Ash Wednesday

by Ethan Hawke

  There was another long stillness, both of us calm now. Christy looked away from me to herself in the mirror, then to the sink. She began biting one of her pinkie nails.

  “What are you going to do about work?” she asked, so sweetly I wanted to grab her face and smooch all over her red cheeks. It blows my mind how much Christy’s face can change from instant to instant: one moment hard, crisp, and angular, the next vulnerable, shy, and soft.

  “I’ll blow it off,” I said. “I’ll call Ed and tell him to make something up. I can get away with maybe three days.”

  Christy started crying, not frantic or sobbing; she was simply staring at me and her eyes filled with tears. Be a man, I said to myself. Let her cry. Take a giant breath and fill that body. You’re not an idiot.

  “I know you think everything has some secret hidden underground meaning that only you can interpret,” I said, still sitting high up on the radiator. “But you don’t understand everything about me; neither do I. Some things are mysteries, right?” I was speaking calmly, avoiding the echo of my voice. “You’re smart, smarter than me, but you still can’t see everything.”

  Her eyes were trained on me, peaceful and unmoving. There was a window in the back of the bathroom, and the wind outside was blowing the leaves of a bush against the glass.

  “You think you make a decision, and then you gotta go forward two hundred percent on it, even if it doesn’t make any sense. It’s all or nothing. But see, you were missing the late-breaking update: that I love the shit out of you, I can change, and I’m not leaving you. You should process that and then if you want you can alter your coordinates.”

  I was in armory for about six months, tank division. We talked mucho about coordinates.

  “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings, but I love you,” I repeated. I wanted her to accept my apology and then we could kiss and get married.

  “You love me now?” she asked, straight-faced, turning so she was flat toward me, her hands tucked into the armpits of her sweatshirt.

  “I love you now.” I tried to be clear, unafraid, unconflicted.

  “Tomorrow?”

  “I want to marry you,” I said.

  There was a giant pause. We looked at each other.

  She tried to speak, but her voice broke. Biting her upper lip, she continued. “Why didn’t you call me?” She cried like her body could disassemble. She shook softly, rhythmically, with her arms now flat at her sides; she had no more energy. I didn’t move toward her, I let her cry. I knew she wouldn’t want me to patronize her by cuddling her in some fake way. Some things suck; they hurt bad. The question is, Do you have the courage to let them?

  This may sound insipid, but it’s honest: Until that moment I hadn’t really considered how Christy had been feeling. I realized how egocentric I’d been.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. “I was trying to get myself in order.”

  “You’re forgiven,” she said, and tried to smile. She clenched her jaw and wiped away her tears, frustrated with herself for crying. “But forgiveness is . . . overrated. Actions have repercussions—like a science experiment, a chemical reaction.” She moved back to the sink, turned both faucets on, and let the water swirl together. She looked worn out. I perceived in her eyes and in her gestures that, yes, she cared about me, she would cry about me, but in the end she could and would get over me. Somehow, I hadn’t realized that.

  “The truth,” she said, talking almost to herself, “doesn’t need us to protect it. All we have to do is live inside it and it will protect us, right?”

  I nodded, I don’t know why; I didn’t understand what she was going on about. She reached into her purse and pulled out a handful of three-by-two-inch pieces of paper and held them out for me. I slid myself off the radiator and took them. They felt thin and slippery like facsimile paper, with black-and-white images of what looked like constellations: Orion’s belt, the Big Dipper. Each image was different. On the left side of each slip was a line drawing of a naked woman’s body with an arrow pointing directly above the belly button. There were a ton of numbers and letters along the top and bottom. I’d never seen anything like these images before. I had no idea what they were supposed to signify.

  “That’s our daughter at seventeen weeks,” Christy said.

  My stomach, my hands, my knees all shook with a sensation of fear I hadn’t known since I was twelve.

  “How come you didn’t tell me?” I struggled to ask.

  “I don’t know. I tried, but the more I tried the more distant you seemed. And—I don’t know—I got scared.”

  “It’s a girl?” I asked. I couldn’t breathe. I was gonna cry. I held my gut tight. I tried not to breathe, not to blink my eyes. My fists clenched, I bit the inside of my cheeks to stop my mouth from quivering.

  I was surprised Christy was pregnant, but somewhere I’d known. My father had said that. “There are no secrets, just things people pretend they don’t know.”

  “They can’t be sure,” Christy continued, “but the woman said, ‘If I had to say, I’d guess it was a girl.’” Christy was looking at me intently. I tried to inhale, to take a quick little breath, but as soon as I did I had to sit down. Christy knelt beside me and hid my face in her sweatshirt. There was no one else in the bathroom, but she covered my face nonetheless, and I felt my cheeks swell hot and my eyes sting.

  “You don’t have to do anything,” she whispered in my ear. “This was my choice. I will take care of everything. I couldn’t ever tell you because I couldn’t find a way where it wouldn’t seem like I was trapping you into a life you expressly hadn’t chosen. I do love you, Jimmy, and there’s no regrets. This will be one beautiful child. I’ve been thinking about all the options now, but none of them will require anything from you.” She said this holding me in her arms. I uncovered my face.

  “What options?” I asked.

  Christy looked deep into my eyes, kissed me once, and then kissed me again and again and again. Our faces were sopping wet. Her mouth was sweet like cherry candy. I unbuttoned the top of her jeans and dove my head straight between her legs. Christy has a fantastic pussy. I’m not saying that to be vulgar. I’m saying it because it’s true.

  “Not here,” she whispered. “Not here.”

  Inside the Nova, with the windows blotted out from the fog of our breathing, Christy was naked from the waist down, sitting on my lap, her black parka zipped up her chest, and that little diamond on her ring finger. The sun had set on the Kingston bus station parking lot and we were making love, her vagina soft, silklike, encompassing, while I warmed up her feet by massaging them with my hands. Grace, the cat, was still sitting undisclosed beneath the passenger seat of the car.

  There’s something about the feeling of snorting cocaine till your brain freezes and you weep ’cause you can’t fall asleep that I enjoy—it’s a fear of death or an awareness of life—and there was something about being near Christy, kissing her, feeling her wetness, that touched the same pulse, only with her it was the opposite of poison. It was more like some ancient healing elixir.

  “Can you say all that stuff again?” Christy breathed above me.

  “What stuff?”

  “About how you want to get married?”

  “I’m not sure I can remember it.”

  Christy snarled, stopped moving, and tightened her vaginal muscles around me.

  “I’m never gonna love anybody more than I love you,” I said. “So the question is: Do I believe in love?”

  “Yes, you do,” she answered for me, excited. “You do.” She moved her hips again and continued to fuck my lights out.

  I thought of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, the story goes, knew the instant he heard the name Adolf Hitler that he had brushed up against the reason he was born. He had been living his whole life with this nagging sensation that he was waiting for something, and the moment he heard that name
the feeling subsided into nothingness. He had arrived.

  Now it’s different, and to me it was shockingly humble, but there with my girl in my arms and our child in her belly I knew I had reached the moment my life had been waiting for. I was going to be a father and a husband.

  I spanked her bottom and cranked up the tunes.

  ISAIAH

  Jimmy was sitting in the driver’s seat. I was on top of him, naked from the waist down, looking at his face. In the position we were in, Jimmy was almost uncomfortably deep inside me. The windows were steamed over from our breathing. I could barely see the empty bus station parking lot outside. The sky was midnight black. Every winter it surprises me just how dark it can be by five-thirty. What I could see outside was balmy and serene, like a restful ocean. As I moved my hips, our car would gently rock as if we were drifting.

  Looking away from his face, I saw two yellow eyes floating in darkness in the backseat, like some cryptic dream. I said a prayer for Jimmy and me, asking a blessing on our love. I didn’t ask anyone in particular; I was just dreaming in my head, reaching out through the glass and metal of our car hoping for some compassion. I knew I shouldn’t have put on the engagement ring. I didn’t want to be misleading.

  The first time I remember praying was in the third grade, sitting Indian style on my bed, the moonlight turning my white sheets blue like magic. There was a chance of snow. They were talking about it all over the TV and radio. Snow in Texas is momentous. I asked God, If I matter at all, please let tomorrow be a snow day. I hated school. I had a test on the states: capitals, flowers, rivers, junk like that. I remember staring at the streetlamp outside my window, impatiently waiting for it to illuminate the first flakes. I remember the sound of cars, their headlights moving across my ceiling. I remember my room; there was an American flag with forty-eight stars hanging against the wall. It had been on my grandpa’s casket. I remember the aqua shag carpeting and the phony wood paneling on the walls. I even remember my prayer. I was on my knees, speaking out loud, directly to the moon. I imagined God simply as two sweeping large arms and strong masculine hands like my father’s.

  “Dear God, my name is Christy Ann, and I promise that I will believe in you forever, and I will be good always, if you can find it in your heart to let it snow tomorrow, enough so I don’t have to go to school. Thank you very much, and I say an extra prayer for all the lonely people who don’t have any friends. Thank you. Amen.”

  I was very concerned about lonely people when I was a little girl.

  I remember all that, but I can’t remember if it snowed or not.

  I looked down at Jimmy’s lips. Sloppy sounds of lovemaking accompanied our every movement. The interior of the car was heavy with our scent. Sometimes when we made love it seemed our sexual organs didn’t belong to either one of us. They were a link, or a bridge, for the two of us to meet. Jimmy and I had such trouble talking sometimes. Making love, everything softened; my head would open up and miles of space would enter in. Our sex was what I imagine it to be like after you’ve run a great distance and all your anxiety has been hammered away and you aren’t even able to think; there is only your breath, coming easily in and out.

  Two yellow unblinking eyes appeared to me again, still floating in the darkness of the backseat. I wondered from which dream these eyes erupted or what symbol was being revealed to me in this vision.

  I hadn’t said good-bye to Gordon, the blind man on the bus. He must’ve been concerned about me, disappearing like that. We would never see each other again for the rest of our lives, of that much I was sure.

  “All that matters is grace,” Gordon had said to me.

  “I have a cat named Grace,” I mumbled.

  “Grace is living with an awake heart, open to the knowledge that your every gesture is the will of Allah.” He paused. We were only minutes outside of Kingston.

  “Is Allah a man?” I asked. I couldn’t help it but whenever people mention Allah, in my brain I picture medieval horsemen with scimitars chopping off Christian limbs.

  “You cannot think of God as a thing, a person, a man, or a woman. Allah is not an object. God isn’t over there or up here.” He made several almost spastic gestures with his hand. “God is the root of me.” He brought his hand into a fist and moved it in toward his chest. “He is not me, but he is my root. Allah is revealed in his creatures, but Allah is not his creatures. Tashbe: Allah is manifest in everything. Tanze: Allah is beyond knowledge, completely invisible. The unity of both is reality. To know God is to know how he makes himself visible.”

  Looking around the bus, I noticed there were a lot of old people. I always imagine old people are Ku Klux Klan or former Nazi officers or else just really really nice—like they make dinner for disabled people all the time and sit around praying and counting pennies, making up for the sin and meanness in the world. I think both those things simultaneously. Each young man is either a rapist in waiting or my future husband. Maybe everyone sees the world like that: Everything’s true, all the time.

  “The world is spinning, right?” Gordon asked. There was a long pause. I was worried; I knew it was a leading question. I wanted a sip of his beer.

  “Go on,” I said simply.

  “Well, I’m not the same person I was yesterday, so how could you know me? How could I know you? I’m trying still to figure out who I was ten years ago.”

  He laughed. I did too.

  “Thank you.” He smiled big.

  There have been a few times, when Jimmy has been very far inside me, that neither one of us would move. I would hold him there, staring into his eyes, and after a damp mystical time we would both simultaneously orgasm. Only by accident would it occur. We could never try and make it happen.

  Outside the Nova it had begun to snow. I could hear the soft patter of snowflakes melting on the heat of the automobile and see thousands of crystals falling on the parking lot where Jimmy had just asked me to marry him. It was a brave act, but I knew we would never get married. I understood and had come to terms with the fact that our destiny was to break each other’s hearts, to destroy each other. Making love was only delay. Wearing his ring was only delay. Jimmy’s great problem was that he wanted to be liked so badly—by me, by anyone—that he couldn’t hear his own mind. This deafness made him unpredictable. You never knew when his own voice would find him.

  But we could make love. I was sweating under my parka now.

  “Every one of us has a ‘charge,’” Gordon had said. “Simply by being born we’ve asked for something to do. The child in your belly has already asked to participate. Is there anything in your life that in some way you haven’t asked for? Life does not crash down on us. Isaiah said, ‘Here I am, send me.’” I remember Gordon blindly thumped his breast with his fist like a boxer asking for a fight. “Here I am. Send me.”

  I’d had sex with Jimmy on our first date. My friend Chance had practically dared me. I knew I shouldn’t have, because immediately I really liked him. I remember exactly the moment he first entered me, because he took my breath away: literally. It was like being a little girl falling off the merry-go-round; for a couple seconds I couldn’t for the life of me remember how to breathe. From that moment forward I was just waiting to be pregnant.

  “Do you control whether this bus arrives safely at its destination?” Gordon had asked. “Whether or not the fan belt was correctly fastened? Do you control the water supply? the grain harvest? the manufacturing of gasoline? the tides? the moon? Yet all these so-called extraneous events manipulate your every breathing moment. Freedom is grace. Living with the knowledge that you are a manifestation of God, that all your actions are the working musculature of heaven, that is grace.”

  When I stepped into an abortion clinic in Albany, I knew I was in breach of an unverbalized agreement I’d already made. There in the waiting room while I was reading a magazine, a woman I barely recognized from my high school back in
Texas came up to me.

  “Christy, is that you?” She was Mexican, with curly black hair. Her name was Cruz Alvarez. “Christy Walker! Oh, my God, it’s good to see you!” I looked in her pale brown eyes and knew I wasn’t going to be able to go through with the abortion. This was the last place in the world I wanted to be recognized. I knew I was old enough to handle a child. Even a year earlier an abortion could have been justified, but I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t asked for this baby, because I had.

  “Creation didn’t happen. It’s happening. Grace will come as you acknowledge how much of every instant is beyond your control.” Gordon’s voice moved inside me like a reed instrument. “That is freedom. People in this country believe freedom is the ability to choose—I choose a Cadillac over a Buick; I am a Cadillac man; our only avenue toward more choice is more money—but choice and money are not freedom.” He adjusted his sunglasses and raised his head. “There is a right kind of dissatisfaction. There’s a void within us that cannot be filled. This void is our need for God. You must search for and stay with that longing.”

  The snow on the rear window was melting into small streams and pouring slowly down the glass. Still those unblinking cat eyes were staring at me, drifting in the blackness. They reminded me of my own cat, the cat I left behind. Looking down on Jimmy I wanted to kiss his face, bite his cheek, make it bleed, drink the blood up, kiss it better, put a Band-Aid on it, heal him, and do it all again. I wanted to suffer. There was no way out, only through.

  The eyes came forward into the perimeter of the dashboard lights. I couldn’t believe it.

  “Oh, my God, Jimmy,” I said, breathless and dizzy. “Is that Grace?”

  “WHO’S IN THE DOG?”

  After a night at the Kingston Skytop Inn and Steak House, a motel with a banner view of Interstate 87, we drove into Manhattan, picked up Christy’s bags from the Port Authority Bus Terminal, and opted for lunch.