A voice in your ear

or, a walk with Ben

In the contact photo I’ve assigned to my friend Ben, it’s an April afternoon and he’s lying spread-eagled on the ground a few blocks from Delancey, making snow angels in a carpet of pink cherry blossoms that have fallen on some stranger’s lawn. Though the photo is no bigger than a pencil eraser, I can see that he’s grinning, stretched out there like Gumby in track pants and a poppy-red jacket. I took it years ago, when he was in town for a visit and rescued me from work one day with the offer of an afternoon walk. Now I see the photo every time we take a walk together, because Ben lives two thousand miles away, and we take our walks by phone.

I’ve been walking with Ben since the spring of 2008. That’s when we became friends, when he came to Seattle and stayed at our apartment. My then-husband Brandon had known Ben since college, but I’d never met him until that visit. Before he arrived, Brandon gave me a basic sketch. 

“Ben’s… you know… a theater kid,” he said. “I don’t know if you’re going to like him.” I grimaced. Brandon knew me well, and what he knew was that I was a huge asshole.

Ben stayed for a week. We played card games, accumulated inside jokes, and ate pasta sauced in a Beardian abundance of butter and onions. He took us to the opera – he’d come to town for a job there and had comp tickets – with a flask of whiskey in my purse. Ben liked to walk to go places, and we took long walks with him, walks of the sort that we usually never did. We loved him; I think he loved us; and at any rate, he’s now been my best Benji for fourteen years. 

Ben was hired at Seattle Opera after that trip, though he would stay only two years before a job wooed him away to Ohio. Now he lives in Memphis. I have privately mourned each change of his address, wanting my friend to be happy but also wishing my friend were here. On the upside, as an opera director, Ben often has reason to travel for work. When he doesn’t, I’ve found a reason to go wherever he is. Or we met up somewhere in between. Ben is always up for New Orleans, a fine quality in a friend. He has a knack for finding cheap flights and accommodations. One dismal winter he, Brandon, and I met up for a weekend in Las Vegas, where Ben had found us a $38 hotel room at Circus Ci cus, which most people call Circus Circus but the neon sign was on the fritz. 

Ten years ago, when Ben was a professor at a college outside Cleveland and I was writing Delancey, he let me use his house as a writing retreat. The house was empty all day anyway; he had an office on campus, and his then-wife, a musician, was on the road. So I went to Ohio and camped out with my laptop at his dining room table. Every evening, when Ben got home from work, we’d go to a park nearby for some exercise. He’d go for a run, and I’d take a walk, and then we’d meet up at one of those outdoor exercise stations for a vicious two-man contest of who-can-stay-on-the-balance-beam-longest. After that, back at the house, we’d tag-team dinner, and then we’d yell goodnight from our respective ends of the hall. When I would tell other people about this idyll, I could tell that many found it mildly odd that I, a married woman, had such a close and easy friendship with a married heterosexual man. I assume that for such people, “I went to Ohio” is code for something really nasty.

It’s not all fun. I remember a visit Ben made to Seattle the following year, when June was twelve weeks old. She’d begun to sleep through the night a few weeks earlier, and in a perverse twist, I had developed acute insomnia. It was December, nearly always dark. I was resentful and afraid; I couldn’t stop crying. The doctor suggested daily exercise and fresh air, but it didn’t help, and during Ben’s stay I was finally diagnosed with postpartum depression. Ben’s life, too, was changing that winter, in its own painful ways. It was reassuring to be miserable with a friend, though I sensed that we irritated each other, both of us wanting compassion but having it in short supply. I took my first dose of antidepressants at the dinner table with Ben and Brandon. I don’t know if they remember it, but I do. I was terrified of what the pills might do to me, whether they would make me numb, or nauseated, or a different person. It took weeks, but they let me sleep again, and slowly returned me to myself. I was on a walk when it suddenly hit me: it was January, a new year, and I was alright.

Ben is my only friend who, like me, has divorced and remarried. Neither of us is still married to the spouses we started our friendship with. When Ben remarried, Brandon and I were newly divorced, and we both traveled to the wedding in Memphis. I like to think about that, being out on the dance floor with my ex-husband and Ben and his beautiful new wife, all of us crossing over from one version of life to another. Ben was one of my first friends to meet Ash.

He and I took walks together by phone before the pandemic, but now it seems more socially acceptable to say you’re taking a walk “with” a friend who is only a voice in your ear. For a while in 2020, Ben and I had a standing date – Wednesday mornings at 9:30 Pacific – though Ben was better at remembering than I was. He also has the advantage, at least in the winter, of living in a warmer and more walk-friendly climate. One Wednesday last February, when I didn’t want to walk in the rain, I took a tip from a Forever35 podcast episode in which novelist Louise Penny talked about running laps around her apartment (!) during covid lockdown. While Ben and I talked, I walked loops from the living room to our bedroom, from my side of the bed to Ash’s side of the bed, across the hall to June’s room, down the hall to the front door, and around again. I logged 1.7 miles.

Taking a walk by phone feels almost intimate in Covid Times. I take in-person walks with local friends too – at this point in the pandemic, I kind of don’t know how else to see people? – but it has surprised me to find that it’s easier to be spontaneous with a friend who is far away. 

One afternoon last week when I’d been at the computer too long, I decided to text Ben. Want to take a walk in 30 minutes? We hadn’t done a call like this in months. Yes, please, he texted back. We talked about the weather. The hellebores are up, I was happy to report. Somehow we arrived at the topic of unfulfilled aspirations of the everyday variety, little things we want to do but never seem to manage. Ben aspires to read more. I aspire to be someone who takes a daily after-dinner walk, an evening constitutional, with her family. I’ve managed it only once in memory, and realistically, I doubt I’ll put in the effort to ever do it often. Oh well, we agreed. It was good to talk about things that matter, but also don’t matter too much. Through the phone I could hear kids yelling somewhere in Memphis, playing in a yard as Ben walked past. It sounded something close to normal.