A Film by Spencer Ludwig

‘It’s on two,’ Spencer says. And Spencer checks the volume on the spare oxygen tank and puts it in the tote-bag along with his father’s cap and scarf and his stepmother’s discarded sections of the New York Times.

‘Have you called for the car?’ Spencer’s stepmother says and Spencer says that he has and tells his father, We’re all set.

‘ Take the cane,’ Spencer’s stepmother says, and Spencer nods and finds the cane in its place under the hall table, which has mail ready to be sent secured under the base of a carved wooden Buddha, a souvenir from a trip to South-East Asia made in the days before she got sick.

‘Don’t forget the toaster-oven,’ Spencer’s stepmother says.

‘Where’s the affidavit?’ Spencer’s father says.

‘What’s he saying?’ Spencer’s stepmother says. ‘What affidavit?’

And Spencer is familiar enough with his father’s mind to know that he is referring to something non-legal that he has decided is integral to their outing. One of the symptoms of his aphasia is that he tends to substitute a word that he was accustomed to use for work for something that he requires in the present.

‘What?’ says Spencer. ‘Your pills? You’ve taken them.’

His father irritably shakes his head.

‘ The affidavit,’ he says, and shakes his right hand in a loosely held fist.

‘What’s he saying?’ Spencer’s stepmother says. ‘Why is he doing that? That tremor is new. Do you think we should take him back to the neurologist?’

By we Spencer’s stepmother means you. She cannot bear to be alone with her husband any more.

‘I think I get it. You mean the backgammon?’ Spencer says.

His father nods, no less irritably.

‘That’s what I said, the affidavit.’

Spencer adds the backgammon set to the tote-bag and their preparations are complete. His father consents to take the cane in his left hand. Spencer’s stepmother stumps along with them for their journey to the elevator, which is precarious because Spencer’s father just follows his own erratic path, making no allowances for the tube that connects his nose to the oxygen cylinder that Spencer is carrying. Spencer, with the tote-bag over his right shoulder, the cylinder over his left (and both hands poised to catch his father should he fall), has to twist and skip to keep the oxygen tube straight. The elevator operator is a kind man who has grown old inside his brown uniform. The badge he wears on the breast pocket of his jacket announces just his first name.

‘How are you doing today, Mister Ludwig? Mister Ludwig.’

It is only recently that Spencer has been honoured by being greeted formally by the doormen and elevator operators of his father’s building. In former times his appearance had been too disreputable, his manner too odd by Museum Tower standards, to merit more than a nod, a request every time he stepped into the elevator for his floor number, even though he had been visiting his father and stepmother here for close to twenty years. But the group mind of the building’s staff had promoted Spencer in the aftermath of his father’s stroke and his display of dutiful care to the rank of someone to whom it was appropriate to show respect.

Spencer’s father stumbles into the elevator, and relievedly allows himself to fall against its rear wall with his hands behind him in case he needs to push off again.

‘Thank you James.’

‘You’re welcome, Mister Ludwig.’

Spencer’s father waits in the lobby of his building with his oxygen tank and the supplies for their journey while Spencer walks the half-block to the garage where Spencer’s father keeps his car. He holds the dollar bill that his father has given him to tip the car-jockey with and which Spencer obscurely resents.

He has tried to persuade his father to sell the car. It costs money to maintain and garage. He hardly uses it, indeed he shouldn’t use it at all because of his medical conditions, and when his son comes to visit him, he is the one to drive it, a black Cadillac El Dorado that had been new six years before, but now is battered and dented from his father’s geriatric adventures in city traffic. Despite his attempts to persuade his father to surrender the car, Spencer likes driving it. It is a much better car than the one he has in London.

Chapter Two (#ulink_415a28f5-81e6-5daa-b410-095a927124de)

When he was young, and visiting his father in New York, his father would be there to meet him at the airport, pacing in the Arrivals lounge in impatience and anticipation and perhaps even pleasure at seeing his son, who would materialise holding a stewardess’s hand, blinking in mother-chosen clothes that were creased and hateful to him from seven hours on a transatlantic flight, or, a few years later, slouching through, his late-teenaged self, dressing to be the person he hoped to become, in jeans and a ripped leather jacket—and his father’s mood, whether it was born out of nervousness or love, would show itself in a suddenness that felt like aggression. In the car from the airport, questions would be hurled by Jimmy Ludwig at his son, How’s school? How’s your social life? How’s your mother? What scores did you get on your tests? When are you going to decide what you’re going to do with your life? Guess what? Guess what? I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count, which were all the more alarming as he seemed to be giving the better part of his attention to the road, twisting his car at high speed within the traffic, yelling, Move it Charlie! to anyone who held up his progress.

His father’s Americanness had manifested itself early in an aptitude for hard work, a disregard for anyone who didn’t have the smarts or the stamina to get on in life, and tastes for chewing gum and television and cars. His father’s decline, or, rather, his father’s announcement of his consciousness of his decline, had shown itself for the first time a few years ago, on what had been supposedly an ordinary visit of Spencer’s into his father’s world, when they were setting off for a downtown restaurant and he passed his keys to Spencer and sat down, uncomplaining and humble, in the passenger seat.

Ever since then, Spencer has always been the designated driver of his father’s car, an accession to power that is not without constraint or perpetual accountability.

Driving through midtown Manhattan after the appointment with Dr Gribitz, Spencer has been telling his father about the Short Beach Film Festival, because an obscure part of himself that he would like to disown is still hungry for his father’s approval.

‘Take a right,’ his father says, gesturing impatiently at the limousine that is hogging the lane in front of them. ‘OK.’

Spencer indicates and shifts into the right lane, though the traffic there is even less mobile, because of the bus a block ahead, which is struggling to manoeuvre past some roadworks.

‘Right! I said right!’

And his father angrily lifts away the oxygen tube to wipe some of the spit that has collected on his chin. ‘I am going right!’

‘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.