The Autograph Man (12 page)

“Look. I’m just thinking about . . . you know, Ian?”

Lovelear thumped Ian on the back. “Ian’s
fine.
Ian’s just dandy, aren’t you, Ian? Alex, it’s like this: if you want a car fixed you go to a mechanic, if you want to know Christ, you go to a Catholic, and if you want to see how much can be drunk in thirty minutes, you go to an alcoholic. We are very fortunate to have sitting with us today Ian Dove. Ian Dove is a professional—”

“Pisshead,” said Ian Dove, sadly.

Lovelear drew the three glasses into triangular formation in the middle of the table. “Gentlemen?” he said in his best
Brideshead Revisited
voice. “Shall we?”

They drank. Soon enough, Kitty began to burn a hole in Alex’s bag. Several times he almost reached for her, holding himself back only with great difficulty. Everything Alex had ever shown Lovelear, Lovelear had maintained to be a forgery, just for the hell of it. This time, he would not give him the satisfaction. He would not be demeaned, not today. Instead he sank his pint of wine and led the cry for more. Through purple lips, the three of them swiftly itemized the best all-time musicals, the greatest Hollywood scandal, largest cast, biggest breasts, earliest nude scenes, most infamous suicides.

“Okay, okay, okay: name three vintage Hollywood decapitations,” said Lovelear, placing three new whisky shots on the table.

The room had started to shimmy by the time John Baguley walked in, bow tie and everything. He went straight to the bar, but Alex knew he had seen them. The more successful Baguley got, the longer the period between Baguley spotting you and Baguley acknowledging you.

“Jayne Mansfield,” said Dove.

“Ding!” said Lovelear.

Alex began to pick wax off their bottle. Maybe he could show the thing to Baguley? Baguley knew his onions, after all! Baguley could verify, Baguley would see the truth! It would have to be done subtly, though. Lovelear didn’t roll with the idea that Baguley knew more onions than Lovelear.
Also, probably best not to bring up right now,
thought Alex carefully, unconsciously moving his lips,
not now when I’m a bit tight. That might make me look crazy.
Alex watched the room rock some more, and then roll. One and a half Baguleys stood at the bar, ordering a ham sandwich. Alex considered the situation. On the one hand, Baguley definitely knew his onions. On the other, Lovelear hated Baguley. There was that onions issue. On the third hand, Ian also hated Baguley. Baguley made bad puns along the AA (Autograph Association / Alcoholics Anonymous) comic axis. Come to think of it, thought Alex, I hate Baguley, too. How’s that for a fourth hand! My God, I hate Baguley. I never realized how much! With his bow tie. Thin mustache. The bastard. And now he’s probably going to come over here. With his hat. Forfugssake. Who wears bastard hats like that, these days?

“Grace Kelly?” said Alex, and stood up. He felt delicate. He tried to ascertain whether Baguley was intending on the back of the bar or their corner of it.

“A point to Mr. Tandem. Mr. Dove and Mr. Tandem now have one each. Tiebreaker.”

“I can’t think,” gurgled Dove, “too pissed. All right, wait. Um . . .
God, er
. . . Montgomery Clift?”

“Baguley’s coming,” said Alex, as Baguley came.

“
Montgomery Clift,
Dove? That was
half
his face. As far as I remember, he still had his freaking
head
when he finished
Raintree
—”

“Baguley, shiddown,” said Alex as Baguley sat down. Alex was much, much drunker than he had hoped. With dread he watched Baguley take off his hat and put it on the table, the worst sort of bad luck in some countries.

“Do you know,” said Baguley loudly, “what I’ve just successfully organized?”

“Own funeral?”

“Hullo, Lovelear. No, actually. A charity auction. A few nights ago. You boys should have come. We auctioned off character parts. In novels. Do you see? So you paid money and you got to be in this or that writer’s book. Your own personal fifteen minutes, you see. I’m a good sport, me—I paid three hundred pounds. Lady writer.”

“What?” said Ian, who was, of course, tighter than all of them. “What’s he saying? Is it English?
Bastard.
”

“Look at that tie, man,” said Lovelear, touching it. “What
is
that tie
about
? Like, what does it
mean
? Does it mean something?”

“And the trouble is, I haven’t decided,” said Baguley, trying to concentrate on Alex-Li, the one he thought sober, “quite what I’d like to be in it, though. In the novel, I mean.”

“Amateur Satanist?” said Lovelear.

“Just a . . . like a . . . bastard?” offered Ian, and laughed a lot, dribbling wine down his chin.

“It’s three, we’re late,” said Alex, smiling, looking at his watch. He almost didn’t want to go; he was enjoying himself. There are friends you have who are only good when drunk. But that, according to the Kabbalah of Alex-Li Tandem, is not entirely a bad thing.

“Tandem . . . you’re getting real flashy with that timekeeping shtick,” said Lovelear in Brooklynese, before judiciously switching to Yeoldechristmascarolese. “My boy, I say you’re hired. We’ll take you on at two thrupp’ny bits a year, and I hope we ne’er regret it! And now—”

Ian made a trumpet noise. Alex contributed a lackadaisical drumroll.

“Baguley,” said Lovelear, lurching forward, “it’s been real. But
man
. . . we seriously have to go now. We have to go watch you buy some more of Alex’s forgeries. Oh,
sure
—this auction is
full
of Tandem forgeries. That’s all he does all day. Forge, forge, forge and forge again. That’s why we don’t bid. We rise above. We are Zen. Basically. Baguley.”

Ian tried to stand but staggered backwards. Alex laughed a lot through his nose.

“You know what you should ask for?” said Ian to Baguley as Baguley made to leave. “You should ask that the writer lady makes you this bloke in the book who organizes an auction and then buys his place in, er . . . wait—no, yeah, in a book as a character who organizes an auction and then buys his place in a book and asks . . .”

For this little Jewish gem, Alex bought Ian two more pints.

WHEN THEY RETURNED
, they were sincerely drunk in a melancholy way. Beneath the stark lights they rubbed their eyes like children. The popular movie actor George Sanders was under the hammer. A thousand pounds for the 1972 suicide note in which he insisted he was too bored to continue.

“I empathize,” said Lovelear, stretching.

“A bird went in search of a cage,” murmured Alex.

“
Jesus.
What asshole said
that
?”

“Remember the scene, Lovelear,” said Ian, tugging at his sleeve, “in
All About Eve,
when—”

“Sure,” said Lovelear, batting him off.

They sat, they bid, but it was not their day. Bored, Alex looked around. Young burly lads in blue uniforms were heaving in pieces meant for a later auction. Statues, tables, gold things. It was easy to forget, when one was an Autograph Man, that names on paper are the very least of what is traded and shifted round the world. Autographs are a small blip in the desire network, historical flotsam. But look at this stuff, the big stuff. These cast-iron dogs with best paw forward. Bronze eagles drawing in their wings, preparing to land. Life-sized marble Negroes, jolly and docile, holding by the paws the result of somebody else’s hunt. And like a border running round it all, many many cold fireplaces ripped from great houses, laid on their sides and overlapping each other, fallen dominoes of the gods. And a moose. Towards the back. Stuffed, standing. Behind it, leaning on its threadbare hindquarters, Alex now spotted Brian Duchamp. A second later, Lovelear had spotted him too.

“Ai yai
yai
—I
knew
this auction was going to get worse before it got better. Dove, wake up, man. Look who it is.”

Dove unfurled like the doormouse.

“Bloody
hell.
Do you think he’s going to go for it,
again
?”

Alex wiped his glasses on his mohair.

“I ’spect so. He is still
mad.
I mean, unless you’ve heard something.”

“Hey, Al, I’ll tell him to come over here, no?”

Alex thumped Lovelear in his right breast.

“
Jesus,
I see him every Thursday anyway—I don’t need to see him more than that.”

“But don’t you want him to like come over here”—Lovelear did a stationary approximation of waddling with his upper body—“you know, and then like sit down next to you”—Lovelear slunk down into his seat until he was the sitting height of Duchamp, who stood at around five foot four—“and then put his face real close to your face, and open his mouth wide and say—”

Here Lovelear said
hello
as a Cockney gremlin might say it, an accurate reproduction of Duchamp. He was not able to reproduce the halitosis, however, which was so acute it probably could not be reproduced in a laboratory.

Brian Duchamp. He of the filthy shirts, the loneliness, the isolated debt-ridden stall (from which, in his madness, he occasionally tried to sell Alex items from his own house: toilet roll holders, lampshades), the supermarket sneakers, skin issues, bad breath.

“What’s he
doing
?” asked Lovelear.

Alex observed.

“Preparing.”

Out of his bag Duchamp was pulling a clipboard, several pens, some catalogues and a number of stray bits of paper, balancing them on the moose. He unfolded a pair of bifocals and thrust them as far up the bridge of his nose as possible, the result being a tremendous and terrifying magnification of milky, mad eyes.

“Oi-oi, look out,” said Ian. “Curtain up.”

“We begin the bid at twenty pounds, twenty pounds, do I have any takers at twenty?”

The auctioneer was gesturing toward a pretty picture of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy in what thirties Hollywood imagined the young people of Austria were wearing at the time (lederhosen, velvet collars, pigtails with wire through them, cowbells). There were takers at twenty, forty, sixty and eighty, and then there was Brian Duchamp. He surged forward, shouting.

“I’ll give you for’ee!”

“Pardon me, sir—are you bidding?”

“For’ee!”

“Forty, sir? I’m afraid the bid is already at eighty.”

“I’ll give yer,” said Duchamp, quieter now, and drowned out by what the newsreaders like to call general consternation, “for’ee pence and a slap—cos that’s how much it’s worth. Cos it ain’t bloody real!”

“Brian,”
said Alex as Duchamp came level with their row of chairs, “Brian, for God’s sake, sit down. Come here. Come on, come here.”

He stood up and made a grab for Duchamp, who cursed him like a sailor and stumbled; Lovelear and Ian wrestled him into a seat.

“Tandem? I see you Thursdays, not today. Thursday’s when I see you.”

Alex marveled at this ability of madness to be completely beside the point. He pressed Duchamp’s shaky hands onto his knees.

“They won’t let you back in, Brian, if you do this again. They threw you out last time, didn’t they?”

Duchamp brought a handkerchief to his mouth and hacked something unspeakable into it. He fixed his sad, low-watt bulbs on Alex.

“These bloody experts, Tandem. But they don’t know nothing! Barely out of fahkin’ short pants and they don’t know nothing!”

A miniature bottle of whisky fell from Brian’s pocket to the floor. He lunged after it. There was a mauve tinge to Brian’s skin. He smelt terrible.

“Lovelear, I don’t think he’s well.”

“News flash.”

“I don’t think you’re well, Brian,” said Alex, bringing himself to put his hand on the poor man’s bumpy forehead. “I think I should probably get you out of here.”

But Duchamp pulled away from him, suddenly. For a moment he had broken from the shell of his world into Alex’s; now he retreated. All his attention returned to the podium.

“Lot 182,” said the auctioneer, “which is a preview program signed by the cast of the film
42nd Street,
including the popular musical actress Ruby Keeler . . .”

The auctioneer kept talking, but so did Duchamp. A hum that had started softly was increasing in volume and pitch, becoming harder to ignore. Duchamp stood up. The auctioneer turned himself up: “DO I HEAR TWO HUNDRED . . .”

“If that’s Ruby,
I’m
fahkin’ Jolson, mate.”

“Sir?” queried the auctioneer. “I’m sorry, is there some sort of a problem?”

“That’s not Ruby that’s not Ruby that’s not Ruby,” Duchamp was shouting. “THAT’S NOT RUBY THAT’S NOT FAHKIN’ RUBY. THAT’S ME! I SIGNED THAT.”

Security was now finally being called, but Duchamp hadn’t finished being mad yet, and there was something admirable—like a theater crowd indulging a bad King Lear—in the way they were going to let him finish what he had started.

“I BLOODY WORKED FOR THESE STUDIOS, DINT I? RUBY NEVER SIGNED A THING! I SIGNED ALL OF THIS STUFF!”

There was method in the madness, as all the Autograph Men present knew. Fresh out of the war, Duchamp had washed up in Hollywood, working in the publicity departments of several studios. He signed thousands of items. In younger, less mad days, Duchamp had been invaluable to collectors who wanted to check on the authenticity of a purchase. He had always maintained that the British market was flooded with forgeries; he had a strong case. Still, Alex could think of better ways to air this issue than exposing oneself to the public, which Duchamp, fumbling furiously with belt buckle, seemed poised to do.

“RUBY, GRETA, MARLENE, RITA, KITTY, BETTE—THEY COULDN’T CLEAN THEIR OWN ARSES. I DID ALL THEIR DIRTY WORK.”

For his finale, Duchamp dropped his trousers, revealing a cotton canvas of heartbreaking, variegated stains.

3.

How many moves, wondered Alex later, on his way out—that is, if this were a sophisticated game like mah-jongg or chess—how many moves to get from where I am to where Brian Duchamp is? Because the people who buy the brass dogs and the billiard tables, they’re not like this, are they? So why are
we
like this? What’s
wrong
with us?