The Autograph Man Read online

  Kitty said a foreign name, and Alex, who was entirely paralyzed with rage, made no sign of acknowledgment.

  “Well, Alex, I think he would have loved you. He would have taken you to his heart, I know. He loved the writers who could say a lot with a little—and the people he would have introduced you to, oy! This apartment was full of writers and artists always—they adored this place, they felt at home here.”

  Kitty stroked the white stone wall behind her.

  “Do you know why I like them?” she said wistfully. “Your letters? They are nothing of movies. Nothing about that. They are just a woman, walking in the world. This is beautiful.”

  “What kind of a person,” began Alex loudly. Shaking, he rose from his seat.

  “Alex,” said Honey sharply, “sit down.”

  Alex sat back down and lowered his voice. “What kind of person hides a kid’s letters for thirteen years? That was thirteen years of my life.”

  Kitty looked at him with concern and then turned her eyes to the window. “I am so sorry for this. For you.” She said this and brought both sets of fingertips to her lips. Alex hated her for that—the theatrical gesture at that moment when he himself was stripped clean, without gesture, without defense.

  “The only reason I can think of, possibly, is that the letters I receive, they are very much the same, you know? It is always ‘I am your greatest fan’—so vulgar, this word, this ‘fan,’ I hate it in the first place—but I think, maybe your letters, they are so unique, and they seem to know me almost—and to Max, this is an affront, you understand? Because he thinks of himself this way. As the only person who understands me. For him, this is very important. I think he wished to maybe . . . preserve an idea, a Platonic idea, he has of—”

  Alex didn’t want to hear the philosophy and thumped his fist on the coffee table, toppling the cups.

  “Let me understand this,” he said, pushing Honey’s hand off his shoulder. “So—what? He just had a grudge? Against me? You got other letters, sometimes, didn’t you? He just screened mine, or what? He just did it for a laugh? Just wanted to waste thirteen years of—”

  “No!” said Kitty, holding the letters to her chest. “He protects me also. He is very paranoid, Max, he worries that some people get a little crazy, very attached, like a Norman Bates or somebody. People are strange about movies. He thinks it is his job to protect me from the crazy people. This is an irony, if you knew Max . . . he is himself a little crazy, I married him once, so I know—for seven days in Hawaii, but it was enough—and he proved to be homosexual, which in this business is rather common. Oh, yes,” she said to Honey’s open mouth. “My dear, everybody should marry a homosexual at least once. It robs a pretty girl of all her sexual vanity. It is very healthy. And then, when I married again, Max lived with us. I couldn’t stop him. My dear,” she said, addressing Honey completely now, who was enthralled, “this is how he is. He used to bring drinks in at our parties like a butler!”

  “That isn’t . . .” said Alex, shaking his head. “Could I just say something without . . . If I could just say my piece. Please?”

  Kitty looked distressed and reached her arms out towards him. “But of course!”

  Alex, given the stage, suddenly wanted to skulk by the curtains.

  “Go on, please,” said Kitty beseechingly, putting a cookie in his hand. “Go on and speak your mind. In America, this is practically the law.”

  “Well . . . look, I mean . . .” said Alex, though an ignoble mouthful of crumbs, “what did you need protecting from? My letters? Did I ever give you any bloody reason to—”

  “Al,” said Honey, and got him by the back of the neck. “You’re being really rude, okay? Give it up. We’ll go now, Miss Alexander. We’ve wasted pretty much enough of your time.”

  Honey stood up, but Kitty, who was leaning against her fireplace, motioned for her to sit. Alex closed his eyes, and apologized for himself.

  With a gentle, forgiving nod, Kitty went back to the cabinet and opened another drawer. With a new handful of letters she came and sat next to him, almost uncomfortably close. She sighed and scattered the letters on the table.

  “Understand, please, of course I don’t need protecting from you,” she said. “But not all my so-called fans are like you.”

  They sat in a line now on this small sofa, Honey, Alex, Kitty, a scenario he could not have imagined a week ago. Pressed on both sides by celebrity, the fantasy of every Autograph Man. Kitty lifted an envelope up and passed it to him.

  “This is the bad thing. It started six months ago. The police say they can do nothing. Can you imagine? It is only Max who worries for me.”

  “Can I?”

  She nodded, and he peered into its torn fold and extracted a letter.

  “It is so horrible,” said Kitty with a deliberate shudder. “He seems to know everything. Where I go and what I buy and what I wear. Obviously, he follows me. For me, it is not so scary as it is tedious—Max barely allows me to leave the house because of this. I am like a prisoner now because of this boring maniac who has nothing better to do than follow an old woman and her dog around New York. It is ridiculous.”

  Alex scanned the letter quickly. It was in a childish script meant to disguise the handwriting, and cliché was so prevalent four movie projects might have been launched from this half-page alone. Aside from its problems of style, the thing was unpleasant. The detail obsessive and very particular.

  “Where are these sent to? Are these all of them?”

  Kitty pointed to the floor in a robust manner, but her eyes gave her away. Now her left hand, which Honey had impulsively taken in her own, was shaking.

  “They come here. And I don’t understand it—almost nobody has the address, really, except a few very dear friends. And, Max, of course.”

  She knocked over a cow-shaped silver creamer and couldn’t be stopped from rushing to the kitchen for something to sop up the milk. Honey and Alex barely had a chance to exchange an International Gesture with a long and noble history, the meaningful look. A minute later she was back and the three of them made an inefficient assembly line of moved cups and rescued books (the milk had surprised everybody by traveling in two directions) while Kitty outlined an impossible situation. Overprotective Max (“I am not even allowed outside with Lucia!”); an increasingly restricted, lonely life; a neighborhood in which antisocial madness was so frequent a lunatic had to truly outdo himself to attract the serious attention of the law.

  “Listen, Miss Alexander, I don’t mean to be . . .” began Honey, which always meant she did mean to be. “But didn’t you ever think it might be this guy Max who’s . . .”

  Kitty lowered herself into her chair.

  “Miss Richardson, I am not an idiot. Of course I think about it—especially when I find all of these fan letters hidden—and not just Alex’s, other things. A few requests, invitations and so forth—I am not saying I would have done these, but I should have liked to have had the opportunity to at least think about—”

  She dipped her head, and blinked away a tear.

  “But no, I cannot believe Max wrote these letters. I don’t want to believe it. We’ve been together forty years. He is my best friend. What he does, he does always to protect me. This is what he thought he was doing, hiding your letters from me. There is nothing malicious in Max. I don’t think he is capable of this, of hurting me.”

  It took some effort, but Honey politely said no more.

  “I’ll take one of these,” said Alex firmly, pocketing a letter and feeling impossibly capable, like Charlie Chan. “I know all the American dealers—maybe they received something from this bloke, maybe it’s one of the dealers. I can compare handwriting. That’s my job. It might be someone like that.”

  Kitty made the relinquishing gesture.

  AT THE SINK, she started the taps and seemed to forget them. Alex walked in and shut them off just before the cascade.

  “I want to get out of the city, sometimes,” she said, putting a fi
nger to the oily surface of the water. “This is so much a city for somebodies. Not as much as Hollywood, I used to think, but now I don’t know. . . .”

  She rubbed her eyes and turned to face him. The smile was identical to that moment when the Salvation Army woman offers May-Ling a bowl of chicken soup.

  “And now, you have the revelation, now we have met. I am no one at all. Just an old woman with a big mouth and too many problems. A terrible deception has been practiced on you, Mr. Tandem—”

  “Not true. Not close to true.”

  She pointed to some yellow rubber gloves on a shelf, which Alex passed to her.

  “Thank you—and you will dry. Dear Kitty, She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence. Yours, Alex-Li Tandem. This one I memorize—it’s so lovely. And at the same time, Alex, if it is not too rude to say, it worries me that you write these. Why did you write? You are really too young even to remember my last film, no matter my first. I think,” she whispered playfully, “it suggests a lack of sexual intrigue in your life, to be interested in this ancient history. There is no girlfriend, or she is not effective. There is a lack somewhere. I think this must be true.”

  “Why don’t you go away, if you want to?” asked Alex earnestly. “I mean, if Max has you all cooped up here? That’s no way for you to live.” He took a wet cup from her. “You’ve got European fans up to the eyeballs, really. I could help you organize—”

  “Wanna keep these, or . . . ?” said Honey, appearing at the door with a saucer of milk-damaged cookies. Kitty beckoned her over and examined them.

  “Lucia will have. Over there, do you see? This bowl. This bowl is English Wedgwood, but what can be done? She is a diva, my Lucia. She fills in for my inadequacies in that department. You know, my dear, you can take off your gloves in the house.”

  “Why don’t you go away?” persisted Alex.

  “You . . . you are so familiar-looking. One feels one knows you already—such a friendly, striking face. And almost terrifying what a tall girl you are. They say it is the additives. Americans—they are all so tall. Either this, or they grow the other way. Or both.”

  “You could open film festivals. It’d be like a comeback tour. Paris, Venice, London . . .”

  Alex’s voice was unexpectedly passionate, angry, and it silenced the tiny room. Honey gave him a look and an International Gesture (index finger drawn across throat) but defiant Alex looked away. He felt irritated by Kitty’s inability to stay on the subject of her own fame. It is an oddity of the Autograph Man that if he were a slave freed by his master, we would find him the next day back at work, self-flagellating.

  Kitty had finished washing her cups. She held her gloves out to Alex. He removed them without a word, as if he had been in her service for twenty years.

  “I have no money,” she said simply. “This apartment is rent-controlled. And with whom will I go? Max would never agree. He has never left this country in his life. And now we are finished with washing, yes? What to do now? I know a thing—you are young, maybe you can help with this computer before I go crazy completely?”

  They walked through to the bedroom. Honey excused herself and used the bathroom, while Alex was told to sit at the desk. He experienced a mortifying rogue sexual thought as the warm bulge of Kitty’s chest descended and remained hovering by his face. She pointed to a key on the laptop. Pressed it and demonstrated its failure. Alex put his finger to the mouse pad. The toilet flushed. The doorbell rang.

  “Who’s that?”

  “It’s Max!” gasped Kitty, backing away from the little window. “But oh . . . this is too ridiculous . . . and I can’t stop him, he has his own key.”

  “Good,” said Alex resolutely. “I want to talk to him.”

  “No, no, no . . . wait . . . yes, it is okay—he won’t know you. I will say you came to fix the computer. It is good, actually. Now you will meet Lucia! Now, this is the real honor.”

  Short-lived. Alex saw only Lucia’s backside; she was barely in the room when Max rushed her from the floor as if she were in danger and, with the dog struggling gracelessly in his embrace, started yelling and raised his comic little fists.

  “You heard me, make like a tree. I’m not joking. How long you been in here, anyways? Did you break in? How’d you find it?”

  “Oh, Max, you are being ridiculous—please, don’t shout like this, Max, one moment, you don’t even know who is this—he is here to fix the computer—I am not in any danger, Max—I really apologize, I don’t know why he is behaving so—”

  Honey emerged from the bathroom, twisting her hem.

  “What’s all the—oh.”

  “And here she is,” said Krauser, triumphant. “Bonnie. Clyde. I know these two grifters, believe me. And they’re hitting the bricks.”

  An operatic argument followed, performed in four voices and three movements (the hallway, one lap of the lounge and then down the stairs, Italian style), in which no useful information was exchanged and a handful of lines were repeated over and over. With a finale on the doorstep.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Taming the Bull

  1.

  “That’s very disappointing, Tandem,” said Lovelear solemnly. “That’s anticlimactic. I’m glad I didn’t get out of this to listen to that.”

  He slipped deeper into the churning water and assumed an expression of supreme tranquillity. Alex pulled his feet up onto his deck chair and hugged himself against the chill. The sun was not going down. It was simply leaving, evaporating, one of those days that fades to white before the night comes. In this dying light, he could see the damage the city had done to the snow. Everywhere it had been squelched and gritted and dirtied. Even on the roofs the hot-air vents were creating islands where earlier there had been continents. And down there in the streets they persisted on stamping all over it. Millions of colleagues, tiny pointillist people, one blob for the head and one for the body. Jumping in taxis, doing the sidewalk race. Everyone was going home except Alex.

  “You should really try this, mate, do yourself a favor,” remarked Dove, looking like a half-cooked lobster, red, with a blue tinge. “ ’Sbit like the best bath you ever had.”

  “It’s nothing like a goddamn bath,” said Lovelear. He clutched the curved sides and lay flat. “This is godly. This is terrific. This is enlightenment right here. This is the tub in which cold and hot do not exist. This is always the right temperature. This is like being born.”

  “I checked the letter she gave me,” said Alex, dragging his fingers through his hair. “It matches Krauser’s handwriting. I mean, it’s obvious to anybody—you wouldn’t have to be an expert. She must know.”

  “Christ, Tandem, they’re probably in it together—some scam to make you feel sorry for her and give her some money or something. I don’t know, I don’t really care. And that’s another thing that smells to high heaven: how can she be broke, Tandem? How? Answer me that. She’s sitting on a goddamn gold mine. She just has to sign her name and she makes six thousand dollars. That’s money from air.”

  And if I leapt, thought Alex, from this roof to that, from that to the next, and shed my body in Brooklyn and my mind in New Jersey, and reached England as my true self, my Buddha-nature, would you know me, my darling? Would you be the same, with your new heart? Would you take me to bed? In the office block opposite, a black girl with Esther’s neatly bald head, but dressed quite differently, in an office suit. She put on a coat and pulled the blind. Everybody was going home except Alex.

  “Okay, here’s another one,” said Lovelear, reaching for an absurd cocktail. “What kind of an Autograph Man goes to the house of Kitty Alexander and fails to get her autograph? Is that normal? Doesn’t ask her anything about anything, doesn’t come back with a single interesting story about the films, doesn’t even steal an item from the house—I’m not saying it had to be anything big—”

  “Small, like,” explained Ian. “From the bathroom. Something that woul
dn’t be missed.”

  “Exactly—although the bathroom would not be my room of choice—and doesn’t come back with anything—anything—that would help God-fearing people like me and the Doveman here believe you were ever there in the first place. And on top of this, to just totally ice the cake, you fail to sleep with Honey Smith which is like, excuse me? If you can’t sleep with Honey Smith, you have a dick malfunction. I’m sorry—you do. I mean, that’s her job. She is actually famous for sucking dick. And you didn’t manage it? Now what precisely,” pronounced Lovelear grandly, crossing his arms over his breasts, “are we to make of an Autograph Man like that?”

  “Answer me this,” said Alex, standing. “What did my face look like before my parents were born?”

  “Er, I’m gonna have to pass on that one, Al,” said Lovelear, blinking. “Ask me another one.”

  “Okay. Can I go now?”

  “Free bloody world,” said Dove, sniffily.

  “For once,” said Lovelear, heaving himself out of the tub, “our friend Dove is right. It is a free world. Free up here, anyhow,” he said, slapping his forehead. “You can always go, Alex. You always could.”

  He was massive, near hairless and completely naked, at once vulnerable and obscene. Alex felt compelled to hand him his towel.

  Lovelear tucked his tongue into his cheek. “You just have to make up your mind to leave, is all.”

  BACK IN HIS ROOM, Alex found a note from Honey suggesting that they eat together, and a hotel questionnaire. The questionnaire, conscious of its own monstrous nature, was offering as its bribe a European vacation, the lucky winner to be chosen at random. Simply hand me in, said the questionnaire, at the front desk when you check out. Three times the questionnaire referred to itself as ‘me.’ Alex took it and a pen to the bathroom, removed his clothes and ran a bath that was too hot for human life. He returned to the bedroom for a bottle of wine and a glass. Sitting on the toilet lid, sweating from the steam, he briskly drank a huge glass of white and filled in his name, sex, racial profile and address. He had no problem giving out personal information. It was the thing he had in abundance. Once in the bath (a slow, stoic lowering), he found a perfectly placed phone just by his head, and a wooden rack by his left hand designed, it would seem, for his wineglass, his questionnaire and his pen. He washed his penis with one hand, soaping gently under his balls, and finished the questionnaire with the other. At home, when in the bath, one always hoped for the entrance of Esther, rushing through half-naked to grab a deodorant, or standing, for a moment, at the mirror, to put a lens in. And then, if you had pleased her, she might turn round and kiss you on the forehead, or run her finger down the seam of your wet belly, or find the soapy penis and kiss the tip of that. She loved you in the morning because the day was new. Argument was left on last night’s pillows along with the wept mascara. Alex drank another glass of wine and found himself, at the end of it, moving his finger around the rim, over and over, waiting for it to sing. The drink, the hot water—these had relaxed him sufficiently. He phoned Adam. It was a crossed line. Two people somewhere were talking faint Japanese.