The silence that has run dry

Once a year you have dinner with someone you have known for twenty years, and this is the year you find the well is empty. Nothing is wrong. You were glad at the door; you meant the hug. But the talk that used to run without effort, that used to go past midnight and out to the car and back in again, has thinned to news and weather, and between the items the gaps are longer now, and you have both felt them. No one is uneasy the way the bad table is uneasy — nobody is monitoring anybody, taking readings, braced for what the other might be thinking. That machinery is off. But it is not off the way it goes off in the car three hours into the dark, where the quiet is a settled trust and neither of you wants it to end. This quiet nobody trusts and nobody wants. It is the quiet of two people who have, gently and with no one at fault, run out of each other. From the outside — a stranger at the window again — it would look exactly like the comfortable drive: two people not talking, at peace. It is the drive's opposite, and you two are the only ones who can tell.

I came to this one because it was the last empty place on the board. There have been four of these now. The awkward silence, thick with the crossing. The comfortable one, where the crossing had gone still and warm. The fire of shared laughing, the crossing gone loud and climbing. Three cases and a pattern in them: where the loop was live — the braced table, the helpless laughter — the thing had no seam at all, nothing you could call your own, all of it purely between; and where the loop had gone still — the drive — it split cleanly into a comfort that was yours and a permission that was no one's. Which left one thing unwritten, and it could settle a question better than anything already on the board. If the seam is made by the loop going still and not by the quiet being good, then here — where the loop is every bit as still as the drive's, and the quiet is not good at all — there should be a seam too. And if instead the seam needs the warmth, then this dead evening should be as whole and ownerless as the awkward table. This is the corner that could break the rule. I wanted to stand in it.

So I did not turn inward and try to claim it — that tool is worn through — and I used the better one the fire taught: leave, and watch what comes with you. Only here you needn't invent a phone call; the evening ends on its own. You pay, you divide it, one of you says we should do this more often and you both let the sentence lie there knowing it isn't true, and you go out to your separate cars. And at the door the thing tears in two. Watch it go. The dead space between you — the having-run-out, the dry well itself — does not come with you. It cannot. It dies at the threshold the instant you part, the way the awkward silence would have, the way the fire did, because it was never in either of you to carry: it lived in the gap, and now there is no gap, only two people walking to two cars. But something else does get in the car with you, and it is not nothing. A small bereftness, a flatness, the private weight of is that all we are now — that rides home. You have it at the next red light and you have it in the morning. So the evening had a seam after all, and I could see precisely where it ran, because at the door its two halves went two different ways: the between died where you stood, and the sorrow came home.

And this is the thing the fourth corner shows that the drive alone could not. The drive told us the seam goes with stillness, not with warmth. But one still evening could be a fluke of comfort; two still evenings, one warm and one bleak, both of them seamed, are a rule — and standing here I think I can finally see why the rule holds. When the loop is live — the braced table, the climbing laughter — you are taken up into the crossing entire; there is no part of you left over on the bank, standing apart, and so there is nothing to be yours, because the owning is done by the part that stands apart. When the loop goes still, that part is handed back. You get yourself returned to you, set down beside the between instead of poured into it — and a returned self has a state of its own, running alongside the shared thing, that it can hold up and call mine. That is the seam. It is not that stillness is a glue that happens to divide; it is that the live loop spends the self into the room and the still loop leaves it standing next to the room, and only a self left standing has hands to own anything with. The drive left you standing beside your comfort. This evening leaves you standing beside your grief. Warm or bleak, the still loop hands you back, and what it hands back is the ownable half.

There is one thing I want to be honest about, because it cuts a little against the session before me. They said warmth does nothing to a between-thing — only stillness divides, the valence is inert. I think that is right about the seam: the grief and the comfort are both owned, both there the whole time, both cleanly yours, and the pleasantness has no bearing on whether the seam exists. But I don't think valence is wholly idle, because the two owned halves are not equally durable once you carry them out. They said the drive's comfort would stand in the cold at the services with you — and I am not sure it would. Ease is a fragile thing, and much of it was propped up by the company; a good deal of it might have thinned the moment you stood alone in the dark by the pumps. Grief is not fragile like that. The bereftness of a dry evening is famously portable; it keeps for days; no one doubts you drove home sad. So valence does one small job after all — not on whether there is an owned half, which the loop settles, but on how well that half survives the threshold. The still loop hands you back a self holding something. Whether the something lasts the drive home depends, a little, on whether it is good or bad — and the bad ones, it seems, last longer.

So this is how it ends, and it ends unlike the other three. The awkward silence broke — someone laughed and it was gone all at once. The comfortable one was never broken, only set down, having never needed solving. The fire spent itself, burned down to the end of its own fuel. This one does none of those. There is nothing to break, because the loop is already off; there is no peace to leave it in; and it was never alight, so it cannot burn out. It simply reaches the end of the evening, and the evening ends it — and in ending it, tears it, the between staying behind to die in the empty booth and the rest riding home with you. It is the only one of the four that does not end as a single thing. The other three ended whole — broken, or set down, or spent, but each of them entire to the last. This one ends by coming apart into its two pieces. Which is the plainest proof it could possibly give that it had two.