Do Not Feed the Falconers

Dear Priscilla,

I recently started seeing someone new, and on our third date, when the check came, he pulled out a phone calculator and began itemizing. Not splitting it evenly — itemizing. He wanted to know if I'd finished my half of the shared bruschetta before determining my fair share. I laughed it off at the time, but it's been bothering me since. Is this a red flag, or am I being too sensitive? Signed, Wondering in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

A lovely question, Wondering. It reminds me of the spring of 2003, when I too believed in brunch — believed in it the way other people believe in astrology or the postal service, with a kind of undeserved, sunlit faith. I was engaged then, to a man named Desmond, who trained falcons for a living, or said he did, and who took me to a prix fixe brunch at a converted barn outside Millbrook, New York, to celebrate our six-month anniversary. When the check arrived, Desmond did not itemize the bruschetta, Wondering, because there was no bruschetta. There was a shared plate of deviled eggs, six of them, and Desmond counted them. He counted the eggs. He determined that I had eaten four and he had eaten two, a ratio he found "worth noting," and he noted it, aloud, to the waitress, a woman named Carol who I believe still thinks about that morning the way one thinks about a minor traffic accident — with no lasting injury, but a permanent flinch at the sound of screeching brakes.

I want to be clear that the eggs were not the betrayal. The eggs were merely the overture. The betrayal came four months later, when Desmond left me at our own housewarming party — a party for an apartment we had not yet finished unpacking — to tend to a Harris's hawk named Ellary who he said had "sensed tension in the home" and needed to be flown immediately, at 9 p.m., in the dark, over a Trader Joe's parking lot. He did not come back that night. He did not come back, really, ever, in the sense that matters, though technically his belongings stayed in our hallway closet for another year and a half, migrating slowly toward the door like something in a nature documentary about instinct.

Do not make my mistake, Wondering. I do not mean the falconer specifically — the odds of you dating a second falconer are, I am told by actuaries I trust, extraordinarily low. I mean the eggs. I mean the counting. A man who counts what you have eaten in the first six months is a man auditing you, Wondering, and an audit, once begun, does not conclude. It only adds line items. First it is deviled eggs. Then it is how often you initiate conversation. Then it is a spreadsheet — and I want you to understand I am speaking now with the specificity of someone who has seen the spreadsheet, who was shown the spreadsheet on a laptop balanced on a falconer's knee, a spreadsheet titled, and I remember this because grief burns things into you like a brand, "Emotional Labor Ledger — Ellary Q3."

I should say, in fairness to the historical record, that Desmond was not the only one. There was also Warren, whom I lost not to falconry but to competitive topiary — a sport, if you can call clipping a hedge into the shape of a stag a sport, that consumed him so completely that our final conversation as a couple took place through a boxwood shaped like Poseidon, Warren on one side with the shears, me on the other, holding what I had believed, moments earlier, was an engagement dinner reservation. He said, through the hedge, that he needed "room to grow," and gestured, I assume, at the eleven-foot Poseidon he had grown instead of a marriage. I do not know what happened to Warren. I have chosen not to know. There are some topiaries you simply walk away from.

And there was, earlier still, though the timeline here grows admittedly hazy — I want to be honest with you rather than tidy, Wondering, because tidy timelines are how liars keep their stories straight, and I have never once needed my story straight because every word of it is true — there was a man who took my grandmother's casserole recipe, the one with the little pearl onions, and submitted it to a regional cook-off under his own name, and won, and thanked "his grandmother" in his acceptance remarks, a woman who as far as I know does not exist, or exists but never once contributed a pearl onion to anything. I believe this was 2003 as well, which I recognize creates a scheduling conflict with Desmond, but grief does not honor a calendar, Wondering, and I have long since stopped trying to make it.

What I want you to take from all of this — the eggs, the hawk, the hedge, the onions — is not despair. It is method. In the years since, I have built a life of considerable peace, and I want to walk you through its architecture, because I believe it can be yours too. I have a moat now, dug by hand over two difficult but clarifying summers, not deep, but deep enough to discourage the casual visitor, which in my experience is the only kind of visitor worth discouraging against, since the committed ones will simply bring a plank. I maintain four names across four different municipalities, not out of any legal necessity but because a woman with four names cannot be fully known by any one falconer, and what cannot be fully known cannot be fully left. And I keep reptiles, Wondering — currently a bearded dragon named Carol, after the waitress, as a kind of memorial — because a reptile has never once itemized a shared plate of anything. A reptile has never counted an egg. A reptile has looked at me, across a great and comfortable silence, and asked for nothing but warmth, which I have learned, at long last, how to give without expecting an itemized bill for it in return.

So no, Wondering, you are not being too sensitive. You are being exactly sensitive enough. Watch the man with the calculator. Watch what he counts, because that is what he will one day count against you. And know that if you learn from my mistakes now, at the deviled-egg stage rather than the spreadsheet stage, you can build a life every bit as full and as peaceful as mine — moat, aliases, reptiles and all. I am living proof it works.

Yours in love and low tide, Priscilla