DAVID FLUSFEDER
A Film by Spencer Ludwig
FOURTH ESTATE • London
For Grace
Table of Contents
Spencer Ludwig, film-maker, arrives at his father’s apartment somewhat out of sorts.
He dawdles at the threshold. Blue carpet, brown walls, black door, he looks for something that will strengthen him against the inevitable onslaught of his father’s and stepmother’s world. If he had a camera with him, he would use it—extreme close-up: the carpet, his sneakers, the apartment door. Before pressing the bell he would whisper, and he does, Here goes.
Spencer has become a frequent visitor to his father’s apartment. He has made this journey—tube from Stockwell to Heathrow, plane to JFK, subway to 50th Street—four times already this year, arriving, like this, encumbered by luggage and laptop, sticky and half dazed. His father, the idol and enemy of Spencer’s youth, is eighty-six years old and in failing health.
‘Here goes,’ he repeats.
Voices are raised from inside the apartment, as they often are. Jimmy?! his stepmother yells, unanswered, maybe unanswerable.
TALK TO ME! Spencer has dawdled long enough, but he lingers some more. Coming out of the subway station, sweating under the weight of his luggage on a cold spring day, he had walked past his father’s apartment building and the Museum of Modern Art and steeled himself with a double espresso and a half-hour of internet poker at a coffee shop on 6th Avenue. There he had sat squeezed at the window between an almost respectably dressed young man and a blonde woman of unearthly thinness. The young man occupied himself in expectorating and muttering. The woman pecked away at her laptop. Spencer tried to keep his attention upon his own laptop and avoid contact with the young man’s sounds or the bird woman’s words on her screen.
HUNTER
I guess that’s pretty lame.
Hunter, he presumed, was a male character, based, as cruelly as her thin vengeful yearning could make him, on her most recent disappointing boyfriend.
Spencer played poker. He clicked and bet and clicked and bet and folded and clicked and raised and reraised and clicked. He was late to see his father, and he wasn’t winning in this session, and its instrumental purpose became lost in the seedy relentlessness of the pursuit itself. Spencer, so tentative in most areas of his life, is ferocious in pursuit and defence of his work, ferocious in his love for his daughter, Mary, and ferocious, sometimes obsessional, in his playing of poker. Once, in Paris in autumn, during a film festival, he stayed all night in his hotel room, eschewing screenings and dinners and parties and meetings with distributors in favour of screen-staring, of clicking and betting and clicking.
A lucky river when he was foolishly chasing a draw against a competent opponent who was extracting the maximum from his top two pairs won Spencer $225. Before he lost the little he had left in his online account, and became too offended by the swirling clutches of mucus and saliva from the young gentleman on his right and the dismal work of the woman on his left
HUNTER
I know. I’m sorry. But I do love
you, you know. That cute thing
you do with your mouth, I just
want to kiss it.
he put his laptop in its case and hoisted his load and went to his father’s apartment.
Here goes. And it is all going full throttle in there, geriatric rage, the hatefulness of old people who have terminally disappointed each other. Spencer’s father is sitting at the table in the corner of the living room working on a jigsaw puzzle, dwarfed by the skyscrapers through the high glass windows that arouse a giddy vertigo in Spencer. His wife is stumping and ranting around the apartment, and Spencer’s stepbrother, Jacksie, is walking after his mother, trying to appease while giving her further fuel to go on.
Jacksie is in his late fifties, but apart from some issues with his prostate and a spreading of the gut, he wouldn’t seem much more than forty or so. He dresses as he has always done, as a sporty suburban child, in shorts and sweatshirt, and the only alarming things about his appearance are the perpetual hurt look in his eyes and the blizzardy whiteness of his teeth. Jacksie lives in California, which is where his teeth are from.
‘I want a toaster-oven,’ Spencer’s stepmother says, spitting out the words as if the world is denying her a basic human right, which she will avenge even if governments should fall and stars be extinguished.
‘You’ll get your toaster-oven,’ Jacksie says.
‘Well where is it?!’ his mother says.
‘Hey Spencer, what’s up?’ Jacksie says.
‘Hello Jacksie.’
‘Look Pop! Look who’s here! You know who this is?’
Jacksie treats Spencer’s father as if he is an imbecile, which Jimmy Ludwig can hardly ever be bothered any more to resent.
Spencer’s father has a very nice smile. Sometimes it is even sincere, as it seems to be now, as he gets up from the table and walks over, stooped and frail, to greet his son. Spencer pulls away the trailing oxygen tube that has become wrapped around his left ankle, and they hug. Before Spencer receives his inevitable insult from his father about his appearance, he reflects that an ease that was