Chapter 4 #2
“Five point seven-five,” Miranda says crisply, and turns the smile on Ben again.
“Perhaps Pete’s right, and no one else could have done it.
Certainly, the argument was put forward that it was your unique voice that led to the video’s success; some found that argument convincing.
I suppose we’ll find out, won’t we? For now, we’ve talked to your team on twenty-seven, and they’ve agreed to allow you a semi-remote model.
So long as you make all your meetings and turn all your projects in on time, you’re welcome to work wherever you like, whether that’s out of their offices or the Gastronome suites.
The time you bill to Gastronome will be at a slightly higher rate, since the work expected is of a different caliber.
It’s all in the contract.” She pulls a thin stack of stapled paper out of her attaché and proffers it.
“If you wouldn’t mind taking a quick look and giving it a sign; it is a tight schedule for you, after all.
You’ve got deliverables due to Standards and Practices quite soon, and they will need the full allotted time to review.
Dave’s a real stickler for that sort of thing. ”
“I knew it wasn’t salt and pepper,” Ben mutters, very much not intentionally, reaching out and grabbing the contract. Pete makes a sound that seems almost like a laugh for a second but turns out to be a cough; odd. Everyone else, thankfully, ignores it entirely.
It occurs to Ben, as he looks down at the contract in his hand, that it’s quite a bit harder to read than he was expecting.
He realizes after a mystified second that it’s because his hand is shaking so badly that the paper is actively vibrating; whoops.
Too much coffee and too little sleep, not enough to eat—Ben purchased a bear claw at his favorite coffee shop on the way into work, yes, but he’d been so nervous that it tasted sickeningly sweet.
In the end, he’d put it back in its bag for later and, he realizes only now, left it behind on the subway.
Ben’s always doing this in critical moments.
Other people learned how, probably, to say rational, reasonable things to themselves, and then follow through with them, somewhere in their orderly, well-managed childhoods.
Things like: “Hey, self, you have a big meeting tomorrow, why don’t you make sure your laundry is done, and then go to bed at a reasonable hour, and get some sleep instead of lying awake in a torment of nerves!
And then, in the morning, you can have a nice normal breakfast and only one coffee.
Certainly, you would never go to a career-altering meeting on no breakfast and a coffee at five a.m., and then another at seven a.m., and then another at eight forty-five a.m.!
Only a madman would do something like that.
” It must be nice, Ben thinks, to be that sort of person. Calming. Restful.
But Ben is the sort of person who grew up in chaos, always one more thing to do, one more problem to solve, one more crazy thing about to happen just when he thought the restaurant was finally closed for the night.
So now, as an adult, he seeks chaos like a homing pigeon, flapping past cleaner and safer roosts to the one his heart knows as his own.
If he cannot find chaos—if chaos is not, by fate or fortune, thrust upon him—then by God, Ben will create it for himself.
The paper shakes in his hand, reminding him that he is not, actually, free to sit and consider this any further.
Quickly, Ben rests it on his lap, smooths it over, tries to read it.
He realizes he has no chance of doing this almost immediately; he can read, of course, but his eyes are skipping over the words, aware that the other three are looking at him.
God, had they noticed the paper shaking?
Miranda in particular would probably see it as a sign of weakness, and Pete—no, Ben doesn’t have time to think about this right now.
He’s not going to be able to focus, not like this; anyway, hadn’t Rick said that Ben should go along, for now? Not push back?
Ben makes a decision. It’s not a great decision, certainly, but it’s the only one available to him in the circumstances, and in a real way, he made it last week, when he realized who Rick was. He said it already: He’s going to sign the contract. So, really, what does it matter what it says?
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 the contract against the edge of Rick’s desk, and scrawls Benjamin Blumenthal in 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, “Who alive schedules 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 quite badly, 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’s any 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 that does make 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… do you 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, I say magic, but I mean more horror show.”
“It’s not that bad,” Ben protests, keeping pace with Pete and trying not to gape as they walk through the halls of Gastronome’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 great anywhere in the actual magazine, where people who might encounter him later in their lives might 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 you can actually 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 simply looks like 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 from Gastronome’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.”