Читать книгу A Film by Spencer Ludwig - David Flusfeder, David Flusfeder - Страница 6

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.

‘I thought maybe we’d go on an excursion.’

‘Terrific,’ his father says. ‘What a terrific idea.’

If this were an independent film, Spencer considers, they would not be allowed to return to the apartment and sit in the dimness of his father’s decline, chilled by the storm of his stepmother’s neuroses. He keeps on driving, south along Park Avenue.

‘Where are we going?’ his father asks. ‘I don’t know. Maybe we should visit the town where I was born.’

‘Why would we want to do that?’ his father says, and, closing his eyes, drifts away to a place that is accessible to none but the very sick.

‘You always were a cold-hearted bastard,’ the son says to the father. His father is sitting in the passenger seat, mouth agape, oxygen fitting trailing out of one nostril, eyes closed, snoring with his laboured breath. Spencer realises, to his shame, that he would not have dared say this unless he knew his father was asleep.

‘Fuck you too,’ Jimmy Ludwig says, not bothering to open his eyes.

Spencer goes into the right lane on Park Avenue, takes the turn on to 42nd Street. If this were an independent film, the sort that juries on competitions favour (and even Spencer’s own difficult slow movements of anguish and observation have been rewarded with prizes), then it would turn into a road movie, father and son driving down an American highway with the sound of the radio and his father’s oxygen tank for company.

‘Ninety-Six Tears,’ says Spencer. ‘Mexicali Baby.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I was thinking about the soundtrack.’

‘What?’

‘For this. Us. If this were an independent movie, I’d have 1960s garage punk and maybe some classical. Schubert. Late Beethoven quartets. The Stooges. Rio Rockers. That’s what I’d have. Maybe some blues. Blind Willie Johnson. And Dylan. But he probably charges too much. Basement Tapes.’

His father stares at him. He shakes his head slowly.

His father used to say to him, When they made you they threw away the mould. Which Spencer in his naivety had at first thought of as an announcement of respect, a recognition of his particularness. But then he realised that it was just a customary fatherly rejection of anything or anyone he failed to understand.

‘Watch out. She’s got her eye on you.’

They have a police car for company. The very male cop is scrutinising them for signs of illegality. Ever since his stroke, Spencer’s father has designated most men as she. His braindamaged mistakes with pronouns make him sound like an elderly, cantankerous homosexual.

‘It’s cool,’ Spencer says, but realises that he’s sweating. He takes this as an effect of his father’s scrutiny rather than the cop’s. Or it might be a symptom of his own ill health. He resolves that when he gets back to London he will improve his diet and his body. Take walks and bicycle rides. Maybe even join a gym and face the self-ridicule of working out. Sit sweating healthy sweat on a rowing machine watching share prices tumble on a TV set.

‘How do you like them apples?’ Spencer says. He tries to remember some of his father’s other catchphrases. When his father was in his difficult, combative prime, he had accumulated a small batch of phrases that he would recite at moments he thought were appropriate in order to demonstrate his unimpeachable ordinary Americanness.

‘You’ll be the only boy in the girls’ school,’ Spencer says. ‘Piss or get off the pot. That’ll put hair on your chest…from the inside!’

‘When they made you…’ his father starts to say.

And Spencer nods in his sentimentality, hoping his father will get to some former coherency even if it is an entirely fatuous one.

But his father doesn’t reach it—the sentence dribbles away into the awkward vacuum where most of his conversation resides.

The patrol car that had been beside them speeds away, looking for more dangerous company.

‘What’s your favourite music?’ Spencer says.

‘Absolutely,’ his father says, which is his customary remark when he is not sure what is required of him in a conversation.

‘Your favourite songs,’ Spencer persists. ‘Or artists. Singers. You liked Frank Sinatra didn’t you?’

‘Sure,’ his father expansively says.

‘We could get some Sinatra on the soundtrack, but it might be a bit cutesy-cutesy. On the nose, if you know what I mean. It might also cost a lot.’

‘Dime a dozen.’

Spencer tries the radio. He finds jazz on NPR, which gives a nice atmospheric soundtrack to their drive, but his father reaches down irritably to fidget and fumble with the radio buttons, so Spencer switches it off again.

‘When are we seeing Gribitz?’ Spencer’s father says. ‘I haven’t been able to shit for a week.’

‘We saw him. We saw him today,’ Spencer reminds him.

‘Who?’ Spencer’s father says.

His father had been a strong man, the smartest and toughest man Spencer had ever known. He feels the loss of his own vitality and cohesion more painfully even than Spencer does, more than anyone except, probably, his wife, whom he now rejects because she condemns him for his weakness. It is painful to be in his company now, diminished, incoherent, uncohesive. It is as if pieces of him have been allowed to drift in different directions, untethered. Spencer feels an enormous rush of pity and shame, which is abruptly halted when Spencer’s father asks him,

‘How’s your friend doing? The flower guy.’

Spencer despises and envies his more successful contemporaries and friends. He has kept true to an ethos derived from high modernism and trash pop and has no time for anything that smacks of sentimentality or storytelling. Films are art and they are garbage and he disparages anything that aims for the in-between. He has seen the cleverest animator of his acquaintance, who had made beautiful suprematist miniatures that rigorously separated themselves from reference and representation, make a fortune from TV commercials and, ultimately, Hollywood. Others had become hacks, others had given up on the form and, or (or both), on themselves. Spencer had stuck to it. We admire your bravery, his friends tell him. Spencer had long ago realised that when people say brave they usually mean stupid.

‘Who’s the flower guy?’ Spencer asks, when he knows perfectly well who his father means.

‘You know. Nick. Dick. The one with all the write-ups in the Times.’

‘Nick? I can’t think of who you mean.’ ‘Ah. Forget about it.’

‘The point about the movies,’ Spencer says, ‘is that what everyone wants is an idea that can be summed up in one line, or less. The pioneer was Twins. People still talk about that with reverence. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito are twins! You’ve got the idea, you’ve got the stars, you’ve got the poster, it’s all there, in one dumb-stupid sentence.’

‘Schwarzenegger, yeah. She’s good.’

‘I happen to think,’ Spencer says, with a pomposity that sounds awful to his own ears, ‘that if a film can be summed up in one sentence then there really isn’t much point to making it. Why bother?’

The lies that movie cameras tell, that the field of vision is as exclusive as the shape of a frame, that no one feels pain, that everything is surface, that things can make sense.

‘What’s the point of making a film if it’s not going to change the world?’ Spencer says.

‘Maybe because people enjoy it?’

Sometimes, still, his father can summon up a difficult acuity. Spencer responds by being merciful.

‘Rick Violet. That’s who you’re asking about.’ ‘That’s right. You still not talking?’

The last time that Spencer and Rick Violet had fallen out was when they were each surprisingly featured in a newspaper’s end-of-year round-up opining as to the five best films of the year. Spencer was seldom asked to do this kind of thing; Rick seldom agreed to it. Rick was not featured on Spencer’s list, which he had tried to compile scrupulously, and then lost the list he was making and forgot the spellings of the directors’ names and had to improvise on the phone to a subeditor.

Rick’s choices had been shrewdly advised. The reason that Spencer took offence was that his own most recent film was on the list, and its selection could have been made because Rick’s shrewd adviser wanted something that could qualify as an obscure gem that hardly anyone would have heard of, or Rick himself had included it as an act of patronising generosity, and Spencer couldn’t decide which was more odious.

‘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.’

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.

‘Why don’t you wait until we stop somewhere. We’ll need to stop somewhere for lunch and gasoline.’ ‘I want a…a…’

‘Pen?’

His father spreads his arms out wide in his ignominy, touching the window with his right hand, the gear stick with his left.

Pylons surround their road. Spencer manages to drive one-handed and take a photograph of a line of them. Spencer finds pylons magnificent.

‘There’s one in the glove compartment,’ Spencer says, and he returns his phone to its perch above the dashboard and reaches over to wave towards the glove compartment.

Rather ingeniously, Spencer’s father uses the glove compartment door as a writing desk. He concentrates hard on forming the words, puffing out his cheeks as he carefully writes, before signing it with a flourish. He examines what he has made and hands the cheque over to Spencer, who has to struggle to take it while passing a truck that has lumbered on to the road from a strip of low-slung no-tell motels. (Air-Conditioning In Every Room! Free HBO! Daily And Weekly Rates. Mirrored Rooms Available!)

Spencer interprets his father’s assiduousness in trying to pay his son’s expenses as a way to expressing who might still be in charge, and also, maybe, if he offers to pay this then he won’t have to pay more.

‘Thank you,’ Spencer says.

‘You’re welcome,’ his father says.

If he were to make this journey into a film, Spencer would resist the too-obvious irony of the self-professed Garden State being a jumble of pylons and factory chimneys and desperate stunted occasional trees trying to make their leafless lives between iron bridges and car parks. Instead he might chart the journey in its road signs, exits to Jersey City, the Holland Tunnel, Bayonne, Newark Airport, Elizabeth, Elizabeth Seaport, the Verazzano Bridge. Improbably and unpersuasively, a billboard, half hidden behind a gas tower, tries to inform them that they are in The Embroidery Capital Of The World! He doesn’t see any signs for Atlantic City, which worries him.

‘What was the scenery like when you were growing up?’

‘What’s that?’

‘The countryside. When you were a boy?’ ‘In Poland? It was beautiful.’

His father sometimes permits himself to become sentimental about his childhood. It is a tactic that Spencer allows himself on occasion, to question his father about his youth in Warsaw. While his father’s memory has grown unreliable about recent events, it is sure on the distant past. And sometimes he will talk about the taste of pickles in brine when he and his friend Benny broke into the cucumber factory at night, or the fresh buttered bagels you could buy on the innocently pre-War street—or not so innocent: his father could also tell stories about the gangs of Polish youths who roamed the streets, whose ideal recreation was to find Jews to beat up. His father, this wasting-away man, who was fastidious with his Italian suits and restaurant cutlery (even if every suit of clothes wore a reminder of the meal he had just eaten), who had made himself at home in law courts and yacht clubs, had taken to carrying a bicycle chain wherever he went. On at least one occasion he had used it, slashing iron across the face of a teenaged Pole, whose cap he had taken away as a souvenir. One victory among many defeats, he had told Spencer.

‘Did you go to the water ever?’

‘Sure,’ his father says. ‘The lakes. In summer.’

‘All of you?’

‘Me, my brother and my mother. And some cousins. We rented a house on the water.’

‘Not your father?’

‘He was working.’

A tradition that Spencer’s father’s father had probably inherited from his own father—pack off the family to the lakes for the summer, while he stayed in the city to swelter and work and pursue whatever recreations grass-widowed men find to occupy themselves. Spencer’s father had followed the same tradition—in the time that Spencer had lived with both his parents, all his holidays were taken with his mother, flying back to England to join the company of her married, unchilded, older sister in dusty guest houses on the South Coast, Hastings, Bournemouth, Weston-super-Mare. And Spencer followed it too: he had never understood the notion of a family holiday; even in the happiest times with Mary and her mother, he had always resisted summers in Walberswick and Tuscany.

Exit 11 offers them the Amboys, Shore Point and the Garden State Parkway, North and South.

‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, that’s where he lived, Perth Amboy,’ Spencer says.

‘Left!’ says his father.

‘You remember? Danny Kaye was in it.’

‘Left! Left!’ wails his father.

‘You used to like Danny Kaye. You remember him?’ ‘For crying out loud!’

And his father grinds his dentures and reaches to grab for the wheel, and Spencer accepts the situation is an urgent one.

‘Oh. I get it. The Parkway? Which direction?’

‘North, sure. Why not? The same way we came,’ his father says, gaining articulacy through derision.

Spencer twists the wheel to the right, a triumph of bravado and fear, forces the Cadillac across the bows of an aged Toyota pick-up, and steers-veers the car into the exit lane.

He quietens his heart as he pays the toll to get on to the Garden State Parkway.

‘I need a leak,’ his father says.

All the rest stops, or at least the two that Spencer misses, timid again at the wheel of his father’s car, unwilling or unable to force a way through the traffic to get to the exit lane, are named for US presidents. He drives past, to his father’s woe, the Jefferson rest stop and then the Reagan.

‘I need a fucking leak! Why are you so dawdle?!’

Spencer eases the car into the slow lane, hunkers over the wheel; he is not going to miss the next exit.

Pulling, finally, into the car park of the pleasingly named Cheesequake Service Area rest stop, Spencer has hardly brought the car to a halt when his father has opened the passenger door and is already setting off for the journey across the tarmac past pick-up trucks and sedans, dragging his oxygen cylinder behind him. Spencer hurriedly secures the car and catches up with his father, who is walking at an impressive pace, arms behind his back, his right hand clutching his withered left wrist, his head down, chin to chest, his eyes glancing up from time to time to check on his direction. Spencer takes hold of the cylinder, opens the door to the rest stop.

‘Do you think there was a President Cheesequake? I don’t remember him.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Just trying to take your mind off your bladder.’

His father moves faster and shakes him off at the men’s-room door. Spencer hooks the oxygen cylinder over his father’s arm and waits for him in the corridor outside.

He looks at the cheque for the first time. The figure matches the correctly spelled words, which doesn’t always happen in the accounting system of his father’s decline. Except: his father has made the amount out for six thousand dollars instead of six hundred.

‘It’s too much,’ he says, showing the cheque to his father upon his unsteady return from the men’s room.

Spencer tries to return the cheque but his father waves it away. He rests for a moment, to gather strength, on the plastic saddle of a mechanical horse that would cost fifty cents to gently rock a child into amusement, before he dourly gets on with the business of wavering towards the café area.

‘Very generous, thank you,’ Spencer says.

He quickly folds the cheque away, as if there were something shameful about it, into the breast pocket of his jacket. Maybe he will keep it as a souvenir, the ironic symbol of the near-possibility of parental help.

Jimmy Ludwig ignores the woman who offers to steer him towards a table. He finds one himself, lowers himself bumpily into a chair and rests his arms expectantly on the Formica tabletop.

‘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.