Ash Wednesday

by Ethan Hawke

  “Did you hear anything I said out there today?” I asked, wanting to concentrate on the new, more positive me. I gestured to the parking lot but knocked my knuckles on the glass. My hand was so brittle and cold, it stung like a bitch.

  “I heard you, but I don’t believe you,” she said simply. “I don’t want your guilty kisses and I don’t want this ring.” She lifted up her hand with the ring right there smack in the center of her palm, her pale fingers all stretched out pointing at me.

  “I’m not going to take that.” I wanted to slap her hand.

  “Be realistic, all right? Take it back,” she said arrogantly, like a schoolteacher. “I’m sure it was expensive.”

  My whole game plan, the entire agenda I had envisioned and tried to enact this afternoon, had been shot to shit. Sometimes I couldn’t even talk to her. The plates of my skull were so tightly pressed together I thought my whole head might crumble under the pressure.

  “You’re not serious, Jimmy. You’ve got some idea in your head but you’re not serious. My bus is gonna leave. I’ll call you from Texas and we can talk. Here, take the ring.” She offered it up again. I had my eyes fixed on the cracks in my blue plastic dashboard in front of me.

  “Fuck that,” I said, turning toward her, my head cocked like a hammer.

  “You really are a piece of work, you know that?”

  “Stop telling me I’m not serious!” I boomed. The dice hanging from the rearview mirror shook back and forth. I tried to calm myself. Christy shuts down when I yell, so I immediately regretted doing it. “This totally blows. This is wrong. How can I change this situation?” I was pleading, really asking her. “Just stop being what you’re being like.” She was acting so removed. She gets like that, like she tries to will herself into this all-seeing, all-knowing person who isn’t emotional, who’s detached from all the menial human ugliness around her.

  “I want you to be in a good mood,” I whined. “I want you to marry me.”

  “I can’t listen to you anymore.” She grabbed the door handle, fighting to get out of the car like we were sinking into a lake. Finally, after struggling awkwardly with the lever, she got the door open. Cold air rushed in. I leaned over her quickly and pulled the cocksucker shut again.

  “Stay in the car,” I said.

  “Don’t touch me!” she hissed. I thought she was going to scratch my eyes out. She kicked the door wide open again.

  “Shut the fuckin’ door!” I yelled, straightening up in my seat.

  “Don’t you ever raise your voice at me. Are you crazy?” Still seated in the car, she glared at me, her finger in my face.

  “I didn’t raise my voice,” I tried to say peacefully. “Just, please, shut the door.”

  “Jimmy”—she moved one leg out on the pavement—“I wanted to love you, to really give to you. I know what happened with your dad. I know about your mother. . . .”

  Mentioning my folks disoriented me. What did they have to do with this?

  “But it hurts like acid on my skin,” she went on, “every time you change your mind or turn me away. So just let me go.”

  She found the black velvet box wedged between the cracks in her seat, stuck the ring back, and tossed it up on the dashboard. Then she slipped her other leg out of the car, threw the cigarette package on the floor mat, stood up out of the Nova, and swung the clunky heavy metal door closed.

  I turned off the car, took the keys and the ring, jumped out, and hounded after her across the empty parking lot.

  “You can say all that”—I was tailing her, the cold air waking me up like electrodes zapping my temples—“and think you understand me better than I do myself. But how I feel—” I had started to yell again.

  Christy snapped around, pointing her long finger directly in my face. “Shut up,” she spat out, in a barely audible voice. We were standing in the open, wind tearing at our clothes. “Do not raise your voice at me.” She has an irrational reaction to being screamed at: Nobody likes it, but she hates it. Turning back toward the front door of the bus station, she accidentally tripped and dropped her purse.

  “You can walk away”—I lowered my voice, but I was still on top of her, walking right behind her—“all smug, like you’re so much smarter and so much older than me—”

  “What are you talking about?” she said, not even looking at me. She was struggling with her purse, trying to get it back over her shoulder, as she moved forward in long quick strides.

  I carried on. “I still know myself better than you do, and I’m telling you I love you and I want to marry you, but I’m not gonna bullshit you, I’m scared. The whole thing scares me.”

  We stepped up onto the sidewalk that borders the entrance of the bus station. She stopped, finally, and turned to me.

  “I’m not scared, don’t you understand? That’s the fundamental difference between us. My love doesn’t scare me. Yours does because it’s a lie.” The skin of her cheeks was getting red and chapped.

  “That’s not true!” I threw my arms up in the air.

  Christy didn’t speak, but she didn’t turn away either.

  “I’m not gonna talk to you ever again if you yell. OK? Am I being clear?”

  I took a deep breath. “Just because I’m scared doesn’t have any pertinence to us.” I went on trying to defend myself, not sure I used the word pertinence correctly. I wanted to sound mature, in control, like a grown man. “When I was eighteen I was petrified that I was a homo, but I’m not.” I was on a bad track there and I knew it immediately. “Just being scared of commitment doesn’t mean I can’t follow through.”

  We were standing smack in front of the dirty glass door to the bus station. There were advertisements, bulletins, and timetables pasted everywhere.

  “I’m leaving, OK? Stop following me.” She was pronouncing every word deliberately. “I’ll call you from Texas. We can talk some more then.”

  “Come home with me tonight and talk?” I asked, as straightforwardly as I could. “You can leave tomorrow.”

  She shook her head no.

  “I won’t let you go,” I said, digging my hands into my armpits to shield them from the wind.

  “Yes, you will,” she said. She went through the door to the grimy old brick building and I followed her. I didn’t give a rat’s ass what she said.

  The inside of the station was filled with vending machines and ticket booths. The air smelled lightly of stale urine, but at least we were out of the wind. A few other people were in there milling idly around.

  “If you think for a second that this is the last time you’ll see me,” I whispered from behind her, trailing her as she looked around for her departure sign, “you’re wrong. While you sit on that bus you can meditate on the simple fact that you’re the one who’s quitting; you’re giving up, not me. Say what you want, but I am here and you are leaving.”

  She beelined straight across the station, not looking at anyone, making herself small and unnoticeable. She passed the wooden rows of seats, like church pews, where people were seated waiting, reading papers, drinking coffee, and then she was off toward a door with a sign above it marked TO ALL BUSES. Only she didn’t go out.

  “Shit, shit, shit!” She pounded the glass door with the flat of her hand. “Oh, my God, Jimmy, you’ve ruined everything!” She wasn’t yelling, but her voice struck a tone of true anguish that rattled and spun the nerves lining my stomach.

  “What? What?” I was about four paces behind her.

  She pressed her face against the glass. “My bus left.”

  Everybody in the bus station was staring at us, waiting for the next move. I couldn’t see Christy’s face. She stood there looking out the glass door, shivering. I laid my hand gently across her back. She turned around and whacked me five times across the top of my head. She socked my right ear hard. Her boot heel slipped and she fell to her knees. Immedia
tely I knelt beside her. Without looking up she adjusted her position, shielding her face, seeming to realize we were becoming a spectacle.

  She sniffled, rubbed her hand across her mouth, and got up and walked calmly into the ladies’ room. I was left kneeling on the floor.

  I stood up, only to sit back down on one of the empty benches. Eventually people stopped gawking.

  I peaked too early. When I was twelve years old, I did sixty-seven one-armed pushups. No one could believe it. I won this scholastic fitness award. I was like a god in my sixth-grade class. Every girl had a crush on me. I was always first pick in gym. By my sophomore year in high school I was already varsity in two sports. Fat lotta good it did me.

  Chaplain Sheppard was the one who initially turned me on to this idea of marriage. I went to him all bent out of shape and upset after I broke up with Christy. You couldn’t knock him over; he was boxy like a football coach, a good mellow guy who was wonderful to talk to. He always spoke so softly you could barely hear him. Even Christy liked him.

  He told me that the definition of grace is the ability to accept change. He said I needed to start calculating my masculinity not by the amount of pussy I could grab, or how many girls I could bang, but by how true I could be with one girl. How infrequently I could lie. How often I could show up when I was needed. How willing I was to love the life I had rather than covet the lives of others.

  The point is, he got me all fired up, and now here I was, shot down, sitting alone on an old wooden bench in a decrepit bus station. To my left was a vending machine selling candy, gum, potato chips, cookies, toenail clippers, and whatever else you could fathom. All the air had squeaked out of me. Eight other people were waiting there as well. Oddly enough, they were all men. Nine of us altogether, waiting: for a bus to arrive, for a ride—or for a girl.

  I looked down the hall at the closed ladies’-room door.

  For the first four or five months of our relationship I’d say Christy and I barely talked at all. We probably spent five nights a week together, but we didn’t go to the movies, we didn’t go out to dinner, sometimes we’d watch TV, but mostly we just had sex. We had sex all the time, but I literally could not converse with the woman. It was comic. Our entire courtship was nonverbal. She’d tell me, “I know you’re not stupid. Don’t you have anything to say?” But really there was only one thing I could think of and it sounded too corny: I thought she was unspeakably beautiful. She has these big ears that would stick out through her hair, and I’d just go nuts. I couldn’t stop looking at them. They jiggled when she talked and I wanted to bite them. What are you gonna say when that’s what you’re thinking?

  It wasn’t until Virginia Beach that we started to communicate, and that was a good five months into our affair. My colonel was making some kind of official trip to a base down there and I had been assigned as his attaché or liaison, more like a personal assistant. It was a lousy job, but I had a bunch of free time. Christy wanted to meet me down there for a romantic weekend. I thought it was awfully boyfriend-girlfriend behavior, but I got railroaded into it.

  I remember standing outside in the warm beach night air in front of the motel in flip-flops and no shirt. It was so humid, taking a deep breath almost made me cough. The salty air shimmered in a red neon light from the bowling alley next door. As I watched the traffic pass, standing in the parking lot waiting for her to arrive, the whole world seemed still and serene except for the thundering drumbeat of my heart. It was like there was a Thoroughbred sprinting on a treadmill inside my chest. I couldn’t wait to see her. Finally she eased into the motel parking lot driving a candy-red Camaro (the rental company had botched her reservation and this was the only car left, so they had to let her have it), and as soon as I saw her face I knew I was a full-blown schoolboy in love. But I still couldn’t speak to her. She parked and got out and—no shit—we didn’t even exchange greetings. I did say, “How’d you get such a sweet car?” but she just shrugged. We held hands and walked out onto the beach.

  Stepping into the warm ocean water, we started making out and soon found ourselves waist deep in the waves. I pulled her shorts down, letting them float away, and we started to make love (crazy girl never wears any panties). We still hadn’t said “hello” to each other, for chrissakes! With one hand holding the base of her spine and the other in between her shoulder blades I could feel her heart thumping its way through the muscles and bones of her back just like mine. The water splashed against our bodies, lighting up like fireflies. There was a sliver of a moon just above the horizon, and I looked at it and wondered what the fuck was happening inside me. Would I survive this? In the dark I could make out the shape of Christy’s eyes, but the night was too black for any recognition of detail. Then I looked down and, as if the shell of her torso were made of crystal, I saw the four chambers of her heart constricting and relaxing. In the hollow of her chest cavity was a heart pumping furiously, all muscle and blood, glowing like a ruby in a dark cave. This girl had a friggin’ fireball for a heart.

  The rest of the weekend we spent talking. Once I began, there was no shutting me up. The words came like water running out of a tub till they all drained out, leaving me empty but clean. I told her how I’d joined the army on a whim after my father’s suicide. I told her about my crying fits, about how I knew I needed to leave the military but didn’t know what to try next. She’d ask a question and actually listen to the answer. There was a sensitivity to her that was both hopeful and heartbreaking. Every now and then you meet a human being and you might as well be a bomb.

  From my bench in the Kingston bus station I looked out the window. There were three hawks circling in the sky about half a mile away.

  I read somewhere that General Sam Houston believed he always knew he was exactly where God wanted him to be whenever hawks circled above him. He had lived with the Indians for a while, and the symbol came to him in a peyote vision. I couldn’t be sure it was hawks I was looking at. They might’ve been buzzards.

  There was an ice-cream shop across the street from the station with a big sign in the window:

  CLOSED FOR SEASON.

  REASON? FREEZIN’!

  Two guys both wearing blaze-orange vests pulled into a gas station, with a sixteen-point stag dead and bloody in the back of their pick-up. He was a big boy, his feet hanging over the rail guard. I’ve never been hunting. No interest.

  An eerie sensation washed over me as I sat on the wooden bench inside the Kingston bus station. I had goose pimples on my arms. I could no longer tell how long I’d been there; it could have been a second or an hour. I began imagining Christy in the bathroom committing suicide. It felt like a premonition. This would be my story: LOCAL WOMAN TAKES OWN LIFE AFTER MARRIAGE PROPOSAL FROM LOSER BOYFRIEND. I could hear the gentle prodding tick of my watch, the volume of which seemed to vary mysteriously.

  When I was twenty-three years old, my father jumped from the nineteenth floor of the George Taft Memorial Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio, on the nineteenth of December and died from head injuries. I’d visited him in the psychiatric ward the day before. The last thing he said to me as I stepped in the down elevator was “These doctors don’t know anything. Just get me a puppy, Jimbo.” He said, “I need something to take care of. I miss you being a little boy. Not a Labrador or any pedigree bullshit, just some kind of mutt.” And the elevator doors shut.

  Grace: the ability to accept change.

  I stood up. At first I wasn’t sure if I should go find Christy or leave. But I went toward the ladies’ room, my boots making a loud thump with every footstep, and opened the door, hoping there were no other women in there.

  “Hey, Bean Dog,” I said quietly. “You doing OK?”

  The bathroom was surprisingly clean: brightly lit, warm, with alternating black and white tiles on the floor that scaled halfway up the walls, three real glass mirrors, big heavy black wood stall doors, and high ceilings, circa 1940. Not like they b
uild things now, when they throw up a sheet of aluminum for a mirror, and the commode and the sink are plastic dipped in piss. This room was like its own universe. For one, it was the only place in the building where you didn’t see your breath. The radiator was conking and letting out a steady release of steam. Of course, people had scribbled on the walls and scratched the wood doors with names, sloppy-ass drawings, and other teenage vandalism, but still, everything about this room was substantial. I didn’t even mind the bright light. It was the kind of halogen overhead light that unfortunately makes every pimple on your face twice as red.

  Christy was standing at the sink, which was a thick heavy porcelain with old metal faucets. She was rifling through her purse, reapplying makeup. She’d been crying, which I was glad to see. Anything was preferable to the I-don’t-give-a-shit, I’m-so-removed attitude she’d been assuming. Her face was swollen and puffy. Her black parka lay on the floor. Her wallet was slipping halfway out of the front pocket, which was classic Christy. I’m always barking about her lack of organization, never hanging things up or keeping track of her glasses, careless stuff like that. She was wearing my old hooded gray sweatshirt over a white long-underwear top. She has great big tits, and ARMY was spelled out bold across them.

  I sat up on top of a wooden box that covered the radiator. My rear end started warming up. We were both silent.

  “Let me drive you on to New York,” I said finally. “We’ll pick up your luggage and shit, talk some more, and see if you still don’t want to marry me.” I was speaking extremely softly but, with the high ceilings and the tile of the bathroom, sound moved well. I hadn’t thought of that plan before I said it aloud.