Hmm, here it goes a guess. The only way to connect a D brane with a closed string is by attaching all the closed circle with the D-Brane. Since this is the time-like dimension, or the endline of worldsheet 'pant', you can see that closed strings will only connect branes in a time-like manner, you can say that they will be moving and connecting branes to branes. So, closed strings will be the particles with which the branes interacts with each other. This is why when we are talking about the Type IIB version of string theory, string theory peopole frequently talk about ads/cft, because IIB is a superstring picture that clearly shows gravitational relations, or, interactions between strings.
Thinking about 'pants', or cobordism, the open strings would be 'ortogonal' to this, so, and exchange of closed strings would be more or less equivalent to stretching open strings.When people talk about N coincident branes, a more precise picture is achieved by adding a B anticomutative to the open strings connecting the branes. This field reduces the minimum energy stable energy along the aligning dimension, this is like the branes were being geometricaly deformed along this dimension. This is a sign of some kind of gravitational attraction between branes. And gravity is more clearly present in the IIB version.