The Autograph Man (25 page)

“Hmm, it’s okay. My favorite’s Sam Goldwyn, though. He had
all
the zingers. This one time, he had some foreign actress in his office, and she was hassling him about making more political movies—”

“Look, sugar,”
broke in Alex, accent and everything, “
pictures are for entertainment. Messages should be delivered by Western Union.
I like that one, too. I’m sure it’s apocryphal.”

“Come again?” Honey was glaring at him as if he had broken a trust between them. “You’re sure it’s
what
?”

“No—sorry—all I meant was—he probably never said it . . . like a, you know,
Play it again, Sam
—just a saying, that’s all.”

“Oh . . .”

She lowered her head and looked up from beneath her brow—a soulful, penetrating stare, like a blues singer finding her note.

“Why don’t you just say that, then? I hate people who talk like they swallowed a dictionary.”

“Me too. Sorry. Point taken.”

“See her?”

She pointed to one from the pile Alex had just sold her—a box full of random items he had picked up at Jimmy’s Antiques and barely looked through. Just put a $500 tag on it and called it a collection.

“Know who she is?”

“Theda . . . Bara,” said Alex, and he had to dig for the name. “Vamp? Silent vamp?”

“Yeah, that’s it—her name was like Arab Death, but all switched around—what do you call that again?”

“An anagram?”

“Yes, Mr. Dictionary,
anagram.
And she was born in the shadow of the Sphinx, weaned on serpent’s blood. According to the publicity. She was supposed to be sex on legs. Hard to believe.”

Together, they looked at the photo. A plain, big woman with heavily kohled eyes and pudgy arms. A suffocating asp pressed to her bosom.

“Her real name was Theodosia Goodman,” said Honey, perfectly deadpan. “The woman was from Cincinnati. She was fat-faced, with bad circulation. When her folks in Ohio heard she was born by the Nile, they were pretty damn surprised.”

Alex laughed gleefully.

“See? I know things too. And Miss Beavers here”—Honey pointed to the photo of Louise Beavers, whom Alex dimly recognized as the black maid from a dozen movies—“she wasn’t fat naturally, so she had to eat all the time, you know, to get fat? She wasn’t Southern, either, so she had to fake a Southern accent, and when she played Aunt Delilah someone had to teach that poor bitch to make flapjacks.”

“Really?” said Alex, truly beginning to enjoy himself. “Seems a lot of work. Couldn’t they have just
hired
a fat black Southern woman? I mean, if that’s what they wanted.”

“Wasn’t about what they could get, it was about what people’ll do to be famous. It’s about humiliation. That’s nothing on Stepin Fetchit.”

“Who?”

“Rolling eyes, usually saying
Yessuh
in an elevator or a cotton field or su’in like that? Every person in Hollywood turned up with some nasty old name and the studios change it: Frances Gumm, Archibald Leach, Lucille LeSueur, Phyllis Isley—they all got nice new names, everybody did. Black man turns up in Hollywood by the name of Lincoln Theodore Monroe Perry they rename him Stepin Fetchit. It’s
tiring,
you know?”

This thought seemed to take away her laughter. She stared despondently at her fingers.

“Makes me want to throw up my hands and say MU! to the whole thing. MUUUU!”

Alex looked quickly about the restaurant, but there was no one to be embarrassed but him.

“That’s a Buddhist word,” said Honey, retrieving her hands from the air, placing them neatly on her lap. “It’s how I let go of things.”

“You’re a Buddhist?”

“In my own way. Why? That so strange? What the hell are you?”

Alex retracted his turtle head. “Er . . . nothing, really. Jewish. I mean, by birth.”

Honey made a sound of satisfaction. Alex made it back at her.

“You’re fairly confrontational for a Buddhist, that’s all I meant. No offense.”

“Yeah, well, it’s in my own way, like I said. I’m
far
from satori, that’s the truth. So. I’m learning, it’s a long road, next question.” She leant in towards him, expectant. “Come on, come
on
—you so full of questions—nothing else you wanna know?”

Her face was a brazen challenge, the kind no woman in England ever wears unless drunk and talking to her mother.

“Look, I haven’t
got
any other questions.
“Man,”
said Alex, folding his arms, “You’re very . . . you know? I mean . . . you’re quite . . .”

Honey smiled hugely, so that Alex was shown every one of her claret gums. “Yeah, I am, ain’t I?” She patted his hand, “I’m just kidding with you, Alex-Li, really. I’m just a little up-front. That’s the word you’re looking for. Know who that is?” she said, pointing to a picture that lay between the two of them, a bosomy girl with a tower of dark hair. Alex identified her correctly.

“Right,” said Honey, “An’ I’m a little like Gypsy. Her real name was Louise Hovick, by the way—but that’s all she lied about. She never pretended she wasn’t what she was. That’s like me.”

Alex, who had no idea what they were talking about again, nodded amiably and started collecting up his things. As she began to do the same, a piece of hair from her bun fell into her face, and suddenly she was familiar all over again.

“Do I . . . ?” began Alex, bringing up his bag from the floor and placing it on the table.

“Do you
what
?”

“Nothing—I just. . . . Do I . . .
recognize
you? Or . . . ?”

“I don’t know,” said Honey flatly. “Do you?”

It seemed very quiet. Alex searched for an appropriate facial gesture but could find nothing suitable.

“We better get going,” said Honey, looking away from him. “We’re done here. And it’s time.”

“Right, right,” said Alex, and put a hand up for the bill. He peeled off the gloves she had given him, but she wouldn’t have them back so he shoved them in his bag. Outside, a riot of car horns started up. As Honey looked out, a waiter passed, and Alex fumbled with the tea tray trying to pass it to him. He tilted to one side, the waiter tried to steady things. Accidentally, Alex touched Honey’s arm again.

She sprang from her chair once more and headed for the bathroom, and over Alex’s flurried apology she called out, over her shoulder, “You go in, go on, go in. I’ll see you in there. Don’t worry about it. Shit happens. That’s Buddhism too. Nice doing business with you, Alex-Li Tandem.”

2.

The tiny blonde at the threshold furnished Alex with a name tag and a plan of the venue. With a high-mooned nail, she pointed out the must-see rooms at Autographicana this year: the Jedicon Room (in which minor players from the popular films held court), an Apollo Astronauts Room (an undistinguished mission that Alex had never heard of and suspected had never taken place), and an alcove where one might queue for the autographs of two of the men who had blown up Hiroshima, here again for the second year running. These all came off the main room, the Rothendale Hotel’s huge, airless “Miami Dream” ballroom. Plastic palms, murals of tropical scenes (the Rothendale was very big on murals), a timetable of events. Tomorrow Autographicana had to make way for Lorna Berkowitz’s bat mitzvah. There were a hundred stalls or more. There were at least a thousand Autograph Men, milling. In their bad trousers. Alex’s first instinct was to turn and run, screaming
MUUUUUUUUU
through the streets of the city.

ONLY THERE WERE THINGS
in here he wanted. Things which worked on him at a subterranean level, far beneath his rational mind: he needed them. So. Welcome to the twentieth century in miniature. Castro’s signature, Oswald’s shirt, Connery’s check stubs, Streisand’s concert program, the AT-AT (still in its original box), Ali’s gloves, an envelope Joyce forgot to post, a photo of Darth signed by both the voice and the body, Dorothy’s ruby slippers (rhinestones, but as expensive as rubies now), Kennedy’s Christmas card, Himmler’s exercise book—

“Himmler’s exercise book?” repeated Alex, craning forward.

Karl and Anna, the pleasant young German couple whose stall it was, smiled. Anna brushed some dust from the plastic flyleaf.

“Oh, yes,” said Karl, shrugging. “Very rare. He was fifteen. This is where he did his workings, you see? And here he got one wrong, you see? Very funny when people see this, you know?” Karl laughed, as if demonstrating what laughter sounds like. “They like this in a way because it is more personal, you know, like this. And the price on it is about fourteen hundred dollars, you know? Rare, rare.”

“Some people have a problem with this,” said Anna, smiling. “But we do not.”

“Right,” said Alex.

“Some people, you know,” said Anna although Alex did not know, “some people make a rule so they say, you know, no Nazis and no serial killers. But . . .”

Anna smiled again. She had the kind of wholly symmetrical face for which smiling is ill-advised. The more she did it, the closer the resemblance to an advert for home insurance.

“History is history,” said Karl decisively, and turned the page. There, pressed between plastic, was a napkin Sinatra had signed.

“Right,” said Alex.

Karl turned the page again. There, pressed between plastic, was Hitler’s tiny signature under a routine policy document. Karl frowned.

“Sinatra’s in the wrong section,” he said. “Should be in Fifties Crooners.”

“Don’t you think—” began Alex, but then came a terrific thud at his back. It was Lovelear.

“Hey, hombre, see anything you like?”

They began to amble around the room, Autograph Men lost in a crowd of their fellows. As a survival technique, Alex persisted with the idea that he was not one of them. That he walked among them, but was not of their nature.

“Lovelear . . .”

“Uh-huh?”

“How do you feel about . . . I don’t know . . . about stuff like Himmler’s exercise book. . . . assorted Nazis. Lot of Nazi stuff this year. You know? It’s like it’s the year of the fascists or something.”

“Oh, sure,” said Lovelear, earnestly. “And who knew? I had Göring ten years ago but nobody’d take it off me, everybody made me feel bad about it. . . . Finally I sold it for, like, nothing. You know how much that’s worth now? Goes to show you, man, these things go in cycles.”

Alec hugged himself. He felt nauseous. The air conditioning kept coming despite the snow outside. He felt himself breathing the artificial air of a chiller cabinet, like he was being refrigerated, artificially preserved for something. He could feel himself growing hysterical. And they just keep on collecting! As if the world could be saved this way! As if impermanence were not the golden rule! And can I get Death’s autograph, too? Have you got a plastic sheath for that, Mr. Autograph Man?

“Dove’s still in line for the Hiroshima guys,” said Lovelear, cheerfully; he had just discovered a muffin in his pocket. “Pretty nice guys, actually. Golfers. That’s not where the action is, though. Hey, Tandem, you’re hurting my arm!
Jesus.
Chill out a little—it’s not so bad. It’s kind of fun. No, the
action
is in the Playboy corner. Trust me, they’re pretty ripe, but they’re signing pictures of back in the day for twenty-five bucks a pop. You wanna meet Miss January 1974? I just met her, man. Samantha Budnitz. She’s a little leathery but she looks pretty good still.”

THEY QUEUED FOR THE
Bunnies who no longer looked like themselves. They queued for the accidental agents of mass destruction. They queued for the five ancient astronauts, heartbreaking in their bright bomber jackets. A nervy woman with Republican hair made everybody write their names on Post-its, which were then passed to the astronauts, who, with watery eyes, looked from the Post-it to the person, back and forth, waiting for the alchemy of cognition, too near-sighted to read the names. . . . In the Jedicon Room, Lovelear had a fight with an Ewok over an obscure scrap of dialogue while Alex watched the Ewok’s ten-year-old daughter, Lo (already a head taller than her father), do a bored cross-eyed tongue-out headstand against the wall in her little white socks. A disgruntled Ewok told Alex that he made only twenty-five percent of the retail price of a signed picture because Ewoks had to buy the pictures in the first place, off the studio. Another told Alex that personally, as a person of restricted growth,
yes as a ha ha, yes it’s okay, you can say it,
as a
midget,
he considered the popular cinema director George Lucas to be one of the great liberators of his people.

But after the kid stuff was finished, the business got done. The business was everywhere. The mood turned from carnival to conference. You couldn’t cross the room without making a deal or overhearing one done. People Alex had met only virtually appeared before him now in hideous material form: Freek Ulmann from Philadelphia, Albie Gottelmeyer from Denmark, Pip Thomas from Maine, Richard Young from Birmingham. All these people now had their bodies, their faces. He traded with them all, listened to them. They needed to talk. Maybe the business itself was simply an excuse for this need. Alex learnt of the dissatisfactions of wives in towns he had never visited and never wanted to. The grade averages of various children passed under review. Richard Young told him he could never truly love a flat-chested woman, no matter how kind she might be to him. A stranger called Ernie Popper told him that most days he wished he were dead.

Familiar faces too. Alex and Lovelear ran into Baguley, negotiating to buy, of all things, a forged Kitty from a notorious Swedish crook. At the point Alex arrived, each man believed himself to be on the verge of pulling off a magnificent sting. The Swede knew he was selling a fake. Baguley thought he was buying the real thing for a steal.

“The Swede,” said Baguley, turning from the stall and stage-whispering in Alex’s ear, “is a total dullard. Used to be a bloody gynecologist. Before that he rode a
bike
or something. Doesn’t know a thing. Doesn’t realize what he’s got. Found four Kittys in an attic, some old director’s house—doesn’t even know who she is! He’s going to take eight hundred dollars each Kitty and be none the wiser.
Marvelous.
”