Silence and the Word Read Online Free PDF

important
than it should be, and it becomes even more difficult to talk, to
say the words. She feels paralyzed. He has dealt with this before.
Silence, and the stillness of her body that signals distress. They
have sometimes played twenty questions—him asking the questions,
trying to guess what is bothering her. She can manage to nod or
shake her head, but, too often, he can’t even come close to asking
the right questions. Tonight, though, he has a new idea. He gets
up, walks naked to the living room, gets a pencil and paper and
brings them back. Turns on the nightstand light, hands her the
paper and pencil, turns away while she scribbles a few sentences on
the paper. She feels ridiculous, and almost doesn’t have the nerve
to give him the paper, but she does. She buries her face in his
chest while he reads her request. He doesn’t laugh. He reaches out,
shuts off the light, turns back and tilts up her head and starts to
kiss her again. This time, on her lips. He kisses her for a long
time. He doesn’t say anything, and she is grateful.
     
     
    See—it’s not just that fiction is easier to
write than nonfiction. Writing it down is easier than speaking it.
The writing lets me distance myself. The hand moving across the
page is further away from the heart of me than the air in my
throat, struggling to form words. If you read this, and then we
meet some day, you will know these things about me, these things
that I have written, that I have told you. Probably I’ll be
embarrassed, but it will be an embarrassment I can live with. It
will be so much easier than having said the words out loud.
     
     
    She feels so silly having him get a pencil
and paper that she tries to teach him the sign alphabet. It is all
she knows of sign language—the shapes of letters, A, B, C—but it is
enough to make small sentences, with patience. In bed, in the
moonlight, she can spell out: W I L L Y O U G O D O W N O N M E?
She usually doesn’t even have to spell out the whole thing; he
figures it out around the D and takes her hand in his to still it
and then smiles and slides his mouth down her body. What is
funniest is that sometimes he forgets what letter a shape means,
especially when she hasn’t done this for him in a while. Then she
ends up sounding out half the letters as she says them, so that she
feels like a grownup talking over the head of a little kid,
spelling out the letters of words she doesn’t want her to hear.
It’s silly, it’s ridiculous—but it’s working. It’s better than
pencil and paper. It’s much better than nothing.
     
     
    My lovers are always startled when they
realize how much trouble I have talking in bed. They’re mostly
quiet themselves—I like the quiet types, and so lovemaking tends
not to be too talkative. For most things, body language and muffled
sounds do well enough. Sometimes we go weeks before they figure it
out. When they do, they almost always say the same thing—”But you write this stuff!”
    “It’s not the same,” I explain. After a
while, they believe me, especially after they see me trying, and
failing, to talk. Sometimes they accept it as yet another of my
strange quirks. One or two have really wanted to know why. I’ve
gotten frustrated enough with the whole business that I’ve tried to
figure it out too.
    The nearest I can come to figuring it out is
that it has to do with being naked. Not just physically naked,
though that’s part of it (I have no problems talking about sex
while sitting on the couch, fully clothed, using sufficiently dry
and clinical terms).
    When I talk about sex in bed with a lover, I
am physically and emotionally naked, open and vulnerable to someone
whom I am inviting past the barriers, the boundaries, someone who
has seen and touched all my private spaces. It’s intense, and
scary. To put my real desires, my most intimate thoughts, into
words, and to say them out loud in a private space where there is
no possibility that I can pretend that I