The Autograph Man (23 page)

RICK:
My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.

RENAULT:
The waters? What waters? We’re in the desert.

RICK:
I was misinformed.

Facts. When Bergman and Bogart kiss, what looks like a moon turns out to be a searchlight. When Lorre is up against the wall, his eyes completely revolve. Did you know that Ronald Reagan was seriously considered for the role of Rick? That
Play it again, Sam
is never said? That Bergman thought Bogart a bore?

“That the mechanics—you see the guys round the airplane? In the final scene? They were midgets, actually. People don’t know—the facts just get lost. Seriously, it’s a fact. The plane was just a cardboard cutout and they couldn’t get the perspective right, so they hired midgets to play the mechanics, can you
believe
that?” Alex asks his right-hand neighbor, who is simply trying to watch the film in peace. The collector is the savior of objects that might otherwise be lost.

BOOK TWO

Roebling Heights

THE ZEN OF
ALEX-LI TANDEM

You see, this is my life! It always will be!
There’s nothing else. Just us, and the cameras, and those wonderful people out there in the dark.

—Sunset Boulevard,
screenplay by Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder and D. M. Marshman, Jr.

In the twelfth century the Chinese master Kakuan drew the pictures of ten bulls with a written commentary.
The bull is the eternal principle of life, truth in action.
The ten bulls represent sequent steps in the
realization of one’s true nature.

—Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki,
Zen Flesh, Zen Bones

CHAPTER ONE

The Search for the Bull

1.

“The longest Sabbath of my life,” concluded Tandem, and cursed Lovelear, whose bag he was carrying. Pausing, he dropped it to the floor, opened his hand and peered into a swollen landscape of red ridges, bloodless islets, like an aerial view of Japan. For the second time today, it was very early on a chilly and unforgiving Saturday morning. What more confirmation does a man need of the bitter futility of international travel?

He bent down once more and seized the bag. Dove beside him was on a peculiar kind of autopilot, pushing a trolley with his eyes closed through a dead president’s airport. Lovelear, despite the bravado, was in fact deeply terrified of flight and had repaired to a nearby restroom, to vomit with relief.

“Look, Ian: New York,” said Alex, as they approached the huge revolving door.

“New York, yeah,” said Ian.

“Ever been to New York, Ian?”

“Can’t say I have, no.”

“Interested in looking at it?”

“Everything looks . . .” muttered Ian, and stepped out. It was snowing. Alex opened his mouth to ask a question, but a sweep of it met him full in the face, lacing his tongue with a dirty, metallic taste of heaven.

“. . . the same at two in the morning,” said Ian softly, laying his head along the trolley’s bar. “Everything does.”

Amidst the snow-blown interference of the scene, Alex could make out the famous taxis, coming and going so that there was never a lack or an abundance and no man had to wait very long.

“Feel like I’ve been here before, a bit,” said Ian, levering his eyes open at the moment a cab stopped before them and wound down its window. “Familiar, like from another life or something. That’s weird, innit? Considering I—”

“Taxi Driver,”
said Alex flatly, removing bags from the trolley,
“Manhattan, Last Exit to Brooklyn, On the Waterfront, Mean Streets, Miracle on 34th Street, West Side Story, On the Town, Serpico, The Sunshine Boys, Sophie’s Choice—”

“All About Eve,”
broke in the driver,
“King Kong, Wall Street, Moonstruck, The Producers, Plaza Suite, The Out-of-Towners
original and remake,
The Godfather
parts one and two,
Kramer vs. Kramer
and freakin’
Ghostbusters.
We can do this all morning, my friend. The meter’s running.”

“Everyone’s been here before, Dove,” said Alex, opening the cab door.

“Are you kidding?” cried Lovelear, spat out suddenly by the revolving doors and thinking of a different film altogether. “You can get
limousines
around the corner.”

“AH, THIS IS
the
life,
” said Lovelear emphatically, making the awkward International Gesture of luxury (hands behind head, legs extended with feet crossed). “I mean, this is
the
life.”

Alex was unsure. Somehow, the limousine, though improbably long on the outside, did not seem, once one was inside, to be any roomier than a normal yellow cab. It was dirty too, the worn upholstery stained many times over by other thrill seekers (How many blow jobs, thought Alex, and how many champagne corks? How did so many people come to believe that these things are to be done in limousines?) From two dusty decanters, pale, warm whiskey came, to which Lovelear was gleefully adding flat, warm cola and raising his glass for regular toasts to the snow, the city, the cops, the skyline, the ideal hot dog, and the curvy girl in the toll booth who had not yet killed herself. Lovelear was from Minnesota.

And they were not there yet. The last of the suburbs were still passing by, hunkered down for the winter and still as Sunday. Alex felt a particular yearning for the suburbs between an airport and a city; he wanted to stop the car and knock on one of those pine doors, and squeeze in between the fireman and his wife until someone rose to make breakfast and the kids started to yell. But you need a specific address for the suburbs. Only in the city can you be dropped off in front of statues and behind opera houses. The suburbs are by invitation only. And here came the city anyway, insistent, unavoidable. Lovelear grabbed the back of Dove’s head and pointed it in the right direction.

“Okay, okay, okay, Dove—get ready, no, come closer to the window, okay, are you ready? Okay . . . look . . . now!”

The car achieved the hump in the road and the city appeared miraculously before them, outlined in moonlight, the concrete EKG of an ecstatic vision people have of themselves. Alex was as moved by it as the next man, more than—it was the only other town in the world for which he had ever felt desire. But sometimes you have to turn your eyes from a mistress or you’ll never go home to your wife; Alex turned now, to look out of the other window, to the harbor and beyond that to melancholy Brooklyn (from the Dutch
Breuckelen,
Broken Land), and to a glimpse of the stone lady herself. The sword in her hand seemed only just to have been raised aloft, and the snow swirled about her form.

2.

Out of the traffic, into the town. To the Rothendale Hotel, a massive, forlorn building. Its old brick had been covered in new paint, and two unsightly extensions built on each side. The street had gentrified; the Rothendale had been forced to keep pace. From the outside it seemed dazed at its own sudden respectability, like a dissolute grandfather forced into a suit and dragged to a wedding.

Inside, a corporate virus had spread from the red-and-gold-trim wallpaper, to the odorless flowers, to the fake-marble water feature, to the repeating monogram pattern in the carpet, to the professional smile that was being laid on Alex right now.

“And you gentlemen,” said the meticulous young man, “are here for the Autographicana Fair?”

Alex considered his walk across the lobby. Which gesture had given him away? Cheerlessly, he took his Autographicana goodie bag and listened to Lovelear interrogate the young man about the hotel’s facilities.

“It’s three
A.M
,” said Lovelear, triumphant in the hallway a few minutes later, “and I could go for a Jacuzzi on the
roof.
You think you could do that in any of those London dumps? Hmm? I could go for a Jacuzzi on the roof
right now.
”

“Then why don’t you?”

“What?”

“Then why don’t you?”

The lift arrived. They got in it.

“I’ll come with you, if you like,” said amiable Dove as the sixth floor sank beneath them. “I’m feeling quite awake actually, now.”

“It’s three
A.M.
, Dove,” said Lovelear wearily, then shook his head and got out on the seventh.

“ ’Course, there’s no thirteenth, you know,” said Dove, who always took silence in a confined space as a personal failure. “In American lifts—elevators, I should say. They don’t have a thirteenth floor.”

It was rare in the extreme for Dove to produce any fact that Alex did not already know, but he did not know that one. He looked up without expectation at the sequential lights; he was surprised.

“Imagine,” said Dove, sleepily. “Ancient superstition like that in a big modern country like this. Mental. ’Slike believing in the tooth fairy. Or bloody resurrection.”

“Good night, Dove,” said Alex, with a generous smile.

“Yeah. Night, Tandem.”

From his bedroom window, Alex could see more famous sights than any Autograph Man has a right to expect. He was being invited to marvel at the withdrawing darkness, at the dawn, at the daily count of enchanted objects: green glass, spires that seemed to pierce fat clouds, theatrical debuts, notorious murders, men going about their days. Tentatively, Alex dug about in his bag for his camera. As his fingers brushed the lens cap, he caught sight of a complimentary magazine on the dresser which had as its cover image the view from his hotel window. Feeling oddly oppressed, he closed the curtain and opened a map.

He was looking for Roebling Heights, Brooklyn, the return address on his package. There was no house number, no other details. He would simply have to go up there and ask around, like the popular detective Philip Marlowe. If that didn’t work he had Plan B, which consisted of going to the Lower East Side, finding Kitty’s fan-club president, Krauser, and beating it out of him, like the popular actor Jimmy Cagney. Yeah, like Jimmy Cagney, God of all scrappers.

What da ya hear?

What da ya say?

On the map he found tiny abbreviated Roebling squeezed between the Black area, the Hipster area, the Hasid area and the Polish area, at the end of a subway line he had never used and never heard of. In the index of his guidebook, Roebling Heights made only one appearance and warranted only one comment.
Roebling,
Alex read,
has seen better days. It has also seen so-so days and worse days. Now it’s settling for just days.
Everybody thinks they’re a comedian, even the writers of guidebooks.

ALEX STOOD IN
the middle of his room and took some deep breaths. He was far from home, far. The only way he could travel this kind of distance was to make wherever he went as much like Mountjoy as possible. To this end, when he packed to leave, he took what everybody takes—clothes and essentials—but he also placed his extended arm upon his desk and swept whatever was there into a carrier bag, which he emptied now onto his hotel bed with the intention of spreading the items around the place. This was traveling without moving. Receipts, bills, unread books with snapped spines, pushpins, Post-Its, the famous pound note (this he Blu-Tacked above the door), a very old hair clip of Esther’s, an aging muffin, half a joint. The joint was a surprise and he pounced on it, smoking it in and out of the shower, during his brief bathroom perfunctories, and then reaching its coiled tip as he nipped naked into the tightly made bed and fought the sheets for the space he had paid for. By his eye, a red light on the phone flashed on, off. He picked up the receiver, but that didn’t stop it, so he phoned reception.

“The light, sir? That would be the light that indicates you have some messages to pick up on your voicemail.”

“I just got to the hotel.”

“Yes, sir, but your voicemail has been active since noon.”

“My voicemail precedes me.”

“It sure does, sir.”

Alex had three messages. He was halfway through the first before he recognized the speaker—that low, throaty New York sound. Something in the timbre of her voice told you she was black. Honey Richardson. He had never met her in the flesh, but they had traded four or five times over the past two years, by phone or computer. And now he remembered he had arranged to meet her at noon, before the big show. Alex put out his joint on the leg of the side table. Her voice was terrific. Like being smacked and stroked at the same time.

Sinking into his pillow, he listened to the music of it without listening to any of the words. Then it was over. He had to play it again to discover that she wished to change their meeting place: instead of the corner of such and such, she would prefer it if they met at the corner of somewhere else. This would be, she said, more appropriate. Appropriate?

Alex hitched up on one elbow, intrigued, and hit the button. It was Honey again, this time with a further explanation of why the previous arrangement had been found wanting. Too busy an area, such a
damn rush of everyone,
and in her situation . . . But this sentence was left unfinished. She seemed to think Alex knew something of her situation that he did not. He knew only that she was an inexperienced dealer, a
woman
dealer, who bought stuff from Alex that he couldn’t give away to anyone else. In the dark, Alex felt around for a pen to take down her number, but it was gone before he put pencil to complimentary pad. And she was still talking—the message was
endless.
Alex sat himself up in bed as she told an ambulatory tale about a recent shopping trip with her sister, Trudy, who was a dental technician, see, and they had wandered into a crowded area and two people came out of nowhere and started yelling and trying to— But here the beep sounded loud in Alex’s ear. Bemused, Alex pressed the button to listen to the third. Honey said:

“Look, here’s how it is. I think the best for everybody concerned is if I meet you in the lobby of the hotel and we just come right into the restaurant, do our business and then leave, and I don’t want anything else suggested or implied and my story is mine and it’s yesterday’s news and I’m just here for the business, as anyone in this business will tell you. I’ve been everybody’s goddamn anecdote and I won’t be yours. I’ll be wearing gloves. Good night.”

Alex phoned reception to find out if Honey Richardson was staying at the hotel. She was staying in the next room.