The Ledger at High Tide

A lovely question, Denise. It reminds me of the summer of 1998, when I too believed a man could be trusted with a knife.

You wrote to me from Flagstaff, wondering whether it's a red flag that your boyfriend of three months — a kind man, by your account, employed, punctual, allergic to shellfish — has proposed you split the cost of your upcoming beach trip fifty-fifty, dollar for dollar, even though he earns considerably more than you do. You called it "practical." You asked if practical is a euphemism for something colder. Denise, I want you to know that this is a wise and searching question, and that I once asked myself a version of it while standing in four inches of cold pond water, holding a receipt.

His name was Gerald, and he was a competitive ice sculptor of some regional renown — third place, 1997 Sedona Winter Invitational, a fact he mentioned the way other men mention military service. For our first anniversary, Gerald carved us a pair of entwined swans out of a two-hundred-pound ice block, and I thought, foolishly, that this was romance. It was not romance. It was inventory. Three days later he presented me with an itemized bill for "shared commemorative sculpture, materials and labor," pro-rated to the half-inch, including a surcharge for "emotional overtime" on the left swan's neck, which he said had given him trouble. I paid it. I want you to sit with that, Denise, the way I have had to sit with it for twenty-eight years: I paid a man for the privilege of watching our love melt into my koi pond. The koi were never the same. Two of them developed what the vet called "trust issues," which I did not know fish could have until that spring, and which I now recognize as the truest description anyone has ever given of me.

Do not make my mistake, Denise. When a man hands you a ledger before he has finished learning your coffee order, that ledger is not about money. It is a diagram of how much of himself he intends to keep. Gerald kept the shed, the truck, both swans (reconstituted, eventually, in a walk-in freezer he rented under a company called Eternal Ice Moments LLC, which I believe is still in business, and which I believe you should not hire, Denise, should you ever require a swan), and, I have come to suspect, though I cannot prove it, the good espresso machine, which vanished the same week and which he always denied taking with a specificity that struck me even then as rehearsed.

I should tell you also about Cornelius, because a single flashback is never the whole education, and I have found that grief, properly aged, develops into a kind of vintage you can pour by the glass as needed. Cornelius kept bees — twelve hives, up on the ridge behind what was then our house, though I want to be honest with you and say I no longer remember whose name was on the deed, mine or his, or possibly, briefly, ours, in that window of 2003 when we discussed such things as though they were permanent. Cornelius left in the spring, the same spring as Gerald, which I recognize does not entirely track chronologically, and which I have stopped trying to reconcile, because a woman my age is entitled to a decade that folds in on itself now and then. He left with the good honey — not all of it, just the wildflower batch, the one I'd been saving for a dinner party that, in the end, I did not have the heart to throw. I remember standing in the driveway asking him, quite reasonably I thought, whether a man who loved bees the way he claimed to could really leave a woman with nothing but the clover honey, which even he admitted was "the honey you serve people you don't like very much." He did not have an answer. He had, I noticed, already loaded the hives.

You see the pattern, Denise, even if I did not, for many years, and even if I confess I still catch myself defending Gerald at dinner parties when his name comes up, which it does, more than you'd think, ice sculpture being a smaller world than people realize. The pattern is this: love, when it is real, does not itemize. It does not pro-rate. It does not present you with a receipt for the swan.

So here is what I want you to do, and I want you to actually do it, not merely nod at it the way readers nod at advice they intend to ignore. Do not go on the beach trip. Or rather — go, but go alone, and let this be the first plank in a structure I have come to trust more than I have ever trusted a man: build yourself a moat. It need not be literal, though I will say, in my experience, literal is more effective. A ring of water, even a modest one, even a decorative garden trench four feet across, does more to protect a woman's heart than any promise a man has ever made me, up to and including Gerald's promise, on our engagement, that he would "never let anything come between us," a promise he kept, technically, since what came between us was a walk-in freezer and forty-one dollars in itemized emotional overtime.

Learn to love the company of reptiles, Denise. I keep a tortoise now — Bartholomew, eleven years old, entirely silent, asks for nothing, has never once handed me a bill — and I credit him with more peace than any of the men whose names I have just given you. Correspond by carrier pigeon where you can; it slows a person down to the speed at which real trust can actually be verified, which is to say, glacially, over years, the way glaciers themselves move, which is, I will note, considerably slower than Gerald moved when he cleared out the shed. Keep an alias for the beach — something plain, something that will not appear on any future ice sculpture invoice — and tell no one, not even the boyfriend, especially not the boyfriend, which hotel you are actually staying in.

I do not say any of this bitterly, Denise. I want to be very clear with you, because I know how this can read on the page: I am not a woman who was broken by Gerald, or by Cornelius, or by the several gentlemen whose names I am sparing you today in the interest of your word count. I am a woman who was built by them, the way a moat is built — one displaced shovelful at a time, until one day you look up and you are standing on an island, dry-footed, watching the tide come in around you, and you understand, finally, that you have never in your life felt so safe.

That is what is waiting for you, Denise, if you take my mistakes as the gift they are. Skip the fifty-fifty beach trip. Learn what a tortoise can teach you about silence. And know that if you follow me this far, you can be exactly as happy as I am.

— Priscilla