The Autograph Man

by Zadie Smith

  “A peculiar time, I think. To call on a lady. But maybe I am not fashionable.”

  Alex squints, trying to focus.

  “Is Max here? Will you throw me out?”

  “Pfui! You talk as if I were a force of nature.”

  “I think you are,” he says in a breaking voice, and has to kick off his shoes or go crazy from the damp coming through them. His legs give in, the sofa catches him. Kitty sits down opposite him. They sit like this for a minute, Alex unconscious with his head against the back wall, his eyes closed and his mouth an open cave; Kitty watching. She takes one of his feet in her hands, removes the sock and massages his instep.

  “No,” she murmurs, “You make a mistake: nature is fascista, the big bully is nature. I am the very opposite. I am not the fittest, and I will not survive. I am cultivated. I pretend I am quite calm when I have strange men in my little house at one twenty-six in the morning.”

  Alex squeezes an eye open. “That’s my foot. What’s the time? Christ, I’m sorry”—he takes his foot back; her hands feel dry—“I’m a bit drunk. I shouldn’t have . . .”

  “Oh . . .” says Kitty, archly. “I see. You didn’t come for a foot massage? You came for passion?”

  The bedroom door swings wide and a yellow wedge of light encompasses the hall, a luminous path for a panting, quick-stepping animal, hot and alive and suddenly amongst them.

  Kitty turns on her stool, opening her arms to receive it.

  “Lucia, see our visitor, yes! Oh! Lucia, Lulu, Lo-Lo, yes, we wake you with our noise—and see how she likes you too—you must pick her up and make some love to her, she is really a prostitute for affection, any affection—look at how she throws herself at him!”

  Alex, finding himself with a sinewy handful of dog, stops its writhing with a firm grip and looks in its peculiar face. The eyes, huge and protruding, are an oily black with bloody specks in the vitreous. Both are covered in a film of mucus, like two unborn things.

  “She is my angel, of course . . .” says Kitty, knotting her fingers together. It is hard for her not to touch this dog. “And we are glad you come—the truth is, we do not sleep so well. Coffee?”

  Here they are again, in the kitchen. She asks him where he is from, what he is, exactly. When he tells her she says, Well, I must say you look Jewish. One of the great unanswerable goyisms of modern times. But Alex has no capacity to be angry with her. He keeps seeing her young face. Maybe he is here to see her young face for her.

  “Lucia is Chinese also,” she says, passing him a tray. “Her family were all Imperial dogs, back through history. This is what the dealer tells me, anyway. It is interesting to me that she is a great fan of Peking duck. She becomes crazy for it, truly!”

  Alex takes the biscuits he is passed, and accepts a tea towel laid over his arm.

  “That’s . . . nice.”

  “I don’t know if it’s nice—it is certainly expensive. And now we will watch the television,” she says, pushing briskly past him with Lucia right behind, dancing through her legs. “Do you know the American television? It is like all the finest food in the world put into a bucket and stirred with a stick. Come.”

  By some accident, or because it is played on a loop, they watch the same infomercial that duped Alex earlier.

  “You will excuse me,” says Kitty, wrapping a blanket round her shoulders and climbing into her bed. “A breeze will kill me—I am finally of the age of the lethal breeze. When I think how my tedious Russian aunts used to complain of it, complain, complain—they couldn’t sit here, they couldn’t sit there, and I had no pity, none, and now I reach the terrible age. No, no, you stay there, don’t worry. How anybody can believe a cream in the jar do this to your bosom, I can’t imagine. You will take control of the whatever-it-is?”

  She passes him the remote, and he slips off the end of the bed to the floor, where he sits cross-legged. Though the television will not stay quite still in his vision (it triplicates, or dances drunkenly to the left), Alex does his best to control it. He flicks. He lands. The popular actor Jimmy Stewart is desperately clutching two handfuls of paper and looking in the godly direction.

  “I hate this channel,” says Kitty with vehemence. “For me it is too morbid. Graveyard of my friends.”

  Alex kneels up and looks down the bed. An obnoxious night light has picked out the patches of scalp revealed by thinning hair and now catches her stricken expression with no sympathy, no care. He would protect her from closeups. Lucia lies against her chest like a baby.

  “I have lunch with him, once.”

  “Really?”

  The position is tiring. Alex lays his head next to her feet.

  “Yes, really. We had a mutual friend in Charlie Laughton, and his wife, Elsa, who was lovely. Odd-looking, but never jealous or this sort of thing. They were both very English, very elegant—which was something for me because everybody in Hollywood was terribly vulgar and I missed my home, and they knew a little of Capri and so on—so, one day, Mr. Stewart came to Texas, I don’t know why, and I was there getting married to an idiot, and Mr. Stewart, he knew nobody, and Charlie, he remember that I am there, and he give him the number for my hotel, and we meet for lunch. Very tall man, with the most unusual voice pattern. He loved me a little, I think—but I was too flattered really to even know what to do. And also there was this marriage to the ridiculous oil man with the terrible feet . . .”

  And this is the touchstone. They talk about the films, about single moments in the films, gestures. He goes to the lounge and looks where she has told him to and returns with a tape. Expertly, he fast-forwards to a single frame.

  “This?” she exclaims, putting on a pair of glasses. “What it is? What is special?”

  On the screen, Joey Kay, agent, husband, is onstage with May-Ling Han, as they accept the applause after the premiere of her first film. The curtain is a landscape of red velvet folds. Flowers are being thrown, great open-throated lilies. Even the orchestra in the pit have laid down their brass to clap. She is a smash! And he reaches out for her, his face full of love, but she does not turn to him. Her focus is now purely on the first three rows. Something has changed. There is a tiny pulse in this wrist that he grips. It speaks a Bible. She has made her choice. Between a man she has loved and those wonderful people out there in the dark.

  “I see nothing here,” says Kitty, peering, “just a lot of dumbshow. The film is ridiculous to begin with. I look as Chinese as my shoe.”

  They go through films like this, fast-forwarding, freeze-framing. Kitty’s laughter is hearty and at odds with her small mouth. Tales of lascivious costars, cruel directors, diva tantrums.

  “You are a library of me,” she says, shaking her head, as he extracts another tape. “Nobody asked you to keep a library. And of such absurdities!”

  “One more,” pleads Alex.

  Later, the light comes through.

  “My God, do you see this! The night is finished. I have to close this blind.”

  She pulls back the blanket and slowly stands. He sees more than he should; a piece of her thigh, the skin candle-white and glutinous, without muscle, falling off the bone. Purple veins, thick as pencils. She closes her robe. As she passes the television, Alex seizes a scene. Kitty in a two-piece, drying her hair. She stops. Stands above it, looking down at the image from an oblique angle, scorning it, almost.

  “Look at this. Can you imagine?”

  “You are so beautiful. Beyond . . .”

  “No, no, no, no. You can’t know, what it is to see.”

  “It’s amazing. You get to see this, always. It’s on film. You sort of live for—”

  “Now you are being ridiculous,” she says severely and walks across the room to the window. “People don’t tell the truth. As if we pass easily from one to another. Youth to age. No—it is not true, one is yanked. And the fear, this they lie about too. I can’t sleep for thinking that it is all almost finished. My life. And I will go alone. And in America. This I never planned. Nobod
y with me, except Max.”

  “Kitty, don’t you think that Max . . . has, Christ—maybe a bit too much control of—”

  “I’m so tired now,” mutters Kitty, going back to her bed. “You must forgive me.”

  “I’ll sleep here,” says Alex decisively. He thinks he will stay here like a sentry, one eye out for death. He switches off the screen. She closes the blind. A warm fuzzy gray fills the room, making the two of them black, indistinct shapes, their own shadows.

  “Of course you will,” says Kitty with equal firmness, and gives him whispered instructions to find a a blanket, pillows. “And your lady friend?” she asks. “She will not miss you? She was maybe a little too tall for you, I thought.”

  “Why,” asks Alex, throwing a blanket over his shoulder, “are we whispering suddenly?”

  Kitty gets into her bed and points to Lucia, who has somehow shunted all the way down and lies like a bolster at its edge. Alex makes his bed. Kitty lies down. Alex lies down. Their breathing begins to fall in sync, because he is tracking her inhalations, following them exactly. Alex’s heart strains at the sound of a stray cough from her, or a wheeze. Of all the possible deaths that stalk everyone every day, at this moment hers feels the most unbearable. This must be, he thinks with satisfaction, the top and bottom of love.

  IT IS FIVE A.M. In a passionate, dramatic gesture, he stands up in his gray underwear, which refuses to conform to the passion and drama of the moment (stuck all to one leg and disappearing up the back), and tells her that she must come with him and leave this place because there’s no other way for her to be free, and besides, he has a plan. He’s been thinking of this speech for an hour in the dark.

  “We talk at breakfast, hmm?” she says as neutrally as she can, turning to find him kneeling by her side in an artificial panic, and with a cast to his face that she has played opposite, many times. “We sleep now. It’s terribly late—too late to play a B movie.”

  She rolls away from him and grips the coverlet. Her fingers have gone cold. Even when making those films, even as a know-nothing girl, she had slept badly on the suspicion of just how many of these people, these moviegoers, take a line, take a look, and use it on a loved one.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Riding the Bull Home

  1.

  The park resembles a Russian prospect. A gold-leaf Orthodox basilica peeps through the trees, a Soviet-style running track sits at its center. Banks of dirty gray ice are heaped up against tree trunks and benches and around the water fountain and there is one odd island of it on the running track that the joggers must jump over. Alex would not have believed there could be jogging in February, but here it is. It is eleven A.M. exactly. Roebling has shaded into somewhere else and he is on his way to find a subway to take him back into Manhattan. He has made plans today, and purchases: food, an air ticket, an improving book. He has had, as the advertising executives like to say, a hell of a morning.

  He finds a seat and watches a mixture of Hipsters and Poles mark out a beat in a perfect circle. The Hipsters run in toweling sportswear, in seventies brand names and sweatbands. The Poles do too, though in a different spirit. These two groups do not meet on the racetrack or chat by the fountain; they keep to themselves. It was the same deal, Alex noticed, in the shop where he bought this muffin. Herring, latkes, kielbasa and pierogi on one side; latte, falafel and cheesecake on the other. And in the bookshop a shelf of the popular writer Charles Bukowski stood across from a table piled high with Polish-language Bibles.

  On the street the Poles seemed to understand the snow and dress for it. The Hipsters think they can accessorize the cold away, or simply ignore it. The Polish girls are waxy skinned, cat-eyed. They don’t know Alex is alive. The Hipster girls are apple-cheeked, with erratic hair, and may be interested, dependent on how much interest you show in the art that they are making. Though he has only been in the area twenty minutes, Alex feels qualified to further probe this weird cohabitation of Hipster and Pole, to puzzle the relations between them, the laws. Is it like-that or like-this? He sips his coffee. He resurfaces with the following:

  The Realm of Like-This

  1.Poles need Hipsters because Hipsters bring new money to the area.

  Spring comes, grass grows by itself.

  2.Hipsters need Poles because Poles are proof that Hipsters—despite their increasing financial stability—are still bohemian. Living near Poles is a Hipster’s sole remaining mark of authenticity.

  The blue mountain does not move.

  3.Hipsters are Poles. Poles are Hipsters. Poles sell 1950s retro gas station T-shirts. Hipsters eat pickled herring.

  White clouds float back and forth.

  Contented with this, Alex stretched his arms along the cold bench. In his pocket, an air ticket, on his lap an open book.

  “Yitgadal v’yitkadash,” he read out loud, and then repeated the same phrase more confidently in English. He glared at the Aramaic, of which he comprehended only their basic forms (yod, tav, gimel, dalet, lamed) but nothing of their attendant dots and dashes. Infuriating. He laid his hands over the text. Breathed from his diaphragm. There was no good reason to be doing this unless one accepted that the very lack of reason made it worth doing—a perfect Jewish formulation. But that wasn’t it. She had said something, that was it.

  HE WAS IN the shower at the time and she stood at the bathroom mirror, openly watching. And this had felt almost normal. She applied her makeup, asked him about his family.

  “My father also,” she replied, to his reflection. “Although at my age, of course, this is more to be expected. But I know what is it, to feel this. My mother, she died when I was very young, eleven. She was my beloved.”

  Alex prepared to exchange those perfunctory TV consolations that everyone of his generation learns by heart. But without a pause, Kitty had already begun to tell a story, as if everything up to this point was prologue to the telling of it.

  “A Romanian,” she said, meaningfully. “Terrible! I hated her so! This is the woman, you see, that he remarried. Like in a novel or a fairy tale, this was the proportion of her wickedness. A thief and an adulterer and a climber, socially. And she hated me. I was so pretty, of course, and she was awful, like a gargoyle or something like this. She beat me whenever he was not looking. But the worst is, we had a summer palace almost, in St. Petersburg—well, what do you think? She took everything from it when he died, from the paintings to the cabinets to the pink English saucers underneath the cups! Everything was sold to the highest bidder, really, this is how it was! These things that were in my family some of them for three hundred years, can you imagine?”

  This detail about the saucers, spoken with such horror, made Alex inadvertently smile, and he turned his face to the wall. Indefatigable Kitty carried on talking, dipping her head to one shoulder and then the other to put in a pair of pearl-drop earrings. Alex shut off the shower, and stepped back from its final cold dribble.

  “And see that is one of the most precious items, right in front of you,” she said, turning and pointing. “This is the result of my labors.”

  Alex looked at the circular gold-framed seventeeth-century miniature resting against the window. Kitty’s great-great-great-great Russian grandmother, damaged slightly by fire and missing one eye. Kitty had spent these last years paying Max to pay other people to shuttle round Europe retrieving the objects of her childhood.

  Alex accepted the towel she passed him.

  “And that’s where your money went.”

  “Of course, where else? I have no champagne, no gigolos. It is odd to me, because I always believe I hate my father for marrying this woman, and now I spend my time and all of this money saving his things. Most of them I don’t even like. But in its way it is a gesture, I think. You never know, until it happens, what you will owe the dead.”

  “MAGNIFIED AND SANCTIFIED,” said Alex loudly, “be His great name.”

  This last came out in the voice of the popular actor James Earl Jones, a rich basso that oft
en appeared in his throat when he attempted religion. He looked up from his book.

  What you owe the dead.

  What you owe the dead.

  What you owe the dead.

  A luminous Hipster girl, with long yellow hair, rucksack and roller skates, had been flying around the track like a goddess. Now she knelt down three feet away from him to tie her lace. She wore a famous skirt from the eighties. Her knees were scuffed and blue. It seemed deeply unlikely to Alex that she would ever have to figure out how to mourn a father dead for fifteen years in a dead language.

  “YITGADAL V’YITKADASH!” he said, too stridently, and the girl flushed purple, apologized. She rolled away before he could explain. He saw her a few minutes later walking out of the gate in a pair of sneakers, a human girl again on two human feet.

  2.

  But rewind: who woke first? Or had they really, as it seemed, woken together, roused by the same curtain-flutter, the stab of intrusive light? Alex had hoped to surprise her in bed, had imagined himself walking in with a tray of fresh O.J. and eggs over easy, and a flute glass with a single rose and the rest of the movie props, but as his eyes opened so did hers. They sat up. And then somehow she was out of her bed before he could stop her (“Can you imagine, at this age, if it is not done immediately it is not done at all!”) and gone. He found her in the kitchen opening a can of sardines for frantic Lucia, whose tongue lay out of her mouth, panting and curled at the tip.

  “Ug,” said Alex, and held his head to stop his brain leaking from his ear.

  “Like Karloff, you look,” said Kitty.

  They ate boiled eggs and bowls of cereal in the lounge window seats, and watched a young couple in the brownstone opposite have an argument. Alex took the two paracetamol Kitty had given him and dropped them into the final pool of milk at the end of his muesli.

  “You see that she is in a suit,” said Kitty, rapping the window with a knuckle, “and he is in pajamas. She is very high-flying, in publishing I believe—see, there are books in every corner—and he I always see in bed until the afternoons. Occasionally he sits on a mat for three hours and crosses his legs. Can you imagine! And once a week they have a huge row, and sometimes he makes a pretense of packing bags, but he never goes. But his body is incredible . . . so we forgive him, I think.”