Chapter 5 #5
“What desert island is this?” Pete asks, cocking his head. He sounds amused. “Sounds like somebody needs to get a UN representative out there to check things out, stat.”
“Oh my God, would you just answer the question?” Ben snaps, finally turning away from the tripod and camera and laptop and hard drives and connecting cables to glare at him.
Pete just offers him a slow, lazy grin, seeming to relax slightly as he leans back against his counter. “What? Am I annoying you?”
“You’re avoiding the topic is what you’re doing,” Ben grumbles, trying to ignore the mysterious spike of pleasure he feels every time he takes a swipe at Pete and, in spite of his generally excellent aim and a long track record of unfortunate success, seems to miss.
“You think that you’re going to draw me into some involved conversation about sending the United Nations to Scallop or Die Island, and whether or not their authority extends to fictional islands, and what the conditions are for scallop-based survival—”
“It already seems like a lot more fun to—”
“And I refuse,” Ben cuts him off sharply, “to be part of it. You and I have to make this video tonight one way or another, and I, for one, don’t want to be here at three in the morning watching you struggling to remember how to use a knife, okay, I have an appointment with my pillow!
I cannot be late! And you could do this with your eyes closed, it’s so clearly a mental block—for the love of God, what is your easiest scallop dish! ”
“Seared on a pesto pasta,” Pete says, blinking at him in what appears to be surprise. “Done it a thousand times.”
“Fantastic,” Ben says, shaking his head. “Do we have all the ingredients for that? I do not want to go back to the grocery store.”
“Oh. Yes,” Pete says, still blinking. He opens his mouth, as if to say something else, and then, after a moment of standing there like a fish who has had the misfortune of encountering Rick, closes it again.
“Then we are in business!” Ben says, clapping his hands together.
“Okay, I’m set up, so here’s my theory—I’m going to turn the camera on at some point, right, and not mention it, and we’re going to stop talking about it.
Camera? What camera? We’re just two—” Ben hesitates for a bare second in panic; are they friends, at this point?
Can he call them friends? Is that too familiar?
Luckily, a useful word falls into his mind before he can spiral too far off course and he finishes, hastily, “—colleagues who are making some food together. Okay?”
“You don’t have to do that, you know.” It’s the first time Ben’s ever heard Pete sound genuinely unhappy, at least in person; it’s weirdly heart-wrenching.
“Coddle me, or whatever. I don’t—I don’t have any illusions about my performance, okay?
You don’t have to pretend like you can get something good out of me—”
“Dude, I’m getting millions of views off your bad footage,” Ben says.
He doesn’t know why he said it—it’s bolder, more arrogant, than he’d usually let himself be—but, riding the impulse, he subtly hits the record button on the camera while Pete’s looking broodily out the window.
“This is not about quality, it’s about not having like, you know, a completely miserable time?
I don’t care if it’s bad, and it’s probably better, honestly, if it is.
I just think the next few hours will pass a lot faster for everyone if you’re not, like, wishing for death every minute of them. ”
“Oh,” Pete says again. Then, a slightly confused smile tipping up one side of his mouth, he adds, “Uh. Okay, then. Where should I start?”
Jaelyn, Ben knows, had been largely silent during the takes; this, he knew, was entirely correct and professional of her.
The phrase “Quiet on the set” became ubiquitous for a reason, after all.
If this was a bigger budget show, there’d be a proper director, too, giving directions and guidance between takes.
But Pete doesn’t have that, and no one else is in here, and Ben has perfect confidence, in this specific case, that the editor who is going to receive this footage will be able to work around his voice.
“Why don’t you start with the scallop dish? You could always try just telling me what’s in it, you know? A little breakdown for the audience? Might be a good place to get into things.”
Ben realizes immediately that saying the word “audience” was a mistake; what hint of cheer there was in Pete’s expression drains away, and his gaze flicks down to the little red light on the front of the camera, betraying it as recording. His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows.
“You got this,” Ben says, hoping he sounds more confident than he feels. “Just… start cooking, okay? You know what to do; you’ve made this a million times. What are the ingredients of the dish? Let’s start there.”
“Right,” Pete says, as if to himself. “I can do this—right.” He blinks, and turns to the camera, and smiles before he says, “Today we’re making scallop pasta with scallops. The ingredients are scallops, and—uh—scallops, and… um… did I say scallops?”
Ben bites back a groan. It’s going to be a long night.
It is a long night. By the time Pete has successfully produced both dishes, which should have, in totality, taken him roughly an hour, it’s nearly 11 p.m., and things in the kitchen have become a little chaotic.
They’ve gone through, in Ben’s opinion, all the stages of creative grief—horror, anguish, denial, more aggressive denial, horror again, sullen acceptance, resurgence of anguish, and hey, might be worth trying that denial one more time—before landing in a final resting place of mild hysteria.
Pete has burned scallops and sprouts and so much pancetta they had to switch to bacon they raided from the walk-in freezer; he has shattered a large bottle of fancy fig vinegar; he has said the word “shrimp” when he meant to say “scallop” twenty-six times; he has developed a slight twitch under his left eye.
But he has also, for the last hour or so, seemed a little better. A little more normal. Ben thinks the questions help a little—if Pete is answering a direct query, or trying to demonstrate something specific upon request, he’s a little more likely to do a vague impression of normal human speech.
Mostly, though, if Ben’s honest, he thinks it’s the hysteria that is carrying the day.
Pete is too lost in cackling over every little thing that goes wrong to worry about what will go wrong, and whenever something does, it makes it all that much more hilarious.
Even some of what goes right ends up striking either him or Ben in a funny way, and the minute one of them even snickers, the other one totally loses it laughing, which ruins a lot of takes.
It’s nice, anyway, honestly, to see him do even a few simple cooking tasks correctly while the camera is on him, even if Ben is a little worried that, given all the laughing, the footage is going to make him look like he’s on some sort of drug.
At the moment, the source of their laughter is the finished meal Pete has produced.
“Why did I think,” Pete says, gasping in between peals of mirth, “that this was going to look good together? Oh my God, it’s a pile of pasta… next to a pile of brussels sprouts…”
“It is a bit,” Ben says, a helpless chuckle escaping him, too, “well, sort of… some heaps? Heaps for dinner.”
“Heaps for dinner,” Pete gasps, and then he’s howling with laughter again, which, Ben thinks, is a sign of how far gone they both are. “Heaps for dinner” is not a funny joke—it’s not even really a sentence. They’ve just been in here, locked together in this absurd situation, a few hours too long.
“Okay, you have to wrap this up so we can actually eat it,” Ben says, trying to get his own laughter under control. “It might be heaps, but it is dinner and I’m hungry, just… say anything. Any wrap-it-up thing, I can make work.”
And then it happens. Pete turns to face the camera, but he’s looking at Ben, pushing his hair back out of his eyes with one hand; he’s smiling, the last hint of amusement still evident in his crinkling eyes, in the tone of his voice, when he says, “Look, okay, the truth is, when it comes to cooking, sometimes it’s all going to go the way you’re hoping, and you’re going to get beautiful dishes that make everyone ask for seconds.
And sometimes, you know, you’re going to get something that tastes like the dog made it.
Or something like this, which tastes good—wait, I should make sure it does taste good before I say that, huh? ”
Pete picks up a fork and tries the vegetable dish first. He makes quite a gratifying noise of pleasure upon tasting the sprouts, especially since he’d asked for Ben’s guidance multiple times while preparing it, taking his cues for the quantities and ratios.
Nodding firmly at it, Pete turns his attention to the scallop pasta, which earns another—although, Ben notes, a little pleased about it, less emphatic—noise of approval.
“Yep, both good. Anyway, what I was saying is sometimes you end up in a situation like this, where the flavor is great but the overall presentation is a bit… kind of… uh. Bad? And in those moments, you have to remind yourself”—and here he pauses, and smiles, and spears a brussels sprout, and seems to lift a toast to the camera with his fork—“just keep cooking.”
It’s a golden moment, a perfect moment. It’s so astonishingly cogent, reads so cleanly as Ben watches it record on the view screen, that Ben stands there for a second, his eyes bugging out of his head, before he finds the voice to say, “Uhh, right, cut! That’s a wrap, I think. That was good, dude.”
“Oh, hunger has made you delirious,” Pete says, but Ben notices he ducks his head to conceal what looks like a smile. “Eat something, please, it’s basically the middle of the night and I’ve trapped you here watching me burn things—”
“Seriously, that last bit was genuinely well done,” Ben argues, but then Pete pushes a plate over to him and hunger overrides altruism and honesty.
He takes a bite of the scallop pasta first, and groans out loud without meaning to, the sharp, salty crust of the scallop fading to an almost creamy sweetness, set perfectly against the herbaceous zing of the pesto.
“God, I hope people make this, it’s amazing. ”
“Nah, the brussels are better,” Pete says. “Even if I did ruin the fig vinegar—you were right, the red wine option is really nice.”
“My mom always had it in the kitchen,” Ben says, shrugging. “And the recipe’s hardly original, just something I make sometimes when I need to trick myself into eating a vegetable. It’s nothing special.”
Pete frowns, but then he turns the conversation to the best places to get scallops in the city, and Ben allows himself to be towed away from the topic with relief.
He tells himself it’s relief, anyway. If it feels almost like regret—if it feels, a little, like he wishes Pete would have poked and prodded at that statement until a hot ball of words choked its way up out of Ben’s mouth and submitted itself to Pete’s cheerful assessment—well.
It’s nothing more than a consequence of the lateness of the hour, and the absurdness of the circumstances.
But Pete waits while Ben finishes eating, even though he’s the slower of the two of them, and helps him pack up the camera equipment, and they wash the dishes together, rather than leave them for the morning crew to deal with.
Pete cracks jokes, seeming relieved and relaxed and less drained by the whole experience than usual, or at least than he usually seems on film.
Maybe this is normal, and the minute the camera shuts off, he is always hit with a shot of this cheerful, positive energy. It’s possible, certainly. Likely, even.
Ben is not, in general, a particularly hopeful person.
Hope is a fool’s errand more than it’s not—it leaves you open to disappointment, and Ben so hates to be disappointed.
But here, a few minutes from midnight, as Pete walks Ben to his train even as he explains that he still has to make it back to Jersey, Ben allows himself the indulgence of thinking maybe it isn’t normal.
Maybe Pete’s buoyant energy under the halogen glow of the streetlamps is because something about Ben’s presence eased something for him.
It would be nice to think that, wouldn’t it?
If nothing else, it would make it easier for Ben to admit to himself that something about being around Pete seems to have a similar effect on him, unwinding some part of himself that is usually tangled up and pulled taut.
They say good night at the mouth of the subway, and Ben thinks, for a wild second, about that first impression he had of Pete, in his sleeveless Ask Me About Canned Beans shirt.
Suddenly the thought of encountering Pete on a vacation, or in a bar, or in any context other than the most important professional opportunity Ben’s ever had…
Well. It makes Ben’s mouth go a little dry.
“I should go,” he says, his voice only creaking slightly with the effort. “Lots to, uh. Edit.”
“Right, right,” Pete says. “And I’ve got to fight my way back across the river, of course. Thanks for your help tonight, okay?”
And, for a second, he twitches forward, like—like he’s going to hug Ben, maybe, or—or lean down and kiss him, carefully at first and then more deeply, drawing him close, and Ben could lose himself in it entirely.
They’d be jostled, probably, by hurrying, irritated New Yorkers, and eventually Pete would break away and laugh and say, “Come on, come on, let’s find somewhere better to be,” and they’d duck into an alley and confirm they were alone, and Ben would make absolutely sure his Grindr location settings were off, and then Pete would smile and reach for his belt and—
—oh, but it doesn’t matter. It’s nothing, anyway, probably, a trick of the flickering lights; a second later, Pete’s waving cheerfully over his shoulder, gone before Ben can so much as say good night.