Diamond-Cut Life

Revelle rhymes with gazelle. This is the first chapter of my novel, which I plan to self-publish this spring. I’ve hired Erick Mertz as my editor. He’s excellent, and I recommend him.

Fire

The day that my husband set my truck and possessions on fire I was stunned but dry-eyed. I had felt an explosion coming, but I hadn’t known which of the three of us would ignite it.

I had been dancing  in my new home that Labor Day morning in 1993 when the doorbell rang. I was dancing barefoot on the hardwood floor to Tom Petty’s Listen To Her Heart. Sunlight was streaming into Pilar and Ruben’s living room, its beams marked by little dust-motes because I was moving so much air around with my body, and I remember the small Celtic cross on the silver chain around my neck bouncing against my collarbones as I whirled, kicked and undulated. My skirt was flying. I decided to use the whirl-kick-body wave sequence in the class I would be teaching in my studio on Wednesday. “She might need a lot of lovin’, but she don’t need you.” I was breathing hard, joyful in my skin, my pain about my imploding marriage chased away in that sundrenched moment.

The song ended, the doorbell rang, and I turned the volume down before walking to the door.  I remember appreciating the aroma of the morning’s coffee lingering in the air as I opened the door. My husband was standing on the front porch of Ruben and Pilar’s house, his lean, ropy-muscled body familiar but the expression on his face strange, several degrees left of center, making my stomach re-clench into the anxiety that was familiar. I looked up at him, my five three to his six-two. The height advantage was his, too.

I had left him five days ago, after a marriage of one year that had felt more like an affair than a marriage. He had moved up to Portland just three weeks earlier. Prior to then, he had lived in Anaheim as I had lived there in Portland, Oregon, he steadily promising to move up and live with me, and just as steadily breaking his promises.

“I need some salve for my hand,” he announced now.

“What? Why?” I was confused and off-balance, something I had felt about half the time in the two years I’d known him. The other half of the time I’d felt enchanted by his vitality, admiring of his competency as a carpenter, and amused by his antics. I’d been hopelessly in love with him. Part of me maybe still was. Why hadn’t I moved my things out of our house yesterday when Ruben, now my housemate, had offered to help me do that?

“I set your truck on fire with all your things in it, and now my hands are burned,” he reported. His tone implied I was the one responsible.

I looked at him more closely. His light brown eyelashes and eyebrows seemed to be partially missing. Were they singed? “I don’t believe you,” I said after a minute. Not believing my husband had often turned out to be the path of reality. But my heart was already racing. I knew he was furious with me, and he’d never been one to control himself.

“It’s over at the Lloyd Center. I’ll show you,” he said. In a trance, I put on my sandals and we walked four blocks west in the warm, hazy sunshine. I trailed behind him, not because I was afraid of him (he had never hit me, not physically), but because I held him in contempt. I didn’t want to be seen with someone crazy enough to ask me for help, for salve, because he’d set my own things, my things, on fire.

When we’d met two years ago we couldn’t get enough of each other, he found me so beautiful, and I him. “You’re a heartstopper,” he’d breathed in my ear during more than one sweaty, love-soaked moment. But I had come to believe beauty was an overrated thing, that it carried more liabilities than benefits. That it could make a person into prey, a target, the way that an antelope that is colored or built differently than the rest of its herd draws the eye of the cheetah, capturing its laser focus, and triggering the deadly chase.

At the Lloyd cinema parking lot, I found he was telling the truth this morning. There was my red Toyota pickup truck, the entire back of the truck and camper shell a charred, steaming ruin. The firemen were finishing, packing things up. Their big, shiny red truck looked like an older, healthy, well-fed relative of my mutilated one. The white foamy stuff that had come from the extinguishers was strewn about like semen, the fire having triggered their explosive release into the world.

“You can’t just leave me for another man and get away with it,” my husband said.

I repressed the scream rising in me. I had learned as a child to hide my pain. “It would have happened with or without the other man,” I said.

“Cheaters always say that. It’s bullshit. You don’t get off scot-free.”

I walked a little closer. The door of the camper shell was up. “I smell gasoline,” I said.

“That’s because I poured gasoline over all of it before I lit the match.”

The withered, caved-in shell of my guitar case was there. . . . the charred remains of my good down parka . . . . .  of the wedding dress I’d designed and made on my mother’s black Singer sewing machine . . . . . the hiking boots that had taken me through hundreds of miles of   wildish backcountry  . . .. . .jumbled piles of what had been, even when I’d woken up that day, my favorite novels, notebooks of dance sequences and choreography, textbooks on teaching I had kept from graduate school. The photo album from my childhood that started with the black and white picture of my mother on her wedding day, large-eyed and luminous, and ended with my high school graduation picture. Irreplaceable.

He was watching me closely, craving a reaction, some outrage, a screaming match. But I knew that coldness was what would hurt him, so that was what I gave him.

I turned away from the sick-sweet smell of the smoldering mess that was my old life. I refused to make eye contact with my husband, who just a year ago had embodied my new life, but was now bonded by fire, like welded steel, to the old. I walked slowly back to the house, leaving Sonny in the parking lot with his singed eyelashes and hands that needed salve.

__________________________________________________________________________

“My name rhymes with gazelle, but starts with an R-e-v,” I explained to the policeman an hour later back at the house. “Revelle Jones Champagne. Spelled like the drink. No hyphen.”

“That’s quite a name,” he smiled a little, probably trying to put me at ease. He needn’t have worried. All I would let him see was calmness and courtesy. I was dissociated, the part of me that was frightened and furious over the fire locked away into a box inside of me.

“I think it will be changing,” I said softly. Pilar and Ruben, whose house we were in, smiled a little. Jones was my maiden name, Champagne my husband’s name. Pilar, my best friend, had taken Ruben’s last name of Lopez when they had married seven years ago, after much discussion and debate. “I’m still an independent person,” she had declared at the wedding reception, done in the style of the old Mexico of their grandparents. “Oh that is clear,” Ruben had said in his dry, understated way.

“So let me see if I have this right,” Officer Chilstrom said. He had arrived soon after Pilar called him, and looked to be about my age, which was 32. “Your husband still lives in Southwest, near Gabriel Park. And you moved in here with your friends five days ago?”

I nodded my head. Ruben and Pilar sat on the couch in their living room where I had been dancing as the fire had been lit. They sat, sides pressed together, faces grave. I was sitting cross-legged on a pillow on the floor, wearing the off-white hip-yoke skirt I’d been dancing in that morning, the one I used for ecstatic dance. My dusty-blue camisole had ‘Cowgirl’ scripted on the front and I felt self-conscious that the officer might read something unsavory into that. I felt unsavory.

“And this morning your husband drove himself all the way up here, parked, got into your truck, drove that vehicle back to, uh, your former shared home in Southwest, and . . . . . filled it up with your personal possessions?”

I nodded.

“And then he drove all the way back up to the parking lot at the Lloyd Cinema and set it on fire?”

“He poured gasoline over all of it first,”  Pilar said, helpful and angry at the same time.

“Gasoline,” Officer Chilstrom nodded, writing busily.

“I blame myself,” Ruben said. All eyes turned to him. “I told Revelle earlier this week that we needed to go down to her old house and bring her clothes and everything up here. We .  . . . .  didn’t make it our highest priority.”

Ruben was being kind to me. He had suggested we do it on Saturday, but Kyle (my boyfriend? I cringed at having a husband and boyfriend at the same time) had wanted to take me out to the museum on the Warm Springs reservation, and go swimming at . . . . and have a picnic. It had sounded much more attractive than dealing with the house still holding my possessions and my husband’s anger, even with Ruben and Pilar accompanying me. And it had been more attractive. At the time.

“I wouldn’t blame myself if I were you,” Officer Chilstrom said to Ruben. “If he couldn’t have attacked her clothes and other things, he might have attacked her, instead. That happens all the time. I hate to say it, but this could have been a lot worse.”

Ruben visibly relaxed, and I realized that had been a brief man-to-man talk, one male protector to another. Ruben had felt he’d failed me, and the policeman had assured him he hadn’t. I agreed with the policeman. My husband was a wild card.

“How soon can you arrest him?” Pilar said. The officer and I started talking at the same time.

“Go ahead,” he deferred to me.

“I’d like to think it over about pressing charges,” I said. “I haven’t had time to think yet.”

“OK,” the officer said. “I was going to ask if you think he’s running at this point, or sticking around in town.”

I shrugged and shook my head slowly. After a minute, Ruben offered, “He’s never been a real predictable guy.” The officer lowered his head and raised one hand in a gesture noting that was evident enough.

“What about a restraining order?” Pilar pressed. You could have said she was the person in the room most in touch with her anger.

The policeman rubbed his clean-shaven chin. “I . . . . would never advise someone not to get a restraining order,” he said carefully. “But they don’t work like an electric fence. People walk through them all the time. Restraining orders tend to be more valuable after the fact. Are there any children in the picture here?”

I shook my head no, thinking that was a blessing now, despite my passionate desire for a child.

“If there had been children, and he broke the restraining order, you’d then be in a better position to get full custody of them.”

The three of us nodded, me thinking that my husband wasn’t someone to be inhibited by legal formalities. Pilar wouldn’t want to hear it, but a restraining order sounded useless to me, another lame attempt to control the sideways-tilted force of nature that I’d married in a time of weakness.

Officer Chilstrom said,.“Well, whether he’s left town or not, he went to so much trouble with the crime that it was clearly premeditated.” He gathered more information on names and addresses, my husband’s physical description and the license plate and description of his own truck.

“Here’s my card,” he said, extending it to me. I took it and then got up from the floor in the spiral motion I’d learned long ago, the one that starts with one foot crossing in front of the body. I could feel the policeman noticing it. We all walked him to the front porch.

“Thank you so much, Officer Chilstrom,” I said, looking him full in the eye. “You’ve been really helpful.”

“If I were you, I’d press charges,” he offered. Pilar nodded vigorously. “The pattern with these domestic violence guys” he went on, “is that they start with something small –“ he raised a hand at Pilar’s exasperated noise “—not that this is small, but a lot of guys start with hurting or killing the woman’s dog or cat, for example. If she doesn’t act on that, if he doesn’t get any consequences for it, he escalates and starts slapping her around, or refusing to let her leave the house. “

Ruben nodded sadly. He had grown up in the barrios of Anaheim, where domestic violence and all the rest of life happened more publicly than in neighborhoods where higher incomes bought space and privacy.

“They get addicted to their own anger,” Officer Chilstrom went on. “Spending some time in jail can calm them down. But not always. Some people are crazy and nothing puts a dent in their violence.”

I wrapped my arms around myself in spite of the heat of the day. All I could feel was the weight of gravity, physical and emotional. I missed Kyle, wanted him to hold me. We had made plans to go out of town together that afternoon, to my friends’ house near the coast.

“I’m ready to arrest this guy as soon as you give the word. The worst thing you could do, though –“ the officer spoke slowly and deliberately now,  “is press charges and then drop them. That tells the perpetrator straight-up that you can be his ongoing prey.”

He looked at me in a direct, pointed way. I held his gaze a moment, seeing he was attracted to me, feeling him challenging me to not be a perpetrator’s prey, almost asking me to let him protect me. I looked down at his pistol in its black holster on his hip. I had never fired a gun. How did guns work at preventing fires from being set? They didn’t. Men worked so hard to be strong and right, often in the wrong direction.

“I don’t see a lot of victims like you,” the officer said suddenly, interrupting my thoughts. When I swung my eyes back to his, raised eyebrows asking for an explanation, he said, “You’re not hysterical.”

“I’ve got good friends,” I pointed out. I did not add that Pilar and Ruben and I were part of a small, tight-knit church, or that I thought friends and community afforded me more protection than any single man could, with or without a gun.

“I can see that,” he nodded. “Well, try to have a good day. You’ve got my phone number if you want to press charges. I can put him in jail in a heartbeat if that’s what you want.”

I stood on Pilar’s porch in the late summer heat, sweating into my blue camisole, wondering how you would possibly send to jail the person to whom you had sworn a holy covenant. Especially when you had already betrayed that covenant with someone else. Kyle was half Apache, and his ancestors would have tortured and murdered someone like Sonny. In a heartbeat.

*                *                      *                      *                      *

You might be thinking that I’m a certain kind of person, the kind of woman, for example, that these things happen to, or that you know what direction this story is heading. But my experience is that predators can be plagued by vulnerability, and their prey can be strangely strong, even aggressive. Victimization is not always what it seems. Neither is revenge, or forgiveness.

Mary, who performed my marriage, told me once that people always remember how things end, and that those endings then color all their experiences and memories, sometimes unfairly. She is right: I have always remembered how things ended with my husband. I have to work harder to remember that they began quite differently.