Anna didn’t say anything. She stared at the space straight in front of her—and Bill had cleverly seated her directly in front of the slide screen, so that the fact that she wasn’t really watching the slides was less painfully obvious. During the past few years she had gotten much worse. Now she hardly even spoke, except to make almost childlike demands—“I’m hungry,” “I’m tired,” and, on the increasingly rare occasions when he took her out, “I want to go home.” He still spoke to her, all the time. But it was like talking to himself.

After the first few years of her forgetfulness, though, Bill began to think that it didn’t really matter if she never answered when he spoke to her. When they were first married, Bill used to pity the older couples he saw in restaurants staring at their food or off into the distance, dining in silence. He saw in those silences what he knew of silence then: the brutality of loneliness. Now, though, as an old man, he smiled at the foolishness of his younger self. Some of those couples may have hated one another, yes. But the silence between old couples, truly old couples—people who are not merely old but have become old together, whose ages are twisted and bound together like interlocking vines—their silences are formed not from absence but from presence, a divine presence filling the space between them. For them, speech is superfluous. They already know everything the other person would say.

Bill still remembered the first time she had read his mind. It was very early, while they were still in high school. He was walking her home, back to her parents’ house in Irvington, New Jersey. They were both walking very slowly, and he was dreading the moment they would arrive at the house and he would have to say goodbye for the night, not to mention dreading her curfew, which they had already broken.