BONE CHINA BEN, PART ONE

An early post on this blog was going to be about Ben, my best friend's husband. If you recall, I credited his incessant prying into my life as the inspiration for this blog: He brought me out of my shell. It started to feel so natural (if sometimes acutely annoying) talking about my personal affairs with him, that talking about them to the general public seemed like not such a big deal. It was going to be the third post, I believe, but I got distracted with a vampire follow-up. Then Ben and I had a tiff, which he started, and that sidelined the plan an additional day or two. He said something tonight, though, that put me back on track. It was so quintessentially Ben that it got me thinking again about Ben's quintessence. What he said was this: "I'm small-boned, too."

For those of you who know him, I needn't say more. But while you're rolling around the floor in hysterics, I'll provide some context for those who don't.

Ben and Erin and I were sitting around my house shooting the breeze, and we started talking about someone who was small-boned.
I don't even remember whom now because the hilarity of what followed totally blotted out the memory. But I made some comment to the effect that Erin is also small-boned, and, Ben (left), perhaps feeling left out, said in a dainty voice, "I'm small-boned, too." The conversation continued a few seconds. Then Erin registered his remark and did a quick rewind. "You're not small-boned!" she said, and laughed in his giant face. "Your head alone is ENORMOUS!" I concurred with Erin. "Yeah, you're not small-boned!" Then we mercilessly ridiculed him off and on the rest of the evening for his warped self-perception, saying things like "Yeah, dude, you're just like a baby bird" and "Tiny, fragile, small-boned Ben." I thought about that King Missile song "Boy Made Out of Bone China."

It goes like this:

There was a boy made out of china, Bone China.
Very fragile boy.
It was stupid to make a boy out of bone china,
What do you expect? He's not going to be good at any sports.
One wild pitch and his head is going to break off, probably.
So he's a gentle good boy who stays inside a lot,
and he hates school because other kids are always trying to break him, it's very bad.

Bone China Ben was undaunted, as always. He towered over us in the kitchen —— all 250 pounds of him, give or take 20 —— and offered proof of his daintiness. "See how I have to use the SECOND button on my cuffs? It's because the bones in my wrists are so tiny."

The quintessence of Benjie. That's it, right there. He alternates between that —— absurd self-appraisal ("I look so damn sexy in this bow tie") —— and painfully honest self-knowledge, as when he admitted to being a control freak and described the personality trait in dead-on, unsparing detail. He knows himself, and he doesn't know himself. Like all of us. Only with Benjie it's more pronounced, more dramatic — because everything about him is more pronounced and more dramatic: the way he walks into a room, the way he kisses his wife, the way he laughs, the way he talks with strangers.

He reminds me of King Henry II in "The Lion in Winter." (I should start calling Erin "Erin of Acquitaine.") That scene where Eleanor is recalling their youth when she was "like the sun," the most prized woman in Medieval Europe, and silly, fearless Henry just walked right up and touched her. Ben is like that. He just walks right up to life and touches it. Nothing is not him. There are no boundaries. It's all life. It's all us.

In the first weeks I knew him he asked me these questions: How old are you? What is your real hair color? How much do you weigh? What's wrong with your eye? What is your sexuality? Do you miss your ex-husband? And my normal response —— dismay or evasion —— didn't seem right with him. Although annoyed by the intrusion, I could sense that his curiosity was genuine. He wouldn't be judgmental or like me less for an answer. He would like me more because there would be more to like. More knowledge, more familiarity, more depth. The more I indulged his questions, the more I saw that there was nothing to fear in facts; privacy was overrated — and often deadening. And the virtue in putting yourself out there for others to scrutinize was that it made you scrutinize yourself.

It was like looking into a mirror.