diamonds and pearls

by Linda Cowell

IN THE LAST DAYS of 2001, I’m riding the down escalator towards the underground parking lot at the uptown Fred Meyer’s in Portland, Oregon, with a large bag of groceries perched on each hip. I catch my reflection in the polished steel wall and think: Not bad for just over forty. The honey-gold silk shirt my husband Sam gave me for Christmas is a nice contrast to the 90s-era low-waisted, acid-washed jeans hanging from my hips. Wide leather belt. Black Frye boots. A newly set one-carat diamond on a thin 18-karat gold chain hangs around my neck. I’m pleased. Not just with my reflection, but with myself.

The good feeling wasn’t just that I was back in shape after having two children. The diamond necklace around my neck had been made using the remains of the engagement ring from my first marriage and was my reward for surviving its end nearly fifteen years before. Wearing it proved I had finally gotten over my ex. When a friend asked if Sam was okay with me wearing the diamond from my first husband, I brushed her off. “Of course he is,” I replied. That Sam would see it every time he looked at me never crossed my mind. And if I had seen it from his perspective? I wouldn’t have been swayed. I was adamant that reclaiming the diamond was my right. It was a piece of my life, after all.

At the time, I’d have said my life was perfect. Sam and I had two children. He earned the income and I stayed at home. I filled my spare time volunteering in their school and the larger community. I was lucky too, for I believed I had found the kind of man who wouldn’t have a problem with me wearing the jewel from my first marriage.

The escalator continued down, and my head was full of self-congratulatory thoughts. I chaffed at my ex, even though we lived three thousand miles apart and hadn’t seen each other since the day we showed up in court to end our marriage. I was smug about getting over him. And that’s exactly when the chain of the necklace looped around the button on my shirt and snapped. The diamond flew and the chain slithered down my chest. The diamond wedged into a groove of the stair just two steps below me, and I tossed the bags. Tangerines cascaded and a carton of milk bounced, but I kept my eye on the glimmer as we, my diamond and I, descended. Straddling the steps, bent over with the car key in hand, I scooted the gem toward the safety of my palm. Within an inch of recovery, the stair flattened, and my diamond disappeared through the teeth of the escalator with a loud grinding crunch.

We were young, Ryker and I, barely out of college when we announced our plans to marry. That summer, his mother laid out an assortment of diamond rings on the kitchen table of their family home outside of Boston, Massachusetts—where we lived at the time. The rings had been worn by dead mothers and grandmothers. My eyes landed on the biggest, most traditional setting, a Tiffany solitaire mount from the late 1800s. I cut up a Band-Aid and wrapped it around the underside of the ring to make it fit the smallness of my finger. The wedding dress I wore was secondhand too: sold to me at half-price after a friend’s engagement fell apart. My mother said wearing red on my wedding day would bring me luck and gave me a scarlet Japanese obi to wrap around my waist.

That marriage ended abruptly on its four-year anniversary when the phone rang shortly before lunch service in the kitchen I managed for Merrill Lynch Financial Services. I heard Ryker’s voice but not the tone in it. I was impatient and irritated by his timing. Didn’t he know how busy I was? Hadn’t I told him that all three dining rooms were fully booked for lunch? My husband and I had planned a weekend away to celebrate. He was calling, I was sure, to finalize the details for leaving town. He talked slowly with pauses, as if making small, tentative cuts to get my attention. He didn’t want to go away for the weekend, he said, as he ginned up the courage to say, “I don’t want to be married to you anymore.” It’s not hard to imagine his secretary at his elbow, reassuring him, pressing him to leave our marriage and join her.

Our marriage had begun its decline well before she reached out and pulled him from the ditch of our relationship. I’ve assured myself that we were young and practicing at marriage, and not a good match. Marriages fail all the time, I reasoned. I blamed him and I blamed her. And I blamed them for their conspiracies. I blamed myself too for not keeping him close, because surely if I were a better wife, he wouldn’t have looked for another.

But that’s not the whole of it. I cringe when I think of the person I was then. I’d have left me too. I wanted what I wanted, and it was always more. My eyes never wandered for other lovers, but my sights were always out and away from us—towards cooking school in France, to buying a home and starting a family. My wanting made me mean when I didn’t get what I wanted, and that meanness flowed into the aftermath of our marriage. I didn’t know a thing about love. I wouldn’t for a long time. Maybe, I still don’t.

Ryker left, and I kept the things we had accumulated as a couple. I kept things as payback for the hurt he inflicted on me. I bought him out of the condominium we owned, fair and square, but I kept our dog, Toby, a Bernese Mountain dog named for the Swiss chocolate bar Toblerone. I refused his reasonable request for the Spanish table his father had brought back from Europe. I told him I gave it away even though it sat dusty in the basement storage unit of our condominium. He never asked for the diamond ring, but I am sure I would have mocked him if he had. I’d sell it before I gave it back. That’s what engagement rings were for, after all—something to give a jilted woman a leg up.

After Ryker left, I was cash poor. I tried to rid myself of the diamond, to sell it to a pawn shop, only to discover its worth was a fraction of what I hoped it would be. The value of a used engagement ring doesn’t match the promise and optimism of a couple looking to the future. Second-market rings are tainted. I told myself I’d kept the ring Ryker gave me because it wouldn’t have fetched much money for the trouble of selling it, but years would pass before I understood the depth of my attachment.

Fifteen years had passed since Ryker called and ended our marriage. Surely I had healed and softened around the edges, and I had indeed moved on. The evidence was all there. Sam and I were well into our marriage. We had started a family. We bought a house and rebuilt it. One year, on my birthday, I asked Sam if we could tie our legs together and cook dinner. Not just any dish but lasagna, a dish with so many parts I knew we’d be tied together for hours. He agreed, despite how annoying a request it was, and we spent that afternoon tethered to one another.

In my busy and blissful state, I believed I had forgiven Ryker. Let bygones be bygones, I told friends, hoping to convince myself that I too believed I was over him. When I found the engagement ring in the steel drawer of the bank’s safe deposit, I decided to bring it into the light of day. A necklace would be a practical solution to the problem of owning a diamond from a previous marriage. I couldn’t fathom giving either of our children the tainted gem. I asked Sam what he thought of my idea. “If that’s what you want to do, then you should do it,” he replied.

After the diamond disappeared into the escalator, I gathered up my groceries, carried them to my car, and returned to the store. I explained to the manager that I had lost a rather large diamond in the escalator and asked if I could look for it. He told me the escalator was due to be serviced in three months. He’d call me then, he said, and passed me his card in case I needed to reach him. The very thought of waiting was absurd. Didn’t he understand that I had lost a large precious stone? He was so cool; I was sure he’d open it up that very night and take it. I wasn’t used to trusting people, but I had no choice but to wait for him to call. Three months later, he did.

I would like to think I handled the waiting with patience, but when the holidays ended and the cold January rains set in, I walked into The Real Mother Goose, the gallery that transformed my ring into a necklace, and I told them the chain on my necklace broke. Without saying so directly, I suggested that they were at fault for my loss, that they might have questioned the design I asked for. The chain was too thin, I said, and the diamond was not fastened to the chain. Even though I knew the designer gave me exactly what I asked for, I suggested they offer to replace the diamond. The fact that the chain simply broke wouldn’t satisfy me. I needed to blame someone.

On a Monday in March, I sat on the edge of the trapdoor at the bottom of the escalator. Most of the world was still asleep. A Halogen lamp illuminated the mechanical understory and cast long dark shadows. A waft of axel grease and a closed-up mustiness ascended as if from some other place and time. I dropped into the hole and my boots landed with a thud beside the store janitor. I fell to my hands and knees beside him, and we began to search.

I pawed through the things that had slipped through the cracks and landed in the catch-pan below the grooved stairs. Little white pills, shiny dimes, paperclips, and pink and purple candy Nerds. The smell reminded me of the Leah-kai, a fishing boat I worked on one summer. My back was warm under the rays of the lamp. The janitor’s tobacco-worn face was wreathed in faded-blonde curls. His breath smelled of coffee. He wore a red plaid overshirt and paint splattered carpenter pants. We searched for two hours, right up until the store opened. I’ll be back tomorrow, I said, as he closed the trap door.

The next morning I suggested we switch sides, hoping we’d see things differently. I trained my eyes to search for light reflecting off gold and crystal shards, willing them to see something, anything like my diamond. On the third morning, I crawled deep into the machinery, twisting and contorting my body, fascinated by the feat of engineering. I looked up to where the diamond had disappeared, imagining its violent pass between the metal steps. If the pressure didn’t break it, the diamond could have ricocheted anywhere. If it fell directly below where it squeezed through, it could have dropped into the stair ahead of it and ridden to the top. We’re looking in the wrong place, I whispered to the janitor, it’s at the top. He nodded while I explained myself. After scraping decades of embedded floor wax from the edges of the upper trap door, he pried it open. His flashlight cut through the dark and caught my diamond in its beam. He placed it in my hand. The metal teeth of the escalator had etched scars into the soft gold of the setting, but the diamond was whole.

Twenty-five years have passed since I lost and found the diamond. Thirty-eight years since the morning Ryker called, forty-two since he and I married, and forty-four since we first met. Ryker is an iota in my timeline, as I am sure I am in his. No doubt he thinks of me less than I think of him. If I had left him, if I had found someone new and more exciting, would I think of him less often? Probably. I don’t long for the life we might have had. That died long ago. But the fact remains. I am obsessed with the idea of him and what’s left unresolved in me is what went wrong between us.

After all this time, the diamond’s significance is fading. I wear the necklace so much I’ve stopped seeing it in the mirror. I forget about it until I remove it before a massage. I’m aggravated by how hard it is to open the clasp, and when I work at it, I think of my ex. Once, while swimming across an alpine lake, I imagined the diamond descending through the deepening green water and sinking into the soft silt of the lakebed. I wanted Fate to work her bony fingers around the chain and snap it for good. I wanted her to do the work for me.

These days Sam and I are on our own. Our children are adults. We live alone, without dogs or cats. We fill our time with books and writing, the house, and our garden. These years feel like they should be for resting easy and reflecting on our lives. But spaciousness, I’ve come to know, exposes the nooks and crannies of the unexamined bits of life.

On a recent winter evening after dinner was finished, Sam put away the leftovers and I washed the dishes. We left the kitchen and retired to the living room. Embers glowed in the fireplace and the light from the front porch softened the room. Sam sat on the faded red couch, his legs long over the coffee table. I lay sideways and stretched my feet out over his thighs. I was drowsy with pasta and the warm dark when Sam asked if I think of Ryker. Or maybe he asked how often I think of him. It doesn’t really matter which question he asked because the answer is yes, and more often than I care to admit to myself or anyone else.

Sam and I are both divorced from our first spouses. Our breaks were emotionally messy but in other ways tidy. I knew his ex and he knew mine. We were all friends back then, having met in college. Sam remembers the exact moment Ryker told him about me, the new girlfriend. He said I was interesting and different. Beautiful. His words set a hook in Sam. The first time we met was in a parking lot near the paddle ball court. Ryker and I had just started dating when I met his posse of friends. Sam wore a Levi’s denim jacket, the one I wear now, khakis, and wire-rimmed glasses. We became friends and lived off campus together. We sorted out how to share a household. We talked late into the night about life and relationships, literature, and art. We shopped and cooked together. After college, we married our first spouses, and I kissed our friendship goodbye when I heard who Sam was dating and later engaged to. As if it were yesterday, I remember the day we met again, five years later at a friend’s wedding. I was newly single, and Sam’s marriage in its last gasps. We met at the airport in Rochester. He wore a black leather jacket now, and his wire-rimmed glasses were replaced by tortoise shell. He held a bouquet of tiger lilies for his wife. Funny how I remember so many details about Sam back then, and so few about Ryker, even though he occupies my mind.

Sam repeats the question, “Do you think of him often?” I scan the room, taking in all the things leftover from Ryker’s and my marriage. The long narrow cherrywood dining room table we bought at the Shaker Museum in Hancock, Massachusetts, in 1985, now etched with the grade school math equations of Sam’s and my children. Snug up against the stove, in the heart of our home, is the butcher block Ryker lugged up four flights of stairs to our tiny apartment in Boston. On the wall above the couch hang two Japanese woodblock prints that belonged to his grandmother. A box containing Toby’s ashes sits on the mantle with the ashy remains of the animals Sam and I have had. The carbon steel baking plaques Ryker carried home from Paris are exactly right for baking Sam’s favorite cookies, the ones we call Squashed Fly because of the raisins. The napkins, the silverware in the camp kit, the reading chair in the living room, the bedside tables. The things from my life with Ryker are wholly twined with this life of Sam’s and mine.

Sam presses on with a quiet questing in his voice, a voice with years of restraint patiently assuaging the unpredictable defensiveness in me. Asking me to soften without saying so.

How much do I think of my ex? “A lot,” I say. An oak log breaks and settles. Heat radiates from the hearth. Sam gets up, stirs the embers, and adds another log. The fire cracks and sparks. Heat rises in the room. My pulse races. I want the words “a lot” to be enough—to not say any more. “He’s an amputation,” I say, “a phantom.”

Admitting goes a long way and still, I keep quiet. I want to keep the truth from Sam, to protect him from knowing that I think of Ryker too often, and the phone call that erased the good memories of our short time together. Somedays I feel generous towards Ryker, knowing he left what made him unhappy. Other times, I imagine we talked out our differences and agreed to end our marriage. Occasionally I search the internet, typing in his name and “Obituary.” I look for an Instagram account, wanting a glimpse of what we might have had together. But I know better. These imaginings are all irresistible dead ends.

Sam’s voice brings me back to the couch, the fire, and us. “Every time I see that diamond around your neck, I think of him.” He’s been formulating this sentence a long time.

Heat rises from the darkest place of my heart. I want my pain, my past, to be mine. I want it to have turned me into something beautiful the way carbon, the building block of life, transforms underground, in the dark depths, with pressure and time, into a diamond. Except scar tissue is thick and permanent. My heart didn’t heal the way a cut heals in two weeks without leaving a mark. Time didn’t restore my heart to a pre-divorce state. It never will.

On the coffee table is a yellowed half-sheet of paper Sam found in a box while cleaning out his office. He picks it up and hands it to me. Scrawled across the page are the directions to find me and never leave. Notes he scribbled down thirty-five years ago before he drove to my condominium in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Our list of things forms in my mind: five dogs and one cat. Two children into their thirties. One abortion. Four aging parents, three of whom have died. His brother’s suicide. A house bought and taken down to the studs and rebuilt. A pandemic. Dinner, laundry, a garden, and gutters. Every night our big, beautiful bed.

A few weeks ago, Sam opened a dozen oysters one after another, carefully, so as not to chip the shells. He drained the milky liquid and loosened the bodies from their shells with the tip of the shucking knife we bought at E. Dehillerin’s in Paris. He covered each one with his homemade sauerkraut and a blanket of velouté sauce. He lit the broiler and slid the tray beneath the blue gas flame. The tops of each half shell bubbled and browned, and we leaned over the stove and ate one after another, our kitchen redolent with the brine of oysters.

Sam and I have a knack for living a messy life with care. Our two separate lives and one married life are cluttered with things from the past—an unavoidable hazard of living. The objects that fill our house are still wet with their stories, but I’m learning to listen to the whispers of our life together. I’d thought picking over the debris of my brief marriage to Ryker, searching through and examining the bits would give me something like a carbon-to-diamond transformation. But it hardened me; left me sharp and unbreakable. I wanted to be over Ryker, but over never arrived. Instead, my marriage to Ryker became the foreign body, the parasite, the worm, the dead matter that found its way into the heart of Sam’s and my marriage. Embedded there, we lived with it, occasionally irritated by its existence. We ignored it. Reminded by memory, we smoothed it over in the dark secret place within and between us. A tiny thing planted in the soft mantel of our past. Make no mistake, Ryker is not the pearl of our marriage, he is the thing, the injury that made the pearl.

The fire settles in the fireplace and a part of me wants a do over. To go back in time to when I am standing in the kitchen before lunch service with the phone to my ear and Ryker is saying what he’s called to say. I want to cheer her on. Yes, her, as she sits at his elbow encouraging him to end our marriage. But if I had a part in the end of that marriage, I might not have this luminous thing I have with Sam.

About the author:

Linda Colwell lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband, Sam.