A Cold Piece of Work

by Curtis Bunn

  “I can’t believe this is happening,” he said. He had much more to say, but he worked hard on controlling his fly-off-the-handle temper, and the best way to handle that moment was to shut it down as best he could.

  “Believe it,” she said with much attitude.

  Monica was not cute when she was this way. Ordinarily, she was a good-looking woman, not breathtaking but certainly attractive enough for Jimmy to be proud to call her his wife. When she was this way, though, she didn’t look the same. In his eyes, she resembled something awkward and distorted, totally unappealing.

  Her eyes seemed to darken and to fall back into the sockets, and she held a perceptible amount of saliva in her mouth. Some creature took over her physical being and the devil owned her mind, Jimmy thought.

  Still, he loved his wife. She could be worse; their marriage could be worse. He could have been like one of his close friends, Lonnie, who simply had been emasculated by his spouse. She controlled everything from what he did (or didn’t do) to with whom among his “friends” he communicated. He became a joke among their friends.

  Monica was not that bad. This level of discord was not regular behavior; Jimmy would not have been able to take it if it were the norm. Other times she got on his nerves (what woman didn’t?) for one thing or another, and he would often acquiesce, mumbling to himself: Keep the peace.

  She figured that if she griped enough Jimmy would again look to keep the peace and give in. She was wrong. No amount of badgering was going to turn his position. For the most part, she was a responsible, fun wife and mother of their two kids. But something about him going back to his alma mater for homecoming turned her paranoid. Jimmy remained calm, but he would not budge.

  “Baby,” he said, trying his best to not sound condescending, “why must we go through this now? You knew about this trip for months. I’m about to leave. This makes no sense.”

  “Why is it that you have to go and that I can’t go with you?” Monica said.

  She went with Jimmy, a captain in the Army, a few places across the country. They moved back to D.C. from California less than a year before, which was good and bad in this situation. It was good because he was back home and it was much easier to get to Norfolk from D.C. than the West Coast or the foreign stops they had. It was bad because he could not fall back on the excuse that it was not “cost-efficient” for both of them to make the cross-country trip for a two-day weekend, as he had in the past.

  Jimmy’s reality was that his wife did not go to Norfolk State. She did not go to an historically black college at all, which meant, to Jimmy, she didn’t understand the value of the weekend—or that there was sort of a “no-spouse code” among most alumni, at least among those he knew well from school.

  She went to the “University of Something or Other in Ohio,” he liked to say, where the brothers and sisters there were in the vast minority. So, while homecoming there surely was fun, it did not include all the elements that make homecoming at an HBCU a special experience and sort of a family reunion.

  Jimmy had been in touch with classmates who talked about how impressed and proud they were to see how much their school had grown. They talked about there being fifty-thousand people there, all black, all caught up in the pride and celebratory spirit that homecoming raises. At a non-HBCU, the homecoming weekend was about the football game mostly and a whole bunch of stuff that did not measure up to the cultural experience of an HBCU. At least that’s what Jimmy—and many—thought.

  “And there’s nothing wrong with that,” he told Monica. “It’s just different. Our weekend is about us, the fellowshipping, the tailgate (before, during and after the game), the band, the parties and, above all, the pride of being at a place that essentially was home for us as teenagers. The place, really, where we were nurtured and grew up. That’s what the black college experience gives you.

  “Homecoming,” he said, “is a celebration of all that.”

  “So what are you saying? Your homecoming means more to you than mine because you went to a black college?” Monica argued. “That’s crazy.”

  “I’m not saying your homecoming isn’t as important to you or that it isn’t fun and great,” Jimmy said. “But the mere fact that you have asked me to come with you to yours tells me you’re not having that much fun.

  “Listen, honey, it’s not like I’m going there and meeting with some woman,” he went on. “I feel funny about even having to say that. But that’s what it comes down to, doesn’t it?”

  Jimmy lived mostly on the West Coast during the years after he graduated with honors as a commissioned officer. He had not made it back to a single homecoming since graduation. For the six years they had been married, Jimmy hardly even talked of homecoming because attending did not seem reasonable, as they lived on the West Coast on a wire-thin budget. He either could not take TDY (leave) because had duty he could not abandon— or he was deployed to the Middle East. Surviving both Iraq and Afghanistan and moving back to D.C. allowed him to get excited about making homecoming, especially after he took Monica to campus during a summer visit to Virginia Beach.

  “Monica, I told you on that trip that I was going to homecoming,” he said, placing the last of his clothes in his luggage. “Don’t act like you don’t remember.”

  He lifted his zipped bag onto its wheels and headed to the garage door so he could dump it in the trunk and keep it moving.

  “This is the only weekend I get all year to myself,” he said. He was calm even though he was furious to have to go through such explanation. He somehow mastered the art—and it was an art— of composing himself in his most heated moments. Jimmy, in fact, smiled as he explained his position although he was percolating inside.

  “I go hard as a husband and father,” he said. “I don’t golf, so I don’t do golf trips. I don’t run off to visit my family without you. I don’t go the Super Bowl or NBA All-Star Weekend. I don’t go visiting one of my boys for the weekend. This is it. I deserve this break.”

  The most important reason of all…he had to explain to her again just before he got into his car.

  He said: “Even if I did take an occasional trip, this should not be a problem. I have earned it. Plus, you didn’t go to school there. So, you’d be standing around bored, looking for me to entertain you. To be honest, I couldn’t have the same kind of fun I normally would have with my fraternity brothers and friends. It’s innocent fun, but we use harsh language and tell jokes that are not always, uh, politically correct. It’s part of what we do. I’m not comfortable doing that around you and you’d be monitoring how much I drink, what I say, what I eat, who I hugged. I can hear you now: ‘Who was that? An old girlfriend? Did you sleep with her?’ That’s not how it should be.

  “Also, I would feel like I had to keep you from being miserable. I can hear you now complaining at the tailgate about needing to sit down and not wanting to go to the bathroom in the Porta Potty or not wanting the food. All that would not be fair to me at my homecoming.

  “I have seen people—men and women—bring their spouses and have a miserable time because they were restricted. When you have your homecoming, I don’t even think about going. I know you and your girlfriends want to talk freely and me being there would prevent that. And I don’t know those people, so I don’t want to be there, putting you in the awkward position of trying to keep me amused. It wouldn’t be fair.”

  Monica was unfazed. “But that’s the difference between you and me,” she said. “I would enjoy my friends meeting my husband. But you’d prefer to run off like you’re single.”

  Jimmy’s patience was diminishing.

  “You know, you’re about to piss me off,” he started. “All that I said and that’s what you come back with? First of all, if they were really your friends, I would have met them by now. This isn’t a family vacation. When you go on your book club trip to Atlanta, I know it’s not a family trip. It’s for you and your girls. I don’t know what the hell y’all do down there and I don’t really ca
re. I trust that you understand you’re married and will act like it. But you don’t invite me on that trip and you shouldn’t. That’s how my homecoming is. It’s not about acting like I’m single. Act like you know me.”

  With that, he knew he needed to leave before the scene turned ugly. He was a thirty-two-year-old man and she was making him feel like he was a kid asking for permission, which did not sit well with him—especially since it had been established long before that he was going alone.

  “Monica,” he said, hugging her; she did not hug him back, “I love you and I will call you when I get to Norfolk. Stop pouting and wish me a good time.”

  She just looked at him. They had a stare-down for a few seconds before Jimmy turned, opened the garage door, deposited his luggage and jumped into his car.

  Monica stood there with her arms folded and a look of disgust on her face.

  He honked his horn as he backed out. Jimmy did not like that his wife was being so sour about his homecoming trip. But he couldn’t worry about it, either. If he did, it would put a cloud over his weekend. The forecast called for seventy-two degrees and lots of sun, meaning there was no room for clouds.

  So instead of feeling awkward about leaving her there pissed at him, he felt reinvigorated, relieved and ready.

  To really put that nonsense behind him, he called one of his boys, Carter, who was flying into Norfolk from New York. He was a fun and level-headed friend who graduated a year before Jimmy.

  “Yo, I’m in a cab headed to LaGuardia,” he said. “I can’t wait to get down there. I got some work to do.”

  “Work to do” meant he had women to conquer. Homecoming was like a free-for-all for Carter.

  “I don’t think I’m going to make the parties,” he said.

  “What? How you gonna come to Homecoming and miss the parties?” Jimmy asked.

  “Oh, that’s right; we haven’t really talked,” he said. “Homecoming is a time for me and Barbara to reconnect. She’s the love of my life, man. I should never have let her go back in the day. It’s the biggest mistake of my life.”

  At least Carter was divorced, which allowed him to do whatever he liked.

  “But hold up—isn’t Barbara married?” Jimmy asked.

  “With three kids, too,” Carter said. It was strange the way he said it, like he was proud.

  “I know that was your girl about a decade ago,” Jimmy said. “But, man, she has a family now. And Barbara was a good girl. You think she’s coming to Homecoming to get with you?”

  “You don’t understand, Jimbo,” Carter said. “What she and I have is not ordinary. Why you think she’s coming all the way from San Diego? We both tried to move on with our lives. And we have moved on, to a degree. But we still have that connection. Actually, it’s even stronger now than ever. It’s crazy.”

  “I wonder if she had the same issue I had—leaving her spouse husband behind,” Jimmy said. “Monica gave me the business.”

  “Well, when hasn’t she?” Carter said, laughing. “She’s just being herself, I guess. I don’t know if Barbara had any issues. I didn’t ask. I just know she’s coming.

  “Listen, I’m not proud of this situation. And I’ve only told you and my brother about it. But I really understand what the power of love means because I would never imagine myself feeling this way about any woman, especially a married woman.”

  They chopped it up for a few more minutes before hanging up. Jimmy was headed to Norfolk to get the whole nostalgic feeling of seeing old friends and visiting the place that really made him—and really, to just get away from the daily grind at home.

  Carter was headed there for love.

  And there was little difference between the two reasons.