Winter Sundays
Heath secretly hated weekends. They were when he felt most alone, even abandoned, when Vanessa’s implacable choices loomed the starkest, and his own mewling acceptance echoed in the emptiness of her shadow. Powerful men loved Vanessa’s bright eyes and easy smile, and once charmed by her brains, they would ask more and more of her. She never disappointed them. Heath busied himself on a pewter December Saturday afternoon cooking, unsure when she would be home, anaesthetized by classical music, and imagining Vanessa’s surprise. Her assignment this week was nearby, for once there would not be a hotel. He had hoped to have her to himself tonight, and had planned a romantic dinner. But she didn’t come home till after ten, and had already eaten “with the guys.” The cordon bleu was untouched.
He sulked as Vanessa changed into sweats and scrubbed makeup from her face. She smiled sweetly when finally sitting with him on the couch, pressing her thigh against his, as if amends were about to be made.
“I was hoping to have a special dinner tonight, just us, spend some time together,” Heath said tentatively.
“Heath,” she sighed. “I can’t have this conversation again. Not now. I really have to focus on tomorrow.” Vanessa folded her arms and frowned. “You know how it is. Every week it’s like my whole career is on the line…”
The word pierced his heart, then dropped into his gut and roiled around. She had said it deliberately, Heath thought, dangling the thing that she had and he didn’t. Vanessa quickly pulled a sheaf of papers from her briefcase and began to study, absently twisting a strand of hair and occasionally mumbling to herself.
Impulsively, he turned some classical music up loud. They had both been serious musicians once, at their beginning, and the despairing, throaty mournfulness of “Adagio for Strings” was to remind Vanessa that she had sacrificed her art for money, and that he had subjugated himself to her lucrative though artless career. But also to annoy her.
“Heath…” she moaned, eyes darting angrily from her pages.
“What’s the matter?” he demanded, knowing the answer.
Vanessa gathered the papers hastily, stomping to the bedroom and slamming the door behind her.
He sat soaking in the sorrow of the strings and watching a few timid snowflakes twist themselves loose from the black sky outside, thinking of the many times he had felt this same helplessness. Vanessa ascended magically in a high-stakes career she stumbled into, never singing operatically again; Heath trailed her awkwardly, a dumb, shaky grin barely masking his nascent dread of obsolescence, trying to avoid having to mention his MFA in Musical Theory or modest success in entry-level jobs. The light slipping from under the bedroom door seemed a spotlight on Vanessa’s priorities, and felt to him brighter and hotter the longer it stayed lit. Finally he strode in, undressed quickly and inserted himself into the bed where Vanessa sat studying statistics and tables, twisting a strand of silky hair, a habit he once found endearing. Heath jerked the blanket, thrashing dramatically and taking some childish delight in the rattle and scattering of her papers.
He heard the alarm go off at four am, heard her groan, and felt her rise. He considered getting up also, kissing her tenderly, whispering his regret and wishing her good luck, but instead rolled into the spot where her warmth had been, and closed his eyes.
Sunday morning the silence in the house buzzed dully, as if somewhere a bow was dragged agonizingly across a cello’s string. The yard had filled with snow, pristine except for the gray gullies her tires had cut when she left. The trees looked forlorn, weighed-down and smothered, spindly limbs stripped bare poking out meekly, as if halfheartedly reminding the world they were still there.
Heath had little to do but wait in the cold house to see if she would come home, to ruminate on her beauty and polish and success, and wonder if he still mattered to her. They were drifting. Where once their differences made their love seem fiercer, now the chasm seemed just too wide. Who could blame the golden girl for moving on from such a fanciful, romantic, but utterly unworkable dream?
A few minutes before one pm he turned on the television, as he did most winter Sundays, and saw her there. Vanessa gripped a microphone in fingers capped by pink, lacquered nails, her hair buttery and radiant, cascading over the shoulders of a crisp blazer. Her lips appeared angelic as she spoke earnestly about a man’s groin, near-shouting over the ringing bleat of the ravenous football crowd behind her, ready for kickoff.
“Back to you, Dan,” she said from the sidelines. In the fleeting seconds that Vanessa’s beaming face remained onscreen, cheery smile frozen, she did the thing, flicking her slender pinkie off the microphone’s stalk, the white crescent at the tip fluttering three times, almost imperceptibly. Their secret signal. As she had for years, through cub reporting in hayseed towns and hard slogs in mid-markets, cable news, and now the network, Vanessa told him that for this half-second no one, and nothing, was more important to her.
Maybe it’s just habit, he thought, smiling wistfully. But for at least one more Sunday, it was there.
Heath left the TV on but drifted to the kitchen. Vanessa would probably only be seen again in hurried glimpses: agitating a tense coach at halftime with her trademark perky grace, then later clutching the game’s sweat-soaked hero, who will assess the keys to victory as something like “we never quit” and possibly faith in God. Heath had seen enough. Truthfully, he had never been much of a sports fan, and always wondered how artsy Vanessa had gotten so comfortable. He let music overpower the swells of the crowd and the sharp bark of the quarterback – strings again, but bouncy and ebullient - Vivaldi. Heath began chopping onions. Vanessa would be home soon.
Tim Jones is a fiction writer living in Northern California. His work has previously appeared in The First Line, Underwood, Into the Void (coming Oct. 2020), and has been featured on the Pendust Radio Literary Podcast. Originally from the Detroit area, he is a big fan of the Lions, Tigers, Pistons, and Wings, which means he knows a lot about faith, perseverance, and disappointment.