The Autograph Man (30 page)

“You look
amazing,
” said Alex, tumbling into his chair.

“Thank you,” said Honey pertly, patting herself down. “Took about five hours. Some of it was painful and the rest was just goddamn boring. I am
so
glad I’m a woman. And you look awful—how thoughtful of you.”

“Put the blame on Mame. So,” said Alex, picking up a long piece of card, “what are we eating?”

“Lots of tiny-ass pieces of food piled on top of each other in the shape of a tower.”

“Good. We
love
tall food. I want the tallest thing on this menu.”

“That’s the wine list, baby. An’ it’s upside down. What’s the matter with you? Why you so
nervous
?”

“I’m not nervous.”

“I’m not nervous,” parroted Honey in a passable accent.
“Bull.”

“I think you’ll find you’re confusing the two states of ‘nervous’ and ‘pissed.’ ” Alex took an ice cube from a glass full of them and gripped it in his hand, an old sobering trick.

“Fairly weird day, no?”

“I’ve had weirder, to tell you the truth.”

“I checked the handwriting. It’s Krauser’s completely. I mean, you just have to look at it.”

“Yeah, I figured,” said Honey, putting her wine down before it reached her lips. “
God,
but that’s sad, isn’t it? I just think that’s so
sad.
For both of them.
Jesus.
You can’t say anything to her—she’s clearly in denial. She doesn’t
want
to know, obviously. Talk about living a lie, right?
Jesus.
”

She moved her hand across the table and laid it over his.

“Honey?”

“Oh—my—God.
Please
don’t say
Honey
like that, like we’re in some bad TV movie. What? What is it? Just say it, whatever it is.”

“I really, really don’t want you to take this the wrong way.”

Honey scowled and took back her hand. “Lemme tell you something. There’s no wrong or right way to take anything. There’s just words and what they mean. Be an American. Say what you mean.”

Alex put his elbows on the table. “I just wanted to—I mean, I want to make sure . . . rather, to establish, that this isn’t— Because, you know I leave tomorrow, and there’s someone who— So, I wanted to, just to be clear, that this isn’t—”

Honey got him by the neck and brought his face to hers and gave him one of the most luxurious kisses he had ever experienced. It was like eating. He was being given something rich and rare.

“No,” she said, drawing back and lifting her hand for the waiter, “this isn’t a date. Don’t flatter yourself. That was just a period on the end of an unusual day.”

Here, a breakdown in transatlantic communication, rare these days.

“You know, a period? The black spot at the end of sentence—what do you call them over there? That was
almost
one, but that was a question, that’s not quite . . . and that’s not it either; and now here’s the real thing, you know, look out, at the end of this.” She curved her hands around the empty air, and gave a sharp nod.

“We call that a full stop.”

“Really?” She smiled. “That’s nice. That’s kind of more like what I meant.”

JUST AFTER THE DESSERTS
came, Alex noticed the hotel tilt and all the air disappear from the room. Honey was telling him about a gallery exhibit “of Jewish stuff” that she thought he might like, but everybody else in the room was being drawn into a vacuum that had just presented itself with its entourage at the circle bar.

“My daughter just
loves
her,” said the waitress, and spilled the coffee. Alex held himself up a few inches from his chair. He could see the tiny girl, a bodyguard the size of a water buffalo, and about fifteen people of the kind the magazines call “handlers.” The aura was being effectively handled. Though the girl was only a hundred yards from Alex, she seemed a galaxy away.

“You’d think she could afford a better hotel,” he said, feeling oddly offended that she had made herself so accessible to him.

“Well,
exactly,
” agreed the waitress.

“Am I
boring
you?” said Honey loudly. Alex scrutinized the black hole, its unusual nature. Everybody knew it was there, and there it sat in its uniform of hot pants and halter top; everybody was already inside it (in her skin, as the girl herself, or in some orifice, doing the girl), but not one person looked at it directly.

“We probably shouldn’t stare,” said Alex, who had once spent three hours staring at pictures of this girl’s head attached to the naked bodies of other girls.

“Oh,
man.
Are you serious? Don’t you know what that
is
over there?” asked Honey, turning around finally. “That’s dry shit on a stick. That’s the cypress tree in the garden. That’s three pounds of flax. Buddha is Buddha is Buddha is Buddha. So what is the big deal, exactly?”

“Sexual vortex,” said Alex, feeling it as strongly as the next man. “Symbolic sexual vortex, added to by means of infinite repetition, televisual sheen. Not necessarily prettier than the waitress. Or you. Or me. Irrelevant. She
is
the power of seventeen. You remember the power of seventeen? It’s nuclear. She’s seventeen for the whole world.”

Honey threw her napkin onto the table.”I know there’s not a thing a pretty girl can’t have in America for a while. Until she can’t have it no more. Symbol, my ass. MU! Come on, let’s get out of here.”

As they made their way through the lobby, they passed the documentary team setting up a shot of the concierge welcoming Shylar to the hotel, although Shylar had been there three days already.

“That was Honey
Smith,
” said the cameraman to the clipboard girl and clapped one hand on the front desk.

2.

Here goes the city. Here it goes. There it is. On television. In a magazine. Written on a towel. In a photograph that hangs above the bed in moody black and white, as you sit indoors in this Technicolor city. There it is again. On channel 9, on 23, briefly on 7, in cartoon form on 14 and always on number 1, which is the channel of the city. And it is also out that window, or so you hear. Car horn, Spanish yell, women’s laughter, syncopated beat, barking. A swooping cop’s siren, like a prehistoric bird, passing through. In here, laid out along the bed, are the secrets of the minibar, multicolored bottles in descending order: we finish one, we knock it to the floor. We finish one, we knock it to the floor. Ten green bottles. And that’s just the beers. This is fun! Honey has retired to her room. But who needs women? Look at this television! The channel of history offers history in neat half-hour segments. The only history is the history of Hitler. The channel of entertainment entertains, ruthlessly. It wants your laughter. It will do anything. The channel of sex looks like sex and sounds like sex but it doesn’t do smells. Smells are important. The channel of nostalgia shows dead people up and walking, hour on hour, always. They tell corny jokes, they clutch the curtains and weep, they tap-dance sometimes. The channel of nostalgia is the channel of old films and—my God—there she is!
There she is.
Right there, on the screen. And that was her beauty and those are pearls that were her eyes, and yes, you
know
the problems of two people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world but still. But
still.
Here is your coat and those are your shoes and that is the door.

And it is not a real plan, of course, until you are standing outside the hotel, swaying slightly, inebriated, and horrified by the cold, the snow. It’s one in the morning. Where did all this white stuff come from? On channel 15 it was late summer, leaves just beginning to curl and blush. The concierge, who understands incapacity, hails you a cab.

IN YOUR OWN CITY
, a nighttime cab ride is a dull box with your thoughts inside. In another, it’s the only journey. There’s not enough light to use your tourist eyes. Nothing can be seen until you are at its feet or by its side—there are no views, only shapes becoming themselves before you. The streetlamps are one continuous stripe. The cabs run through town like a blood supply, taking drunk people to bars. He is surprised at himself, for doing this. But Honey told him he would, and she knows Autograph Men. The very definition of them might be that they find it hard to let go.

He reaches forward and asks a man called
KRYCHEK, GARY
to take him on a detour through a square famous for its museums and prostitutes. It has, Alex realizes for the first time, almost a metaphysical name. There is even an imposing electronic counter sitting on top of a tower, clicking backwards to some zero date that cannot be contemplated when one is this drunk. He can see all the doors of the museums are flung open. Byzantine art, Renaissance sculpture, medieval French armor. The city is having a festival to encourage culture by opening museums (as they put it) 24/7. But the real crowds are still here, outside, letting those vile LEDs count their lives away. They eat popcorn while they wait and look up at the ticker-tape news, traveling round the edge of a skyscraper. A president has died: it’s not theirs. The snow is timorous now, falling in light flakes that can’t survive the wet ground. On a soapbox four black boys are screaming about reincarnation. Adverts shine and move and speak and transform. Stretched the length of a building, a mammoth moving image of a white cat, licking at a bowl of milk. This last is very beautiful, like a dream everybody’s having together. The days of the museums are numbered. A chubby redheaded whore stops Alex’s cab from presuming to cross her path with one flick of her ass. She shows them the International Gesture of contempt (middle finger) and trots into an exhibition of Chinese ancestor painting.

“See, this area ain’t really ideal for driving tours,” says Krychek dryly. “Lot of pedestrians. With big asses.”

“Roebling, then,” says Alex-Li, at which Krychek laughs and stops the cab and Alex has to give him twenty dollars to start the engine again.

And so they pass over a bridge and its water.

3.

All the opening lines he can think of call for a younger woman in the role (
“I couldn’t leave without seeing you again”; “We’ve got to talk”
). He ends up standing in the doorway with his mouth open. But there is no noise from either of them, only the sibilant swish of a silk dressing gown as she accepts him into her apartment, leads him to the lounge. Here she picks up a pocket watch from the top of a cabinet and holds it up in her hands like a baby bird.

“A peculiar time, I think. To call on a lady. But maybe I am not fashionable.”

Alex squints, trying to focus.

“Is Max here? Will you throw me out?”

“Pfui! You talk as if I were a force of nature.”

“I think you are,” he says in a breaking voice, and has to kick off his shoes or go crazy from the damp coming through them. His legs give in, the sofa catches him. Kitty sits down opposite him. They sit like this for a minute, Alex unconscious with his head against the back wall, his eyes closed and his mouth an open cave; Kitty watching. She takes one of his feet in her hands, removes the sock and massages his instep.

“No,” she murmurs, “You make a mistake: nature is
fascista,
the big bully is nature. I am the very opposite. I am not the fittest, and I will not survive. I am cultivated. I pretend I am quite calm when I have strange men in my little house at one twenty-six in the morning.”

Alex squeezes an eye open. “That’s my foot. What’s the time? Christ, I’m sorry”—he takes his foot back; her hands feel dry—“I’m a bit drunk. I shouldn’t have . . .”

“Oh . . .” says Kitty, archly. “I see. You didn’t come for a foot massage? You came for passion?”

The bedroom door swings wide and a yellow wedge of light encompasses the hall, a luminous path for a panting, quick-stepping animal, hot and alive and suddenly amongst them.

Kitty turns on her stool, opening her arms to receive it.

“Lucia, see our visitor, yes! Oh!
Lucia, Lulu, Lo-Lo,
yes, we wake you with our noise—and see how she likes you too—you must pick her up and make some love to her, she is really a
prostitute
for affection, any affection—look at how she throws herself at him!”

Alex, finding himself with a sinewy handful of dog, stops its writhing with a firm grip and looks in its peculiar face. The eyes, huge and protruding, are an oily black with bloody specks in the vitreous. Both are covered in a film of mucus, like two unborn things.

“She is my angel, of course . . .” says Kitty, knotting her fingers together. It is hard for her not to touch this dog. “And we are glad you come—the truth is, we do not sleep so well. Coffee?”

Here they are again, in the kitchen. She asks him where he is from, what he is, exactly. When he tells her she says, Well, I must say you
look
Jewish. One of the great unanswerable goyisms of modern times. But Alex has no capacity to be angry with her. He keeps seeing her young face. Maybe he is here to see her young face for her.

“Lucia is Chinese also,” she says, passing him a tray. “Her family were all Imperial dogs, back through history. This is what the dealer tells me, anyway. It is interesting to me that she is a great fan of Peking duck. She becomes crazy for it, truly!”

Alex takes the biscuits he is passed, and accepts a tea towel laid over his arm.

“That’s . . . nice.”

“I don’t know if it’s nice—it is certainly expensive. And now we will watch the television,” she says, pushing briskly past him with Lucia right behind, dancing through her legs. “Do you know the American television? It is like all the finest food in the world put into a bucket and stirred with a stick. Come.”

By some accident, or because it is played on a loop, they watch the same infomercial that duped Alex earlier.

“You will excuse me,” says Kitty, wrapping a blanket round her shoulders and climbing into her bed. “A breeze will kill me—I am finally of the age of the lethal breeze. When I think how my
tedious
Russian aunts used to complain of it, complain, complain—they couldn’t sit here, they couldn’t sit there, and I had no pity, none, and now I reach the terrible age. No, no, you stay there, don’t worry. How anybody can believe a cream in the jar do this to your bosom, I can’t imagine. You will take control of the whatever-it-is?”