A Film by Spencer Ludwig Read online

  DAVID FLUSFEDER

  A Film by Spencer Ludwig

  FOURTH ESTATE • London

  For Grace

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Acknowledgement

  Also by David Flusfeder

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  Spencer Ludwig, film-maker, arrives at his father’s apartment somewhat out of sorts.

  He dawdles at the threshold. Blue carpet, brown walls, black door, he looks for something that will strengthen him against the inevitable onslaught of his father’s and stepmother’s world. If he had a camera with him, he would use it—extreme close-up: the carpet, his sneakers, the apartment door. Before pressing the bell he would whisper, and he does, Here goes.

  Spencer has become a frequent visitor to his father’s apartment. He has made this journey—tube from Stockwell to Heathrow, plane to JFK, subway to 50th Street—four times already this year, arriving, like this, encumbered by luggage and laptop, sticky and half dazed. His father, the idol and enemy of Spencer’s youth, is eighty-six years old and in failing health.

  ‘Here goes,’ he repeats.

  Voices are raised from inside the apartment, as they often are. Jimmy?! his stepmother yells, unanswered, maybe unanswerable.

  TALK TO ME! Spencer has dawdled long enough, but he lingers some more. Coming out of the subway station, sweating under the weight of his luggage on a cold spring day, he had walked past his father’s apartment building and the Museum of Modern Art and steeled himself with a double espresso and a half-hour of internet poker at a coffee shop on 6th Avenue. There he had sat squeezed at the window between an almost respectably dressed young man and a blonde woman of unearthly thinness. The young man occupied himself in expectorating and muttering. The woman pecked away at her laptop. Spencer tried to keep his attention upon his own laptop and avoid contact with the young man’s sounds or the bird woman’s words on her screen.

  HUNTER

  I guess that’s pretty lame.

  Hunter, he presumed, was a male character, based, as cruelly as her thin vengeful yearning could make him, on her most recent disappointing boyfriend.

  Spencer played poker. He clicked and bet and clicked and bet and folded and clicked and raised and reraised and clicked. He was late to see his father, and he wasn’t winning in this session, and its instrumental purpose became lost in the seedy relentlessness of the pursuit itself. Spencer, so tentative in most areas of his life, is ferocious in pursuit and defence of his work, ferocious in his love for his daughter, Mary, and ferocious, sometimes obsessional, in his playing of poker. Once, in Paris in autumn, during a film festival, he stayed all night in his hotel room, eschewing screenings and dinners and parties and meetings with distributors in favour of screen-staring, of clicking and betting and clicking.

  A lucky river when he was foolishly chasing a draw against a competent opponent who was extracting the maximum from his top two pairs won Spencer $225. Before he lost the little he had left in his online account, and became too offended by the swirling clutches of mucus and saliva from the young gentleman on his right and the dismal work of the woman on his left

  HUNTER

  I know. I’m sorry. But I do love

  you, you know. That cute thing

  you do with your mouth, I just

  want to kiss it.

  he put his laptop in its case and hoisted his load and went to his father’s apartment.

  Here goes. And it is all going full throttle in there, geriatric rage, the hatefulness of old people who have terminally disappointed each other. Spencer’s father is sitting at the table in the corner of the living room working on a jigsaw puzzle, dwarfed by the skyscrapers through the high glass windows that arouse a giddy vertigo in Spencer. His wife is stumping and ranting around the apartment, and Spencer’s stepbrother, Jacksie, is walking after his mother, trying to appease while giving her further fuel to go on.

  Jacksie is in his late fifties, but apart from some issues with his prostate and a spreading of the gut, he wouldn’t seem much more than forty or so. He dresses as he has always done, as a sporty suburban child, in shorts and sweatshirt, and the only alarming things about his appearance are the perpetual hurt look in his eyes and the blizzardy whiteness of his teeth. Jacksie lives in California, which is where his teeth are from.

  ‘I want a toaster-oven,’ Spencer’s stepmother says, spitting out the words as if the world is denying her a basic human right, which she will avenge even if governments should fall and stars be extinguished.

  ‘You’ll get your toaster-oven,’ Jacksie says.

  ‘Well where is it?!’ his mother says.

  ‘Hey Spencer, what’s up?’ Jacksie says.

  ‘Hello Jacksie.’

  ‘Look Pop! Look who’s here! You know who this is?’

  Jacksie treats Spencer’s father as if he is an imbecile, which Jimmy Ludwig can hardly ever be bothered any more to resent.

  Spencer’s father has a very nice smile. Sometimes it is even sincere, as it seems to be now, as he gets up from the table and walks over, stooped and frail, to greet his son. Spencer pulls away the trailing oxygen tube that has become wrapped around his left ankle, and they hug. Before Spencer receives his inevitable insult from his father about his appearance, he reflects that an ease that was entirely absent from their relationship is now present. They used to make each other physically uncomfortable. Spencer tries to remember when he stopped fearing his father.

  Jimmy Ludwig used to be an attorney, specialising in corporate law, patents disputes, the breaking of international contracts. He came over to the US with his English wife after having spent an uncomfortable few years as a Polish immigrant in London after the War. He worked as an engineer in a factory while attending law classes at City College. Sometimes he joked that his first wife was cheaper than language classes.

  After he became successful he developed a taste for Italian suits, the dapper effect spoiled only a little by the trousers always being cinched and belted to one side, his propensity to collect food stains on his shirt and tie. He carried on working until seven years ago, when he suffered a stroke that deprived him of some of his powers of expression and comprehension. In the past year, his body has started to disintegrate. Now he sits in a room and is rude to his wife and solves jigsaw puzzles and watches boxing on TV in between visits to doctors who give him sampler packs of speculative medications and tell him they can do nothing for him.

  Neither he nor his second wife is capable of looking after themselves or each other. Despite Spencer’s history with his father, he has found himself, for motivations he doesn’t quite understand, being a dutiful and attentive son.

  When Spencer is in New York, he ferries his father to doctors’ appointments and plays backgammon against him, remorseless competition for twenty-five cents a point, with breaks for meals, when Spencer’s father either quarrels with Spencer’s stepmother or eats in a morose efficient silence, while Spencer makes occasional attempts to heal his father’s marriage, and he is always relieved when the week is over.

  ‘Still best-dressed man,’ Spencer’s father says.

  Spencer dresses badly out of a sort of principled vanity. Believing that a gentleman should either be a dandy or a schlump, he wears a uniform of black sneakers and baggy black jeans and loose fitting black T-shirts
with a faded image or logo on them.

  ‘How are you doing?’ Spencer says.

  ‘I’m doing shit,’ Spencer’s father says. ‘Good to see you.’

  ‘And you.’

  Spencer’s stepmother takes a moment to greet Spencer. He wonders, ever since he was a child he has wondered, why she always manages to leave lipstick smears on her front top teeth. He would have thought that she would have noticed this by now or that her husband would have pointed it out, but Spencer’s father no longer talks to his wife.

  ‘I fell over. Do you want to see the bruise?’ she says to Spencer.

  Spencer, without meaning to, takes a step back in recoil.

  ‘Uh. No. It’s OK,’ he says.

  ‘There are some things a stepson shouldn’t see!’ Jacksie yells. His voice is always full-volume, as if he is accustomed to dealing with the nearly deaf.

  ‘We’re going to Gribitz,’ Spencer’s father says.

  Spencer’s father has problems with his lungs, his blood pressure, the nerve endings of his hands and feet, he is in constant pain from stenosis of the spine; but he is most concerned about his inability to empty his bowels.

  ‘Pop’s got a lot of issues with his BMs,’ Jacksie says.

  Jacksie always calls Spencer’s father Pop, even though he had his own father once and, apart from one excursion to Kennedy Airport when Jacksie was young, there has never been any aspect of their relationship that could be described as father-son.

  ‘Charlie,’ says Spencer’s father.

  Charlie is his default name for any man. When Spencer was young, his father would sometimes consent to tell his son bedtime stories set in the War. There were three characters, Steve, Mike and their leader, Charlie. Charlie was the daring one, who would, with ingenuity and audacity, deliver the pals from evil and imminent death. Spencer had initially projected himself as Charlie but then accepted that he was as yet unworthy of the role and decided instead that it was his father’s name for himself.

  ‘I’ve got something to show you that you’re going to love,’ Jacksie says. ‘Sit down. Make yourselves comfortable.’

  Spencer angles his father’s chair to face the television set and sits beside him. Waiting for their appreciation is a DVD of Jacksie’s home in southern California. Jacksie, after some struggles to comprehend the workings of the remote control which Spencer longs to tear out of his hand, manages to solve the problem of how to press the play button.

  Jacksie sits on a smaller chair that is closer to the television.

  ‘This is my home,’ he says. ‘A friend of mine did this. I think you’ll find it’s very good.’

  On the screen, Jacksie and his wife Ellie wave at the camera from a terrace. There are vines in large urns beside them. A verdant hillside behind them is dotted with similar houses, Spanish colonial style, white stucco walls, terracotta roofs.

  ‘On a clear day you can see all the way to Catalina,’ Jacksie says.

  He sits forward avidly watching as if he were seeing it for the very first time.

  ‘What do you think of the camerawork?’ Jacksie asks. ‘I think it’s execrable,’ Spencer says. ‘Yeah, it’s good isn’t it?’

  Spencer’s father has fallen asleep. Spencer surreptitiously photographs him with the camera on his mobile phone. There are new messages on it, from his daughter, which he wants to respond to, and from his producer, whom he is seeking to avoid.

  ‘Hey! Spence! I hope you’re paying attention!’

  ‘Yes. Oh. Sorry.’

  Spencer returns his attention to the screen. An urn of grapes, a dying spaniel, a shot of Jacksie and Ellie on their veranda accompanied by a dreary plinkety-plonk of a faux jazz soundtrack.

  ‘Jerry, who filmed this, composed the music himself,’ Jacksie says.

  ‘Yes, well, I suppose he might have,’ Spencer says.

  When the thing is finally over, Spencer feels compelled to say something nice.

  ‘Well, your house is very beautiful,’ he says.

  ‘It certainly is!’ Jacksie says. ‘My little piece of Eden. I bet you really want to visit us now.’

  ‘I do. Seeing this makes me want to see it in person.’

  ‘It would have exactly the same effect on me,’ Jacksie says.

  And back in stumps Jacksie’s mother, Spencer’s stepmother, Spencer’s father’s second wife. When Spencer first met her, thirty-five years before, she was a tanned suburban beauty. He was six years old, she affected to adore him. Now her skin is heavily lined, her eyes are bitter and narrow, her limbs and back are bent and crooked, and her scalp can be seen through the sprayed dyed helmet of her hair, which she has tended to once a week at the ironically named beauty parlour. She is seventy-four, twelve years younger than her husband. They have been married for thirty-four years, far longer than either were with their first spouses.

  ‘I think we need a day bed,’ she says.

  ‘OK,’ Jacksie says.

  ‘We’re going to need help here. I can’t ask someone to sleep on the sofa. Don’t you think so, Spencer?’ ‘Yes. I suppose so.’

  ‘Jimmy!’ she yells, waking up her husband. ‘I’m talking about the day bed!’

  Jimmy Ludwig slowly opens his eyes. He fixes a look of uttter pained hopelessness on to his wife that comes close to breaking his son’s heart, shakes his head, which produces a corresponding wince of pain, and stands up to inspect his jigsaw puzzle with his chin pressed uncomfortably to his chest.

  ‘Where’s your collar? Jimmy! I said, Where’s your collar?’

  He does not risk a movement of the head this time. He lifts a jigsaw piece, which might be an azure tip of one of the flowers in a pot beside four ginger kittens, and inspects it by rolling his eyes up so he can just about see it from the painful angle that his vision is forced to examine the world from.

  ‘Dad,’ Spencer says. ‘You should probably put on your collar.’

  Spencer retrieves his father’s neck brace from beneath the magazine rack, where it had fallen, or been discarded, on to a pile of his father’s completed jigsaw puzzles.

  Spencer’s father accepts the collar, a wide strip of yellow foam bandaged by a strip of white cloth that has become a little grubby through frequent use. He wraps it around his damaged neck, a strip of Velcro seals it shut, and his chin is supported, and lifted a little. He makes another little grunt, which might be of protest, or acceptance—although that is unlikely—but the noise is partly lost in the constant low rumble and hiss of his oxygen machine.

  Spencer’s father’s first name was originally Izio. (His last name was originally Lewissohn, but that was discarded a couple of generations before he was born.) When he arrived in London he thought it advisable to have an English-sounding name, as if that would somehow obscure his utter foreign-ness. He attempted to call himself Tim, because that was the name of a colonel he had served under whose manners had impressed him. Meeting his future first wife at a Polish ex-servicemen’s dance in Clapton, he tried out his adopted name. In his thick accent, the word came out sounding more like Jim, which was what she called him. He was too embarrassed, for both of them, to correct her, and so he was, as it were, christened.

  ‘I want to have the day bed over there,’ Spencer’s stepmother says.

  ‘That’s where Pop sits,’ Jacksie says.

  ‘Don’t you think I need a day bed?’

  ‘I’m not saying you don’t. That’s not the issue,’ Jacksie says.

  ‘Tell me then. What is the issue?’

  Jacksie seldom stands up to his mother, so his effort now is quite impressive. Nonetheless, he looks to Spencer for support, and lifts his hands, as if to protect his face.

  ‘Don’t you think,’ Spencer says, ‘that you could have the day bed, without disruption? Maybe you could put it over there, against that wall.’

  ‘I don’t want it against that wall. I want it here.’

  ‘But. That’s where my father sits,’ Spencer says. ‘That’s where his chair is.’

&nb
sp; ‘The chair can move!’

  ‘Maybe,’ Jacksie says, emboldened by having an ally, by he and his stepbrother outnumbering, if not outvoicing, his mother, ‘maybe Pop doesn’t want the chair to move.’

  Spencer’s stepmother explodes in self-pity and rage.

  ‘You know what I don’t like around here?! No one cares about me. No one asks me how I am! The toaster-oven has been broken for three days!’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mom. We’ll get you a new toaster-oven,’ Jacksie says.

  ‘All we’re saying,’ Spencer says, ‘is that you can have a day bed and my father doesn’t have to move his chair. There’s enough room here for both.’

  His stepmother ignores him, turns her spite on to her son.

  ‘And let me tell you something. You want to hear something? I don’t care any more. I don’t want a fucking toaster-oven.’

  And with that, she stumps off again, before stumping back in again to remind Spencer that his father has an appointment with Dr Gribitz in just under an hour.

  ‘Mom?’ Jacksie says.

  ‘Don’t fucking Mom me,’ Spencer’s stepmother says, and stumps back towards the bedroom on her crooked legs. (The soul writes itself on the body.)

  ‘Do you mind if I use the phone?’ Spencer says.

  ‘Of course I do!’ his father says in an attempt at humour.

  ‘Be quick,’ his stepmother says, poking her head around the bedroom door. ‘You’re taking Dad to Gribitz.’

  His first call is to Cheryl Baumbach at the Short Beach Film Festival.

  ‘I’m here in New York,’ Spencer says. ‘That’s great. That’s terrific.’

  ‘Coming down tomorrow, I hope. I just wanted to check that you had received my DVDs’. ‘I’m sure we have.’

  ‘Particularly Robert W’s Last Walk. For the retrospective.’ ‘For the…?’

  ‘You said you wanted to screen all my films.’

  ‘Well we do. Of course we do. We’re very excited.’

  She does not sound excited. She sounds absent, almost uninterested, and Spencer’s stepmother returns to fuss and flurry around them and Spencer’s father continues to ignore her.