The Autograph Man Read online

“I heard. What did he say?”

  “He said he wanted to talk to me, seriously.”

  “Yes, he said that he would.”

  Alex thought he heard something pointed in this and bristled at the idea of Adam and Joseph speaking together, without him. Rubinfine and Adam, Joseph and Rubinfine—these couplings did not bother him. He knew the measure and the depth of them. But he understood little of Joseph and Adam’s relationship, except that it was close, and he dreaded this, vaguely. He knew they shared an interest (Adam’s practical, Joseph’s theoretical) in mystic Judaism, specifically the Kabbalah. Alex worried that his and Adam’s shared interest in marijuana and girls might be the less significant bond.

  “Well, Alex, the thing is, he asked me to call again.”

  Alex silently chewed the inside of his cheek.

  “He’s;—we’re both a bit worried about some of the things you were saying, on Tuesday night. Particularly the stuff about the—”

  Joseph’s voice let itself go again in a little expulsion of air, which, from Alex’s end, sounded like a kiss in the earpiece. Alex decided to help him out.

  “About the Kitty, is that it?”

  As he spoke, Alex drew the plastic envelope from his bag and took out the postcard. He felt a genuine rush of blood to the head, as if he were a Catholic touching a reliquary. He tried to regulate his breathing. There she was, there she was. The ink was raised off the coarse paper, like a scab. Kitty, famously, dotted her only i with a little lopsided heart. Alex touched it now and loved her for it. He believed she was the first. He believed, further, that those who create clichés share some splinter of the Creation. Dog became a cliché. Trees, too.

  “We-ell,” began Joseph carefully, “you got a bit out of hand, and that’s fine, that’s nothing to be ashamed of—but then, when one wakes up, it’s hard sometimes to let go of one’s delusions . . . You have to do it softly, I think. It’s okay, and nobody thinks any less of you—we just want to check you’re okay. We’re just worried about you.”

  “Worried I’m going to sell it?” asked Alex in a guarded voice.

  The line went quiet.

  “Alex?” said Joseph, after a minute. “But I don’t understand.”

  “Look, Joe,” snapped Alex, “I’m not being rude—no, actually, I am being rude, actually—I really don’t see what it’s got to do with you. You’re not even in the business anymore, you know? With the best will in the world, why don’t you just keep your nose out of it?”

  “Wait—sell it? I don’t . . . Alex . . . That’s academic, isn’t it?”

  “Academic how?”

  “What do you mean, how?”

  “I mean how?”

  Joseph emitted a laugh like his father’s, sudden and without gaiety.

  “What’s funny?” asked Alex coldly.

  “Okay, well, let’s say for the sake of argument,” said Joseph, pompously, “that you tried to sell it, Alex—inside the autograph community. Then how would it be ethical for me not to say something? I mean, I may not be, strictly speaking, in the business, but I know the dealers who would take a risk on something like that, they’re friends of mine. And knowing what I know, knowing that it’s not real, I’m not simply going to sit back and become basically a kind of accessory to the crime—”

  “Joseph Klein,” said Alex, dryly, “no one’s making false accusations against you. No one’s coming to take you away. You’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “You’re hilarious. Look, Alex—”

  “No, look, you look. I think you’re bloody jealous. It’s my autograph, all right, it was sent to me—”

  The train chugged back into action. Alex watched the thick colored electric cords merge from four strands into one rope, hugging the side of the wall as the train slipped briefly into a tunnel. The phone’s reception was so clear he could hear the nervous tug of Joseph breathing. Why was he still getting reception? How big were these satellites, anyway? Big as planets? Were they carcinogenic? Alex put his head between his knees. “That’s not true,” said Joseph, very sadly. “I’m never jealous of you. I’m hurt you’d think that.”

  And with Joseph these weren’t just words. You could hear the hurt, you could feel it. Alex had not yet come across another man so easily affected by the words of others. He’d had plenty of sticks and stones as a boy, Joseph, on account of being small and slender and posh; he’d already done sticks, stones, fists, shifty kicks, flesh wounds and shoves. But it was words that truly got to him. He still flinched at a swear word. Not long ago, Alex had seen him on the other side of the high street and shouted his name. Joseph fell over.

  “Joseph . . . look,” said Alex with shame, “I’m sorry. I’m being nasty—I didn’t mean to be nasty. I just feel a bit sick, to be honest. I’ve the worst hangover man has ever known. And I don’t understand why you’re on my case.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Joseph in a quiet, worried voice, “what you mean by the word sent.”

  “I mean sent. I have it. It’s real. It’s in my hands. It was sent to me.”

  “Right. And that would be? Post? Heaven?”

  “Sent,” said Alex again, with conviction. “Just sent. Look—I’m not saying I can explain it—”

  “Bloody hell. Alex. Alex . . .”

  Joseph kept on talking. Alex brought Kitty right up under his nose where he could see her. That exquisite tt, achieved with just one lunge of the pen, curling in on itself, carrying on.

  “The thing is,” said Joseph, as Alex tuned back in, “I was there. You went into the kitchen and you came back with that autograph. That’s what happened. I’m sorry. But that’s a fact.”

  Through thin, angry eyes, Alex watched the eldest woman in polyester reposition a handbag to obscure the swell of her abdomen. A man across from him sat with his hands cupping his groin. The boys had just finished eating. As the train picked up speed, they made a face and put their fingers in their ears. No one travels anywhere anymore without imagining, if only for a second, the moment of impact. And if the crucial second were this second, thought Alex, every one of these people would be better prepared than me.

  “Alex . . . I don’t mean to be—but do you know what date it is today? That is, next Thursday? Your mum told Adam, and Adam told me. Don’t you think that might be relevant? I think you’re having a breakdown. Hello, Heller Insurance.”

  “What?”

  “Hold the line, please.”

  Singer: Ann Miller (1919– )

  Song: “Prehistoric Man”

  Film: On the Town (1949)

  I had rickets as a child!

  I was the fastest tap dancer alive!

  With this space in my brain, thought Alex, I could have learnt Hebrew. I could have been somebody.

  The music stopped.

  “Why is it,” said Alex, feeling combative, “that Adam has a mystical experience twice a week and that’s just fine, that’s dandy, but when I do, finally, everybody thinks I’m a lunatic?”

  There was no reply. Alex assumed the connection dead.

  “Are you at all worried, Alex?” came the unheard question, just as Alex brought his thumb to the OFF button, “that you might be delusional? That you might be depressed? Alex?”

  One of Alex’s talents, one of the few left over from his precocious childhood, is knowing exactly how long he’s got before he throws up. It is perfect timing, then; conversation ended, bag and flask grabbed, out of the train, across the platform for the westbound, a lunula of vomit onto the empty tracks, and then the arrival of the train taking him to the center of things. A destination is spelled out in letters made of light.

  2.

  Reaching the surface, Alex snuggled up close to a harassed mother at the ticket barrier so that her ticketed and his unticketed body might pass through together, as one. It had never failed him before, this tactic, but here came a hand, heavy on his shoulder, and he was taken to the next level of punishment: a gray-haired woman sitting behind a pane of glass. Her left leg was
in plaster, resting on a pile of books that in turn was balanced on a stool. Her spectacles hung from a chain. A plastic name tag, printed in a font meant to approximate the natural sweep of a human pen, said Gladys.

  Alex smiled.

  “Can I get one from Mountjoy, please.”

  Gladys cupped her ear theatrically, International Gesture for Come again?

  “You waan what? You goin’ Mountjoy?”

  “No—no, I just came—”

  “Bwoy—speak into de ting; me kyan hear you.”

  “I said, I just came from Mountjoy—”

  “So, you want a ticket back dare?”

  “No, I—just—the machine at Mount— There was a train coming, so I just jumped—”

  “Oh, I see. You can call me Cassandra, young man, ’cos I see, I see.”

  “No, look. Right. No. Let’s start again. Wasn’t like that, was like this: I just—there was no time to buy . . . so I . . .”

  Alex faded. The woman reached for a long piece of homemade something—two pencils bonded with an elastic band—and slipped it down into her cast. Scratched.

  “So, what you are sayin’—and feel free to correct me if I am perchance mistaken—is dat you skipped de fare; you jus’ skip it like it nutting—”

  “Wasn’t like that—”

  “—dareby ignoring de executive and legislative decrees of our government—”

  “Is this . . . ? I mean—in the wider sense—necess—”

  “—not to mention de explicit conditions of travel as set out by de London Underground, available for perusal by anyone wid eyes; as well as violatin’ a communal code of fairness and right doin’s; as implicitly held by your fellow passengers—”

  “Yes, ha. Very good. Look, I’m actually running—”

  “—and last, but by no means least, making a nonsense of your own personal conscience wid regard to an imperative morality which, if we don’t feel it in our bellies, we will find articulated in Exodus: Thou. Shalt. Not. Steal.”

  Sometimes Alex thought that if you got all the part-time mature students in the world and laid them head to toe around the line of the equator strapped down in some way so they couldn’t move, that would be a good thing. Ditto anyone in night class.

  “Ten pounds, please, young man. Wid de fare on top.”

  Alex didn’t have ten pounds so he handed over some plastic, which made the woman suck her teeth, lift her leg off the The Last Days of Socrates and go hobbling to the back of her box to get the mechanical swiper thing. She swiped, she passed it through, he signed, he passed it through, she held it up next to his card, he smiled. She looked at him with suspicion.

  “Is dis yours?”

  “What? Is there something wrong with it?”

  She looked at the card again, at the signature, at the card, and then passed it back to him.

  “I don’t know. Mebbe wid you. You look like you sick or someting. Like you goin’ to fall over.”

  “Sorry, Gladys, are you a doctor? Or a prophet? I mean, as well? Or can I go now?”

  She scowled. Called for the next person in line. Alex grabbed his flask from the counter. Stalked towards the exit.

  OUTSIDE, HE TOOK a sharp left, intending just to run the length of the street, turn left and walk straight into the auction house. But he had not counted on the sales. On the women. The sun was low enough to spotlight them, they were outlined very precisely. They put Alex in mind of the Chinese shadow puppets of the old Tangshan theater. They moved fast and did not blur. So beautiful! In through doors, setting off tinkling bells, back out, doing it again. Handsome, quick, lithe: deer doing the hunting for a change. There was a chasm between this and the manner in which Alex shopped (a sort of blind lunge from store to store, and only for necessities, toilet paper, toothpaste). These women made desire look efficient. There was nothing in this street they wanted enough to induce any loss of poise. They were amazing.

  But I am too late already! thought Alex, looking at his watch. His sweater was mohair; his neck was sweating. Still, how could this be resisted? In preparation, he paused in the middle of the street, took off his trench coat, tied it round his waist. He took a tiny pad out of his pocket and pressed it into his palm, ready to take notes. And then Alex began to walk, slowly, amongst them, splitting them down the center as they went, as he always did, for his hobby, his research, his book. Goyish. Jewish. Goyish. Jewish. Goyish. Goyish. Jewish. Goyish!

  NOT THEM, NOT as people—there was no fun to be had out of that. Only wars. No, other things. A movement of an arm. A type of shoe. A yawn. A dress. A whistled tune. It gave him a simple pleasure. Other people wondered why. He chose not to wonder why. All possible psychological, physiological and neurological hypotheses (including the Mixed-race people see things double theory and the fatherless children seek out restored symmetry, and especially the Chinese brains are hard-wired for yin-and-yang dualistic thought) made him want to staple his eyeballs to a wall. He did it because he did it. He had an unfinished manuscript that maybe someone would publish one day, called Jewishness and Goyishness, the culmination of his work on the subject. Jewishness and Goyishness had once been a fairly academic text by any standard. It had an introduction, it had essays and explanations, footnotes, marginalia. (He had imagined it as an appendix, a sequel, if you like, to Max Brod’s effort of 1921, Heidentum, Christentum, Judentum. He was also indebted to the popular comedian Lenny Bruce.) It was split into many different categories, things like:

  Foods

  Clothes

  The nineteenth century

  Cars

  Body parts

  The lyrics of John Lennon

  Books

  Countries

  Journeys

  Medicines

  Each category was then split into Jewish and goyish things relating to it. In a spasm of superstition early on, he had made the decision to mark the sections of the book with the Tetragrammaton, God’s fourletter name:

  YHWH

  Occasionally, when the section was particularly contentious, he used its more potent Hebrew incarnation:

  As if the invocation of the Holy Name would protect his heresy.

  He had been young, naive, when he began it. It was a different book now. It was still about Jewishness and Goyishness, but now that was all it was about. No essay was more than a page in length. There were no captions to the many illustrations. All stripped away. Just a few footnotes here and there. No commentary. Now he was left with the beautiful core of the thing itself: three hundred pages and counting of what amounted to a two-sided list. Jewish books (often not written by Jews), Goyish books (often not written by Goys); Jewish office items (the stapler, the pen holder), Goyish office items (the paper clip, the mouse pad); Jewish trees (sycamore, poplar, beech), Goyish trees (oak, Sitka, horse chestnut); Jewish smells of the seventeenth century (rose oil, sesame, orange zest), Goyish smells of the seventeenth century (sandalwood, walnuts, wet forest floor). And God’s unsayable name on every page. Over and over. The book was a thing of beauty. He did not let people read it. If ever it came up in conversation, he found himself spoken to as if he were a character in a film. Rubinfine told him he was wasting his life. Adam worried for his sanity. It was Joseph’s opinion that to discuss the book at all was to indulge the dangerous idea that the thing actually existed. Esther found the whole thing utterly offensive.

  Well, maybe Jewishness and Goyishness wasn’t for everyone. But didn’t everyone get everything? Hadn’t they had enough yet? Everything on earth is tailored for this everyone. Everyone gets all the TV programs, as near as dammit all of the cinema, and about eighty percent of all music. After that come the secondary mediums of painting and those other visual arts that do not move. These are generally just for someone, and although you always hear people moaning that there isn’t enough of them, in truth someone does all right. Galleries, museums, basements in Berlin, studio flats, journals, bare walls in urban centers—someone gets what they want and deserve, most of the time.
But where are the things that no one wants? Every now and then Alex would see or hear something that appeared to be for no one but soon enough turned out to be for someone and, after a certain amount of advertising revenue had been spent, would explode into the world for everyone. Who was left to make stuff for no one? Just Alex. Only he. Jewishness and Goyishness was for no one. You could call it the beginning of a new art movement if it weren’t for the sad fact that no one would recognize a new art movement if it came and kicked them in the face. No one was waiting for Jewishness and Goyishness. No one wanted it. And it was not finished yet. When it was finished he would know.

  FOR A WHILE NOW, his book had been in crisis. It was lopsided. Goyishness, in all its forms, had become his obsession. There was now too much in it concerning aluminum foil, sofa covers, pushpins, bookmarks, orchards. In the book, as in his life, Jewishness was seeping away. Three months earlier he had attempted his greatest audacity: a chapter devoted to the argument that Judaism itself was the most goyish of monotheisms. He failed spectacularly. He became very depressed. He called his mother, who stopped making things out of clay in Cornwall with Derek (the boyfriend) and returned to London to stay in his flat for a few weeks, to keep an eye. But for Sarah it did not come naturally, this mothering role. That had been Li-Jin’s thing. Her gift was friendship, and Alex, for his part, did not know how to lie back and have soup brought and temperatures taken. Their progress together was awkward, somewhat comic, like the days of two crook-backed adults living in a Wendy house. And all without Li-Jin. The terrible, undimmed sadness of it. Every time they met, they felt it afresh, as if they had planned a picnic, Alex arriving with all the cutlery, Sarah with the mackintosh squares—where was the food?

  Still, Alex (who like most young men remained convinced his mother was uncommonly beautiful even as she thickened and grayed) was charmed by her physical presence, her floaty hippie skirts and scarves, her hands which looked like his, the matter-of-fact way she would suddenly hug him to her chest as one man hugs another man on a playing field. She had things to say.

  She said, “If I’m anything, darling, I’m probably a Buddhist.”