A Film by Spencer Ludwig

His father dutifully refastens his collar and looks so grateful for the attention that Spencer’s heart is pierced. And he is so confused by this feeling that he answers his telephone without looking to check the identity of the caller.

‘Spencer!’

‘Oh. Right. Hi Michelle.’

‘Spencer!’

‘Hi.’

‘Where have you been hiding yourself?’ ‘Not hiding. I’m in the States.’ ‘Oh. Your father. How is he?’

Michelle’s voice drops. She is attentive and kind and wise, alert always to nuances of emotion and need, and Spencer has come to hate his dependency upon her. He owes her money. She will have a job that she thinks he ought to take, and not because she is looking for repayment, but because she approves of the project and she hopes, she has always hoped, that it will bring out the best in him. Michelle has been unyielding in her support for Spencer over the years. Spencer and Michelle co-produce his films. This is because he is prone to making the self-damaging, heartfelt decision. He gets things wrong. He finds it hard to take many people seriously, particularly money men, and he hates indulging others while being patronised by them. Michelle does these things for him.

He knows he is an unrewarding colleague. He takes things as his due, without consideration. She has other people she works with, other, better, jobs that she will be prepared to sacrifice to further his work. The understanding among their friends is that she is unspokenly in love with him, but neither Spencer nor Michelle believe this to be true. If he is actually ever to make it, the Film by Spencer Ludwig, then he will have to be free to make it, which means he will have to be free of all obligation. Michelle will have to be paid off before they can work together again. Spencer has decided that if his life is to go in any manageable way then he has to sunder all links of dependency.

His father is sulking again. He defiantly removes his surgical collar and places it in his lap.

‘Look. Michelle. I’m driving right now. I’ll call you as soon as I can.’

‘Please do. I’ve got some great news for you. Don’t you want to hear it? Maybe it’s what you need. You sound quite down.’ ‘It had better wait. I’m sorry.’

His father is now looking at his own cellphone, which his wife has insisted he carry with him at all times. He seldom switches it on, because his wife will always be calling him on it. But he switches it on now and Spencer can see that there are seven unanswered calls, all from what might be bitterly called home.

‘I’ll call you as soon as I can. Sorry Michelle.’

He switches the phone off and tosses it on to the dashboard.

‘Sorry,’ he says to his father. ‘That was my producer.’

His father grunts, and tosses his own phone to join Spencer’s.

They are driving along the West Side now, parallel to the Hudson. Across the river is New Jersey, where Spencer was born, and which he was delighted to escape. He could turn around now, deliver his father back to his world, but he is not going to do that.

What is this for? It is for Spencer’s father. Living in a world without pleasure or curiosity or joy is no life at all. Spencer’s father spends his crepuscular time between doctors’ appointments solving jigsaw puzzles. In the corner of the living room that his wife had wanted to exile him from is where he was accustomed to read the newspaper in the morning and where now he is accustomed to sit with the newspaper in the morning and mimic his former habits and pursuits. His short-term memory was damaged by the stroke. By the time he has begun the second paragraph of a news item, his fractured memory has lost anything of what was in the first.

‘We’re going to Atlantic City. We shall have fun,’ Spencer says.

Spencer imagines walks along the ocean, soft exchanges of secrets in plush congenial bars, rich widows and Russian heiresses decorously offering their attentions, as father and son light up Cuban cigars. But Spencer’s father gave up smoking when he was fifty. He used to smoke three or four packs a day, light the next cigarette from the embers of the previous one, or start another when the current cigarette was still alight in the ashtray. To sit on his father’s lap was a desired pleasure but not painless. Spencer learnt early it was best to dress for the occasion; to dress as an American child, in shorts and short-sleeved shirts, was asking for trouble, the burning ash dropping from his father’s mouth and hand on to his unprotected skin.

A last hurrah, the desperados make one final ride-out. Or maybe this is the first of many, one long trip, the first chapter from New York to Atlantic City, and then farther, Route 66, through the desert, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, down to Mexico, Spencer and his father on the road, and no matter how jeopardising this might be for his health, it must be good to feel the air on his face—Spencer insists, on this subject he is intractable, unbullyable, that they have the windows down rather than use the Cadillac’s air conditioning—the experience of speed in itself is a good thing.

Spencer’s father needs his son to make this happen. He takes a solidity in the presence of his son, it is some kind of connection to a world that goes on living, a world that he once was a significant part of.

And what does Spencer want from this? Can he still take a solidifying comfort in the substance of his father?

As they drive through lower Manhattan, Spencer is gratified to see there are more homeless people on the streets than there used to be. If his father is going to die he wants, vengefully, to see systems crumble.

‘How much?’ his father says.

‘How much what?’

The Lincoln Tunnel was always Spencer’s less-preferred. He loves the Holland Tunnel best, the sheer length of it, the railed platform along the side where policemen used to stand and slowly wave back to Spencer, helpless and besotted in the back seat. He felt ridiculous waving to policemen, even when he was eight or nine years old and taking trips with his father and stepmother, but he couldn’t help himself, there was an unavoidable exhilaration about it.

‘Your…judgement.’

His father knows he has said the wrong word and retreats into an abashed tunnel-darkened silence. Spencer’s policy on matters of this kind is to push him, so his father won’t settle into an accustomed lonely space behind walls of ununderstood language.

‘My, what?’

‘Judgement. I want to…’

In the darkness of the tunnel, his father, still expert in matters such as these, retrieves his wallet from the back pocket of his chinos, picks out from behind his Medicare and AARP cards the loose cheque that he keeps for emergencies.

‘Pay?’ ‘Right.’

‘There’s toll booths on the Turnpike, but I’ve got cash. They don’t take cheques.’

‘No. Your…’ His father makes a forlorn effort of concentration, shakes his head. ‘It’s pathetic,’ he says.

They are into New Jersey now, dipping up out of the tunnel into the glare of a less glamorous light. The road takes one regretful curve towards and then away from the Manhattan skyline and they are in the state where Spencer was born, forty-odd years ago, where he had learned to speak with an American accent at kindergarten and first grade, because otherwise he would stick out more than he already did, his sensitive ways, his take on the world, his incapacity for roughhousing with older, more athletic boys, and with an English accent at home, because his mother disapproved of all aspects of America.

Spencer’s notional best friend when he was six wanted to become a policeman, because policemen carry guns. A few months ago, trying to explain to his daughter who he was or at least who he had been and what he might have been in danger of becoming, he had told her about his early years in New Jersey and Mary had insisted on looking up the name of his notional best friend on Google. Raymond Auch still lived in Berkeley Heights. He had not become a policeman. He was a senior vice-president in his father’s real estate firm and had married well, into a blue-blood family from Philadelphia. Mary had found the wedding announcement on the New York Times site. Spencer always told people that if he had stayed in New Jersey he would probably have become a junkie or a lawyer or both.

His mother disapproved of chewing gum and television, instant coffee, big cars, what the country had allowed her husband to be, who he insisted on becoming. In the cold rigour of mealtimes, the three of them sat uncomfortably together, each not being able quite to comprehend how this was his or her world, where nothing, to any of them, ever seemed entirely familiar.

Spencer as a child—he made up for it subsequently—ate very slowly, to his father’s irritation and disapproval. His mother, in sympathetic complicity, would give smaller and smaller portions each time, which he would halve with his knife, and when he had laboured to consume the first half, he would halve the remainder again, and so on, in an infinite progression.

But this is not meant to be a memory drive.

‘No, go on. What are you trying to say?’ Spencer says.

‘It’s pathetic,’ his father repeats.

‘My judgement?’

‘Not judgement. Journey.’

His father settles back, looking first pleased with himself and then angry that selecting and finding the right word to express his thought should be such a source of pride.

‘Journey? You mean my plane ticket?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You don’t have to do that. I’m not asking you for the money.’ ‘I know you’re not.’

Which is why, probably, he is prepared to give it. Spencer had learned, not long after leaving New Jersey, that any money he accepted from his father was a lever of power he was voluntarily submitting himself to. He had made it a policy after that never to ask for money from his father and seldom to accept it when it was offered.

‘It was six hundred dollars. Approximately.’ His father now looks for a pen.