Chapter 9 #2
It takes Ben a second to realize she’s speaking to him; she’s still looking at Pete, seeming to be attempting to measure him with her eyes. Feeling enormously stupid about it, Ben says, “Oh, I’m, uh… Ben? Ben Blumenthal? I’m the video editor, um, on the—”
“We didn’t ask for you, Ben Blumenthal,” Priyali says, glancing briefly at her clipboard, before sighing and shaking her head at Pete. “Well, it’s too late now, it’ll have to do. Why are you here?”
Again, it takes Ben a second to parse that he’s the one being spoken to.
“Oh. I’m…” God. Why is Ben here? What could he possibly say?
I’m the reason this all happened, so I am performing ritualistic penance by observing what dread horrors my hubris has wrought?
Or, perhaps, would it be more accurate to offer, Since you ask, I am desperately in love with this man who I have trapped in his own personal version of hell; he asked me to be here, and I’d do basically anything he asked me to do, simply because I’d be so pleased to be the one he asked to do it!
Maybe he should just go for broke and say, Sorry, lady, you’ll have to ask Pete, because if I were him, I think I’d be about the last person I’d ask to come with me for—
“Moral support,” Pete says, bringing Ben’s entire train of thought to a grinding, shuddering halt. “Is why he’s here. Is that allowed? I’m not saying he has to come onstage with me or anything, just—”
“Fine, whatever, I don’t care,” Priyali says, and points her pen at Ben. “Don’t burn the studio down or anything, got it? If you being here becomes a me problem, that’s going to become a you problem, are we clear?”
“Crystal,” Ben mutters, sinking into the heels of his shoes. “It’ll be like I’m not even here.”
Ben means this as a promise, not a prediction, but in the end it is a little bit like he isn’t even there.
Pete is whisked into a room full of mirrors and makeup chairs and seen to briefly by a makeup artist who is not currently occupied with a passed-out actor in the hallway, while Ben stands awkwardly behind him.
Then Pete is, after all, pushed into wardrobe, where he is made to exchange his button-down shirt and bomber jacket for a clinging black T-shirt, while Ben stands awkwardly behind him.
Then Pete is dragged into a greenroom, where he is briefed extensively and pointedly by Priyali on what’s going to happen, while Ben stands awkwardly behind him.
They don’t get a chance to talk, or even exchange more than one or two speaking looks, before Priyali is saying, “Well, that’s it, you’re up, if you wanted more prep time, you should’ve been on time, let’s go, up and at ’em,” and dragging Pete off towards the stage doors.
Ben tries his level best to follow awkwardly behind, but Priyali shoos him off, telling him to go lurk on the side of the soundstage if he must, but to leave her alone.
Pete casts a desperate look over her shoulder, but when Ben tries again to follow them, Priyali snaps, “One more step and I’m calling security, Blumenthal; I don’t have the time or the energy tonight.
” Ben, at this point, has no choice but to hold up his hands, a gesture both of surrender to her and, rather more emphatically, apology to Pete.
They’re out of sight a moment after Ben stops walking, ducking through a door and vanishing to parts unknown, so Ben follows the signs in the large hallway for the soundstage.
The second he walks through the double doors into that enormous, open area, Ben realizes his mistake.
Or, rather, Ben realizes his mistakes, plural; there are several.
He’s been on soundstages before, hasn’t he?
In college, on various trips and studio visits he got the chance to attend through his classes, and once or twice as an interested visitor in adulthood, justifying it as an education experience to pay for a guided studio tour.
Plus, of course, there’s the fact that he’s made a career in the video and film industry, and so has spent a fair amount of time thinking and talking about the mechanics of how any given show or movie is shot.
So it hadn’t occurred to him, the way it should have occurred to him, the way it is occurring to him now, that he should have prepared Pete.
He should have warned Pete that shows like this are shot on a large, constructed soundstage with, and this is the important part, anywhere from three to five huge cameras pointed directly at it.
This particular soundstage, Ben notes with a slightly hysterical alarm, has four huge cameras; great.
Only three more than Pete already can’t bear to be in front of.
But, of course, the cameras are not the only problem.
It’s not that Ben isn’t familiar with the phrase “Filmed before a live studio audience.” It’s not even as though he’s never seen a live studio audience before—he’s seen several studio audiences, and been in a few himself, and they’ve all been, to the best of his knowledge, one hundred percent populated by fully alive people only.
But Ben has never seen a live studio audience for an actual live production before; every time he’s been in or around one, it’s been for something that was being taped, and would pass, before being broadcast, beneath the merciful eyes of an editor.
No such eyes will pass over Late Night Live with Brian O’Malley, unless you count Ben’s helpless ones; the audience knows this.
Ben’s not even totally sure how he can tell—if it’s something about the body language, the looks on their faces, what.
But somehow, to look at the crowd in front of that stage is to know that everyone in it is thinking something along the lines of, God, I hope something crazy happens tonight.
Ben swallows as the theme music begins to play; when Brian O’Malley walks onstage, he takes a breath.
Pete’s the first guest, and according to Priyali, he just has to chat a little bit about himself, like a normal person, for two minutes.
Then there will be a commercial break, and then he’ll have a brief five-minute cooking segment.
Barely a cooking segment, really! Pete’s just making a cocktail and searing off a steak that’s already been cooked sous vide—even Renata could do that, and she’s always been hopeless in the kitchen.
“It’s going to be fine,” Ben whispers to himself, more a prayer than anything else. “It’s going to be fine.”
Thirty minutes later, when he and Pete are shivering together in front of the studio, bathed in the striating red-and-white glow of the fire truck lights, Ben says, “Do you know, I think I jinxed it?”
Pete’s voice is hollow, like his eyes, like his laugh, which is less a laugh and more a flat and toneless, “Ha. It was you, huh? You turned the burner up as high as it would go, and then you glugged enough oil into the stupid pan to country fry the damn steak, and then you were the one who dumped water on a grease fire? That was you?”
“Ah,” Ben says carefully, because, no. That had all been Pete. “Well. That’s not exactly what I’m saying—”
“Water on a grease fire.” Pete shakes his head, looking haunted.
“I’ve known better since I was ten—younger, probably.
If my father sees this, I’m never going to hear the end of it.
Why did I do that? And why did I say any of that stuff, in the interview part, that was…
I mean, why?” He folds his arms over his chest, still wearing nothing but the tight black T-shirt Priyali put him in, and moans, “I couldn’t stop thinking about all the cameras, and all the people, and it was like my body was just…
moving on its own! Making terrible decisions!
He asked me if there were any signs in my early life that I’d be into cooking and I said Virgo, Ben!
I’m not even a Virgo! I’m a Taurus! And it doesn’t matter!
I only know because one of my exes told me it’s why I was so stubborn, and I think he just wanted me to pet-sit for his turtle! ”
Ben, who is a Virgo, and who knows this because Renata is constantly sending him weird memes that say things like “Big Virgo Energy” invariably followed by the words it u, decides now is not the moment to say so. Instead, carefully, he offers, “Anyone could have been confused—”
“Could anyone have burned down the studio?” Pete says this with a wildness that makes Ben grimace.
Still. “You didn’t burn down the studio,” Ben says, in the most soothing voice he can muster.
“You, okay, you lightly singed a small section of the soundstage; I’m sure that’s happened hundreds—well, dozens—well, I’m sure you’re not the first person to set something on fire in Studio 8B, anyway. But it’s all still there—”
“They had to evacuate the building—”
“Only the floor we were on!” Ben protests.
Then, at Pete’s narrow-eyed glare, he admits, a little more honestly, “Well, okay, and the two floors above us and the three floors below that, so a total of six floors, but! It’s a big building!
There are—uh—well, the elevator had buttons up to seventy, so that’s, what?
Six over seventy, uh… like, eight percent?
They had to evacuate eight percent of the building; that’s practically no evacuation at all.
That’s closer to no evacuation than it is to evacuating everyone. ”
For the first time since they walked—well, ran, pursued by an employee in an orange Floor Fire Safety Officer vest screaming, “This is real, people! This is not a drill!”—out of the building, Pete looks something other than dead inside.
One eyebrow quirking up, he asks, “Did you just do that calculation in your head?”