‘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.