Chapter 8 #2
“Goodbye, Renata,” Ben snaps, and hangs up on her before she can say anything else.
When he sets his phone down on the table, Roux, who, Ben thinks darkly, has always liked Ren, leaps up next to it and, with one swift paw, knocks it to the floor.
Ben, in getting it, nearly pitches off his chair and decides that perhaps it’s time for bed before Renata’s dire premonitions are proved right after all, and he dies of his own incompetence.
He tells himself, very firmly, that when he wakes up in the morning, he’ll come up with an idea for an adequate Pete distraction.
He does not, the following morning, come up with an idea for an adequate Pete distraction. In fact, he tries so hard and comes up with so little that by the time he has a single idea, it seems like a great one.
It is not a great idea. It is, at best, a mediocre idea; in fact, in the hours after he begins to put it into motion, Ben realizes it might be quite a bad idea.
If it were a morning show Pete were filming, then the idea of getting him so drunk the night before that he was a little hungover would be…
Actually, Ben realizes a little grimly, that would still be quite a bad idea.
A hangover might be distracting enough to help Pete function, but it also might make him throw up on live television; probably not worth the risk.
But it’s not a morning show; it’s Late Night Live with Brian O’Malley, which begins taping at 9:00 p.m. and runs until nearly midnight. Even if Ben gets Pete absolutely sloshed tonight, his hangover will almost certainly be gone by then, so it’s not a plan that will solve his problem at all.
However, by the time Ben realizes this, he’s already suggested a night out to the kitchen staff, and Pete has already moved some plans around, and Ezra and Adina have already started arguing about which bar they should all go to, so.
It seems a bit late to put a stop to things, and Ben doesn’t figure it can do any harm.
If nothing else, it will be relaxing, right?
A nice night out with friends before the hammer falls?
At this point, Ben realizes he’s thinking about this evening as something not dissimilar to a last cigarette before the firing squad.
Feeling equal parts guilty for his faithlessness and utterly sure it’s less faithlessness than an accurate grip on reality, Ben does his best to put such thoughts from his mind and heads out with the group in the genuine spirit of having a good time.
And, for the first hour or so, he has a good time.
They all do. They end up at Fox’s, a seedy hole-in-the-wall bar that’s only a block and a half away from the office, and Pete explains as they walk that they always end up at Fox’s, because the proximity ends up outweighing any argument.
The air is cold and crisp as they make their way up Sixth Avenue, little snowflakes so small as to almost look like a trick of the light drifting lazily around them.
Pete’s dark hair, peeking out from under yet another beanie, seems to be catching it as they go.
The bright white flakes under his striped knitted cap, against his black bomber jacket, make him look like a catalogue model.
It makes Ben self-conscious in a way he’s not entirely familiar with, and he finds himself trying to subtly scrub the snow from his own dark hair until he sees Pete looking at him, smiling.
The quality of that smile—the soft, knowing warmth—Ben can’t parse it or place it at all.
It stays with him, though, as their little group digs into a corner of the bar, wrapping around his heart the way a vine can grow around a tree: gently enough at first, and then tightening to the point of exquisite, reshaping agony.
Maybe that’s why he’s not prepared for what happens; maybe it’s because he doesn’t know enough to be prepared. Maybe it’s because when the conversation turns to most embarrassing moments, Ben’s two drinks deep, and not entirely at his sharpest.
Regardless, he doesn’t see the harm in it when, after Adina confesses to some shame about a mistake she made during a class she taught last week, Ezra suggests a little contest.
“Everyone submits, for the judges, an embarrassing moment,” Ezra says, with a sharp little grin. “Adina, you can go with that one or submit another, if you want. Regardless, everyone goes, and the most embarrassing moment wins. Does everyone agree to the rules?”
There’s a chorus of yeses; later, Ben will kick himself for not noticing whether or not Pete was one of them.
They’re separated by a few people—Ben had been ordering drinks when the table had been claimed, and couldn’t very well say, “Get up, Ezra, I want to sit next to Pete,” when he returned.
Not with any dignity, anyway. He doesn’t hear Pete’s voice among the rabble, but then, it’s hard to pick out anyone’s voice from a chorus of yeses in a crowded bar. Ben doesn’t think anything of it.
This is a mistake.
Ezra goes first. He tells a very amusing story about getting caught backstage in flagrante delicto with Kenickie during a college performance of Grease; the detail of it having been at his conservative, all-male college adds to the humor, as does the fact that apparently, they were making creative use of some of the props.
But Ben notices, as Ezra tells it, that he doesn’t seem that embarrassed by it, and that ultimately it isn’t a story that makes him look particularly bad.
In fact, by the time he’s done, he seems very pleased with himself and the reception the tale has received from the group, and Ben half wonders if he brought up the topic for the excuse to tell it.
Brogan goes next, and that’s a good and proper embarrassing story, one involving a fishing boat, a malfunctioning bikini top, and the particularly ill-timed emergence of both a passing whale-watching cruise and a humpback whale.
Ben laughs nearly to the point of tears as she tells it; the only thing that takes away from it is her brash, no-nonsense energy, how clear it is that, while she knows objectively it’s embarrassing, it never bothered her.
Also, she goes into such extensive detail about the fish she caught on the journey that Ben, who is starting to really feel his third drink, begins to hazily suspect her of being Rick’s daughter.
Adina, whose honestly fairly milquetoast work story kicked the whole thing off to begin with, volunteers to go next, and tells a frankly equally milquetoast story about a childhood family trip, which revolves around her laughing so hard that she shot milk out of her nose in the middle of a packed deli in Cleveland.
This makes Pete, usually so affable, mutter, “God, is that the standard for an embarrassing story? I’d better sit this one out. ”
It is, Ben realizes, the first time Pete’s spoken in a while.
For once, he hasn’t been paying attention; the stories have been revealing and interesting, if not necessarily in the way the people telling them meant them to be, and anyway Ben’s been doing his level best not to stare at Pete too obviously.
He regrets it now. There’s a quality to Pete’s tone, to the hunch of his shoulders, to the strained, tight look in his eyes, that reminds Ben of the energy he puts off when the camera is rolling.
Naturally—and oh, Ben could kill him for it—Ezra, several drinks deep himself, seems to take this as a challenge. “Come on,” he says, in a wheedling tone. “The rest of us are doing it—”
“Famously a great reason to do something,” Pete says, his tone ringing with so many obvious warning sirens that Ben’s amazed Ezra can’t seem to hear a single one. “Not at all the sort of sentence that has led to some of history’s worst decisions—”
“Oh my God, don’t be a such baby,” Ezra says, rolling his eyes. “You can just tell us a boring story like Adina’s—”
“Hey!” Adina snaps, glaring at him over the rim of her glass.
Ben notices, warmed by it a little in spite of his growing apprehension, that her eyes dart briefly to Pete as she says it, as though she too has picked up on the same tension Ben’s noticed.
“Just because my story doesn’t involve the worst thing I’ve ever heard of someone doing with a pom-pom—”
“You need to get out more,” Ezra says, although Ben, having also heard the pom-pom story, thinks that the reality is maybe that Ezra needs to get out less.
Even so, he finds himself wishing Ezra would get out, would go anywhere else, when he turns back to Pete and says, “Seriously, man, it’s your turn. We all agreed—”
“Did we?” Pete’s voice is low, rumbling now. “Or did you all agree, while I sat here silently, because I would never agree to—”
“Listen, you should let me go; I’m going to win anyway,” someone says; oh no, wait.
Ben said it, before he could think about it, before he could remind himself that the last thing he wants to tell Pete is the story that lead-in demands.
But, God help him, it’s already come out of his mouth, and Pete is giving off a trapped-animal-lashing-out energy that, in Ben’s experience, never leads to anything good.
So, in for a penny, he carries on. “I can pretty much guarantee you I’ve got the most embarrassing story here.
Might not be any point hearing Pete’s, really.
You’ll see what I mean if you let me tell it. ”
Ezra looks at him like he’s bitten a lemon; Ben raises an eyebrow back. Finally, sounding irritated about it, Ezra snaps, “Oh, fine, then. If you must.”