by Ethan Hawke
The Howard Johnson’s in Times Square felt like the crossroads of the universe. A good portion of the planet passes through this restaurant at some point in their lifetime. It was about twelve-thirty in the afternoon. I couldn’t get Christy to eat anything of substance; she was curled up across from me practically making out with a root beer float. It was seedy as all hell, but to me the HoJo’s was like heaven. The place was walled with giant filthy glass windows that let in a peculiar funky gray filtered light. It was right on the corner of 45th and Broadway, and outside looked like Tokyo or some futuristic dream: a madness of blinking lights and billboards all selling different variations of sex. It was like sitting in the dim calm of an aquarium as schools of manic fish flashed by in explosions of color and energy.
Christy’s bags were laid up against our red plastic booth. This waitress kept hustling by, accidentally tripping on them and giving me a nasty look each time. She was pretty sexy, actually—she was in her early forties but she wore her little black-and-white waitress outfit like a stripper might, real tight and slutty—but that’s a look that works on me. Christy was in a great mood. It’s easy to love her when she’s in one of these moods. Her eyes were bright green; her root beer float had the effect heroin has on a junkie. She kept turning her long skinny spoon upside down in her mouth, closing her eyes, and meticulously licking off the ice cream.
We were trying to figure out what to do, and it was starting to become clear to me that I didn’t have any options, not really—not if I truly wanted to marry her. I’d been maneuvering in different ways to get her to consider returning to Albany as an option, but it was a no-go. The only real question was what I was going to do about my lieutenant. But that was my problem. I’d figure it out. This was where the rubber met the road.
The noise in the HoJo’s was pretty deafening. The place was buzzing with lunching tourists, and everybody was chattering away full steam. Christy herself was yakking a blue streak.
“It’s funny, isn’t it? When you look at this many people all in one place”—she was pointing with her spoon at the crowds of people scurrying by outside—“it’s easy to imagine us all like water: like waves on top of the ocean. Don’t you think?”
“I guess,” I said. Maybe I should just resign, I thought, and let the chips fall. In truth, I never should’ve joined. I went to college for two years for chrissakes; I’m not an idiot. I’ve made so many mistakes in my life, wasted so much time.
There was a little blond girl maybe three years old sitting at the table across from us with her father, who was probably just a year or two older than me. His beard was thicker than mine, but otherwise we could’ve passed for brothers. I was having a tough time not eavesdropping on their conversation. They had tickets to The Lion King laid out on the table. The girl had bright Irish red cheeks. She leaned forward, sticking out her clean tiny tongue, and said in a high voice, “Dadda, what does my tongue smell like?”
“I don’t know, darling,” the father answered. His voice sounded startlingly like my own.
“Where do we go when we die?” Christy asked, forcing me to look back at her.
“What?” I asked.
“Or, more to the point, where did I go? The first time I came to New York City I was with my father on a business trip. I was probably only ten. That girl isn’t alive anymore. You can’t go talk to her. You can’t find her walking around out there.” Sometimes when Christy speaks, it’s like there’s a tiny hole on top of her head and light is just pouring out of it. She relaxes and lets go so rarely that when she does, it feels like a great rain of light.
“I look at you and think of the evening I first met you, and you’re not that person anymore. I mean, the elements are the same, but you’re different. Look at me right now.” Christy lifted her long arms up in the air, still holding the dripping spoon, asking me to take in all of her. “I will never be this person again. When we walk out of here today—when tomorrow morning comes—I will be somebody else, not exactly the same as I am right now. Maybe that’s all that dying is.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. The sun had come out from behind a cloud, and I still couldn’t take my eyes from the child across from us. The girl was silhouetted against a now-bright window; her father had on a smokin’ cool leather jacket. It’d be fun to take your kid to see The Lion King, I thought. I don’t know, maybe it’d be boring. I’ve never really spent any time with children, and I had no idea how I was going to handle the whole up-and-coming situation.
“I haven’t been home to Texas in eight years,” Christy continued. “How did that much time go by? I’m a woman now; when did that happen? I’m gonna be a mother.” She was holding her hand to her chest, giving me an expression of disbelief.
“You sure you don’t want any of this?” I asked, holding my burger. More than halfway done with the monstrous thing, I could say with authority that it was excellent. Probably the best burger I ever ate: fresh tomatoes, fresh onions, a gargantuan crisp deli pickle.
She shook her head no and went on talking. “I mean, let me tell you this. You hear people talk about whether or not ‘you’ are your body or if ‘you’ are your mind. What your spirit is, right?”
She paused and I nodded.
“Well, let me tell you what you’re not. You are not your body, no way. I mean, my body right now is a carnival and I am not in control of it. You should feel what’s going on inside of me; I’m vibrating like . . . I don’t know, like the fuselage of a crashing plane. OK?” She smiled at me, set down her spoon, and cradled her belly with both hands. “This body that you see is not me. I’m not doing any of this. Feel my elbow.” She held out her bent arm for me to touch and, laying my hands on her milk-soft skin, I felt her whole joint popping with electricity.
“Sometimes I wonder if our personality—or what we think of as ourselves—isn’t just more like a radar device on a plane. You know, this consciousness, or whatever, is just there to keep our bodies out of trouble, to keep us from bumping into one another.” She leaned over and, without using her hands, sipped up some root beer from the straw. “We get so hung up on things like our names, where we were born, our country, our religion. All this information that was just handed down to us—I mean, even our genetic codes, right?” She held out her almost misshapen long fingers for me to observe. “These hands are my grandmother’s hands, OK? They’re not mine. Even what a person is good at: he can run fast, he’s good at math”—she was randomly pointing, selecting from the people sitting around us—“I mean, none of that is us.”
“All right, Christy, none of that’s us,” I said, taking another big bite of my cheeseburger. It was greasy, I’m not saying it wasn’t, but man, oh, man, it was scrumptious. No shit. This restaurant was giving me a buzz. Maybe it was just Christy talking, but for the first time in maybe years I felt myself blowing up with air. Christy seemed lighter too. I like it when she talks to me—whatever she wants to say, I don’t care; I just like it that she wants to tell me things. If the way we were feeling was any kind of indication, I knew we were doing the right thing in getting out of Albany. Just being miles away from the military made my shoulders fall back into position and my breath come looser and deeper. The juxtaposition of Times Square outside with the warmth and the relative calmness of all of us inside made me feel like we were dining in the center of the earth.
The little girl across from us spoke loudly to her father. “Dadda, when you were a little boy and I was your mommy, I took you to see a play once. Did you know that?” I couldn’t hear his reply.
“Do you know how hard I worked to get out of Texas?” Christy went on, her ideas falling one on top of the next. I don’t think she even registered the little girl, the father, or the scowling waitress passing us by. Right then it was all about me. She wanted to communicate. “All I ever wanted was to go to New York City. I went to summer school and took extra classes just to graduate a year and a half ea
rly, and then what did I do? I came here, got married to some alcoholic kid from back home, and took care of him for three years. Was that what I was in such a hurry to do? It didn’t make any sense. It’s like I broke my own leg, you know?”
I’ve always thought that way about Christy, that she was like a cypress tree who for some hidden reason refused to turn its branches all the way toward the sun.
“And I never wanted to go back home until I was somebody strong. A person with authority who could speak with experience and intelligence to justify why I left so suddenly. But I haven’t become that person. I was a seventeen-year-old girl and I walked right by these windows in a leopard-skin jacket, and now eight years have gone by and I don’t feel anything important has happened.”
“What about the baby?” I asked.
The question interrupted her momentum.
“Until now, I guess. Until now.” She looked down and dug with her spoon into the last giant ball of ice cream at the bottom of her fountain soda glass.
I was feeling more in love with Christy right then inside this Howard Johnson’s than I knew I was capable of; I wanted to be her, to be inside of her, to have her own me to use as she wished, to protect her, to read her to sleep at night, to be that root beer float sliding down her throat.
“Yes, I was your mommy,” the girl beside us announced, nodding triumphantly to her father. “Your name was Sofie, and I took you to the park and I gave you chocolate and juice. Do you remember?”
“No,” he answered simply.
Christy and I looked over at the father and daughter across from us and then back at each other.
“Can I tell you something really corny,” Christy asked me. “Promise not to bring it up later and hold it against me and make fun of me? ’Cause sometimes you do that.”
“Sure.” I nodded.
“Promise,” she insisted, smiling.
“Promise.”
“When I was a little girl, do you know what I secretly wanted to be when I grew up?”
“What?”
“A saint.” She smiled, her red lips wide and wet with foamy ice cream. “And if I had to say—I mean, if I could actually choose—I still do. I’d like to be the saint of all the people who don’t have any beliefs at all and don’t want them.”
The sound of her voice was beautiful; air seemed to move right through her.
“Is there any way I can talk you into getting something to eat?” I asked her.
“I’m really not hungry,” she said simply. “Seriously.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t have any breakfast either.” I was starting to worry with this news of the pregnancy that Christy had better start taking care of herself. She was still sneaking cigarettes and she hadn’t eaten anything but candy bars and this ice-cream float since I’d picked her up the night before. She’s never been good at the whole self-maintenance bit. She could drink like a hound dog. I’ve held her head over the toilet countless times. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her do any exercise.
“Don’t get all cocky about this, but being with you is the closest I’ve ever come to a sensation that I was someplace authentic. But how are we supposed to carry that with us? How do we build a house with that? Can you? Or is that just a feeling, like the feeling that I love this root beer float.
“What am I besides what I think?” Christy moved on. “’Cause what I think is always revolving. I know, I know”—she cut herself off—“that’s why people have beliefs. They lock things down in their mind and put up some fence posts and decide what to believe in, but that doesn’t mean the fence is real. It’s all pretty arbitrary, isn’t it? Honestly, it can’t be that all the Hindus are going to heaven and the rest of us are screwed to the wall, can it? Whatever is happening is going to happen to all of us whether we like it or not, don’t you think?”
She pushed away the ice cream and ran long fingers through her hair.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” she announced, but she didn’t move.
“Why don’t you go?” I asked.
“Oh, I’m OK.” She shrugged.
“Do you want to see my angry faces?” the high voice of the child by the window called out. “I have two.” Then she proceeded to demonstrate two comic presentations of ferocious anger. One with arms crossed and a furrowed brow, the other with her fists clenched in the air and her teeth menacingly exposed like a tiger.
“I mean, let me ask you something.” Christy started up again, smiling, amused by the little girl’s antics. “Here we are right in the center of Times Square surrounded by everybody and their mother, right? I mean, there’s a giant world outside, right?” She glanced out the windows beyond the little blond girl. “Look outside, you can see the passage of time.”
She was right. At least a hundred years were represented out there—some sad scraggly tree trying its best to grow in its designated patch of dirt, a pigeon-stained crumbling statue of a once-famous actress, an old tired dog tied to the metal grating of a forlorn tailor shop that looked like it’d been closed since Jimmy Carter was president, a Day Glo–bright billboard of a naked woman holding a microwave oven—anything you were looking for could be found there.
“Do you honestly think that we two, here alone at this table, can make each other happy for the rest of our lives?” Christy asked. She waited for an answer.
There was a silence between us that seemed to occupy the whole restaurant.
“Obviously no, right? I mean, let’s face that. Let’s look that in the eyes.” She bent her head forward and stared intensely at me, then shook her head lightly as if to break her own spell. “But happiness is overrated. Nobody who’s gonna live for more than, like, a couple of days is gonna be happy for the rest of their life. So let’s forget happiness. The more interesting question is can we build a home together? Is it possible? And what is home? Is there a place we can live that is permanent? This little baby in my belly is more at home right now than it will be for the entirety of its breathing life, and it isn’t even born. It will spend virtually every evening, for hopefully the next ninety years, trying to feel as safe and warm in bed as it does right now inside its mama’s belly. And this mama is no saint.” She pointed both her long fingers at herself accusingly. “I love to drink, and I don’t think saints do that. I can’t even quit smoking. You don’t see many paintings of saints with a Marlboro hanging from their lips, you know what I’m saying? But if I had my choice that’s what I’d be—a person who does the right thing all the time, not because I’m trying to but by instinct. I want to be one of those girls who says, ‘Oh, from the minute I got pregnant, cigarettes tasted like an ashtray.’ But they don’t. They taste great. And I’ve got this free-floating anxiety that lives in me and transports itself from one worry to the next; it’s powerful and it’s lurking, trying to find anything at all to give me cause for a nervous attack, you know?”
I did. To say Christy struggles with her nerves is an understatement.
“This feeling twists me up through all the minutes of every day, and smoking calms it. It does.”
“What are you talking about, Christy? I feel like you’re trying to tell me something but you’re not saying what it is.” I felt like that most of the time we spoke.
“I’m just telling you that if you want to try and drive me home, it’s a long way.”
“I wanna take you home, Bean Dog.”
“You do? Do you really?” she asked, biting her nails.
I nodded.
“Well, I want to take you home too.”
“Cool.”
“No, I mean it. What are we gonna do about the army?” Christy asked.
“I don’t know. I’m gonna quit, I think.” I was uncomfortable now that the conversation’s focus had turned to me.
“Is that what you want?” she asked.
“I know I don’t want to go back there,” I said s
oftly. That was the truth. I needed to move on; it was as obvious as the sun. At that moment I wasn’t even scared. I had a friend and that was all I needed. If I went ahead and left this restaurant, it seemed I’d come out somebody new. My only fear, still buried in my guts, was, Who would that person be?
“I love you as you are, Jimmy, I don’t need anything about you to change. But you’re gonna change,” Christy said, seeming to answer my thoughts. “Things will happen to both of us. I only want what you feel is right, but if we’re ever gonna get married, if I’m gonna have a baby, there’s certain things we probably should do to get ready. Like, I’m gonna need to meet your mom, see where you come from, visit your father’s grave. I think that’s important.”
“Let’s not do that,” I said, as naturally and as instinctively as I’ve ever spoken.
“We should, Jimmy,” Christy said, crossing her legs in the Howard Johnson’s red booth. “Let’s go tell your mom about the baby, deal with the military, take care of business, you know? Then head out to Texas. We need to begin this right. My whole life I feel I’ve been continually starting from a standing-still position. I never build on anything. It’s always move on and”—she snapped her fingers—“start from scratch.”
“We don’t need to go to Ohio,” I reiterated.
“I think we do,” she said peacefully.
I looked down and picked up one of my remaining French fries. My mom, I thought. What a drag.
The little girl across from us was pointing at that old tired dog leashed to the grating of the tailor shop. My eyes followed her small finger. The animal looked to be a black Labrador patiently waiting for its master.
“Dadda,” she called out, “who’s in the dog?”
MY ACTIONS MAKE ME BEAUTIFUL
Jimmy’s father was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. He personally never killed anyone, or so Jimmy claimed. When he returned home from the service he worked in landscaping and construction during the warm months, and in the winter he harvested and sold Christmas trees. Jimmy was eight when his father suffered his first severe manic episode. After breakfast one morning, a twenty-nine-year-old Mr. Heartsock called his wife, Jimmy’s mom, out onto their front porch, took off his wedding ring, and threw it down their suburban street. He stepped up onto his motorcycle and roared away. Several weeks later he was institutionalized for the first time, after he was found sleeping naked and half frozen in a snowy local high school football field.
