Chapter 6 #2
Nevertheless, Rick had pressed the invitation into Ben’s actual hands himself only yesterday, breezily saying, “Kid! There you are. You don’t come to our staff meetings, so I keep forgetting to give this to you.
Learned my lesson about emailing it out a few years ago; if that creep from the sports desk on twenty-three shows up this year, I’m going to end up getting arrested, so try not to spread the news around the building, okay?
But I promise, it’ll be worth canceling your plans.
” Ben had laughed in what he hoped was a convincing impression of someone who might, conceivably, have plans to cancel.
He’d unfolded the invitation with slightly trembling hands; even now, as he hails and climbs into the back of a cab, it’s burning a hole in his pocket.
It’s a crude, handwritten thing in the style of house party invitations in eighties films, photocopied onto a half sheet of neon printer paper, and he knows he’s being stupid bringing it with him—it’s not like someone is going to be checking them at the door.
But, pathetically, Ben knows himself well enough to know he’ll need the proof, the piece of physical evidence that he’s wanted here, to make himself walk through the door.
He sweats through the cab ride, relieved that he has landed a stoic, silent driver.
For the thousandth time, he looks down at his outfit, even knowing that it’s far too late, at this point, to do anything about it—he just hadn’t known which direction to go.
For gay Halloween in Michigan, at least in his teens and much of his twenties, Ben had generally thrown on some messy eyeliner and whatever band T-shirt he felt would play best to the crowd, called it a day.
It had always gone over well enough. Since then, he has transitioned into what he thinks of as New York City Introvert Halloween, which, depending on the year, either involves wearing pajamas and handing out Twix bars to kids in his building, or hiding in his apartment with the lights off, pretending that he isn’t home.
But this is semi-professional Halloween, the dress code on the invite offering the guidance, Costumes required.
Dress to impress but not to kill; if you wouldn’t want it on your LinkedIn, don’t wear it.
With very little time to decide, and even less time to shop, Ben had made the executive decision to half-ass it.
Really, it was his only move, and when he climbs out of the cab, he takes a minute in front of the large brick building to assess the clothing under his gray wool peacoat.
Staring down at his well-worn maroon chinos and the branded ketchup T-shirt Renata sent him for his birthday a few years ago, he hopes to God he’s made the right call.
He’s looking to come off like a cool, understated guy who doesn’t care very much about his costume one way or the other, as opposed to what he is, which is something more akin to an alien meeting human beings for the first time.
Still, he’s made it here, and he’s bound to know a few people—he’d asked Pete about it, and Pete grinned and said, “Oh, yeah, everyone will be there, it’s a blast,” but then they’d both been distracted by trying to solve for a missing element of a bolognese Ezra was working on (it needed some simmering time with a parmesan rind, in the end) and the conversation had been lost. But “everyone” both sounded promising and implied Pete would be there, which Ben is, admittedly, counting on.
Rick had said he invited everyone else in the Gastronome staff meeting, so there will probably be one person Ben has exchanged pleasant conversation with, but he’d prefer a proper ally.
He is not going to find one by way of loitering outside the building awkwardly. He takes a breath, steels himself, and steps inside.
It’s clear from the moment Ben steps through the door that the party is on the first floor, and close by.
Taking off his coat and draping it over his arm, Ben follows the sound through the large, high-ceilinged, and mostly open-concept warehouse space, brick outer walls and cement floors broken only by white plaster dividers that don’t reach the ceiling.
Ben would truly hate to work in a space like this, with sound bouncing around every wall, but it does make it easy to find the gathering, which is centered in a large, heavily windowed back area.
It’s not at all what Ben expected, which is to say he hadn’t known quite what to expect.
What he’d hazily pictured had featured things like a tower of shrimp, or little hand-passed canapés with intricate flavor profiles, and guests standing around with very erudite expressions, critiquing each bite.
Instead, what he sees reminds him more of parties his parents would occasionally throw for morale at Trattoria Luciana, or the annual Fleur de Sel Halloween blowout, at which everyone would have a little too much fun, and after which the following day’s openers would wish a variety of horrors on everyone involved.
There’s a lot of food, on every available surface that isn’t covered by the staggering variety of booze, but it’s a disconnected hodgepodge of different cuisines, dishes, presentations.
After a few minutes of looking around the room, he’s able to connect some of the faces he sees—faces famous enough, in the food and restaurant world, to make Ben’s eyes bug out a little—with some of the food on the tables.
He realizes, a little staggered by it, that this party is essentially a potluck: Anyone here who owns a restaurant must have come with some catering to offer.
His eyes skip dizzily along the labels affixed to the various trays, chafing dishes, bowls, and plates—some of the most iconic restaurants in the city are represented.
The spread is so high-end that it’s a little difficult to parse when compared to most of the guests.
Ben’s imagination, never brilliant with things like fashion, had fallen short here as well, but he’d envisioned complicated, impressive costumes, or ones that left him shaking his head at their wit.
Mostly, instead, the other guests are dressed like him, or in costumes they clearly purchased hastily at some point in the last ten years.
There are, in fairness, a few people in more elaborate getups, but all of those seem to be surrounded by a team of hangers-on aggressively filming them; Ben writes them off as influencers and does his best to avoid them.
He gets a drink. He sips his drink. He finds himself, as he usually does, drifting over to one corner of the party, to lean against a wall and observe other people having fun.
It’s not what he should do, of course—he should get out there, mingle, introduce himself, participate—but this, above anything else, has always been Ben’s problem.
It’s why he’s never made any friends in New York, or taken anything out of those stupid networking events: Ben is not built to network.
The people who do well at those things are like those phone board operators they used to have in the forties, charting every new connection and flipping between them with ease, calmly managing dozens of conversations at once.
Ben is more like an answering machine, happily receiving incoming transmissions but not designed to make even one outgoing call on his own, let alone dozens of them.
He always ends up feeling it most acutely in moments like this, entirely alone in a room full of people; it would be easier, probably, if he didn’t.
In this, he realizes, his expression twisting into a slightly wry smile, he’s like Pete, telling himself it will be a disaster so aggressively that it becomes one.
It’s just that knowing that doesn’t help.
Ben is seriously considering the merits of slipping back out before he can run into anyone he knows, when, from his left, he hears: “Kid! There you are!”
Ben bites down on a groan, swallows it, turns; Rick is there, of course, and dressed, horribly, as a fish. After a second, Ben realizes that it’s not just a fish costume—he is dressed as one of those mechanical singing bass that swept the nation as a craze when Ben was a kid.
“If you start singing, I’m walking away,” Ben warns, his tongue slightly looser from the booze. “I mean it; I don’t care who you are.”
Rick laughs. “You’re always a riot; thanks for coming. Come on—I want to introduce you to some of my friends.”
The next twenty-five minutes pass in a haze.
Ben meets chefs and critics and executive producers, two celebrities whose books he’s read, restaurant owners, a wholesale distributor who moves citrus across half the country.
This last is Rick’s juice hookup, and Ben ends up in a conversation about the intricacies of breeding and growing oranges for flavor, which becomes a conversation about marketing and branding the resulting product, which becomes a discussion of Larry’s plans to fly out to a farm in Ohio next week to source apples for a new product.
The interaction goes on for so long that eventually Rick wanders off to seek entertainment elsewhere.
Ben’s surprised to find, when he turns around and realizes he’s alone, that he misses Rick a little, had appreciated the company, the introductions.
The thought that he might be growing genuinely fond of Rick is too horrible to contemplate, so he turns back out to face the party, scanning the crowd for familiar faces.
There’s Adina, who looks occupied in conversation with a stranger—there’s Ezra, who doesn’t look occupied at all, but if Ben’s honest, he’s looking for—
—there. Pete is standing near the door, only his head visible over the crowd, laughing at something. Ben throws back the last of his drink, for all it’s mostly melted ice by now, sets the cup down, and makes a beeline for him.