The Autograph Man (9 page)

“Li Tandem. I thought I wrote it perfe— Look, oh, well, it’s typed just there, Rabbi, on the other side. Alex-Li Tandem.”

“Alex-Li Tandem? ‘Tandem Autographs: More Stars than the Solar System.’ Huh? What kind of a name is that, anyway? Tandem? You converted?”

“The father, Li-Jin Tandem—may his memory be a blessing—was Chinese,” explained Rubinfine, and with so much phony solemnity Alex wanted to reach over and stab him in the eye with his house keys. “Tan, originally. Someone thought ‘Tandem’ sounded better. Odd—clearly doesn’t. Mother, Sarah. Lives in the country now. Lovely lady.”

“Is that a fact,” said Darvick. “Chinese. Is that a fact.”

“Those are the facts, yes,” said Alex-Li. “Now, gentlemen, if you’ll excuse me . . .”

“You’re excused, you’re excused,” said Rabbi Darvick, petulant, bending down and hooking his fingers under the bookcase once again. “If you’re not a help, you’re a hindrance!”

“If you’re not for us, you’re against us!” said Rabbi Green.

“Well,” said Rubinfine, “maybe you’ll stop involving yourself with things beyond your understanding? Maybe. And maybe I will see you on Shabbat. We need to talk seriously, Alex. Maybe we will. Maybe a lot of things. But ‘maybe’ is a word for men, Alex. ‘Maybe’ is for Mountjoy. But in God’s mind, no man says ‘Maybe.’ ”

“Yeah,” said Alex, “okay.”

“Maybe,”
said Rubinfine. “This word is not in His vocabulary.”

“Right,” said Alex. “Got it.”

“And Alex, if you . . .”

Stress induced Alex-Li Tandem’s jaw to lock for a moment and it was some effort to free it.

“If I what, Rabbi?”

“If you get any Ford, remember me.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Hod

SPLENDOUR • One tube, many people • Goyish mime •
She who sees • Shadows • Jewishness and Goyishness •
John Lennon was Jewish • The night in question •
Enduring everyone • “The Ballad of Esther Jacobs” •
The tragedy of Alex-Li • The fundamental goyishness of
Leonard Cohen

1.

By the doors, a very old man who had made a dreadful smell. The carriage was putting on a brave face, though, for surely he could not help it. By the
NO EATING
poster, two schoolboys eating. Standing at the extreme other end, three women, dressed identically in bright polyester flecked, supposedly, with colorful paint. They were telling humorless anecdotes about their weekends. They were placed at regular intervals along the melancholy arc of sexual maturity and they knew it. They laughed frenziedly, jiggling on the hand straps, demonstrating what
three women having fun
looks like. They did not like each other, Alex thought.

Sighing, he opened his flask, took a deep swig. The smell made his eyes water. Rather than ask him to close the flask, a woman to his right performed an elaborate goyish mime—watch-check, realization of missed stop, little gasp, up on balls of feet—then got out of her seat at the next station and left the train. Thirty seconds later, Alex spotted her in the adjoining carriage squished between a very fat man and a nun, such a very tidy example of karma that he found himself considerably moved.

THE TRAIN WAS
stuck overground between stations when Alex’s phone rang. Without thinking the thing through properly, he answered it.

“The thing about a delusion,” Joseph was saying rather smugly, “is, if you allow it to continue, it develops, and then it can get
very
serious.”

Alex could picture him, exactly. He had been to Joseph’s office, observed him in his cubicle. Even in that room of five hundred identical cubicles, Joseph’s was peculiar for its total absence of personalization. No photographs, no flags, no jokes. Just the neat package of Klein himself, his polished shoes, his compact computer, his hands-free phone. Always the only man in a suit and tie. One of the very few who arrived at his desk by a quarter to nine. Leant forward, both elbows on the desk, his fingers clutching each other in imitation of a church roof. Forehead pressed against the steeple.

“Joe, I’m on a train.”

“Yes. And I’m at work.”

“I’m stuck between stations.”

“Alex, I have to take a call now.”

“Joseph, please don’t put me on hold. If you put me on hold I’m going to grow a tumor.”

“We need to talk seriously.”

“Everybody wants to talk seriously to me today.”

“I’ve got to answer this—you’re going to have to listen to some music. I’m sorry about it. I’ve got a claimant on the other phone. Hold the line, please. Hello, Heller Insurance?”

Joseph had been working for Heller since he left college, a fact that depressed Alex more than it did Joseph. In the world of Heller, as Alex understood it, the principles of Heisenberg were dangerously ignored: at Heller, certainty reigned. At Heller, effect was neatly traced back to cause. And someone always had to pay for it. So if a man tripped, for example over a paving stone, or burnt himself with a cup of hot coffee, he was encouraged to phone the number at the end of the advert so that Heller Insurance might sue somebody on a no-win-no-fee basis, the small type of which agreement involved a fee whatever the outcome. There were no accidents in the minds of Helleric employees. Only malevolent woundings. And by coincidence, whenever Joseph happened to be speaking of his work, Alex was usually thinking of some way to seriously injure himself.

Tell me he’s lazy, tell me he’s slow,
sang the phone.

Bored, cradling phone between ear and chin, Alex eyed the youngest of the women in polyester, imagining what it might be like to see her in unlikely underwear and awkward positions. Against his will, his mind went along with the singing phone.

Singer: Ava Gardner (1922–1990)
Song: “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man”
Film:
Show Boat
(1951)
I was married to Mickey Rooney!
The marriage represented the biggest female-to-male height
differential in Hollywood!

As Alex saw it, the only fortunate aspect of Joseph’s job at Heller Insurance was the fact that Joseph himself never had to know what it was like to be put on hold by Heller Insurance.

AS THE SONG
finished and started once more, Alex remembered a sentiment from his favorite (and only) poet. Why let this toad called
work
squat on your life? Joseph should have been an Autograph Man. It was in his nature. He was careful, shrewd. But also passionate, also devoted. The perfect coalescence of collector and trader. When he was a boy, Joseph’s enthusiasm for the trade was so strong it was viral; Alex had caught it and kept it ever since. At fifteen Alex started to sell seriously, at twenty he had a business. But Joseph, ever under the spell of his father, never had the guts to make his hobby his career. There was cowardice in this, Alex thought, and he blamed it for the strained state of their relations. Alex thought Joseph resented him, and Alex resented Joseph for resenting him. Neither of them spoke of their resentments, real or imagined. And both of them resented that. As a formula for the slow disintegration of friendship, the above is practically mathematical.

“Alex?”

“Still here.”

“What’s the music, out of interest? Vivaldi?”

“No. Show tunes. Bad ones. Don’t put me on hold again, man. I barely got through the first time.”

“Alex, have you spoken to Adam?”

“This morning. Before I spoke to you. Regarding the car disaster. I drove Esther into a bus stop.”

“I heard. What did he say?”

“He said he wanted to talk to me, seriously.”

“Yes, he said that he would.”

Alex thought he heard something pointed in this and bristled at the idea of Adam and Joseph speaking together, without him. Rubinfine and Adam, Joseph and Rubinfine—these couplings did not bother him. He knew the measure and the depth of them. But he understood little of Joseph and Adam’s relationship, except that it was close, and he dreaded this, vaguely. He knew they shared an interest (Adam’s practical, Joseph’s theoretical) in mystic Judaism, specifically the Kabbalah. Alex worried that his and Adam’s shared interest in marijuana and girls might be the less significant bond.

“Well, Alex, the thing is, he asked me to call again.”

Alex silently chewed the inside of his cheek.

“He’s;—we’re
both
a bit worried about some of the things you were saying, on Tuesday night. Particularly the stuff about the—”

Joseph’s voice let itself go again in a little expulsion of air, which, from Alex’s end, sounded like a kiss in the earpiece. Alex decided to help him out.

“About the Kitty, is that it?”

As he spoke, Alex drew the plastic envelope from his bag and took out the postcard. He felt a genuine rush of blood to the head, as if he were a Catholic touching a reliquary. He tried to regulate his breathing. There she was, there she was. The ink was raised off the coarse paper, like a scab. Kitty, famously, dotted her only
i
with a little lopsided heart. Alex touched it now and loved her for it. He believed she was the first. He believed, further, that those who create clichés share some splinter of the Creation.
Dog
became a cliché.
Trees,
too.

“We-ell,” began Joseph carefully, “you got a bit out of hand, and that’s
fine,
that’s nothing to be
ashamed
of—but then, when one wakes up, it’s hard sometimes to let go of one’s delusions . . . You have to do it softly, I think. It’s
okay,
and nobody thinks any
less
of you—we just want to check you’re okay. We’re just worried about you.”

“Worried I’m going to sell it?” asked Alex in a guarded voice.

The line went quiet.

“Alex?” said Joseph, after a minute. “But I don’t understand.”

“Look, Joe,” snapped Alex, “I’m not being rude—no, actually, I
am
being rude, actually—I really don’t see what it’s got to do with you. You’re not even in the business anymore, you know? With the best will in the world, why don’t you just keep your nose out of it?”

“Wait—sell it? I don’t . . . Alex . . . That’s academic, isn’t it?”

“Academic how?”

“What do you mean, how?”

“I mean
how
?”

Joseph emitted a laugh like his father’s, sudden and without gaiety.

“What’s funny?” asked Alex coldly.

“Okay, well, let’s say for the sake of argument,” said Joseph, pompously, “that you tried to sell it, Alex—inside the autograph community. Then how would it be ethical for me not to say something? I mean, I may not be, strictly speaking,
in the business,
but I
know
the dealers who would take a risk on something like that, they’re
friends
of mine. And knowing what I know, knowing that it’s not
real,
I’m not simply going to sit back and become basically a kind of
accessory
to the crime—”

“Joseph
Klein,
” said Alex, dryly, “no one’s making false accusations against you. No one’s coming to take you away. You’ve done nothing wrong.”

“You’re hilarious. Look,
Alex
—”

“No, look,
you
look. I think you’re bloody jealous. It’s
my
autograph, all right, it was sent to
me
—”

The train chugged back into action. Alex watched the thick colored electric cords merge from four strands into one rope, hugging the side of the wall as the train slipped briefly into a tunnel. The phone’s reception was so clear he could hear the nervous tug of Joseph breathing. Why was he still getting reception? How big were these satellites, anyway? Big as planets? Were they carcinogenic? Alex put his head between his knees. “That’s not
true,
” said Joseph, very sadly. “I’m never jealous of you. I’m hurt you’d think that.”

And with Joseph these weren’t just words. You could hear the hurt, you could
feel
it. Alex had not yet come across another man so easily affected by the words of others. He’d had plenty of sticks and stones as a boy, Joseph, on account of being small and slender and posh; he’d already done sticks, stones, fists, shifty kicks, flesh wounds and shoves. But it was words that truly got to him. He still flinched at a swear word. Not long ago, Alex had seen him on the other side of the high street and shouted his name. Joseph fell over.

“Joseph . . . look,” said Alex with shame, “I’m sorry. I’m being nasty—I didn’t mean to be nasty. I just feel a bit sick, to be honest. I’ve the worst hangover man has ever known. And I
don’t
understand why you’re on my case.”

“I don’t understand,” said Joseph in a quiet, worried voice, “what you mean by the word
sent.
”

“I mean
sent.
I have it. It’s real. It’s in my hands. It was sent to me.”

“Right. And that would be? Post? Heaven?”

“Sent,” said Alex again, with conviction. “Just
sent.
Look—I’m not saying I can
explain
it—”

“
Bloody
hell. Alex.
Alex
. . .”

Joseph kept on talking. Alex brought Kitty right up under his nose where he could see her. That exquisite
tt,
achieved with just one lunge of the pen, curling in on itself, carrying on.

“The thing is,” said Joseph, as Alex tuned back in, “I was
there.
You went into the kitchen and you came back with that autograph. That’s what happened. I’m sorry. But that’s a fact.”

Through thin, angry eyes, Alex watched the eldest woman in polyester reposition a handbag to obscure the swell of her abdomen. A man across from him sat with his hands cupping his groin. The boys had just finished eating. As the train picked up speed, they made a face and put their fingers in their ears. No one travels anywhere anymore without imagining, if only for a second, the moment of impact. And if the crucial second were this second, thought Alex, every one of these people would be better prepared than me.

“Alex . . . I don’t mean to be—but do you know what
date
it is today? That is, next Thursday? Your mum told Adam, and Adam told me. Don’t you think that might be relevant? I think you’re having a breakdown. Hello, Heller Insurance.”

“What?”

“Hold the line, please.”

Singer: Ann Miller (1919– )
Song: “Prehistoric Man”
Film:
On the Town
(1949)
I had rickets as a child!
I was the fastest tap dancer alive!

With this space in my brain, thought Alex, I could have learnt Hebrew. I could have been somebody.

The music stopped.

“Why is it,” said Alex, feeling combative, “that Adam has a mystical experience twice a week and that’s just fine, that’s dandy, but when
I
do,
finally,
everybody thinks I’m a lunatic?”

There was no reply. Alex assumed the connection dead.

“Are you at all worried, Alex?” came the unheard question, just as Alex brought his thumb to the
OFF
button, “that you might be delusional? That you might be depressed? Alex?”

One of Alex’s talents, one of the few left over from his precocious childhood, is knowing exactly how long he’s got before he throws up. It is perfect timing, then; conversation ended, bag and flask grabbed, out of the train, across the platform for the westbound, a lunula of vomit onto the empty tracks, and then the arrival of the train taking him to the center of things. A destination is spelled out in letters made of light.

2.

Reaching the surface, Alex snuggled up close to a harassed mother at the ticket barrier so that her ticketed and his unticketed body might pass through together, as one. It had never failed him before, this tactic, but here came a hand, heavy on his shoulder, and he was taken to the next level of punishment: a gray-haired woman sitting behind a pane of glass. Her left leg was in plaster, resting on a pile of books that in turn was balanced on a stool. Her spectacles hung from a chain. A plastic name tag, printed in a font meant to approximate the natural sweep of a human pen, said
Gladys.