A Film by Spencer Ludwig

by David Flusfeder

  ‘That was Mary,’ he says.

  His father is sulking now, looking glumly at the drying damp patch on his groin, fiddling with his surgical collar. ‘You shouldn’t take that off.’

  His father ignores him, continues to pull at the Velcro fastening, and Spencer catches an unwelcome sympathy for how his stepmother must feel.

  ‘You should keep that on,’ Spencer says.

  ‘Should I?’

  ‘Yes. It’s for the best.’

  His father dutifully refastens his collar and looks so grateful for the attention that Spencer’s heart is pierced. And he is so confused by this feeling that he answers his telephone without looking to check the identity of the caller.

  ‘Spencer!’

  ‘Oh. Right. Hi Michelle.’

  ‘Spencer!’

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Where have you been hiding yourself?’ ‘Not hiding. I’m in the States.’ ‘Oh. Your father. How is he?’

  Michelle’s voice drops. She is attentive and kind and wise, alert always to nuances of emotion and need, and Spencer has come to hate his dependency upon her. He owes her money. She will have a job that she thinks he ought to take, and not because she is looking for repayment, but because she approves of the project and she hopes, she has always hoped, that it will bring out the best in him. Michelle has been unyielding in her support for Spencer over the years. Spencer and Michelle co-produce his films. This is because he is prone to making the self-damaging, heartfelt decision. He gets things wrong. He finds it hard to take many people seriously, particularly money men, and he hates indulging others while being patronised by them. Michelle does these things for him.

  He knows he is an unrewarding colleague. He takes things as his due, without consideration. She has other people she works with, other, better, jobs that she will be prepared to sacrifice to further his work. The understanding among their friends is that she is unspokenly in love with him, but neither Spencer nor Michelle believe this to be true. If he is actually ever to make it, the Film by Spencer Ludwig, then he will have to be free to make it, which means he will have to be free of all obligation. Michelle will have to be paid off before they can work together again. Spencer has decided that if his life is to go in any manageable way then he has to sunder all links of dependency.

  His father is sulking again. He defiantly removes his surgical collar and places it in his lap.

  ‘Look. Michelle. I’m driving right now. I’ll call you as soon as I can.’

  ‘Please do. I’ve got some great news for you. Don’t you want to hear it? Maybe it’s what you need. You sound quite down.’ ‘It had better wait. I’m sorry.’

  His father is now looking at his own cellphone, which his wife has insisted he carry with him at all times. He seldom switches it on, because his wife will always be calling him on it. But he switches it on now and Spencer can see that there are seven unanswered calls, all from what might be bitterly called home.

  ‘I’ll call you as soon as I can. Sorry Michelle.’

  He switches the phone off and tosses it on to the dashboard.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says to his father. ‘That was my producer.’

  His father grunts, and tosses his own phone to join Spencer’s.

  They are driving along the West Side now, parallel to the Hudson. Across the river is New Jersey, where Spencer was born, and which he was delighted to escape. He could turn around now, deliver his father back to his world, but he is not going to do that.

  What is this for? It is for Spencer’s father. Living in a world without pleasure or curiosity or joy is no life at all. Spencer’s father spends his crepuscular time between doctors’ appointments solving jigsaw puzzles. In the corner of the living room that his wife had wanted to exile him from is where he was accustomed to read the newspaper in the morning and where now he is accustomed to sit with the newspaper in the morning and mimic his former habits and pursuits. His short-term memory was damaged by the stroke. By the time he has begun the second paragraph of a news item, his fractured memory has lost anything of what was in the first.

  ‘We’re going to Atlantic City. We shall have fun,’ Spencer says.

  Spencer imagines walks along the ocean, soft exchanges of secrets in plush congenial bars, rich widows and Russian heiresses decorously offering their attentions, as father and son light up Cuban cigars. But Spencer’s father gave up smoking when he was fifty. He used to smoke three or four packs a day, light the next cigarette from the embers of the previous one, or start another when the current cigarette was still alight in the ashtray. To sit on his father’s lap was a desired pleasure but not painless. Spencer learnt early it was best to dress for the occasion; to dress as an American child, in shorts and short-sleeved shirts, was asking for trouble, the burning ash dropping from his father’s mouth and hand on to his unprotected skin.

  A last hurrah, the desperados make one final ride-out. Or maybe this is the first of many, one long trip, the first chapter from New York to Atlantic City, and then farther, Route 66, through the desert, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, down to Mexico, Spencer and his father on the road, and no matter how jeopardising this might be for his health, it must be good to feel the air on his face—Spencer insists, on this subject he is intractable, unbullyable, that they have the windows down rather than use the Cadillac’s air conditioning—the experience of speed in itself is a good thing.

  Spencer’s father needs his son to make this happen. He takes a solidity in the presence of his son, it is some kind of connection to a world that goes on living, a world that he once was a significant part of.

  And what does Spencer want from this? Can he still take a solidifying comfort in the substance of his father?

  As they drive through lower Manhattan, Spencer is gratified to see there are more homeless people on the streets than there used to be. If his father is going to die he wants, vengefully, to see systems crumble.

  ‘How much?’ his father says.

  ‘How much what?’

  The Lincoln Tunnel was always Spencer’s less-preferred. He loves the Holland Tunnel best, the sheer length of it, the railed platform along the side where policemen used to stand and slowly wave back to Spencer, helpless and besotted in the back seat. He felt ridiculous waving to policemen, even when he was eight or nine years old and taking trips with his father and stepmother, but he couldn’t help himself, there was an unavoidable exhilaration about it.

  ‘Your…judgement.’

  His father knows he has said the wrong word and retreats into an abashed tunnel-darkened silence. Spencer’s policy on matters of this kind is to push him, so his father won’t settle into an accustomed lonely space behind walls of ununderstood language.

  ‘My, what?’

  ‘Judgement. I want to…’

  In the darkness of the tunnel, his father, still expert in matters such as these, retrieves his wallet from the back pocket of his chinos, picks out from behind his Medicare and AARP cards the loose cheque that he keeps for emergencies.

  ‘Pay?’ ‘Right.’

  ‘There’s toll booths on the Turnpike, but I’ve got cash. They don’t take cheques.’

  ‘No. Your…’ His father makes a forlorn effort of concentration, shakes his head. ‘It’s pathetic,’ he says.

  They are into New Jersey now, dipping up out of the tunnel into the glare of a less glamorous light. The road takes one regretful curve towards and then away from the Manhattan skyline and they are in the state where Spencer was born, forty-odd years ago, where he had learned to speak with an American accent at kindergarten and first grade, because otherwise he would stick out more than he already did, his sensitive ways, his take on the world, his incapacity for roughhousing with older, more athletic boys, and with an English accent at home, because his mother disapproved of all aspects of America.

  Spencer’s notional best friend when he was six wanted to become a policeman, because policemen carry guns. A few months ago, trying to explain to his daughter who he was o
r at least who he had been and what he might have been in danger of becoming, he had told her about his early years in New Jersey and Mary had insisted on looking up the name of his notional best friend on Google. Raymond Auch still lived in Berkeley Heights. He had not become a policeman. He was a senior vice-president in his father’s real estate firm and had married well, into a blue-blood family from Philadelphia. Mary had found the wedding announcement on the New York Times site. Spencer always told people that if he had stayed in New Jersey he would probably have become a junkie or a lawyer or both.

  His mother disapproved of chewing gum and television, instant coffee, big cars, what the country had allowed her husband to be, who he insisted on becoming. In the cold rigour of mealtimes, the three of them sat uncomfortably together, each not being able quite to comprehend how this was his or her world, where nothing, to any of them, ever seemed entirely familiar.

  Spencer as a child—he made up for it subsequently—ate very slowly, to his father’s irritation and disapproval. His mother, in sympathetic complicity, would give smaller and smaller portions each time, which he would halve with his knife, and when he had laboured to consume the first half, he would halve the remainder again, and so on, in an infinite progression.

  But this is not meant to be a memory drive.

  ‘No, go on. What are you trying to say?’ Spencer says.

  ‘It’s pathetic,’ his father repeats.

  ‘My judgement?’

  ‘Not judgement. Journey.’

  His father settles back, looking first pleased with himself and then angry that selecting and finding the right word to express his thought should be such a source of pride.

  ‘Journey? You mean my plane ticket?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You don’t have to do that. I’m not asking you for the money.’ ‘I know you’re not.’

  Which is why, probably, he is prepared to give it. Spencer had learned, not long after leaving New Jersey, that any money he accepted from his father was a lever of power he was voluntarily submitting himself to. He had made it a policy after that never to ask for money from his father and seldom to accept it when it was offered.

  ‘It was six hundred dollars. Approximately.’ His father now looks for a pen.

  ‘Why don’t you wait until we stop somewhere. We’ll need to stop somewhere for lunch and gasoline.’ ‘I want a…a…’

  ‘Pen?’

  His father spreads his arms out wide in his ignominy, touching the window with his right hand, the gear stick with his left.

  Pylons surround their road. Spencer manages to drive one-handed and take a photograph of a line of them. Spencer finds pylons magnificent.

  ‘There’s one in the glove compartment,’ Spencer says, and he returns his phone to its perch above the dashboard and reaches over to wave towards the glove compartment.

  Rather ingeniously, Spencer’s father uses the glove compartment door as a writing desk. He concentrates hard on forming the words, puffing out his cheeks as he carefully writes, before signing it with a flourish. He examines what he has made and hands the cheque over to Spencer, who has to struggle to take it while passing a truck that has lumbered on to the road from a strip of low-slung no-tell motels. (Air-Conditioning In Every Room! Free HBO! Daily And Weekly Rates. Mirrored Rooms Available!)

  Spencer interprets his father’s assiduousness in trying to pay his son’s expenses as a way to expressing who might still be in charge, and also, maybe, if he offers to pay this then he won’t have to pay more.

  ‘Thank you,’ Spencer says.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ his father says.

  If he were to make this journey into a film, Spencer would resist the too-obvious irony of the self-professed Garden State being a jumble of pylons and factory chimneys and desperate stunted occasional trees trying to make their leafless lives between iron bridges and car parks. Instead he might chart the journey in its road signs, exits to Jersey City, the Holland Tunnel, Bayonne, Newark Airport, Elizabeth, Elizabeth Seaport, the Verazzano Bridge. Improbably and unpersuasively, a billboard, half hidden behind a gas tower, tries to inform them that they are in The Embroidery Capital Of The World! He doesn’t see any signs for Atlantic City, which worries him.

  ‘What was the scenery like when you were growing up?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The countryside. When you were a boy?’ ‘In Poland? It was beautiful.’

  His father sometimes permits himself to become sentimental about his childhood. It is a tactic that Spencer allows himself on occasion, to question his father about his youth in Warsaw. While his father’s memory has grown unreliable about recent events, it is sure on the distant past. And sometimes he will talk about the taste of pickles in brine when he and his friend Benny broke into the cucumber factory at night, or the fresh buttered bagels you could buy on the innocently pre-War street—or not so innocent: his father could also tell stories about the gangs of Polish youths who roamed the streets, whose ideal recreation was to find Jews to beat up. His father, this wasting-away man, who was fastidious with his Italian suits and restaurant cutlery (even if every suit of clothes wore a reminder of the meal he had just eaten), who had made himself at home in law courts and yacht clubs, had taken to carrying a bicycle chain wherever he went. On at least one occasion he had used it, slashing iron across the face of a teenaged Pole, whose cap he had taken away as a souvenir. One victory among many defeats, he had told Spencer.

  ‘Did you go to the water ever?’

  ‘Sure,’ his father says. ‘The lakes. In summer.’

  ‘All of you?’

  ‘Me, my brother and my mother. And some cousins. We rented a house on the water.’

  ‘Not your father?’

  ‘He was working.’

  A tradition that Spencer’s father’s father had probably inherited from his own father—pack off the family to the lakes for the summer, while he stayed in the city to swelter and work and pursue whatever recreations grass-widowed men find to occupy themselves. Spencer’s father had followed the same tradition—in the time that Spencer had lived with both his parents, all his holidays were taken with his mother, flying back to England to join the company of her married, unchilded, older sister in dusty guest houses on the South Coast, Hastings, Bournemouth, Weston-super-Mare. And Spencer followed it too: he had never understood the notion of a family holiday; even in the happiest times with Mary and her mother, he had always resisted summers in Walberswick and Tuscany.

  Exit 11 offers them the Amboys, Shore Point and the Garden State Parkway, North and South.

  ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, that’s where he lived, Perth Amboy,’ Spencer says.

  ‘Left!’ says his father.

  ‘You remember? Danny Kaye was in it.’

  ‘Left! Left!’ wails his father.

  ‘You used to like Danny Kaye. You remember him?’ ‘For crying out loud!’

  And his father grinds his dentures and reaches to grab for the wheel, and Spencer accepts the situation is an urgent one.

  ‘Oh. I get it. The Parkway? Which direction?’

  ‘North, sure. Why not? The same way we came,’ his father says, gaining articulacy through derision.

  Spencer twists the wheel to the right, a triumph of bravado and fear, forces the Cadillac across the bows of an aged Toyota pick-up, and steers-veers the car into the exit lane.

  He quietens his heart as he pays the toll to get on to the Garden State Parkway.

  ‘I need a leak,’ his father says.

  All the rest stops, or at least the two that Spencer misses, timid again at the wheel of his father’s car, unwilling or unable to force a way through the traffic to get to the exit lane, are named for US presidents. He drives past, to his father’s woe, the Jefferson rest stop and then the Reagan.

  ‘I need a fucking leak! Why are you so dawdle?!’

  Spencer eases the car into the slow lane, hunkers over the wheel; he is not going to miss the next exit.


  Pulling, finally, into the car park of the pleasingly named Cheesequake Service Area rest stop, Spencer has hardly brought the car to a halt when his father has opened the passenger door and is already setting off for the journey across the tarmac past pick-up trucks and sedans, dragging his oxygen cylinder behind him. Spencer hurriedly secures the car and catches up with his father, who is walking at an impressive pace, arms behind his back, his right hand clutching his withered left wrist, his head down, chin to chest, his eyes glancing up from time to time to check on his direction. Spencer takes hold of the cylinder, opens the door to the rest stop.

  ‘Do you think there was a President Cheesequake? I don’t remember him.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Just trying to take your mind off your bladder.’

  His father moves faster and shakes him off at the men’s-room door. Spencer hooks the oxygen cylinder over his father’s arm and waits for him in the corridor outside.

  He looks at the cheque for the first time. The figure matches the correctly spelled words, which doesn’t always happen in the accounting system of his father’s decline. Except: his father has made the amount out for six thousand dollars instead of six hundred.

  ‘It’s too much,’ he says, showing the cheque to his father upon his unsteady return from the men’s room.

  Spencer tries to return the cheque but his father waves it away. He rests for a moment, to gather strength, on the plastic saddle of a mechanical horse that would cost fifty cents to gently rock a child into amusement, before he dourly gets on with the business of wavering towards the café area.

  ‘Very generous, thank you,’ Spencer says.

  He quickly folds the cheque away, as if there were something shameful about it, into the breast pocket of his jacket. Maybe he will keep it as a souvenir, the ironic symbol of the near-possibility of parental help.

  Jimmy Ludwig ignores the woman who offers to steer him towards a table. He finds one himself, lowers himself bumpily into a chair and rests his arms expectantly on the Formica tabletop.