But the look in Pete’s eyes as Ben walked out, the way his face briefly fell into something that looked like genuine panic before it smoothed away again… Well, Ben would be lying if he said it didn’t follow him all the way down to the twenty-seventh floor.
FIVE
Ben ends up spending most of the rest of his workday waiting around on twenty-seven for Jaelyn to upload the footage of Pete’s attempt at performing for the camera. It is not a pleasant wait. Word of the video, and that Ben has been picked up for an additional contract withGastronome, has clearly spread around the office. He’s not sure which is worse: the obsequious, congratulatory messages from colleagues who have never bothered to be nice to him before, or the people who keep sarcastically saying things like, “Hey, big shot, you mind taking a crack at this video for us? I know it’s a little beneath you.”
At three thirty, unable to take it anymore, Ben retreats to Brew, where he impatiently refreshes his email inbox and jiggles his leg for a while before he remembers that he could just…go home. After all, Miranda said that he could work from wherever he liked, so long as all hisdeliverables were turned in on time; in fact, the words “semi-remote” had been bandied around. And certainly, his regular bosses hadn’t seemed bothered about the whole thing—Jessica the germophobe had come by his desk and talked for twenty minutes about how she wishes they could all go remote, and then said she was glad he’d secured this new contract, as she’d be grateful to have one less vector of diseasearound. It was quite clear, as it always was with Jessica, that she meant this as a compliment, but Ben, as usual, found he had rather a hard time taking it as one.
Anyway, it’s not likely anyone will miss him, so he throws his laptop in his bag, rides the subway home, stops in at his favorite coffee shop and decides, in a moment of self-care and personal growth and feeling, for once, pretty all right with the world, to order a nice soothing herbal tea instead of yet another cup of coffee. After all, Ben is becoming a bigger and better person. He’s got a new job at the place he’s always dreamed of working, and yeah, okay, Pete’s still a disaster on camera, but he’d turned out to be…different in person. A much better cook than Ben thought, for one thing, which can only help them in the long run. And, he reflects as he walks towards his apartment with his still-steaming to-go cup, a lotnicer. It might be fun working with him, although “fun” is not a word Ben has ever particularly associated with the word “work,” nor indeed “job” or “paycheck.” But this was creative, and Pete was pretty funny, and the first video gotmillionsof views, and now Ben just has to…do it again.
In a cruel and unhappy twist of fate, as Ben takes the first sip of what was billed to him as a calming ginger-chamomile blend, the icy hand of devastating stress closes around his midsection and twists. Hejusthas to do itagain? He doesn’t even entirely know how he did it the first time! He was accidentally drunk and somewhat unfairly pissed off and drawingdevil hornson Pete’shead—how in God’s name is Ben supposed to do itagain?
Abruptly but entirely in a frenzy, Ben’s casual, slightly self-satisfied stroll morphs into a hunched, unhappy scuttle. He hurries the rest of the way home, lets himself into his apartment, and presses his back against the door when he shuts it behind him, letting out a long breath and standing there for a moment. Once his nervous system gets the memo that he is not, in actual fact, in any kind of danger, he’s able to push himself off the doorand gather… Well. It’s notquiteall of himself that he manages to gather, if he’s honest—there are some bits and pieces off screaming in various corners—but enough of himself, anyway, to be getting on with.
Naturally, his mother chooses this exact moment to call him; she has, in this specific and unfortunate sense, always had incredible timing.
Heart pounding in his chest—a ridiculous state of affairs, Ben knows, for speaking with one’s own mother—he picks up the phone. “Hey, Ma.”
“Oh, ‘hey, Ma,’ he says,” Lucia says; Ben can hear her eyes rolling. Her voice still bears the faintest hint of her Italian accent most of the time, the bulk of it burned out of her vowels and cadences bit by bit as Ben grew up, but when she’s annoyed at him—which is usually—it’s always thicker. “‘Hey, Ma!’ Were you going to tell me you were working forGastronomenow, or was I supposed to find out in the papers with everyone else?”
“Ma, my contract video editing gig is not in the papers,” Ben tries, knowing even as he does it that there isn’t any point.
“Maybe nottoday,” Lucia counters, drawing in a huge breath, “but—” and then the barrage begins. She’s so proud of him; she’s so embarrassed she had to hear about it from Bethany in her jazz tap class; does Ben know Bethany? Of course he knows Bethany, she’s little Jeffrey’s mother—Ben’s little friend Jeffrey from when he was nine—no, surely not the Jeffrey who ended up in prison for that horrible business with—but wait, why is Ben trying to change the subject? It’s such incredible news; it’s such terrifying news; does Ben know how many creeps and weirdos are on the internet? Lucia felt like the belle of the ball out on her errands this morning—everyonewanted to know about her son the viral star—and how did Ben think it felt, for her to not even have talked to him yet? Has Ben thought about how hurt his father must be, not to have heard it from him?What was the pay like—oh, not enough, of course not. Are there going to be more videos—oh, yes? Well, at least she knewthatfirst. Is Ben worried about that? Does he think he can handle that, all that pressure? Oh, she’s soproudof him!
By the time, forty-five minutes later, she says, “All right, Benny, they’re wrapping up family meal out there, I should go get ready to work the early crowd—Danny, do you want to say hello to your—ah, no, he’s gone out the back. Ciao!” Ben is back against the door. He’s also sitting on the floor, having slumped down against the slick wood surface as she went on and on and on. Roux, at least, is having a good time, and is sitting in his lap purring, but Ben… Well. It’s not that he doesn’t love his mother, it’s just?—
It’s just thatsometimes, what Ben wouldreallylike to do after one of her phone calls is give it the exact same treatment he gave Pete’s first run of disastrous footage. He wants to record it and pop it into his editing software and pick it apart, pulling out each contradiction and logical fallacy and thing that really, really isn’t helpful. He wants to scrawl things likeWhy?AndWho says that?AndDo you honestly not find this exhausting?over particularly choice moments, although that’s not even possible in audio, and he’s clearly losing his mind.
His fingers do twitch, though, with the pent-up frustration of years of one-sided conversations, all the things he’s wanted to say that he’s choked down because it wouldn’t go well. Renata, of the two of them, was the one who would pipe up, push back, engage in the ongoing argument that was their family conversation. Ben has always been the type to put his head down and get on with things—someone had to, after all. The things still needed to be done.
But when he’d made that first video of Pete—yeah, sure, Ben had been drunk and annoyed and feeling a little vindictive. That had been part of it, maybe even most of it. But underneath allthat, it had feltgood, weirdly, hideously good, to let a part of himself he usually tries to keep a leash on get out andrun.
He checks his email inbox, and, of course, has the same little jump scare he’s been having for the last few days every time he checks his email inbox. Ben scrolls hastily past a lot of unsettling media requests that he realizes only now henever asked Rick how to handle, but then brightens somewhat when he sees an email from Jaelyn, in spite of the subject line,Bet you $20 you regret saying “No Cuts.”Even the emoji she’s included as the sole copy of the body of the email, which resembles a face melting like an ice cream cone, doesn’t dim Ben’s resolve.
He gets up off the stupid floor, because it’s high time he did, and cracks his knuckles. Setting his laptop up on the kitchen counter, he starts pulling ingredients out of the fridge to make himself dinner as he watches through the—dear God,four and a half hoursof footage? Well, whatever, it doesn’t matter. He’ll watch through the first part while he makes dinner, and then the rest over the course of the evening, and as he gets more and more annoyed with Pete’s total inability to function on camera, his frustration will happily seize upon the outlet. Maybe hewasworried about his repeat performance, but that was before his mother called him up to, among other things, suggest he should be worried about it. He’s not about to give her the satisfaction of beingright.
He hits play on the footage as he’s gathering prep bowls, but as he’s reaching over to preheat the oven, he pauses, transfixed by what’s on the screen. The video’s scrub bar reads nearly five minutes by the time Ben realizes he’s just beenstandingthere, horror-struck, his finger hovering in mid-air like he’s trying to make contact with E.T.
At minute six, he orders a pizza.
The next several hours are, honestly, a bit grueling. Ben was expecting his frustration to mount as he watches Pete, butinstead Ben finds what swells within him is sympathy. The man has simply gotproblems; now that Ben knows how Pete usually cooks, and without any cuts for him to hide in, it’s a lot harder to find it funny.
Or, well. Okay. It is still…prettyfunny. Ben feels guilty about it, but—there are moments, in spite of the strange knot of fellow feeling that seems to have sprouted in his chest since he last did this a week and a half ago, where he can’t help but let out alittlelaughter. Pete’s stupidly handsome face is so unusually expressive, for one thing, seeming to go rubbery with comical shock or dismay as he drops, spills, trips, and otherwise clatters his way around the kitchen he’d moved so easily in this morning. He’s making a Halloween cocktail and appetizer; the appetizer is a seven-layer dip with a spiderweb drawn on top in sour cream, although if one counted the layers Pete attempts to make, screws up, and grimly throws away, it would be more like a twenty-five-layer dip. But the drink—it’s a blueberry spritzer, and there must be some note somewhere that Pete needs to refer to it as a “Boo-Berry” spritzer, because between every actual take, captured on the long reel of uncut footage, is Jaelyn gently saying, “Okay, Pete, that was good, but could you try actually saying ‘Boo-Berry’ this time?”
But it becomes apparent, as the footage rolls on, that Pete cannot say “Boo-Berry.” Pete can say “blueberry,” and “blowberry,” and “blackberry,” and “boysenberry,” and “gooseberry,” and “bloo-bluh,” and several creative swear words, none of which sound like the word “Boo-Berry” at all. The frustration is obviously getting to him; on what has to be his thirtieth attempt to spit the pun out of his mouth, Pete’s composure snaps, and waving his knife in the air like a madman, he all but shrieks, “Blueberry—whoberry—whyberry! Why are we evendoinga blueberry cocktail, blueberries aren’t even inseason, no one has ever! In history! Thought, ‘Wow, it’sHalloween, I better have some “Boo-Berry” juice’—oh myGod, tell me I didn’t finally get it right in thattotally unusable take?” This, as it turns out, proves to be Ben’s breaking point as well, and he throws his head back and loses it laughing in spite of himself.
He has to pause the footage for a second to calm down and wipe his eyes, only to crack up again when, a few minutes later, Jaelyn appears in frame, glares, and grimly mouths, “No cuts, huh?” into the camera.
But actually, when Ben gets to the end of the footage, he opens up the email she sent him and types a quick reply:Haha. You owe me $20.He doesn’t regret the “no cuts” call at all. Pete’s—bad, still, of course, abominably bad, and it’s harder to watch than the last round because sometimes, between attempts at demonstrating very basic cooking skills that Ben is now sure he could typically do drunk and half-dead and with his eyes closed, he looks truly wretched. It must, Ben can’t help but think, be incredibly frustrating for him, to so abruptly be unable to access this skill that seems to be woven into his bedrock most of the time.
But the lack of cuts helps. Pete is still comically awful, awkward and forgetting what he’s doing and ruining so many different dip layers that even Ben loses track of them. Even something as simple as guacamole proves a challenge: Somehow he manages to drown the first batch in so much lime juice that it’s inedibly sour, oversalt the second round beyond the point of saving, and, without realizing it, accidentally dump so much cayenne pepper into the third that it renders the next fifteen minutes of footage borderline unusable, since it’s just Pete jumping around in anguish, drinking water, drinking milk, panting, drinking more milk, cursing the heavens, and glaring at the bottle of cayenne pepper as though he intends to remember its sins here today.
Still, though, he’s not as bad as he was, by the end of that first round of footage. Even in his haze of semi-drunk self-righteousness, Ben had not used any of the last half hour of what was sent for the initial video. It had felt—wrong, too personal. Even if Petehadbeen affecting his camera-triggered incompetence, which Ben now knows he was not, those last thirty minutes would have been him reaching a place within himself that Ben can’t imagine anyone wanting broadcast out to the internet. His nervousness, or stage fright, or whatever you wanted to call it, had become so bad after hours and hours of hearing “Cut! Reset to go again!” that he was truly barely coherent. On his first watch Ben had turned it off, wincing, when Pete said, “It—that’s—kale! The salad!” and then blinked blankly into the camera as though trying to remember why, exactly, that wasn’t an appropriate sentence.
That doesn’t happen this time. By the end of thefour and a half hoursof footage, Pete looks exhausted and wan and like he’d be willing to fight his way out of the test kitchen if it meant an escape from Jaelyn and her treacherous equipment, but he is at least speaking in more or less complete sentences. In some ways he’sbetterat the tail end of the video, after the cayenne pepper incident, and Ben wonders idly as he starts to mark off clips to pull for the final cut whether the pain and frustration was distracting enough that Pete could almost forget a camera was on him. It’s a theory, anyway, if at some point they want to try to shift things towards demonstrating to the audience that Pete can, actually, prepare a meal like a normal person sometimes.
That’s not going to be possible with this video, though, and as Ben sinks into the editing, he finds that the lingering traces of his nerves fall away. He’d thought, before, that he was able to do this because he was angry at Pete—this time, stone-cold sober and wholly invested, he realizes he was able to do it because it’sfun.This has always been what he’s liked about editing, even with simple stuff like wedding videos; he can see the shape even this strange mess of footage wants to take, the way to make it seem funny and entertaining and, above all else, a little bit intentional. It’s satisfying, especially here, to have the control and creative freedom to do as he likes, and it’s also nice that it’s about a topic about which he, Ben, happens to know so much. He always knows what Pete’stryingto do, so it’s easy to work around it and fill in the gaps.
It is somewhat slower work than it was the first time, without the fuel of misplaced tipsy rage. It takes him the better part of the rest of his night and then about half of the next day, working on it in bits and pieces in between his meetings on twenty-seven, to get the final cut of the Halloween video into a place he’s happy with. He doesn’t dare go up to theGastronomeoffices to work—even though he knows technically he can, he doesn’t want to abuse his privileges—but he thinks, a couple times, about stopping by to…say hi, or whatever, to Pete. Check in.
