The Autograph Man (31 page)

She passes him the remote, and he slips off the end of the bed to the floor, where he sits cross-legged. Though the television will not stay quite still in his vision (it triplicates, or dances drunkenly to the left), Alex does his best to control it. He flicks. He lands. The popular actor Jimmy Stewart is desperately clutching two handfuls of paper and looking in the godly direction.

“I hate this channel,” says Kitty with vehemence. “For me it is too morbid. Graveyard of my friends.”

Alex kneels up and looks down the bed. An obnoxious night light has picked out the patches of scalp revealed by thinning hair and now catches her stricken expression with no sympathy, no care. He would protect her from closeups. Lucia lies against her chest like a baby.

“I have lunch with him, once.”

“Really?”

The position is tiring. Alex lays his head next to her feet.

“Yes, really. We had a mutual friend in Charlie Laughton, and his wife, Elsa, who was lovely. Odd-looking, but never jealous or this sort of thing. They were both very English, very elegant—which was something for me because everybody in Hollywood was terribly
vulgar
and I missed my home, and they knew a little of Capri and so on—so, one day, Mr. Stewart came to Texas, I don’t know why, and I was there getting married to an
idiot,
and Mr. Stewart, he knew nobody, and Charlie, he remember that I am there, and he give him the number for my hotel, and we meet for lunch. Very tall man, with the most unusual voice pattern. He loved me a little, I think—but I was too flattered really to even know what to do. And also there was this marriage to the ridiculous oil man with the terrible feet . . .”

And this is the touchstone. They talk about the films, about single moments in the films, gestures. He goes to the lounge and looks where she has told him to and returns with a tape. Expertly, he fast-forwards to a single frame.

“This?” she exclaims, putting on a pair of glasses. “What it is? What is special?”

On the screen, Joey Kay, agent, husband, is onstage with May-Ling Han, as they accept the applause after the premiere of her first film. The curtain is a landscape of red velvet folds. Flowers are being thrown, great open-throated lilies. Even the orchestra in the pit have laid down their brass to clap. She is a smash! And he reaches out for her, his face full of love, but she does not turn to him. Her focus is now purely on the first three rows. Something has changed. There is a tiny pulse in this wrist that he grips. It speaks a Bible. She has made her choice. Between a man she has loved and those wonderful people out there in the dark.

“I see nothing here,” says Kitty, peering, “just a lot of dumbshow. The film is ridiculous to begin with. I look as Chinese as my shoe.”

They go through films like this, fast-forwarding, freeze-framing. Kitty’s laughter is hearty and at odds with her small mouth. Tales of lascivious costars, cruel directors, diva tantrums.

“You are a library of me,” she says, shaking her head, as he extracts another tape. “Nobody asked you to keep a library. And of such absurdities!”

“One more,” pleads Alex.

Later, the light comes through.

“My God, do you see this! The night is finished. I have to close this blind.”

She pulls back the blanket and slowly stands. He sees more than he should; a piece of her thigh, the skin candle-white and glutinous, without muscle, falling off the bone. Purple veins, thick as pencils. She closes her robe. As she passes the television, Alex seizes a scene. Kitty in a two-piece, drying her hair. She stops. Stands above it, looking down at the image from an oblique angle, scorning it, almost.

“Look at this. Can you imagine?”

“You are
so
beautiful. Beyond . . .”

“No, no, no, no. You can’t know, what it is to see.”

“It’s amazing. You get to see this, always. It’s on film. You sort of live for—”

“Now you are being ridiculous,” she says severely and walks across the room to the window. “People don’t tell the truth. As if we pass easily from one to another. Youth to age. No—it is not true, one is yanked. And the
fear,
this they lie about too. I can’t sleep for thinking that it is all almost finished. My life. And I will go alone. And in America. This I never planned. Nobody with me, except Max.”

“Kitty, don’t you think that Max . . . has,
Christ
—maybe a bit too much
control
of—”

“I’m so tired now,” mutters Kitty, going back to her bed. “You must forgive me.”

“I’ll sleep here,” says Alex decisively. He thinks he will stay here like a sentry, one eye out for death. He switches off the screen. She closes the blind. A warm fuzzy gray fills the room, making the two of them black, indistinct shapes, their own shadows.

“Of course you will,” says Kitty with equal firmness, and gives him whispered instructions to find a a blanket, pillows. “And your lady friend?” she asks. “She will not miss you? She was maybe a little too tall for you, I thought.”

“Why,” asks Alex, throwing a blanket over his shoulder, “are we whispering suddenly?”

Kitty gets into her bed and points to Lucia, who has somehow shunted all the way down and lies like a bolster at its edge. Alex makes his bed. Kitty lies down. Alex lies down. Their breathing begins to fall in sync, because he is tracking her inhalations, following them exactly. Alex’s heart strains at the sound of a stray cough from her, or a wheeze. Of all the possible deaths that stalk everyone every day, at this moment hers feels the most unbearable. This must be, he thinks with satisfaction, the top and bottom of love.

IT IS FIVE A.M.
In a passionate, dramatic gesture, he stands up in his gray underwear, which refuses to conform to the passion and drama of the moment (stuck all to one leg and disappearing up the back), and tells her that she must come with him and leave this place because there’s no other way for her to be free, and besides, he has a plan. He’s been thinking of this speech for an hour in the dark.

“We talk at breakfast, hmm?” she says as neutrally as she can, turning to find him kneeling by her side in an artificial panic, and with a cast to his face that she has played opposite, many times. “We sleep now. It’s terribly late—too late to play a B movie.”

She rolls away from him and grips the coverlet. Her fingers have gone cold. Even when making those films, even as a know-nothing girl, she had slept badly on the suspicion of just how many of these people, these moviegoers, take a line, take a look, and use it on a loved one.

CHAPTER SIX

Riding the Bull Home

1.

The park resembles a Russian prospect. A gold-leaf Orthodox basilica peeps through the trees, a Soviet-style running track sits at its center. Banks of dirty gray ice are heaped up against tree trunks and benches and around the water fountain and there is one odd island of it on the running track that the joggers must jump over. Alex would not have believed there could be jogging in February, but here it is. It is eleven
A.M.
exactly. Roebling has shaded into somewhere else and he is on his way to find a subway to take him back into Manhattan. He has made plans today, and purchases: food, an air ticket, an improving book. He has had, as the advertising executives like to say, a hell of a morning.

He finds a seat and watches a mixture of Hipsters and Poles mark out a beat in a perfect circle. The Hipsters run in toweling sportswear, in seventies brand names and sweatbands. The Poles do too, though in a different spirit. These two groups do not meet on the racetrack or chat by the fountain; they keep to themselves. It was the same deal, Alex noticed, in the shop where he bought this muffin. Herring, latkes, kielbasa and pierogi on one side; latte, falafel and cheesecake on the other. And in the bookshop a shelf of the popular writer Charles Bukowski stood across from a table piled high with Polish-language Bibles.

On the street the Poles seemed to understand the snow and dress for it. The Hipsters think they can accessorize the cold away, or simply ignore it. The Polish girls are waxy skinned, cat-eyed. They don’t know Alex is alive. The Hipster girls are apple-cheeked, with erratic hair, and may be interested, dependent on how much interest you show in the art that they are making. Though he has only been in the area twenty minutes, Alex feels qualified to further probe this weird cohabitation of Hipster and Pole, to puzzle the relations between them, the laws. Is it like-that or like-this? He sips his coffee. He resurfaces with the following:

The Realm of Like-This

1. Poles need Hipsters because Hipsters bring new money to the area.

Spring comes, grass grows by itself.

2. Hipsters need Poles because Poles are proof that Hipsters—despite their increasing financial stability—are still bohemian. Living near Poles is a Hipster’s sole remaining mark of authenticity.

The blue mountain does not move.

3. Hipsters are Poles. Poles are Hipsters. Poles sell 1950s retro gas station T-shirts. Hipsters eat pickled herring.

White clouds float back and forth.

Contented with this, Alex stretched his arms along the cold bench. In his pocket, an air ticket, on his lap an open book.

“Yitgadal v’yitkadash,”
he read out loud, and then repeated the same phrase more confidently in English. He glared at the Aramaic, of which he comprehended only their basic forms (
yod, tav, gimel, dalet, lamed
) but nothing of their attendant dots and dashes. Infuriating. He laid his hands over the text. Breathed from his diaphragm. There was no good reason to be doing this unless one accepted that the very lack of reason made it worth doing—a perfect Jewish formulation. But that wasn’t it. She had said something, that was it.

HE WAS IN
the shower at the time and she stood at the bathroom mirror, openly watching. And this had felt almost normal. She applied her makeup, asked him about his family.

“My father also,” she replied, to his reflection. “Although at my age, of course, this is more to be expected. But I know what is it, to feel this. My mother, she died when I was very young, eleven. She was my beloved.”

Alex prepared to exchange those perfunctory TV consolations that everyone of his generation learns by heart. But without a pause, Kitty had already begun to tell a story, as if everything up to this point was prologue to the telling of it.

“A
Romanian,
” she said, meaningfully. “Terrible! I hated her so! This is the woman, you see, that he remarried. Like in a novel or a fairy tale, this was the proportion of her wickedness. A thief and an adulterer and a climber, socially. And she
hated
me. I was so pretty, of course, and she was
awful,
like a gargoyle or something like this. She beat me whenever he was not looking. But the worst is, we had a summer
palace
almost, in St. Petersburg—well, what do you think? She took everything from it when he died, from the paintings to the cabinets to the pink English saucers underneath the cups! Everything was sold to the highest bidder, really, this is how it was! These things that were in my family some of them for three hundred years, can you imagine?”

This detail about the saucers, spoken with such horror, made Alex inadvertently smile, and he turned his face to the wall. Indefatigable Kitty carried on talking, dipping her head to one shoulder and then the other to put in a pair of pearl-drop earrings. Alex shut off the shower, and stepped back from its final cold dribble.

“And see that is one of the most precious items, right in front of you,” she said, turning and pointing. “This is the result of my labors.”

Alex looked at the circular gold-framed seventeeth-century miniature resting against the window. Kitty’s great-great-great-great Russian grandmother, damaged slightly by fire and missing one eye. Kitty had spent these last years paying Max to pay other people to shuttle round Europe retrieving the objects of her childhood.

Alex accepted the towel she passed him.

“And that’s where your money went.”

“Of course, where else? I have no champagne, no gigolos. It is odd to me, because I always believe I hate my father for marrying this woman, and now I spend my time and all of this money saving his things. Most of them I don’t even like. But in its way it is a gesture, I think. You never know, until it happens, what you will owe the dead.”

“MAGNIFIED AND SANCTIFIED,”
said Alex loudly, “be His great name.”

This last came out in the voice of the popular actor James Earl Jones, a rich basso that often appeared in his throat when he attempted religion. He looked up from his book.

What you owe the dead.

What you owe the dead.

What you owe the dead.

A luminous Hipster girl, with long yellow hair, rucksack and roller skates, had been flying around the track like a goddess. Now she knelt down three feet away from him to tie her lace. She wore a famous skirt from the eighties. Her knees were scuffed and blue. It seemed deeply unlikely to Alex that she would ever have to figure out how to mourn a father dead for fifteen years in a dead language.

“YITGADAL V’YITKADASH!” he said, too stridently, and the girl flushed purple, apologized. She rolled away before he could explain. He saw her a few minutes later walking out of the gate in a pair of sneakers, a human girl again on two human feet.

2.

But rewind: who woke first? Or had they really, as it seemed, woken together, roused by the same curtain-flutter, the stab of intrusive light? Alex had hoped to surprise her in bed, had imagined himself walking in with a tray of fresh O.J. and eggs over easy, and a flute glass with a single rose and the rest of the movie props, but as his eyes opened so did hers. They sat up. And then somehow she was out of her bed before he could stop her (“Can you imagine, at this age, if it is not done immediately it is not done at all!”) and gone. He found her in the kitchen opening a can of sardines for frantic Lucia, whose tongue lay out of her mouth, panting and curled at the tip.

“Ug,” said Alex, and held his head to stop his brain leaking from his ear.

“Like Karloff, you look,” said Kitty.

They ate boiled eggs and bowls of cereal in the lounge window seats, and watched a young couple in the brownstone opposite have an argument. Alex took the two paracetamol Kitty had given him and dropped them into the final pool of milk at the end of his muesli.

“You see that she is in a suit,” said Kitty, rapping the window with a knuckle, “and he is in pajamas. She is
very
high-flying, in publishing I believe—see, there are books in every corner—and he I always see in bed until the afternoons. Occasionally he sits on a mat for three hours and crosses his legs. Can you imagine! And once a week they have a huge row, and sometimes he makes a pretense of packing bags, but he never goes. But his body is
incredible
. . . so we forgive him, I think.”

“I want you to come to London with me,” said Alex.

Kitty laughed shrilly, as if she had been tickled. She stood up to clear away the breakfast things, but he grabbed her hand. She took her seat again and lifted a cool eyebrow.

“What it is you would like me to say to this?”

Alex let go, sulkily set about his cereal again.

“It’s just—”

“What is it just?”

“You said you wanted to see Europe again.”

“I would also like to be twenty-six again. But things are not so miraculous.”

Alex looked up, moved towards her and held her elbows. “Just to get away. From Max, from being stuck in the house all day. It’s just a holiday. It’s not the end of the world. It’s easy. We’ll go tonight.”

“You are very sweet,” said Kitty, smiling and standing once more. “And very unstable. You sound like Trevor Howard or somebody. And everything with you is done at maximum speed. I have known you precisely twenty-four hours. Pass me this and the egg cup, please.”

Across the road, a huge sash window jerked open and the young lady in the suit thrust her hand out, pointing to the street.

“Out there!” she shouted. “Out there in the world!”

“Ooh la la,” said Kitty, whistling and heading for the hall. “And finally it explodes.”

“Listen to me,” said Alex, following her. “I know you don’t have any money. But you
do,
I mean—you could have. So easily. Put that stuff down, wait—just put it down for a second.”

With a good-humored groan, Kitty left her tray on the cabinet. Alex scanned the room for a pen and found one on the mantelpiece. He grabbed an old magazine. “Just write it here—your name.”

Kitty took the magazine and pen from him and dropped them on the sofa.

“Oh,
Alex.
This is your plan? You think I never think of this? But am I to sell my own autograph, fifty dollars here, there, a stoop sale of my life—Max tells me about this sordid business—I’m sorry, Alex, it is rather too undignified. Look at how I live, alone, eating breakfast with a stranger. My life is quite undignified enough.”

“Wait,
wait. Fifty
dollars? Is that what Max told you? He doesn’t know what he’s
talking
about. I’ve seen people buy a letter of yours for eight thousand dollars, Kitty. Eight
thousand.
”

And this did stop her. Her mouth opened and closed again. She sat down.

“Eight?”

“Eight.”

“This is quite serious, this money. I could do very much with this. And you,” she murmured, looking up at him and tucking a stray wisp of hair behind her ear, “you are quite serious, too, I think.”

Alex sat down by her. “I thought about it. All night. It makes sense.”

They heard the window across the way close again, and there was something conclusive in it. The end of something over there, the beginning of something over here.

“But what can be done? It must be illegal. And how, anyway, am I to sell my own—”

“That’s what I’m telling you. You don’t do anything. I’ll do it, all of it. There’s nothing dodgy about it. I’ll take a percentage, like any agent—”

“Ha! This I hear before, and then they run off with everything—”

“Just ten percent, standard. I want to help you—”

“You want to help
somebody,
” she flashed, moving away from him. “You feel guilty about something, I see it in you—I am a Catholic, I know about guilt also. It gives you the Samaritan disease! I don’t want any charity!”

“Right, well, then you can just owe me for the air ticket. Listen to me, please. It’s not charity. It’s a gift, back to you, for what you’ve given me. The point here is you could have a nice holiday. Make some money. Then, if you liked, you could live anywhere. You could live in Italy. Anywhere. If we did it right.”

“Lucia, please”—the dog scurried up on to her knees—“do you listen to this fantastical business! Where do you feature in such a plan, hmm? And then Max—oy! Max would love all of this, no?”

“Max, Shmax,” said Alex, and swore colorfully, making Kitty laugh. “It’ll just be a week or so. We’ll tell Max when you get back. He won’t complain when he sees the money. And if you fly first-class—well, how big is Lucia? She’ll fit in a bag, won’t she?”

Lucia settled into Kitty’s lap and made a noise of approval as the extra skin of her neck was kneaded between two attentive fingers.

“Kitty?”

“Yes, I listen, I listen. But it is a lot to be taking in all at once. And what does this mean, doing it right? How would ‘right’ be?”

“Incrementally.”

“This word I don’t know.”

“Slowly. In bits. If we flood the market, the value will disappear. We’ll sign old photos—we could try dating the ink, even—but most private buyers, they don’t even check. And old letters, if you have any. I’ll do it through open markets, auctions, on the computer, through agents . . .”