The Autograph Man (33 page)

“This has been,” said Alex, bowing his head, “the weirdest week of my life.”

Joseph let out that awful, mirthless laugh that had begun to belong to him.

“It’s fantastic—it’s melodrama. It’s wasted on
you,
though. If only you knew how to dress for it.
All right, Mr. De Mille, I’m ready for my close—
”

“But it’s so masochistic, Klein,” blurted Alex, feeling now the full sadness of it. “To choose
me.
Of all people.”

“That’s one thing, Tandem,” said Joseph, pressing down on the pedal with a dull smile, “that you have never been. From the day I met you, however buggered you were, you were always looking for pleasure, not pain.”

“See, that’s it again, that really irritates me—like I don’t suffer, so I’m the goy, I’m the putz—”

“No,” said Joseph passionately, “I never said that, never felt it. Life is a negation already. It’s pointless and vain to negate the negation.
I’m
vain. Adam said from the start—”

“Adam knows?”

“Adam guessed. He sees everything. He knew when we were kids. He said I need to find somebody else to love, that’s all. It’s not an accident. It’s a decision I made, he says. A vain decision to suffer.”

A car in front of them slowed almost to a halt, and Joseph turned again to look at Alex, who couldn’t quite bear it. Both their eyes moved stupidly to the dog.

“How about Endelmann. He need any? Love?”

Alex wished to all the gods he knew that Joseph would stop saying that word. He pulled Lucia up on to his lap, where she proceeded to eat the leather ball of the gearshift.

“I would say he’s overindulged, actually.”

“Shame,” said Joseph, pulling a hand through his hair and exhaling everything. “Okaaay,” he sighed. “Done, done, done. That’s enough for one day, I should think. Let’s try to concentrate. Look out for the signs now. We’re looking for anything that says ‘To the East.’ ”

2.

“That?” said Joseph, slipping into the crescent booth. “That is Endelmann. The eunuch.”

“Does he want to meet Grace?” queried Adam, pushing a cat carrier with his foot from under the table. “Or is he the replacement?”

Rubinfine squeezed up to let Alex in on his left. He was wearing a pair of tight jeans, gruesome in their restrictions, and a jumper advertising the 1989 Mountjoy Israeli Dance Championships in which he met Rebecca and took third place.

“Am I just being an
appalling
cultural philistine,” Rubinfine asked the assembled, “or can I mention that there’s a raw egg floating in this soup?”

“Alex,”
said Adam, and reached impetuously across the table. Alex gave him his hands.

“Ads. How
are
you?”

“Good. You look good, man. I think you’re going to like this restaurant. The waiters are real Russians. I don’t think they’ve ever had a person of the Negro persuasion in here before. I ordered the starters—one of them almost fell in the borscht when I opened my mouth—oh, look, here we are; okay, okay, beer, is it? Beer, Joseph?
Izvinitye
. . .
da,
okay,
dva botillky peevo, pojalsta . . . spasibo, spasibo, da.
So,” he said turning back to the table, “are we ready for Thursday?”

“The car, Ads . . .” began Alex, but had to end there with just a smile.

Adam shrugged. “The car is the car. The important thing is, we’re going to do this thing on Thursday, and it’s going to be wicked—really, just
great
—everything’s organized, you just have to turn up—we don’t even have to talk about it, we can just sit here and drink the vodka. Okay? Is that cool?”

Alex nodded and picked a hunk of bread from a grubby china bowl, rimmed with the flaking gold-leaf pattern that appeared on every single item in the room. He took a bite from the bread and then held it up with a question as to its Russian name.

Adam made a ridiculous explosion in his throat.

“Why are you learning this language? There’s so much
phlegm
involved,” asked Rubinfine with distaste. He passed his full soup bowl back to a passing waiter.

“Rubinfine,” said Alex, feeling a rush of goodwill and thumping him on the back, “long time. So, I hear I owe you. Thanks for organizing . . . well, Green and Darvick told me you’ve been working behind the scenes et cetera. Rabbi Burston, is that right?”

“I do what I can,” said Rubinfine piously, lowering his head back and inadvertently knocking it lightly against a giant samovar. “He’s meant to be at a wedding that day, he’s very in demand—it wasn’t easy. Favors had to be offered.”

Adam, never the sort of man to waste much time with table etiquette, put his butter knife into a little pot of iridescent fish eggs and delivered a line of them to his tongue.

“Oh,
good,
” he said with relief. “I’m glad you don’t mind about Rabbi Burston—I mean, not that there’s any reason to mind, really—and it’s a bit of a shlep to get to, but no one in Mountjoy was really available, and he is progressive, so the women thing wasn’t an issue and we’ve got to be grateful for him doing it at short notice and all that.”

Joseph seemed to suppress a giggle, and Alex, who was in the process of freeing Grace from her box, looked up.

“Mind? What’s there to mind?”

“
Exactly,
nothing, really—I knew you’d see it like that. Joseph, get that waiter, man—we’re going to need to get the dog something to eat other than the cat.”

Grace was circling Alex’s lap, one paw trailing to goad Lucia. Now she stretched up and licked Alex’s nose with her tiny coarse tongue.

“I don’t get you. Is there something wrong with Burston?”

“But didn’t Green . . . ? Or—”

Here a waiter with an epic jaw came and pleaded with Adam in Russian, pointing sporadically at the animals.

“Ooh-litsa,”
murmured Adam, as the waiter turned on his heel and marched back towards the kitchens. “That’s definitely ’s;treet.’ I really want to know what the long word was, though—I think it might have been zoo, or menagerie, as in,
This is not a—
”

“Adam, what’s wrong with Rabbi Burston?”

“Nothing, really,” said Joseph, his sorrowful dark eyes taking on some of the mischievousness of his boyhood. “I met him on Sunday at the barn dance and he seemed really capable, interesting. I had a conversation with him about Preston Sturges, he was really interesting on that, about Jewish subtexts in Hollywood film of the era, really sharp, I thought—”

“What was he doing at the barn dance?”

“Do you know what he said to me, Al?” said Adam, wiping his mouth with a napkin. “We were having the old Kabbalah debate, but he said this one fantastic thing:
God is a verb.
He said, ‘I’ll agree with you on one thing—God is a verb.’ That’s
great,
isn’t it?”

“The man can also line-dance,” said Joseph. “Honest to God. He danced everybody else off the—”

“He’s a midget, isn’t he?” concluded Alex, letting his chin fall to his chest.

The table went quiet.

“No, actually, his growth is—” began Rubinfine, but Alex held a hand up to stop him.

“How tall? Come on, how tall?”

“Very reasonable, mate, really,” said Adam, looking concernedly across the room at the approach of the earlier waiter and a man with a managerial forehead. “I don’t think he’s much under, like, four six?”

Lucia ran to greet the manager, licking his shoes that smelt of the kitchen. A scene followed. Adam begged them all to stick to Russian, this being great conversational practice for him, but the manager’s face took on that look of undiluted pessimism concerning the rationality of others, a look that is every Russian’s birthright. With a shake of his wrist, he turned away a second waiter, who was heading for their table with his high-held tray of beer and blintzes.

“And it is now,” he said, exercising the foreigner’s clout with the present tense, “that I am asking you to leave.”

“It’ll be like a feature,” offered Joseph, once they were out on the street. “You know. No one’s likely to forget it. It’ll be memorable.”

“It’s not a garden pond,” said Alex, stiffly, taking Grace’s box from him. “It’s Kaddish. I don’t want any features. I’m not likely to forget it, am I? I mean, am I? Really?”

“I’m so glad to hear you say that,” said Adam, linking arms with him, pointing in the direction of other lunch possibilities.

IT STARTED TO RAIN
hard. After two restaurants refused to be arks, the sheen rubbed off lunch somehow. Joseph had to get back to work, Rubinfine wanted to buy a pair of those socks with the friction soles.

“Am I being forsaken?” asked Adam, shaking his little dreads free of water.

“Can I give you a lift?” said Alex, opening the door of—

“Hey,” he said, putting Grace on the seat, “I need a new name. It’s a new car.”

“Kitty. She was always Kitty. She was only Greta because you’re afraid of being obvious. Nothing wrong with the obvious. It’s sustaining.”

“Oi, don’t start. It’s raining. Lift or no?”

“No,” said Adam, drawing his coat over his head like a pantomime hunchback, “I think I’m heading other way, library. I’ll get the tube. Tell Esther I’ll be back late.”

Alex got behind the wheel and wondered why he hadn’t told him.

3.

Opening the front gate for Lucia, he saw a curtain switch. He was halfway up the path when Anita Chang came down it, clutching a handbag in front of her, a clumsy prop meant to encourage the misconception that she was just on her way out.

“Alex!” she said without pleasure.

“Anita,” he said without hope.

“And how did you find New York?”

“Pilot knew the way.”

Her fixed smile flat-lined.

“
Your
dog?”

“
A
dog.”

“A dog that belongs to you?”

“A new dog in town. Visiting friends in the area. Trying out,” said Alex, as Lucia attacked a patch where Anita was growing daffodils, “the local cuisine.”

“I see.”

“And I hear. And Endelmann, that’s the dog, he touches. Grace smells, but you know that. We find someone with taste, we could make a band.”

TAKING OFF HIS COAT
in the hallway, Alex heard two voices together, two opposite voices, and from such extreme poles of his mind that for a moment his brain refused to reconcile them. And then, at the threshold of the living room, the obvious stated itself: these were not voices from his brain at all but two people in the world, living. He had no business reconciling them.

“Hey, stranger,” said Esther.

She was stretched out on the floor before Kitty, dressed unseasonably in cream-colored culotte and a thin red cashmere vest.

“This,” she said, lifting up on one hip, “is the most amazing woman in the world.”

Kitty reached forward and rubbed her freshly shaved head.

“She listens to my stories, this is all. I think she likes them. I tell her all about our meeting in New York, and your tall American friend,
Harvey,
” said Kitty, very pleased with this basic subterfuge. “But,
Alex,
you never explain she was like this, such a beauty! To look at her causes disaster—I am surprised you survive.”

“Barely,” said Esther quietly, and with a smile, trying to give him a private look. He turned away.

“What is this?” asked Kitty, cupping her ear.

“She said ‘Barely,’ ” said Alex bluntly. He felt that mad cold one sometimes feels upon seeing an absent loved one, a kind of dysrecognition: Is this really her? Are we really lovers? Is this where I put all of my life? Does she know me? Do I—

“Tea,” he said, and left the room.

In the kitchen he put the kettle on and placed both hands on the sideboard.

“Are you angry?”

He turned and saw her in the doorway.

“No, Es, of course not. ’S just—”

She folded her arms.

“It’s nothing. It’s just, I haven’t even told
Adam.
And it’s a bit much, all at once. Seeing you and . . . Look, are you okay? How’s your finger?”

“Cast off. Fine. It was just a fracture, really.”

“And . . . ?”

“Bruised, that’s all.” She put her hand to her chest and pressed it softly. “They did a really good job. Put everything back where they found it.
Alex,
” she said, putting her hands behind her head and opening her eyes wide, “Kitty Alexander is sitting in your living room. In
your
living room.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Well, is it a secret? Aren’t you going tell Adam? I mean—
Jesus,
man—what’s she
doing
here? In
Mountjoy
?”

“Es, please,
please,
” he said, reaching out for her like a blind man, “let me just— Can we talk about all that later? I mean, can I get a kiss or something? I’ve
missed
you.”

“Oh, come here,” she said at last. He walked forward and she enfolded him in her rangy arms. “I don’t understand—you should be over the moon. What’s
wrong
with you?”

“Almost everything.”

The smell was as ever: cocoa butter; a perfume she had used since college; and the aftershave she put on her head.

“Al, I’ve been talking to her all afternoon. She’s just
amazing.
Did you know,” she said, between kisses, “that she went to bed with Clark Gable and Carole Lombard? At the same
time
?”

“Hmm . . . That’s a lot of movie star in one bed. Kiss me over here.”

“But—I don’t understand—I mean, how does it
feel
?” she said, her plum-lips buzzing each word on his earlobe. “She’s
here,
you met her. Ever since I’ve
known
you you’ve wanted—”

“Come to bed with me,” he murmured, pushing one hand past her culotte and some aggressive knicker elastic. “It’s just me, but we could call some actors. . . .”

“Alex, stop it. . . . She’s so much
nicer
than I imagined. She seems such a
diva
in the films, but she’s so
normal.
She’s just incredibly frank, and she’s a feminist—really, I’m telling you, man, she’s
inspirational.
The things she says—I could listen to her
all
—
Alex!
”