The Autograph Man

by Zadie Smith

  “. . . the same at two in the morning,” said Ian softly, laying his head along the trolley’s bar. “Everything does.”

  Amidst the snow-blown interference of the scene, Alex could make out the famous taxis, coming and going so that there was never a lack or an abundance and no man had to wait very long.

  “Feel like I’ve been here before, a bit,” said Ian, levering his eyes open at the moment a cab stopped before them and wound down its window. “Familiar, like from another life or something. That’s weird, innit? Considering I—”

  “Taxi Driver,” said Alex flatly, removing bags from the trolley, “Manhattan, Last Exit to Brooklyn, On the Waterfront, Mean Streets, Miracle on 34th Street, West Side Story, On the Town, Serpico, The Sunshine Boys, Sophie’s Choice—”

  “All About Eve,” broke in the driver, “King Kong, Wall Street, Moonstruck, The Producers, Plaza Suite, The Out-of-Towners original and remake, The Godfather parts one and two, Kramer vs. Kramer and freakin’ Ghostbusters. We can do this all morning, my friend. The meter’s running.”

  “Everyone’s been here before, Dove,” said Alex, opening the cab door.

  “Are you kidding?” cried Lovelear, spat out suddenly by the revolving doors and thinking of a different film altogether. “You can get limousines around the corner.”

  “AH, THIS IS the life,” said Lovelear emphatically, making the awkward International Gesture of luxury (hands behind head, legs extended with feet crossed). “I mean, this is the life.”

  Alex was unsure. Somehow, the limousine, though improbably long on the outside, did not seem, once one was inside, to be any roomier than a normal yellow cab. It was dirty too, the worn upholstery stained many times over by other thrill seekers (How many blow jobs, thought Alex, and how many champagne corks? How did so many people come to believe that these things are to be done in limousines?) From two dusty decanters, pale, warm whiskey came, to which Lovelear was gleefully adding flat, warm cola and raising his glass for regular toasts to the snow, the city, the cops, the skyline, the ideal hot dog, and the curvy girl in the toll booth who had not yet killed herself. Lovelear was from Minnesota.

  And they were not there yet. The last of the suburbs were still passing by, hunkered down for the winter and still as Sunday. Alex felt a particular yearning for the suburbs between an airport and a city; he wanted to stop the car and knock on one of those pine doors, and squeeze in between the fireman and his wife until someone rose to make breakfast and the kids started to yell. But you need a specific address for the suburbs. Only in the city can you be dropped off in front of statues and behind opera houses. The suburbs are by invitation only. And here came the city anyway, insistent, unavoidable. Lovelear grabbed the back of Dove’s head and pointed it in the right direction.

  “Okay, okay, okay, Dove—get ready, no, come closer to the window, okay, are you ready? Okay . . . look . . . now!”

  The car achieved the hump in the road and the city appeared miraculously before them, outlined in moonlight, the concrete EKG of an ecstatic vision people have of themselves. Alex was as moved by it as the next man, more than—it was the only other town in the world for which he had ever felt desire. But sometimes you have to turn your eyes from a mistress or you’ll never go home to your wife; Alex turned now, to look out of the other window, to the harbor and beyond that to melancholy Brooklyn (from the Dutch Breuckelen, Broken Land), and to a glimpse of the stone lady herself. The sword in her hand seemed only just to have been raised aloft, and the snow swirled about her form.

  2.

  Out of the traffic, into the town. To the Rothendale Hotel, a massive, forlorn building. Its old brick had been covered in new paint, and two unsightly extensions built on each side. The street had gentrified; the Rothendale had been forced to keep pace. From the outside it seemed dazed at its own sudden respectability, like a dissolute grandfather forced into a suit and dragged to a wedding.

  Inside, a corporate virus had spread from the red-and-gold-trim wallpaper, to the odorless flowers, to the fake-marble water feature, to the repeating monogram pattern in the carpet, to the professional smile that was being laid on Alex right now.

  “And you gentlemen,” said the meticulous young man, “are here for the Autographicana Fair?”

  Alex considered his walk across the lobby. Which gesture had given him away? Cheerlessly, he took his Autographicana goodie bag and listened to Lovelear interrogate the young man about the hotel’s facilities.

  “It’s three A.M,” said Lovelear, triumphant in the hallway a few minutes later, “and I could go for a Jacuzzi on the roof. You think you could do that in any of those London dumps? Hmm? I could go for a Jacuzzi on the roof right now.”

  “Then why don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “Then why don’t you?”

  The lift arrived. They got in it.

  “I’ll come with you, if you like,” said amiable Dove as the sixth floor sank beneath them. “I’m feeling quite awake actually, now.”

  “It’s three A.M., Dove,” said Lovelear wearily, then shook his head and got out on the seventh.

  “ ’Course, there’s no thirteenth, you know,” said Dove, who always took silence in a confined space as a personal failure. “In American lifts—elevators, I should say. They don’t have a thirteenth floor.”

  It was rare in the extreme for Dove to produce any fact that Alex did not already know, but he did not know that one. He looked up without expectation at the sequential lights; he was surprised.

  “Imagine,” said Dove, sleepily. “Ancient superstition like that in a big modern country like this. Mental. ’Slike believing in the tooth fairy. Or bloody resurrection.”

  “Good night, Dove,” said Alex, with a generous smile.

  “Yeah. Night, Tandem.”

  From his bedroom window, Alex could see more famous sights than any Autograph Man has a right to expect. He was being invited to marvel at the withdrawing darkness, at the dawn, at the daily count of enchanted objects: green glass, spires that seemed to pierce fat clouds, theatrical debuts, notorious murders, men going about their days. Tentatively, Alex dug about in his bag for his camera. As his fingers brushed the lens cap, he caught sight of a complimentary magazine on the dresser which had as its cover image the view from his hotel window. Feeling oddly oppressed, he closed the curtain and opened a map.

  He was looking for Roebling Heights, Brooklyn, the return address on his package. There was no house number, no other details. He would simply have to go up there and ask around, like the popular detective Philip Marlowe. If that didn’t work he had Plan B, which consisted of going to the Lower East Side, finding Kitty’s fan-club president, Krauser, and beating it out of him, like the popular actor Jimmy Cagney. Yeah, like Jimmy Cagney, God of all scrappers.

  What da ya hear?

  What da ya say?

  On the map he found tiny abbreviated Roebling squeezed between the Black area, the Hipster area, the Hasid area and the Polish area, at the end of a subway line he had never used and never heard of. In the index of his guidebook, Roebling Heights made only one appearance and warranted only one comment. Roebling, Alex read, has seen better days. It has also seen so-so days and worse days. Now it’s settling for just days. Everybody thinks they’re a comedian, even the writers of guidebooks.

  ALEX STOOD IN the middle of his room and took some deep breaths. He was far from home, far. The only way he could travel this kind of distance was to make wherever he went as much like Mountjoy as possible. To this end, when he packed to leave, he took what everybody takes—clothes and essentials—but he also placed his extended arm upon his desk and swept whatever was there into a carrier bag, which he emptied now onto his hotel bed with the intention of spreading the items around the place. This was traveling without moving. Receipts, bills, unread books with snapped spines, pushpins, Post-Its, the famous pound note (this he Blu-Tacked above the door), a very old hair clip of Esther’s, an aging muffin, half a joint. The joint was
a surprise and he pounced on it, smoking it in and out of the shower, during his brief bathroom perfunctories, and then reaching its coiled tip as he nipped naked into the tightly made bed and fought the sheets for the space he had paid for. By his eye, a red light on the phone flashed on, off. He picked up the receiver, but that didn’t stop it, so he phoned reception.

  “The light, sir? That would be the light that indicates you have some messages to pick up on your voicemail.”

  “I just got to the hotel.”

  “Yes, sir, but your voicemail has been active since noon.”

  “My voicemail precedes me.”

  “It sure does, sir.”

  Alex had three messages. He was halfway through the first before he recognized the speaker—that low, throaty New York sound. Something in the timbre of her voice told you she was black. Honey Richardson. He had never met her in the flesh, but they had traded four or five times over the past two years, by phone or computer. And now he remembered he had arranged to meet her at noon, before the big show. Alex put out his joint on the leg of the side table. Her voice was terrific. Like being smacked and stroked at the same time.

  Sinking into his pillow, he listened to the music of it without listening to any of the words. Then it was over. He had to play it again to discover that she wished to change their meeting place: instead of the corner of such and such, she would prefer it if they met at the corner of somewhere else. This would be, she said, more appropriate. Appropriate?

  Alex hitched up on one elbow, intrigued, and hit the button. It was Honey again, this time with a further explanation of why the previous arrangement had been found wanting. Too busy an area, such a damn rush of everyone, and in her situation . . . But this sentence was left unfinished. She seemed to think Alex knew something of her situation that he did not. He knew only that she was an inexperienced dealer, a woman dealer, who bought stuff from Alex that he couldn’t give away to anyone else. In the dark, Alex felt around for a pen to take down her number, but it was gone before he put pencil to complimentary pad. And she was still talking—the message was endless. Alex sat himself up in bed as she told an ambulatory tale about a recent shopping trip with her sister, Trudy, who was a dental technician, see, and they had wandered into a crowded area and two people came out of nowhere and started yelling and trying to— But here the beep sounded loud in Alex’s ear. Bemused, Alex pressed the button to listen to the third. Honey said:

  “Look, here’s how it is. I think the best for everybody concerned is if I meet you in the lobby of the hotel and we just come right into the restaurant, do our business and then leave, and I don’t want anything else suggested or implied and my story is mine and it’s yesterday’s news and I’m just here for the business, as anyone in this business will tell you. I’ve been everybody’s goddamn anecdote and I won’t be yours. I’ll be wearing gloves. Good night.”

  Alex phoned reception to find out if Honey Richardson was staying at the hotel. She was staying in the next room.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Discovering the Footprints

  1.

  It was quite a spread. The white linen cloth, as pristine as the morning, presented dreams of breakfast from around the world. Here boiled eggs sat in their china cups, pretty as Buddhas. Half a pig, sliced up and fried, had been arranged into a mountain around which scrambled egg shimmied and shook. Porridge, in a huge cauldron, sat on a piece of tartan, waiting to be ladled. Endless choice. Thin slices of waxy Dutch cheese, Italian bologna or German hams, conserves claiming Cornwall in ye olde earthenware jars, Philadelphia cream cheese, melted Swiss chocolate, fluffy Caribbean ackee, or twelve hot English kippers, like dismal shoe soles, laid out in starfish formation. On the side, a swan-necked jug of maple syrup, a pancake tower, baskets of croissants and moist muffins, sizzling grits, the yang of bagels split conveniently from their yins, strips of smoked salmon re-formed into the silhouette of a fish (open-mouthed, so it seemed to eat a shiny mound of its own red roe), dried cereals for the serious, unlimited coffee (but no tea), all the juices of the known world and a resplendent four-tier fruit display, kept cool by an ice sculpture of Mount Rushmore.

  It had taken three return visits, but finally the battle of the buffet was drawing to a close. Tandem and Dove were doing coffee shots with tobacco chasers. Lovelear was scanning the remnants of their breakfasts while holding forth on one of his favorite topics: the Overlooked Invention. He had always believed some aspect of his breakfast could have been made simpler by technology, could have benefited from an obvious (once realized) household tool. And it was here again, this morning, absent from the table, screaming out to be invented. It would solve an (as yet unidentified) age-old chore and bring to Lovelear overnight fame, wealth. If only he could find it. He had been searching for it every breakfast since boyhood.

  “Did you ever think,” said Alex-Li, checking his watch, “that historically we may have reached a saturation point as far as ease is concerned? So there’s actually no way you could’ve made that breakfast any easier than it was? Unless we, like, took it intravenously.”

  Lovelear reached out for the guava juice and poured himself a pint of it. “Tandem, nobody thought they could improve on matchbox design? And then some guy went to the factory—”

  Alex pushed for a name, any form of corroborating detail.

  “A factory, okay? ’S not important to the overall scenario—and it’s 1926 and the guy walks into the big man’s office and he’s like—I mean, the guy’s; like—I’m gonna sit down here and tell you how you could save millions of dollars every year, but in exchange I want twenty thousand dollars a year for the rest of my natural born life—that was a lot of money back then—wouldn’t cover a year’s groceries now, but on with the story—and they’re like, what the hell, thinking this guy’s a crackhead or whatever, so, they just sit back and say okay, whatever, let’s hear it. ’Cos they got nothing to lose. And he says, Put the sandpapery shit on one side. Because they were putting that shit on both sides, up to that point. Put it one side, man. Lived like a king till he died.”

  “I have to go,” said Alex.

  “You don’t have to go anywhere. Fair’s not for another hour. Where you gonna go? You don’t know nobody in New York.”

  Dove had been nose to nose these last few minutes with a milk carton, reading its side as he polished off a final bowl of cereal. Just as Alex pushed back from the table, he raised his head, slid the carton towards Alex and pointed at an image printed on its side. A fourteen-year-old missing person, one Polly Mo of the Upper East Side. Snaggle-toothed and eager against an unearthly lapis lazuli; detached, as in all school photos, from family and furniture. Alone in the big blue world. Last seen by the CCTV of a candy store, buying ten Lotto tickets. Fondly, Ian wiped a splatter of milk from her face. “They’ll find her soon, prob’ly. Hopefully. Poor love. She must be on a million of these things. ’S good idea, mind—they should do it back home. Oi, what do you reckon,” he said to Lovelear, lifting the carton and placing the girl’s face alongside Alex’s own. “The missing twin sister? A bit, don’t you think? Around the eyes?”

  “Dove, if that’s your criteria, there’s another half-billion girls in the world who could be Tandem’s missing twin sister. Jesus Christ”—Lovelear scowled, grabbing the carton out of Dove’s hands—“what a way to become a household name. Depressing the hell out of people when they’re trying to eat breakfast.”

  “Got to meet this weird woman person dealer thing,” said Alex, snatching his bag from under his chair. “Late already. A bit of business. Not expecting much. I don’t think she knows what she’s doing. You go on ahead, I’ll see you in there.”

  “Whatever. You’re no great loss. Me and the Doveman, here: we’re Zen, we’re down for whatever. Wax on, wax off,” said Lovelear, harpooning the remnants of a Mexican sausage with the tip of his knife, holding it up. “Just remember to put a rubber on it.”

  HE KNEW INSTANTLY that he recognized her. He had no idea why. He strained
to get a better look from behind the maître d’s podium; he stepped in front of it and waved—but at that moment she rested her head against the solid, silent glass, beyond which it snowed and snowed and things looked less like themselves and more like another note in a symphony of white. This was her backdrop, this was the scene she was stealing. She was black in a red dress. She sat completely alone at the very back of the sea-themed restaurant, amidst papier-mâché starfish and plastic shrimp, the tentacles of an octopus mural stretching out to get her. Alex approached. At closer range, he could see that the dress was quite ordinary, with a high neck and motherly overtones, the earrings larvae-like clusters of pearls. There was a certain statuesque weight to her; she was maybe thirty-five or so. Alex fixed on a set of mesmeric, glossy lips, the same color as the dress, a luxurious addition to a face that had its lines and troubles. She was holding a vast pocked California orange in her right hand, and had almost succeeded in peeling the thing in one fluent corkscrew gesture.

  “Hey, there. This enough fish for you? This enough snow for you?”

  Alex took the hand she offered. If he lived to be a hundred he never expected to meet another woman wearing skin-tight black rubber gloves in a public restaurant. As he went for his seat, she made a low noise of triumph and held the orange peel up by one end. She bounced its coil above the tabletop.

  “That’s nicely done.”

  “I always think it’s so much nicer that way. Like the orange got free itself. Just went right on and slipped its skin.”

  Alex smiled feebly, and continued the battle to make his coat stay draped over the hunched shoulders of his chair. She spoke, therefore, to his back. She had a husky voice, but an orotund, serious one. There was no element of flirtation in it, nor anything overtly mad. He turned and sat. There was a pause. It was all he could do not to look at the gloves, and it wasn’t working: he was looking at the gloves.

  “I told you I’d be wearing these on the phone, right?” she asked, sharply. All the warmth bled from her face. She pushed her chair back from the table.