For another moment or two, Ben makes a show of reading it over anyway, not wanting to look like the rube that he is. He flips through the pages, scanning them without absorbing anything. Then he takes the pen Miranda offers him, rests thecontract against the edge of Rick’s desk, and scrawlsBenjamin Blumenthalin his crabbed, spiky cursive.
“Good,” Miranda says, all but snatching her pen and the contract out of Ben’s hands. “That’s settled. I have a ten ten meeting, so I have to dash, but I’ll email you a copy of all this later, of course.” Without turning to look at him, as she stalks towards the door, she adds, “Richard.”
“Miranda,” Rick returns, rolling his eyes at her retreating back. When the door has snicked shut behind her, he mutters, “Whoaliveschedules a meeting at ten ten? I swear she makes this stuff up.” Then, to Ben and Pete, he snaps, “You two, clear out. I need to talk to some lures about all this.”
Ben thinks that’s a joke, but Pete very decidedly does not laugh and makes a wide-eyed face of warning at Ben when the corners of his mouth begin to twitch. Sure enough, a second later Rick pulls an enormous tackle box out from under his desk with an air of finality, opening it with a loud, foreboding click.
“Yeah, we’ll…go,” Pete says quickly. He stands and puts a brief, urging hand under Ben’s elbow; Ben rises almost unthinkingly at his touch, light though it is, as if he’s a marionette Pete’s controlling. Distantly, he wonders if maybe he doesn’t need something to eat quitebadly, but that’s a problem for later Ben to solve.
Still, he’s not so far gone that he can’t identify and walk out the door, so he does, waving awkwardly at a glaring Rick and then turning away with a grimace. Pete’s close on his heels, and when the door closes behind them, Ben lets out a huge breath, feeling as though he’s been holding it for the last forty-five minutes. “God. Did I black out in there? I feel like maybe I blacked out in there. Something about all that business talk always makes my brain…oozy.”
Pete laughs, shaking his head. “Oozy, huh? I think that’s the Miranda effect; she’s not exactly well-liked around here, if it’sany comfort. It’s not just you. My friend Adina—she’s one of the test cooks, you’ll meet her—anyway, she says that every minute you spend with Miranda costs you two minutes of energy. Even being around her charges interest.”
In spite of himself, Ben can’t help but laugh. “Sorry to say it, but thatdoesmake me feel a little better. Really, they should let me skip the rest of the morning at my other job as compensation.”
“I mean,” Pete says, and shrugs, giving him a little grin. “The way I heard it, you don’t have to go down there, so long as all your work is done and you don’t have any meetings. Right? That’s what she said? So…doyou have any meetings?”
“I…guess not,” Ben says, blinking slowly. “No. Mondays are a no-meeting day on twenty-seven. One of my bosses has a thing about it. And I don’t have anything due until Thursday, and I did it last week, anyway.”
“Well,” Pete says, and shrugs. “There you go. How about a new employee orientation? You are technically working here now. You should come see where the magic happens.” Pete pauses ruefully, and then, as he starts walking, says, “Well, Isaymagic, but I mean more horror show.”
“It’s notthatbad,” Ben protests, keeping pace with Pete and trying not to gape as they walk through the halls ofGastronome’s actual offices. He knows the magazine wasn’t always based in this building—they were moved in from their original location in Chelsea when Formica bought the magazine out—but it’s still surreal, and fairly cool, to be here. Framed covers of various iconic issues line the walls, along with a few bronzed newspaper articles about important moments in the magazine’s history. Ben notices, to his irritation, that somewhere in the middle of the wall there is a beautifully staged headshot of Rick, one that must be twenty years old but would still look greatanywhere in the actual magazine, where peoplewho mightencounter him later in their livesmight have a chance to view it. There is, below it, a little plaque below it that reads,Richard Raleigh: Not Pictured, which makes Ben want to scream a little, for all he can tell it must be an inside joke.
“Really?” Pete says doubtfully, pulling Ben back to the moment.
Then, because he’s not a very good liar, Ben can’t help but add, “I mean, okay, it’s not—it’s not that good, either. But youcanactually cook, right? When…whatever’s happening in that footage isn’t happening? It seems like you can.” It does not seem like this, at least based on what Ben’s seen of Pete’s cooking so far; it simplylookslike it based on his current outfit. This isn’t a fair tool to use to assess such things, of course, but in Ben’s defense he keeps accidentally ending up a step or two behind Pete, distracted by the densely packed wall of preserved moments fromGastronome’s past. This leaves him with a rather unfortunately thorough view of how well Pete is wearing his black jeans, which is doing a lot of heavy lifting for Ben’s opinion of him, at this moment.
“Cross my heart and hope to die,” Pete says, with an accompanying gesture across his chest, and then steps into a large, high-ceilinged, open room. “In fact, how about this? I’ll prove it.”
Ben steps into the room after him and has a disquieting sense of déjà vu. He’s been in this room before—no. Of course not. This is the test kitchen, he realizes after a beat; he’s never been here, but he spent ten hours watching footage ofPetebeing in here, standing…yes, just over there. Ben blinks as Pete crosses the room to the same butcher block-topped island he stood at to cook the kale salad. It’s interesting to see it from a wider framing. There’s a stand-alone range set into the counter, though no accompanying oven, and a number of pots and pans hanging from a rail on the wooden front panel of the island,which is itself painted a deep royal purple, theGastronomebrand’s anchoring color since it was founded in—God, was it a hundred years ago this year? Ben finds he can’t quite remember, even though he knew that date by heart when he was a kid. Then again, Ben’s childhood was itself a hundred years ago, or it feels that way most days, so. Maybe it’s not such a surprise he’s lost track of some of the fine detail.
Regardless, Pete’s isn’t the only counter; there’s five more, two behind him and then three more next to them, so that all six are lined up in two neat rows. Though no one else is in here at the moment, each counter is slightly personalized. His has what looks to be a ceramic hanging sculpture of a braided bunch of garlic dangling from one of the low overhead lights, and a large knife block in one corner that had only been half in frame during the video. Ben had spent maybe forty-five minutes of his ten total hours of editing puzzling over what on earth the thingwas, and now that he’s looking at it, he’s annoyed it wasn’t adjusted into the camera’s sightline by whoever did the filming. It’s an odd, gnarled piece of tree branch, bark removed and wood polished to a high shine, with thin, barely visible slots out of which a variety of colorful knife handles are jutting straight up. It alone speaks to Pete as a competent if unusual cook; a collection of knives like that takes time and money to assemble, and such a well-crafted home and display for them… He must care about them enormously.
“I know it’s a lot to take in,” Pete says, half-joking, “but you can join me, you know.”
God, Ben must be staring. But the truth is, Pete’s right—thereisa lot to take in. He walks over to Pete’s counter as if in a dream, craning his neck to look around him as he goes. God, there are ovens set into the walls—homeandcommercial—oh, and that’s a door to a walk-in fridge, next to one which must be the walk-in freezer. But there are two home fridges in here, too, each with amasking tape label too far away for Ben to read, and what looks like a grill-top, and?—
“Oh, wait, you need somewhere to sit,” Pete says, shaking his head, and runs off for a moment. He returns with a little metal stool, which he sets down in front of his counter before, humming to himself, he opens the walk-in and disappears inside.
Ben, a little overwhelmed, sits down on the stool. But when Pete returns, laden with a carton of eggs and a jumble of produce he’s barely containing in his arms, Ben realizes he has been silent much too long and says, “Uh, do you need like—help? With that?”
“Thanks, but nah,” Pete says easily, and it seems that he doesn’t. The Pete that Ben spent ten hours staring at on a screen in increasing certainty that he was minutes from death every second of his life—well, that Pete would have managed to find a banana peel, and slip on it, and throw everything in the air, and then have every egg somehow land directly on his face. But this Pete simply leans across his counter and sets everything down in one smooth movement, then slides the walk-in door shut on his way to a large basket that turns out to contain bread. Once he’s bent and plucked a round blonde loaf out, he stops by a cabinet from which he selects several spices, drops it all off on the counter, and, still humming, opens one of the two fridges with a masking tape label. Closer now, Ben can squint and see that the fridge Pete reaches into is labeledGrabs, and the other one is labeledKeeps.
“This is the freebie fridge,” Pete explains, as he rummages around in it. “Anything in here is up for grabs, and—ha, yeah, I thought so.” He emerges with a large plastic container atop which he has perched two glass pints of orange juice. “Rick has this buddy who’s a juice wholesaler, and every once in a while,he brings in a case for us. It’s honestly insane how good it is; you have to try it.”
“I mean,” Ben says, making a face. “If it’s like a—a special thing for the staff, I wouldn’t want to?—”
“Oh, shut up,” Pete says, grinning and waving a hand. “We’ve all tried it before; besides, I’m having one, too. The code of the fridges is very sacred here—if it’s in Grabs, it’s for grabs.”
“And I assume if it’s in Keeps, it’s for keeps?” Ben asks, as Pete sets the bottle down in front of him.
“Oh, yeah,” Pete says, shaking his head ruefully. “God help you if you take something somebody else put in Keeps; that’s a serious offense. But the orange juice is yours—seriously. Nobody will mind.”
Ben hesitates for a second, but then shrugs and says, “Thanks.” As Pete begins to open containers and pull out pots and pans and cutting boards, Ben twists off the bottle cap and takes a sip of the juice; his eyes go wide. “Oh myGod.”
“See?”
“How is that so…” Ben pauses, not sure how to describe what it is, and takes another sip. “God, like—crisp and sweet and sour and soorangey, somehow, even though it’s not quite like any orange juice I’ve ever tasted, and—floral, too, I think.” He pauses, and then, realizing he has perhaps let himself get a bit carried away, corrects, “I mean, uh. It’s…really good.”
