A Film by Spencer Ludwig

by David Flusfeder

  ‘OK. Let’s go to work.’

  ‘The backgammon? I left it in the car.’

  His father purses his lips. His son has disappointed him, again.

  Spencer goes back to the car, retrieves the backgammon set and hesitates for a moment, because he has left the cellphones inside, clearly displayed on the shelf above the glove compartment, then hesitates for a second moment because he has parked the Cadillac, inexpertly, across two bays that are reserved for buses; but there are three stretch limousines parked there too, and a police car, New Jersey State Trooper, beside an Academy bus that announces cheerily that it is an Atlantic City Casino Special!

  ‘No,’ he says out loud, alarming the line of passengers descending from the bus, most of whom are old, most of whom look poor, all of whom snake away from him.

  A few still slumber in the rear seats, faces uncomfortable against the window. He says NO! again, louder this time. He will take this at least from his father, that this is his world and he shall do what he likes.

  His father is waiting impatiently in the centre of the eating area. Spencer wonders whether he would pick him out even if he didn’t know him. His father’s pastel-yellow short-sleeved shirt, white windcheater, beige chinos, the large nose and small eyes that can barely contain so much impatience and quiet fury; and Spencer’s burdened heart lifts with love and tenderness for the old man who used, once, to terrify him into tears and a sense of the difficulty, perhaps futility, of accomplishing anything meaningful in the world.

  ‘Well what do you want? They have burgers, pizzas and, uh, yogurt, by the looks of things.’

  His father shrugs. He’s not listening, and he doesn’t care. Even if President Cheesequake himself offered him a pickled cucumber dripping brine and a buttered bagel from the Warsaw streets circa 1939, Spencer’s father would not care. Food is a burden, forced upon him by his wife and now his son.

  ‘Let’s get to work,’ his father says, and opens up the backgammon set.

  ‘I’m going to have a burger. Do you want a burger?’

  ‘Whatever you like, I’m not tired,’ his father says.

  Spencer orders cheeseburgers for them both, medium rare, and cups of coffee. When the waitress returns with the coffees, his father, ungraciously, grabs his cup off her tray.

  ‘Where’s the…?’

  ‘That’s mine. Yours has got milk.’

  ‘That’ll put hairs on your chest,’ Spencer’s father says. ‘From the inside.’

  He holds out three pink packets of Sweet ‘n’ Lo, which has become an unspoken ritual between them. Spencer’s father has hardly any strength left in his hands. He is unable to tie his shoelaces or button up his shirts or behead the packets of sweetener he laces his coffee with. Spencer twists off the tops of the packets, and Spencer’s father nods, both in gratitude and as a kind of statement of the dry banal horror his life has become reduced to.

  As they wait for their food, they play backgammon. When their food arrives his father sulks, because he has just won two games in a row and resents the break in their sport.

  Spencer eats in a kind of voluptuous joy. He had not realised how hungry he was. His father eats more or less effectively. Spencer suspects that his father has no sense of smell and little sense of taste. Spencer’s father is accustomed to two meals; Spencer likes to eat at least three or four times a day. It never occurs to his father and it never has that anyone else might be feeling something different to him. You have no empathy, Spencer had once told his father. You remind me of your mother, Spencer’s father had said in reply, which was not a statement of approval.

  When he was a child and stayed with his father and stepmother, Spencer’s appetite was always being confounded. He spent the days either hungry or overstuffed from the monstrous dinners that Spencer’s stepmother provided. It never occurred to either adult that the child might be hungry, and Spencer had found it always difficult to express his desires in his father’s and stepmother’s world.

  ‘How is it?’

  His father makes a doleful face. It is the expression he uses when he is asked how he slept, when an elevator man asks him how he is feeling, when he deigns to look at his wife when she is talking.

  ‘You want to try some?’

  ‘No. No thank you. Here. Try some of mine.’

  The doleful face becomes brutal in its contempt. Spencer is grateful for the return of the waitress. Despite his protestations of hungerlessness, Spencer’s father consumes his cheeseburger, with only a few dots of mustard and ketchup on his trousers and shirt to show for it. He pushes away the plates, which Spencer is about to dispose of, but is deterred by his father opening up the backgammon set again. ‘Let’s get to work,’ his father says.

  The set is an old wooden one, bought at least thirty years before, when the smart thing among affluent co-dependent New York couples was to play backgammon. Mr and Mrs Jimmy Ludwig had followed the pursuits appropriate to their age and station and class. They had taken up, and soon abandoned, golf and then tennis. For two years they had season tickets at Madison Square Garden for New York Rangers ice hockey games. For six months, they became devotees of Transcendental Meditation. They had travelled, safari in South Africa, tours of South-East Asian Buddhist temples. But the only thing that had really taken with Spencer’s father was yachting. He loved piloting his boat, tinkering around in its engine room, the pre-attorney engineer at home in the oil and the machinery and the grease. When Spencer stayed with his father and stepmother during his desolate American childhood summers, he had sat on the boat, moored on the Long Island Sound, and watched his father and stepmother play backgammon on this board. It had been made by Gucci, the points were green and red triangles, and all the pieces had the Gucci symbol etched in gold, which now had faded. One of the pieces had been lost and been replaced by a smaller, unmarked disc from another set. One of Spencer’s few achievements in his father’s eyes was that he had supplanted his stepmother as the preferred opponent.

  After a while, Spencer forgets what kind of spectacle they must be offering. This would be a scene he would have in his movie, father and son, the schlump and the dying man, sitting at a Formica table with a backgammon board between them, bright lights, a black plastic condiment stand holding mustards and ketchup, another with sachets of sugar and Sweet ‘n’ Lo, a salt and pepper shaker, uncomprehending men in baseball caps at nearby tables, the looks of pity and fear that pass between them when they look at the old man with his oxygen tank. And the action, the click-clacking of dice rolling on the wooden board, the movement of the pieces, sliding and grazing and sometimes slamming down on their points.

  His father hates to lose, at anything, especially at backgammon against his son. Not only is he a bad loser, he is also a terrible winner. Spencer lets him take the first couple of after-lunch boards, and the glee with which his father watches Spencer write down the points he’s gained is unseemly. He complains when Spencer throws a double, but when Spencer draws attention to his father throwing two doubles in a row, his father gloats.

  ‘Ah, stop crying,’ his father says.

  And Spencer sets out to play as well as he can.

  ‘Incredible,’ his father says when Spencer makes a long-range hit on an exposed piece.

  ‘Disgusting,’ his father says when Spencer throws a double five to escape his home-board trap.

  When Jimmy Ludwig plays backgammon, he is in accord with a part of his brain that has been untouched by strokes and aphasia and death. He sees the position clearly, chooses the correct—and biggest—play instantly. If there is a choice between a dull safe move and a hit of one of Spencer’s pieces, then he will always make the hit, even if it leaves him exposed in his home board. And his language is untroubled. There is a kind of deliverance in the pursuit, except it is gruelling to be part of the nakedness of his father’s need to win. It is the only aspect of his life that, as far as Spencer is aware, still holds any pleasure for him, or urgency.

  And meanwhile Spencer is s
treaking along a run of luck. He even executes a Coup Classique. His father had borne off all but three of his pieces while Spencer kept one man back on the farthest-away point of his father’s home board while building a fortification on his own. Spencer has one chance to hit, and takes it. His father takes an age to return to the board and by the time he has done so, Spencer is about to win the game.

  Both Spencer and his father are grateful when the waitress returns to clear away the debris of their food. ‘Can I interest you gentlemen in some dessert?’ ‘Sure,’ his father says. ‘You having something?’ Spencer says. ‘Not for me. You go ahead. More tea.’ ‘He means coffee,’ Spencer says. ‘And the check.’ ‘You got it. And for you, sir?’

  His father reaches into his wallet for his American Express card, which he waves towards Spencer. ‘It’s OK, it’s on me,’ Spencer says.

  ‘Sir?’

  Spencer reckons that he has been called sir today more than he ever has been. He wonders where this will end. He feels obliged to order a dessert. Even though he will make unkind remarks about Spencer’s eating habits and weight, it gives his father a peculiar kind of pleasure, perhaps fatherly in nature, to sit impatient while his son consumes mounds of sweet stuff in public.

  Chapter Three

  Spencer’s stepmother has called them three times on his father’s cellphone and twice on Spencer’s. He has also missed calls from Mary and Michelle. He sees the list of calls missed when they return to the car.

  ‘Where are we going? Gribitz?’ Spencer’s father says.

  ‘No. Atlantic City.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Film festival. I told you. I’ve been invited. I’ll be giving an interview, and there’ll be some screenings—they seem to want to hold a retrospective of my work—and there’ll be a dinner, a gala dinner.’

  His father seems impressed, and maybe proud, which is rare.

  ‘Your plays?’

  ‘Yes. My films.’

  The Academy bus from the Cheesequake car park is ahead and Spencer accelerates to catch up and then settle in behind it. Despite the derision and contempt he will receive for driving so slowly, this is less nerve-racking than relying on his father’s sense of direction.

  His father’s cellphone rings again. Spencer reaches to answer it but Jimmy beats him to it. With a speed and a sureness that are admirable given his state and age, Spencer’s father grabs hold of the cellphone with his left hand and stabs his window open with his right and all of it in one fluidly jerky action throws the phone spiralling out of the car to the side of the road and stabs the window shut again and sits back, grimly triumphant.

  Spencer quickly takes hold of his own phone and slips it for safety into the breast pocket of his jacket. It beeps and vibrates busily against his chest.

  ‘Let me have a look of that.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Let me have a look.’

  Reluctantly, Spencer passes over his telephone. His father sneers at it while lowering the window. ‘Please. No,’ Spencer says. His father smiles. ‘I need that,’ Spencer says. ‘Work.’ ‘Keep your eyes on the road.’

  It is good advice; Spencer has been wavering the car out of its lane. He is almost touching the bus with its cargo of sleeping old women and small men in hats whose heads hardly reach the oval bus windows.

  His father’s aim is true. When he has restored the car to its lane, Spencer looks in the mirror to see his mobile telephone skittering, bouncing and breaking on the gravel behind them.

  There is no way back. Spencer is driving in the middle lane. There are cars behind and on either side. His telephone is irretrievable. They can only go further.

  After Cheesequake, nature. The Parkway cuts through townships, well-mannered white wooden houses, American flags fluttering in front of civic buildings. They drive past forests, where sturdy blond outdoor types hike along narrow creeks through the pine trees.

  ‘It’s a different ecosystem here,’ Spencer says. ‘Garden state.’

  But his father is sleeping, exhausted after his latest triumph. His mouth is open, lower lip trembling; he is lightly snoring.

  Spencer has to be careful not to do what he used to do, years ago, on American road trips with his father, before his father trusted him to drive better than he trusted himself. Spencer would gaze half hypnotised at the broken white lines in the middle of the road, the grey unbroken concrete slab of the median divide, and make shapes and faces and sleepily troubling meanings out of the blur.

  ‘Vertigo,’ Spencer says, ‘is much misunderstood. It’s not a fear of heights, it’s a desire to throw yourself off them.’

  A car horn hoots, he pulls the Cadillac back into lane and a fist waves at him through the window of a red pick-up truck that speeds past them on their left.

  His father sleeps on, undisturbed, untroubled, except for the inadequate volume of oxygen his hopeless diaphragm can draw into his thirsty lungs. Spencer wipes the sweat away from his brow and turns on the radio, keeping the sound down. He follows the Academy bus and listens to jazz on NPR.

  ‘This,’ says Spencer, looking at his sleeping father, thrilled and frightened at the starkness of the thought and at the audacity of speaking it out loud, ‘is a film to finish before you die.’

  Driving along the Parkway looking through the windscreen of the Cadillac derealises everything. The world is two-dimensional, nothing is quite alive. Spencer’s urge to twist the wheel is not just a rebellion against enforced orderliness, the tyranny of straight lines, or even the vertiginous thrill of yielding, of softness longing for hardness, the consummation of collision, it is also a desire to connect, to make human contact, even in the messiness of blood and broken flesh.

  Spencer did not do nature, he did people, and things. Not for him the speedy dissolves of clouds rolling over a huge blue sky. If he had a camera with him, he would have filmed the rest-stop restaurant scene in Cheesequake, the Coup Classique, his father’s face, the apartment day-bed/toaster-oven debates, his stepmother’s face, some shots of the road, the first elevated section of the New Jersey Turnpike, big ten-wheelers, the toll booth in the rain, he’d hire a policeman to slowly wave to them in the Lincoln Tunnel, he’d film the factories and pylons and smokestacks they pass by.

  And the footage would be linked and voice-overed by Spencer’s voice. He has narrated films before and he makes a fair enough job of it. His voice is low, considered, a little wheezy. It would get its premiere at the Navarra Film Festival or maybe Toronto, be bought by Channel 4 and PSB. And the whole thing would be utterly predictable. Pathos, poignancy, the Atlantic City School. He is glad not to have a camera with him.

  The work that he is proudest of—Robert W’s Last Walk, The Captain’s Grief-—is the work that the world has most disregarded. The novelties and fripperies—One Door Opens, Competition—are the ones that do best. There is a message here, but Spencer chooses not to hear it. He feels that in some way he is being rewarded, or punished, for his least important work. It could only be worse if the world paid him its greatest respect for the films he hasn’t even made.

  Spencer’s early ambition, still as unrealised as the world through a car windscreen, was to show pain. Film is good at showing actors’ vanity. Brando in the dust at Karl Malden’s boots. When Joan of Arc is tortured she shows ecstasy.

  His father is in pain even in sleep. Except it does not quite reveal itself in the little intermittent winces at the corners of his mouth; the irritated movements show themselves as irritation merely. So how does Spencer feel his father’s pain? It is an act of empathy that film surely must be capable of mediating.

  ‘It can’t be surface only,’ Spencer says. ‘Or maybe it is.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  His father snaps to wakefulness.

  ‘I was just thinking,’ Spencer says. ‘How you feeling? You hurting? I’ve often thought, or sometimes at any rate, that there must be some internal compensation to getting older. Is there?’

  ‘I don’t unders
tand what you’re saying.’

  A narrow stripe of white that looks like forgotten toothpaste is etched into the line that cuts his father’s face from the corner of his mouth to his chin.

  ‘When you get older, does the system adjust? Balance out somehow? I mean, is it like someone going blind? You know, suddenly their other senses get more acute? They can hear better than they ever could before? That sort of thing.’

  ‘I don’t get what you’re saying.’

  This might be answer in itself, but Spencer persists,

  ‘Maybe something internal, dream life or some such. Natural opiates. Autoeroticism. Happy memories of childhood. The body gets worse, the mind compensates.’

  ‘Is there anything good about getting old? Is that what you’re asking?’

  ‘Yes. That’s right.’

  ‘I don’t buy that. It’s all shit,’ Spencer’s father says. ‘Right. OK. But isn’t there anything? Anything at all that gets better?’

  ‘I’ll tell you. This is how it is,’ Spencer’s father says.

  He slams his right hand down on the glove compartment, maybe for emphasis, maybe because he doesn’t have any better control of his movements. With his index finger he traces a diagonal line up to the right.

  ‘Child,’ Spencer’s father says.

  The line then goes horizontal some way towards the passenger door.

  ‘This is…?’ Spencer’s father looks to him for the word.

  ‘Man’s estate.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Adult. Grown-up? Man.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The line then plummets down to another diagonal, but a much steeper one this time.

  ‘This is me,’ Spencer’s father says, jabbing at a low spot on the plummeting diagonal.

  ‘OK,’ Spencer says.

  His father then continues the line another half-inch, punctuating its end with a vicious jab. ‘And then it’s goodbye Charlie.’

  Spencer’s father sits back again with his arms crossed like a classroom child who has been provoked out of his sullenness to teach his teacher a lesson.