A Film by Spencer Ludwig

‘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 there 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.

‘That was Mary,’ he says.

His father is sulking now, looking glumly at the drying damp patch on his groin, fiddling with his surgical collar. ‘You shouldn’t take that off.’

His father ignores him, continues to pull at the Velcro fastening, and Spencer catches an unwelcome sympathy for how his stepmother must feel.

‘You should keep that on,’ Spencer says.

‘Should I?’

‘Yes. It’s for the best.’