A Bright Ray of Darkness

by Ethan Hawke

  He stared mournfully out at New York City. Lights passed by out the window, red, green, blue. His face seemed to move erratically, lit by the glow of the storefronts and moving with the speed of the limo.

  “Here’s the deal,” he continued in his famous, almost high-pitched lisp. “The great thing about being a man is that as you get older you get more masculine. Unfortunately, so do the women.” He laughed at his own joke. “There’s a gender war out there and don’t pretend there isn’t. The way everyone’s reacting to your cocksmanship. It’s the matriarchal society trying to make sure that you are shamed significantly enough that their lousy husbands keep their pricks in their pants.”

  I jammed the key in the bag and slid it to my nose.

  “Here’s what I know: I fucked Ida Hayes, this is when she was only twenty-four, in an elevator at the Oscars. I had my finger on the door close button till I came. Then I let go of the button, zipped up my prick, walked into the house, and sat my bum on national TV. OK, that’s a great story, right?” Dean grinned at me as we blazed uptown. “I’ve won Best Actor at Cannes, which was my life goal; I have fished while discussing the enlightenment of the individual soul with Victor Chavez at dawn over a lake in Venezuela. I have prayed with survivors in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, I’ve handed out rice cakes in Rwanda, I sat in a cave in silent meditation by myself for a month in Mongolia, I smoked peyote, I did all that, and guess what? It’s all without meaning. Everything. Everything real is happening inside the self. I know that scares you, ’cause no matter what you say, I can see in your eyes that you still believe in God.”

  The coke was shining a bright light up my nose and through the top of my empty skull. I wasn’t thinking about anything—much less the concept of God. I wondered what it was about my face that made him think I was a believer.

  “You can’t handle the fact of nothing,” he said, tossing his head like a horse. “There is nothing. There is no such thing as an individual. As William Harding or Dean Deadwilder. Thirty-five years from now you are not going to mourn the dissolution of your marriage—you will only wonder why you gave a fuck. You’ll think about it the same way you remember the feelings you had when your mom took you on a trip to your grandma’s but forgot your favorite blankie—and you cried and cried. You kicked and hollered. You considered it unjust. You throttled your car seat, people tried to console you, but you were despondent. Now, years later, you can laugh about the little blue blankie because you can see how trivial that was. It’s a blanket. Get along without it. It did not define you any more than that sweet wife of yours did. You get it? Everything that’s happening, is happening inside the self. And whatever the self is, it is not William Harding the movie actor or the adulterer. Whatever the self is will not die when your body has worms crawling through your eye sockets.”

  We were racing across town; one second his face was lit a bright friendly yellow, the next a sickly green, then a terrifying red.

  “I can see by the way your cheekbones are trying to fight their way out of your skin that you are still in love with the idea of being married. You want your ‘woman’ back. You want to be normal. A family man. You want people to respect you, to think you are a good person. But let me tell you something, you are trying to use your ears to walk and crying ’cause it ain’t working.”

  At this point my brain was fully hijacked by the cocaine.

  “Let me tell you about the Gender War,” Dean continued. “He vs. She. Man vs. Woman. Venus vs. Mars. Men do, women are. It’s a battle. It happens in our relationships and it happens inside ourselves. This is the real struggle. The male says, I want to do! And the female says, I want to be! Both desires exist in all of us. They are in conflict. I want to enjoy the river vs. I want to catch all the fish and dam the fucking bitch so it never floods my crops. And everybody’s looking to make peace. Marry me. Let’s be one. We can unite. The masculine and the feminine, we can heal the great split, the original chasm. Ever since the first cell split, illusion was created and the war commenced. But here’s the thing: The illusion is that we are, will be, or ever were anything but one cell. We don’t get it. The things that separate us, be they our bodies, our countries, our genders, they are not real. It doesn’t matter if you and your wife split up. Because it’s a false perception that you are even separate beings.”

  I guess I had a stupid look on my face because he leapt up in his seat and almost shouted at me excitedly.

  “Listen, it’s a like a wave who thinks it’s different from the wave next to him…he doesn’t even notice that they are both, always have been, and always will be water. Get it? Look at you—you don’t understand a word I’m saying.”

  He was right. I had the key up my nose again and was staring blankly.

  “Let me ask you this,” he proposed. “What is the point of your life? Why do you wake up, why do you go to the bathroom, ride the subway, smoke cigarettes, go put on your costume, recite some lines, bow, call a friend, go home, eat dinner, watch a movie and jerk off and go to bed? Why do you do that? You’ve already done it all before? See, what I mean is, some people have never reached their goals—so they still think their goals will have meaning and create change. Some people never try—so they still secretly think when and if they do try, their goals will have meaning. But those few of us who have achieved our goals, or those people who are racked with the disappointment of failing to meet their goals after a lifetime of real effort, both know that the fuckin’ goal was pointless—like the winner of a 1919 minor league baseball game. It’s a shared fantasy that any of this crap ever mattered in the first place. People love to apply themselves to games, jobs, relationships, politics, to create the illusion of meaning…If I can just heal my shoulder, then I could be quarterback! If only I could finish this documentary and tell the story of my great-uncle to the world; then I would matter. If I was a movie star, then I would exist. People will light a crack pipe or steal a television just to try and feel that they exist—to ramp up the idea that something is in fact happening—or others just turn on a video game and go to sleep—they don’t want to look square in the eyes that there is nothing to do. Maybe people think that if they confront the meaninglessness, the utter worthlessness of life they will buckle under the weight of the emptiness, and they are afraid. Maybe…”

  He took a deep breath, trying to settle his coke-fueled brain, and continued, “What if I say, wait a goddamn second here, I am not going to buy into it all—I know my life is transitory and that my whole existence is at play in this galaxy no more and no less than a beaver in the backwoods of Ontario, I know that! I can see the Milky Way. So, I don’t want my life to depend on what I achieve, what some asshole movie critic thinks of me, what Ingmar Bergman thinks of me…But, then, where will my sense of self come from? I need some sense of identity, right? I am a great actor. I have won numerous prizes! That is my identity. But that’s obviously pretense, right?” he asked me with that famous odd, almost feminine, lisp.

  “We all know that—an award, success, has no intrinsic meaning. Vincent van Gogh never won an award. So, then I say, OK, I get it, I want to live for the simple joy of living. What about that? Like a kid who just enjoys a game—doesn’t look for an identity as a great game player. She just plays! See, if we allow ourselves to be totally fucking intimate with nothingness; to embrace the great nothing—without defending it at all—without getting caught in the gender war of being or doing. When you recognize that you are an insecure macho pretentious asshole without trying to change it, then we can be still long enough to see that there is a hole—a shotgun-blasted hole—right there in the center of our chest, that we imagined that was our identity, but now we can see there is nothing there. And if we embrace that emptiness and stare down inside it—we might see that down this dark never-ending well is peace. And it’s not scary to have no self, it’s a relief. Like telling the truth instead of defending a lie…Stop defending a
reality that doesn’t exist: you.”

  He stopped for a moment and shoveled two more heaping keys of coke up his nose.

  There was a silence. He stared at me, waiting for a response.

  “I’m supposed to be on vocal rest”—I smiled—“and I think I lost you pretty soon after you gave me the coke.”

  He laughed a big warm laugh that shook the car.

  Dean knew some media-mogul type who was having a party in a suite on top of the Pierre hotel. There were giant glass chandeliers in the lobby and the doormen wore snazzy suits. We went to the penthouse floor, talking a mile a minute—both of us squinting, chewing on our lips, and swirling our tongues like a couple of drug fiends. At least I was; Dean might have been more composed.

  * * *

  —

  When I walked into the party, it was like entering a wide-screen film version of a teenager’s idea of a movie star’s nightlife. I moved in slow motion. I imagined myself photographed elegantly—my hands swaying when I moved, like I was strolling into the Playboy Mansion. My glances were imbued with knowing irony. One lingerie model after another passed me, giggling, or calling to a friend, or singing a pop song. We walked through the cigarette smoke and the thumping music to the faux hotel kitchenette in the back. Dean dumped his coke out on a breakfast table, opened us each a beer, and started talking to a young South American woman standing by the fridge.

  This tawdry eighties crap—parties, drugs, models—has always embarrassed me. I find that whole aspect of my profession revolting. Or at least I wanted to, or believed I should. When I was younger and first becoming famous, I would ask myself, in these situations, What would Jack London think? Would he be here? And I would usually leave. But I don’t think I knew Jack London that well anymore.

  I immediately made eye contact with a dead ringer for a twenty-one-year-old Brigitte Bardot. This woman was a stone-cold fox. She was a walking key lime pie—if you love key lime pie. She was the type of woman that even heterosexual women would love to see naked. Her tits were huge, gravity-defying. She could drive cross-country for a month, not change her jeans, and her pussy would still smell like crushed roses. Her hair fell softly with each gentle toss of her head, moving like the mane of a unicorn. She walked over to me and, in a dopey midwestern accent, told me that she had had my picture on her locker back in the twelfth grade. Three whole years ago!

  “That’s nothin’ to be embarrassed about,” I said, smug and cocksure.

  “Hey,” Dean interrupted us. “I need to tell you one thing, before you two leave.” Obviously, I was not aware I was “leaving.”

  “All right,” I said and looked him in the eyes.

  He leaned forward and whispered in my ear, “This is one of those moments where I’m not sure how to behave, but I’m gonna risk it—sins of commission are better than sins of omission, right?”

  I nodded hesitantly.

  He pushed me gently back so he could look me in the eyes one more time, as if to ready us both, then leaned forward again and said, “Your wife. I saw her at six-thirty yesterday morning, making out with that Valentino Calvino in the lobby of the Four Seasons. You don’t know her at all anymore. You never understood her anyway. Frankly, I like her and I think I understand a panther like Mary better than you do. But it’s over with you two. Let her go. Get a lawyer. I got one that’s going to call you tomorrow. Hire him.”

  He leaned back and looked me in the eyes to see how I was doing, then handed me the giant bag of coke with ten blue pills (to ease the edge), pointed at the blond Brigitte Bardot type, smiled, and said, “Go have a great night.”

  Now, I didn’t know who the hell Valentino Calvino was, but I didn’t believe Dean at all. Mary was going to come back to me. I felt sure. She needed me. I wasn’t going to back down. Dean was always so dramatic. Also, I wasn’t sure where he had this idea that I wasn’t letting my wife go. This was my plan. I’d let her go, and she would come back. Not to mention, I was still making googly eyes with a twenty-one-year-old Brigitte Bardot.

  I did manage to ask Dean before he left, “Who’s Valentino Calvino?”

  “He’s that Italian fashion stud. Come on, you know who he is.”

  “Isn’t he gay?” I asked.

  “Well, if he is, he’s the fag fuckin’ your wife.” Dean smiled his world-famous insouciant smile, kissed me on the mouth with his beard scratching my face, and walked away.

  Then I was alone with Brigitte; the coke was whipping my mind the way an old-time stagecoach driver might whip some poor sweaty horses. For a moment, a timid voice in my head reminded me that the first preview would be happening later this same day and that I should probably sleep and protect my voice. But as fast as you can say “Free Acting Lessons,” I started laying a rap on Brigitte. I didn’t care about Valentino Calvino, my voice, or the goddamn play. I finally felt good.

  “Are you an actress?” I began.

  “No…I would like to be, but…it’s hard to break in when you’re a model. I mean, I’m taking some classes at HB, but…”

  I cut her off. “Don’t believe that,” I said. “Just because you are stunningly attractive does not mean you should buy into society’s fiction that you cannot also be gifted. Have you seen Frances?”

  She shook her head no.

  “The Jessica Lange film?”

  Still the movie did not register.

  “Well, when Jessica Lange was young, people thought she was a sex kitten sent directly from Zeus to fuck up mankind. And I say this so you understand that she was nearly as sultry a siren as you are, OK? But she didn’t let that define her. Her performance in about three to five films will stand strong next to anything Robert De Niro or Gene Hackman has ever done. Brigitte Bardot’s early work is sensational. Have you seen Contempt?”

  She shook her head no again.

  “She could actually put on screen, for an audience to understand, how alienating it must be to be placed behind a glass wall the way men do to ravishing women—the way men must do to you. That’s the point of acting: to bring about awareness of humanity, to conjure compassion, and to alleviate shame. Your beauty doesn’t exclude you from your greater role as a human being. Vanessa Redgrave, Elizabeth Taylor, Catherine Deneuve—you must watch these women’s work. Watch it compulsively. And you can have that. Because the uncanny thing about you, the way you look—yeah, you’re foxy as hell and you have a sexuality that, I’ll be honest, makes it difficult to form sentences in your presence—but more than that, there is a deep fuckin’ kindness to you, a kindness that can’t be faked.” I was on a roll. “Something that people, men and women, are going to try to eat up and destroy, and you can’t let them. Your intelligence radiates a kind of crazy-sad nostalgia that I guarantee you, if it hasn’t already—this nostalgia, mixed with the way your skin shimmers, is going to make you feel lonely sometimes…Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  She nodded. I offered her a neatly chopped line of blow.

  “See.” I paused as if I were feeling awkward. “I want to kiss you right now. But, more than that, I don’t want to kiss you, because I don’t want you to think this whole conversation we’re having is a come-on. Because let’s just call a spade a spade—you read InStyle magazine and Us Weekly and People, right?”

  Again, she nodded.

  “Well, my life is like the goddamn space shuttle exploding right now, being played over and over on folks’ television sets, and I’m not going to be anybody’s boyfriend—you know that, and I have to try to accept that.

  “But I just want you to hear me on this. It’s not hard for any two-bit famous actor to get into some girl’s panties—I’m not saying yours specifically, I would never be that presumptuous, but you gotta trust me on this. Getting ass is not a struggle for the contemporary film actor, even one who is a bastard-adultering playboy, all right? So, you
can relax, and know that I don’t want anything from you—except to see you across a room seventeen years from now…I’ll be in a tuxedo talking to some boring movie executive and you will be glamorous beyond any mortal’s imagination, standing next to your husband, and we will make eye contact and you and I will both know that in regard to you—I was a part of the solution, not the problem. I’ll be one of those who helped you on your way. You hear me?”

  “Yes,’’ she said.

  “You want to get out of here?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but I think you should stop doing cocaine. I’ve never seen somebody do so much at one time,” she said with sincere concern.

  I looked at her completely deadpan. I had no idea I’d even been doing it, but it seems I was cutting up lines for two of us, and then doing them both all by myself. Dean’s baggie was beginning to empty.

  “Yeah, I think you’re right.” I looked around and swallowed one of the blue pills with my beer.

  * * *

  —

  The hotel we were in had a heated pool on the roof. This was not a great idea for my voice, but nothing about this night was on any of my to-do lists. I talked young Brigitte Bardot into going for a swim. She insisted on bringing a friend. By normal standards, this friend was a very attractive young woman, but naked and next to Brigitte, the friend seemed like a small, wet camel.

  I sat on the steps, keeping my privates in the water, while the girls splashed and frolicked through the October steam floating above the heated pool. Reciting some of Hotspur’s soliloquies for the girls—I was feeling like Errol Flynn. I cannot tell you how exquisite it all was—the 4:00 a.m. Manhattan lights snapping around us were almost musical in the crisp fall air. The stars were bright. I could see Brooklyn, I could see Central Park, and I could see these two young mermaids with their heaving breasts bouncing playfully. I could hear their giggles and squirms. I thought about my children and their laughter. For a moment, with the little blue pill helping, I knew everything with my kids would be OK. Soon the girls began serenading me on the steps of the pool—their nipples wet, cold, and erect; their naked legs clasped tight around their vaginas, beads of heated water dripping from their hair; their melodic, fairylike voices singing: