The Autograph Man Read online

  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 thems
elves, 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.

  Greta Garbo was not easy. If she put pen to paper at all, Garbo tended to use a pseudonym, Harriet Brown. Garbo would demand that her bank chase up the whereabouts of any check she had written that had not been cashed. She wouldn’t let her name go, even on a receipt. A Garbo autograph, even a bad one, is still worth about six thousand pounds. Kitty Alexander signed even less than Garbo. Kitty was as awkward and invisible as Jehovah. She was aloof. The public hated her for it. And in time she was forgotten, for the public do not like to be ignored. But Autograph Men are rather more masochistic than the public (the public are primarily sadistic); they enjoy contempt. The Autograph Men remembered Kitty, always. These are the same people for whom untimely deaths are good business, along with assassinations, and serial murders, and high-profile failures. Monroe’s first husband, the third man on the moon, the Fifth Beatle. They have peculiar tastes. For a long time, Kitty Alexander’s autograph has been one of the most sought-after scribbles in this peculiar world. Most Autograph Men have given up the hope of ever getting one. Not Alex. Every week since he was thirteen, Alex has sent a weekly letter to Kitty, to an address in Manhattan, her fan-club address. Never once has he received a response. Not once. Only a drawer full of form letters, signed by the fan club president. And therefore, therefore, it takes Alex a long moment, therefore, to remember why, how, by what means, a blank postcard with Kitty’s autograph clearly written upon it has come to be pinned, like Luther’s declaration, to his own front door. Carefully, he unpins it and holds it up to the light. It is exquisite. It is real. Or he is not Alex-Li Tandem. He presses the TALK button.

  “Alex,” says Joseph in his quiet way, “listen to me one more time. You did not receive it from God. Nor did you receive it in the post. You forged it, Alex; you were on a very bad trip. Everybody was. Listen to me. It isn’t real, it never will be real, and things do not become real simply because we want them to be so.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Netsah

  ETERNITY • Three rabbis • The problem of the bookcase • The world is broken • Rebecca’s midgets

  • Alex’s secret book • Rubinfine’s goyish tastes

  • Bette Davis was Jewish

  The black trees, vivid against the blue sky, were elms. The crazy boxes, each containing one regretful man, were Ford Mondeos. The birds, for the most part, were magpies. And the tall young man with the Oriental look, deliberately slowing his pace down the Mountjoy Road, was none other than Alex-Li Tandem. He realized he was heading directly for three men staring at an open car boot, and he didn’t like it. He had not been spotted yet, but soon he would be. One of these men was a rabbi well known to him. Where to hide? From here he could see Adam’s video store, Hollywood Alphabet, like an open cave across the street. Closer by, one of these outdoor toilets, fitted with the mechanical doors and the urban myths. But for sanctuary it was too late. There was no escape. Nothing to be done.

  “Alex!”

  “Hullo, Rubinfine.”

  “Alex, Alex, Alex. What a day, no? What a gift of a day!”

  With gloomy clarity, Alex noted that Rubinfine’s smile this morning was merely a grimace the other way up. He stood with his right foot crooked up against the Justice side of Mountjo
y’s War Memorial, a huge stone monolith engraved with four values—Justice, Courage, Honor and, for some reason, Patience—a proud commemoration of Mountjoy’s wartime sacrifices although Mountjoy itself had not been built until 1952. Two other men, unknown to Alex, stood at the corner of Courage and Patience.

  “And yet,” said Rubinfine, solemnly, “even on a day such as this, we are presented with a problem.”

  He put his hands on his hips in the oddly feminine way he had sometimes and gaped into space. Before him, a parked Citroën, its boot open, gaped back. Quickly, Alex became panicked. Although already outside, he began looking about him in the manner of a man searching for the exit sign.

  “Look, Mark,” he said, “I mean, Rabbi Rubinfine—you know what? I actually can’t really stop. Heading for the tube. I’ve got an auction on this morning, you know how it is. Places to go, people to buy. So, if you don’t mind, actually, I might just—”

  “Alex-Li,” said Rubinfine. The beauty spot on his cheek twitched, and with it, his new and unpleasant mustache took a leap to the right. He cupped his hands round Alex’s face. He was wearing a salmon-colored V-neck, paired with some ridged green cords, a long houndstooth coat and a pair of black sneakers.

  “When a man hurries,” said Rubinfine, trying to sound Talmudic, “the first things he forgets are his toothbrush and his God.”

  This kind of thing drove Alex crazy. In his opinion, Rubinfine was too young to be making up aphorisms. He was only three years older than Alex. He was thirty, only thirty. You can quote all you like at thirty, but that’s where it’s got to end.

  “Now,” puffed Rubinfine, “other things being equal, I’ve some friends here I want you to meet. This is Rabbi Darvick and Rabbi Green. Rabbi Darvick visits us from Brooklyn, New York. Rabbi Green, you may have met, actually. He’s a Mountjoy man. We’re attending a rabbinical conference—Grantam Park? Lasts a week. We’re swapping ideas, learning tolerance,” said Rubinfine, grinning at Green, who seemed to barely tolerate him. “Come and say hello.”