by Ethan Hawke
“You know, this screwball thing is fryin’ a friggin’ hole in my pocket,” I said, as I finally dragged it out. My head was swimming. If you pushed me, I would’ve fallen on my butt. I’d been staring at this dinky bit of baggage since I got it. Something about the little thing made me dizzy. The longer she didn’t know what I was doing there, the more irritated she’d get and the harder it would be to carry the whole thing off. I had to act quick.
“I got this made and everything so you’d know I wasn’t fuckin’ around and not being flaky. I would have spent more money on it, but I know you like things that are simple and elegant and classy—not, like, ostentatious. So it’s classic, not cheap, OK?”
“Can we go inside, Jimmy?” Christy said, shivering. She had this expression like she was completely misinterpreting everything I was doing. She didn’t comprehend what I was up to at all.
“Nah, nah, nah, we’re not gonna go inside and do this whole business standing in front of some Coke machine. It’s too important for that.”
She was irritated I’d followed her down here, I could tell that, which I have to admit surprised me. I thought she’d be more romantic.
“This’ll just take a second.” I wanted to touch her, but her hands were in her pockets and she was being too still. Standoffish. I needed to do it; then she’d be in a good mood.
“All right, look, I’m just gonna do this, OK?”
She nodded. The extreme temperature was making her eyes sharp and fierce, and she was looking at me as if she half anticipated I’d change into a frog.
BAM. CABLOOEY. WHOOSH. My mind went blank.
“Uh. . . .” I was standing there dizzy, noticing the little bits of yellow sprinkled in her blue eyes. It wasn’t that I was having doubts, it was like I was a whirlpool and had been for days. I was gradually gaining speed, spinning around faster and faster until here I was, only a blink away from blowing out the other side.
“I love you, and I don’t ever want to be without you.”
That was all I could remember to say.
I needed to kick it up a notch. Like I said, Christy’s not dumb. She always knows exactly what everybody in a room is thinking. Push came to shove, I’d have to say she’s the smartest person I know. She and my father.
Boy, she was looking at me hard. I felt like I was just a rib cage barely holding on to a collection of churning and gurgling organs.
“Here’s the deal. If I imagine my life with you, I see all this light in my future, you understand? Like I picture it, and I can feel all kinds of good things, you know? Like growth and light and green things, and . . . and—”
Green things had thrown me off; I hadn’t meant to say that. I was trying to be articulate.
“And without you, I just see, like, gray, like shit, you know? It’s the same: nothin’.”
In the middle of this parking lot, with the frozen February air blowing through our coats, I did it—I got down on my knees, both knees. My hands were so numb, it was difficult to unclench my fists. The ground was icy and uncomfortable. Little gravel stones of the pavement were grinding through my pants. I wasn’t wearing anything special, and I really should have. I had on my dad’s corduroy coat with the sheepskin lining and some junky green fatigues. I should’ve shaved. Christy’s always moaning about my scratchy face. I could’ve dressed better and shaved—I’m sorry about that—but everything else I did the only way I knew how.
The truth is, I’d wanted to do this whole dance in her crummy house, with Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard’s album Pancho and Lefty playing on her old turntable. Things were working out differently from what I’d foreseen, but I was feeling good about how I was rolling with the punches: adjusting efficiently to an alternative action.
The little black box was out in my hand where Christy could see it. I remember the exact expression on her face when I got down on my knees. She was perplexed, definitely. She was also a little self-conscious that I might be making a spectacle of myself, but nobody on God’s asphalt earth was looking at us. It was too cold.
“Christy Ann Walker”—I wanted to be formal, lend myself some gravity—“will you marry me?”
Fuck, I loved this girl so much. I don’t know how she did it, but I felt like she was me. I think that was why I’d broken up with her: I was fighting for myself, for the old me who had lived before we’d ever met—but then there I was, all alone again, and I realized there was no old me anymore, only this one.
“I love you, and I bought you this ring to be a symbol that this is no joke. I had ’em make it a little extra big, ’cause they told me it was easier to get these things reduced than expanded. So don’t take it as some kinda sign, or metaphor, or analogy, or something, if it doesn’t fit right. It will fit right eventually, OK? I promise.”
I opened up the case, revealing the ring. It was a beautiful delicate thing with two little diamonds centering a third larger diamond. I’d designed it to match this toy jobby I bought for her when we first met. She used to wear that toy ring even after two of the phony gems fell out.
She was flabbergasted.
Which, like I said, surprised me. It just goes to show you, how when two people spend time apart, they can be thinking in completely opposite directions and coming to radically different conclusions and forming geometrically opposed interpretations about the same events that transpired between them, and—all the while—feel they’ve arrived at some mutual understanding.
Christy had her hands in her pockets and was looking down at me and this diamond ring. She’d begun biting her upper lip. A terribly sober expression had taken over her face. I thought she’d be crying by now and covering me with kisses—which in hindsight was unrealistic.
“I’ve thought a lot about this. I’m not a rash man. You know that.” I paused, waiting for her to meet my eyes.
She nodded her head slowly.
“I thought this through, and I want to be your husband. For real. No shit. Sometimes you gotta take a good look at your life and ask yourself, What kind of man do you want to be? And what steps are you willing to take to be that man? Do you understand what I’m saying?”
She was listening. I desperately wanted her to hear me, to witness the changes I’d been going through. I touched her leg. She bent down and crouched beside me. My eyes were tearing up.
“People are always talking about how much they love somebody, or how significant love is, you know? But what are they willing to do about it? Mostly nothing. But, you see, I love you and I’m willing to do something about it. I want to be there for you all the time. I want you to be able to count on me, and I want the chance to prove that I can be counted on. I want to stop fantasizing about some fictional me I hold in my head, that could live if ‘this’ happened or would live if ‘that’ happened, and I want to be somebody right now. Some fuckin’ integrity, you know? Some beliefs. I believe in you and me and in what my dad taught me: There is no obstacle that enough love cannot move.
“And you and I know you’re the best thing that ever happened to me, and, yes, that’s an expression, something people say, that has no meaning, but what I mean is there isn’t anybody in the whole world who has loved me the way you have, not my mother, not my old man, not my friends, and you’re also so damn beautiful and”—now I whispered this part—“you make the best love I’ve ever known and your pussy is so sweet, I love the way it tastes and smells and I love that soft flesh around it, and you’re so smart and you’re funny and you’re nice, and I whack myself in my dingy head, and I think, How could I let this girl go? What do I want? What am I hoping for? Nobody likes to talk about it, but we’re all gonna die someday. Dead. Eyes closed. Right? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. It’s true, right?”
She nodded.
“There’s nothing preventing me and you from loving each other and being some kinda world-class shining beacon of love except how bad do we want it and what are
we willing to do for it?” I took a deep breath, long, even, into my guts. I let my head teeter back into balance. My knees were killing me, so I shifted my butt and sat right down on the pavement. “Now, I know I did you wrong, and I was freaking out and being stupid and I was mean to you. You know sometimes I get all fuckin’ confused”—I raised my voice and pulled at the short hairs on my head—“and I can’t see outside of my own asshole. I’m unhappy. I’m unhappy. Why am I unhappy? It’s gotta be somebody’s fault, right? It couldn’t just be that I’m a self-centered fuck spinning around inside my own dank cloud of concerns. And look, let’s face it, I haven’t been doing anybody any favors with all the drugs I’ve been doing. But we don’t even have to talk about that. I don’t want to do drugs anymore.” The ground was arctic. I sat up on top of my ankles now. I was looking down at this ring she still hadn’t taken from my hand.
“There isn’t anything I can think of that I really want, or that the best part of me wants, that marrying you won’t start doing. I love you, Christy, I want to be your man. This is it. This is love in action. I’ve thought a lot; like I said, I’m not a rash man. You gotta know I’m serious. You’re my girl. I love you, and if you’ll marry me I’ll never leave you. I’ll take care of you till I die and beyond. I swear it.”
“Jimmy.”
She looked at me with a sad expression she gets sometimes, like she’s twenty million years older than me, which—I gotta admit—agitates the hell out of me. Then she looked down at the diamond glimmering there in the cold winter light. She took it out of the box and placed it in her hand. Her long queenly fingers were trembling softly. She didn’t put it on.
“Jimmy, I’m freezing, can we please go inside?” she asked sweetly.
“Yeah, yeah, sure,” I said. What the hell else was I gonna say?
We needed shelter from the blistering cold of that Kingston parking lot, and some privacy, so we went and hid inside my Nova. I had these ’73 Pontiac Firebird bucket seats I’d recently put in the car, and they’re sweet smooth cherry leather, but they did get stone-ass cold. They annoyed Christy—she thought I put them in too close to the floor and too far forward into the windshield but I didn’t. That’s the way they go.
I flipped the ignition, and thank God it started. It would’ve sucked if the engine gave me any problems. I cranked up the heat, which was a little disappointing. The thing let out a heinous death cry but wasn’t giving off much warmth.
Christy sat Indian style. Most times she’d sit that way in the car, playing with her feet and biting her toenails. She was undoubtedly cute, at least most of the time. She looked over at me and took me in for a long beat, about to say something, but then didn’t. Turning her head to the window, she rolled it down a crack and lit a cigarette that she’d pulled from a mashed-up package I had left on the dash. The strike of the match filled the car with the pungent smell of sulfur. She did her best to blow the smoke outside but it wasn’t an effective technique.
I still couldn’t believe she wasn’t more psyched about me asking her to get married. Maybe she was in shock.
“How did you find me here?” she asked quietly, not looking at me.
“Fat Chance,” I said.
“Don’t call her that,” Christy snapped.
Christy’s old roommate’s name was Chance, but she’s fat like a hippo, so everybody calls her Fat Chance. Anyway, after blowing me a shitload of static, Chance told me that Christy was on the Adirondack Trailways bus departing at twelve o’clock. So I grabbed Grace, Christy’s cat (I couldn’t figure out why she’d abandoned her); I already had the ring in my pocket and shot like a rocket down to Kingston. There’s always a long layover there, and I thought I could catch her and pull a Sir Lancelot, propose marriage, return the cat, and let her know that everything was good-to-go. The whole breakup had been a big fat mistake, and it was my job to right the situation. I’d never opened up the Nova like that on public roads before. The motherfucker has a ’97 6.2 liter Mustang engine. Some people piss and moan about the sacrilege of putting a Ford engine in a Chevy, and intellectually I agree, but the shit hauls ass.
Now I was sitting there going nowhere and getting the runaround like a pudwhacker.
“What else did Chance say?” Christy said, still not looking at me.
“Nothin’.”
“What else did she say, Jimmy?” Christy was angry. Of all the reactions I’d imagined to my marriage proposal, anger had never occurred to me.
An old woman all loaded down with scarves and mittens and a hat walked slowly by our window, and this is exactly the point at which I remembered that Grace the cat was still in the car, loose because she hated her carry case. Grace was a small gray and white seventeen-year-old tabby that Christy’s dad gave her when she was eight. I couldn’t remember why I’d brought her. The cat hid underneath the passenger seat swatting at my feet the whole way into Kingston. Christy was really gonna go ballistic when she found out Grace was in the car.
“What else did Chance tell you?” she asked again. It was obvious there was some accessory information I wasn’t clued in to that Christy was afraid Chance had spilled.
“Chance told me you’re going to Texas,” I said. “That’s all.”
“Do you know why I’m going to Texas?” she asked, getting increasingly brittle.
“No. I don’t want you to go to Texas. I don’t want anybody to go to Texas. Texas is for derelicts. They should make it a jail, give it back to Zapata.” I was being good, keeping things light, not getting angry. Christy didn’t respond. Her hands were slipped inside the sleeves of her parka with just the cigarette poking out.
She didn’t laugh or smile, but finally she did look me in the eye. “Would you mind pulling up a little bit, so I can make sure my bus doesn’t leave without me?” she asked quietly.
“You still want to get on that bus?” I asked. She might as well have stubbed her cigarette out in my eye. It had never occurred to me that she wouldn’t accept my proposal. Never. Not once.
“Yes,” she said, ashing into the Nova ashtray on top of a pile of other lipstick-stained butts. I was glad I hadn’t cleaned the thing out; it was a subtle sign, reminding her of how much time she’d spent in this car, how she belonged here.
“I’ve made a decision, Jimmy,” she said, in a choked voice, her eyes darting around out the window, looking anywhere but at me. “I’m going home. I have no idea how you found me here. I love you; you know I love you, I’ve told you that a thousand times. But something’s gotta give in me, you understand?” Her teeth were slightly chattering. “ I haven’t been home since I was seventeen. I felt so sure when I was a girl that—I don’t know, that I was born into the wrong family or something. But I’ve been gone eight years now, and I haven’t found anything else. At least not until you.” She looked down at her knees and brushed at the wrinkles in her pants. “I believed in you, Jimmy. I thought it’d be wonderful if we had a baby. I told you that and you freaked.”
Her eyes found mine and stayed there.
“Jimmy, I’ve been lost as long as I can remember, and I don’t want to be anymore. I want to be found. I know it doesn’t seem likely, but the only answer I can come up with is to go back to Houston.” She started biting her lip and picking what was left of the nail polish from her fingernails. “There’s like this glass wall between me and the world. I don’t understand it but I got to get rid of it.”
I tried to interrupt her but she stopped me.
“People don’t like me; they don’t. I know you do, but I have trouble connecting with people. I want to go see my grandmother and my father. They loved me so much when I was a kid, and I’ve done nothing since I was, like, twelve but spit in their faces.” She pulled hard on her long skinny cigarette and then reached her lips up to the window and exhaled through the sliver of an opening, with 98 percent of the smoke blowing right back inside the car.
“I want y
ou to marry me,” I reiterated. The only response I could think of to what she was saying was to stand firm. Listening to the thumping whistle of the second hand on my watch, I knew I had to be strong right now. People don’t realize it, but it’s in all these clicks that you make or break your life. I had made my decision as well, and I was gonna go after it. Whole hog.
“Well, I’m going to Texas. What are you going to do?” She was being tight-lipped and serious. The car was filling with more stagnant clouds of smoke. It’s strange to be inside a car but not moving. After a certain period of time it’s unsettling.
Christy put out her cigarette right next to all the other ones and breathed into her hands to warm them up.
“Baby doll”—I was still being cool—“I’m in the army. We’ve talked about this. I can apply for a transfer or in about a year I can get an honorable discharge, but, come on, I can’t just split—”
She interrupted me. “Do you remember what I said to you inside the hospital cafeteria, when you so courageously opened your heart to me to say you didn’t love me anymore? Do you remember what I said?”
She waited so long for my response, I was forced to shake my head no.
“I said, What will I live for?”
“I don’t remember that,” I muttered. Of course I didn’t remember. How could I? I hadn’t listened to a word she said. I was too consumed with figuring out what I was gonna say.
“I had this idea that we could be a home for each other, but maybe that’s not right. Maybe a person can’t do that for someone else. But people need a center, and I don’t have one. It was too much for me to ask you to give me that.” Without the cigarette her breath was still fuming like a dragon’s, it was that cold. “But I’m sick and tired of being kept at a safe distance. I can’t take your waffly plans: Today we should get married and build our own house, and then tomorrow me having a set of your keys is too big a step. Or being told I love you too much. I don’t deserve that.” She sat on her hands. I wondered what she’d done with the ring.