Ash Wednesday

by Ethan Hawke

“I go up to their hotel room, and this Tripp”—my father said the name as if it were a curse—“offers me a glass of wine. It’s eleven-thirty in the goddamn morning, he wants to marry my seventeen-year-old daughter, and he offers me a glass of wine. Body odor to this guy was like a stamp of authenticity. He smells, she looks like a ragamuffin teenage runaway standing behind him, and their room looks like it belongs to a couple of four-year-olds. And how old was the guy, at least four or five years older than you, right?” He turned to me.

  “He was four years older.” I did it. I looked in his sprinkled yellow eye and answered him. He didn’t seem to notice.

  “Listen, for a father this Algonquin Hotel room may as well have been the seventh tier of Hell.” My dad charged on. “She goes to New York wanting to be Virginia Woolf or Dorothy Parker or whatever, and she’s not there six months before her aspirations have become to be the subject of his pissant photo sessions. This twerp’s got some fancy-pants dream of being a photographer—right?—and now all of a sudden he’s got my girl being a model and I’m supposed to sign some papers so she can work as an adult and this other set that are gonna let her marry this freak.”

  “I only invited you there so you would stop it,” I said quietly. Looking at his face now, I was aware of how rarely he looked at me.

  “That’s not what you said at the time.” He laughed, a big hearty chuckle. “Oh, boy, so that’s the story now, huh? Jimmy, I’m sure you realize this, but to watch your daughter willfully hurt herself? I can’t tell you.” He threw up his arms like King Lear. “I know that’s the weekend I lost you.”

  “You didn’t lose me, you signed the papers,” I said simply. Now I couldn’t stop looking at him. I loved him, I couldn’t help it. All I really wanted to do was kiss his cheeks. I didn’t want to be angry. I wanted to see all the good he had done for me. I’d lived long enough at this point to meet individuals whose parents had truly scarred them. People who had been raped and abused, people who had been completely forgotten. My father had never done any of those things. We just misplaced each other. And now when our eyes met we didn’t know where to hold on. He was what I was running away from, and yet he was a part of me. That, I realized, was why I’d invited him here.

  “I signed those papers to try to keep you close,” he said, meeting my eyes. “You may not remember, sweetie, but you were going to do what you were going to do. I just thought I’d stay closer as your ally than as your enemy.” He paused and looked around the table for help but his eyes came back to me. “But I’ll believe you if you tell me I did it wrong. You were very intimidating, even as a kid.”

  “Oh, Christ, Daddy, I wasn’t intimidating, you just never knew how to listen,” I said, trying to smile. “That’s all you need to do.” I was now holding his gaze full on and he was listening.

  “OK,” he said, his smile failing. “I can do that.”

  Under the table I grabbed Jimmy’s hand, the way a pilot grabs the throttle.

  “My mother used to say”—my father grinned, exposing the gap between his two front teeth—“’Frank has been successful at everything he’s set out to do in life, with the exception of marriage.’ I hope that’s not a trait I passed on to you.”

  “Well, it isn’t all up to her, sir.” These were the first words Jimmy had spoken in what felt like twenty years. “It takes two. Isn’t that the, you know”— he paused and smiled—“common wisdom?”

  You could never predict Jimmy. He didn’t give a shit about Tripp anymore—or my dad. He just seemed happy I was holding his hand. And for the first time in what felt like lifetimes, I was sitting still.

  THE BLESSING

  We were staying in your basic Mom and Pop version of a Motel 6. The neon sign out front advertised a pool and HBO in a bright blue light spilling out over Route 28. The pool was dead center in the parking lot, all tarped off for the winter. An Indian couple from Delhi owned the place. I don’t know how they found their way to Ohio, but they kept the place super clean and seemed happy enough, very chatty and friendly. Christy was in the bathtub scrubbing her hair. She’d been so damn amiable lately. Her pregnancy had lifted a veil, a curtain of depression, that had often seemed draped around her. Most times she’s quick to vacillate in and out of extreme irritation. For example, if I drop a banana peel on a table or pee on the seat, or if a cabinet door is left open and she bumps her head, that usually gets under her skin. But with the onset of the second trimester she was always scratching my back, playing with my hair, or rubbing my ears. She was almost constantly nice to me. If something annoying happened, like I took a wrong turn or we lost a pair of gloves, she’d laugh about it. She loved it whenever I touched her. We were boning twice a day. On the flip side, she could cry watching CNN.

  Anyway, she always loved taking baths. She has a whole independent bag for bath stuff: salts, oils, bubbles, minerals, whatever. She’d been in the bathroom for over an hour. I was sitting on the bed with my shirt off, my jeans on, the television muted, and my nose buried in that prayer book.

  The Lord’s Prayer was always my favorite: Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Reading all the blessings and vows got to me somehow. They were filling me up, like water collecting in a cloud, making me exceedingly emotional. I can’t say it was honestly the mystery of Christ moving through me, it might’ve been the familiarity of the words or simple nostalgia, but these passages were searing through my chest. They seemed to come off the page and form a connective tissue between all the disparate moments of my life: my first communion, Christmas Eves, Sunday school, confirmation. Shit, I lost my virginity on a youth group retreat. The realization that Jesus had been there when anything big was happening to me made me feel close to him, or at least to his name. It felt good to be near these words again, like there had been some order, a constant presence in my life, even though I had been blind to it.

  I thought of how my unborn child couldn’t possibly understand the sounds she must be experiencing there in the bathroom, the twists of her mother’s body, the echoes of the tile walls, the water sloshing, just as I can’t understand the movements and sounds that shaped my life. Fuck, man, I was reading this book sitting on the bed listening to Christy splash around, and for a brief moment I felt held by God. I don’t even know what I mean by God, but I felt held in a way that I knew I’d been held before, like I was moving with some deep hidden electrical current or an underground rushing body of water. I was on the road I had been born to walk, and I had never been away from it.

  Stepping out of the darkness of the bedroom into the harsh fluorescent light of the bathroom, I shut the lid of the toilet and sat down. Chris was completely submerged underwater, but after a second or two she resurfaced. She wiped the soapy water from her eyes and smiled a goofy grin. There was a melon-sized bulge in her belly now and a thin dark line up the center of her stomach. Her breasts were large and seemed to float in the soapy bath.

  “Can I read some of this to you?” I asked, motioning to the small prayer book in my hands.

  She nodded and pulled her hair back off her forehead and behind her ears. Her giant toes were playing with the faucet, spinning the handle until the water shut off. It was quiet now. Only the slight rattle of the radiators and my voice broke the silence.

  “This is the marriage blessing, OK?” I looked at her apprehensively, waiting for some reassuring gesture.

  She nodded. With her hair all wet and flat against her head, her eyes were the large expectant eyes of a twelve-year-old.

  “’Most gracious God,’” I began, my voice thin and nervous, “’we give thanks to you for your tender love in sending Jesus Christ to come among us, to be born of a human mother, and to make the way of the cross to be a way of life.’”

  I didn’t look up. I’m not the most tremendous of public readers, so I concentrated on trying to let her hear the words. “’We thank you also for consecrating the union of man a
nd woman. By the power of your holy spirit, pour out the abundance of your blessing upon this man and this woman. Defend them from every enemy, lead them into all peace, let their love for each other be a seal about their hearts, a mantle about their shoulders, and a crown about their foreheads.’”

  I just loved this; emotion was percolating like boiling water in my chest. “’Bless them in their waking and in their sleeping, in their work and in their companionship, in their joys and in their sorrows; in their life and in their death. Finally in your mercy bring them to that table where your saints feast forever in your heavenly home’”—I paused to make sure I didn’t well up too much and start blubbering out of control; my vision was blurring like I was looking through an inch of water, but still I didn’t look up from the page—“’through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns one God forever and ever.’”

  When I finished reading this, blammo! I was crying again. I can’t explain what was happening to me, but I was ripping apart at the seams. It just all sounded so damn deep and profound: “A SEAL ABOUT THEIR HEARTS,” “FEASTING WITH SAINTS.” My eyes were all red and swollen. Like a sledgehammer, these passages were knocking me out. Christy and I were giving each other the only thing we truly have to offer: our time. We were going to give each other the living minutes of our life. Damn. I hadn’t sincerely thought about God in so long, and now the ideas were cascading over me. I couldn’t tell you what “the way of the cross” meant or define for anybody what the Holy Spirit is, but I loved this girl, we were gonna get married, and I was gonna BATHE IN THE HEAVENLY MERCY OF MY EVER LOVING FATHER.

  “Jimmy, are you all right?” Christy asked.

  I looked up from my red cloth-bound book, which I was now clinging to as a child hangs on to its security blanket, and Christy’s expression shocked me. She was frightened.

  “You’re not like born again or anything, are you?” she asked me earnestly.

  I thought for a moment. “Well, not really. It’s just beautiful, don’t you think?”

  “I think it’s—I don’t know, it scares me,” she said gently, moving her knees slightly back and forth in the bathwater, the ripples sending the soapy water high up the sides of the thin plastic tub. She sat up, her breasts hanging drenched and heavy on her chest. “That kind of language,” she continued softly, “always makes me think that maybe in another lifetime I was burned at the stake.” She splashed her face with water. “That stuff gives me the creeps.”

  I felt like she’d sucker-punched me. “It’s kind of pretty, though, don’t you think?” I asked weakly.

  She shrugged her shoulders and dunked her head under the water again.

  Suddenly my vision clouded over. It was like I was blind. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. Without saying anything I stood up and stumbled out of the light of the bathroom and found my way down onto the gushy hotel bed and the darkness of the muted TV light.

  “Are you OK?” she called from the bathroom. “I’m sorry if that passage gives me the heebie-jeebies, sweetie, but it does. Talking about God just seems so pointless.” There was a pause as she figured out what she meant. “It’s like drilling a well right by a river, you know? The water’s already there; you don’t have to dig for it. Whatever is good or valuable about religion is always around us. You don’t have to go to church for it. To be honest, churches give me the willies. Whenever I go inside one, I feel like the whole place is pleading to some outside force, you know? Like God or whatever is outside of us, withholding the goods. I don’t really buy that idea—that someone up on a hill is doling out favors, but only if we ask in a really really nice way. I don’t buy it, do you?”

  I was staring into space listening to her voice, cringing more and more with each new statement.

  “I guess I believe in God,” I said, dazed. We hadn’t ever talked about this kind of thing before. This should be important; it surprised me that the subject had never come up. Through the slightly open bathroom door, I could see the sink glowing brightly, but I couldn’t see anything else, just the shiny wet floor and the glowing white sink. Amazing, I thought, how instantly I could feel I didn’t know Christy at all, and how little I felt she knew me.

  There is this place deep inside where I feel I am connected to everything, not just trees and grass and dogs but buildings and stairways, rocks and sidewalks. It’s a deathly quiet place that I guess I’ve never shared with anyone and probably couldn’t, a place that is cold sober when my body is stumbling drunk, another consciousness that sits still like an antenna in tune with some other part of the galaxy. It was this part of me that I wanted to bring to our wedding, a centered space from which I could send out my oaths. I imagined that this secret antenna was my connection to whatever eternity might be and was the part of me that Christy alone perceived and loved. It was that same magic timeless part of her that I wanted to marry. But in the dark of the motel room, I realized that whether I was married or not, no one would ever know all of me; my truest self would always be estranged and alone. I was incapable of expressing my limited screwball faith and I knew that, even if I could, I’d box it in so dramatically it would be trivialized. I began to feel the familiar swell of numbing anger.

  “Look,” Christy said, unplugging the bath, “I don’t care if you believe in God. It just seemed a little scary, you reading that scripture like you were Moses or something.”

  “Moses?” I snarled, listening to the water draining out from the tub. “What are you talking about Moses for?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t.” Sometimes she acts so much smarter than me. I wanted to smack her head through a wall. I was dizzy thinking so many thoughts. My stomach hurt. My religious ideas were so half-baked they couldn’t stand the cursory inspection of a five-year-old, and that pissed me off. I rubbed my forehead, digging painfully into my eye cavity to relieve some of the pressure building up inside my cranium.

  “If you and I are going to commune with the Holy Spirit,” Christy said through the doorway, “it’s you and me who are going to do the communing, and I don’t think any self-respecting God gives a horse’s ass what rituals we enact, as long as our intentions are clean, you know?” She was getting out of the tub, wrapping a scrappy thin motel towel around her chest and another one around her hair. Through my obscured vision I could make out a glimpse of her reflection in the mirror above the white-hot glare of the sink. “My point is, I’m not gonna swear my everlasting love on a bunch of crapola creeds I don’t believe in. I can’t. You know what I mean, Beanie?” She was trying to maintain a demure, unthreatening tone.

  I was silent, turning my eye to the flickering blue light of the television. Commercials were spinning by.

  “Sweetie . . . are you out there? Sweetie?” She poked her head out of the door and looked at me.

  “It’s not crapola,” I said, feeling the need to stick up for a religion I had basically paid almost zero attention to for the whole of my adult life. To not do so, I worried, would be a betrayal of where I came from and of all the thousands of little prayers I secretly pray. I kept forgetting to breathe.

  “I’m sorry I called it crapola, all right? I was trying to be funny,” she said earnestly. “You understand that blind faith in this kind of thing causes wars and gross atrocities, right? You understand that?” She had her very serious, no-bullshit manner about her that I find very condescending.

  “People do those things,” I said.

  “Yeah, people reading out of little red books.” She made a move to go back to the sink.

  “Give me a fuckin’ break! I thought it was beautiful! Call a fuckin’ lawyer. I felt good for ten seconds; shoot me!” I screamed, punching myself so hard in the head I thought I might fall over. Sometimes I do that, I wanna hit something so bad I just smack my own face. I paused momentarily and tried to control my voice. There was the same frightening placid silen
ce coming from the bathroom that always follows one of my outbursts. I’ve said it before but, man, it’s no joke: Christy hates to be yelled at.

  “It’s like a song, you know?” I tried to present a new calm exterior. “You’ve forgotten about it, but then it comes on the radio and you still know all the lyrics and it makes you so happy that somewhere it’s still being played and now you can sing along, like your life isn’t passing you by at a zillion fuckin’ miles per hour.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t curse so much” was all she said.

  I skulked around for a minute or so not looking at her, unmuted the television, and sat in silence for probably over an hour. There was an old episode of Babylon Five on that I watched while Christy got dressed for bed and slammed some suitcases shut.

  Zoning out there on the bed, I started thinking about my first girlfriend, Lisa. God, her smile was a knockout, all crooked and sarcastic! She was Catholic and a good time. I remember kissing her out on our high school parking lot while snow was falling on us. The skin on her neck was hot, and I was feeling her breasts through her blue down vest. She’d just gotten her driver’s license and was standing outside her daddy’s green Chrysler station wagon. The snow collecting on top of our heads like funny hats made us laugh. She was so adorable: auburn hair, very petite—not like Christy at all. She loved me as if her whole life depended on it, like her heart would split in two if the world ever disappointed me. Later on that same snow day, we went back to her parents’ house and goofed around on her living room couch while The Terminator was playing on HBO. She gave me her body—to play with, to touch, to kiss—as a gift. I don’t mean that sexist or anything. It was her gift to me. My hand slid inside her, making those squishy sounds of wetness, but she didn’t smile or look away embarrassed, she just soaked me in. I can still see the depth of her brown eyes. As I entered her, she whispered in my ear, “Is there anything else I can do for you?” and I came instantly. It felt like the fluid from my spine emptied out completely, leaving me paralyzed in her arms. Fuck, man, I miss her. I’ll always miss her. Sometimes it hurts bad. The longing for the past is like a tangible physical torture. Oh, God, I wanted to remember every moment of my life. I didn’t want to forget anything. If I could remember, then the passing seconds might have some meaning or be amassing into some definition or purpose. But I dumped Lisa, I knocked her up, and she got all turned around and confused about the abortion. She cried and cried, called the house for weeks, but . . . I let her go. Once every other year or so I still spoke with her. She had two kids. She told me she hated her husband, but she probably just said that for me. No one will ever love me like that again. The burden of all those memories creates in me a yearning for the quiet I imagine would come with a giant heroin overdose or if I shoved my skull under the wheel of a moving bus.