The Christmas Ring: An eShort Story

The Christmas Ring

Also by Douglas Kennedy

Fiction

The Moment

Leaving the World

The Woman in the Fifth

Temptation

State of the Union

A Special Relationship

The Pursuit of Happiness

The Job

The Big Picture

The Dead Heart

Nonfiction

Chasing Mammon

In God’s Country

Beyond the Pyramids

ATRIA BOOKS

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2011 by Douglas Kennedy

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Atria Books ebook edition December 2011

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-1-4516-8302-8 (ebook)

Contents

Introduction

The Christmas Ring

Pursuit of Happiness Teaser

A Special Relationship Teaser

State of the Union Teaser

Temptation Teaser

The Woman in the Fifth Teaser

Leaving the World Teaser

The Moment Teaser

Reviews

About the Author

About Atria

Introduction

Christmas is, without question, the most contradictory moment of the year. And the endless complaint about this holiday period—which I remember first hearing back in the early 1960s (when I was beginning to become cognizant of such things)—is its horrendous commercialization; how back then (i.e., the idealized past) Christmas was a time of giving and ‘joy and the nonmaterialistic exchange of simple gifts (for the latent Puritans out there who still think that our country made a mistake when it abandoned its Plymouth Rock religiosity in the pursuit of a secular, all-embracing great democratic experiment).

It always fascinates me how so much conservative thought is bound up in an idealized vision of times past—that Currier & Ives vision of skaters in Central Park, with not a neon Christmas light or a cheap plastic Buzz Lightyear in view. The fact is, Christmas aspires to be about very honorable Christian ideals about benevolence and charity and good will toward man and the comforting bulwark that family is supposed to provide. But sentient beings are, even at their very best, hugely complex individuals—and from the Greeks onward world literature has been centered around the family as being such a repository of individual and collective grief. And most of us have experienced, at one time or another, the family Christmas that has turned into its very own O’Neill drama, in which all the internecine resentments are laid bare. Just as Christmas is, without question, the most isolating juncture of the year and one in which that great ongoing existential sense of being truly alone in the world can be magnified one-hundred-fold amidst all the hope and aspiration that this allegedly festive season throws into the public arena.

Personally I’ve always loved the aesthetics of Christmas, and as I am now always at my home in Maine with my children (who are now adolescents, but still adore the season) I do experience the pleasure of snow augmenting the white New England clapboard that defines my coastal village. I can actually burn pine in my fireplace and drink bourbon-laced eggnog with my neighbors and even walk an empty beach on Christmas morning, an annual tradition that is as bracing (it is very cold in Maine in late December) as it is restorative.

But I have also known considerable despair at Christmastime, especially the despair that comes with facing into the end of a long, difficult marriage, and when it comes to the complexities of my parents and their own shared unhappiness. As such, when asked to write a Christmas story, I wanted to create a parable for our overfed times: an era during which many of us really do have so much, and yet still perhaps have so little. A Christmas story, to my mind, should address the ideals of the season by looking at how they reflect the way we live now, and how this time of year always brings out the sad child in so many of us.

And I must acknowledge a literary debt here—to the great short story writer, O. Henry, who, in the late nineteenth century and the early 1900s, acutely observed American mores in the guise of deftly conceived, narratively cunning stories which usually imparted a moral lesson with considerable understated elegance. The Gift of the Maji,the story of a rather impoverished young husband and wife who sacrifice certain prized possessions to buy each other Christmas gifts (I won’t spoil the twist in the proverbial tale), has always struck me as, alongside that novella by Mr. Dickens, the most perfect Christmas story imaginable. My own story is considerably different from that of O. Henry’s, but from him I did glean this (and it’s an idea that permeates the tale you are about to read): Christmas is also a time when we need to look into ourselves and see if we are living the lives that we want to be living, and whether we are happy with what we have become in life.

Christmas is also the end of the year, and the end of every year brings us that bit closer to our own mortality. If Christmas should tell us anything it’s that, given the terrible brevity and fragility of human existence, we owe it to ourselves to do good with the time still allotted to us.

—Douglas Kennedy

The Christmas Ring

My ex-husband had his extravagant moments. When we first were going out, he thought nothing of whisking me off for a long weekend to Mustique, or arranging two tickets on the Concorde to Paris, when that supersonic option still existed. And upon deciding that we would marry, he marched me, on Christmas Eve 2002, to a private jeweler on West 46th Street (no store-bought ring for my honcho husband) and plonked down seventy-eight thousand dollars for a multi-diamond ring, which somehow managed to look refined and ostentatious at the same time. I knew the price because Todd told me the price. He always told me the price of everything. And because three years after our marriage (when things were starting to go very wrong between us), I had it re-appraised. The jeweler (another Diamond District operator) actually called two colleagues over to marvel at the cut and refinement of the diamonds, and the value of the karats.

If I was you, I’d have it reinsured for one hundred and fifty thousand, the jeweler said. But if you want to sell it right now, I’ll give you one hundred and thirty, no questions asked.

I made the mistake of mentioning this conversation to my husband over dinner at some Michelin-starred place that evening (we were always eating out, even though we spent over one hundred thousand on a bespoke kitchen in our Tribeca loft).

The ring’s actually doubled in price? he said, sounding shocked. Let me see it.

I’m not taking it off. In fact I’m never taking it off. It’s my running-away money.

Yeah, right Todd said with a sour laugh. As if you needed the money.

He had a point. Though I wasn’t pulling down his $2.9 million per year, I was making somewhere in the high six figures. Because, like Todd, I too was a corporate stain—a lawyer, specializing in mergers and acquisitions…and, as my husband was fond of telling everyone, someone who was even more hard-nosed that he was.

Erica is the ultimate pragmatist, he once informed a group of our friends, much to my considerable chagrin and rage. But the bastard did have a point. I’m a litigator; he’s a litigator. And litigators are not known for their romantic sensibilities. Only Todd didn’t see himself that way. He was a killer in the courtroom who fancied himself something of aesthete, an opera fanatic who could sing entire arias from Verdi’s Don Carlos when there was a willing audience of anyone he wanted to impress. Suddenly this legal eviscerator showed to the world that, behind the Darwinian facade, he had soul. Whereas I…I was the legal technician with a heart made of reinforced concrete.

Erica can never find the poetry lurking behind life’s essential complexities. Or, at least, that’s the story he put around when he filed for divorce six months ago. We mediated ourselves into a negotiated settlement (I got the co-op; he got the weekend house in Litchfield), and everyone in our little legal and social circle commented on how predictably controlled I was in the face of Todd running off with a rather well-known soprano just three weeks after the divorce was finalized. When I say running off I mean marrying—in a big deal wedding in Milan where the bitch was singing Mimi at La Scala. I had to dodge a lot of commiserating looks from professional colleagues, all of which were underscored by the question: How the hell could you—the pit bull of litigators, the relentless inquisitor who could probably find the dirt on the pope—not have sussed out that your husband had been carrying on a full-blown affair for over two years?"

Maybe it’s because I simply can’t find the poetry lurking behind life’s essential complexities.

Of course I maintained a steely dignity in the face of all this. Whenever someone offered commiserations or made a comment about the tackiness of Todd’s post-divorce rush to the altar, I’d bat it away with a comment like, You are looking at a happily divorced woman. Or I’d resort to irony: In private Todd was always a diva…so I’m not surprised he simply had to marry one.

And in private…

In private, I was falling apart.

As in losing six pounds a week without even trying. And then suffering six straight nights of insomnia. My entire nervous system suddenly becoming so overloaded that, in the middle of a negotiation over some merger and acquisition, I excused myself and locked myself in the Ladies and balled my eyes out, all the submerged grief suddenly coming out in a ferocious wave.

Afterwards I remade my face and told myself that the poison had been vented—or some such nonsense. I went back in and closed the deal. I headed home and drank six glasses of a very good Graves and once again could not render myself unconscious. When I stepped on the scales the next morning to discover that another three pounds had slipped away, I phoned my doctor and begged for an emergency appointment.

Have you ever thought you might be depressed? he asked me after running a battery of tests.

I don’t do depressed.

Well you’re doing it now.

He gave me some mild antidepressants that would help me sleep and counseled me to take some time off, to stop thinking that I could just equate divorce to a far-too-painful pair of shoes I had insisted on wearing for years but