‘Not a problem, sir. I shall procure you a wheelchair.’ ‘I’m very grateful.’
‘Not at all. It’s what we do. We’re here to expedite and facilitate your felicitude.’
The desk clerk tries not to show his pride in his own vocabulary. He speaks in an almost offhand way as if there is nothing to remark upon in his choice of words. The pride shows through nonetheless.
‘Oh. Great. Thanks.’
The desk clerk is in his early twenties. He will, Spencer suspects, go far.
‘Thank you Dwight.’
‘You’re most welcome. And I believe there’s a message for you, Mister Ludwig, from a British gentlewoman named Michelle.’
Spencer accepts the slip of paper and crumples it unread into a pocket of his jeans, and Dwight disappears and reappears pushing a heavy metal wheelchair with the words Property of Atlantic City Medical Center Do Not Remove painted across its backrest.
‘Oh. Great. Thanks. And, uh, Dwight?’
‘Sir?’
‘One other thing?’
‘Of course. Yours to name and mine to satisfy or rectify.’
‘This might be a more difficult one to arrange. But we’re running low on oxygen. I don’t know if you can tell us where, how, we might facilitate…?’
‘You require a refill or some new tanks or both? We can expedite and facilitate. Leave it with me, sir.’
By the time that Spencer has navigated his grumbling father to subside into the wheelchair and laid his cane across his twitching lap (his legs inside his flapping trousers seem even skinnier than when they had set out on this journey), and hung their carrier bags from the wheelchair handles and manoeuvred his father (so light, so dry) up the ramp out of the reception area, and through the colonies of slot machines, and into the elevator (backwards was, he thought, easier and more considerate but, he discovers, if he turns his father to the wall, removes any stimulus from him, then he becomes less troublesome and prickly) and along the brown corridor to their room, and opens the door, there is already a suite of oxygen equipment installed.
‘I’ll have to give Dwight a good tip,’ Spencer says.
His father looks doubtfully at the room.
‘It’s a shithole,’ he says.
‘Which bed do you want?’
This is all getting more intimate than Spencer had anticipated. In his projection of their arrival, he had imagined gaming tables and showgirls, the respect paid to his work and career; he had not thought about the arrangements of sleep and toilet, he had not pictured the damp patch spreading across his father’s groin.
His father, to Spencer’s slight alarm, removes his trousers and hangs them, with some fastidiousness, over the back of the chair that faces the vanity mirror. He yanks off his surgical collar and tosses it on to a bed. He then approaches Spencer, while pulling ineffectually at his shirt.
Spencer blinks. He can feel his lips involuntarily pursing in preparation for a kiss.
‘My poppers,’ Spencer’s father says.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Poppers!’
Spencer’s father waves his hands towards his shirt front.
‘Your buttons?’
‘What I said! Poppers!’
Spencer hurriedly unbuttons his father’s shirt while his father averts his attention. This process cheers neither of them. Spencer hangs the shirt over the bedstead. He then sets about invalid-proofing the room. He drapes towels over the sharp edges of the furniture, rolls up the bathroom rug so his father won’t snag his stick or his foot on it and fall on one of his innumerable nighttime trips to the john; he pushes the wooden chair in tight to the dressing table; he situates the companion armchairs in the bay by the window so father and son can play backgammon more congenially.
His father is comfortable now. He sits on an armchair in his white briefs and black socks. Unlike Spencer he has hardly any hair on his body. And unlike Spencer he is skinny. Apart from one period in his early fifties, after he gave up smoking and developed a little pot belly that offended his vanity and which he banished in a few months with a careful diet, denying himself sugar and fats, while compensating by rewarding himself with even more salt, Spencer’s father had always been thin and wiry-strong; Spencer had always tended to fat. And in his decline, his father has lost weight and bulk. Even his hands have lost their muscle tone. Spencer imagines lifting him, carrying him fretful around the room, cradling him and cooing to him.
‘Here,’ his father says.
He holds out his left arm, where his gold watch hangs around his wrist. If his decline were to be measured in time then his watch would be its most reliable recorder. Except the record would not be in hours, but in the gold links of the bracelet. Every month, every few weeks, another link would need to be removed to accommodate its owner’s shrinking wrist.
‘Can you?’ Spencer’s father says, shaking his arm.
‘The watch? You want me to help you take it off?’
As he used to do when he was a child trying to concentrate, and maybe to offer his father a moment to return to his former tyrannical and entirely unhelpless state, Spencer’s tongue protrudes between his lips as he battles to unclasp the watch from his father, who fails to respond to the bait.
‘It’s heavy,’ Spencer says, weighing it in his hand.
‘Eighteen-carat. Patek Philippe. It’s yours.’
‘Oh. No. Thank you.’
‘You don’t want it?’
Of course Spencer doesn’t want it. The watch is an item of jewellery rather than a timepiece. It is clunky and gold and flashy, designed to suit a man who is flamboyantly sure of his sexuality or else deeply unsure. It corresponds to everything that Spencer’s mother and Spencer too, loyally but not unthinkingly, had ever rejected in his father’s attitude to life; and even if it accorded in any degree to Spencer’s sense of style, which is founded, of course, on the movies, French café types in black and white waiting for Jean Gabin to show or Michéle Morgan to sing, William Powell mixing a highball, Robert Mitchum in a lounge suit, pushed out of his laziness to prove his strength, again—even though the only model he has ever come close to exemplifying is Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider—he still wouldn’t want it.
Spencer doesn’t wear watches. He has a combative, rebellious attitude towards the very notion of time. But there is something soft, close to pleading in his father’s voice, which it would be rude, perhaps unloving, not to respond to.
‘All right. Yes. Thank you. It’s very…beautiful.’
Spencer, somewhat laboriously, fixes the watch to his own, much plumper wrist, which his father at least has the grace not to draw attention to. Spencer’s father disapproves of fat, just as he disapproves of ugliness. Both are markers of negative moral equity.
‘Have fun with it,’ his father says. ‘Now let’s get to work.’
He subsides in the armchair, resting his elbows and naked arms at the round table beneath the window, which offers a rejected view of a clear grey sky.
Jimmy Ludwig’s appetite for backgammon is insatiable. Spencer’s only respite is when his father’s questionable bladder demands frequent visits to the bathroom, which he makes totteringly, eschewing the cane, patting or grabbing at each hard surface he passes to help him on his way.
Spencer takes one of his father’s bathroom breaks as the opportunity to call his stepmother. It is only right, he supposes, to let her know where her husband is.
‘Hi, it’s Spencer,’ he unnecessarily says.
‘I’ll call you back. I’m waiting for the police. Your father. He still hasn’t returned from Dr Gribitz. Do you have any idea—’
‘He’s with me, still with me. He’s fine.
We’re fine.’
‘What?!’
‘We, uh, took a little drive.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Atlantic City.’ (And how he doubts the words will contain any of the blistered ironic romance they still have for him.)
‘What??!’
&n
bsp; ‘Atlantic City.’
‘Excuse me, Spencer. I heard you the first time. What the hell are you doing in Atlantic City?’
‘I think I told you. There’s a film festival here at which I’m a guest. They’re showing a retrospective of my films—’
‘Spencer. I do not, I am not…’
(New Yorkers clip their Ts so smartly, and he always experiences a little thrill, close to erotic, at the way New Yorkers pronounce words with two consecutive Ts in them, such as battle.)
‘We’re playing backgammon. He seems on very good form. I think the trip is good for him.’
‘What? Where is he?’
‘He’s in the bathroom right now. He’s fine.’
‘Do you know how long it’s been since he went anywhere?’
‘No. How long?’
‘That’s not really the point is it? How long.’
‘Well look. I just wanted to let you know. We’ll be back in a couple of days. I’ll deliver him safe and sound.’
‘Do you know what you’re doing, Spencer?’
(And he is reminded here of Rick Violet: his stepmother and Rick are the only people he knows who relentlessly use the name of the person they are talking to in conversation. His stepmother uses it as an attack weapon, Rick as an act of charm, but charm too is an aggressive act. He wonders if that is why he has an antipathy to each of them, and if so, which of them is the one who reminds him of the other. He has known his stepmother for longer, but it was only when he became friends with Rick that he realised just how much he disliked her.)
‘Yes. Of course. I—’
‘You’re killing him is what you’re doing.’
‘Well no. I don’t think so. We’re fine. Really. Look. I’ll get him to give you a call later after he gets out of the bathroom.’
‘Please. Please do not bother yourself on my account. You just get on with killing your father and tell me when the funeral is. And are you going to call the police now? Are you the one who’s going to tell them they’ve been wasting their time? Are you going to have to apologise?’
‘Look. I—’
‘And by the way, Spencer, where is my fucking toaster-oven?’ Spencer hangs up the phone, one beat ahead of his stepmother.
When his father returns from the bathroom, his face is beatific.
‘I had a shit,’ he proudly reports. ‘My first in a month.’
Spencer had hoped for comradeship, maybe even an exchange of secrets. He would tell his father his artistic manifesto, and maybe in the telling discover for himself what it is. And his father would tell him stories of his childhood and youth and War years, first loves, dangerous travels, the Captain’s griefs, and maybe, for once, tell him something about his first marriage, with Spencer’s mother, that isn’t designed to protect either Spencer’s opinions or his own. They clack their pieces around the board and Spencer tries to initiate the frank exchange, but his father isn’t having any of it.
‘Tell me about your first marriage,’ Spencer says, and his father pretends to hear this as an announcement by his son of an impending wedding.
‘When’s the happy day?’ he says.
‘Good question,’ Spencer says.
‘Make your mind up. You’re not getting any younger.’
‘Happy day,’ Spencer says.
‘I need a six and a one.’
When his father plays backgammon, his senses and concentration are attuned. He makes fewer aphasic mistakes with his language.
‘You must have been happy once. When you were first married. An adventure. There must have been some love there.’ ‘Your turn,’ his father says. ‘Let’s take a break,’ Spencer says.
They have been playing for a couple of hours and he is hungry and tired and bored. But his father is on a winning streak (exploiting Spencer’s hunger and tiredness and boredom) and never likes to quit when he is ahead.
‘You had enough?’ his father says, and Spencer is sufficiently competitive and ungenerous himself not to be able to relent.
They play on, until Spencer is dazed and irritable and seeing double. When he wins three boards on the trot, the final one by a gammon (Incredible! his father says, a less-used variant of Disgusting!), moving the score in his feverish favour to plus twenty-seven, which equates, at twenty-five cents a point, to a profit of $6.75, his father pushes peevishly at the table.
‘OK. Don’t play if your heart is not in it.’
Unkindly, Spencer says,
‘No, it’s OK, I’m getting my second wind now, we can play on.’
‘No. You’ve had enough. You’re tired. You’ve got a big day tomorrow.’
Spencer is touched that his father remembers that he has any kind of day coming up tomorrow. His tone is gruff but not unfatherly. And, on some level, which almost flatters Spencer, his father sees him as an aspect of himself, or at least finds a use for him as a way of declaring his own weakness without loss of face. Spencer relents.
‘Yes. You’re right. Jet lag. Maybe we should get something to eat. You hungry?’
His father purses his lips and shakes his head. His father never admits to such human weaknesses as hunger or tiredness or need.
‘Well keep me company at any rate. We could go downstairs to eat or order something in.’
‘Whichever you want. I’m not sleepy.’
On the third floor of the Horseshoe hotel-casino and resort are the conference rooms, where the festival is going to be. On the second floor are the bars and cafés and restaurants. Father and son sit at a round table in an Italian restaurant and Spencer looks at the few other occupied tables to see whether he can spot any other likely festival attendees, and his father looks at the menu as if he understands what he is seeing.
Spencer is pierced by guilt. This has been a most arduous day. His father customarily takes one walk a day into the hallway of the apartment, stands trying to be motionless by the elevator bank, while teetering and tottering because his body refuses to be still, conducting its treacheries and rebellions in the useless twitches of random nerve endings, the twists and gasps of dying muscle.
‘I don’t think we’re ready to order yet,’ Spencer says to the waiter who comes over to serve them.
‘I’ll have the…’ his father says.
The waiter waits, puzzled.
‘Cappuccino,’ his father says.
‘OK.’
‘And a salad.’
‘What sort of dressing would you like with that?’
‘Calamari,’ Spencer says.
‘OK. But I just need to know what dressing the gentleman would like with his salad.’
‘Calamari. He doesn’t want cappuccino.’
‘Oh. OK. And the dressing?’
‘What dressing do you want?’
His father has already shut his menu and is looking around for the ice that a busboy had been ordered to bring.
‘Dad? What dressing do you want on your salad?’
His father focuses on him.
‘Medium rare.’
‘He might want a steak.’
‘Yeah. Steak. Medium rare.’
‘OK. I have him for a cappuccino and calamari and salad and steak, medium rare. We’ll get on in a moment as to whether he would like T-bone, porterhouse, sirloin or filet, brisket, New York, minute or chump. But what dressing would he care for on the salad?’
And oh it goes on, as it has gone on with the busboy and the cocktail waitress and the maitre d’, as it will go on with everyone who demands something of Jimmy Ludwig, any stranger with a list of possibilities, anyone asking him to choose a noun that corresponds to an intimation of desire. His father expresses little desire because it is such a struggle to find words to signify any. Or his father experiences no desire and his vocabulary has etiolated accordingly, words dropping away from his control along with all the rest.
Spencer practises a funeral encomium at their casino restaurant table. At first he says it in his head but the silence has grown hateful. He had pushed his
father’s wheelchair past the International Buffet, which had been at least busy, obese diners in electric wheelchairs whizzing from table to counter from one cuisine to another, Italian, South-East Asian, Southern Fried, and skeletal diners sitting alone, so slowly lifting fork to mouth. And none of them looked like New Jersey or Albanian filmmakers, just gamblers down on their luck. Here, at Lucio’s, Spencer and his father are almost alone, their silence broken by the occasional clatter when the kitchen doors swing open, the clink of fresh ice brought by the busboy.
‘My father,’ Spencer says, ‘could not be described as having a genius for friendship. If ever he could be persuaded to visit somebody else’s house, it wouldn’t take long for him to look at his watch, make some kind of an attempt at a rueful smile, and say, Well, it’s been nice, and get up to leave…No. It’s probably bad to begin with a negative, isn’t it? Even though it might be in keeping. My father was the toughest and in some ways the smartest man I ever met.’
The subject of the speech, who had naughtily been allowed to leave the surgical collar in the room, has his chin tight to his chest, as he saws at the piece of meat that he has not permitted Spencer to cut up for him.
‘A lot of you here will already know some of my father’s history.’
Spencer looks around the restaurant as if he were surveying the mourners in a funeral chapel. But who would be here? His stepmother, of course, and Jacksie and his wife Ellie, and his other stepbrother, who performs shady transactions in poorer parts of the developing world. His stepmother’s cousin and her husband, if they were able to make the journey, because the latest word from them was that her cancer was getting worse and the quantities of steroid he was taking for his pulmonary condition were sending him amok, berserk. Maybe their daughter, Spencer’s step-cousin, if she was out of rehab again. His stepmother’s lawyer. His father’s accountant and his father’s broker. A representative from the building, either James the elevator operator or Philippe the doorman. Anybody else? He did not think he would take Mary to Papa Jimmy’s funeral. Who would he be orating to? He would be speaking his father’s life to air and to people who didn’t know whether to exult or grieve that they had outlasted Jimmy Ludwig.
‘My father was born in Warsaw in 1922. His family was middle-class in a sort of undistinguished way. Does this matter? Do your class origins matter? I suppose they do. How’s the steak? He was a rebellious boy, expelled, I think, from six different schools. When he was seventeen, the Germans occupied Poland. It was not a good time to be a Jew in Warsaw. It was going to get worse, unimaginably so, but all the same, if you could get out, it was wise to do so. So my father and a friend of his, who was called Benny, went east, to Biafystok, which was being occupied by the Soviets.’
A Film by Spencer Ludwig Page 8