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goodbye and not managed to get the thing on the cradle. The little lag when his phone was hung up but you were still on the line, in a weird half-life of the call, semiconnected, followed by the final late disconnection click, then silence, and then if you didn’t hang up, sharp insistent beeps. These were the odd ways the phone communicated with sounds: urgent beeps to say hang up, long-belled rings to say answer, rude blasts of a busy signal to say no. The phone always telling her things. She pushed the eleven buttons—the 1, the area code, the number, zeroing in, the nearly infinite combinations ousted—her fingertips not needing to feel the grooves of the numbers, but feeling them nevertheless. So many distractions, unneeded and unwanted. She had to concentrate to keep the information away. There was a bird outside, trilling at her. It was at least fifteen feet from the closed window, but it still bothered her. It must be in the Chinese oak in the courtyard. The ring of another person’s phone sounded so hopeful, and then it grew lonelier. It lost possibility, and you could almost see the sound in an empty house.
    He didn’t have an answering machine. Make a note of that. A distinction. You can let it ring all day. Is that true? Has anyone ever tried it? The plastic rubbed against her jaw and her ear. She tilted it away again. If she lay on her side and let the receiver rest on her head, using a hand only for balance, she could talk for hours.
    â€œHello?” said a male voice that cleared itself as it spoke, so the end of the word had a cough pushing through it. Then came another cough. Was it the first time he had spoken today? Or had she woken him up? Roused from sleep was a special, intimate opportunity. But it carried high risk also. The woken person could sometimes start out frightened or vulnerable and then grow angry as the reality of the call’s interruption hit his conscious mind. It had happened to Jelly once: “Why the fuck are you disturbing my sleep? You have no idea how hard it is for me to fall asleep. And now. Well now I am awake for the goddamned duration, you bitch.” Jelly couldn’t get through a feeling like that. Not even Jelly. But this man just finished coughing and waited. She closed her eyes and focused on the white of ease, of calm, of joy. The pure and loving human event of calling a stranger, reaching across the land and into a life.
    â€œHello,” she said. Her voice sliding easily through the “l”s, to the waiting, hopeful “o.” She always takes her time. Nothing makes people more impatient than rushing.
    â€œWho is this?”
    â€œIt’s Nicole.”
    â€œNicole? Nicole who? I think you have the wrong number.”
    This was a crucial moment.
    â€œIs this Mark Washborn?”
    â€œUh, no. I mean, Mark. It isn’t. Who is this again?”
    â€œNicole. I’m a friend of Mark’s. I thought this was his new number.”
    â€œNo. That’s weird. I know Mark. I mean, he’s a good friend of mine.”
    â€œOh my. How awkward. I am so, so sorry I disturbed you, uh . . .” She rarely used “uh,” but it was an important wordish sound that introduced a powerful unconscious transaction. Used correctly, not as a habit or a rhythmic tic, it invited another to complete the sentence. An intricate conjoining, it was an opening without content, just the pull of syntax and the human need to complete.
    â€œJack. Jack Cusano.”
    â€œJack Cusano? Not Jack Cusano, the record producer?”
    â€œUh, yeah.”
    â€œJack Cusano who composes film scores. The gorgeous work you did on those Robert DeMarco films.”
    â€œThat’s right.” He laughed. His laugh cleared out his throat a bit more. She lay back on her pillow, held the phone so it barely touched her cheek. She imagined her voice going into the transmitter, sound waves being turned into electrical pulses, up