The Autograph Man (27 page)

“This one,” he said, drawing his top lip tight over his gums, “this one is just strong as hell. And this one here is less strong, but it’s ethical. Everybody gets paid their folding green, including the brown ladies who get it out of the field, if indeed coffee even comes from a field—I’m just going by what my grandson tells me. But you’re boring me into a wooden kimono, so I’m taking it strong, and nix on the moo-juice. Keeps me lively. Anyone else?”

He hitched his little potbelly up on the bar, lifted his feet off the floor and loomed in towards Honey, who shrank back, knocking a pyramid of pizza boxes to the floor.

“Hey, you. I know you? You in pictures? This guy over here, he could stand one more greasing, he’s not slick enough—but
you.
You’re a slinky piece of homework.”

Krauser turned his face to the ceiling, put his big lips to an invisible trumpet, played it, sang:
Struttin’ . . . struttin’ with some barbecue, barbecuoooo
. . . Know what my grandson calls himself? Jamal Queeks. His mother looked just like you. And thereby hangs a tale. And there goes—say bye-bye!—there goes two thousand years of tradition. It’s a goddamn shame. Well, isn’t it?”

Honey pressed her bag to her chest and walked over to the door, opened it, stood proudly, waiting. Alex persisted.

“Mr. Krauser—please listen to me. I think Miss Alexander—I think she might be glad to see me. It’s more than that: I need to see her. I know that sounds weird. I waited such a long time—and then she sent me her autograph. Twice.”

“Put that in wri-ting,” said Krauser to the rhythm of a sax solo, tapping out a beat with the hubs of his palms. “And I’ll pa-a-aste it in my scra-hap-book.”

“He has them right in his bag,” said impassioned Honey, stepping forward from the doorway. Her eyes were burning, her hands shook, and Alex felt a startling throb of gratitude and love for this new friend who would abandon her Zen for him in this way.

“Look,” she was saying, “we came out here, you know? We came out here. This guy’s from London, England. He didn’t have to? Nobody
has
to, you know? And I’ll say it, he’s too polite to say it: this boy’s been writing your
crazy
ass for fifteen years—”

“Thirteen, actually,” said Alex, raising a hand. “Thirteen years.”

“Okay, so
thirteen
—and without replies, and so what? So this: so he
deserves
this. People like you don’t signify without people like him—you get that much information? You understand that?
Asshole,
” said Honey, in response to a clownish face Krauser made. “
Racist
asshole. And let’s get real here, anyway. It’s not as if Miss Alexander is exactly prime-time these days. Am I lying? Am I saying something here which ain’t the case?”

Krauser launched off the bar forward into the room and landed four inches short of a serious man. A mountainous vein that ran from his temple to the back of his left ear stood raised and angry.

“Now,” said Krauser, “don’t you chew the scenery with me, Miss Thang. I’m no crazier than your mother was. It’s like this: I lack patience when it comes to two kinds of people: Moochers and Autograph Hounds. Here are the facts: Miss Alexander does not send anything unless
I
send it for her. And I do not send anything. There it is, soup and nuts. Miss Alexander does not have
time
for Autograph Hounds. She is the greatest star in the firmament, as they used to say back when it meant something. A Hum Hum Dinger from Dingersville. Protecting Miss Alexander from people like you is what I do. And that rhymes. Ladies. Gentlemen.”

They were escorted to the door.

2.

The center of Roebling. Here a wide, pretty street steadily climbs its hill and shoveling a share of the snow is every man’s civic responsibility. Honey and Alex have spent an afternoon walking up and down this street, asking questions in the local shops, wandering down side streets to no end. Each waiting for the other to give up. When a coffee shop presents itself for the eighth time, it is Alex who raises his shoulders, puts his arm round Honey’s waist, and moves them both into the warmth. And the world continues. A Spanish-speaking kid is running past, screaming something. He dives behind a Jeep, misses his big brother’s ice-hearted snowball, pops back up and gets it in the neck. The black kids are starched for church. One rabbi, adrift. A few people are improbably fat, but no more than a few. A city truck disperses pink grit like industrial candy along the road. This is the desirable end of Roebling: the side streets are lined with dignified, crumbling brownstones that draw up their shabby skirts and disappear just before the black area and one block into the Jewish. At least one aging American novelist is known to live here. He can be seen, prominently displayed in the bookshop window, and sometimes in the flesh, trying to convince young American men to shoot hoops with him.

At the hill’s crest lies the neglected Roebling Zoo. Here, a big-bottomed capybara, or even a reclusive family of gophers, can legitimately feel themselves star attractions. The snakes have all gone. There never were any tigers. And on a Sunday, this zoo attracts only the hipsters, looking to be distracted from their hangovers, maybe, or just charmed by the crazy dances of captive jackrabbits. From their coffee-shop window seats, Honey and Alex watch a steady drift of them, these lovely, sorrowful kids who are never in a hurry. Gangly, sloping, beautiful, wearing a generation’s forgotten coats, tramping uphill in the snow.

“And so,” says Honey, sprinkling chocolate, “she’s having it today, this operation? But it’s not risky, right? ’Cos you wouldn’t be here, obviously, if that was the deal.”

Alex is convincing Honey who is convincing Alex who is convincing Honey that removing a pacemaker is a routine procedure. They both use this phrase,
routine procedure,
unwittingly stolen from a long-running television show. Frantically, they agree with each other (“Right”; “Right”;
“Right”
).

“This is exactly it—I just want to have the relevant facts. Ask someone, have someone tell me. That’s what I’m used to. I grew up . . . my dad was a doctor.”

“Yeah? What he do now?”

“Turns in grave, mostly. Dead.”

“Well. I’m sorry.”

“So you should be. It was your bloody fault in the first place. Oi,” said Tandem, dismissing his homely china cup and reaching out for Honey’s steaming glass packed in sedimentary layers, beige, brown, deeper brown, white. “What’s that like? Why’s it look better than mine?”

Honey gathered a spoonful of the highest level of fluff and held it out for him.

“See,” she said, bringing the steel to his lips, “you got a black decaf. Because you the kind who like depriving himself. You think you’re going to benefit by drinking that. But the reality is, you’re miserable. Ain’t no benefit involved. Now
this,
it’s got a chocolate, mocha and caramel dust on it—see, tastes good, don’t it?—with half-and-half, whipped cream, a shot of Kahlúa, toffee pieces on top
. . .
”

Alex opened his mouth and closed it again around the spoon.

“See, now that’s good, ain’t it?”

Alex nodded helplessly.

“And it teaches me the impermanence of pleasure—that’s my Zen, again, you see? It won’t do me no good, but it’s a pleasure while it lasts. And when I die, I can add it to the list of pleasures that fleeted. Flighted. Is that a word, fleeted?”

Alex removed the spoon and assumed the hounded saucer eyes of the popular comedian Buster Keaton.

“That was so good it
hurt.
” Honey laughed, dipped her head and rose with a cream mustache. “The funny thing is, once you’ve actually had pleasure,
real
pleasure, it’s fine letting go of it. It ain’t a thing. It’s a
no
-thing.”

“You should go on the Shopping Channel. They need more Buddhists on that channel. I really think—”

“Krauser.”

“Huh?”

Honey took possession of another man’s newspaper and spread it out against the shop’s window. From behind the local headline (an unfortunate reprobate had vanished with his stepdaughter) Krauser materialized, a tricky mix of man and newsprint in the glassy sun. He was trying to cross the street at its most hazardous point; he had on a waxy green raincoat with wrinkled hood, his arms outstretched as if this were in some way useful for the passing traffic. He vanished for a moment behind a dark-inked advert claiming to improve your memory skills and reappeared in the middle of a political scandal.

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE
these days to follow a man or quit a job without an encyclopedia of cinematic gesture crowding you out. Honey snorted at Alex, who set out hugging walls and scuttling on tiptoe, but soon enough she herself made use of a pair of shades and an unconvincing whistle. Then it turned out Krauser’s hat was connected to a transistor radio—the wire went round the brim and behind his ear; an aerial protruded from his pocket; he was oblivious to them both, engrossed in a political news show of some kind. (“Zimbabwe!” he was heard to shout, as he took a sudden left into a quiet road. “Now he’s on to
Zimbabwe
?”)

Four doors from the end of this street, he stopped. Turned off the dial by his ear. Honey and Alex hung back by some garbage cans. They watched him skip up the front steps of a turn-of-the-century brownstone, ring the bell and get let it in by machinery. The door closed behind him. Like good detectives, they watched the spot where he had last been, jogging up and down and breathing on their hands. Alex rolled a cigarette.

“This is ridiculous—this
can’t
be her place.”

“Why not?”

“It’s too easy. It’s . . . This just doesn’t happen that I want something and then it’s just
there.
With no
effort.
That’s not how it happens.”

Honey put her hands round his waist and squeezed. “Baby, that’s
exactly
how it happens. Somedays, shit just lands in your lap, believe me, I know. Gimme some of that smoke when it’s ready, huh?”

“Is this the plan, this? Waiting?” he asked, trying to use the flank of Honey to light the thing out of the wind.

“The plan is no plan. Waiting is what we’re doing.”

“And when the waiting’s finished?”

“Then something else’ll happen, I guess.”

The wait was not long. Ten minutes later the door opened once more and Krauser stepped out. A pair of arms passed him a small, writhing bundle and a lead; the door closed, he connected the one to the other, and off up the hill he went trailing a compact dog. It was dressed in a red velveteen coat, it had a corkscrew tail and it was walking in that certain highfalutin way as if everybody and the President were looking at it.

CHAPTER FOUR

Catching the Bull

1.

Not yet! He didn’t want her caught, not yet! But the steps went up—wide, cold, mineral. Honey was already there, finger on the bell. She turned and grinned. He was on the stairs. Admiring a tuft of moss, the way it had pushed through stone. Green through the snow. Where were these steps going? He held out an arm, but Honey rang the doorbell anyway. Another step, icy. And taking him closer to a world with one less sacred thing in it. Because fans do this: they preserve something, like the swirl of color in a marble, in the solid glass of their enthusiasm. He had done that, Alex. He had kept her as perfect and particular as a childhood memory.

A voice calls from an upper window, three stories up at least. He can see nothing. The glittering windows of these brownstones share the sun, parcel it out. She calls to say she is coming. Honey turns again, grins again. Gives him the International Gesture of well-being, the vertical thumbs.

Alex squints at the crumbling plaster of this high-arched Roebling doorway. Then he closes his eyes. Now here is its replacement: Celebration Pictures’ grand Palladian façade, splendid in the California sunshine, a lifetime ago. It is a photograph Alex owns. At the moment it was taken, a Crawford or a Cooper swept by in a smudgy white Rolls-Royce. Three harried writers (sleeves rolled, chewing cigarettes) leant against the right-hand pillar, and a headless costume girl was cropped out of the shot. And in the foreground, a new arrival. Kitty Alexander, smiling devotedly into a deceitful wide-angle lens that loved twelve starlets altogether. Second row, third on the right.

It’s not a famous shot, but he loved it. Because this is the beginning of her. She had recently lost her real name, Katya Allesandro (“Too Russian,” said the producer Lee J. Komsky, “and also too damn Eyetalian”), and some weight (the studio put her on its infamous ACT diet: apples, coffee and tobacco), and the first assaults were made on her extravagant accent (this last never succeeded; she remains a Russian-Italian child of Capri).

That is the face. The one he loves. Why subject it to Buddha’s rules of impermanence? This is the face. Her forehead melts into her nose like buttermilk down a ladle, as it did on Garbo. She has the bone structure of a nymph, heart-shaped and high-cheekboned. Her eyes are green, her hair is black and bobbed. Her plucked brows can’t hide their natural soulful curve, like two sighing bridges over Italian water. That face can and will play everything from disenfranchised Russian princess to flighty Parisian ballerina to Chinese immigrant. Maybe it is precisely the fluidity of the face that stops her from being a star of the first order. It is a face that will do whatever you ask of it, so full of gesture and movement that the critics will offer the futile, consolatory comment that the silents died too early, before their greatest star was out of her nursery. It is a face, as Hedda Hopper had it (the alliteration itself brings on nostalgia!), to be conjured with, it is made of magic, and it is no more.

2.

“Max? But you are not Max. Where is Max now? Are you coming from Max?”

The sun is everywhere, a cosmic spotlight, and she grabs his sleeve, a firm grip. Her face, folded over many times, still makes sense. She remains a beautiful woman. Her makeup is not too much, only a little cornflower blue flaking from the eyelids. There is no hotel robe, no black silk Parisian slippers with the exploded-dandelion toes. No sign of the white, queenly towel wrapping a steeple of wet hair. Instead, a simple pair of high-waisted jeans with red sneakers and black shirt. The swell of her breasts is weird, youthful. She has one plain clip in her thin, but still bobbed, gray hair. The sole embellishment is the fabulous brooch that has landed on her throat, a ruby-encrusted butterfly.

“Do you know something about computers? I am trying to send the message and I do as I am told, all the instructions that I have, and I
cannot
—I don’t know what is it, but something is not correct. I must have done something,
God
knows what. Can you imagine? That I am having to fuss with this all afternoon by myself—Max walks Lucia, so, that is this, I suppose, can you
imagine
?”

“Miss Alexander?” asked Honey, with a fantastic smile, and bent in towards her, for Kitty was small, smaller than one would imagine, as they always are.

Kitty looked up, confused, her palm still pressed to Alex’s wrist. Her skin here was puffy and risen, like pastry. Alex’s leg was doing something uncontrollable. So was the city. The city was carrying on—he couldn’t stop it. A boy in the street punched another boy in the arm even though the boy didn’t exist and neither did his friend. And Alex saw it happen. And he could see her. This time there was no glass between them. The viewing was not one-way. She could see him too. She was inspecting both him and Honey: a shrewd, amused study.

“Yes,” answered Kitty, genially, “Yes, this is of course my name. But I think I don’t know you—I would remember, you are very striking—so, I am sorry you must leave now, unless you have some idea of computers and you are not a psychopathic killer or the like, which you could say—but how would I believe?”

She laughed quickly, and touched a shaking, involuntary finger to Honey’s forearm.

“I think it is when
Lucia
goes,” she confided, “I lose my concentration and things get unnecessarily complicated, and I tell Max, I can walk, I’m not an invalid, but the truth is that he is in love with Lucia himself a little, he is her
paramour
—or so I imagine, but look at me, eesh!” She released both of them, Honey and Alex, and brought her fluttering hands up to the delicate hollows of her cheeks. “It is too cold, here, really, I cannot stand like this on the step to chew fat or otherwise to talk of Jesus and this sort of thing, so I say good-bye, I don’t mean to be impolite, of course, but please excuse me—”

For Alex, speech was another minute away. It was Honey who put her hand to the door frame.

“Miss Alexander, my name’s Honey Richardson. We’re here to see you.”

To this, Kitty made that superb little
oof!
of Russian exasperation and clasped her hands together.

“I understand this, but my dear . . . I am not here to be seen. I assure you, Jesus and I, we are—how do you say? Entirely strange to each other.” She gave a guileless smile of finality and took a step backwards, inwards, letting the door fall to.

“But I’m Alex-Li Tandem,” said Alex-Li Tandem, and it swung back, like one of those doors in the old tales that are meant for only one man, for only one man’s name will open them.

ON THE STAIRS
, the most that Alex could manage was to tell himself over and over that those are stairs, and these are my legs, and this action is called climbing. In the tight, mirrored hallway, he regressed back to physical mantra: don’t touch, make space, step back. Reaching the lounge, he took a preparatory breath—but she had already left the room, insisting on making coffee. Honey yes’d and no’d to the questions of milk and sugar called out from an unseen kitchen. Tandem attempted orientation. He was here.
He
was
here.
There was no feeling of disappointment. It was (as he had foreseen!) a home for European trinkets, rescued (he imagined) from fire and theft and revolution. It was the home of a collector. It had its New York touches, of course—capacious windows, indecipherable, modish art (from this lounge he could see down the mirrored hallway, straight through a bedroom to a New York bathroom, white-tiled, with ancient, leaky shower fitting and aquamarine verdigris steadily eating the copper taps), but its heart, this was resolutely Old World. An imposing stone Buddha, as big as an eight-year-old, sat by the doorway, bearing the loss of its nose with great fortitude. A wire-and-silk lotus flower rested in its lap. A girl in an etching looked over her shoulder. The likenesses of dogs were everywhere—shaped as bookends, embodied in ornaments, embroidered on pillows, painted on mugs—and then when one looked again they resolved themselves into the one dog, one aristocratic breed: a stubby-legged, cream-colored baton with abbreviated black snout, bulbous eyes and crumpled forehead. Two mahogany cabinets with mother-of-pearl trim stood opposite each other on eight wooden paws. Everywhere white linen throws, Arabic arches and Venetian prints, beaten-thin cowhide rugs, and pink silk shot through cream pillows, unraveling. Ornate silver mirrors hung at dipping angles, seeming to catch the room just before it fell through the floor. Everything made with care and handled with same. Alex thought of his days and the rooms they had always been spent in, where the furniture came packed flat, requiring cajoling before it would stand upright and live. Now he was in her room, her days. Because they were just as he had anticipated, he began to feel very calm. His Zen came over him. Honey was fumbling with a magazine; his own hands were still. Soon, Kitty would come in here and they would talk and it would be as it would be.
Spring comes, grass grows by itself.

Then the sound of a minor calamity of china from the kitchen.

“I should help?” whispered Honey, and sprang up with her two sets of glass twins, hurried down the mirrored hall and multiplied again, accompanied now by an infinite amount of doppelgänger Honeys, companions.

TIME MOVED FORWARDS
.

“But I am telling it backwards!” Kitty complained, and put another sugar, her third, into the cup. For a few minutes she had been talking very quickly and (or so it seemed to Alex) in a number of languages. Now, finally, she stopped fussing, and fell into an armchair. She sat like a much younger woman, with one bare foot tucked underneath her and one knee drawn up to her chin. Alex and Honey sat on a neighboring sofa. Now she beamed at them. Alex couldn’t be certain which face he did back. She picked up a hair clasp from an empty silver fruit bowl on the coffee table, brought her hair up behind her and fastened it in a tiny tight bun with this clasp, which she took from her teeth.

“Wait,
wait,
” she said, and pulled a curl forward to frame her face. “First things are first. Alex-Li Tandem! Alex-Li
Tandem.
I cannot
believe
it is you. I am such a fan of yours, truly. But you are not at
all
what I expected. Not at
all.
And meanwhile, I think I sit just as you wrote it, no? One leg up, one leg down . . .” She glanced down at herself and then back at him with a look that only magicians and doctors rightfully deserve. “How could you
know
a thing like this!”

Alex opened his mouth, but Kitty smacked her hands together and caught whatever he had to say between them.

“And this one, you remember?
Dear Kitty, She is very proud of her feet and touches them often. When standing she feels the air under her arch and stubbornly believes she could have been a dancer. Love, Alex-Li Tandem.
True, completely! It is my biggest vanity, my feet,” she laughed, extending her left and pointing the toes to the ceiling. “Applause you deserve for this!” she said and began to clap. Honey joined in at a sardonic pace. Alex, who had no experience with applause, sat and smiled stupidly towards it. His knee was going again. Kitty stopped, moved forward and put both hands on it.

“Nervous. Don’t be. Silly to be, please,” she murmured, and her face suggested she understood him all the way through, to the marrow, as we all want to be understood. Alex, so grateful for this, wanted to nod but couldn’t. Any movement of the head might cause chaos in the tear ducts. A small bell chimed somewhere in the room. Alex found himself meditating on the gold-green spine of a gardening book. Kitty smiled at Honey and Honey smiled back. What had begun as an incidental silence between them all began stretching across the room like a tarpaulin.

“You know,” began Honey, but Kitty had spoken at the same moment. Honey laughed, Kitty laughed.

“No, I was just—” said Honey.

“Please,”
said Kitty, and put her coffee cup to her lips.

Across the street, a sash window slammed shut. Alex put his hand up, something he hadn’t done since school.

“I have to—I mean, you must let me—” he began, and thought with pain of what this speech had always been in his head, how glorious, how crystalline. “No, start again—what I
mean
is—I’d really like to say—without, you know, going on—just how much I’ve
admired
you—I mean, not just like for the films—but more, you know, as a person who—”

Kitty took a deep, exasperated breath. “Oh, no, no, no,
no,
” she said with amazement. “You must know I don’t care for any of this. Pfui! You write better than you speak, I think. But of course our dear Sirin said this was true of all the great writers, and he should’ve known. He was a
great
friend of my third husband. Now. Cookie?”

Alex shook his head. His mouth had taken on its six-in-the-morning state. So dry you just can’t be sure if the words will come.

“What I was
trying
to say,” continued Kitty happily, “though I get it backwards—look: I start again. I am trying to tell you about your letters, because I think the story is
very
unusual. Because you see, I get almost no letters ever on this topic. I mean, letters concerning my
cinematic career
”—she snorted at this—“
if
you can give it such a grand name. A few maybe, once a year from the Oscar people—
when
they remember. But I don’t care for any of it really. My life has moved on—I mean, I
hope
it has moved on, I flatter myself it has, at least.”