Uniting a Mysterious Ring With Its Rightful Owner

We offer the Hate Read's first trigger warning today. The author of today's atrocity, aspiring socialite Patricia Morrisroe, published a "book" titled 9 1/2 Narrow: My Life in Shoes. So you know we're in the hands of a materialist philosopher of sorts. The book was blurbed by Irene Beckerman, author of Love, Loss, and What I Wore, so you know we're in for a head-thumper.

Romance ain't what it used to be. Just read the weekly human rights violation that is the Modern Love column. If you hadn't guessed, this monument to bourgeois matchmaking can be found in the country's paper of record, The New York Times. Cue the tiny doomsaying, violin-playing orchestra in my head.

The saga begins on Ms. Morrisroe's 25th anniversary when she receives a $2,350 diamond ring in the mail from Neiman Marcus, which begins a series of reveries on jewelry and subplots that could only have been hatched in the mind of a crack-addled Real Housewife:  

Shaped like an oval shield with a sapphire in the center, the ring was so gigantic it extended beyond the knuckle of my index finger. It was a “statement ring,” and here’s what it said: My husband, after 25 years of marriage, still didn’t get my taste in jewelry. 

Decades earlier, there was the chunky Art Deco engagement ring that became a nonengagement ring when we postponed the wedding. Though we had been engaged for only 15 minutes, it was long enough for me to decide that while I still loved my former fiancé, I definitely didn’t love the ring.

The horror. Who could this terrible man be? One feels a bit of sympathy for Mr. Morrisroe  until realizing that if he's held it together for 25 years, he can't be made of much. Thankfully, their 10th anniversary ring tells all:

For our 10th anniversary, my husband presented me with a delicate Burmese ruby to make up for the Art Deco disaster. I was moved but conflicted: “pigeon blood” rubies derive their name from the color of the first two drops of blood dribbling from a butchered pigeon’s nose.

I have no great fondness for pigeons, but I didn’t want their symbolic blood on my finger. Luckily, the United States government gave me the perfect out. “Myanmar is violating human rights, and the U.S. has banned Burmese rubies,” I told my husband.

“I bought the ring before the ban,” he said. 

“Other people don’t know that. Besides, I feel bad for the pigeons.” 

“That’s the last time I ever get you a ring,” he said.

No doubt the Burmese military junta could count on this couple for a good hard-on. We would provide you a .GIF to show you what a Burmese military junta hard-on looks like but the free wifi at McDonald's is too slow to do .GIF quality control. And we regret to inform Ms. Morrisroe that "pigeon's blood" rubies have no blood in them. But alas, the $2,350 "bargain" ring was not meant for her, so she suspected a "secret admirer." Wrong--it was a Stefan from Studio City, California. She bravely trucked out to the remote tundra outpost of White Plains, New York to return it:

Neiman Marcus doesn’t have a branch in Manhattan, so I brought the ring to the Neiman-owned Bergdorf Goodman. The woman at client services suggested taking it to Neiman Marcus in White Plains.

Two days later, my husband announced that he had made a reservation at one of our favorite restaurants.

“You know what I’d really like to do?” I said. “Go to White Plains.”

“Are you crazy? That’s 40 miles away.”

“I know, but I’ve got to get rid of the diamond shield ring.”

“I was hoping we could have a nice romantic dinner,” he said.

“We can — in White Plains.”

Leaving Manhattan! Can you imagine? Do you even know where White Plains is? Isn't that where poor people go for colonoscopies? Meanwhile, Mr. Morrisroe had learned his lesson and bought his beloved a bracelet instead. The beautiful, or atrocious, thing about this Modern Love is the cast of characters we are privy to and to which the New York Times subjects its readers:

As it turned out, he hadn’t. His gift was a beautiful bangle bracelet that immediately fell off my wrist. To be fair, I’m very small-boned, but now it would have to be returned for resizing to the jeweler’s workshop in Jaipur, India. Still, I was so happy he hadn’t given me the shield ring that I didn’t care.

[A few weeks and paragraphs later]

Back home, I spotted a familiar box on the coffee table. Inside was my bangle bracelet. The jeweler had been able to resize it in her New York workshop. Now I realized why my husband had made dinner reservations. He had wanted to make it a special night.

The bracelet was beautiful. It was also very small, but after I used soap and ignored the pain in my thumb joint, I was able to get it on.

Can you just picture the jeweler with the workshops in New York and Jaipur resizing the bracelet to fit poor Ms. Morrisroe's bird-like wrists? We may be in for another one of the Times' famous labor investigation. Here the abuse would just be interacting with Ms. Morrisroe and the people in her orbit. On her book, an Amazon reviewer optimistically opines that it "Will Make You Laugh, Cry and Think." She's definitely right about the crying. 

The main building of the White Plains gulag