The Autograph Man (7 page)

“What do you mean, class thing? We’re not
posh.
”

Here Adam paused to do some of his weird stretches. These made Alex feel that his friend came to the pool with a complex, beneficial, possibly spiritual, certainly undisclosed, exercise program in his mind, while Alex just spent the time pissing around (often literally), examining the incredible potential variance in the curvature of young women’s pubic bones. Adam hooked his ankle round the handrail. Near Alex a floating plaster flipped over to reveal a tiny circular concentration of blood. Again, thought Alex, there should be a law. Adam yawned, and seemed to take his arms, turn them backwards and force his hands to pray behind his back. His stretch was impressive and women looked. These days he was the opposite of fat and did not smoke, except for weed. His stomach was a taut drum of rippled jet. He said:

“No, true, but we’re posher than
Marvin.
That’s the key fact. But it’s subtler than that, though, it’s like, the voice Marvin’s doing, that’s the same voice you do when you’re doing your Lenny Bruce goy voice—”

“So what are you saying?”

“Well, brainiac, I’m saying that
maybe,
in relation to him and his ex–drug dealer, working-class soulfulness et cetera,
we’re all goys.
”

“And
he’s;
the Jew?”

“And he’s the Jew.”

“That argument is uniquely . . .” said Alex, but couldn’t think of the word.

“Yeah . . . but I sort of
like
it for that. You should put it in your book—justifies a whole new subsection.”

After which Adam went alone to the diving tank, while Alex, treading water furiously, internally raged at a repulsive woman in fluorescent costume. Her head was hinged and awful on her fat neck. Her mouth was huge. She was laughing off her son’s fecal mishap in the shallow end. There should be law upon law, with commentary.

IT WAS NOW
that Marvin—who had turned his back on Alex to look towards the house opposite—made a sudden little yelp. He rolled back on his heels in the International Gesture for surprise. He thrust one arm out in the air. He looked like Chaplin.

“Mate, isn’t that your
car
? Check it! Oh my
gosh. Jesus Christ Almighty.
”

Two spaces down from where she was usually parked, Alex could see his vintage MG, Greta, hitched up on the curb quite desperately, trying to save herself. Her front bumper had been brutally torn from her body and now hung by an iron thread; her door had been punched by a giant. Her back window had been visited by a glass spider. So had the front.

“
And
the passenger window!” shrieked Marvin, pointing to the passenger window. Greta’s side was scratched from toe to tail, and her canvas roof was sadly pleated and condensed, an exhausted accordion. The whole of the car, in fact, was shorter by half a foot.

“Brer, did
you
do that?”

Alex folded into the door frame like Lauren Bacall. It was only eight-thirty
A.M.
, but already it was time to throw in the white towel. The day had looked good. The day had lied. He felt he could not fight days like this. He believed utterly that there are days in which it is revealed that someone has written a cruel story about you for their own entertainment. He believed, further, that on such days all you can do is follow, dumbly, with your knuckles grazing the ground. In that sense, if in no other, he was a profoundly religious man.

“I can’t believe that, Dred! Look at dat!” said Marvin, grinning. Marvin was enjoying himself. Alex parted his hands, slowly, relinquishing whatever was left.

“What do you want me to say, Marvin?”

Marvin sniffed. “Don’t mistake me, I don’t really care, I’m only the milk operative. I was just wondering if you did or did not do that to your own car. Other than that . . .” Marvin grinned some more.

Now Alex let Marvin’s face fall out of view, bent his legs and crouched on the doorstep. On its lip, on the doorstep’s concrete lip, he met a massive pulsing snail wearing its shell a long way down its back, as a sort of afterthought. Alex peeled it off and held it in the cup of his palm for a moment. Then he launched it towards the grass, but even with that action came the sad thought of more creative possibilities for both him and the snail: the polished dark country of Marvin’s shoe, the cool, featureless Lapland of the window ledge, the barren Arizona of the path that leads down to the road and eventual death.

“Look. Seriously. Are you depressed? I mean, generally?” asked Marvin with real curiosity.

“Yes. Yes, I imagine so.”

“You
imagine
so?”

“Marvin, I don’t want to talk about this, actually.”

“And you don’t know
when
did you do that to your car?”

“Marvin, I have no recollection.”

Marvin said
“Ha!”
like the first blast of a military horn. He took an elegant hop down two steps and moseyed down the path. The snail found itself somewhere maddeningly familiar, wet and green; a place where bad things, most often revolving blades, might arrive, with no warning, from nowhere. Alex crossed his eyes. Clicked his heels together three times. Closed his door against Mountjoy.

CHAPTER TWO

Yesod

FOUNDATION • Famous Phrases #1 • Muhammad Ali was Jewish • Stress balls versus funnels • The covenant and the pound notes • Famous Phrases #2 • God and Garbo • Kitty Alexander’s autograph • Joseph explains the Judaic attitude to transubstantiation

1.

Back inside his flat, valiant Alex-Li held up a series of clothing items at arm’s length, and if he could not smell them he put them on. He took no great care, for the result was always the same, irrespective of effort. Everything he wore looked as if it had been flung at him by an irate girlfriend in a hallway, a ragbag of items he remembered wearing the night before, mixed with some he didn’t recognize.

With one sock on, he hopped across the room, picked up the Autograph Association Flip Calendar on his desk and peered at it. February 12. Underneath, a photo of Sandra Dee. She was smiling and offering up two facts about herself:

My real name was Alexandra Zuck!

I began modeling at 13!

Alex ripped through February 16 (Dolores Del Rio) and 17 (Peter Lawford), settling on the eighteenth, a Wednesday, as the most probable date. Archibald Leach was teeing off with his godlike chin pointed towards the camera, with his perfect golf clothes. Almost too good to look at. Saying, in quotation marks:

“Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even
I
want to be Cary Grant.”

Underneath this was something in Alex’s handwriting:

Auction—12 pm Rock and movie memorabilia. 3 pm
Vintage Hollywood

So he had business today.

The phone began to ring. Alex, who always felt subtly attacked by the phone if he could not see it, hurried to find his glasses and put them on, remolding the mad wire arms until they behaved themselves and hooked behind his ears.

“Yes? Yes, hello?”

“Tandem,” said a girl, “I see you’re picking up the phone,
finally.
Good phone voice, too. Give the man an Oscar. Oh, and I’m still alive?”

Alex opened his mouth, but the line went dead.

“Esther?”
said Alex into the void. Quickly, he tried calling her back at each of her numbers. Either by accident or design, all went instantly to the automated message and then the dreadful beep. These beeps still gave Alex stage fright. He seemed the only man left who felt that way about it. He despised the performance aspects. Anyone who is able to leave a successful answering machine message is a kind of actor. At Esther’s home, Alex left some silence. On her mobile, he said, “But no, look, the thing is I’ve really got to go to work now.” But this was simply thinking aloud.

FROM THE FLOOR
of his wardrobe, Alex picked up his big leather satchel. He was an Autograph Man. The job fell into three compartments: Collecting. Trading. Verification. The first two, fairly self-explanatory; the third he had sometimes to explain to people at parties. He had been humiliated many times by that ubiquitous good-looking drunk girl who rests against the refrigerator and coolly assesses the validity of your life while people dance wildly in the lounge. She is impressed by the simple career nouns—
lawyer, doctor, journalist,
even
fireman.
But
junior information consultant interfacer, second technical administrator
—jobs like these do nothing for her. Nor do fanciful careers, jumped-up hobbies with aspirations. So try convincing her that you, Alex-Li Tandem, are the man people pay to flick through a selection of aging paper and give your opinion as to what is real and what forged in their collection. It does not matter to her that this is a skill and an art. It is a skill knowing the difference between the notorious Sydney Greenstreet secretarial (expertly forged by his assistant, Betty) and the curves and loops of the real thing. It is a skill distinguishing the robotic scratch of a Kennedy Autopen from the real presidential signature. Knowing when to lie about these matters, and how much, is an art. But try telling her that. Alex-Li is an Autograph Man. A little like being a Munchkin, or a Good Witch, or a Flying Monkey, or a rabbi. Not much, without your belief.

The greatest portion of Alex’s work is done from home, but on the occasions when he leaves the house he uses the bag. He puts it on the desk now, opens it, and into the many folds and pockets he slips Elizabeth Taylors and Veronica Lakes, Gene Tierneys and James Masons, Rosemary Clooneys and Jules Munshins, back to back, separated by sheaths of plastic. Today, along with the regulars, he fills it with an auction catalogue, some racy photographic items (Bettie Page, Marilyn, Jayne Mansfield, various Playmates; for a private customer he hopes to see at the auction), a folder of private letters from David Ben-Gurion to his tailor, a banana, a difficult Russian novel he has no intention of reading and an autograph magazine he does.

THE PHONE RANG
.

“Obviously,” said Adam crossly, “you have no right to mine or anyone else’s friendship, really, anymore. You’ve finally disqualified yourself. That’s what antisocial behavior means, Alex, that’s the result.”

“Adam?
Adam!
” said Alex. He was delighted to hear from his friend. Hearing Adam’s voice sat firmly in the pros column of life.

“No,” said Adam, “listen. I’m serious. Two facts: she has a broken finger, index. And she also has a strained neck. That’s
neck,
Alex. Imagine my reaction. Your girlfriend, yes. But also my sister.”

“Wait: Esther? She didn’t say anything.”

“That would be because she’s not talking to you. For no good reason, however, I am.”

“That’s big of you.”

“Yeah, I think so.
And,
in exchange, these are the things I want. One, you owe me back
The Girl from Peking.
You’re now two weeks overdue. You need to
buy your own copy.
Sometimes other people might want to rent it? Two, you need to phone Esther
immediately
and start I don’t know what. Groveling. And three, I want you to go and see a doctor, because that was some sort of allergic reaction, Tandem, that wasn’t normal. And I’m talking about a
proper
doctor, not some Chinatown con artist.
Alex
”—sighed Adam—“you let me down. That evening was meant to be . . . a religious experiment. You turned it into the Tandem road show. Not everything in the world has to turn into the Tandem road show. You are not the world. There are other people in this film we call life. Alex? Alex?”

“I’m here. Listening.”

“You scared me, mate. Joseph said when he went round to yours later you were behaving really weirdly, practically speaking in tongues. Hmm? Alex?”

Alex maintained what he hoped was a dignified silence. He had read about them in novels; this was his first attempt.

“Hello?
Hello?
Do you want to talk about the car?”

Alex’s stomach turned over; he began to moan. Adam had paid for half of that car.

“
Ug.
Not really.”

“Good. Me neither.”

“Uu-uug.
Uuug.
”

Adam whistled. “Oh, Alex, I know, I know. Don’t worry, because I still love you. Though I’m alone in that, mate, at the moment. Fan club of one. Come round to the shop later. Promise, yes? You need to get out of the house at this point, I think. Promise? On your note?”

Alex grunted. He resented these promises. Their unbreakability was restrictive. As a rule among them all, his father’s notes were to be invoked only with great caution. You had to earn your right to speak of them. Joseph very rarely mentioned them. Rubinfine knew not to refer to them at all.

“Good. We’re open all day. Esther won’t be in. Which is probably for the best in the current climate. We need to talk seriously about something. You know what date it is today, right?”

The phone went dead. Alex heaved his bag onto his shoulder and touched, in order, the things he always touched before leaving his bedroom: a small chipped Buddha on his desk, a signed
Muhammad Ali
poster, and an old pound note, Blu-Tacked to the top of the door frame.

2.

Reaching the kitchen, he clicked his heels together and bowed to Grace, who was standing on the sideboard, actually standing, on two legs, either stretching or making some last-ditch attempt to evolve. Alex put the kettle on to the boil and got a flask from the cupboard. He untied a little plastic bag of bitter-smelling herbs and Grace retreated, backing herself into a cupboard. Alex emptied the herbs into the flask. He added hot water. It was called Chia i, the Tea of Spring, supposedly, but black as all hell. Smelt bad. Looked bad. Oh, and, hello, tasted bloody awful, too. But it was for
widening and dispersing
heaviness in the lungs, according to his Dr. Huang of Soho. Alex’s lungs felt heavy. Everything felt heavy. He screwed on the cap and put the flask in the pocket of his bag.

Opening the door of his living room, he now remembered quite clearly that under the prolonged influence of a hallucinogen he had swerved his car into a bus stop while his girlfriend, Esther, sat in the passenger seat. There were no words for how sorry he was about this. Nor was there anyone to tell. He was not a Catholic. He lived alone. Not for the first time he had the feeling that he lacked sufficient outlets. Instead of his life being shaped like a funnel, through which things passed and maybe refined themselves, it was more like—what do you call those things? Stress balls? Made all out of elastic bands and each day you add another elastic band? Tighter. Bigger. More involved. That’s how it was for him. And that’s how he imagined the life of a Catholic, anyway. As a sort of funnel. Poor Esther.

He crossed the floor and knelt down before the television. He retrieved
The Girl from Peking
from the video recorder. He put it into its case and felt a soothing pulse of happiness. Prompted by beauty. On the cover were the two beautiful faces of his favorite actress, the musical star Kitty Alexander. In the picture on the right, she was dressed as a Peking girl, her eyes Sellotaped into an approximation of his own epicanthic fold, wearing her coolie hat and cheongsam. She was lost on the streets of fifties Broadway. And then, on the left, the same girl but now made over, dressed as the toast of Hollywood, in a mushroom-shaped ball gown, with the little white gloves, the pink princess slippers, the coil of lustrous black hair peeking over one shoulder. The story of the film, essentially, was the progress from the picture on the right to the picture on the left. You had to read the video case backwards, like Hebrew.

There was a split in the protective plastic. Alex slipped his finger in and felt around, touching first one Kitty and then the other.
Citizen Kane. Battleship Potemkin. Gone with the Wind. La Strada.
It amazed him that so many people—in fact, it would be fair to say
most people
—were unaware that the 1952 Celebration Pictures musical
The Girl from Peking,
starring Jules Munshin as Joey Kay and Kitty Alexander as May-Ling Han, was in fact the greatest movie ever made. Carefully, he squeezed her into a fold of his bag.

IN THE HALLWAY
, he took his waxy trench coat off the stand and put it on. He felt small in it today. He was twenty-seven years old. He was emotionally undeveloped, he supposed, like most Western kids. He was probably in denial of death. He was certainly suspicious of enlightenment. Above all, he liked to be entertained. He was in the habit of mouthing his own personality traits to himself like this while putting his coat on; he suspected that farm boys and people from the Third World never did this, that they were less self-conscious. He was still,
still
slightly thrilled by the idea of receiving post addressed to him and not to his mother. Bending down, he picked up a bundle from the mat and flicked through bills, bills, pizza advert, bank statement, envelopes from America containing movie stars and presidents, a brochure regarding erectile dysfunction, a free package of creamy foundation for an imaginary white woman he wasn’t sleeping with.

3.

Occasionally he went to Western doctors. They prescribed things to relax him (the ugly neologism of choice was
de-stress
), ranging from fresh air to ball games to little colored pills. Last year he had visited Poland and walked the placid squares of Kraków, dosed to the eyeballs, feeling some sort of communion, holding his breath when the bells rang, keening in cafés over an unbounded loss he couldn’t quite name. The pills had a priapic side effect. Each pair of feminine legs clipping past caused him agony. He had the oddest feeling: a need to impregnate everyone in the country. Walking through a narrow street near O´swie,cim he had been confronted by a huge cloud of pollen—at least, he had presumed it pollen and walked straight through it. Actually, it was a wasp swarm. Being a young man of Mountjoy, a young man with all the mod cons and every expectation of security, personal and national, he had not been able to conceive that the dark cloud he strode into might be anything dangerous. He had written a poem about all of this, his second poem in twenty-seven years. It was not good. But what might he have been in 1750 in one of these Polish squares, wearing boots and a hat and the expectations of the Enlightenment and an impressive gold-buckled belt? What would Rubinfine have been? And Adam? And Joseph?
I saw the best minds of my generation / accept jobs on the fringes of the entertainment industry.

The phone rang. The downstairs phone being without cord, Alex picked it up and walked to and fro with it in the hallway for a while, like a new father with a distressed baby, hoping the thing might either make a new noise or fall silent. It did not. On his third fro, he came up against his own front door and stopped. He looked at the door. He turned from it, and tried looking at it again. He drew his fingers along the groove of the unvarnished pine, against it. The phone continued to ring.

4.

Autograph collecting, as Alex is not the first to observe, shares much with woman-chasing and God-fearing. A woman who gives up her treasure with too much frequency is not coveted by men. Likewise a god who makes himself manifest and his laws obvious—such a god is not popular. Likewise a Ginger Rogers is not worth as much as one might imagine. This is because she signed everything she could get her hands on. She was easy. She was whorish. She gave what she had too freely. And now she is common, in the purest meaning of that word. Her value is judged accordingly.