A Film by Spencer Ludwig. David Flusfeder

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СКАЧАТЬ back in stumps Jacksie’s mother, Spencer’s stepmother, Spencer’s father’s second wife. When Spencer first met her, thirty-five years before, she was a tanned suburban beauty. He was six years old, she affected to adore him. Now her skin is heavily lined, her eyes are bitter and narrow, her limbs and back are bent and crooked, and her scalp can be seen through the sprayed dyed helmet of her hair, which she has tended to once a week at the ironically named beauty parlour. She is seventy-four, twelve years younger than her husband. They have been married for thirty-four years, far longer than either were with their first spouses.

      ‘I think we need a day bed,’ she says.

      ‘OK,’ Jacksie says.

      ‘We’re going to need help here. I can’t ask someone to sleep on the sofa. Don’t you think so, Spencer?’ ‘Yes. I suppose so.’

      ‘Jimmy!’ she yells, waking up her husband. ‘I’m talking about the day bed!’

      Jimmy Ludwig slowly opens his eyes. He fixes a look of uttter pained hopelessness on to his wife that comes close to breaking his son’s heart, shakes his head, which produces a corresponding wince of pain, and stands up to inspect his jigsaw puzzle with his chin pressed uncomfortably to his chest.

      ‘Where’s your collar? Jimmy! I said, Where’s your collar?’

      He does not risk a movement of the head this time. He lifts a jigsaw piece, which might be an azure tip of one of the flowers in a pot beside four ginger kittens, and inspects it by rolling his eyes up so he can just about see it from the painful angle that his vision is forced to examine the world from.

      ‘Dad,’ Spencer says. ‘You should probably put on your collar.’

      Spencer retrieves his father’s neck brace from beneath the magazine rack, where it had fallen, or been discarded, on to a pile of his father’s completed jigsaw puzzles.

      Spencer’s father accepts the collar, a wide strip of yellow foam bandaged by a strip of white cloth that has become a little grubby through frequent use. He wraps it around his damaged neck, a strip of Velcro seals it shut, and his chin is supported, and lifted a little. He makes another little grunt, which might be of protest, or acceptance—although that is unlikely—but the noise is partly lost in the constant low rumble and hiss of his oxygen machine.

      Spencer’s father’s first name was originally Izio. (His last name was originally Lewissohn, but that was discarded a couple of generations before he was born.) When he arrived in London he thought it advisable to have an English-sounding name, as if that would somehow obscure his utter foreign-ness. He attempted to call himself Tim, because that was the name of a colonel he had served under whose manners had impressed him. Meeting his future first wife at a Polish ex-servicemen’s dance in Clapton, he tried out his adopted name. In his thick accent, the word came out sounding more like Jim, which was what she called him. He was too embarrassed, for both of them, to correct her, and so he was, as it were, christened.

      ‘I want to have the day bed over there,’ Spencer’s stepmother says.

      ‘That’s where Pop sits,’ Jacksie says.

      ‘Don’t you think I need a day bed?’

      ‘I’m not saying you don’t. That’s not the issue,’ Jacksie says.

      ‘Tell me then. What is the issue?’

      Jacksie seldom stands up to his mother, so his effort now is quite impressive. Nonetheless, he looks to Spencer for support, and lifts his hands, as if to protect his face.

      ‘Don’t you think,’ Spencer says, ‘that you could have the day bed, without disruption? Maybe you could put it over there, against that wall.’

      ‘I don’t want it against that wall. I want it here.’

      ‘But. That’s where my father sits,’ Spencer says. ‘That’s where his chair is.’

      ‘The chair can move!’

      ‘Maybe,’ Jacksie says, emboldened by having an ally, by he and his stepbrother outnumbering, if not outvoicing, his mother, ‘maybe Pop doesn’t want the chair to move.’

      Spencer’s stepmother explodes in self-pity and rage.

      ‘You know what I don’t like around here?! No one cares about me. No one asks me how I am! The toaster-oven has been broken for three days!’

      ‘Don’t worry, Mom. We’ll get you a new toaster-oven,’ Jacksie says.

      ‘All we’re saying,’ Spencer says, ‘is that you can have a day bed and my father doesn’t have to move his chair. There’s enough room here for both.’

      His stepmother ignores him, turns her spite on to her son.

      ‘And let me tell you something. You want to hear something? I don’t care any more. I don’t want a fucking toaster-oven.’

      And with that, she stumps off again, before stumping back in again to remind Spencer that his father has an appointment with Dr Gribitz in just under an hour.

      ‘Mom?’ Jacksie says.

      ‘Don’t fucking Mom me,’ Spencer’s stepmother says, and stumps back towards the bedroom on her crooked legs. (The soul writes itself on the body.)

      ‘Do you mind if I use the phone?’ Spencer says.

      ‘Of course I do!’ his father says in an attempt at humour.

      ‘Be quick,’ his stepmother says, poking her head around the bedroom door. ‘You’re taking Dad to Gribitz.’

      His first call is to Cheryl Baumbach at the Short Beach Film Festival.

      ‘I’m here in New York,’ Spencer says. ‘That’s great. That’s terrific.’

      ‘Coming down tomorrow, I hope. I just wanted to check that you had received my DVDs’. ‘I’m sure we have.’

      ‘Particularly Robert W’s Last Walk. For the retrospective.’ ‘For the…?’

      ‘You said you wanted to screen all my films.’

      ‘Well we do. Of course we do. We’re very excited.’

      She does not sound excited. She sounds absent, almost uninterested, and Spencer’s stepmother returns to fuss and flurry around them and Spencer’s father continues to ignore her.

      ‘Spencer!’

      ‘Yes,’ he says to his stepmother. ‘Just one more call.’

      He signs off to Cheryl Baumbach with an attempt at the sort of benevolent charm one might expect from a director whom festivals deem worthy of a retrospective and then he calls his daughter.

      Mary is ten years old. She is air whereas he is earth, free where he is most trammelled. Her company delights and somewhat intimidates him. Her mother, to whom he was nearly married, is sensible, and worldly. The period when he was with her, when he had temporarily learned to clean the dishes the same day they were dirtied, to wash the basin after СКАЧАТЬ