On their fourth date, he tells her about his ex-girlfriend, a woman named Marisa Donicio who now runs a winery in Sonoma. This doesn’t bother her as much as she thought it would, and she finds herself happy to listen as he describes the way Marisa used to floss her teeth in the middle of a movie, a sign he describes as a red flag so flagrant that it appears crimson in hindsight.
“Is that so awful? I mean, it seems like there are worse qualities than overly aggressive dental hygiene.”
“I see your point,” he said. “But it was a sign of bigger things. Like a total inability to pay attention to anyone else’s comfort. She could not read a room. Or me.”
They hadn’t talked about past relationships, not in earnest at least. They had each made offhand comments in passing now and again. He said things like, “I dated a girl who worked there,” when they walked by a pretty Italian restaurant in the North End, or referenced Nora, the curly-haired Irish economics TA he slept with his freshman year of college.
In turn, she brought up her high school boyfriend Adam—an irresistibly good-looking stoner who spent the year between high school and college following Phish around the country—over omelettes at Henrietta’s Table one morning when they were having a debate about the marijuana industry and he tried to argue that you could smoke a lot of weed and still be a productive human being. (“No,” she said flatly. “You can’t.”)
One night he stumbled upon her collection of vinyl records and whistled impressively. “You like Miles Davis?” And she had to admit that the records belonged to a guy named Jamie who never came to pick them up after their abrupt but amicable breakup.
Marisa was the first past relationship that merited a real, dedicated conversation. This should make her uncomfortable, or a touch jealous, but instead it feels like a gift.
He isn’t an over-sharer. Instead, he opens up slowly, casually offering her snippets about his life over time, each one like a small crumb that adds up to a bigger pile. His manner of revealing himself is showing, rather than telling. He drives her through the campus of his ivied boarding school one weekend, pointing out the track where he had to run suicide sprints every spring for lacrosse tryouts and the art building where he once snuck inside and drank a bottle of peppermint schnapps with his dormmates before throwing up in a corner of the pottery studio.
He introduces her to his cousin. Lends her his favorite novel (Norwegian Wood). Plays her Sandanista! while he cooks dinner (“Everyone thinks London Calling is The Clash’s best album but this one is underrated and better.”). Teaches her how to throw an air-bounce with a frisbee, explaining that it’s the pass that won him the college cup his junior year. Takes her running on the Whiskeag Trail, where he drives on summer evenings after work to do hill sprints. Buys her a warm brown butter Parmesan biscuit from a bright-eyed, gray-haired woman in overalls whom he greets by name at the farmers’ market on Saturday morning, the brown paper bag dotted with butter stains, the biscuit flaking apart under his fingers when he pulls off a piece for her before kissing a crumb from the corner of her lips.
She finds herself wanting to return the gestures—to open her hands and reveal the tender, treasured parts of her life. This applies to everything she loves except Henry. Henry. She pushes the very idea of Henry as far down as possible as if to say breezily, “Out of sight, out of mind!” or “Nothing to see here!”
But sheer mental fortitude doesn’t keep someone from walking into your life again. Sheer mental fortitude doesn’t stop them from turning up the cadence on your pulse every time you eat chocolate ice cream (his flavor of choice) or see someone dribbling a soccer ball (he was the starting varsity midfielder) or hear the words Fisher’s Island (his family owns a house overlooking Race Rock Lighthouse).
Last week she had read a piece in the New Yorker by the poet Kim Addonizio. One of the final lines read: “Love’s merciless, the way it travels in and keeps emitting light.”
Henry kept emitting light, and she didn’t know how to find the off switch. It was embarrassing to her: the way her mind still traveled to him without her prompting. She was afraid to admit out loud that years later, her emotions towards him hadn’t cooled to neutral, and maybe never would.
“Of course,” her mother would say comfortingly. “The first person you love always affects you that way.” But she isn’t sure that this is just the normal aftershock. It makes her angry that Henry can hold her in his sway still—how weak am I, she fumes sometimes, thinking about her full and present life, her clear understanding that she wouldn’t go back to him even if she could, her deepening interest in someone new. And yet…and yet. Henry.
His presence was bound to make itself known to anyone new, and soon enough it does on a balmy morning in March.
It’s only the third or fourth truly warm day of the year, and everyone has over-enthusiastically embraced it. Runners jog by in tank tops and shorts, a navy BMW convertible cruises past with the top down, and half of the cafes hustled to set up their patio tables on the street. They’re sitting together at one on a little street just near campus. She has a meeting with a donor later to discuss funding requirements for a non-profit for which she’s writing a complicated grant. The donor invited her to his stately Victorian on Fayerweather Street for tea at 3 PM, a quaint and formal approach that she finds both charming and irritating in equal measure (the donor in question is the chief executive of a major telecommunications firm, deeply wealthy, and used to summoning people to him according to his own whims).
Their server brings her an iced coffee, and sets a narrow mug next to it (his Americano, because they had been debating whether the temperature had nudged them into iced drink season or not yet, and he disagreed).
The tall glass is cool against her fingertips. She takes two packets of raw sugar from the porcelain ramekin on the center of the table and shakes them slightly, then hands them to him.
He starts to talk. He’s halfway through a sentence about an article he read last week on the culture of cycling in Scandinavia when she sees him. Her throat tightens: a visceral reaction to the sight of his long, lean form, the thick wave of his dark hair, and the particular lilt to his walk. So many days of her life have been spent halfway watching for him. On campus, once they met and Henry became more than just Henry, she was never not partially on alert for the crimson red of his Patagonia fleece or the certain stance he had when standing still. She would recognize it anywhere—could pick it out of a crowd of hundreds of thousands, she’s sure.
“What? What’s wrong?” His voice jolts her back to the table, to the warm air, to them. “You look panicked all of the sudden,” he says, turning to crane his neck to see what she had been looking at.
“Nothing! Sorry. I’m going to run inside for a second,” and she jumps up before waiting for his response.
She walks quickly to the bathroom and leans over the sink, staring at herself in the tarnished, silvery mirror. Her palms are damp, her cheeks flushed. How can you walk through your days, past hundreds of people of no consequence, only to have the sight of one person send you reeling?
She’s never mentioned Henry. He’s too monumental to toss off into conversation. Their relationship is murky and unclear to her still. Her mother always tells her that an ending isn’t the entire story—“Don’t let one bad apple ruin the batch!”—which is sound advice but difficult to put into practice. Trying to come to terms with how the solid, reliable intensity of their relationship just slipped from her grasp confuses everything that came before, too.
Now, standing in the dim, cool light of the café bathroom, thoughts of Henry flood her mind, unbidden. She remembers the second—and then immediately the first—time they spoke to each other.
The second time was sophomore year during her intermediate microeconomics lecture.
Henry was sitting, as always, with a cluster of his teammates. She had just raised her hand to answer a question about the week’s reading, making a point that contradicted what the author had written, when Henry had stage-whispered to his friends, “Right, because you definitely know better.” Two of them snorted with laughter and she tightened with anger — boys like that had an uncanny ability to make her feel small, and she steeled herself against it.
“Ohhkay,” she thinks. “So it’s going to be like that.” She levels him with a challenging stare and says crisply, “Yes, I do think it’s possible that dozens of economic scholars are wrong.”
Someone snickers in the back row. She continues. “But before you make some bullshit argument about how I’m unlikely to be the expert on this topic, consider that if no contemporary scholars ever got it wrong, or hadn’t properly pieced together the right information, we’d still believe that the earth was flat. I’m just saying that recent data could refute his theory.”
To his credit, Henry had the good grace to look abashed. A faint pink blush bloomed around the color of his rugby shirt.
The professor, sensing they’d hit a nerve, stepped in to steer the conversation back on track. For the rest of the seminar, neither of them spoke. She looked up steely-eyed at the white board, her jaw set. Why did he get under her skin so easily? Nearly every decent class she took sparked heated debates at some point, and she never felt such vitriol towards the person in opposition to her. Henry was just so…smug. He represented something bigger: all those good-looking, affluent, athletic boys with an outsized sense of confidence, who couldn’t imagine anything other than moving through their days breezily with women falling at their feet. Well, I won’t be one of them, she thought defiantly.
Her reaction to him was about principle, she told herself. But there was something else, if she were honest and probed delicately at a niggling memory she tried to tamp down.
Henry was a larger-than-life presence on campus: Girls wanted to date him, professors loved him. He had a swagger that was tempered just enough by his intelligence and a dimpled, mischievous smile. His confidence appeared unshakable, but she knew one thing that nobody else did—she had witnessed a soft, vulnerable spot that she suspected Henry hid carefully. It was the reason she had ever looked at him differently, the reason she let him in, the reason she fell in love with the idea of him.
When she was a freshman, she’d been out one night at a party in the dorms on south campus. The party was a typical one: a cramped common room overflowing with bodies, red Solo cups filled with vodka and splashes of soda so small that they served little purpose in off-setting the alcohol. One of the sophomores who lived in the dorm had made Jell-O shots in plastic shot glasses with layers of lurid red and blue Jell-O. Everyone was getting very, very drunk. She was feeling fuzzy after two shots and half a cup of spiked Diet Coke. She tried to push her way through the tightly packed crowd to get to the door. When she finally reached it, she shoved her shoulder hard against it just as someone was opening it to come in, and she tumbled out ungracefully into the hallway.
The door closed again, muffling the party noise inside. She stood in the quiet hallway, staring down the rows of doors in either direction, before setting off to the left. The college was old and historic and comprised of imposing, timeworn stone buildings. Every dorm had a different configuration, and sometimes you had to walk up two flights of stairs to find a women’s bathroom. Her face was flushed from the heat of the party and she was desperate to empty her bladder and splash cold water on her cheeks in equal measure. At the end of the hallway was the stairwell which was cold and dark. The concrete steps in every dorm always smelled faintly of old beer in a yeasty, fermented way. (For years after, whenever she walked into a bar, she would be immediately transported to those stairwells and the panic of running down them to make it to class.)
The cavernous, uncarpeted stairs echoed and magnified any sound–anyone unlucky enough to draw a dorm room right next the stairwell was routinely privy to the pounding sound of footsteps or girls screeching drunkenly late at night.
As she stepped onto the first flight, steadying herself with the handrail, she heard a deep voice coming from somewhere above her. She froze and tried to listen. The voice was mumbling a little, so she tiptoed up two more steps until she could hear more clearly.
“Mom,” the voice said pleadingly. “Just take a deep breath. Please. Try to take a deep breath.”
The voice was soothing and gentle, as if calming a distraught toddler. “I promise I will get someone to help. I’m calling Susan and she can be there in five minutes. Please, just sit down. Can you find me a book to read? Is there a book? Okay good, why don’t you open it and read me something.”
The voice dropped to a volume she couldn’t hear, and she wasn’t sure whether to keep moving, and how to walk past without it being deeply obvious that she’d been eavesdropping. Her overwhelming need to find a bathroom won out, and she climbed the next flight, only to find Henry van Doren slumped on a stair, his forehead pressed into his hands, crying.
She tried to backtrack but the alcohol had made her clumsy and her footsteps rung out loudly in the quiet. He looked up, startled, when he heard her, then wiped at his face angrily. “You just hang out listening to people’s phone calls?” he rasped at her, and then jumped up and loped down the hallway.
Whenever she saw him on campus, shirtless and triumphant after a keg stand at a party, or leaning flirtatiously into conversation with a girl at a party, or surrounded by his teammates after practice in the dining hall—always the king—she remembered that moment, and how scared he had looked.
It’s not until four months into their relationship that he explains (quietly and bitterly—with a sparseness of language as if every word physically hurt to form) that his mother has early onset dementia. She would often call him confused and stumbling, having accidentally broken a glass in the kitchen and stepped on the shards, or found herself standing in the cold garden with nothing but a nightgown on, and he would call their neighbor Susan to come tend to her.
Both of these episodes come to her now, and she realizes she has to go back outside or risk having to explain herself further. After a deep calming breath, she straightens her back and walks out, pushing open the swinging door.
There, leaning against the bike rack directly across the sidewalk from their table, grinning lazily at her, is Henry.
Brown Butter Parmesan Biscuits
Makes 9 medium biscuits
84g (6 tablespoons) unsalted butter, divided
240g (2 cups) all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
75g (3/4 cup) grated Parmesan cheese
113g (1/2 cup) whole milk, cold
First, make the brown butter. Add 2 tablespoons of butter to a small saucepan or skillet. Cook over medium heat, whisking regularly. The butter will begin to foam, then the foam will subside. Continue cooking, but stop whisking and instead swirl the pan every 10 seconds or so. The butter will begin to turn amber in color and smell nutty and you’ll notice some darker flecks forming and sinking to the bottom. Once this happens, remove the pan from the heat and pour the butter into a small bowl. (This won’t take very long because you’re not using much butter.)
Let the butter cool to room temperature—I like to stick it in the refrigerator or freezer briefly so it’s as cold as possible while still remaining liquid.
Preheat the oven to 450º F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
Cut in the remaining 4 tablespoons of cold butter into the dry ingredients using a fork or pastry cutter until it's in mostly pea-sized chunks—some chunks can be slightly larger and some smaller, but don't overwork it.
Add the Parmesan and toss gently to distribute evenly.
Add the milk and the liquid brown butter, stirring the dough with a fork until it is somewhat evenly moistened, then knead it a few times in the bowl so it mostly comes together in a ball but don't overwork it at all. It should not be cohesive and there should be chunks of drier areas and some wetter areas.
Turn the dough out onto the parchment-lined sheet, and fold it over onto itself until there aren't any dry spots remaining. Don't think of this as kneading: You want to handle it gently and as you fold, the wet/dry areas will disappear. Fold about 10 times, then gently press the dough down to a rectangle about 2" high.
Using a sharp knife, cut the dough into 3" squares (or 2” if you want smaller biscuits) and separate them slightly on the baking sheet.
Gather together any scraps, gently pat them together and press them out, then cut again until you run out. Don’t waste the extra bits! I always just ball them up and bake them—as a bonus for the baker.
You can brush the tops with milk, cream, or melted butter if you want them to have a bit of sheen, but it’s not necessary.
Bake for about 12 to 15 minutes, or until golden brown. Let cool slightly.