The Autograph Man (28 page)

Here she made a movement very familiar to Alex. It was from the dressing-room scene, in which May-Ling begs the stage manager to make her an understudy. A quick forward thrust of her head, chin up, eyes pleading—and then an impossibly poignant retraction. Everything back in its box, including all feelings. Alex knew the next line
(“I’m sorry, I just can’t do it, honey”)
and thought for a moment he might say it.

“Besides,” continued Kitty brightly, and with that air of ingenuous, childlike egotism that belongs to those who are used to an audience’s attentions, “it is like a garden, celebrity. It requires tending, do you see? I am seventy-seven now—I have only one kidney left. I have already had the cancer, and by some miracle I keep my treasures”—she placed both hands on her breasts—“but I cannot always be so lucky. I have to get on with things while the time is here—I have time to tend a garden full of weeds? And more than this: to do as Max says, to pretend the garden takes care of itself?”

Honey, who had long lost the thread of this metaphor, nodded eagerly. She took a biscotto from the tiny china plate that Kitty was holding up to her and chewed around the edge of one with that unique ineptitude we bring to food we do not recognize.

“I want to thank you for—” began Alex, and then closed his eyes and tried again. “The autographs. Thank you for doing th—”

Kitty whooped, and put two fingers over his lips.

“My
God,
don’t be
ridiculous
! The
least
I could do—but still you don’t let me explain, so let me explain. And so then recently some bad things have been happening here—this we will come to in a moment—but because of this bad things, you see, I don’t like to be alone in the apartment. And on this night, three weeks ago, somehow, I get a panic!” she said, her face re-creating the feeling. “I don’t know why—I think I hear a thing on the stairs, I get a little crazy—and so I call for a car and Lucia and I, we go into Manhattan, to Max’s, and we have a key of course, but there is no sign of Max. Probably,” she said sotto voce to Honey, “in one of these strange bathing places where they have all the sex with barmen they see never before . . . anyway, this is not my business. . . . It was very late and cold, and I did not wish to go all the way back, I’m not so young to be gallivanting around New York. So I am in Max’s and I eat and Lucia eats and we wait, wait, wait, and nothing and we get rather bored, can you imagine? In this little, so dirty apartment which I have not been in in maybe ten years and Lucia has never been! So we are bored, and we nose around a little. And to make it short, this is where we find you! Lucia finds, actually. In cupboards in the kitchen—hundreds of these things! I never before seen or heard of these. Every one: Alex-Li Tandem, Alex-Li Tandem, Alex-Li Tandem—going back to I don’t know when. Almost all the envelopes closed. Unread! And so I open, naturally, because they are for me. They are for
me.
And what is inside . . . oh, it was so beautiful. . . .”

She kept talking, Kitty. Alex was being praised. He was great and talented. Something he had written had affected someone, as surely as if he’d pushed them over with his hands. All this was said. And he heard the noise of it, the way she sang it, but it meant nothing to him. For thirteen years he had believed he had an audience, even if it was only Krauser, reading them and tearing them up. He had heard of those perfect Zen artists who write their books and paint their pictures with no expectation of audience, and set fire to their work when they are finished. But that is a choice they make.

Kitty stood up and moved to one of her dog-footed cabinets, took a small key from her jeans pocket and began fiddling with the lock. The front rucked, folding like a wooden fan, and a writing desk was revealed, ten slim drawers either side. These she began to open, looking for something.

“Wait—you never saw
any
of my letters?” asked Alex with what was left of his voice. “In all that time?”

“Never! This is what I say. I am not so grand to ignore so many letters.”

Alex was turning a funny shade of purple. Honey put her hand on his and gave it a supportive squeeze. “I don’t understand,” said Honey. “You mean he never showed them to you?”

“Exactly. This is it, exactly. He hid them, I think. Can you imagine!” she said, and tutted, as if at a child’s foible.

“But didn’t you ask him?” pressed Honey. “Didn’t you ask him
why
?”

“No, I don’t ask him. He doesn’t know I found them—I abhor this, anyway, this
theatrical
exposure. Terribly cruel thing, I think, to reveal somebody like this, like it is television or something horrible. But of course I wonder why he would do . . . Ah, now, here we are.”

From a drawer Kitty took a small bundle of letters in Alex’s pink envelopes. She rested an elbow against her defunct fireplace. “They are so lovely, really. I read almost all of them—it did not take very long, they are so brief. I took a few only, so he doesn’t notice. I like this very much:
Dear Kitty, Whenever she hugs children she looks over their little shoulders to the parents and smiles to prove she does not hate children. Love, Alex-Li Tandem.
This is too perfect! This is what I do, always!”

Alex tried to smile.

“I wish so much,” she said, “I could have found them before, when my third husband was alive. He was a painter. Maybe you know of him?”

Kitty said a foreign name, and Alex, who was entirely paralyzed with rage, made no sign of acknowledgment.

“Well, Alex, I think he would have
loved
you. He would have taken you to his heart, I know. He loved the writers who could say a lot with a little—and the people he would have introduced you to, oy! This apartment was full of writers and artists always—they adored this place, they felt at home here.”

Kitty stroked the white stone wall behind her.

“Do you know why I like them?” she said wistfully. “Your letters? They are nothing of movies. Nothing about that. They are just a woman, walking in the world. This is beautiful.”

“What kind of a person,” began Alex loudly. Shaking, he rose from his seat.

“Alex,” said Honey sharply,
“sit down.”

Alex sat back down and lowered his voice. “What kind of person hides a kid’s letters for thirteen
years
? That was thirteen years of
my life.
”

Kitty looked at him with concern and then turned her eyes to the window. “I am so sorry for this. For
you.
” She said this and brought both sets of fingertips to her lips. Alex hated her for that—the theatrical gesture at that moment when he himself was stripped clean, without gesture, without defense.

“The only reason I can think of, possibly, is that the letters I receive, they are very much the same, you know? It is always
‘I am your greatest fan’
—so vulgar, this word, this ‘fan,’ I
hate
it in the first place—but I think, maybe your letters, they are so unique, and they seem to
know
me almost—and to Max, this is an affront, you understand? Because he thinks of himself this way. As the only person who understands me. For him, this is very important. I think he wished to maybe . . . preserve an idea, a Platonic idea, he has of—”

Alex didn’t want to hear the philosophy and thumped his fist on the coffee table, toppling the cups.

“Let me understand this,” he said, pushing Honey’s hand off his shoulder. “So—what? He just had a grudge? Against me? You got other letters, sometimes, didn’t you? He just screened mine, or what? He just did it for a laugh? Just wanted to waste thirteen years of—”

“No!” said Kitty, holding the letters to her chest. “He
protects
me also. He is very
paranoid,
Max, he worries that some people get a little crazy, very attached, like a Norman Bates or somebody. People are strange about movies. He thinks it is his job to protect me from the crazy people. This is an irony, if you knew Max . . . he is himself a little crazy, I married him once, so I know—for seven days in Hawaii, but it was enough—and he proved to be homosexual, which in this business is rather common. Oh, yes,” she said to Honey’s open mouth. “My dear, everybody should marry a homosexual at least once. It robs a pretty girl of all her sexual vanity. It is
very
healthy. And then, when I married again, Max lived with us. I couldn’t stop him. My dear,” she said, addressing Honey completely now, who was enthralled, “this is how he is. He used to bring drinks in at our parties like a butler!”

“That isn’t . . .” said Alex, shaking his head. “Could I just say something without . . . If I could just say my piece. Please?”

Kitty looked distressed and reached her arms out towards him. “But of course!”

Alex, given the stage, suddenly wanted to skulk by the curtains.

“Go on, please,” said Kitty beseechingly, putting a cookie in his hand. “Go on and speak your mind. In America, this is practically the law.”

“Well . . . look, I mean . . .” said Alex, though an ignoble mouthful of crumbs, “what did you need protecting from? My
letters
? Did I ever give you any bloody reason to—”

“Al,” said Honey, and got him by the back of the neck. “You’re being really rude, okay? Give it up. We’ll go now, Miss Alexander. We’ve wasted pretty much enough of your time.”

Honey stood up, but Kitty, who was leaning against her fireplace, motioned for her to sit. Alex closed his eyes, and apologized for himself.

With a gentle, forgiving nod, Kitty went back to the cabinet and opened another drawer. With a new handful of letters she came and sat next to him, almost uncomfortably close. She sighed and scattered the letters on the table.

“Understand, please, of course I don’t need protecting from
you,
” she said. “But not all my so-called fans are like you.”

They sat in a line now on this small sofa, Honey, Alex, Kitty, a scenario he could not have imagined a week ago. Pressed on both sides by celebrity, the fantasy of every Autograph Man. Kitty lifted an envelope up and passed it to him.

“This is the bad thing. It started six months ago. The police say they can do nothing. Can you imagine? It is only Max who worries for me.”

“Can I?”

She nodded, and he peered into its torn fold and extracted a letter.

“It is so horrible,” said Kitty with a deliberate shudder. “He seems to know everything. Where I go and what I buy and what I wear. Obviously, he follows me. For me, it is not so scary as it is
tedious
—Max barely allows me to leave the house because of this. I am like a prisoner now because of this boring maniac who has nothing better to do than follow an old woman and her dog around New York. It is
ridiculous.
”

Alex scanned the letter quickly. It was in a childish script meant to disguise the handwriting, and cliché was so prevalent four movie projects might have been launched from this half-page alone. Aside from its problems of style, the thing was unpleasant. The detail obsessive and very particular.

“Where are these sent to? Are these all of them?”

Kitty pointed to the floor in a robust manner, but her eyes gave her away. Now her left hand, which Honey had impulsively taken in her own, was shaking.

“They come here. And I don’t understand it—almost nobody has the address, really, except a few very dear friends. And, Max, of course.”

She knocked over a cow-shaped silver creamer and couldn’t be stopped from rushing to the kitchen for something to sop up the milk. Honey and Alex barely had a chance to exchange an International Gesture with a long and noble history, the meaningful look. A minute later she was back and the three of them made an inefficient assembly line of moved cups and rescued books (the milk had surprised everybody by traveling in two directions) while Kitty outlined an impossible situation. Overprotective Max (“I am not even allowed outside with Lucia!”); an increasingly restricted, lonely life; a neighborhood in which antisocial madness was so frequent a lunatic had to truly outdo himself to attract the serious attention of the law.

“Listen, Miss Alexander, I don’t mean to be . . .” began Honey, which always meant she
did
mean to be. “But didn’t you ever think it might be this guy
Max
who’s . . .”

Kitty lowered herself into her chair.

“Miss Richardson, I am not an idiot. Of course I think about it—especially when I find all of these fan letters hidden—and not just Alex’s, other things. A few requests, invitations and so forth—I am not saying I would have done these, but I should have liked to have had the opportunity to at least
think
about—”

She dipped her head, and blinked away a tear.

“But no, I
cannot
believe Max wrote these letters. I don’t
want
to believe it. We’ve been together forty years. He is my best friend. What he does, he does always to protect me. This is what he thought he was doing, hiding your letters from me. There is nothing malicious in Max. I don’t think he is capable of this, of hurting me.”

It took some effort, but Honey politely said no more.

“I’ll take one of these,” said Alex firmly, pocketing a letter and feeling impossibly capable, like Charlie Chan. “I know all the American dealers—maybe they received something from this bloke, maybe it’s one of the dealers. I can compare handwriting. That’s my job. It might be someone like that.”

Kitty made the relinquishing gesture.

AT THE SINK
, she started the taps and seemed to forget them. Alex walked in and shut them off just before the cascade.

“I want to get out of the city, sometimes,” she said, putting a finger to the oily surface of the water. “This is so much a city for somebodies. Not as much as Hollywood, I used to think, but now I don’t know. . . .”

She rubbed her eyes and turned to face him. The smile was identical to that moment when the Salvation Army woman offers May-Ling a bowl of chicken soup.

“And now, you have the revelation, now we have met. I am no one at all. Just an old woman with a big mouth and too many problems. A terrible deception has been practiced on you, Mr. Tandem—”