What Silence Tastes Like

"A confession is only a story with the lights turned down, and the audience leaning in."

Nine months earlier

She signed the contract on the fifteenth of December, in Margaret's office, with the same fountain pen Margaret had used to sign Sophia's own first contract twenty years before.

It was a small ceremony. Two lawyers sat at the end of the table like undertakers. A tray of coffee went round, and nobody drank it. When Sophia put her name at the bottom of the last page, in the blue-black ink that did not quite dry, she heard in her ears the faint clear note of a glass being struck with a spoon, and she thought, absurdly, of a wedding.

"There," said Margaret softly. "That wasn't so terrible."

"No," said Sophia. "That is what is terrible about it."

She went home on the train and told Nathan. He took it better than she had feared, which frightened her more than if he had shouted. He only nodded, and put down the knife he was using to peel an orange, and said, "Then I am going to make a condition. You do not go there alone at night. You do not stay for dinner. And if there is ever a day when you come home and cannot tell me what he said, you stop."

"Agreed."

"Say it back."

"I will not stay for dinner. I will tell you everything. If I cannot, I stop."

He kissed her forehead. His mouth was dry and warm, and smelled of orange. She had the oddest wish to hold on to him with both hands, and did not know why, and let go.

…

The sessions began in January, on Tuesdays and Fridays.

They worked in the long room off the kitchen, at the enormous dark table, with a tape recorder between them and a pot of tea going cold at her elbow. He always sat with his back to the window. He always wore white. He always began, without prelude, as if the thought had been waiting at the door, and he spoke for an hour or ninety minutes without a single stumble, in complete sentences, in a voice so low and so even that after the first week she could not tell where her own pencil ended and his story began.

She had expected to loathe it. In the first two weeks she did. She would come home at dusk with a headache like a band of iron round the temples and stand under the shower until the water ran cold. But in the third week something shifted, and she noticed it only afterward, on a Friday, when she looked up from her notes and found that the light had gone from the lawn and she had not once looked at the clock.

It was the prose. God forgive her, it was the prose. He did not tell it as a confession. He told it as a memoir of his own attention, a long, careful, glittering account of a mind that had been curious since childhood about the rules at the bottom of things. A boy of eight, standing in his grandmother's pantry, wondering why a plum should taste of the sun. A boy of twelve, at a boarding school in New Hampshire, holding a dead bird and feeling the first small thrill of a question that nobody had permitted him to ask. It had cadences. It had shape. He wrote, though he did not know it, with the instincts of a natural storyteller, and she found that she needed only to prune and polish.

She said so once, on a snowy Tuesday in the second month, and was ashamed of herself afterwards.

"I am not writing it," she said. "You are. I'm only putting it in order."

"Yes. I know." He smiled into his cup. "That is why you are the only one who can do it. You have never once tried to make me better."

…

On the ninth Friday, he spoke about taste.

She had known it was coming. They had circled it for weeks, like a pair of swimmers circling a drowned house. She had arranged her face for it in the car, deliberately, as one arranges one's coat. She had her pencil sharp, her tape fresh, her hands in her lap. But when he began, in the pale cold light of the late afternoon, with the first of the March thaw dripping from the eaves, she found that her body had gone quite cold and still, as a rabbit goes still in the grass.

"People always ask me about the taste," said Desmond.

He had pushed back his chair and was looking, not at her, but at the long dark shape of the table. His hands lay in front of him with the fingers loosely laced. There was no tremor in them. There was nothing in his face at all but a faint, courteous, inward look, the look of a man trying to find the right word in a foreign language.

"They imagine that I will say it tasted of fear. Or of iron. Or of something rich and awful and sweet, as in the old stories. It is a disappointment to them, I think, when I tell them it did not taste of anything they had imagined. I'm sorry. I would like to say it was monstrous. It would make a better book."

"What did it taste of?" asked Sophia.

Her voice, in her own ears, was quite small and clear, like a voice speaking from the bottom of a well.

He did not answer at once. Outside, a branch of the copper beech scraped against the glass, once, and was still.

"It tasted of silence," said Desmond Hale.

The tape turned. The room was very quiet.

"I do not mean that as a figure of speech. I have spent seven years looking for a better phrase and there isn't one. You know how it is, when you have been talking for a long time, and someone puts a hand on your sleeve, and for one instant the whole room stops? When the noise in your own head goes out like a lamp? It was like that. It was the taste of the moment after a sound. I had spent my whole life being full of noise, Sophia. I had a voice in me that never stopped, a commentary, a running narration of every thing I did and felt and tasted. And for the first time, in that kitchen, in the small hours, with the rain on the roof, it stopped."

He looked up. His clear brown eyes were wet and bright and utterly sincere.

"I was not cruel. I want you to put that in the book. I was not angry. I did not hate her. She was kind, and she was frightened, and then she was not frightened, and she looked at me with an expression I have never been able to describe, and I thought, Here is the only person in the world who is not talking. And I wanted to know what that was. Only to know. I'm not a demon. I only dared to do what human curiosity quietly craves."

There was a pause.

Sophia sat with her pencil resting against her lip. Her right hand, the stained one, had moved, quite without her permission, and written a line across the top of the page in her small neat script. The taste of the moment after a sound. She read it. She read it again. Then, with great care, she set the pencil down on the table, and folded her hands, and discovered that they were trembling.

The line was good.

That was the whole horror, in the end. It was not what he had said. It was that it was good, that every syllable had been placed with the delicate precision of a man laying a table, and that some small dry professional corner of her mind, the part that had read three hundred manuscripts a year for twenty years, had already begun to hear how the paragraph would close.

She would put it at the end of the chapter. She would cut the word quietly. She would leave a white space after it, like a breath.

"You've gone pale," said Desmond gently.

"It's the thaw. The light."

"Yes. It would be." He stood, and crossed to the window, and looked out at the dripping lawn with his hands behind his back. After a moment he said, without turning, "I won't ask you to forgive that. I'd only like to ask you something else."

"What?"

"When you hear a sentence like that, Sophia, and you know that it is true. Does it frighten you more that I said it, or that you want to keep it?"

She did not answer. The tape ran on, patient and blind, recording the ticking of the eaves.

…

That night, at twenty past three, she woke with a cry in her throat and the sheet wound round her legs.

She lay still in the dark, her heart pounding, and tried to understand what she had been dreaming. There was a kitchen in it. A long white kitchen with a rain-streaked glass roof, and a woman at the table, whom she could not see, whose face was turned away. The woman was writing in a small blue notebook. She was writing very fast. And Sophia knew, in the strange immediate way of dreams, that she must go and read what she was writing, and that she must not, because if she read it the woman would turn around.

"Soph?" Nathan's voice, thick with sleep, came out of the dark beside her. His hand found her shoulder. "What is it? You're soaked."

"A dream."

"What about?"

"I can't remember." And that was true, she found. It was only a taste in her mouth, faint, dry, familiar, like the last second after a bell. "Go back to sleep. I'm going to get a glass of water."

She put on her robe and padded down through the dark house. The stairs creaked. In the hall the orange light from the street lay across the floor in a long slant, and the little pine courthouse on the landing glowed faintly in it like a thing under water. She went into the kitchen and turned on the lamp over the stove, and filled a glass, and drank, and stood with her forehead against the cool door of the refrigerator and tried to will her heart to slow.

It would not slow.

Presently, without any decision, she opened the refrigerator.

The light fell out over her bare feet, hard and white. Eggs. Milk. A jar of cornichons. Half a lemon, with its cut side turned to the shelf. And on the middle shelf, under a sheet of foil, the remains of the Sunday roast, a heavy cold piece of beef the color of old mahogany, with its fat gone white and firm along one edge.

She stood and looked at it for a long time.

She was not a woman who liked meat. She had been, for twenty years, a person who ate a salad at her desk and called it a lunch, who had spoken once, at a dinner, with some pride, of having not touched red meat since 2003. But now, in the cold white glow of the open door, she found that her mouth was wet. She found that her stomach had turned over with a hard, clean, hollow ache that was quite unlike hunger. It was more like recognition.

She took off the foil. She cut a slice with the carving knife, cold, thin, and put it in her mouth.

It was very good. It was, she thought, with a faint swimming dismay, the best thing she had ever tasted. It tasted of salt, and iron, and the dark of the oven, and under that, so faintly that she could not have named it, of something quiet.

She ate another slice. Another. She stood in her own kitchen, in the middle of the night, in her husband's old robe, eating cold beef with her fingers, and as she ate, she became slowly and horribly aware that she was not alone. She did not turn around. She did not need to. She knew exactly who was standing behind her, in the corner of the dark, with his hands folded and his head a little on one side, and she knew exactly what he was saying.

Does it frighten you more that I said it, or that you want to keep it?

The refrigerator hummed. Upstairs, a floorboard creaked as Nathan turned over in his sleep.

Sophia put down the knife. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and covered the roast with its foil, and shut the door, and the kitchen went dark. Then she stood very straight in the dark with her hands pressed flat against her ribs, and whispered, in a small clear voice that she did not recognize, "It's only beef."

The dark did not answer.

But it was a long time before she could make herself go back to bed.