“Far from Chicago,” he agreed. He picked up his coffee cup in both hands, as though it were a precious thing, though it was thick china, the kind you’d have to hurl at a wall to break. “Business,” he said at last. “You?”

“I live here.”

“You live in the hotel?”

“In town.”

“Oh, you’re merely breakfasting, not staying.”

“I’m staying.” I started to long for a second Bloody Mary as though for an old friend who might rescue me from the conversation. “Somebody was mean to me,” I said to the radio shrink. “I decided to be kind to myself.”

He palmed the cup and drank from it then settled it back in the saucer. The green shirt was a sickening color against the pink leather. “It’s a good hotel for heartbreak. Join me,” he said, in his commercial break voice, deeply intimate, meant for thousands, maybe millions, of people.

There were other radio hosts in those days, also called doctors, who would yell at you. A woman who said to heartbroken husbands, You better straighten up and fly right. A testy man—No, no, no, no: listener—he called his listeners listener—listener, this is your wake-up call.

But Dr. Benjamin practiced compassion, with that deep voice and his big feelings. Once you forgive yourself, you can forgive your mother, he would say. Or perhaps it was the other way around: your mother first, then you. He told stories of his own terrible decisions. Unlike some voices, his had ballast and breadth. For some reason I had pictured him as bald, in a bow tie. I pictured all male radio hosts as bald and bow tied, until presented with evidence to the contrary. Instead he had a thatch of silver hair. The expensive shirt. Cowboy boots.

I listened to his show all the time, because I hated him. I thought he gave terrible advice. He believed in God and tried to convince other people to do likewise. Sheila from Hoboken, Ann from Nashville, Patrick from Daly City. On the radio it didn’t matter where you lived, small town or the suburbs or New York City (though nobody from New York City ever called Dr. Benjamin): you had the same access to the phone lines and radio waves. You were allowed to broadcast your loneliness to the world, in the hours between eleven p.m. through two a.m. Central Standard Time. Every so often a caller started to say something that promised absolute humiliation and I would have to fly across the room to snap the radio off. My husband cannot satisfy me, Doc—

So long ago! I can’t remember faces but I can remember voices. I can’t remember smells but I remember in all its dimensions the way I felt in those days. The worst thing about not being loved, I thought then, was how vivid I was to myself.

Now I am loved and in black and white.