His background in silence began in a quiet home with parents already masters of the craft. Nature and nurture supported lush pauses lasting days, into which grew nuance, curiosity, and calm. We often stared across the street at each other from our bedroom windows, I with my hands over my ears, muffling my mother's date nights, phone rants, calamitous cooking.
     He found them once, his parents, dancing in the living room, the only sound the jiggle of dishes in the cabinet as his father spun his mother out and reeled her back in.
Once he thought he heard his mother hum: he in bed and she in the kitchen, black ponytail swinging as she rhumbaed with the eggs sputtering in the pan. He couldn't make out the tune but swore he heard her legging-clad thighs whisper as she moved.
     Downstairs, he peered around the kitchen doorway to find the room empty, the refrigerator sucking up air with its self-proclaiming. He unplugged it. Later that night, he thought he heard his father whistling to the curb, the rolling trash can keeping time. In the morning, the refrigerator was gone.
     As he grew, relationships subsisted across decades on open air, nothing but string and tin-can networks to connect. Words: useless at best, harmful at worst, names for things that didn't last, like dinner and feelings. Cotton-swaddled audio files floated to me from his channel, each more spare than the last—muffled cries, birdlike burbling, a kettle aspirating, a hand pressing into a mattress. I sent recordings from airport food courts, the Mercato Monti where I lurked next to a stall of Sicilian caps–and from my mother's basement, curled over my knees while racoon babies trilled in the window well.

(Now, the candle flame gutters under the bossa nova from my phone.)
 
Some envied his sumptuous silences and lost themselves: no pressure, only wallowing. Silence kept them together. His fans flocked to the comments, sharing intimacies of their haiku encounters, many of which I suspect were invented. I told no one about the refrigerator.

Later, his slogan: Silence is Sexy.

"Hear, hear!" someone blurted in the auditorium. Flustered by my breathing, I gripped the armrests. The conductor of silence raised his arms, eyes closed, urging us deeper into the swells.

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The first line of the story—or something close to it—presented itself while I was doing nothing one day. I might actually have been in an airport. At the time (and still) my husband and I were working on separate projects exploring family silences (not secrets).