A Film by Spencer Ludwig Read online

‘Right! RIGHT!’

  ‘OK. You win.’

  And Spencer twists the wheel with more assurance and speed than he can usually summon up and possess, and blisters the El Dorado across two lanes to the left, barely missing the front of a taxicab and just shaving the rear bumper of a truck.

  ‘That’s more like it,’ his father says, sitting back in his seat and looking at his son with an expression that Spencer can’t register because he is too nervously looking straight ahead.

  Tomorrow will be a fuller day, with appointments at the urologist, the pulmonarist and the optometrist. But already today his father has been poked, prodded, X-rayed, sono-grammed and MRIed. Now they are driving south down Park Avenue, and the day has been horrible and uncomfortable for them both and Spencer does not want it to end like this.

  ‘You hungry?’ Spencer asks.

  ‘Not really,’ his father says.

  ‘Maybe we should stop there?’ he says, pointing over to the Hooters sign. ‘Get a burger, a milk shake, and stare at the waitresses’…you know…’

  He is bashful with his father, always has been. The two of them had never found an adequate way of being with each other. What had begun as physical unease had spread to an emotional discomfort and even, in some sort of way, a moral one.

  ‘What, you know?’ his father asks, and Spencer doesn’t know if he is being teased or toyed with or just being asked a question that is simple and direct.

  ‘They have, you know…’

  And he gestures with his cupped right hand, lifting air in front of his chest and winking in a most uncomfortable way. ‘Keep your hands on the wheel,’ his father says. ‘Breasts, big breasts,’ he says.

  His father laughs. It is nearly soundless apart from the wheezing for air and a little mucus sliding up and down his nose. Spencer wonders if it is he who is being laughed at or the idea of the two of them sitting in a restaurant staffed by young women with big breasts or, just for a moment, the indignity of his own condition and age.

  Stuck in traffic, Spencer’s father has been slumbering. Abruptly, he comes to.

  ‘Oh shit. I forgot to go to the men’s room.’

  And Jimmy Ludwig in the passenger seat looks shamefully down at the wet patch spreading on his groin.

  The turn to 53rd Street is ahead, a bus waits for a herd of tourists to finish crossing the road, and it is all preordained, to drop his father off outside his building, the near-silent comedy (grunts and panting for a soundtrack) of the doorman helping his father and his burdens out of his seat, and the car dropped off at the garage, the return into the apartment where some zones are freezing and others tropical hot, because Jimmy Ludwig and his wife have a very different sensitivity to temperature, and to sit, and wait, and wilt. Anything, especially the unknown, would be better than this. Spencer does not take the turn to 53rd Street.

  ‘What are you doing?’ his father says.

  ‘I thought maybe we’d go on an excursion.’

  ‘Terrific,’ his father says. ‘What a terrific idea.’

  If this were an independent film, Spencer considers, they would not be allowed to return to the apartment and sit in the dimness of his father’s decline, chilled by the storm of his stepmother’s neuroses. He keeps on driving, south along Park Avenue.

  ‘Where are we going?’ his father asks. ‘I don’t know. Maybe we should visit the town where I was born.’

  ‘Why would we want to do that?’ his father says, and, closing his eyes, drifts away to a place that is accessible to none but the very sick.

  ‘You always were a cold-hearted bastard,’ the son says to the father. His father is sitting in the passenger seat, mouth agape, oxygen fitting trailing out of one nostril, eyes closed, snoring with his laboured breath. Spencer realises, to his shame, that he would not have dared say this unless he knew his father was asleep.

  ‘Fuck you too,’ Jimmy Ludwig says, not bothering to open his eyes.

  Spencer goes into the right lane on Park Avenue, takes the turn on to 42nd Street. If this were an independent film, the sort that juries on competitions favour (and even Spencer’s own difficult slow movements of anguish and observation have been rewarded with prizes), then it would turn into a road movie, father and son driving down an American highway with the sound of the radio and his father’s oxygen tank for company.

  ‘Ninety-Six Tears,’ says Spencer. ‘Mexicali Baby.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I was thinking about the soundtrack.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘For this. Us. If this were an independent movie, I’d have 1960s garage punk and maybe some classical. Schubert. Late Beethoven quartets. The Stooges. Rio Rockers. That’s what I’d have. Maybe some blues. Blind Willie Johnson. And Dylan. But he probably charges too much. Basement Tapes.’

  His father stares at him. He shakes his head slowly.

  His father used to say to him, When they made you they threw away the mould. Which Spencer in his naivety had at first thought of as an announcement of respect, a recognition of his particularness. But then he realised that it was just a customary fatherly rejection of anything or anyone he failed to understand.

  ‘Watch out. She’s got her eye on you.’

  They have a police car for company. The very male cop is scrutinising them for signs of illegality. Ever since his stroke, Spencer’s father has designated most men as she. His braindamaged mistakes with pronouns make him sound like an elderly, cantankerous homosexual.

  ‘It’s cool,’ Spencer says, but realises that he’s sweating. He takes this as an effect of his father’s scrutiny rather than the cop’s. Or it might be a symptom of his own ill health. He resolves that when he gets back to London he will improve his diet and his body. Take walks and bicycle rides. Maybe even join a gym and face the self-ridicule of working out. Sit sweating healthy sweat on a rowing machine watching share prices tumble on a TV set.

  ‘How do you like them apples?’ Spencer says. He tries to remember some of his father’s other catchphrases. When his father was in his difficult, combative prime, he had accumulated a small batch of phrases that he would recite at moments he thought were appropriate in order to demonstrate his unimpeachable ordinary Americanness.

  ‘You’ll be the only boy in the girls’ school,’ Spencer says. ‘Piss or get off the pot. That’ll put hair on your chest…from the inside!’

  ‘When they made you…’ his father starts to say.

  And Spencer nods in his sentimentality, hoping his father will get to some former coherency even if it is an entirely fatuous one.

  But his father doesn’t reach it—the sentence dribbles away into the awkward vacuum where most of his conversation resides.

  The patrol car that had been beside them speeds away, looking for more dangerous company.

  ‘What’s your favourite music?’ Spencer says.

  ‘Absolutely,’ his father says, which is his customary remark when he is not sure what is required of him in a conversation.

  ‘Your favourite songs,’ Spencer persists. ‘Or artists. Singers. You liked Frank Sinatra didn’t you?’

  ‘Sure,’ his father expansively says.

  ‘We could get some Sinatra on the soundtrack, but it might be a bit cutesy-cutesy. On the nose, if you know what I mean. It might also cost a lot.’

  ‘Dime a dozen.’

  Spencer tries the radio. He finds jazz on NPR, which gives a nice atmospheric soundtrack to their drive, but his father reaches down irritably to fidget and fumble with the radio buttons, so Spencer switches it off again.

  ‘When are we seeing Gribitz?’ Spencer’s father says. ‘I haven’t been able to shit for a week.’

  ‘We saw him. We saw him today,’ Spencer reminds him.

  ‘Who?’ Spencer’s father says.

  His father had been a strong man, the smartest and toughest man Spencer had ever known. He feels the loss of his own vitality and cohesion more painfully even than Spencer does, more than anyone except, probably, h
is wife, whom he now rejects because she condemns him for his weakness. It is painful to be in his company now, diminished, incoherent, uncohesive. It is as if pieces of him have been allowed to drift in different directions, untethered. Spencer feels an enormous rush of pity and shame, which is abruptly halted when Spencer’s father asks him,

  ‘How’s your friend doing? The flower guy.’

  Spencer despises and envies his more successful contemporaries and friends. He has kept true to an ethos derived from high modernism and trash pop and has no time for anything that smacks of sentimentality or storytelling. Films are art and they are garbage and he disparages anything that aims for the in-between. He has seen the cleverest animator of his acquaintance, who had made beautiful suprematist miniatures that rigorously separated themselves from reference and representation, make a fortune from TV commercials and, ultimately, Hollywood. Others had become hacks, others had given up on the form and, or (or both), on themselves. Spencer had stuck to it. We admire your bravery, his friends tell him. Spencer had long ago realised that when people say brave they usually mean stupid.

  ‘Who’s the flower guy?’ Spencer asks, when he knows perfectly well who his father means.

  ‘You know. Nick. Dick. The one with all the write-ups in the Times.’

  ‘Nick? I can’t think of who you mean.’ ‘Ah. Forget about it.’

  ‘The point about the movies,’ Spencer says, ‘is that what everyone wants is an idea that can be summed up in one line, or less. The pioneer was Twins. People still talk about that with reverence. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito are twins! You’ve got the idea, you’ve got the stars, you’ve got the poster, it’s all there, in one dumb-stupid sentence.’

  ‘Schwarzenegger, yeah. She’s good.’

  ‘I happen to think,’ Spencer says, with a pomposity that sounds awful to his own ears, ‘that if a film can be summed up in one sentence then there really isn’t much point to making it. Why bother?’

  The lies that movie cameras tell, that the field of vision is as exclusive as the shape of a frame, that no one feels pain, that everything is surface, that things can make sense.

  ‘What’s the point of making a film if it’s not going to change the world?’ Spencer says.

  ‘Maybe because people enjoy it?’

  Sometimes, still, his father can summon up a difficult acuity. Spencer responds by being merciful.

  ‘Rick Violet. That’s who you’re asking about.’ ‘That’s right. You still not talking?’

  The last time that Spencer and Rick Violet had fallen out was when they were each surprisingly featured in a newspaper’s end-of-year round-up opining as to the five best films of the year. Spencer was seldom asked to do this kind of thing; Rick seldom agreed to it. Rick was not featured on Spencer’s list, which he had tried to compile scrupulously, and then lost the list he was making and forgot the spellings of the directors’ names and had to improvise on the phone to a subeditor.

  Rick’s choices had been shrewdly advised. The reason that Spencer took offence was that his own most recent film was on the list, and its selection could have been made because Rick’s shrewd adviser wanted something that could qualify as an obscure gem that hardly anyone would have heard of, or Rick himself had included it as an act of patronising generosity, and Spencer couldn’t decide which was more odious.

  ‘No. Well yeah, we’re sort of friends again.’

  Shamefully, a week before his departure from London, he had called Rick Violet. Spencer had been running bad online, his Visa card was just above its maximum, and there was enough money left in his overdraft to pay either his rent or buy flights and rent a New York hotel room for three days. The Short Beach Film Festival would offer him hospitality in Atlantic City but was not able to pay for him to get there. They assured him that he would understand. The only four people in the world who would give him the money he needed were the last people he would want to ask—his father, his producer, his almost ex-wife, and Rick Violet.

  Just to test the water, he told himself, when in truth it was to toy with humiliation and shame, to taunt himself with his own feelings of inadequacy and dependence, he called up Rick, because he was the one he liked the least of the four. An assistant answered the phone, as an assistant always did. Rick’s assistants were invariably women, invariably beautiful, invariably in love with Rick. The only variety was the identity of the assistant; over the past few years, Spencer had never seen or spoken to the same woman twice. He left a message that he’d called, and a few hours later Rick was on the line.

  ‘I’m having a little party. It would be great if you could come,’ Spencer had said.

  ‘Birthday?’

  ‘No, just a party. No particular occasion. You know, drinks, people, maybe show some movies. It’s safe, I won’t be showing any of mine.’

  ‘Hey. Compadre. I love your movies. You know I’m your number-one fan.’

  This wasn’t entirely false. Complacent in the knowledge that he was fabulously successful and Spencer a hardly-heard-of purist, Rick could indulge and patronise and, it was true, appreciate Spencer’s work, which made it all the more galling.

  ‘Yes, well, likewise,’ Spencer said. ‘It would be nice if you could make it.’

  ‘That’s so sweet of you. I’ll be there.’

  It was a safe invitation. There was no chance that Rick would attend a party of Spencer’s, even if he were actually hosting one.

  The conversation would move, as Spencer knew it was destined to, on to Rick’s casually worn glory. First, though, as if interested, Rick asked Spencer how things were in his world.

  ‘Oh. You know. A little rough. Trying to raise some money.’

  ‘You know you can count on me for contributions. You know that.’

  ‘I know that, Rick. I know.’

  One of the subsidiary agonies of talking to Rick was the effect it had on Spencer’s speech patterns. He adopted the bogus style of dialogue of a character in one of Rick’s own awful films, reiterating vaguely significant phrases, calling Rick repeatedly by his name.

  This was it now, when he might ask, state a figure that Rick would enjoy rounding up to the nearest five thousand. He could hear in the silence of the telephone Rick’s offer of charity waiting—well, not exactly silence, a hubbub of activity, people talking on telephones, carrying things, the industrial whirl of Rick’s success.

  ‘Tell me, how’s it all going with you, Rick?’

  And here it would come, the litany of triumphs, the different projects on the go, most of it glossed over as if it was annoying, Spencer would understand, as few people could, the pain of the incidental, when all Rick wanted, all he ever wanted, was to make movies. And then, in the midst of this, one clunking moment—just when Spencer would be feeling that maybe he was too hard on Rick, that Abbie and all the others could be right, that Rick was a nice guy, who had talent, so why begrudge him any of his luck?—he would drop into the conversation something so tactlessly self-regarding that at least one positive effect of their conversation would be that Spencer would be supported in his resentments and spites.

  ‘It’s good, it’s good.’ Rick had been saying something about a recent triumph in a festival that Spencer had never been invited to, but was now segueing into a topic that he expected Spencer to be familiar with. ‘But you’ve probably been following all this, I shouldn’t bore you with it again.’

  ‘Well I’ve been busy. I’m off to a festival shortly myself.’

  ‘Cannes? I’m getting kind of tired of that. But I guess I’ll probably see you there. You in competition? Or Un Certain Regard?’

  Rick’s French accent was casually, affectedly poor, with just a few glimpses of its available perfection. ‘Uh, no. Not Cannes. America.’

  ‘Oh, Ann Arbor. I love that festival. A lot of people don’t get how cool it is.’

  ‘Um. No. East Coast.’

  ‘Well that’s great, Spence. Terrific. I didn’t even know there was a festival going on ther
e right now. But that commercial of yours must have opened up a lot of doors.’

  ‘What commercial?’

  ‘Yeah yeah. Heh. Right. Anyway. I was saying. You must have heard about the Oscar shenanigans.’

  ‘No, Rick. I don’t think I have.’

  ‘Really? There’s been coverage in the dailies and the trade of course.’

  ‘Never buy them.’

  ‘Well who would unless they had to, Spence?’ (This was another habit of Rick’s, to establish some kind of intimacy with whoever he was talking to by settling upon some unpleasant diminutive of their name.) ‘Word up. I hear you. But online?’

  ‘Nope.’ (He didn’t know why he was making such a point of this, except as a futile attempt to deny Rick something he wanted.)

  ‘You mean you never Google me?’

  This was said in naked, startled disbelief.

  ‘Never have, Rick, never have,’ Spencer said, but of course he has, he does it a lot; the last time, the evening before, he had learned that Rick had recently been made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Artes et des Lettres, which had irked Spencer beyond speech and postponed this telephone call by a day.

  After he had managed to end the conversation without asking for any money, Spencer transferred his remaining funds into his DiamondPoker account and played for four and a half hours, in which time he successfully channelled his sickly fury to quadruple his starting stake, and had enough cash to pay both his rent and his New York expenses.

  Spencer’s mobile telephone rings, to his father’s irritation. Jimmy Ludwig does not like competition or rivalry for attention. It is Mary, who is sobbing.

  ‘Daddy. Daddy,’ she says.

  ‘Hey honey.’

  ‘Daddy, I’m sorry I said you were rubbish. You’re not rubbish. You’re nice and pretty and I love you. I didn’t mean it.’ ‘It’s OK, I know you didn’t mean it.’ ‘Did you?’

  She marvels at this.

  ‘How could you?’ she asks. ‘I didn’t know that.’ ‘Look. I better go. I’m driving.’ ‘I love you Daddy.’

  These are beautiful words, and just as he counts on Mary eventually to forgive him all his derelictions and failures, so too he will forgive her anything so long as she remembers to speak this sentence.