize to Ads, find Esther.

“How’s your head, anyway? Where’s your head at, Alex? Did it come home?”

From a sleeve of cardboard Alex drew out a pristine signed photograph of the popular actress Kitty Alexander, signed boldly to the lighter portion. He reached out an arm for Marvin, to steady himself.

“You all right?”

“I don’t understand,” whispered Alex, looking about wildly.

“It’s not rocket science, mate. It’s just the post. Someone sends it, you get it. Nice photo. Who’s that, then? Hey,
hey
—don’t close the door on me, you’ve got to sign for it, Alex—wait, man—otherwise I don’t get my commission, you get me? There’s no moolah for meelah, otherwise.”

Alex held the photo to his chest and then out in front of him. If it wasn’t real, he wasn’t Alex-Li Tandem. The inscription:
To Alex, finally—Kitty Alexander.

Alex’s face exploded into Technicolor.

“Was this Adam? Jacobs—the video guy, you know, down the road? My friend? Or Rubinfine, the rabbi? Did someone put you up to this? Where did this
come
from?”

Marvin sighed, took the package from Alex and turned it back over. “Return address American, envelope . . . American. I’d say America, man. Look, I can’t stand here all day. It’s just a package. It looks just like the one I gave you last week—”

“Why do you keep saying that? When?”

“Last week—a package from America, I gave you one. My name is Marvin. This is a house. That was your car. There is the sky. Laters, man.”

Marvin did his traditional mosey down the path, but just before the gate Alex braved the cold ground and raced barefoot after him.

“Wait, Marvin, wait. When you gave this other package to me—did you—did I open it? I mean, did you
see
me open it?”

Marvin did the International Gesture for
memory retrieval:
the furrowed brow. “Er . . .
Jesus,
man, I don’t remember. Nah, I don’t think so. You were in a hurry, innit? You were off somewhere, going somewhere—I dunno. I didn’t
see
you for five days after that, anyway. You were
sleeping it off
in inverted commas, if you get me, yeah? Oh, man—I forgot—sign here, please.”

Alex signed Marvin’s clipboard, thunderously dotting his
i.
He grabbed Marvin’s cheeks and kissed Marvin full on the lips.

“
Oi!
Get out of it. I’m not that kind of delivery boy. I’m a milk operative, man. A milk operative. And dat’s it. Wait—
that’s
your signature? That’s not even English. Is that Chinese, man?”

“Now, you see, Marvin,” said beaming Alex-Li, “this is a good fact. You didn’t see me open it. That’s the most important fact yet. Because it means—don’t you see? I’m not insane. I must have opened it at Ads’, when I was high. Which is reckless. But, it’s not insane. I am not insane. On the contrary, I understand. I
understand.
”

“Bit early in the morning for epiphanies,” said Marvin disapprovingly. He gave his shirt one thorough, valedictory shake and shut the gate behind him.

“ANITA,” SAID BREATHLESS ALEX-LI
Tandem, patting down his bed hair and placing the cat box on the ground by his feet. “God, you look great. Look, I’m glad I caught you before you left. . . . You see, this is a bit awkward, but the thing is, I’m going to New York tonight, bit last-minute, you see—and I was just wondering, really—as it’s only for a few days—whether, you might consider taking—”

“No,” said Anita Chang.

AT HOLLYWOOD ALPHABET
the fools of the world were trying to force their late videos into the slot before opening hours. Except Adam was wise to them. He had fashioned the slot to be precisely an inch too small for the videos. It was the gateway through which no man could pass, unless he was truly determined. At nine, then, each morning, Adam calmly took up his position by the slot, sitting on a fold-up chair with the Zohar on his knees, his smooth black fingertips striking against the coarse white grain of the page. He read aloud and in Hebrew.

Rabbi Shim’on said

“This one is not known by any name in the world,

for something sublime is inside him.

It is a secret!

The flowing light of his father shines upon him!

This secret has not spread among the Comrades.

Alex had the knack, though. He knew how to angle his video in such a way that it took a sliver of paint off the door’s woodwork and fell rattling into the waiting cage.

“Tandem?”

“Always.”

Alex’s manic excitement this morning made the opening of the door a trial. It also made the making of tea a trial, and the hearing of the incredible tale. By the time Adam was asked to take Grace, he had been worn down. He said yes as they sat on the three steps that formed the split level of the borrowing area, hugging mugs of green tea, looking out upon a sea of stories.

“You’ll tell Esther, right? Just as I told it to you? You’ll tell her the facts. The whole story.”

“Soon as she’s back from the library. Promise. The whole story. But Alex, have you thought any more about—?”

“Doesn’t it feel good,” said Alex happily, “when everything gets tied up?”

Grace curled round Adam’s ankles. Adam picked her up and held her to him.

“When Lovelear sees this!” said Alex, hugging the package. “There’s a return address, clear as day!”

“Hmm.”

They sat quietly for a time, listening to the morning.

“Adam,” asked Alex suddenly, “what do
you
think is wrong with him?”

Adam visibly brightened, and turned to face him. “What do
you
think is wrong with him?”

Alex frowned. “Well, I don’t know, do I, that’s why I’m asking you.”

“I see,” said Adam quietly.

Adam stood up, with Grace in one hand and
The Girl from Peking
in the other. With a sigh, he put Kitty back in her rightful place between
Gilda
and
The Glenn Miller Story.

“You seem disappointed in me,” said Alex.

Adam shrugged.

“So this story of Torah,” he said, “is merely the garment of Torah. Whoever thinks that the garment is the real Torah—may his spirit deflate! The Torah has a body; this body is clothed in garments: the stories of this world. Fools of the world look only at the garment, the story of Torah; they know nothing more. Beneath the garment is the true Torah, the soul of the soul. They do not look at what is under that garment. As wine must sit in a jar, so Torah must sit in this garment. The Zohar helps us look under this garment. So look only at what is under the garment! So all those words and those stories—they are garments!”

Adam said all of this in Hebrew. The only word Alex understood was Torah.

4.

“No, can’t stop, no way,” said Alex, stepping over the iron bed frame. “Train. And I intend to catch it.”

But Rubinfine, Darvick and Green spread their arms and formed a wall.

“It’s as important as hell, if you’ll pardon my French,” said Darvick, and grabbed on to the waistband of Alex’s jeans.

“You see, the thing is that Rabbi Rubinfine,” said Green pleadingly, taking Alex’s face in his hands, “well, he has something very important to explain to you—he wants to give you his reasons. For doing what he did. Which, though essentially good, may not be immediately apparent. Do you see?”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s
important,
” insisted Darvick, getting a firmer grip, “that the rabbi should be allowed to give a proper account of himself—to say his piece, like any defendant!”

Alex shook himself free and held up his package and drew Kitty from her sheath like a sword. He held her above his head. He felt like the popular film actor John Cusack. He said, “You see this?”—Rubinfine screamed like a woman—“Today this is more important. Okay?
Okay.
Rubinfine—what’s going on?” asked Alex as Rubinfine sat down where he was and knocked the back of his head three times feebly against the monument.

“You see what we’re trying to achieve here?” barked Darvick, motioning to the bedstead and the 2CV it was bound for.

“I see it,” said Alex, simply. “I’m just not interested. Erm . . . hey . . . Rubinfine, are you—”

“Four rabbis,” broke in Green, looking pointedly at Rubinfine, “entered the
Pardes,
the paradisal garden. One gazed and died, one became demented, one cut the plants, and only one, Rabbi Akiva, survived unharmed.”

Rubinfine looked devastated. Darvick chuckled, softly. Green smiled his beatific, full-lipped smile and stepped aside to let Alex pass.

“Rubinfine—did I—”

“Go,” said Green. “You’re late already.”

His heart full of gratitude, Alex began his sprint to catch the train, just audible as it came down from the east, over the peak of the artificial mount from which the great suburb of Mountjoy receives its name. He could hear Rubinfine, his voice carried on the tail end of that same easterly wind, his tone deeply aggrieved. “ ‘Cut the plants’? And that’s meant to mean
what
?”

CHAPTER TEN

Keter

CROWN • Jimmy’s Antiques • Highballs with Lola-Lola • Conspiracy theories • The youth brand • Zen radio • Flying into nothing • Zen
Casablanca
•
The collector saves

1.

Late that night, in the queue to check in, Alex-Li reflected with pleasure on the glories of the day. After seeing the rabbis, he had caught the train to the east of the city and walked into Jimmy’s Antique Market (est. 1926) feeling every inch the conquering hero. Through the covered arches he walked, past the ratty stalls hawking every kind of nostalgia; clothes, glassware, records, posters, stamps, badges, coins, autographs. He had known some of these traders for almost fifteen years, from the days when he came as a boy to spend his pocket money. He had always felt a kinship with them, however reluctant. But today he felt different. He had been set apart. How many of them had found the item they dreamt of, their personal grail? Had Lola-Lola worn Marilyn’s air-vent dress? Had Stuart Pike played Hendrix’s guitar? Had the popular writer J. D. Salinger ever once penned poor, devoted Oliver McSweeney a friendly note?

The peculiar thing about such obsessions is their specificity. Just as a man with a fetish for slight, downy-armed Japanese women is left cold by a big, brassy blonde, so the man who has spent his life in the pursuit of the tap shoes worn by the popular musical star Donald O’Connor can muster no real enthusiasm when the man at the stall to his right shows him the ruffled shirt Henry Daniell wore in
Camille.
All fandom is a form of tunnel vision: warm and dark and infinite in one direction.

ALEX TRAMPED THROUGH
the market, looking for interested parties. Jimmy himself (grandson of original Jimmy) informed him that Lovelear and Dove were around here someplace, but he couldn’t find them. For the first time in his life, he really wanted to see Lovelear—or at least he wanted to show Kitty to someone who would fall to his knees and clasp his hands together in prayer.

But Stuart Pike spotted him first. Under duress, Alex stopped at Pike’s stall, with its mountain of twentieth-century tat (Beatles wigs, cocktail shakers in the shape of hula girls), and sat with him awhile, looking through his serial-killer correspondence. One of the more infamous of Stuart’s “friends” had recently been executed in the state of Texas. The man’s trademark had been to carve the name of his victim into her own forehead. On death row he was married twice and proposed to a dozen times. Stuart was inconsolable.

“Every letter he sent me,” said Stuart, showing him an example, “I could get an American to buy it. Four, five hundred dollars. Roaring bloody trade.”

Stuart was a Yorkshireman of good family. He had been in a glam rock band, once. He owned three paintings by the popular psychopath John Wayne Gacy.

“Do you know who Kitty Alexander is, Stu?”

“Is she the Arizona baby murderer?”

“No, no, she’s, she
was,
an actress. In the fifties. Russian-Italian-American. Very beautiful. Actress.”

“Actresses,” said Pike, as if considering an unusual species variation. “Never been much into actresses. Got the bail bond that Lana signed for her daughter. Actually, I know a feller who’s got Judy’s tranquilizer prescriptions, only signed by the doctor, but still. Better than a kick in the head. Any good to yer?”

IT WAS IN LOLA-LOLA’S
fifties boutique that Alex found Lovelear and satisfaction. Lola-Lola, a peroxide, top-heavy, Muscovite divorcée, was sitting on her pink pouffe, drinking highballs, entertaining Lovelear and Dove with a set of Bettie Page playing cards. Misha, her overworked young man (
“moy malchik!”
), was out front, frantically looking for the left hand of some white kid gloves a customer had set her heart on. In the back room, the popular singer Bobby Darin sang of an underwater date he’d planned. A buzzing lightbulb cast a red light over distressed minks and limp fox furs, UFO toasters, skirts like open umbrellas. On the back wall, a grainy projection of some unknown American family on a sun-spotted lawn, reliving their heyday at an eternal barbecue.

Alex sat cross-legged on the floor next to Dove. He laid Kitty in front of them all. He began his story—shortened, by this point, and refined. Lola-Lola gave a shriek of pleasure at the key moment and placed her flat palm over her cocktail glass. Lovelear opened his mouth to say something, looked closer, and remained silent. Dove thumped Alex on the back and gave him a hug, which affected Alex more than he would admit.

“She just sent it to you,” said Dove respectfully. “No note. No explanation.”

“No note,” said Alex, choking up. “No explanation. It’s just a gift. It’s a
gift.
I think she wants to see me. I think she wants me to go there.”

“Ahlex,” purred Lola-Lola, from the very curl of her throat, “zis is fantastic—after all zis time you deserve it. But still it is not heep to be always smiling like the hep-cat who is eating of all the cream!”

“If you give me and Dove the return address,” Lovelear said, with some grace in defeat, “we’ll look her up for you when we go. How’d that be? Tell you all about it when we get back.”

“Thanks, Lovelear,” said Alex, a few seconds before the penny, as the journalists say, dropped. “Nice thought—but you mightn’t be there for months—and I’m actually off right now, no, I mean, actually tonight, for this Autographicana thing, so—yep—flying across—the—great—big—”

THE GLORIES OF THE
day, then, had been tarnished somewhat. Lovelear and Dove were, at present, exactly twenty-three people behind him in the snake that led to check-in. At every bend they waved their arms like a French mime act, an attempt to get simple messages across, stuff like:
Bag unzipped
and
Better not have weed in that suitcase
and
Look at that fat woman.
It caused Lovelear pain not to be able to deliver to Alex his commentary on every stage of this queue and everybody in it. In the final stretch, it seemed to become too much for him; with despair Alex watched him pushing his way through, negotiating his gut around the public’s matching luggage. He was wearing a tight white T-shirt and some famous blue jeans, having read in a magazine that no man can go wrong in such a combination. The article had been illustrated by photographs of the popular film players Marlon Brando and James Dean. Alex would like to send a picture of Lovelear to that journalist.

“So!” says Lovelear, releasing his massive bag. “What do you think her deal is?”

Lovelear’s bag flumps to the floor and spreads itself over Alex’s feet. Lovelear kicks it but it only shunts an inch into somebody else’s way. Swearing obscenely, he drags it back up, rests it on his hip like a child, and then lunges forward, swinging it onto his back. Lovelear is one of the few in this queue with a bag that requires picking up. Everyone else’s have got the wheels and the cases with the stiff armature, the handle. The goyish guys like Lovelear who lug hold-alls might as well be walking around clasping the necks of dodos. Alex reaches for his notebook but he has left it at home. And as soon as his fingers register the emptiness of his pocket, he feels that he does not wish to make a note, not today. Maybe not ever again. This may be the death of the book. He has grown tired of filing.

“I was back there,” says Lovelear, “thinking it over, right? And I’m thinking: is it a
trap
or something? I mean, could it be? Like her guy Krauser’s got some trumped-up harassment charge against you or something? That
totally
happened to a collector I knew. And then that thing with me and Miss Sheedy, now known as the party of the second part—I’m not saying that’s how it
is.
I’m just saying we don’t
know.
We don’t have all the facts. You’re really just flying into the unknown, that’s all I’m trying to say.”

Since the afternoon, Lovelear had been growing conspiracy-crazy. He did not understand an object’s status as a “gift.” He did not believe, for example, that a film is any more than its publicity, a painting any more than an abstruse way to make a buck. He did not believe that songs or books were in any way substantially different from sandwiches or tires. Product is product. And he did not believe in free lunches. And he did not believe a woman just—

“You know, like just turns
around
and does this thing that she’s refused to do for
anyone
for twenty
years,
without a reason? I mean, does that even make
sense
to you?”

Alex tells him the same thing he told him three hours ago and has tried, in one way or another, to tell him since their acquaintance began: this is not a film.

IN THE PLANE, ALEX
is relieved to find he has been seated on his own. He is in an aisle seat with Esther’s absence next to him. Illegally reclining, he opens his plastic bag, a gift from the plane. The plane is a famous brand of plane, part of a worldwide brand that reaches as low as cola and as high as a jumbo jet. This is a plane for young people and/or the young at heart. With intellectual leanings. And natural style. It is a brand that employs the most shameless flattery to get what it wants.

Our youth is but a brief night: fill it with rapture!

So it is written in a peculiar font on the plastic bag. Alex feels no rapture when he opens this bag; he feels nothing, nothing, not even recognition. Who is this bag for? Who
is
this youth? What does he want with individually wrapped facial cleansing wipes? Why does he like all fonts to be bold, and all colors in flat, uncompromising blocks? What does he do with such a miniature writing pad—what notes is he making?

Alex tries the earphones. Over the radio, the youth can choose from three genres of music, none of which Alex enjoys. Then a comedy channel, whose comedy derives from a feeling of familiarity with a youthful comedian’s life (
So you’re doing the washing up, yeah? And your girl walks in, yeah?
), the recognition of which resemblance makes Alex feel suicidal. Finally, a sub-Zen relaxation tape that consists of an L.A. therapist whispering koans over the sound of the sea. The sea has been enhanced in some way so as to lend it a musicality it never seems to possess when you are standing at its edge worrying about pollutants.

“A distraught mother,”
says the lady, “begged Buddha to heal the dead child in her arms. He did not perform a miracle. He said ‘Bring me a mustard seed from a house where no one—’ ”

“Could you please do your belt up, sir? The light hasn’t gone off yet,” says a stewardess to Alex, who had not even noticed they were in the air.

2.

The autumnal quilt retreats (England is always autumnal from the air); now they are above the clouds. Alex sits in the plane, imagining himself from the perspective of a bored child sitting in a car, looking up. They should swap; this plane is designed for the very young and the very bored. All Alex is required to do for the next six and a half hours is eat and watch television and fall asleep for a while. All this is so earnestly wanted for him,
of
him. No one has desired his comfort and sleep this badly since he was a baby.

Everything possible is being done to make him feel that nothing momentous, like flight, is occurring. At no point does anyone suggest that he and three hundred other strangers of unknown mental health status are trapped in a four-hundred-ton aircraft flying thirty thousand feet up in the air relying on equations of energy and velocity that no one aboard could sketch out in even their most basic form. Everything in this plane is an interface, like the windows on his computer. Nothing on this plane has anything to do with flying, just as his desktop doesn’t have anything to do with the processing of information. Pretty, pretty pictures. Lovely, distracting stories we tell each other. If Alex leans far out into the aisle, he can get a glimpse of the brilliance of the illusion: this private experience he is meant to be having is replicated as far as the eye can see. The same meals, the same detritus (the missing sock, the broken biro, the twisted blanket, the plastic water glass quite exploded), the same angle of recline, the same TV screen showing the same father and son playing catch, the same vigilant mindfulness of one’s personal space. In this context, leaving the interface, crossing over the white line, is pretty unthinkable. It’s a hero’s job—or a madman’s. Accompanied by birdsong, the Zen lady says, “Knowledge is the reward of action, because it is by doing things that we are transformed. Executing a symbolic gesture, truly living through a role, this is when we come to realize the truth inherent in the role. When we suffer its consequences, we fathom and exhaust its contents.” Alex turns to channel 6 in preparation for watching the popular cinema classic
Casablanca.

GOD KNOWS
(
THINKS ALEX
about an hour and a half later, when he is washed in joy) Europe has made many American movies, but America has only ever made one European film:
Casablanca.
Ah, Casablanca! Rick plays chess, not cards. Every European immigrant actor who was in town at the time is in the cast. The music, the script, the cinematography—European ears, and minds, and eyes. Look at the miracle of it! An American movie with no happy ending, made by Europeans, mostly European Jews, in the middle of a World War! Alex can think of no better example of the accidental nature of great art. He knows all the legends. The chaotic set, where the script was written daily; the actors who did not know what their lines would be until they were handed them. Alex puts his chair back one more notch (he has been saving this notch) and marvels at the size of Bogart’s head. He mimes along with lines that seem, to him, almost Zen-like in their purity:

RENAULT:
I’ve often speculated why you don’t return to America. Did you abscond with the church funds? Did you run off with a senator’s wife? I like to think that you killed a man. It’s the romantic in me.

RICK:
It’s a combination of all three.

RENAULT:
And what in Heaven’s name brought you to Casablanca?