The Autograph Man

by Zadie Smith

  “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.

  “This one,” he said, drawing his top lip tight over his gums, “this one is just strong as hell. And this one here is less strong, but it’s ethical. Everybody gets paid their folding green, including the brown ladies who get it out of the field, if indeed coffee even comes from a field—I’m just going by what my grandson tells me. But you’re boring me into a wooden kimono, so I’m taking it strong, and nix on the moo-juice. Keeps me lively. Anyone else?”

  He hitched his little potbelly up on the bar, lifted his feet off the floor and lo
omed in towards Honey, who shrank back, knocking a pyramid of pizza boxes to the floor.

  “Hey, you. I know you? You in pictures? This guy over here, he could stand one more greasing, he’s not slick enough—but you. You’re a slinky piece of homework.”

  Krauser turned his face to the ceiling, put his big lips to an invisible trumpet, played it, sang: Struttin’ . . . struttin’ with some barbecue, barbecuoooo . . . Know what my grandson calls himself? Jamal Queeks. His mother looked just like you. And thereby hangs a tale. And there goes—say bye-bye!—there goes two thousand years of tradition. It’s a goddamn shame. Well, isn’t it?”

  Honey pressed her bag to her chest and walked over to the door, opened it, stood proudly, waiting. Alex persisted.

  “Mr. Krauser—please listen to me. I think Miss Alexander—I think she might be glad to see me. It’s more than that: I need to see her. I know that sounds weird. I waited such a long time—and then she sent me her autograph. Twice.”

  “Put that in wri-ting,” said Krauser to the rhythm of a sax solo, tapping out a beat with the hubs of his palms. “And I’ll pa-a-aste it in my scra-hap-book.”

  “He has them right in his bag,” said impassioned Honey, stepping forward from the doorway. Her eyes were burning, her hands shook, and Alex felt a startling throb of gratitude and love for this new friend who would abandon her Zen for him in this way.

  “Look,” she was saying, “we came out here, you know? We came out here. This guy’s from London, England. He didn’t have to? Nobody has to, you know? And I’ll say it, he’s too polite to say it: this boy’s been writing your crazy ass for fifteen years—”

  “Thirteen, actually,” said Alex, raising a hand. “Thirteen years.”

  “Okay, so thirteen—and without replies, and so what? So this: so he deserves this. People like you don’t signify without people like him—you get that much information? You understand that? Asshole,” said Honey, in response to a clownish face Krauser made. “Racist asshole. And let’s get real here, anyway. It’s not as if Miss Alexander is exactly prime-time these days. Am I lying? Am I saying something here which ain’t the case?”

  Krauser launched off the bar forward into the room and landed four inches short of a serious man. A mountainous vein that ran from his temple to the back of his left ear stood raised and angry.

  “Now,” said Krauser, “don’t you chew the scenery with me, Miss Thang. I’m no crazier than your mother was. It’s like this: I lack patience when it comes to two kinds of people: Moochers and Autograph Hounds. Here are the facts: Miss Alexander does not send anything unless I send it for her. And I do not send anything. There it is, soup and nuts. Miss Alexander does not have time for Autograph Hounds. She is the greatest star in the firmament, as they used to say back when it meant something. A Hum Hum Dinger from Dingersville. Protecting Miss Alexander from people like you is what I do. And that rhymes. Ladies. Gentlemen.”

  They were escorted to the door.

  2.

  The center of Roebling. Here a wide, pretty street steadily climbs its hill and shoveling a share of the snow is every man’s civic responsibility. Honey and Alex have spent an afternoon walking up and down this street, asking questions in the local shops, wandering down side streets to no end. Each waiting for the other to give up. When a coffee shop presents itself for the eighth time, it is Alex who raises his shoulders, puts his arm round Honey’s waist, and moves them both into the warmth. And the world continues. A Spanish-speaking kid is running past, screaming something. He dives behind a Jeep, misses his big brother’s ice-hearted snowball, pops back up and gets it in the neck. The black kids are starched for church. One rabbi, adrift. A few people are improbably fat, but no more than a few. A city truck disperses pink grit like industrial candy along the road. This is the desirable end of Roebling: the side streets are lined with dignified, crumbling brownstones that draw up their shabby skirts and disappear just before the black area and one block into the Jewish. At least one aging American novelist is known to live here. He can be seen, prominently displayed in the bookshop window, and sometimes in the flesh, trying to convince young American men to shoot hoops with him.

  At the hill’s crest lies the neglected Roebling Zoo. Here, a big-bottomed capybara, or even a reclusive family of gophers, can legitimately feel themselves star attractions. The snakes have all gone. There never were any tigers. And on a Sunday, this zoo attracts only the hipsters, looking to be distracted from their hangovers, maybe, or just charmed by the crazy dances of captive jackrabbits. From their coffee-shop window seats, Honey and Alex watch a steady drift of them, these lovely, sorrowful kids who are never in a hurry. Gangly, sloping, beautiful, wearing a generation’s forgotten coats, tramping uphill in the snow.

  “And so,” says Honey, sprinkling chocolate, “she’s having it today, this operation? But it’s not risky, right? ’Cos you wouldn’t be here, obviously, if that was the deal.”

  Alex is convincing Honey who is convincing Alex who is convincing Honey that removing a pacemaker is a routine procedure. They both use this phrase, routine procedure, unwittingly stolen from a long-running television show. Frantically, they agree with each other (“Right”; “Right”; “Right”).

  “This is exactly it—I just want to have the relevant facts. Ask someone, have someone tell me. That’s what I’m used to. I grew up . . . my dad was a doctor.”

  “Yeah? What he do now?”

  “Turns in grave, mostly. Dead.”

  “Well. I’m sorry.”

  “So you should be. It was your bloody fault in the first place. Oi,” said Tandem, dismissing his homely china cup and reaching out for Honey’s steaming glass packed in sedimentary layers, beige, brown, deeper brown, white. “What’s that like? Why’s it look better than mine?”

  Honey gathered a spoonful of the highest level of fluff and held it out for him.

  “See,” she said, bringing the steel to his lips, “you got a black decaf. Because you the kind who like depriving himself. You think you’re going to benefit by drinking that. But the reality is, you’re miserable. Ain’t no benefit involved. Now this, it’s got a chocolate, mocha and caramel dust on it—see, tastes good, don’t it?—with half-and-half, whipped cream, a shot of Kahlúa, toffee pieces on top . . .”

  Alex opened his mouth and closed it again around the spoon.

  “See, now that’s good, ain’t it?”

  Alex nodded helplessly.

  “And it teaches me the impermanence of pleasure—that’s my Zen, again, you see? It won’t do me no good, but it’s a pleasure while it lasts. And when I die, I can add it to the list of pleasures that fleeted. Flighted. Is that a word, fleeted?”

  Alex removed the spoon and assumed the hounded saucer eyes of the popular comedian Buster Keaton.

  “That was so good it hurt.” Honey laughed, dipped her head and rose with a cream mustache. “The funny thing is, once you’ve actually had pleasure, real pleasure, it’s fine letting go of it. It ain’t a thing. It’s a no-thing.”

  “You should go on the Shopping Channel. They need more Buddhists on that channel. I really think—”

  “Krauser.”

  “Huh?”

  Honey took possession of another man’s newspaper and spread it out against the shop’s window. From behind the local headline (an unfortunate reprobate had vanished with his stepdaughter) Krauser materialized, a tricky mix of man and newsprint in the glassy sun. He was trying to cross the street at its most hazardous point; he had on a waxy green raincoat with wrinkled hood, his arms outstretched as if this were in some way useful for the passing traffic. He vanished for a moment behind a dark-inked advert claiming to improve your memory skills and reappeared in the middle of a political scandal.

  IT IS IMPOSSIBLE these days to follow a man or quit a job without an encyclopedia of cinematic gesture crowding you out. Honey snorted at Alex, who set out hugging walls and scuttling on tiptoe, but soon enough she herself made use of a pair of shades and an unconvincing
whistle. Then it turned out Krauser’s hat was connected to a transistor radio—the wire went round the brim and behind his ear; an aerial protruded from his pocket; he was oblivious to them both, engrossed in a political news show of some kind. (“Zimbabwe!” he was heard to shout, as he took a sudden left into a quiet road. “Now he’s on to Zimbabwe?”)

  Four doors from the end of this street, he stopped. Turned off the dial by his ear. Honey and Alex hung back by some garbage cans. They watched him skip up the front steps of a turn-of-the-century brownstone, ring the bell and get let it in by machinery. The door closed behind him. Like good detectives, they watched the spot where he had last been, jogging up and down and breathing on their hands. Alex rolled a cigarette.

  “This is ridiculous—this can’t be her place.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s too easy. It’s . . . This just doesn’t happen that I want something and then it’s just there. With no effort. That’s not how it happens.”

  Honey put her hands round his waist and squeezed. “Baby, that’s exactly how it happens. Somedays, shit just lands in your lap, believe me, I know. Gimme some of that smoke when it’s ready, huh?”

  “Is this the plan, this? Waiting?” he asked, trying to use the flank of Honey to light the thing out of the wind.

  “The plan is no plan. Waiting is what we’re doing.”

  “And when the waiting’s finished?”

  “Then something else’ll happen, I guess.”

  The wait was not long. Ten minutes later the door opened once more and Krauser stepped out. A pair of arms passed him a small, writhing bundle and a lead; the door closed, he connected the one to the other, and off up the hill he went trailing a compact dog. It was dressed in a red velveteen coat, it had a corkscrew tail and it was walking in that certain highfalutin way as if everybody and the President were looking at it.

  CHAPTER FOUR