The Autograph Man (26 page)

“Ah, Mr. Tandem,” said the Swede, with a terror-stricken flick of his strawberry-blond head, “the expert. Good to see you. And you are well?”

Weighing up his dislike for these men, Alex decided to give the break to the Swede.

“Fine. I’m fine. And that’s a very fine Alexander. Very nice piece. Lucky Baguley.”

“Yes, yes, I am glad you think so.” The Swede padded at his sweaty face with a monogrammed handkerchief on which an
H
and an
I
wrapped around each other. “Baguley is indeed lucky.”

“The rumor’s going round,” drawled Baguley, pushing the brim of his hat up with a finger, “that you’re in New York to find her. Find Kitty. That’s the rumor. I’ve got ten bob says you’ll be arrested at the gates. She’ll set the dogs—”

“Hey,” yelled Alex across the room.
“Hey.”
He could see Honey over by the Suffragette table, flicking through a wine box of filed postcards.

“Who you waving at?” asked Lovelear, turning. “Dove out there?”

Alex caught her eye; she grinned at him and raised her hand; but then her face altered. The smile vanished, that look of terrible injury returned; she turned her back, hurried through a tourist group of kindly oval women from the Midwest. She disappeared into a room dedicated to that popular disaster, the sinking of RMS
Titanic.

“What the—” began Lovelear.

“That’s so
weird
. . . . I had a meeting with her an hour ago—I really thought we—”

“Rewind: you
know
Honey Smith?” She’d
lied
to Alex about her name!

“Honey who? That’s Honey Richardson. That’s the dealer I met this morning.”

The Swede cupped his hands to his mouth and guffawed like an English schoolboy.

“Honey Smith—this is a name I do not hear in a while. Boy, the Swedes loved that story, yes sir, they did. Though personally I would have paid her more, yes? Twenty-five does not seem very much. He had much money, of course.”

“You do know,” said Baguley, eagerly, “that she’s in the business now? Yes,
yes.
A colleague of mine bought a Fatty Arbuckle off her in Berlin. My hand on my heart. Said she did him under the bloody table too. Lucky bastard.”

“I just
saw
her, man,” squealed Lovelear, pointing at the space where she had been. “I swear to God it was her. Tandem was waving to her! Tandem’s getting the goods from
Honey Smith
! Tandem, are you boning Honey Smith? She’s like the most famous whore in the
world.
Okay, so I need the whole story
now.
”

The name gave up its secret. Alex recalled the two mugshots: the ruffled Scottish actor, squinting in the flashbulb, the hooker, unbowed, familiar with this kind of camera. Front page for a week? Two weeks? And then it had struggled on for a time in all its lurid installments: her story, his, the girlfriend’s, the pimp’s, the public’s, the confessional interview, and then, finally, the tidy resolution: her return to obscurity.

3.

Hotel rooms are the godless places. You don’t care for anything in there. Nothing in there cares for you. In his room, drunk, lonely Tandem phoned home. But in Mountjoy it was five
A.M.
—the resilient silence of answering machines. On Esther’s machine, he sang “All the Things You Are” in four different keys to avoid high notes; on Rubinfine’s he grew offensive and then, on Adam’s, grossly sentimental. Joseph picked up, but by then Alex had become ashamed. He opened his mouth and nothing happened. Joseph put the phone down. It got late. After drinking everything it contained, Tandem approached the final phase of his relationship with his minibar: surreal optimism. He was reaching out for a chilled can of caramelized peanuts when there was a knock at the door. He was expecting a neighboring irate Christian (sex was on the television at high volume), but through the spyhole saw a convex Honey, all forehead and eyeballs, looming out from the hall on a pair of tiny feet. Alex hunted for his trousers, the remote control. He switched the channel. She knocked again, louder.

“I don’t think it’s polite to keep a lady—”

“Hi,” said Alex, lunging for the door handle, fastening his fly. “Honey.
Hi.
It’s late.”

“Now, you. . . .” she whispered, narrowing her eyes for confirmation of her initial diagnosis, “you’re drunk. Yes you are. Don’t even try to deny it. You’re a
drunk.
”

“You’re a Buddhist.”

“You’re a Jew.”

“That’s a chair,” said Alex, pointing to the fold-up director’s chair in Honey’s rubber hand. She was wearing red satin Chinese pajamas, her hair parted in the middle and drawn back in two thick plaited ropes.

“I always bring my own. Step aside.”

She walked unsteadily past him and unfolded the chair in front of the television. It said
HONEY
on its back-supporting canvas strip. She sat down. Alex perched on the end of the bed, a few feet from her.

“So,” he said.

“I thought I told you,” said the television, “you’re off this damn case. You’re too close to it, McLaine.”

“Got any liquor?” asked Honey.

Alex tried to think. “No . . . noooo, actually—wait . . .
wait
. . . maybe. Maybe . . . red. In the cupboard? There’s wine, small size, definitely wine, though. . . . Yes, wine. Two of them! Screw cap—hurrah! Just unscrew . . . this . . . like this . . .”

“Got any glasses? Actually, forget it. This is fine.”

Honey took her bottle and put it to her mouth in such a way that one couldn’t help but have thoughts. Her eyes wheeled round the room, as if she had just this moment recognized she was not in her own.

“Little bigger than mine. Smells funny. What’s that? Stuck up by the door.”

“Um . . . a note. A bill. English money. Thing my father gave me.”

“All my father ever gave me was a concussion,” said Honey dramatically, and drank half her bottle in one swig.

“Honey, was there something—”

“Shhh. I like this guy, this guy’s good. He’s got range.”

In silence they watched the last twenty-five minutes of a film. Unsustainable ideas of sex floated in and out of Alex’s head, none of them very determined.

“Anything else on?” she asked, as the moody saxophone played and the credits replaced a city skyline.

“Well, of
course
there’s something else on. . . . There’s something like seventy-two channels. Look, Honey—”

“Why bother with painful exercise routines?” asked the television.

“Honey,” said Alex, switching it off, “it’s awfully late. Did you want to . . . talk about something? Or something?”

“Well,” said Honey, talking to the wall, “I sucked this famous dick once—caused a whole lot of fuss—but I guess you heard that about, I mean,
about that,
today.”

The silence that followed seemed like an Alice-hole they were falling through, the two of them tumbling after something curious. Honey closed her eyes for a moment and out of each came a weighty tear.

“Remember me now?” she said finally.

“Honey, I really don’t—”

“Want my autograph? See, trick is to get mine on a corner of a big old sheet of paper and then go door-stop the actor in Marr-lee however you say it, in London, and get him to sign the same piece without him knowing? That goes for a hundred dollars. Me by myself—doesn’t push much more than twenty-five.”

He had not noticed until now how intensely drunk she was. She wore only one glove. He was reminded of Lady Day in those final recording sessions—eyeballs out of control, lip hitched up for a fight.

“Yep. Been on TV and everything. Talk shows. Made a movie.” She dealt with those two tears now, clamping one hand to her chin and smearing them across her fingers. “Actually, sounded like you were watching my movie when I knocked. I understand it plays a lot in hotel rooms.” She laughed darkly and clapped her hands.

“You know Richard Young?” she asked, taking a whiskey miniature from her pocket and unscrewing it. “Meticulous son of a bitch? English? Jewish? His pants are always just so. Real successful.”

Alex filed through the faces he had met today and came up with a black-haired, handsome, careful young man who had about him the air of the wunderkind, a quality that depressed Tandem beyond measure now that his own wunderkind days were behind him.

“From Birmingham. Yeah, he’s up and coming. He’s got a fantastic collection, Rich.”

“Yeah, well,
Rich
heard from some guy who heard from some other guy who heard from some asshole that you’re in New York to find Kitty Alexander. Kit-ty Al-ex-ander. Zat true?”

Alex tried to gulp at his wine in a carefree way, and sent it on a catastrophic journey down his T-shirt. “Ug . . . You know . . . It’s just . . . she sent me an autograph. It’s not really . . . it’s not a big deal. It’s not like I
came here
to find her. It’s not like that. I’m not some lunatic stalker. I just wanted to thank her for it. I’m just another fan.”

Honey stuck an improbably curved nail in his face. “No, no, no—
biggest
fan—that’s what I heard. An’ I must say I was surprised. You don’t seem like a fan of anything to me. I thought you were totally Zen—you know, rising above it all.”

Honey stood up and stumbled towards the window, stepping ineptly over the repeating monograms. She rested against the curtain and pointed out.

“Lives in Brooklyn. I grew up in Brooklyn. Sunday sitting on the stoop. Everybody knew who you were. Before church, after church . . .”

“I’m going to make some coffee, I think,” said Alex, crawling up the bed and stretching for the kettle on his side table.

“More people know you than you know people. . . . See, that’s all it is. Ain’t nothing more than that, really. It’s for amputee people. That’s all. I’ll tell you what’s messed up, too. In my neighborhood,
I’m
a celebrity. Do you believe that? In certain areas of Brooklyn, I’m Elizabeth Taylor.”

“I met her once,” said Alex, missing the electrical socket for the plug and falling off the bed.

Honey swiveled on her heel, and laughed until she needed the bathroom. Soon he could hear her vomiting in there, despite the sound of running taps. He stood at the door with a towel and offered to help, but she wouldn’t let him in.

After that, they had coffee. Talked until the light came over the city in two incoherent stages, electric orange followed by a thin, sulky blue. Honey didn’t believe in abortion anymore, although she used to. Alex thought televised charities were run by crooks. Honey didn’t see why she should touch things if she didn’t know where they came from. Alex couldn’t see the point of fake nails or figure skating. Honey thought there was something weird about English children. They both wondered why there had to be so much mayonnaise on everything.

“I know Roebling. Roebling knows me. I can show you where Roebling is, show you around,” said Honey, folding up her chair.

“Fine. You’re on.”

“Huh? I’m on what?” asked Honey.

“Let’s do it,” said Alex-Li.

CHAPTER THREE

Perceiving the Bull

1.

In the event, Honey reversed the plan. Practically minded, she voted for the Lower East Side first, to find Krauser, and then on to Roebling. Despite its map proportions, she remembered Roebling from her working days as a complicated sprawl where the grid system employed in much of the city finds itself replaced by the ancient way of things. Chaotic roads with peculiar names, roads that dip and curve and hide the door numbers of apartments from the public view.

“
And
it’s cold as hell out there,” said Honey, pulling on some leather gloves in the lobby. “And I don’t need to be wandering around with a bitch of a hangover and no idea where we’re going. I just
know
this guy Krauser is going to help us out. No question. We’re going to show what a nice guy you are. We’ll
charm
his ass.”

Alex continued to struggle with the zip of his duffel coat and then succumbed like a toddler when Honey, bored by the performance, gripped him firmly by the toggles, zipped him to the neck and brought the huge bear hood, trimmed with a halo of synthetic fur, over his head. Her own coat was close-fitting and camel-colored, adding and subtracting from her curves where necessary. She evened out the cord either side of her waist, tying it to the left in a bow.

“Okay? So we done now?”

She gave a maternal pinch to his cheek, already pink from the concierge’s premature flourish with the front doors.

“Yes. That’s— You just touched me.”

“Strike up the band. Whatever you got, I got it by now, anyway.”

“I feel bad,” said Alex, as they took the fierce day full in the face, “about my . . . colleagues. Lovelear, Dove. I should at least . . .”

Honey hooked her arm around his.

“They got room service, right? TV? And there’s a maid to clean it up after. That’s pretty much nirvana these days. Anyway, what is this, a school outing? Two of us is plenty, already.”

It was a five-minute walk to the subway, long enough to bring out the tourist in Alex-Li. He walked like a visitor, face to the American heavens. When a taxi sounded its horn, he looked to see why. Just before the subway’s entrance, a Japanese man in an orange boiler suit stepped out backwards from a doorway, caught his heel on a raised paving stone and dropped a crate of litchees across the sidewalk. Honey crushed a few under heel; out came their little white centers.

“Come
on,
let’s get on with this,” she called back to Alex, who had meant to negotiate his way round but now took some pleasure in getting a dozen litchees in a footfall. He hurried along behind her down the subway steps. This was her city, not his. He had to give himself up to the sensation of not-knowing, of no-power. He felt like the boy who finds the treasure map and shows it to his more competent friend, seeing the
X
as well as he, but less able to find it.

“Cold,” said Honey, once they were underground. “C.O.L.D.
Co-o-old.
”

Opening her mouth, she made the cigar smoker’s
O,
releasing a cloud of steam. Along from them, on the platform, two black boys made animated hand gestures at each other, different congregations of fingers, first three fingers divided from two, then one divided from four—Alex watched them and recalled diagrams he had seen, hand gestures of the high priests in the temple.

“You do me a favor, okay?” said Honey over the train rumble. “You lay this out”—from her bag she produced a foot-long piece of material, a miniature rug decorated with a clan’s tartan—“like, wherever you see a spare seat. I don’t like to sit directly on these things.”

Even in the short journey they had made thus far, Alex was thrilled to see how many people had spotted her. As the train doors closed behind them, three pairs of eyes seized her immediately. One boy made an obscene International Mime to his friend (the groping tongue in the cheek); now a girl tried to replay the flit of an image that she had seen in some quick-firing neuron. Her mouth opened, she looked away and back once more, and then, with an indiscreet, triumphal flex of the fist—she had it!—she smiled and endeavored to return to her bad novel. But her eyes wandered repeatedly off the top of the white page. Back to Honey’s famous red mouth.

And so it went. When they got off at their stop, a gaggle of cruel-eyed schoolgirls sent one of their number leaping up the stairs, four reckless steps at a time, just to see her from the front. At street level, they crossed the intersection and bought a pretzel. She bit into it and Alex asked her:
How does it feel?
She stared at him for a spell, shrugged and unfolded the hotel’s complimentary map of the island.

“This address you got here—it’s in Chinatown. Two blocks from here. We need to take a left here—yeah, a left, definitely. Okay, now,” she said, setting a quick pace, “Alex-Li wants to know. He wants to know.”

“I want to know. Is that awful? I’m curious. Just about how it feels.”

“Curiouser and curiouser.”

She thrust her hands into her pockets and lengthened her stride, deliberately placing each step in the mushy imprints of an earlier stranger. No cars passed, barely any people.

“I hate it,” she said finally. “I hate it, obviously I hate it. But it’s weird. I hate, hate, hate it, and yet . . .”

They passed a chess game (two Russians, three dogs), got caught up in its cries and then strained to hear them. They walked another block without a word. The smell of duck was beginning. At the lights, Alex looked right, stepped out unthinkingly. Honey grabbed his wrist and saved his life.

“Every time, I feel sick,” said Honey a minute later, as they jogged across. “But the weird thing is, if nobody looks, I notice. I just notice—and I feel . . . I don’t even know how to explain it. Like, out of focus. Fuzzy.”

“Fuzzy?”

“You asked, I’m telling you. Fuzzy. Like I can’t sense myself. It’s sort of disgusting, isn’t it?”

At the next corner, an ancient advertisement for pianos, starting just above Alex’s head and ending many miles away where a crane bent its interested head over the rooftops. Adverts become themselves when there’s nothing left to sell: this one was especially moving. The faint, chalky letters of
LAIRD & SON
, their doomed musical venture.

“See,
she’s;
the real thing,” said Honey. Mistaking his interest, she pointed to a still larger billboard to the right. It was a full-color photograph of a beautiful woman. She was selling a clothes store. Her colossal bronzed legs stretched the length of a deli and clear over the human fish tank of a public gym where people were busy going exactly nowhere, running at great speeds towards impassive glass.

“That’s when you go on to a different level,” said Honey respectfully. “You’re godly, then. You got a half-million commuters looking at your you-know-what on a daily basis? People crashing they cars, people losing they lives? That’s when you know you made it. Hey, you know what? That one, the red. That’s the door.”

Alex stopped and looked blankly at the door, then the letter box. The one-way correspondence of his boyhood had fallen through that hole. So many letters! He had turned into a man while he wrote them. Looking at it now, he felt terribly sad. If he had been alone, he would have walked away. But here was Honey pressing him forward to peer at the roll call of apartments and their owners: businesses and private individuals, artist’s studios and whole squashed families. Krauser they found under his trading name, president of the KAAA. Alex still wanted to turn back, but as Honey went to press the bell, the door opened of its own accord, and a grocery delivery boy, still counting his stingy tip, let them in as he left.

“And what now?” whimpered Alex, shivering in the hallway. It was somehow colder than outside, because of the betrayal, because in here one
expected
warmth.

“What now is just what is,” said Honey.

A VOICE HAD BEEN
speaking without pause for a couple of minutes. Now it said: “Am I speaking English? So scram. So drift. So take the air. Don’t you get it? I’m not in the market for a goddamn shakedown.”

“No, wait,” said Honey, raising her voice and putting her lips against the paneled wood, “No, listen a minute. If you’ll just . . . We don’t want to sell you a thing, Mr. Krauser—and we’re not a charity. We—he, my friend Alex, he just wants to talk to you, that’s all.”

The dry voice behind the door started up again, a strange, breathy, scratched monotone, like one of those old gramophone records of inflectionless writers reading their own prose: “And I’m saying I don’t like onion ballads. Go sucker-bait somebody else. I’ll give you a tip: this is a building full of schmucks. Try Castelli. Upstairs. He’s the cliff dweller on the fifth. Boy, does Castelli love an oil merchant. Ha!”

“Mr. Krauser, couldn’t we just—?”

“Go pick yourself an orchid.”

They heard footsteps leading away from the door, the sound of running water, a radio. Honey stepped back and Alex replaced her, ringing the doorbell once more, jamming it down. He waited a while and repeated his full name. The water stopped running. Slowly, the sequence of sounds reversed, and Alex could once again sense this man, close by on the other side. Alex set upon reciting his Krauser facts.

“Yeah, yeah, buddy,” cut in the scornful voice, “I know who I am. Don’t worry about me, I’m on the beam.”

But Alex pressed on: “And before, in the fifties, you were her script editor, I believe . . . and after that, you acted basically as her agent, that’s right, isn’t it?”

“Well, listen at you. You’re a regular encyclopedia salesman.”

Here, the door opened. And one had to, as in the old cartoons, look a foot lower than expected, down to where the bald dome of President Max Krauser skimmed the midair between Alex’s shoulders and Honey’s breasts. This, the postal nemesis? The man’s face was a nothing-much, dominated by a pair of bulky bifocal spectacles, tinted with rising orange mist like a TV sunset. He had a fleshy, pink, vulnerable mouth that deserved a younger man—a few wet, black, adolescent hairs grew around it. A zipped-up brown jogging suit, the auteur’s silken neck scarf, sneakers. A belly like a present he was hiding from a nephew. He was not, on second glance, completely bald: very tightly curled silver hair edged round the back of his head like a fringing cloud.

“Max Krauser?”

“You can take that to the bank and cash it.”

Leaving the door wide open, yet without any hint of invitation, Krauser turned his back, walked into his apartment. The effect, from where Alex stood, was monkish, Krauser a silver-haired friar all in brown. And the room itself? A Kitty-cave, naturally. Posters, movie stills, framed news clippings, magazine covers. One kitsch masterpiece: Kitty painted in thick sentimental oils on a stretched piece of black velvet, gilt framed. But Alex recognized at once that this church was interdenominational. A record player somewhere (the room was subsiding with the weight of rubbish) sang over and over of
Minnie the Moocher . . . a red-hot hootchie-cootcher,
and all about the place were pictures of black men with clarinets, trumpets, sax, double bass and microphone, also their records, also their biographies, their posters, their concert programs, whatever they had left behind. Furniture was an afterthought. There were only four pieces of it: a small card table, bereft of the chairs it needed; a tall, stiff-necked brass lamp with nodding art deco head weeping jangling, pea-green, cut-glass tears; a pool table pressed up against one wall, its baize covered in junk mail, pizza boxes and record sleeves. In the center of the room, one barbershop chair.

“Okay, I’m captive,” said Krauser, turning and dropping himself into this. “Go into your dance.”

Honey moved to the left, laid her rug over a corner of the pool table and cautiously perched upon it, her gloved left hand down a pocket. Alex pushed his glasses up his nose and peered at the small man in the swiveling chair.

“Look,” he said, shrugging as if to apologize for what he was about to say. “My name is Alex-Li Tandem.”

At this, Krauser seemed to jolt; one foot slipped to the floor. He brought it back slowly and returned it to the foot rest. He introduced a new, benevolent smile and sat forward. Alex, thus encouraged, began to speak his piece, forging a little path for himself between the spot he stood in and one at the threshold of the walk-through kitchen. He went back and forth. But Krauser was neither looking nor listening. Krauser was stretching his legs. Krauser was doing a soft-shoe shuffle on his threadbare carpet.

“Ta-ta ta ta-taaa,” scatted Krauser, spreading his arms like the men in the musicals. “This is the sandman shuffle, young man. I got a degree in toe-ology. You still talking?”

Honey groaned, stood up, folded her rug and made the International Gesture for lunacy (temple, tapping finger). She pointed at the door. But Alex persisted.

“Java juice, java juice, java juice,” murmured Krauser meditatively, as Alex, with no special plan in mind, moved towards him. At the crucial moment, Krauser sprang from his chair, pushed past Alex and proceeded to the kitchen. Here, he leant over the breakfast bar and picked up two packets of coffee.