TWENTY-SIX.

Winter is here. Sky and pavement form a seamless, inexorable band of gray. There will be snow soon. For some reason this neighborhood has gone without refuse pickups for three or four days, and bulging plastic sacks of trash are heaped in front of every building, yet there is no odor of garbage in the air. Not even smells can flourish in these temperatures: the cold drains away every stink, every sign of organic reality. Only concrete triumphs here. Silence reigns. Scrawny black and gray cats, motionless, statues of themselves, peer out of alleys. Traffic is light. Walking quickly through the streets from the subway station to Judith’s place, I avert my eyes from the faces of the few people I pass. I feel shy and selfconscious among them, like a war veteran who has just been discharged from the rehabilitation center and is still embarrassed about his mutilations. Naturally I’m unable to tell what anybody is thinking; their minds are closed to me now and they go by me wearing shields of impenetrable ice; but, ironically, I have the illusion that they all have access to me. They can look right into me and see me for what I’ve become. There’s David Selig, they must be thinking. How careless he was! What a poor custodian of his gift! He messed up and let it all slip away from him, the dope. I feel guilty for causing them this disappointment. Yet I don’t feel as guilty as I thought I might. On some ultimate level I just don’t give a damn at all. This is what I am, I tell myself. This is what I now shall be. If you don’t like it, tough crap. Try to accept me. If you can’t do that, just ignore me.

“As the truest society approaches always nearer to solitude, so the most excellent speech finally falls into silence. Silence is audible to all men, at all times, and in all places.” So said Thoreau, in 1849, in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Of course, Thoreau was a misfit and an outsider with very serious neurotic problems. When he was a young man just out of college he fell in love with a girl named Ellen Sewall, but she turned him down, and he never married. I wonder if he ever made it with anybody. Probably not. I can’t imagine Thoreau actually balling, can you? Oh, maybe he didn’t die a virgin, but I bet his sex life was lousy. Perhaps he didn’t even masturbate. Can you visualize him sitting next to that pond and whacking off? I can’t. Poor Thoreau. Silence is audible, Henry.

I imagine, as I near Judith’s building, that I meet Toni in the street. I seem to see a tall figure walking toward me from Riverside Drive, hatless, bundled up in a bulky orange coat. When we are half a block apart I recognize her. Strangely, I feel neither excitement nor apprehension over this unexpected reunion; I am quite calm, almost unmoved. At another time I might have crossed the street to avoid a possibly disturbing encounter, but not now: coolly I halt in her path, smile, hold up my hands in greeting. “Toni?” I say. “Don’t you know me?”

She studies me, frowns, seems puzzled for a moment. But only a moment.

“David. Hello.”

Her face looks more lean, the cheekbones higher and sharper. There are some strands of gray in her hair. In the days when I knew her she had one curious gray lock at her temple, very unusual; now the gray is scattered more randomly through the black. Well, of course she’s in her middle thirties now. Not exactly a girl. As old now, in fact, as I was when I first met her. But in fact I know she has hardly changed at all, only matured a little. She seems as beautiful as ever. Yet desire is absent from me. All passion spent, Selig. All passion spent. And she too is mysteriously free of turbulence. I remember our last meeting, the look of pain on her face, her obsessive heap of cigarette butts. Now her expression is amiable and casual. We both have passed through the realm of storms.

“You’re looking good,” I say. “What is it, eight years, nine?”

I know the answer to that. I’m merely testing her. And she passes the test, saying, “The summer of ’68.” I’m relieved to see that she hasn’t forgotten. I’m still a chapter of her autobiography, then. “How have you been, David?”

“Not bad.” The conversational inanities. “What are you doing these days?”

“I’m with Random House now. And you?”

“Freelancing,” I say. “Here and there.” Is she married? Her gloved hands offer no data. I don’t dare ask. I’m incapable of probing. I force a smile and shift my weight from foot to foot. The silence that has come between us suddenly seems unbridgeable. Have we exhausted all feasible topics so soon? Are there no areas of contact left except those too pain-filled to reopen?

She says, “You’ve changed.”

“I’m older. Tireder. Balder.”

“It isn’t that. You’ve changed somewhere inside.”

“I suppose I have.”

“You used to make me feel uncomfortable. I’d get a sort of queasy feeling. I don’t any more.”

“You mean, after the trip?”

“Before and after both,” she says.

“You were always uncomfortable with me?”

“Always. I never knew why. Even when we were really close, I felt — I don’t know, on guard, off balance, ill at ease, when I was with you. And that’s gone now. It’s entirely gone. I wonder why.”

“Time heals all wounds,” I say. Oracular wisdom.

“I suppose you’re right. God, it’s cold! Do you think it’ll snow?”

“It’s bound to, before long.”

“I hate the cold weather.” She huddles into her coat. I never knew her in cold weather. Spring and summer, then goodbye, get out, goodbye, goodbye. Odd how little I feel for her now. If she invited me up to her apartment I’d probably say, No, thank you, I’m on my way to visit my sister. Of course she’s imaginary; that may have something to do with it. But also I’m not getting an aura from her. She’s not broadcasting, or rather I’m not receiving. She’s only a statue of herself, like the cats in the alleys. Will I be incapable of feeling, now that I’m incapable of receiving? She says, “It’s been good to see you, David. Let’s get together some time, shall we?”

“By all means. We’ll have a drink and talk about old times.”

“I’d like that.”

“So would I. Very much.”

“Take care of yourself, David.”

“You too, Toni.”

We smile. I give her a little mock-salute of farewell. We move apart; I continue walking west, she hurries up the windy street toward Broadway. I feel a little warmer for having met her. Everything cool, friendly, unemotional between us. Everything dead, in fact. All passion spent. It’s been good to see you, David. Let’s get together some time, shall we? When I reach the corner I realize I have forgotten to ask for her phone number. Toni? Toni? But she is out of sight. As though she never was there at all.

It is the little rift within the lute,

That by and by will make the music mute,

And ever widening slowly silence all.

That’s Tennyson: Merlin and Vivien. You’ve heard that line about the rift within the lute before, haven’t you? But you never knew it was Tennyson. Neither did I. My lute is riven. Twang. Twing. Twong.

Here’s another little literary gem:

Every sound shall end in silence, but the silence never dies.

Samuel Miller Hageman wrote that, in 1876, in a poem called Silence. Have you ever heard of Samuel Miller Hageman before? I haven’t. You were a wise old cat, Sam, whoever you were.