Ash Wednesday

by Ethan Hawke

  “Oh, don’t take this the wrong way. It was a beautiful service and I’m very happy for you, I really am.” Her voice was clear and musical as always. “It’s just, frankly, I hope you don’t feel rushed into anything. You have to be careful. Pregnant women don’t always think too sharply.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I said, both hands firmly on the wheel.

  “God, Jimmy, I don’t know why you’re getting so uptight. I wish you guys the best, I really do.”

  “You keep saying that, Mom, but that’s not what it sounds like.”

  “Look, I’m just not the biggest advocate of marriage, I hope it works out better for you than it did for me. If all you want is the sunshine report, maybe I’m not the right person to be talking to. Sharing your life with somebody is not what it’s cracked up to be.” She was doing her lipstick now, studying herself in the tiny mirror I’d glued to the visor. “In my experience one person seems to get larger and the other gets smaller, and I don’t want you to be the one who shrinks.”

  “You don’t like Christy?” I asked.

  “I don’t know her, sweetheart. If you love her, she must be terrific.” She kissed her hand to get rid of the excess lipstick.

  “You know something, Mom? I don’t think I’m gonna talk to you for a while, all right?” I was trying to stay calm, but I felt like I was turning inside out.

  When we arrived at airport Departures, I helped her with her bags and kissed her good-bye.

  “Do yourself a favor, will you?” she said, before stepping away. “Get rid of that car.”

  Watching her walk through the mechanized departure doors, I rubbed the muscles around my navel to try and settle my nerves. I’d never felt so much like an adult. There was no doubt about it, I thought. The umbilical cord was gone.

  My mother was spot-on in regard to one subject, however: that car. With all the praying that’d been goin’ down in the last week, I’d forgotten the only thing I should’ve been praying for: that sack-of-shit Chevy Nova. For every mile we passed, I tried to be grateful. For every turn up ahead, I braced myself. If it rained we were done for; there weren’t any wipers. I took them off to replace them with better ones, but you know how these things go.

  As we left Missouri and entered Arkansas, almost immediately the highway we were driving on ceased to be any kind of main throughway. The road was narrowing and beginning to wind and ascend a large slope. I couldn’t figure out how this had happened, I didn’t remember exiting and the incline was becoming so steep that I was terrifyingly aware of the engine’s rpms revving into a high-pitched whine. Christy wasn’t worried yet; she was playing with Grace’s collar, spinning it around and pushing back her ears. How did I make a wrong turn? I thought to myself. I’d been so careful. I wanted to remedy the situation before Chris realized we were lost. Maybe everything was fine, I tried to reassure myself.

  We arrived at the peak of the hill and immediately began a descent. The pull of the brake pad against the wheel was discernible in my intestines. Needless to say, I don’t have power brakes.

  At the bottom we turned and immediately began the ascent of another steep hill. Christy reached over and flipped on the radio: static. The SEEK button spun all the way through the dial without stopping once. She clicked it off and put on her seat belt, situating the strap comfortably under the bulge of her belly.

  “This car better make it to New Orleans, cowboy,” she said quietly.

  “Or what?” I asked.

  “Or you’re in trouble, Ratskin!” she said, licking her finger and pushing it into my ear. I tell you, the more pregnant she got, the harder it was to bring her down. Progesterone happy head, she called it.

  “Give me a break,” I moaned, leaning away from her. I was edgy about where the hell we were headed and how far off the track we might be. It was still dark; dawn was not coming as rapidly as promised. A truck was barreling toward us, its high beams blazing. I flashed my lights at him but he didn’t respond. I dimmed mine anyway, acquiescing; one blind driver is better than two. For a moment I could see nothing, not even the line marking the center of the road, my eyes whited out in the glare, but the moment passed and we were still traveling, rattling like a bag-a-bones forward up this old country hill.

  I snapped my brights back up.

  A WALK IN THE SUN

  We had booked the honeymoon suite at the Fairmont Hotel in New Orleans. The room was lavish, with high cracked ceilings. A hundred years ago the Fairmont might have been called extravagant. Rich red velvet carpets lined the hallways, the lobby was gaudy with giant crystal chandeliers, and beautiful intricate murals were painted on the open walls, but like all of New Orleans stains on stains had washed and beaten the colors down to a muted version of what they had once been. The city seeemed dipped in a film of alcohol.

  After we checked in, I undressed and began preparing for my nightly bath. I could see Jimmy doing push-ups while he watched the end of a basketball game on TV. He would pause for a minute or so at a time and nibble on a slice of pizza left cold in a box on the floor.

  “Can we listen to some music?” I asked, as I heard the announcers discuss the final score.

  There was a radio inside the television set, and Jimmy flipped off the game and spun the radio dial. With the overhead light out, the TV off, and no lamp on in the room, a dim yellow glow from the city seven floors below poured into the honeymoon suite, giving the air a sepia tint. Sitting on the thick ravaged hotel carpet, Jimmy already looked like an old photograph. He was wearing only boxers, and the skin tone of his legs and chest was glorious, sweet and golden like a malted milkshake. He stood up and walked purposefully toward me. I could tell he wanted to dance, but dressed only in my towel and fully sober, I wasn’t ready. Dancing makes me self-conscious, unless I’m drunk. Some old Frank Sinatra melody crackled through the television speaker, and I guessed from Jimmy’s response that he loved this song. He pulled me toward him, mouthing the words along with the music. He grabbed my hands formally and we began to dance as if we were at the high school prom. My towel fell from my chest onto the floor, leaving me naked. Jimmy refused to let me bend over and pick it up and waltzed us to the center of the room.

  All right, I decided: one nude dance.

  Jimmy loved dancing. His father had taught him some old school moves and he’d probably used them on every girl he met, but they were fun and cutting the rug with him was always comfortable and easy. Frank Sinatra led us around the room, as I looked for the still point inside our dance. Against my stomach I felt Jimmy getting an erection.

  I imagined myself a willow tree, flowing and supple but ultimately strong and rooted. With his erection pressed tight against me, we moved more slowly, just holding each other. As the song ended and another began, he slid down to his knees, kissing my stomach and tickling my navel with his lips. Then he moved under me, his mouth between my legs. I stood awkwardly in the center of the dark room. I wanted to sit down and hide from the windows but I couldn’t bring myself to step away.

  Feeling Jimmy in between my legs, kissing, lapping, and loving me, I felt sorry for him. Would he really be happy as a married man? It’s a boyish and silly quality, but Jimmy’s lust for adventure was one I admired. His eyes were full of a desire to prove himself. I wondered whether fatherhood and husbandry would be enough.

  Did my mother and father ever dance like this, newlyweds holding and licking each other with aspirations of a lifetime together? Probably.

  Jimmy picked me up and set me down on the bed. Sometimes when we made love, I would do a kind of invocation of ancient gods, Apollo or Aphrodite, beckoning them into the room in hopes of casting a spell.

  Waves of sexual pleasure began beating back the busy patterns of my brain. My body was now resting on the cotton sheets of our bed and Jimmy’s head was buried between my legs, while his hands gently reached up to cradle my swollen breasts.

 
As a child, I’d been obsessed with the events around my own birth. All the stories that collected around my parents’ meeting, my conception, and my birth were molded in my mind into the stuff of legend. A couple times with my dad I would meet someone in a bookstore or in line at the movies whose name I recognized from an anecdote, someone who was intimate with my parents when they were in love, and it felt like shaking hands with a fictional character from a favorite novel. I was now aware of myself as a player in some larger epic.

  Only four months earlier, Jimmy had insisted on taking me fishing, and inside a gas station near Lake Ontario we’d asked an old clerk, Wayne Sheffle, if he knew any sweet spots. He told us of a secret cove where the fish were bountiful out on his land; we were welcome to camp there if we liked. “I always like to help out lovers,” he’d said, winking at us. For three days we camped there, swimming naked in a freezing-cold pond, picking flowers, and making love inside our blue two-person tent while it rained. Either during the rainstorm or later that second night our child had been conceived. On the third night, two locals came by the little cove, blasting shotguns and yelling at us to get off their land. They were obviously drunk and dangerous. Jimmy went out of our tent and walked over to them. The larger of the two stepped forward and shoved the shotgun right in his face.

  “Get the fuck out of here,” the man slurred, the barrel of his gun at Jimmy’s chest.

  Jimmy stood silent for a moment and then held out his hand. “I’m Jimmy Heartsock. What’s your name?”

  The man looked confused for a moment. “Don’t worry about who I am, just get off my damn property.”

  “Wayne Sheffle told me we could camp here,” Jimmy said, leaving his hand outstretched with the gun still in his face.

  “Wayne Sheffle is an asshole, and he stole this land from me.”

  “He seemed like an asshole,” Jimmy said.

  The man slowly lowered his gun and begrudgingly shook Jimmy’s hand. Slurring some drunken monologue involving deeds and parents, the man went on about how Wayne Sheffle had ripped him off. Finally they left, telling us we were cool to camp there another night, but if we saw Wayne again to let him know that their business wasn’t done. We packed up and left at the first light of dawn, but Jimmy had unknowingly succeeded in his first challenge as a father: protecting me and our fertilized embryo from a couple of drunken rednecks.

  My child’s poem was intertwined with mine now. Someday the child might ask questions. “What did you love about Daddy?” “Why did you get married in Ohio?” Perhaps we would drive by this hotel ten years from now, pointing out this honeymoon spot on the way to drop our child off at summer camp. Perhaps we’d be divorced.

  Be still, Christy, I told myself.

  Twisting on the soft hotel mattress, I invoked the gods and tried not to worry too much as Jimmy moved on top of me. Careful not to crush my belly he kissed me, his mouth wet with my own salty taste, and entered me. Whatever the cards dealt us, it was a relief to acknowledge myself as simply a supporting player in a much longer, ever-expanding, rhyming verse. Rolling over, I sat on top of him. Jimmy was gorgeous. This whole marriage business was exhausting. If things went well, I realized, we would probably keep on at this pace for the rest of my life.

  I woke up at five-thirty the next morning, got dressed, and ventured out while the entire metropolitan area was just beginning to go to sleep. The bellmen in the lobby were all dark black with strong sexy accents in over-the-top gold and red uniforms. They nodded and smiled silently, as if they were guiding me back into an earlier moment in the century. I was hungry and wanted some ice.

  Enjoying the silence, I strolled through the wide empty hotel foyer and made my way downstairs and onto the street. The air outside wasn’t hot yet, but you could tell it would be; it had been the hottest Mardi Gras in sixty-seven years, or that’s what we heard the day before on the radio. Ice, I kept thinking. I need some ice.

  Like the city, I smelled of sex. The main boulevard outside the Fairmont was lined on both sides with metal Louisiana State Police barricades, stretching side by side far into the horizon. At the moment, however, no floats were passing and no people were screaming or cheering; there was only masses and masses of garbage covering the ground: half-eaten sandwiches, bright red pizza boxes, thousands of beer cups, cigarette packages, and green Heineken bottles rolling back and forth in the gutters. Transparent plastic bags billowed and floated; newspapers lay abandoned over the asphalt along with the remains of crawfish and shrimp, crushed into the seams of the sidewalk. PAT O’BRIAN’S HURRICANE cups were stacked on top of each full garbage can on every corner. Broken under my feet were millions and millions of beads: yellow, red, green, purple, and orange string necklaces. They were in every crack and crevice; they hung from tree branches, streetlamps, and statues. The day before, when Jimmy and I had arrived, this entire boulevard had been a sea of human beings thousands deep. Children, adults, and elderly of every race were lined up, grabbing and begging for these little glass-bead necklaces being thrown from passing floats. Now there was almost no one around at all. A young black man in navy slacks and a white button-down shirt was standing outside a place called the Picadilly Lounge. He had two rugs laid out over parking meters and was beating them lethargically with a broom.

  As I walked across the street and made my way toward the French Quarter, I stepped over the dried white skull of a ram with purple and yellow beads wrapped around its horns and hanging loosely out of its eye sockets. It was inexplicably lying in the gutter beside a crushed green sixteen-ounce plastic soda bottle and some red Styrofoam hamburger packaging.

  Direct sunlight had yet to climb over the low buildings of the Quarter, but rays of bright warm orange light shot between the buildings, creating long thin shadows. A young woman appeared from around a corner dressed in a short black miniskirt and a loosely done lace-up top, her hair cockeyed and crazy and caught under the elastic of the cat mask she was still wearing. Her legs were bare and her stockings were in her hand. She passed me by without acknowledging me, floating like a ghost.

  On my left and right in the closed-down shop windows were advertisements of sex shows: LUST IS LIFE: BOTTOMLESS MEN OR WOMEN. Pictures of naked girls were spread out in the glass, black squares covering their genitals. On the side of a brick building was a large decades-old faded green hand-painted advertisement for GINGER-MINT JULEP. I wanted some, with ice. A man was sleeping on a bench in a brand-new jeans jacket, with hundreds of different-colored bead necklaces around his neck. The section of sidewalk around him smelled pungent with vomit.

  Making a left onto Dauphine, I passed two men dressed as the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz. I wondered what had happened to Dorothy and the Scarecrow. Perhaps they were still passed out on a couch in a ballroom full of other sleeping fictional characters.

  I was beginning to love being pregnant and was already experiencing a sweet nostalgia, aware that I would yearn to return here and that this morning in particular was a golden hour of my life. Waddling a little, I kept moving forward, noticing the beauty of the empty streets. I had been to New Orleans once before, as a child, although I didn’t remember much, only the photos. Shortly after Christmas one year my father took me to a tree-burning ceremony somewhere in the center of the French Quarter. On a grassy island between two large boulevards, families piled their dead trees. Little kids stood around drinking hot chocolate in the balmy wet air as the trees went up fast, like books of matches. Tinsel was melting and lifting up into the sky. The scent of singeing pine tickled my nose as I watched silk-wrapped balls warp and melt. There was a picture of me on my father’s shoulders from that night with a small white crown on my head and a fairy’s magic wand dangling loosely from my hand. No tangible connection to that little girl existed in me. Someday soon, I thought, I will have no connection to the woman I am now. It’s amazing how permanent I always feel each moment is, as if the person I am at any given in
stant is someone constant. When I was seven I vowed never to have sex, it sounded so revolting. At eleven it seemed unfathomable that I would ever be married or have a job. Now I cannot imagine death. I realize it will probably come just as effortlessly as sex, or present itself as unavoidable as adulthood, but I can never quite feel its reality. Walking down the morning streets of New Orleans, I felt closer to the afterlife than I’d ever been; the whole of the French Quarter smelled as if it had passed away forty years ago. Mortality was palpable here. I sensed that it too would be as passing and impermanent as being seven had been.

  The sun crept over the buildings and daylight was complete. In an instant with this one hit of light the whole mood and composition of the city altered. About twenty yards away a young woman laughed boisterously as she rode the shoulders of her boyfriend, who was galloping like a pony toward Bourbon Street. They were oblivious. With this sunrise somehow I felt I was exactly where I was supposed to be: on this street, at this hour, with this child in my womb and my newlywed husband still asleep in our bedroom. I couldn’t help but grin at the crystallizing realization that, no matter what happened, everything was just as it was supposed to be.

  Have faith, the light seemed to announce.

  What if always, every day, no matter what you did, you were in exactly the right place at exactly the right time?

  As I reached the end of the French Quarter I could see that a fast food restaurant was open across one of the main drags. I walked in and bought a large orange juice with tons of small perfect cubes of ice.

  I walked back toward the hotel down Rue Dauphine, the New Orleans sun climbing higher with every step I took. Already it was almost hot.

  As I went up the steps of the Fairmont Hotel, pleasantly swishing shards of cool ice around my hot mouth, I felt a tickle of wetness in my underwear. In the privacy of the empty elevator I reached down under my dress and touched myself. Pulling up my hand I could see unmistakable dark red drops of blood.