‘So there’s no compensation? There’s nothing good?’
‘Shit. All shit,’ Spencer’s father says.
When Spencer was seventeen, he dropped out of school. He travelled around England, hitching lifts, staying with benevolent strangers and drinkers who befriended him in pubs and the families of people who knew people he knew in London. He spent his cash on fried breakfasts, beer and a haircut, and when he ran out of money he returned home. This was 1984. When Spencer’s father was seventeen, it was 1939, the Germans were occupying Warsaw, and he left his city for the Soviet Union.
‘Who was that guy who used to come around sometimes when we lived in New Jersey?’
‘What guy?’
Spencer has a memory of a cheerfully mournful man sitting in the living room of their house in Berkeley Heights, nattily dressed, legs swinging because his father’s armchair was a little too high for most visitors, looking tired and wretched behind his smile.
‘A guy. You used to know him from the army or the camps or maybe back in Warsaw. He used to visit you a few times.’ ‘Visit me? Where?’
‘In New Jersey. He was always very well dressed.’ ‘Oh yes! Zig Pianko.’
Spencer’s father’s pleasure is in his ability to recall the name rather than any emotion that the name or the memory of Zig Pianko evokes.
‘He used to visit us. In New Jersey,’ Spencer’s father says.
‘That’s right,’ Spencer says.
‘He would sit there and I would sit there and we had not a thing to say to each other. It was heartbreaking.’ ‘Where did you know him from? From the War?’
‘Yeah. The War.’
The difficulty of choosing an actor to play Spencer’s father—film shoots drag on, extremities of cold and boredom, what actors are really paid for is to sit around doing nothing without making a fuss about it, which is not conducive to the well-being of the impatient and the frail; even the most generous insurance company might baulk at Spencer’s father being hired to play himself—but the greatest difficulty would be to find someone who could do justice to his voice. Spencer’s father’s voice is a beautiful thing. It occupies a resonant low register, lower than Spencer’s, and even though Spencer’s father can’t sing (and seems to take pleasure in the fact that his son is equally ill fitted for music and sports, as if Spencer’s incapacities somehow validate his own), his speaking voice is baritone-musical, a joy for child Spencer to listen to on those rare occasions in his childhood when his father could be persuaded to tell his stories of Charlie and his two friends conducting their dangerous missions in wartime.
But it is Jimmy Ludwig’s accent that makes his voice so special. Max von Sydow could possibly do it, or maybe Armin Mueller-Stahl. In Jimmy Ludwig’s voice is a memory and a scar of every place he has ever lived. He thinks he speaks like an American, because when he moved from the Old World to the New, he believed, and continues to believe, that America is a place without class, where any foreigner can prove himself with diligence, where the holder of a US passport and a good credit rating is an American gentleman as fine as any with an Ivy League degree and money earned by a long-dead family member whose grubbiness has been smoothed away by time and a Boston accent, but to anyone’s ear he speaks like a Polish-Russian-English-American. Here is pre-War Warsaw, there Siberia 1941, here’s a trace of Italy 1944, here London 1946-51, and the Yankee overlay, his pronunciation of buoy as boo-ee and route as rowt, hides nothing.
‘I knew him from then,’ his father says.
Spencer supposes that the Poles don’t have a th sound, because his father uses a t or a d. I knew him from den, or Dat’s terrific! Or ‘t ting is…Incredible! In the gaps within the words, lost worlds appear. Spencer has a memory of his mother teasing his father in the living room of Berkeley Heights (one of those rare weekend occasions when his father wasn’t working, or asleep on the sofa, or busying himself with illicit rendezvous—and who could blame him? He had been in Siberia, where he could not raise an erection to buy himself some extra food). In her almost impeccable English accent she was trying once again to teach him to perform the dental fricative: Rest your tongue between your teeth and blow gently out around it…Go on, you do it, say, The teeth, and his father said T’e teet and blew little bubbles of saliva around his words, which infant Spencer thought was sort of magical, because he was not above making those kinds of sounds and oral expulsions himself.
Zig Pianko gave up on making approaches to Spencer’s father. His father had no time for the past. Spencer’s father, if pressed about the past, would complain about the lack of love he received from his parents. It’s incredible! I never had a birt’day party! Spencer felt as if he were being blamed for it.
In a film of his father’s life, maybe his father could play himself. Dress him in baggy trousers and school cap, put a bicycle chain in his hand and discreetly film from afar on a dangerous Warsaw street.
‘Have you ever acted?’
After his father has been made to understand the question, he looks at Spencer as if he has been asked if he has recently been caught masturbating in public or knowingly bought a German product.
‘How do you represent the past?’
The movie Atlantic City, which Spencer, ever the literalist, had watched before leaving London, is from a far-past time. In the opening scene, Susan Sarandon switches on a cassette player. In the second scene, there is a piece of business with a public payphone. People smoke in bars.
Tootie-Frootie ice cream and craps don’t mix.
When Burt Lancaster tells Susan Sarandon that he watches her, window into window, adjoining apartments across the way, as she performs her post-oyster bar depiscinising routine of rubbing herself with lemon juice and perfume, she takes a moment to consider. And her response? She loosens her shirt and comes towards him. This is the sort of moment in films that Spencer despises.
When his father can be persuaded to turn his attentions away from the symptoms of his decline, they move into irritation at their slow progress behind the Academy bus and rest on his disappointments at his son. He doesn’t say it, even a man so immune to tact as Jimmy Ludwig doesn’t say it, but the question is there: I survived my youthful ordeals, my family died, for this? This is the summit of our civilisation? This is our culmination and consummation?
To his father’s credit, he does not consider himself a special case. He is not ashamed to have survived, he never sought out the company of others with any kinds of similar experiences. He did not want to reminisce with Zig Pianko. He does not consider himself noble or heroic to be alive. He just wishes his son, in his status as the Last Man, were more worthy of the role.
‘When are you going to get a job?’
‘I have a job.’
Spencer can hear a whine in his voice, which he detests. His father is eighty-six years old, he is nearly forty-two, and Jimmy Ludwig still has the capacity to turn him into a child whose throat raws with self-pity as he tries to prove himself to his father.
‘Your plays.’
‘Yes. My films.’
On the occasions that Spencer’s films have been shown in New York, his father has politely sat through screenings, at the Film Forum, the Kitchen, once at Lincoln Center, twice at the cinema that used to be in the basement of Carnegie Hall. His wife, Spencer’s stepmother, used to come to them too, at the beginning, and she had attended the first of these events dressed according to her idea of a costume appropriate for a movie premiere, jewellery and furs. Neither of them has ever come to an after-screening party, for which Spencer is not ungrateful.
‘It’s your night,’ his father had said the first time he had rejected the invitation. ‘Enjoy.’
‘It would be nice if you could be there,’ Spencer had said entirely insincerely.
‘Nice for who?’ his father said.
Spencer’s father was seldom forthcoming with his opinions of Spencer’s films, and Spencer could never be sure which he was protecting, Spencer’s standing in his landscape of
imagined achievement and respect, or his own untutored uncertainty in a foreign world.
There are many things that Spencer is not sure of about his father. How long the overlapping crossover period had been between his two wives, for example. But, the most fundamental and most unanswerable question Spencer has for his father (not a matter of dates, or the amount of money he has in the bank, or whether he had ever believed himself to be in love with his first wife, and when had he fallen out of love and life with his second wife and seen her, finally, for who she is; and indeed whether he believed in love; and why he had rejected most of the people he had ever been close to; and what was the origin of the feud his family had with their next-door neighbours when Spencer was young; and is his father aware of how many financial metaphors he uses to describe his transactions with people and the world; and what he thinks of his son, truly, is Spencer such a disappointment to him as it appears, or is there an amount of respect to be had for a man who made his way in a difficult world that Jimmy Ludwig could have no understanding of?; and why he could have such an acute intelligence for systems and such an emptiness of response when it came to emotions, other people’s), the question that occupies Spencer most of all while knowing that it can never be answered is whether the person his father is had been determined by his experiences in wartime, or whether the person he is is what had enabled him to survive.
Somewhere, less than a hundred miles from where they drift down the Parkway, is the ranch-style wooden house where Spencer spent the first six years of his life.
Their next-door neighbours were the Weathers family. Between the Ludwigs and the Weathers was some unspoken animosity that was never explained to Spencer, beyond that it was not permitted for him to go into their house nor to invite the two Weathers girls into his. The younger Weathers girl, who was just a few months older than Spencer, was called Mary-Lou. Mary-Lou Weathers had a fragilely pretty face and light brown corkscrew curls. She was fascinating to Spencer because of her shamelessly brazen habit of picking her nose in public and studiously eating what she retrieved. Once, fearful and thrilled, Spencer broke the rule against entry. He was with a group of neighbourhood kids on the Weathers’ lawn. Mary-Lou invited the group in, not specifically excluding Spencer, but she knew as well as he did that he would not be able to come. Nonetheless, Spencer joined the group, waited for something enormous and biblical to occur as he walked slowly stutteringly in, trying to pretend he was a man of the world who often walked into his neighbours’ houses, and stood at the edge of Mary-Lou’s bedroom as she showed off her new Barbie doll.
Spencer was not especially interested in Barbie dolls but he was excited to be in the forbidden place. No one asked him what he was doing there. Nothing awful or even interesting happened to him in Mary-Lou Weathers’s bedroom. After a few minutes, his bravery proved, his curiosity unappeased, he went back home again.
‘So,’ his father says.
‘What?’ Spencer says.
‘When are you going to make a living?’
‘I refuse to judge the value of what I do by how much money it makes.’
This would be edited straight out of the movie. Spencer’s films have been accused of many things, but pomposity is not one of them. Not even the literary ones that used to be commissioned by the BBC, modernist journeys inspired by fragmentary heroes, Pessoa, Cortázar, Barrett. There are times he has tried to concentrate on plot but all that achieved was slowness. He has never possessed Rick Violet’s single demonstrable skill, of moving characters quickly out of rooms. He has, he could remind his father, won prizes with his films. Trudy Tuesday, History of the Tango, The Late George Reid, The Captain’s Grief, Sonata for Piano and Violence, Robert W’s Last Walk have all been shown at international festivals and received awards. His most recent film, Vertigo, commissioned, but never shown, by Channel 4, was written about with some disquiet by those few critics who pay attention to Spencer Ludwig’s career as if it was his most personal work, when anyone paying any kind of attention should have realised that it was, without question, his least.
His father does not shake his head. He does not even deign to raise an eyebrow.
‘And I have a job, what you understand by job, at the film school.’
‘Full-time?’
There are just a few topics where Jimmy Ludwig’s language does not fail him. Most of them involve money. ‘Well, no. Two days a week.’
This is not in fact true. It is, if Spencer were to be honest with himself, a lie. His teaching takes up at most one day a week.
‘You make enough money?’ ‘Sort of. Up to a point.’
‘The first responsibility of a man is to provide for her family.’
The pompous sententiousness of this is alleviated only slightly by his father’s trouble with pronouns. Perhaps that is what this film should be called, The Trouble with Pronouns. Bitter-sweet and poignant, an old man’s decline, the son as witness, memory the enemy.
‘You remind me of the story,’ Jimmy Ludwig says.
‘What story?’
He wishes he hadn’t asked. He has better things to do than play the role of his father’s stooge.
‘The fellow who shovelled shit in the circus. Well, he said, at least I’m in show business!’
Vengefully, Spencer twists the wheel, pulls out into the fast lane and speeds past the Academy bus. He is childishly pleased by the sight of his father hurled back into his seat.
‘Tell me something,’ Spencer says when they have each returned to some kind of equilibrium.
‘What’s that?’
‘You remember the Weathers?’ ‘The what?’
‘Our next-door neighbours when we lived in Berkeley Heights. The Weathers family. They lived next door to us. When I was a child, in New Jersey. The Weathers.’
‘Sure I remember them. He was a moron.’
‘You fell out with them. I wasn’t allowed in their house. What was the fight?’
‘I told you. He was a fuckin’ moron.’
Spencer is pleased by the discovery that in contempt, even recollected contempt, his father’s ability with pronouns improves. He is less pleased by the pursuing sound of a police siren. He slows, pulls into the right lane to let the police car cruise by. It does not pass him; the car, New Jersey State Trooper, settles in behind him, lights flashing red and blue. An automated voice orders him to pull over to the side of the road.
Spencer has never been stopped by the police before in the US. He has seen it often enough on television shows, witnessed it on New York City streets, men, usually dark skinned, sitting placid in their cars, policemen leaning in through the open driver’s window, shining in a torch, the police car behind still flashing its lights. Light equals virtue and law and order. Darkness and blackness are the signifiers of lawless secrets and sins. He knows, in a learned observational way, that when a driver is stopped by the police in the United States he stays in his car. Nonetheless, when he pulls on to the hard shoulder of the Garden State Parkway, his father beside him saying, What the…? What?, after he puts the Cadillac into park, after the siren behind him has swirled into silence, he opens the driver’s door.
And an amplified voice barks at him.
Stay where you are! Sir! Switch off your engine and stay in your car!
Poised, frozen, not sure how to follow the mixed instructions, Spencer stays where he is, one foot on the tarmac, one hand on the door handle, his bald patch naked and exposed.
‘What are you doing now?’ his father asks.
Sir! Get back into your car!
‘You’re an idiot,’ his father says.
‘Broke the mould, I know,’ Spencer says.
And a force reaches him, not the crash upon his unprotected head that he had been unconsciously expecting, but a grip tight as metal on his arms, and he is pulled and lifted, shoved, delivered against the side of the car, the wheel arch cutting cruelly into his shins, his chest squeezed against the bonnet—or hood, he supposes he should call it—his head forc
ed to one side so his view is the windshield, and the wipers that have been triggered in the commotion, and his father’s face behind glass, a false-tooth smile, and a look that he is so unaccustomed to seeing that it takes him a while to register as pleasure.
‘Please,’ Spencer says.
The policeman’s body pins him uncomfortably twisted between body and car. The breath of the policeman is hot on his face. Spencer detects the scent of burnt cheese and engine oil and beer. He wonders if this is what it feels like to be in one of those underground sex clubs with names like Anvil and Hoist.
‘I’m sorry,’ Spencer says.
The policeman pulls Spencer’s wrists hard together. A knee rams into the small of his back. Spencer grunts in pain. ‘I’m English,’ Spencer says.
Through the windscreen, his father’s expression moves from pleasured to troubled. At first Spencer is grateful for his concern, then is reminded of the panicky expression his father’s face shows when he is in some urgency of urinating.
‘My father,’ Spencer says.
And the policeman breathes harder, holds him tighter. Spencer will never know whether it’s the decrepitude of his father or his own nationality that has protected him, but the policeman has relented, and he is no longer being squeezed to the side of the car. He may even wiggle his wrists a little inside the policeman’s grip. The most alarming thing is that his father seems to be having a fit or a seizure of some kind. The right side of his face clenches, twists and drops. It is like an awful parody of a wink. It might, Spencer considers, Spencer hopes, actually be a wink.
‘Get back into your car, sir,’ the policeman says, not unkindly, almost, it might be said, fatherly.
‘Yes. Thank you.’
Spencer scuttles back into the driver’s seat and scrupulously rests his arms on the steering wheel to show the policeman that not only does he mean no harm but that he would be incapable of providing it.
‘Thank you,’ Spencer says.
‘I’d like to see your driving licence, sir,’ the policeman says. ‘A leak,’ Spencer’s father says.
A Film by Spencer Ludwig Page 6