“If only there was some sort of timekeeping tool,” Renata says, in a faux-musing voice, “that was visible upon the device you used to contact me?—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, all right, I’m sorry,” Ben says, rolling his eyes even as guilt shifts uneasily in his stomach. “I’ll go, sorry to wake you?—”
“Oh, I wasn’t asleep,” Renata says, sounding suddenly cheerful. “Just got in from a wrap party, actually; I just wanted to establish that if you call me at this time of night again, without texting first, I’m going to assume someone is dead. Anyway, what’s up?”
Ben wrestles down a small scream of frustration. But then, this is the price of dealing with one’s family—no one ever quite hits your buttons like they do. He doesn’t want to say it, especially after that little opening salvo, so badly that it feels a little like it’s giving him a chemical burn as he spits it out of his mouth, but: “Actually, I was hoping for… God. Some advice?”
There is a pause. Then Renata cackles; it is, Ben notes wearily, quite reminiscent of the cackle she perfected at age nine, to accompany her witch Halloween costume. At every house he took her to she let that cackle out, delighting some of the neighborhood homeowners and deeply unnerving others. As Ben remembers it, old Mrs. Hoffman down the road had been so badly frightened that she’d come round to the restaurant the next day and asked if anyone had ever considered an exorcism. She had, unfortunately for her, had the bad luck to catch Ben’s father, Daniel; Lucia might have been more sympathetic. Daniel, on the other hand, had simply listened calmly, waited until she was done, and then said, “Go home before I have her curse you, then, Carol,” which he had found quite funny.
“Some advice, you say?” Ren’s voice is almost painfully entertained, now that she’s stopped laughing; glad she can’t see him, Ben grits his teeth. “How can I guide you, brother dearest? What tangle have you fallen into that only your wiser, prettier, younger sister can solve?”
“You know what, forget it,” Ben starts, “I don’t?—”
“No, hey, come on,” Renata says, sounding more serious now—or, at least, as serious as Renata ever sounds. She’s always had their mother’s talent of taking life fairly lightly, up until such a time as she becomes angry, annoyed, frustrated, or too hungry. “I won’t be mean about it—what is it?”
“Ugh,” Ben mutters, and then, figuring he might as well, says, “Well—you know how I’m doing these videos forGastronome?”
He lays out the problem for her, explaining, as vaguely as he can bring himself to, about Pete and his stage fright, the performance issues, and how guilty he, Ben, feels about having accidentally created this whole situation in the first place. And, to her credit, Renata listens actively, making little “Mm-hmm” noises or asking the occasional question, sounding utterly unperturbed by all of it. It’s honestly soothing, and Ben realizes,slightly embarrassed that it comes as a surprise, that she might in fact be quite good at her job, which to his understanding is, at its core, about playing the chords of various difficult personalities in such a way that they produce beautiful music, instead of unintelligible noise.
And then, even more miraculously, Renata does have some useful advice, which is: “Honestly? Your best bet is probably distracting him. You said the cayenne pepper worked, right? That other sensation to process? I’ve got actors who have to wear over-tight shoes, you know that, or have a tag stuck inside their clothes just the right way; something to distract them. That’s what your boy needs—or, at least, that’s what I’d try.”
“Huh,” Ben says, thoughtfully. “Yeah, that’s—thanks.”
“No problem,” Ren says cheerfully. Then, a note of wickedness entering her tone, she adds, “Now that business is complete, did you want to talk about how you’re totally in love with this dude, orrrrr?—”
“Goodbye, Renata,” Ben snaps, and hangs up on her before she can say anything else.
When he sets his phone down on the table, Roux, who, Ben thinks darkly, has always liked Ren, leaps up next to it and, with one swift paw, knocks it to the floor. Ben, in getting it, nearly pitches off his chair and decides that perhaps it’s time for bed before Renata’s dire premonitions are proved right after all, and he dies of his own incompetence. He tells himself, very firmly, that when he wakes up in the morning, he’ll come up with an idea for an adequate Pete distraction.
He does not, the following morning, come up with an idea for an adequate Pete distraction. In fact, he tries so hard and comes up with so little that by the time he has a single idea, it seems like a great one.
It is not a great idea. It is, at best, a mediocre idea; in fact, in the hours after he begins to put it into motion, Ben realizes itmight be quite abadidea. If it were a morning show Pete were filming, then the idea of getting him so drunk the night before that he was a little hungover would be… Actually, Ben realizes a little grimly, that would still be quite a bad idea. A hangover might be distracting enough to help Pete function, but it also might make him throw up on live television; probably not worth the risk.
But it’snota morning show; it’sLate Night Live with Brian O’Malley, which begins taping at 9:00 p.m. and runs until nearly midnight. Even if Ben gets Pete absolutely sloshed tonight, his hangover will almost certainly be gone by then, so it’s not a plan that will solve his problem at all.
However, by the time Ben realizes this, he’s already suggested a night out to the kitchen staff, and Pete has already moved some plans around, and Ezra and Adina have already started arguing about which bar they should all go to, so. It seems a bit late to put a stop to things, and Ben doesn’t figure it can do any harm. If nothing else, it will be relaxing, right? A nice night out with friends before the hammer falls?
At this point, Ben realizes he’s thinking about this evening as something not dissimilar to a last cigarette before the firing squad. Feeling equal parts guilty for his faithlessness and utterly sure it’s less faithlessness than an accurate grip on reality, Ben does his best to put such thoughts from his mind and heads out with the group in the genuine spirit of having a good time.
And, for the first hour or so, he has a good time. They all do. They end up at Fox’s, a seedy hole-in-the-wall bar that’s only a block and a half away from the office, and Pete explains as they walk that theyalwaysend up at Fox’s, because the proximity ends up outweighing any argument. The air is cold and crisp as they make their way up Sixth Avenue, little snowflakes so small as to almost look like a trick of the light drifting lazily around them. Pete’s dark hair, peeking out from under yet anotherbeanie, seems to be catching it as they go. The bright white flakes under his striped knitted cap, against his black bomber jacket, make him look like a catalogue model. It makes Ben self-conscious in a way he’s not entirely familiar with, and he finds himself trying to subtly scrub the snow from his own dark hair until he sees Pete looking at him, smiling.
The quality of that smile—the soft, knowing warmth—Ben can’t parse it or place it at all. It stays with him, though, as their little group digs into a corner of the bar, wrapping around his heart the way a vine can grow around a tree: gently enough at first, and then tightening to the point of exquisite, reshaping agony.
Maybe that’s why he’s not prepared for what happens; maybe it’s because he doesn’t know enough tobeprepared. Maybe it’s because when the conversation turns to most embarrassing moments, Ben’s two drinks deep, and not entirely at his sharpest.
Regardless, he doesn’t see the harm in it when, after Adina confesses to some shame about a mistake she made during a class she taught last week, Ezra suggests a little contest.
“Everyone submits, for the judges, an embarrassing moment,” Ezra says, with a sharp little grin. “Adina, you can go with that one or submit another, if you want. Regardless, everyone goes, and the most embarrassing moment wins. Does everyone agree to the rules?”
There’s a chorus of yeses; later, Ben will kick himself for not noticing whether or not Pete was one of them. They’re separated by a few people—Ben had been ordering drinks when the table had been claimed, and couldn’t very well say, “Get up, Ezra, I want to sit next to Pete,” when he returned. Not with any dignity, anyway. He doesn’t hear Pete’s voice among the rabble, but then, it’s hard to pick out anyone’s voice from a chorus of yeses in a crowded bar. Ben doesn’t think anything of it.
This is a mistake.
Ezra goes first. He tells a very amusing story about getting caught backstageinflagrante delictowith Kenickie during a college performance ofGrease; the detail of it having been at his conservative, all-male college adds to the humor, as does the fact that apparently, they were making creative use of some of the props. But Ben notices, as Ezra tells it, that he doesn’t seem that embarrassed by it, and that ultimately it isn’t a story that makes him look particularly bad. In fact, by the time he’s done, he seems very pleased with himself and the reception the tale has received from the group, and Ben half wonders if he brought up the topic for the excuse to tell it.
Brogan goes next, and that’s a good and proper embarrassing story, one involving a fishing boat, a malfunctioning bikini top, and the particularly ill-timed emergence of both a passing whale-watching cruise and a humpback whale. Ben laughs nearly to the point of tears as she tells it; the only thing that takes away from it is her brash, no-nonsense energy, how clear it is that, while she knows objectively it’s embarrassing, it never bothered her. Also, she goes into such extensive detail about the fish she caught on the journey that Ben, who is starting to really feel his third drink, begins to hazily suspect her of being Rick’s daughter.
Adina, whose honestly fairly milquetoast work story kicked the whole thing off to begin with, volunteers to go next, and tells a frankly equally milquetoast story about a childhood family trip, which revolves around her laughing so hard that she shot milk out of her nose in the middle of a packed deli in Cleveland. This makes Pete, usually so affable, mutter, “God, is that the standard for an embarrassing story? I’d better sit this one out.”
