The Autograph Man (39 page)

They were not.

But they would be.

All his people, all his loves.

The dead walk. He was with them on the train. He had drunk with them, this evening. They carried him home; he was looking at them now. On the walls in black and white, but also in this bed, in full Technicolor. A child knows this, and is told to get over it. A famous Irishman knew it and made peace with it and said all that needs to be said on the matter. But it was still really messing with Alex. He was having trouble with it, basic as it may be. Ten years ago, Sarah’s sister had visited with her young children and Alex’s cousin Naomi refused to sleep in this room because she was scared of the
dead ones on the walls.
Everybody laughed, over breakfast. He had laughed. Everybody had laughed. Because it is wrong, says everyone, to take it so personally—and so he hadn’t, he was a
grown man
(this is probably what everybody means, he thought, by this stupid phrase; they mean
Don’t take it personally, don’t take growing personally, being grown
). He hadn’t taken it personally, not for years. He took it cinematically, or televisually—if he took it at all. But here it came—he tried to grab the top of the door frame to keep himself up—here was the death punch, the infinity slap, and it was mighty. He wheeled away from the spot, clutching in his hand something he had accidentally ripped from the wall; his mouth was open as if someone had kicked a hole in his face. But he made no noise. He didn’t want to wake the dead. He had control, still. He found some spot where he could not be heard, hot and dry and full of towels, and said his Kaddish without gesture or formality—just a wet song into his hands.

CHAPTER TEN

In the World

1.

The doorbell rang. Alex crawled down the stairs.
Literally
crawled down the stairs. Terrified by the heady forward momentum but unsure about standing, he crawled, and when that grew weary on the knees, he flattened himself out and slid down. He opened the front door on all fours, one arm stretched out for the knob.

“Mornin’,” said Marvin.

“Marvin,” said Alex, getting to his feet.

“How was New York, man?”

“Big. Tiring.”

“You
look
tired.”

“I slept on the landing.”

“Uh-huh,” said Marvin, and took out his pad.

Somewhere a bird sang the first four notes of “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” The light was white, the street overexposed. Nobody likes to talk about the first day of spring any more; it is seen as willful sentimentality on the part of nature. But it seemed like spring to Alex today. You could feel Passover and Easter and a long, sluggish, sofa-bound weekend of bad films round the next corner, coming with the sun. The whole day was in bloom.

“Tandem?” said Marvin, lifting his head and following Alex’s gaze, which went straight upwards to the bleached sky.

“Hmm?”

“You gonner order or what?”

“Hell of a day, no?”

“
Every
day is a hell of a day.”

“What do you want to
do,
Marvin?” croaked Alex, and then coughed the frog out.

“Excuse me?”

“Apart from being a milk operative. I mean, what do you want to do with your
life
?”

Marvin eloquently groaned, like a disappointed academic, and slapped his own forehead.

“I tell you something, yeah? Das an idiot’s question, yeah? Life is going to do things to
me.
And that’s all there is. And it’s all good. Yogurts?”

“No, no . . . just milk.”

Marvin made that same sound of disappointment. He put his hands on his hips.

“Look. I saw you in the paper, yeah? I wasn’t even gonner mention it, ’cos that stuff don’t jangle with me, not at all. I got mine—I’m not after anyone else’s. I’m not like these other bredrin, always envious. But at the same
time,
I have to say, I was gently assumin’ you might be a bit more adventurous in your dairy needs from now on. Now dat the situation has changed. Though we would like it otherwise,” said Marvin, somberly, “the world is a marketplace to a degree, bro. Now I got to be all unsubtle ’cos you’ve got me forcing the issue somewhat, you get me?”

“I will have,” said Alex, looking over Marvin’s shoulder to his float, “one each of the milkshake things, some yogurts, the weird Italian cheese you tried to sell me that time, and whatever else you think I might like.”

“
Boo
-yah. Return of the prodigal son,” said Marvin with a whistle, and pimped down the path, clicking his fingers.

A few minutes later, carrying a cardboard box containing various degrees of fermented milk, Alex stepped back into his house feeling something like renewed hope. He closed the door with a jaunty nudge of his backside. Esther was in the hallway. A black silk Chinese dressing gown of his hung from her, open. She brought the two sides protectively together and hugged them shut with folded arms.

“There you are,” he said and walked towards her, but she stepped back from him. Her face knew no false economy: it always gave out only what had been put in. Right now it was a picture of pain.

“Let me put this down,” he said, nodding at the box. He walked into the kitchen and put it on the sideboard. When he turned back round, there were two women standing in the doorway.

“I’m tired,” said Esther. “I’m pretty angry as well, very, actually, but mostly I’m just really . . . I’m
tired.
You need to listen. And you need to shut up while you’re doing it.”

Alex began his favorite noise, the first-person pronoun, but she reached out one arm to stop him.

“I think you need to listen to Kitty first, Alex, okay?”

“Good morning, Alex,” said Kitty, quietly. She was, of the three of them, the only one fully dressed.

Alex tried again with that noise, that insistent
I,
but Esther shook her head.

“You know what I do this morning?” said Kitty, unfolding a newspaper she had in her hand. “I wake up very early, and I step over you. And I go downstairs and I pick up the newspaper from the mat. And I read my own obituary. Now,” she said, smiling half-heartedly, “this I think is a very harsh way to start the day.”

“Kitty, I—”

“In which it says, among other things, that in the end my career was something of an insignificance, and that—here it is—
her chief interest in cinematic history was for collectors, for whom her autograph held an almost mystical fascination.
This is very prettily put, no? This is my whole life, apparently, in a sentence.”

“Oh, Kitty, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I thought—it was just for a day—I thought it made sense . . .”

“It says here also,” said Kitty, wiping away a tear, “that although a natural talent, I wasted my ability in frivolity. . . . It goes on to outline various frivolities in the most
vulgar
manner possible—and then, where it is—yes, that I became
more noted in Hollywood for the men and women I had slept with than for the films I made.
Silly, to be upset by it,” said Kitty, bringing both hands now to her eyes, dropping the paper. “I am too old for such vanity. . . . I don’t know. It is not that I ever thought I was Joan Crawford, do you understand? But can you
imagine
? Reading
this
?
Can
you?”

Alex opened his mouth and shut it again.

“And the worst thing is, it is written by a supposed friend of mine, this filth, would you believe.” Kitty threw the paper on the sideboard with a little noise of disgust. “One always hopes that other people . . . well, that they will think better of you than you do of yourself.”

“All I can do,” said Alex, slowly, “is apologize. That’s all I can do.”

Kitty nodded. Esther put a protective arm round her, but Kitty, after a moment, moved from underneath it.

“It was dishonest, Alex,” she said, looking squarely at him, taking a step forward.

“I
told
him it was a terrible idea,” said Esther, vehemently. “The worst
possible
karma.”

“And rather unfair to me,” said Kitty more gently, as if talking to a boy.

“
Completely
unfair, that’s what I said,” agreed Esther, with a fury (Alex realized now) clearly stretching to another matter. “That money should be returned
immediately.
”

“Oh, one minute, please,” said Kitty, tutting delicately, and placing a finger on Esther’s raised hand. “We do not have to be completely
crazy,
now.”

Now Alex stepped forward to meet Kitty and held her by her shoulders.

“It’s
your
money,” he said, “and it’s pointless giving it back. Even when they find out you’re not . . . then it’ll just be worth more because you’ll be the actress who everybody thought was dead and her autograph went for such and such on the day that everybody thought she was dead—and on and on. That’s the way it works. It’s all madness anyway. Take it, Kitty. Take it and bloody
run.
”

“This is an interesting argument,” she replied, licking her finger and taking some sleep from Alex’s left eye. “I could be convinced therein. So . . . what to do? I keep the money, I see. Minus your ten percent, naturally.” Kitty was smiling. Alex was smiling back at her.

“I already took that out. About fifteen grand. Thanks.”

“You are a
good
boy,” said Kitty, patting his face. “I am very glad we meet. You are a realist, like me. This is good. You kill me, but then you resurrect me. And so you are forgiven.”

Kitty made the sign of the cross, kissed her fingertips, and reached up to ruffle his hair.

“Are you staying? Going?” asked Alex.

“I
stay,
” said Kitty, seeming to make the decision as she spoke. “For a week or two, maybe. Don’t panic, don’t worry—now I have the means, I think I move out of your bedroom. The room service is not very impressive. And we must separate Lucia and Grace before they become
completely
obsessive about each other.”

Alex kissed Kitty’s hand.

“Well,” said Esther, chewing her lip as a tear journeyed down the bridge of her nose, hanging for a while on the tip, “someone’s got to call whoever needs to be called to retract this story, and I need the key for the car if I’m going to get to bloody college on—”

“I
leave
you,” said Kitty, with an actress’s wink and sense of timing. At the doorway she said, “I know you have another big event this evening, yes?”

Alex, who had locked eyes with Esther, nodded in silence.

“I cannot come, sadly—I think the Pope would kill me. But maybe we have dinner afterwards, hmm? Yes, we do this.”

They were left alone. Esther broke their eye contact and looked to the ceiling.

“Yeah, so . . . I’ll need the keys for—”

“You think I did it for me? Is that the problem?”

“I don’t
know,
” she said, bringing both hands quickly to her face and putting a halt to crying, putting crying in its place. “It actually doesn’t really matter right now.”

“You think I did it for some kind of glory, personal glory? Right?”

Esther closed her mouth and spoke through her teeth, a trapped, staccato yell. “It’s not what I
think you did.
It’s like the girl on the sofa—it’s not what you did or didn’t do. It’s how I
feel
about it. It’s about how you make people
feel.
You know? I’m coming up for an operation and you’re with some
girl.
How do you
expect
me to feel?”

He wanted, desperately, to touch her scalp, to draw her into him. To save them both from all this second-rate dialogue, the stuff that love engenders, the stuff of lovers. But he was in the middle of an argument and you’re not allowed to touch during a row, even though nine times out of ten, it’s the thing you want to do most.

“Please,” he said, raising his game, gesticulating. “We’ve been together ten years. You know? And
that’s
what you think of me?”

Here she swore at him and accused him of gross manipulation, but he persisted. And nothing about this argument was news. They had been performing variations on it for the last six years. It ran and ran. This is what relationships
are:
stage shows that run and run until all the life is drained from them and only the gestures remain.

“You think,” snapped Alex, “it’s like you think I have, like, the morals of a sewer rat, or something.”

“Let’s not talk about morals,” said Esther, solidly. “Let’s not do that.”

She nodded to herself three times as if agreeing to somebody’s unspoken question. She left the room. Something gave way in Alex’s stomach, something like a trapdoor. Love, the withdrawal of love. Was this it? Now? The changeover? That day when the two-soldier fight, the war against plastic armrests and hypocrites and pseudos and television and food shaped in towers and triple-layered plastic packaging and consumer surveys and love songs and all organized religions—when this fight becomes singular? When you have to do it all
solo
? It had been threatening to come these last few years. Sometimes he wanted it to. The rest of the time, the thought scared him half to death. On this occasion, he made it to the stairs on adrenaline only and put himself between her and another step. He asked her. Loudly. Repeatedly. Is this it? Is this it? The End?

“We’re both still alive, still here,” she said wearily, and hugged herself ever more tightly. “The end looks more . . . bloody. Dagger, vial of poison, all of that. You know the drill. We’re all right for today, okay? Beyond that—I just don’t know, Tandem. We’ll have to see, really.”

She stepped round him and continued up the stairs.

“Look,” she said, turning and seeing the appeal for clemency in his eyes, “have a shower, baby. You stink. Go and see Ads. I’m going to deal with the papers. I’ll be at the service. We’ll meet Kitty afterwards. Get out of the house for a while, out of my face.”

No withdrawal, then. Suspension, only.

2.

Without taking Esther’s advice (he was interested to know how far he could go with this fug thing), Alex got on a bus to the Mulberry synagogue and sat on the front seats of the top deck enjoying that charming childhood illusion that he was flying down the street.

“Not withdrawn!” he called down to a shopping family. “Just suspended!”

“Good morrow, good wight!” he yelled at a vicar.

“Get a job,” said an old man in the bus.

“HELLO, BEAUTIFUL!” he shouted, sticking his arm out of the narrow window and waving at a schoolgirl.

“Piss off, Humbert,” she called back, hitching her rucksack up her back, the better to give the two-fingered salute.

At Mulberry Central he got off and asked two passing Hasidim for directions to the Progressive synagogue, which the men gave, along with looks of pity. Singing “Ol’ Man River,” a song he found useful for steeling oneself, Alex walked through the leafy avenues of Mulberry. At almost every corner there seemed to be a Hasid waiting to make him feel like a mold the planet had grown. Could they smell him? Or did they just
know
him? A sort of spiritual X-ray vision; sensing his paltry soul, his fermented faith. Alex decided to counterattack by waving at them. This was good. Waving felt good. To get absolutely no response to a friendly wave, waved with an open heart, is morally emboldening.