The Autograph Man

by Zadie Smith

  “I want you to come to London with me,” said Alex.

  Kitty laughed shrilly, as if she had been tickled. She stood up to clear away the breakfast things, but he grabbed her hand. She took her seat again and lifted a cool eyebrow.

  “What it is you would like me to say to this?”

  Alex let go, sulkily set about his cereal again.

  “It’s just—”

  “What is it just?”

  “You said you wanted to see Europe again.”

  “I would also like to be twenty-six again. But things are not so miraculous.”

  Alex looked up, moved towards her and held her elbows. “Just to get away. From Max, from being stuck in the house all day. It’s just a holiday. It’s not the end of the world. It’s easy. We’ll go tonight.”

  “You are very sweet,” said Kitty, smiling and standing once more. “And very unstable. You sound like Trevor Howard or somebody. And everything with you is done at maximum speed. I have known you precisely twenty-four hours. Pass me this and the egg cup, please.”

  Across the road, a huge sash window jerked open and the young lady in the suit thrust her hand out, pointing to the street.

  “Out there!” she shouted. “Out there in the world!”

  “Ooh la la,” said Kitty, whistling and heading for the hall. “And finally it explodes.”

  “Listen to me,” said Alex, following her. “I know you don’t have any money. But you do, I mean—you could have. So easily. Put that stuff down, wait—just put it down for a second.”

  With a good-humored groan, Kitty left her tray on the cabinet. Alex scanned the room for a pen and found one on the mantelpiece. He grabbed an old magazine. “Just write it here—your name.”

  Kitty took the magazine and pen from him and dropped them on the sofa.

  “Oh, Alex. This is your plan? You think I never think of this? But am I to sell my own autograph, fifty dollars here, there, a stoop sale of my life—Max tells me about this sordid business—I’m sorry, Alex, it is rather too undignified. Look at how I live, alone, eating breakfast with a stranger. My life is quite undignified enough.”

  “Wait, wait. Fifty dollars? Is that what Max told you? He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I’ve seen people buy a letter of yours for eight thousand dollars, Kitty. Eight thousand.”

  And this did stop her. Her mouth opened and closed again. She sat down.

  “Eight?”

  “Eight.”

  “This is quite serious, this money. I could do very much with this. And you,” she murmured, looking up at him and tucking a stray wisp of hair behind her ear, “you are quite serious, too, I think.”

  Alex sat down by her. “I thought about it. All night. It makes sense.”

  They heard the window across the way close again, and there was something conclusive in it. The end of something over there, the beginning of something over here.

  “But what can be done? It must be illegal. And how, anyway, am I to sell my own—”

  “That’s what I’m telling you. You don’t do anything. I’ll do it, all of it. There’s nothing dodgy about it. I’ll take a percentage, like any agent—”

  “Ha! This I hear before, and then they run off with everything—”

  “Just ten percent, standard. I want to help you—”

  “You want to help somebody,” she flashed, moving away from him. “You feel guilty about something, I see it in you—I am a Catholic, I know about guilt also. It gives you the Samaritan disease! I don’t want any charity!”

  “Right, well, then you can just owe me for the air ticket. Listen to me, please. It’s not charity. It’s a gift, back to you, for what you’ve given me. The point here is you could have a nice holiday. Make some money. Then, if you liked, you could live anywhere. You could live in Italy. Anywhere. If we did it right.”

  “Lucia, please”—the dog scurried up on to her knees—“do you listen to this fantastical business! Where do you feature in such a plan, hmm? And then Max—oy! Max would love all of this, no?”

  “Max, Shmax,” said Alex, and swore colorfully, making Kitty laugh. “It’ll just be a week or so. We’ll tell Max when you get back. He won’t complain when he sees the money. And if you fly first-class—well, how big is Lucia? She’ll fit in a bag, won’t she?”

  Lucia settled into Kitty’s lap and made a noise of approval as the extra skin of her neck was kneaded between two attentive fingers.

  “Kitty?”

  “Yes, I listen, I listen. But it is a lot to be taking in all at once. And what does this mean, doing it right? How would ‘right’ be?”

  “Incrementally.”

  “This word I don’t know.”

  “Slowly. In bits. If we flood the market, the value will disappear. We’ll sign old photos—we could try dating the ink, even—but most private buyers, they don’t even check. And old letters, if you have any. I’ll do it through open markets, auctions, on the computer, through agents . . .”

  The plan, for Alex, was formulating as he spoke it. It was growing as he spoke it. His own perceived heroism was filling the room like a giant airbag. He couldn’t see any way that either of them might be hurt.

  3.

  A late lunch was taken in the piano bar of the hotel. Lovelear and Dove sat on painful stools, waiting for two slovenly blond waitresses to get off work. They had been pleading with these women, Alex was informed, since breakfast. As evidence of this, a stack of empty tissue-lined raffia bowls, soaked in the sweat of thirty hot chicken wings, awaited collection. To this, industrious Alex had since added one empty bottle of red wine, three glasses sticky with the residue of whiskey, a cocktail that had only managed to save its cherry, and a can of beer with a cigarette in it. A dimpled red arm and a sallow pinch of cleavage swung into view, come to collect the ketchup.

  “They’re something, aren’t they?” said Lovelear.

  Alex took Lovelear’s violent nudge in the ribs silently, and then released a musical burp, for he alone was the Zen Master. He patted his belly. Across the room, a very old gentleman called Mr. Martins fatally extended the final chords of “Some Enchanted Evening,” meaning to wring some applause out of what was left of his audience: three drunk men, two waitresses and one busboy. Alex clapped, gamely, and with some accuracy, considering. The old guy turned and bowed, only for Alex. Tugging at his raggedy purple tuxedo like a butler. And this is what an audience is when you get down to it, thought Alex; this gruesome, banal exchange. No-talent applauded by no-taste. Martins closed the lid of his piano with unsteady hands, removed his name card from the top, and replaced it with one which said BACK AT 5:30 P.M.! One of Lovelear’s waitresses wheeled in an ice sculpture, freshly cut. A heavy-hipped Venus in her shell.

  “We’re going skating,” said Lovelear, licking round his fingers for fugitive sauce, “when Della and Maude get off. We’re all skating. It’s our last afternoon. You’re coming. We’re skating and then, very quickly, we’re getting laid, and then we’ve got a flight outta here so we’re gonna have to love ’em and leave ’em. Literally. That’s the plan.”

  Alex had not told them of his own plan; the thought of Lovelear’s redoubtable enthusiasm was too much. And he didn’t feel that he could trust either of them to keep quiet. Beyond these two facts, Alex had not progressed. He had booked Kitty on a flight an hour earlier than his own. He meant to drop her off at the airport and then pick her up at the other end. In the interim, as the consultants like to say, skating seemed viable.

  “Oh. Fine,” said Lovelear, wrong-footed by lack of resistance. “Well, you’re gonna need a sweater.”

  “Fine.”

  “And a girl—you can’t have ours. Get Honey Smith, and then if our two don’t put out, you know, we can always get her to—”

  Dove, who adored slapstick, had already begun to snigger as Alex reached into a neighboring umbrella stand. Alex pulled out one of the golfing breed and thwacked Lovelear across the shoulders with it.

  “You’ve
got dog-mind,” said Alex, still wielding the umbrella, as Lovelear stared at him like cinema. “Dog-mind. All you do is howl after the moon. Chase your own tail. Thasswhayoudo. That’s the dog—see,” stumbled Alex, alcohol flooding his moral high ground. “A dog—like this is a dog—and just chasing, chasing its tail, that’s you.”

  “Damn right I chase tail,” asserted Lovelear, slipping off his stool and switching all his dead-eyed attention to Della, the fat one, who had just thrown her apron over the bar.

  IN HIS ROOM, Alex washed his hands and head. With his hair wet, there was something of the Russian monk about him. It fell, the hair, in two black uneven sections, flat against his head, and through this poked his fanatic’s ears, pointed and prominent. Unable to improve things, he left the room and went next door.

  “Skating?” queried Honey, stepping back from the doorway. “With you?”

  “And others, yes.”

  “Are you okay? You look funny.”

  “Yes. My hair is wet. I’ll meet you in the lobby in ten minutes. Bring a jumper.”

  “A what?”

  “A sweater. The snow keeps coming. Oh, how it comes.”

  “Uh-huh. It’s a little early to be this drunk, isn’t it?”

  “No, no, no, Mrs. Buddhist, let me ask you a question. Did you know in a book by a famous Jew someone asks someone what his name is and the person says, ‘Negro’?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “And here’s another question,” said Alex, leaning into the door. “Do you think that because you are a woman of black—no, start again: I mean, a black woman, that I can’t understand what you, you know, are or something?”

  Honey put a rubber finger to his sternum and pushed. “Do you wanna try moving your breath back a little? Please?”

  “Because you know actually as it happens my girlfriend is black. My best friend is. Too. You know? So. There’s that. To consider.”

  “Congratulations,” said Honey, smiling. “Well, I guess it’s our last few hours together, darling. I’ll meet you in the lobby in ten minutes, okay? Try putting your head back in the water again.”

  Returning, Alex noticed what he had missed the first time: his room had been returned to its pre-Tandem state. Two days perfectly rewound.

  IT TURNED OUT the girls were not natural skaters. Della was the worse of the two, collapsing spectacularly, every few minutes, into Lovelear, who struggled to put the quaking giggler together again, like a man setting jelly back in its mold. Maude, in Ian’s stiff and adulterous arms, lifted each foot as if walking through sludge and let out a birdy screech whenever he tried to coax her from the safety barrier. Honey did not need Alex. A stately skater, she made her way round the circle smoothly and without incident, occasionally executing a turn with a neat flourish. Alex himself sat on the side and smoked a cigarette. The edges of skates are very thin and very sharp, he felt, the opposite of human feet. It takes an optimistic man to put them on. Skating is not to be undertaken lightly.

  But there existed pleasures for the non-skater at this rink. Not normally moved by a scene, he was provoked into admiration by this ingenious piece of city planning, up on its hill with panoramic views. It gave to you a sensation you never even knew you wanted: skating on top of the world. From here he could see Roebling. He thought of an open suitcase with Kitty bent over it, folding her dressing gown. He could see the airport, he could see the top of the hotel. Briefly, he considered his minibar bill. He could see where the Jews lived and the Poles and the Hispanics and the Blacks and the Russians and the Indians and the Punks and the Lunching Ladies. He could see flags, silk, being carried on the breeze.

  Over on the rink, he could see Honey in the center of a crowd of kids. They were tugging at her. One of them kept putting something long and sharp-looking into her face. Alex lifted a hand to see if she was okay, but she waved him off and smiled. Two kids tumbled to the ice and now he could see what she was doing. She was signing. There were about ten of them, arguing over a pen and looking for receipts to write on. It got larger. Husbands came, then wives. She had to skate to the barrier and take them in a messy kind of queue. Alex felt something wet and brought his hand down from the air. On the crease of his lifeline, one of those unlikely snowflakes had landed, the size of a sweet. He watched it melt. Laughed. He laughed like a loon. Then the trees were kings in ermine and every building was an achievement and the sun was demanding that the clouds move, and light made film stars of everyone, and Della’s breasts became marvels, and the sky grew pink and Sinatra was singing! Sinatra was making a list of the things he loved. A fireside. Potato chips. Good books.

  Conditions were favorable. Alex threw his finished cigarette into a bush, laced his boot and stomped onto the ice. He’d made barely a step when Honey came behind him and he was away.

  “Did you see that?” she asked hotly in his ear.

  “I feared for the lives of those children. I thought you were going to stab them with their own pens.”

  “Nah, I decided to give ’em a break. It’s just a name,” she said, guiding the two of them through the arch made by another couple’s stretched arms. “It’s not me. It doesn’t take from me. It’s just ink.”

  “That’s very enlightened of you, Miss Richardson.”

  “I thought so. Now. Mr. Tandem. If you were staying in town, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, don’t you think?”

  After that they took one more revolution perfectly, uninterrupted, performing that fantasy of flight. Both knew this was their version of good-bye and the bottom line is there was something godly in it and here is Alex’s (partial) list:

  Sinatra’s voice between 1948 and 1956

  Donald O’Connor’s right foot

  The old route to school on a March morning

  The letter

  Being inside her with her legs crossed round my hips

  People falling over

  Jokes

  Overweight cats

  Food

  The films of Kitty Alexander

  Relationships that do not involve blood or other fluids

  Tobacco

  Telling children that all life is suffering

  Alcohol

  God

  Smell of cinnamon

  Esther

  4.

  Last call. That ominous point where only the right piece of paper will let you go a step further.

  “Now,” she said, holding his chin, “you will be there, this you promise me.”

  “I’ll be there. An hour later. I’ll be there.”

  “An hour, can you imagine? What is one to do in an airport for an hour?”

  “Watch people come,” suggested Alex. “Watch people go.”

  Kitty shuddered. “This I’ve seen plenty, including the version where they don’t come back.”

  Alex gave Kitty a kiss on her powdery forehead. She smelt of theatrical makeup. She was dressed in a red suit with diamonds in her ears and a sparkle of green on her eyelids. Her hair was curled. Inside her holdall, even Lucia had a nice tartan jacket. The two of them are from that age when travel was still performance.

  “Poor Lucia. In a bag for seven hours. It is indecent for a lady to travel this way.”

  “She’ll be all right,” said Alex, sneaking a hand in to stroke Lucia’s back. “Just keep her quiet.”

  “Max has probably already called the police department. He will think the stalker take me away to rape me or something crazy.”

  “I’ll deal with Max,” said Alex and, without any confidence in this final proposition, kissed her once more and said good-bye.

  AN HOUR LATER, a piece of good luck befell him: he got bumped up to business class. He had never been there before, and though he understood he was meant to take it with good humor, something about it terrified him. The effort that had been taken. And all to identify and assert a few tiny differences: between orange juices, serviettes (cotton or paper), thickness of blanket, sharpness of pencil. The distinctions between coach
and business class seemed to him worldly manifestions of the goyish conception of heaven. Which is a place for the kind of child who exults in his own lofty tower of ice cream the instant his friend’s cone falls to the ground.

  On the other hand, in business class you get phones. Alex swept his credit card through one and at a rate of nine dollars a minute listened to Esther tell him that while she was being operated on, during a lucid spell, she had felt his father’s presence at the end of her bed.

  “I s’pose,” she said, her voice almost unrecognizable, weak, “that sounds completely mental.”

  Alex was silent. Esther had her moments of what she called “spirituality,” which ranged from inconstant trust in back-page star signs all the way to creative discussions with her African ancestors via poetry. In this area, Alex kept his counsel. He was barely capable of faith. Confronted with spiritualism, he found only humor.

  “Go on,” she said. “Say it. Whatever it is.”

  “No, I . . . nothing. Just. My father? Not your father?”

  “Your father. He was holding my feet.”

  “Right, because he was a big foot-holder in life, feet were a very important—”

  “Oh, forget it. Forget it. Look, I can’t raise my voice, I’m all bruised. I’ve got to go.”

  A stewardess brought her face very close to Alex’s and asked if he wanted cocoa.

  “Esther, wait. Wait. When are you getting out?”

  “Morning. Soon. I’m ready. I want to get out.”

  “I’ve got something huge to tell you.”

  “Save it for tomorow. I’ve got a load of stitches to show you. We can play Show and Tell. Where are you, anyway?”

  “Direct course to Mountjoy. I’m flying over water. In the event of a crash, what do you think’s a better chance—water or land?”