The Itemized Heart

Dear Priscilla,

I've been seeing a very nice man for about three weeks now — kind, funny, remembers that I like my coffee with oat milk and a little too much cinnamon. Last night, on our fourth date, the check came and he suggested we split it evenly, right down to the tax. I didn't mind, exactly, but something about the way he pulled out his phone calculator afterward, just to double-check, has been sitting strangely with me ever since. Is this just how dating works now? Am I old-fashioned for wanting to be swept off my feet a little, arithmetic-free? I don't want to read too much into a perfectly reasonable financial arrangement, but I also can't stop thinking about it.

— Denise, Tulsa, Oklahoma

Denise, sweetheart, what a lovely, ordinary little question. It reminds me so much of the autumn of 2011, when I too believed that a calculator, produced at a dinner table, was simply a tool of convenience and not, as I would later learn, a loaded weapon.

His name was Corwin. I want to be clear that I do not say his name with bitterness — I say it the way one says the name of a hurricane, purely for record-keeping purposes, so that future generations know what came through and what it left behind. Corwin and I had been together fourteen months when he suggested we celebrate our anniversary at a lovely little bistro downtown, the kind of place with cloth napkins and a wine list that pretends not to have prices on it. I remember feeling so hopeful that night, Denise, the way you must have felt watching your gentleman friend remember your cinnamon preference. Hope is a beautiful, stupid thing.

The check arrived. Corwin did not simply suggest splitting it. Corwin produced, from his blazer pocket, a small spiral notebook — the kind you'd use to jot down a grocery list, or, apparently, to pre-itemize a romantic dinner in advance, which I can only assume he had been filling out under the table like a court stenographer. Line by line, Denise. The bruschetta, halved, because I had eaten what he generously estimated to be "the bigger end." The bottle of Sancerre, split three ways, because I had, in his accounting, only finished "point-six of my share" before switching to water. And then — and I want you to sit with this the way I have had to sit with it for fifteen years — a line item for the shared plate of calamari that simply read, in his own handwriting, "D's thumb-lick, est. 1 ring, $0.40."

He charged me forty cents, Denise, for licking sauce off my own thumb. In a restaurant. On our anniversary. While violinists — actual violinists, hired for the evening by the restaurant, not by him, he did not so much as tip them — played somewhere near the kitchen.

Do not make my mistake, Denise. I know the calculator on your gentleman's phone seems so much smaller and shinier and more modern than Corwin's little spiral notebook, but I promise you, it is the same notebook. Technology simply gives cruelty better lighting. A man who reaches for precision at a dinner table is a man who has already, somewhere in his soul, begun keeping a ledger of you — and once a man starts keeping a ledger, dear, he will eventually show you the balance, and the balance will not be in your favor.

I want to tell you it ended with Corwin, but of course it didn't, because these things never travel in straight lines, do they. There was, some years later, the falconer I met at a renaissance faire outside Bakersfield — a beautiful man, truly, with forearms like something out of a woodcut, who vanished one Tuesday afternoon in 2003 with my Kenmore mixer and no forwarding address. I want to be precise here, Denise, the way Corwin taught me to be precise, because I also distinctly remember that same falconer showing up to my housewarming party in 2007, mixer in hand, as though four years were a weekend. I have stopped trying to reconcile the timeline. Grief is not a spreadsheet, whatever Corwin might have believed.

And then, naturally, there was my fiancé, Desmond, who left me two weeks before our wedding for a woman he met at the regional competitive topiary championships — a woman who, I later learned, had trained a hedge into the shape of a swan in under six minutes, a feat I have never once tried to understand and never will. He took the good hedge shears. He took my grandmother's casserole recipe, the one with the water chestnuts, and I have since seen a suspiciously similar casserole appear at three separate church potlucks under the name "Marjorie's Surprise." There is no Marjorie, Denise. There has never been a Marjorie. I have checked.

You asked me a simple question about a dinner check, and I have given you a hurricane, a falconer, and a hedge, and I want you to know that this is not me losing the thread. This IS the thread. This is what a lifetime of loving generously and being handed a receipt in return does to a woman. You start out worrying about split checks and you end up, fifteen years later, doing all your own topiary, alone, on principle.

Here, then, is my advice, freely given, the way advice should be: it costs you nothing, unlike calamari.

Do not marry the calculator. Do not marry the man who owns the calculator. If you must keep company with men at all — and I understand the urge, I remember it fondly, the way one remembers a fever — keep the relationship shallow enough that no ledger can ever be opened. I have found, in my own life, that a modest moat around the property works wonders for keeping accountants of the heart at bay; even a decorative one signals intent. I maintain three separate identities across three separate grocery store loyalty programs, not out of any fear, Denise, but simply so that no one man can ever again reconstruct, from a stack of receipts, the full shape of what I eat and therefore the full shape of what I am. And where human companionship is concerned, I have found reptiles to be a vastly more trustworthy investment. My bearded dragon, Nathaniel, has never once asked me to Venmo him for a shared appetizer. He does not know what money is. This, Denise, is the beginning of real intimacy.

I am not asking you to get a bearded dragon by Thursday. I am only asking you to notice the phone calculator for what it is: a spiral notebook wearing a nicer outfit.

You are young yet, and you still believe a nice man remembering your cinnamon means something permanent. Let an old woman tell you — that is exactly the tenderness right before the itemizing begins. Watch for the notebook, Denise, in whatever form it takes.

Learn from my mistakes, as I never got the chance to, and you will end up exactly as happy as I am today: unbothered, unbilled, and gloriously, deliberately alone with a lizard who loves me for free.

— Priscilla