Chapter 5
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 with Gastronome, 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 his deliverables 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 disease around.
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 lot nicer.
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 got millions of 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.
He just has to do it again? He doesn’t even entirely know how he did it the first time!
He was accidentally drunk and somewhat unfairly pissed off and drawing devil horns on Pete’s head—how in God’s name is Ben supposed to do it again?
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 door and gather…
Well. It’s not quite all 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 for Gastronome now, 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 not today,” 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—everyone wanted 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 knew that first. Is Ben worried about that?
Does he think he can handle that, all that pressure? Oh, she’s so proud of 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 that sometimes, what Ben would really like 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 like Why? And Who says that?
And Do 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 all that, it had felt good, weirdly, hideously good, to let a part of himself he usually tries to keep a leash on get out and run.
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 he never 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 hours of 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 he was worried 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 being right.
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 been standing there, 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, but instead Ben finds what swells within him is sympathy.
The man has simply got problems; 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.