A Film by Spencer Ludwig

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.’

‘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.

‘Spencer!’

‘Yes,’ he says to his stepmother. ‘Just one more call.’

He signs off to Cheryl Baumbach with an attempt at the sort of benevolent charm one might expect from a director whom festivals deem worthy of a retrospective and then he calls his daughter.

Mary is ten years old. She is air whereas he is earth, free where he is most trammelled. Her company delights and somewhat intimidates him. Her mother, to whom he was nearly married, is sensible, and worldly. The period when he was with her, when he had temporarily learned to clean the dishes the same day they were dirtied, to wash the basin after he shaved, to respond to a direct question with more than a grunt, had lifted Spencer in the opinion of his father, an unearned respect that he has not entirely squandered.

Mary has a cold and she is looking for something from him that will make her feel better. Mary has a direct relationship to the world that usually involves acquisition.

‘Daddy. Will you get me an iPod?’

‘No honey. I won’t get you an iPod.’

‘Why not? You’re in America. You’re in New York’

‘You’re ten years old. You don’t need an iPod.’

He does not need to listen to the list of her friends who own iPods, the Roses and Lilys and Poppys and all the others, who stand out, pink skinned, yellow haired, floral named, from the Shinequas and Taaliyahs and Chanels at her primary school (and who, presumably, do not own iPods or iTouches or iTastes). Unspoken but loudly declared in the list she reels off are all the indignities and unfairnesses of her life, and the precarious-ness of her loyalty to Spencer.

‘Spencer! Gribitz!’

‘Yes yes. I know. Look, honey. I have to go in a moment. I’m taking Papa Jimmy to his proctologist.’

She does not ask what a proctologist is, because Mary, like her mother, does not wish to appear unknowledgeable about any subject. But showing off his vocabulary of fancy medical terms will not protect him from his daughter’s needs or scorn.

His daughter does not have to stay loyal to him. There is another man in her world, whose name is Doug. Mary’s mother has demonstrated her preference for Doug over Spencer so why shouldn’t Mary feel the same way? She lives with him and Doug has money, so Doug can buy her an i-anything if only she would ask him—it is a tattered piece of loyalty that impels her to persist with Spencer anyway. And she has a headache. And her stomach hurts. She is off school and Mummy has said that she may not go to Grace’s party, which is unfair.

‘Not if you’re sick, honey,’ Spencer says, nobly resisting the opportunity to join forces with his daughter against her mother.

Spencer had tried to be a family man. He had done what he thought was his best at making a go of it, family Christmases, family holidays, but he had not convinced anyone of his sincerity, least of all himself.

Mary’s mother made more money than Spencer did and she saw the world rather as Spencer’s father did, a straightforward place where value was measurable by money, in which the person who owned the most things was the winner.