"So how exactly do you determine tone of expression from reading lips?" Colin asked on the way out.
I smiled down at my autographed books.
"That's a silly question. It's like asking blind people what they dream of when they sleep."
I walked faster. Colin kept up. We didn't talk on the drive back to my apartment.
*
If a tree falls in a forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound? If two people argue, and one of them doesn't hear the argument, can the damage be undone?
*
A few weeks after the book reading, Colin and I fought for the first time. He wanted to cancel a dinner we'd planned long ago. The reason was the premiere of his indie filmmaker friend's first movie.
"Premiere? What premiere? It's going to be in his fucking basement, for God's sake!"
"It doesn't matter, okay, his specialty is low-budget films, and besides, he spent one whole year on the damn movie, all right? You just can't appreciate movies, that's all!"
"Don't you use that kind of tone with me!"
It took me a moment to comprehend his silence.
"Right," he eventually said. "right. You can read my tone of expression from my lips. That's it, right?"
And he left. For the premiere.
It went downhill from then on, and I suppose we both knew it. The last argument we had, he yelled at me so loud I thought I'd regained my hearing.
"I'm breaking up with you!"
I didn't say anything for a while, and when I did, it was nothing but a "Are you serious?"
"Why?" He sneered. "Can't you tell whether or not I'm serious from my lips?"
And that was it. Colin and I broke up.
I have few nice memories of the last months of the relationship. The most vivid one of them is of Colin fussing with my bangs and tucking my hair behind my ears.
"You look pretty like that. How come you never do it anymore?" he'd said.
I never told Colin that he sometimes shouted so loudly at me that I didn't need to read his lips to know his tone of voice. Colin was never very good at determining at what level I could start hearing clearly. I also never told him what it felt like to realize that he didn't sound like what I'd imagined, because, of course, I had never heard his voice until he started shouting and cursing at me.