Chapter 3 #2
He spends the rest of Sunday mostly trying and failing to clean his apartment.
It’s not that the apartment is even particularly dirty; Ben just needs to be doing something.
Unfortunately, every third or fourth minute, he finds his thoughts drawn away again, cycling into some rumination or another.
By the time he calls it quits for the day, orders some takeout, watches half a movie that slides out of his head instantaneously, and goes to bed, his apartment doesn’t look any different than it did when he started.
He has considered roughly twenty-six different ways Rick might verbally eviscerate him, and another ten or eleven scenarios in which some Formica executive saunters into tomorrow’s meeting and fires him, and has also spun out rather more possibilities than he cares to dwell upon about what Pete might say tomorrow when they’re face-to-face.
He didn’t seem angry over those messages.
He seemed the opposite of angry: helpful and surprisingly funny for a guy who, in the footage Ben watched, spent about ten minutes trying to pull up the word “spatula.” But a lot can be lost through text.
Maybe Pete’s trying to lure him into a false sense of security, to better pummel him with rage tomorrow morning.
It occurs to Ben, at this point, to wonder why exactly he’s so afraid that anyone will be angry at him.
Surely, the video going viral is a good thing, right?
It will make Formica money—it will make Gastronome money—it will boost Pete’s career.
It might even boost Ben’s career, if one can call it a career; Ben himself has never quite been able to.
And yeah, okay, Rick had wanted Ben to tank it, so he might be a little annoyed, but…
why would any of these people be angry, otherwise?
What issue could they possibly have with Ben?
Well, Ben’s brain, never quite able to decide if it’s with him or against him when the chips are down, points out, Pete might not be thrilled that three million people and counting heard you suggest he was less intelligent than a dog. It’s a compelling argument.
But then again… surely, Pete would have said something earlier, if he was upset. He’s had plenty of opportunities! And Rick’s Richard Raleigh, so he’s had plenty of opportunities, too, ample time to pick up the phone and put in a call to get Ben fired, if that’s what he wanted to do.
Things never seem to go as badly as Ben expects them to, and he tries to let that thought comfort him to sleep.
Unfortunately, the inescapable other half of that idea—that sometimes the reason things don’t go as badly as Ben expects them to is because they go much worse—renders his attempt at sleep less than successful.
He tosses and turns and groans at the ceiling and plays with Roux for a while and then tosses and turns some more and finally, around 5 a.m., gives up and heads out to get a latte and whatever pastry he can force himself to choke down.
By the time he makes it to the small but high-gloss waiting area outside Rick’s office, Monday morning at 9:15, Ben is jittery from too much coffee, slightly sick to his stomach with nerves, and can feel the beginnings of a tension headache pounding behind his eyes.
He perches on one of the waiting area’s chrome and white leather chairs, one leg bouncing up and down so quickly it might as well be vibrating, and waits.
It’s only a minute before Pete slouches around the corner.
He is not, for once, wearing his Ask Me About Canned Beans shirt; he’s wearing black jeans, and a black T-shirt, and black canvas shoes that Ben recognizes immediately as kitchen-safe non-skid.
This, of course, is a perfectly normal thing for him to be wearing: It’s the unofficial uniform of kitchen staff everywhere, and far more ubiquitous than the white chef’s coat, at least outside of a certain sort of establishment.
At Fleur de Sel they’d made him wear whites after he made it to sous chef, but until then he was in black like everyone else.
And at Trattoria Luciana there were no real rules on staff dress, beyond the highly necessary and insurance-mandated non-slip shoe requirement.
But still, most people gravitated towards black, which didn’t show stains, and tended to hold up in the wash, and was easy to keep identifiable and separated as work clothes.
This, Ben thinks, looking Pete over more appreciatively than he would dare allow himself on more sleep, is what Pete should have been wearing in that video.
This is how Pete should dress all the time.
In his canned beans T-shirt and standard blue jeans, Pete had been hot in a distracting but incidental way; he’d looked like someone you might do a quick double take at during a beach day, or aim to make a series of enjoyable mistakes with on a vacation.
But in kitchen blacks, Pete looks… serious. Professional. Competent.
“Hello?” Pete says, waving a hand in front of Ben’s face, which is when Ben snaps back into reality and realizes he has been staring. Horrified, he tries to think of some explanation for himself as Pete continues, “You good in there, man? You kinda look like you saw a ghost.”
“I just didn’t recognize you without your stupid bean shirt,” Ben snaps, retreating in panic. “I was starting to think maybe you had a closet full of them. You know, like a cartoon character?”
As it did the other day, this flash of Ben’s verbal claws makes Pete laugh. “Yeah, Rick said I had to dress like a real cook today. It looks like he trusted you to dress yourself, which you should take as a compliment.”
Ben grimaces slightly down at his own outfit, which is a pair of skinny maroon chinos underneath a navy-blue quarter-zip striped sweater that his mother had given him for some holiday or birthday—Ben can’t remember quite when, just that he’d thought, When am I ever going to wear this?
When has any outfit I’ve ever worn suggested a tendency to shop the Middle-Aged Straight Man Whose Wife Buys His Clothing Collection?
Did you mean to get this for Dad? But Ben is, nevertheless, wearing it today, largely because he’d realized, sometime around 7:30 in the morning, and after an almost entirely sleepless night that he could have spent handling it, that he was basically out of clean laundry.
His is an outfit of necessity, one he has been bricking it over a little since he stepped out his front door, and he had to fight the urge to duck into a thrift store or something on the way here, to pick up something a little more… him.
Thankfully, instead of revealing any of this, Ben is able to contain himself to muttering, “He might live to regret it.”
“Nah,” Pete says, his brow crinkling for a second before the expression smooths away.
He sits down in the chair next to Ben, relaxing into the cupped backrest instead of hovering at the very edge of the seat as though ready to spring into the air, the way Ben is.
“You look great—that’s what these execs like to see in the behind-the-scenes people, I think.
Professional, a little creative, but not too creative. Too creative is expensive.”
“So there are going to be execs in this meeting?” Ben asks.
It’s a Pyrrhic victory; on the one hand, he does manage not to say, You got that from this outfit?
This outfit that says, “The man who stands before you is wearing the very last pair of clean underpants he owns?” Are you kidding me right now?
This, truly, is an important and critical success.
On the other hand, his voice audibly cracks with nervousness on the word “execs,” so.
All in all, a bit of a humiliating turnout.
But Pete doesn’t jump on, or even seem to notice, this moment of visible weakness from Ben; he just waves a hand, and says, “Oh, yeah. Anywhere there’s money, there’s executives. That’s how it works around here.”
“Have you worked here a long time, then?” Ben asks.
He sort of knows the answer—Pete’s been working here long enough to have bylines going back at least six years—but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s only been here for six years.
He could have started somewhere else at Gastronome, or at Formica, worked his way up to article writing and recipe development a dozen ways.
Pete shrugs, and a shadow seems to cross his expression for a moment.
“Long enough to know how things… generally work around here, yeah. I wouldn’t worry too much; they’re going to be happy.
It’s a lot of traffic, and that’s all they care about.
” He drops his voice low and adds, “Well, the execs will be happy. Rick… might be a little annoyed, honestly, but don’t let him get to you. He’s all bark, really.”
“Unless you’re a fish,” Ben says, before he can think better of it, also keeping his voice pitched low.
Pete grins at him, shaking his head. “Right, yeah. Naturally. It’s different for them.”
Ben finds that, in spite of his nerves, a small smile is starting to play at the edges of his own mouth. “I guess if he really goes off on me, I could always let his location slip to the nearest school of walleye.”
“Which would be where, exactly?” Pete’s eyes are almost dancing now, and Ben finds himself settling back into his chair a little, his muscles releasing their rigid control of him by a fraction. “I have to imagine they’d have some trouble roaming the halls.”
Ben opens his mouth to say—well, something, anyway, he would have figured it out—when the frosted-glass door that reads Richard Raleigh swings open. From inside, Rick growls, “Tweedle Dumb! Tweedle Dumber! Inside, now!”