Chapter 5 #2
Or, well. Okay. It is still… pretty funny.
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 a little laughter.
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 even doing a blueberry cocktail, blueberries aren’t even in season, no one has ever!
In history! Thought, ‘Wow, it’s Halloween, I better have some “Boo-Berry” juice’—oh my God, tell me I didn’t finally get it right in that totally 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 Pete had been 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 the four and a half hours of 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’s better at 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’s fun.
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’s trying to 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 the Gastronome offices 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.
Every time he has this thought, it is, of course, followed by another thought, such as, Why on earth would you do that?
Or Don’t you think that would be incredibly weird?
Or What exactly are you planning to say to him, then?
“Hello, person I hardly know and just eviscerated on video for the second time in as many weeks, I’m here to touch base on your emotional well-being!
” No. Pete has been kind to Ben, and that’s because Ben is a weird little gremlin person and Pete is an incredibly attractive and competent man with, admittedly, a fairly significant camera-related flaw, but who, after all, does not have flaws?
Ben himself has dozens and dozens of them, carefully cataloged in a little recipe box in his mind that he can flip through whenever he likes; it’s stopping that’s the problem.
It wouldn’t be the same thing, for Ben to go hovering around in Pete’s workplace, as it was for Pete to swing by Ben’s desk—for one thing, Pete had been doing that mostly to size him up, which was only fair, in the circumstances.
And if on Tuesday night, getting ready to lock the video back at his own apartment, Ben lingers for a moment on the disquieting notion that he is awfully worried about what Pete thinks of him, it hardly matters.
He drowns out the thought in the rush of satisfaction he gets from sending the file to Dave in S Thursday makes Ben long for Wednesday, and also, quite possibly, for death.
His day is back-to-back meetings he has no business being in, and the technical video he finished a week ago for today’s deadline suddenly needs three additional minutes edited in, and Renata keeps texting him complaining about some fight she’s having with their father, which, as far as Ben can tell, started with a disagreement about the best type of lasagna and spiraled out from there.
So when the email comes through from Miranda a few minutes after five, he’s braced for the worst. This is, probably, what saves them in the end—Ben has found it often is—but it doesn’t ever make the experience of actually finding the worst any more enjoyable.
The email is Ben’s promised copy of his contract, paperwork, the slideshow she showed them, and best of all, the production schedule.
Relieved to finally have that to study properly and add to his own universe of calendars, Ben opens it eagerly as he rides the subway home, waiting an age for it to load on the spotty signal.
His eyes skim eagerly over the first week and—stop.