‘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