The Autograph Man (17 page)

In the film, Kitty’s eyes are taped down as ever, and she is lost in New York, again, a Peking girl with no friends. In less than an hour she will be the toast of Broadway and then Hollywood, but of course she doesn’t know that yet. Soon everybody will know her name. She will be famous. Soon. For now, she can only walk the streets, a nobody, fearing every shadow. Lonely. Alex’s heart cleaves to her as he watches her slender form slipping into cinemas, sitting in the dark. You see, it is only at the movies that May-Ling Han finds comfort. From his elevated booth, Jules Munshin, who plays Joey Kay the projectionist, looks down. He is in love with her, of course. He thinks he has no hope. He is dumb-looking, poor. But he’ll get her. Things are moving faster than he knows. In one hour twenty minutes it will all be over. In between, there will be some tears. And then the laughter. He will become her manager, her husband, her everything. It is called a happy ending. The miracle of cinema is how rarely the convention of the happy ending is broken. The bigger miracle is that the convention of the ending is never broken at all. Alex watches Joey watching Kitty watching the huge flickering faces of people she presumes to be gods.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Hochmah

WISDOM
• Three rabbis • Something is like a coin • Where the dead live • The wisdom of Lauren Bacall • Walking to the center • Description of a struggle/The defense • Virginia Woolf was Jewish • Suicide do’s and don’ts • Real prosperity

1.

“So,” said Rubinfine. “What are we going to do about
this
?”

Alex checked his watch. It was Thursday. It was nine in the morning. Rabbis Darvick and Green looked exhausted. Darvick had specks of white gloop in the corners of his eyes. Green had both hands against the Mountjoy memorial, knees bent, puffing like he’d run a marathon. Rubinfine looked just fine. Parked in front of them all was a small Italian car. Next to that, a huge dining room table fashioned from walnut.

“What are you
doing
out here?” asked Alex. “Again. It’s nine in the morning.”

“What are
you
doing?”

“Look, I
live
round here. And now I’m going to work.”

Darvick’s fat face started to shake. He laughed with his shoulders forward and his mouth wide open. He grabbed Alex by the wrist to steady himself.

“I thought you didn’t
have
a job. I thought you were just this schloompy guy with no job.”

“Well, Rabbi, you’ve been misinformed. I
have
a job. I’m heading for Pemberton Hill. I have work. That needs to be done.”

“Of
course
you do,” said Green soothingly. “Everybody has things they need to do.”

“Aaa-lex?” asked Rubinfine, softly, studying the sky. “What’s the law concerning sun roofs? By which I mean: if we put the table in through the boot, but let its forelegs, as it were, protrude from the roof . . . would I be violating any road regulations you’re aware of?”

“Rubinfine,” said Alex with his eyes closed, “that table is not going in that car.”

“On the contrary,” said Rubinfine.

“It must,” said Darvick.

“Fine. That’s fine,” said Alex, and turned to go, walking straight into a wall of flesh, shaped like Green.

“You see,
Rebecca,
” said Rubinfine, crouching down beside the table, “needs it. At the barn dance, on Sunday. For the . . . small people. It’s for the refreshments. She wants a buffet rather than a sit-down meal. She thinks it will be more . . . suitable. You know how she thinks of everything. Also, this table is particularly low and, as you know, their growth is . . .”

Rubinfine sighed.

Green leant forward. “Restricted,” he said.

“You’ll come to the barn dance?” asked Rubinfine.

“Uh-uh,” replied Alex firmly. “I’ll go to America. Sorry. I’ve got business.”

“Rebecca will be
very
disappointed,” said Rubinfine, his hands fussing with the air. “She hoped to see you. Didn’t she, Rabbi Darvick? She won’t be happy.”

Despite himself, Alex felt for him. “Tell her,” he said, kindly, “that I have an autograph for her. A Munchkin. Mickey Carroll. He was one of the Lollipop Guild, I think. That’ll pacify her.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Darvick. He was staying in the Rubinfines’ overdecorated spare room. Rebecca liked to charge in unannounced to force-feed her guests. Alex had been there once when his own flat flooded. It was like living inside a violent tea cozy.

“I shall come this evening, pick it up,” said Rubinfine. “I shall bring Joseph.”

“Shall you indeed,” said Alex.

“I shall. I know that Joseph wants to talk to you, seriously.”

“Still?”

“So!” said Rubinfine. “You don’t think the table will go?”

“I
know
it won’t go.”

“
Faith,
Alex,” rumbled Rubinfine, becoming purple. “My colleagues will know this story by heart, but if they don’t mind I will retell it. It is a story told by Bahya ben Joseph ibn Paquda.”

“Ah, yes,” said Green, hugging himself.

“Yes,”
said Darvick.

“HOPING,” said Rubinfine loudly, “to create a path across a stream, a traveler threw all his silver coins in the water. All the coins sank except one. Catching this one in time, the traveler used it to pay the ferryman, who rowed him across.
Faith,
says Bahya, is like that last coin. When all of life’s treasures are gone—”

“—it alone will help a man across the waters of life!” said Green, with a radiant smile.

“Yes,” said Rubinfine irritably. “It alone, you see? Well?”

“Right,” said Alex. “Well, I have to go.”

Throughout this, Darvick had been massaging his chin. Now he said, “You know, I don’t think that one’s about
faith.
As I remember it, the coin is
good judgment.
I’m almost certain of it.”

“Well, either way—”

“Also,” said Darvick, shaking his head in concern, “Bahya was one of the Sephardim, the mystics—that’s right, isn’t it? And, you know,
Kabbalah
. . .”

Darvick laid his hand flat in midair and turned it from side to side. Green nodded.

“Yes, well I meant it as a . . . warning, more than a literal . . .” said Rubinfine, struggling. “If you recall what Rabbi Zeeman said in conference only yesterday . . .”

Resolutely, Alex shook hands with the three rabbis.

“Off, are we?” asked Rubinfine, holding him fast. “Taking that Kitty to market, hmm? Joseph seems to think you’ll get a very nice price.”

“Joseph shouldn’t be discussing my business. As it happens, I’m going to get it verified this morning, that’s all. Not everything in life is for sale. Good-bye, Rabbi Rubinfine. Rabbi Darvick. Rabbi Green.”

“Of course,” said Rubinfine, as Alex released himself, “we
saw
Esther.”

Alex squinted.

“Oh,
yes,
” said Green. “The pretty black girl? Yes, she passed by here moments before you. She told us about her heart. So affecting! Like something from a film!”

Alex considered stabbing Green to death with a broken biro he had in his pocket, but he needed the information. “Well? How
was
she?”

Three blank faces.

“I mean, how did she act?”

More nothing.

“Did she look all right?”

“Oh, she looked—she really looked—” stuttered Darvick.

“Oh, yes. She
did,
” murmured Green.

“What?”

Rubinfine opened his mouth, closed it and opened it again.
“Beautiful,”
he said.

THERE IS SOUTH LONDON
. And then there is
South
London. And then there is
South London.
And then there is Pemberton Hill. And Pemberton Hill made Alex feel unwell. He couldn’t help it. He knew he didn’t have a leg to stand on. But you feel how you feel. And Alex had always felt like a North London boy, though it was an affiliation out of character. His instinct was to detest grouping of all kinds—social, racial, national or political; he had never joined so much as a swimming club. But for this corner of the world he felt that irrational something which enabled him to almost understand why people behave as they do in the contentious, blood-slick places of the world.

North versus South. Huge row about it once, nuclear row, sitting in a park one summer with Ads, during a heat wave. Shorts rolled up, legs in the air, decimated picnic. A troop of ants determined to cross a teacup into a land of pâté. A perfect London summer’s day, in short, marred by this ancient row over North versus South.
Stupid and offensive pose,
Adam had said, furiously demolishing Alex’s defenses one by one (houses, parks, schools, pints, girls, weed, public transport), revealing them for the shibboleths they were. Soon enough, the ants found a shortcut over their bellies. Finally, tired of rowing, Alex had stretched out in the high grass to bleat the only honest reason he had:
I think it’s because nobody
knows
me in South London. And I don’t know anyone. It’s like being
dead
.

EVERY THURSDAY MORNING
, Alex died. Every Thursday morning, Duchamp was the only mourner. In a covered market in Pemberton Hill, covered by concrete, under an underpass. Plants, old books and chipped china for sale, the sunlight breaking over all this in columns, a ballet of dust in these columns. Unspeakably sad, the whole place. Old women, rain hats tied in girlish bows under their chins, walked up and down lines of stalls, in a fretful, lonely way, looking for something like war widows threading though a cemetery of unmarked graves. Alex always held his breath as he passed through, only releasing when he got to the end of it all: three school desks pushed together, Duchamp, his autographs, his toxic smell.

“Now . . . it’s Alex, innit? The Chinaman. My eyes . . .” said Duchamp, coming up close. Alex stepped back, reeling. “What can I do for you, squire?”

Duchamp looked dreadful. The deterioration, even from the day before, was terrible to see. His mind had given up some time ago, obviously, but now his body was giving up. And there’s no way back from that. He didn’t look scared, though. That’s the safety net of madness, Alex supposed, that’s its gift. Duchamp had no goyish fears, thanks to that net. It was only Alex who was feeling a terror grip him. A selfish terror.
How few Thursdays Duchamp has left to him! How many do
I
have?

“Nothing, really,” said Alex, moving to the other side of Duchamp, the side without the mouth. “Actually, I’m not buying at the moment, Brian. I’m selling.”

“Sorry, chief, didn’t catch that—”

“I said, I’m not
buying
right now, Brian. I’m selling.”

Duchamp took out a handkerchief, the more frankly to pick his nose. Exploring his bare gums with a fat tongue, he waddled down the line of desks, finished fiddling with his nose and now held the handkerchief to his mouth. Whilst he spoke he coughed up yellowish stuff flecked with red, and would not or could not stop shaking his head.

“Oh, now look, Tandem, look, I can’t help you, mate. . . . You can’t sheriously expect me . . . I ain’t buying, Tandem—I’ve gorra
sell
if I want to live. You can’t ask an old git like me to buy, now, with the market like it is, flooded with fakes—I’m selling, Tandem, I aint
buying.
I’m like whassisname.”

Alex made the International Gesture for
Sorry, Brian?
(Hands holding invisible football, squinty eyes, head at an angle.)

“Oh, don’t give me that—come on,
whassisname
. . . oh, bugger it—him, the fat one, oh come on, squire! It’s Alex, innit? Tandem—it’s you, innit? Well,
Tandem’ll know.
Nuffing Tandem don’t know about this business. He’s the
innellekchewl,
inny? Every bugger knows
that.
You should ask
’im.
”

“Brian . . . I don’t . . .”

“Yes, you do, come on, now, in the films . . . Don’t be a nonce all your life—”

“Brian, I don’t
know
. . .”

Duchamp’s nodding grew faster, frightening.

“Oh, God, Brian, I don’t know . . . is it Oliver Hardy?”

“Piss
off.
”

“Brian, I
just don’t
have time for this, today—no, all right all right all right . . . Charles Laughton? Sydney Greenstreet?”

“No, it weren’t no one like that . . . funnier than them; a funny one, you know. Fat, like. Huge!”

“Brian—
please.
Could we just—”

“W. C. Fields! In that one he did, you know that one, the Dickens one . . . I’m like ’im, watching me money . . . come on, you know it! What was it he said? Funny, it was. Come
on.
It was, er— Oh, now I know it, it was:
Expenditure twelve pounds and three shillings. Result: happiness. Income
—no wait, how’d it go, no wait—bloody ’ell—it’s the other way round innit, it’s
Income, twelve
—”

People who are about to die, and the insane. These people speak into the middle distance, eyes clouded by some sort of a film, like a thick uncryable tear, and with their hands going, distractedly picking at their chests. In Lauren Bacall’s autobiography, one of Alex’s all-time favorite books, she described Bogie’s death that way. The odor (
I realized it was decay
) the hands picking at the hairs on his chest
as though things were closing in, and he wanted to get out.
The fight to die. Duchamp was still on his feet, by some miracle, but death was on him. Alex could smell it, see it, feel it, just as Lauren did. Lauren Bacall:
not
the goddess of all sex (as has been claimed) but the goddess of all compassion. And now remembering Lauren’s honest book made Alex step forward and take Duchamp’s busy hands, and place them by his sides and say, “All right, Brian, all right. What have you got for me, then?”

A 1936 MGM
fan album, unsigned, photo of the actress Angela Lansbury, unsigned, a toothbrush holder, one slipper (
“Danny Kaye’s slipper, mate. He gave it me”
), six stills signed by the horror actor Vincent Price, all forged; a picture of Brian’s sister, June. And more. And more.

IT BEGAN TO RAIN
heavily. Alex helped Brian move his three school desks out of the range of errant raindrops. After they’d lifted everything ten yards, and picked up whatever had fallen, Brian offered him a small plastic school chair to sit on and took one for himself.

“Stay here a bit, eh?” said Brian, shivering.

Alex stayed. He brought up a box from under the stall and began working through the folders. There was good stuff in that box. Quite a lot of it. Duchamp had a cracking Harold Lloyd, for example. Some good mid-range forties studio stars: Tyrone Power, Joel McCrea, Van Heflin, Mary Astor. And a very nice Merle Oberon. All under the desk. On top of the desk, he was offering the public a broken anglepoise lamp. With no real hope of a reaction, Alex suggested that this situation might be reversed.

Brian breathed on him and then rubbed his eyes, over and over.

“But, Brian, it would be better if—”

“Have you a lady friend at present, Tandem?”

“Sort of. She doesn’t want to be my friend much right now.”

“Well, there you are,” said Duchamp, firmly. “Women are the answer. They are. If you’ll only let them into the story. Women. They are the answer.”