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 understand 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.
‘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.
‘So there’s no compensation? There’s nothing good?’
‘Shit. All shit,’ Spencer’s father says.
When Spencer was seventeen, he dropped out of school. He travelled around England, hitching lifts, staying with benevolent strangers and drinkers who befriended him in pubs and the families of people who knew people he knew in London. He spent his cash on fried breakfasts, beer and a haircut, and when he ran out of money he returned home. This was 1984. When Spencer’s father was seventeen, it was 1939, the Germans were occupying Warsaw, and he left his city for the Soviet Union.
‘Who was that guy who used to come around sometimes when we lived in New Jersey?’
‘What guy?’
Spencer has a memory of a cheerfully mournful man sitting in the living room of their house in Berkeley Heights, nattily dressed, legs swinging because his father’s armchair was a little too high for most visitors, looking tired and wretched behind his smile.
‘A guy. You used to know him from the army or the camps or maybe back in Warsaw. He used to visit you a few times.’ ‘Visit me? Where?’
‘In New Jersey. He was always very well dressed.’ ‘Oh yes! Zig Pianko.’
Spencer’s father’s pleasure is in his ability to recall the name rather than any emotion that the name or the memory of Zig Pianko evokes.
‘He used to visit us. In New Jersey,’ Spencer’s father says.
‘That’s right,’ Spencer says.
‘He would sit there and I would sit there and we had not a thing to say to each other. It was heartbreaking.’ ‘Where did you know him from? From the War?’
‘Yeah. The War.’
The difficulty of choosing an actor to play Spencer’s father—film shoots drag on, extremities of cold and boredom, what actors are really paid for is to sit around doing nothing without making a fuss about it, which is not conducive to the well-being of the impatient and the frail; even the most generous insurance company might baulk at Spencer’s father being hired to play himself—but the greatest difficulty would be to find someone who could do justice to his voice. Spencer’s father’s voice is a beautiful thing. It occupies a resonant low register, lower than Spencer’s, and even though Spencer’s father can’t sing (and seems to take pleasure in the fact that his son is equally ill fitted for music and sports, as if Spencer’s incapacities somehow validate his own), his speaking voice is baritone-musical, a joy for child Spencer to listen to on those rare occasions in his childhood when his father could be persuaded to tell his stories of Charlie and his two friends conducting their dangerous missions in wartime.
But it is Jimmy Ludwig’s accent that makes his voice so special. Max von Sydow could possibly do it, or maybe Armin Mueller-Stahl. In Jimmy Ludwig’s voice is a memory and a scar of every place he has ever lived. He thinks he speaks like an American, because when he moved from the Old World to the New, he believed, and continues to believe, that America is a place without class, where any foreigner can prove himself with diligence, where the holder of a US passport and a good credit rating is an American gentleman as fine as any with an Ivy League degree and money earned by a long-dead family member whose grubbiness has been smoothed away by time and a Boston accent, but to anyone’s ear he speaks like a Polish-Russian-English-American. Here is pre-War Warsaw, there Siberia 1941, here’s a trace of Italy 1944, here London 1946-51, and the Yankee overlay, his pronunciation of buoy as boo-ee and route as rowt, hides nothing.
‘I knew him from then,’ his father says.
Spencer supposes that the Poles don’t have a th sound, because his father uses a t or a d. I knew him from den, or Dat’s terrific! Or ‘t ting is…Incredible! In the gaps within the words, lost worlds appear. Spencer has a memory of his mother teasing his father in the living room of Berkeley Heights (one of those rare weekend occasions when his father wasn’t working, or asleep on the sofa, or busying himself with illicit rendezvous—and who could blame him? He had been in Siberia, where he could not raise an erection to buy himself some extra food). In her almost impeccable English accent she was trying once again to teach him to perform the dental fricative: Rest your tongue between your teeth and blow gently out around it…Go on, you do it, say, The teeth, and his father said T’e teet and blew little bubbles of saliva around his words, which infant Spencer thought was sort of magical, because he was not above making those kinds of sounds and oral expulsions himself.
Zig Pianko gave up on making approaches to Spencer’s father. His father had no time for the past. Spencer’s father, if pressed about the past, would complain about the lack of love he received from his parents. It’s incredible! I never had a birt’day party! Spencer felt as if he were being blamed for it.
In a film of his father’s life, maybe his father could play himself. Dress him in baggy trousers and school cap, put a bicycle chain in his hand and discreetly film from afar on a dangerous Warsaw street.
‘Have you ever acted?’
After his father has been made to understand the question, he looks at Spencer as if he has been asked if he has recently been caught masturbating in public or knowingly bought a German product.
‘How do you represent the past?’
The movie Atlantic City, which Spencer, ever the literalist, had watched before leaving London, is from a far-past time. In the opening scene, Susan Sarandon switches on a cassette player. In the second scene, there is a piece of business with a public payphone. People smoke in bars.
Tootie-Frootie ice cream and craps don’t mix.
When Burt Lancaster tells Susan Sarandon that he watches her, window into window, adjoining apartments across the way, as she performs her post-oyster bar depiscinising routine of rubbing herself with lemon juice and perfume, she takes a moment to consider. And her response? She loosens her shirt and comes towards him. This is the sort of moment in films that Spencer despises.
When his father can be persuaded to turn his attentions away from the symptoms of his decline, they move into irritation at their slow progress behind the Academy bus and rest on his disappointments at his son. He doesn’t say it, even a man so immune to tact as Jimmy Ludwig doesn’t say it, but the question is there: I survived my youthful ordeals, my family died, for this? This is the summit of our civilisation? This is our culmination and consummation?
To his father’s credit, he does not consider himself a special case. He is not ashamed to have survived, he never sought out the company of others with any kinds of similar experiences. He did not want to reminisce with Zig Pianko. He does not consider himself noble or heroic to be alive. He just wishes his son, in his status as the Last Man, were more worthy of the role.
‘When are you going to get a job?’
‘I have a job.’
Spencer can hear a whine in his voice, which he detests. His father is eighty-six years old, he is nearly forty-two, and Jimmy Ludwig still has the capacity to turn him into a child whose throat raws with self-pity as he tries to prove himself to his father.
‘Your plays.’
‘Yes. My films.’
On the occasions that Spencer’s films have been shown in New York, his father has politely sat through screenings, at the Film Forum, the Kitchen, once at Lincoln Center, twice at the cinema that used to be in the basement of Carnegie Hall. His wife, Spencer’s stepmother, used to come to them too, at the beginning, and she had attended the first of these events dressed according to her idea of a costume appropriate for a movie premiere, jewellery and furs. Neither of them has ever come to an after-screening party, for which Spencer is not ungrateful.
‘It’s your night,’ his father had said the first time he had rejected the invitation. ‘Enjoy.’
‘It would be nice if you could be there,’ Spencer had said entirely insincerely.
‘Nice for who?’ his father said.
Spencer’s father was seldom forthcoming with his opinions of Spencer’s films, and Spencer could never be sure which he was protecting, Spencer’s standing in his landscape of imagined achievement and respect, or his own untutored uncertainty in a foreign world.
There are many things that Spencer is not sure of about his father. How long the overlapping crossover period had been between his two wives, for example. But, the most fundamental and most unanswerable question Spencer has for his father (not a matter of dates, or the amount of money he has in the bank, or whether he had ever believed himself to be in love with his first wife, and when had he fallen out of love and life with his second wife and seen her, finally, for who she is; and indeed whether he believed in love; and why he had rejected most of the people he had ever been close to; and what was the origin of the feud his family had with their next-door neighbours when Spencer was young; and is his father aware of how many financial metaphors he uses to describe his transactions with people and the world; and what he thinks of his son, truly, is Spencer such a disappointment to him as it appears, or is there an amount of respect to be had for a man who made his way in a difficult world that Jimmy Ludwig could have no understanding of?; and why he could have such an acute intelligence for systems and such an emptiness of response when it came to emotions, other people’s), the question that occupies Spencer most of all while knowing that it can never be answered is whether the person his father is had been determined by his experiences in wartime, or whether the person he is is what had enabled him to survive.
Somewhere, less than a hundred miles from where they drift down the Parkway, is the ranch-style wooden house where Spencer spent the first six years of his life.
Their next-door neighbours were the Weathers family. Between the Ludwigs and the Weathers was some unspoken animosity that was never explained to Spencer, beyond that it was not permitted for him to go into their house nor to invite the two Weathers girls into his. The younger Weathers girl, who was just a few months older than Spencer, was called Mary-Lou. Mary-Lou Weathers had a fragilely pretty face and light brown corkscrew curls. She was fascinating to Spencer because of her shamelessly brazen habit of picking her nose in public and studiously eating what she retrieved. Once, fearful and thrilled, Spencer broke the rule against entry. He was with a group of neighbourhood kids on the Weathers’ lawn. Mary-Lou invited the group in, not specifically excluding Spencer, but she knew as well as he did that he would not be able to come. Nonetheless, Spencer joined the group, waited for something enormous and biblical to occur as he walked slowly stutteringly in, trying to pretend he was a man of the world who often walked into his neighbours’ houses, and stood at the edge of Mary-Lou’s bedroom as she showed off her new Barbie doll.
Spencer was not especially interested in Barbie dolls but he was excited to be in the forbidden place. No one asked him what he was doing there. Nothing awful or even interesting happened to him in Mary-Lou Weathers’s bedroom. After a few minutes, his bravery proved, his curiosity unappeased, he went back home again.
‘So,’ his father says.
‘What?’ Spencer says.
‘When are you going to make a living?’
‘I refuse to judge the value of what I do by how much money it makes.’
This would be edited straight out of the movie. Spencer’s films have been accused of many things, but pomposity is not one of them. Not even the literary ones that used to be commissioned by the BBC, modernist journeys inspired by fragmentary heroes, Pessoa, Cortázar, Barrett. There are times he has tried to concentrate on plot but all that achieved was slowness. He has never possessed Rick Violet’s single demonstrable skill, of moving characters quickly out of rooms. He has, he could remind his father, won prizes with his films. Trudy Tuesday, History of the Tango, The Late George Reid, The Captain’s Grief, Sonata for Piano and Violence, Robert W’s Last Walk have all been shown at international festivals and received awards. His most recent film, Vertigo, commissioned, but never shown, by Channel 4, was written about with some disquiet by those few critics who pay attention to Spencer Ludwig’s career as if it was his most personal work, when anyone paying any kind of attention should have realised that it was, without question, his least.
His father does not shake his head. He does not even deign to raise an eyebrow.
‘And I have a job, what you understand by job, at the film school.’
‘Full-time?’
There are just a few topics where Jimmy Ludwig’s language does not fail him. Most of them involve money. ‘Well, no. Two days a week.’
This is not in fact true. It is, if Spencer were to be honest with himself, a lie. His teaching takes up at most one day a week.
‘You make enough money?’ ‘Sort of. Up to a point.’
‘The first responsibility of a man is to provide for her family.’
The pompous sententiousness of this is alleviated only slightly by his father’s trouble with pronouns. Perhaps that is what this film should be called, The Trouble with Pronouns. Bitter-sweet and poignant, an old man’s decline, the son as witness, memory the enemy.
‘You remind me of the story,’ Jimmy Ludwig says.
‘What story?’
He wishes he hadn’t asked. He has better things to do than play the role of his father’s stooge.
‘The fellow who shovelled shit in the circus. Well, he said, at least I’m in show business!’
Vengefully, Spencer twists the wheel, pulls out into the fast lane and speeds past the Academy bus. He is childishly pleased by the sight of his father hurled back into his seat.
‘Tell me something,’ Spencer says when they have each returned to some kind of equilibrium.
‘What’s that?’
‘You remember the Weathers?’ ‘The what?’
‘Our next-door neighbours when we lived in Berkeley Heights. The Weathers family. They lived next door to us. When I was a child, in New Jersey. The Weathers.’
‘Sure I remember them. He was a moron.’
‘You fell out with them. I wasn’t allowed in their house. What was the fight?’
‘I told you. He was a fuckin’ moron.’
Spencer is pleased by the discovery that in contempt, even recollected contempt, his father’s ability with pronouns improves. He is less pleased by the pursuing sound of a police siren. He slows, pulls into the right lane to let the police car cruise by. It does not pass him; the car, New Jersey State Trooper, settles in behind him, lights flashing red and blue. An automated voice orders him to pull over to the side of the road.
Spencer has never been stopped by the police before in the US. He has seen it often enough on television shows, witnessed it on New York City streets, men, usually dark skinned, sitting placid in their cars, policemen leaning in through the open driver’s window, shining in a torch, the police car behind still flashing its lights. Light equals virtue and law and order. Darkness and blackness are the signifiers of lawless secrets and sins. He knows, in a learned observational way, that when a driver is stopped by the police in the United States he stays in his car. Nonetheless, when he pulls on to the hard shoulder of the Garden State Parkway, his father beside him saying, What the…? What?, after he puts the Cadillac into park, after the siren behind him has swirled into silence, he opens the driver’s door.
And an amplified voice barks at him.
Stay where you are! Sir! Switch off your engine and stay in your car!
Poised, frozen, not sure how to follow the mixed instructions, Spencer stays where he is, one foot on the tarmac, one hand on the door handle, his bald patch naked and exposed.
‘What are you doing now?’ his father asks.
Sir! Get back into your car!
‘You’re an idiot,’ his father says.
‘Broke the mould, I know,’ Spencer says.
And a force reaches him, not the crash upon his unprotected head that he had been unconsciously expecting, but a grip tight as metal on his arms, and he is pulled and lifted, shoved, delivered against the side of the car, the wheel arch cutting cruelly into his shins, his chest squeezed against the bonnet—or hood, he supposes he should call it—his head forced to one side so his view is the windshield, and the wipers that have been triggered in the commotion, and his father’s face behind glass, a false-tooth smile, and a look that he is so unaccustomed to seeing that it takes him a while to register as pleasure.
‘Please,’ Spencer says.
The policeman’s body pins him uncomfortably twisted between body and car. The breath of the policeman is hot on his face. Spencer detects the scent of burnt cheese and engine oil and beer. He wonders if this is what it feels like to be in one of those underground sex clubs with names like Anvil and Hoist.
‘I’m sorry,’ Spencer says.
The policeman pulls Spencer’s wrists hard together. A knee rams into the small of his back. Spencer grunts in pain. ‘I’m English,’ Spencer says.
Through the windscreen, his father’s expression moves from pleasured to troubled. At first Spencer is grateful for his concern, then is reminded of the panicky expression his father’s face shows when he is in some urgency of urinating.
And the policeman breathes harder, holds him tighter. Spencer will never know whether it’s the decrepitude of his father or his own nationality that has protected him, but the policeman has relented, and he is no longer being squeezed to the side of the car. He may even wiggle his wrists a little inside the policeman’s grip. The most alarming thing is that his father seems to be having a fit or a seizure of some kind. The right side of his face clenches, twists and drops. It is like an awful parody of a wink. It might, Spencer considers, Spencer hopes, actually be a wink.
‘Get back into your car, sir,’ the policeman says, not unkindly, almost, it might be said, fatherly.
‘Yes. Thank you.’
Spencer scuttles back into the driver’s seat and scrupulously rests his arms on the steering wheel to show the policeman that not only does he mean no harm but that he would be incapable of providing it.
‘Thank you,’ Spencer says.
‘I’d like to see your driving licence, sir,’ the policeman says. ‘A leak,’ Spencer’s father says.
‘Um. Please. My father? He has a very small and irritable bladder.’
For the first time Spencer and the policeman look at each other face to face. The policeman is older than Spencer had expected and is proud and careworn. He also looks as if he suspects Spencer of making fun of him.
‘I need a leak,’ his father says.
‘Oh. OK. We can do that,’ the policeman says.
Spencer sets about getting out of the car but the policeman pushes him back down again.
‘Stay where you are, sir, and leave your arms where I can see them.’
Spencer feels that this is a little unfair, as he has his arms in plain view, and he is troubled at the prospect of retrieving his wallet from his back pocket in order to show the policeman his driving licence while keeping his arms still.
‘I was going to help my father.’
‘We’ll take care of it, sir.’
His father is looking less panicky, almost smug. The policeman speaks into his walkie-talkie and soon they are joined by a second policeman, who opens the front passenger door, and courteously, solicitously, eases Spencer’s father out of the car and to the edge of the hard shoulder. Discreetly, he stands with his back to Spencer’s father and holds his jacket out wide to shield the undraped man from the view of other motorists.
‘Your licence, sir. Slowly, sir.’
Spencer eases forward to reach into the back pocket of his jeans and pull out his wallet. He finds his driver’s licence and presents it to the policeman, whose name is Porrelli.
‘I’m English, this is an English licence,’ Spencer says.
‘So I see.’
‘Look. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. What’s the problem? Was I speeding? I don’t think I was speeding, I’m used to English roads where the speed limits are higher. I—’
‘This is not about speeding, sir.’
‘Oh. Good. I mean. Oh. Then. Oh, I get it. Littering. It’s the business with the phones isn’t it? Some highway ordinance, I’m sure. I told my father—’
The other policeman escorts Spencer’s father back to the car.
‘You see?! I told you something would happen,’ Spencer says.
‘No one likes a whiner,’ Spencer’s father says.
‘I’m sorry,’ Spencer says. ‘I told him not to, I said we’d get into trouble. I should have gone back and looked for them, but he needed to make a…a rest stop, you know, men’s room, comfort station, he has a small and irritable bladder, and I didn’t think we had the time, so I’m very sorry. Is there a fine for this sort of thing?’
‘She’s always been a whiner,’ Spencer’s father says. ‘When she was a baby she used to bang her head.’
‘Sir, does your father have any ID?’
‘Dad? Could you show this gentleman some ID?’
‘Absolutely.’
His father does not move. ‘Dad. Your wallet.’
‘What about it?’
‘Can I have it for a moment?’
‘What is this? They want money?’
‘He, this gentleman, the police officer, just wants to see some ID.’
‘Forget about it. They’re not getting a nickel.’
His father crosses his arms stubbornly across his chest.
Wildly, Spencer considers tickling his father. Before his neuropathy set in, he had always been very ticklish.
‘Sir. We need to see your father’s ID.’
‘Yes yes, I know.’
If this were an independent film, what would happen? They would end up as best friends, just for one night, the four of them in a roadside bar drinking beer and discovering astonishing synchronicities; or it would turn into torture and labyrinth, the hint of unspeakable horrors in a rural cellar where no light shines and nothing is real except for the imminence of pain and execution. If it were one of Spencer’s films, then not much would happen, he has to admit. The day would pass, night would fall, morning might break upon this frozen tableau.
‘Not a red nickel,’ his father says.
If this were one of Rick’s films, if this were one of Rick’s early films, a shoot-out would probably ensue, or a song, bright colour pastiche, stolen emotion and borrowed resonance. Spencer has never received the credit that he had avoided taking for Rick’s early successes. He had scripted them and shot them and done it all with a freedom that was unavailable to him for work he produced under his own name. If this were one of Rick’s, as the fawning critics like to say, mature works, what would happen? Something casual and opaque that hinted at philosophical depths because Rick did not have the intellect or the technique to reach into them directly. He could only imply and hope, no, know, that the critics and the audiences would pander to his engorged sense of his own capacities.
‘Sir,’ says Officer Porrelli.
‘What’s going to happen? Is there a fine or something?’
‘Sir?’
‘Littering, I suppose it would be. He threw it out of the window, and I—’
And Spencer feels guilty. Why should he give up his father in this way? Was this going to be the start of something?—anything that goes wrong in his life, he would blame his father because his father was sick and vulnerable and couldn’t look after himself.
‘He threw what out of the window, sir?’
‘This isn’t because of that?’
‘Of what?’
‘You haven’t said sir.’ ‘Excuse me?’
‘Sir. I’m sorry. It’s just that I’d got used to you saying sir in every sentence.’
The look in Porrelli’s eye is the one that he had had before, when it was accompanied by grip and restraint and barroom pizza-parlour breath and the threat of the bad things that policemen are entitled to do to fathers and sons who have put themselves in opposition to the law.
Long ago, when he was in his father’s company, in Long Island summers on his father’s boat, or at meals where gruffly self-made men would display their chests and their women and pretend to be humorous by pausing with silver carving knife to brusquely interrogate the other males at the table whether they were leg or breast men, Spencer had felt any part of himself that had the potential for power or extension in the world become small and timid, looking for, expecting, protection from his father’s strength. As a child, Spencer had always made the mistake of confusing self-assurance with knowledge. Ever since his father first became sick, Spencer had grown into some kind of adulthood. He could not trust his father’s strength. And his father’s self-assurance could be most vehement when it was most obviously wrong.
Spencer has given up any thought of help from his father, so he is surprised when his father reaches for his wallet and with scrabbling neuropathic fingers manages to prise out his driving licence and pass it to Spencer.
‘Give this to the gentleman,’ his father says.
Porrelli compares his father’s driving licence to Spencer’s. He steps away from the car and lowers his chin to speak into his walkie-talkie.
‘It’s her,’ his father says.
‘Who?’
‘Your mother,’ his father says.
Spencer’s mother died years before, surprised by death similarly to how she had been disappointed by life. For a moment, he struggles with the notion that his father has been granted something additional and perhaps compensatory, that he is drifting into the shade between this world and the next, which means, contrary to all Spencer’s knowledge and intuition, that there is an afterlife, and that his father, in some kind of senescently sentimental dance, is back in step with his lost, dead, under-loved first wife.
‘She called them. Your mother.’
And he realises that it is his stepmother that his father must be referring to. And indeed, when Porrelli returns to the car, he tells them that his father had been reported by his wife as a missing person.
‘He’s not missing. He’s with me,’ Spencer says.
‘Your mother reported him as missing. Sir.’
‘She’s not my mother. She’s my stepmother.’
‘You might want to make a call to your mother.’
‘I would. If I—’
And his father looks at Spencer and looks at Porrelli and in an effort of recollection, of recohesion that makes Spencer wonder how much psychic and physical energy it will have cost him, says,
‘I am taking a drive with my son. My wife is crazy. Frankly her credibility with me right now is zero. No one should listen to her. I am sure you have many important duties to to to. To do to.’
It is a courtroom speech, a summing-up to convince judge and jury and witnesses. Apart from its stuttering conclusion, it is a masterly performance. Porrelli hands back the licences—to Spencer’s father rather than to Spencer.
‘Have a good day sir,’ Porrelli says.
‘Thank you,’ Spencer says.
‘Enjoy New Jersey.’
‘Goodbye Charlie,’ Spencer’s father says. ‘Let’s move it.’
After their escape from the New Jersey troopers, the mood is lighter, easier, this is something father and son have done together, think what they could do now, a murder spree, a daring bank job, get jobs as ferrymen on a lonely river, discover philosophy and wildlife in the tranquil rhythms of their trade—and the film that they could be making, Danny DeVito as Spencer, Walter Matthau as Jimmy, except DeVito is too old and Matthau is dead. Fantasy casting is an easy game to play—Kirk and Michael Douglas, Henry and Peter Fonda, Lee J. Cobb and Frank Sinatra—but this one could be real.
‘You remember Lee J. Cobb?’
‘Who?’
‘Lee J. Cobb, the actor. On the Waterfront, remember?—Johnny Friendly, the union boss. Big guy, sort of brooding and scary. Always intimidated me. Reminded me of you, to be honest. Lee J. Cobb.’
‘Lee Cobb,’ his father says, and the gap between words and their meaning is so wide that chasms open up in the car that the world and its weather fall into. Leaving Jimmy Ludwig alone and cold with his back pain and his bladder condition and his constipation, and Spencer has ruined the mood.
‘Lee J. Cobb,’ Spencer insists.
And something happens. Words to ear, an internal percussion drums into the cochlea, electricity pulses, neurons spark, synapses connect to dendrites and axons of neighbouring cells, and somehow, in Jimmy Ludwig’s brain, there are still enough willing neurotransmitters to ferry the electricity across the synaptic gaps, and the name Lee J. Cobb continues on its difficult route, detouring around the cells that died in 2001 when Jimmy Ludwig suffered his stroke, and memory comes alight. In some dingy place of his recollection, a movie star’s face and manner and name are suddenly apparent and accessible, and this is one of the miracles of film.
‘Yes! Sure! Lee J. Cobb!’ Spencer’s father says, and his ensuing smile is open and broad and he rests a wavery hand on Spencer’s arm in gratitude.
‘His real name was Leo Jacoby,’ Spencer says, regretting this instantly, concerned that the extra information will open up the chasm again.
‘That’s terrific,’ his father says. ‘My name used to be Izio.’
‘I know,’ Spencer says. ‘The teeth.’
‘What’s that?’ (What’s dat?)
‘The teeth.’
‘Yes,’ Spencer’s father says. ‘T’e teet.’ Spencer’s tired heart is filled with love, and the road slides down to the ocean.