Chapter 9 #3
“Oh,” Ben says, surprised, but before he can answer, Brian O’Malley is walking up to them.
He’s still wearing the tailored blue suit he was sporting behind the desk during taping, and there’s a dark jacket in his hand, swung up over his left shoulder.
His carefully structured coif of thin, wheat-blond hair is being utterly destroyed by the wind, but if he notices, he doesn’t seem to care.
He walks up to Pete and Ben with the confidence of a man who has been famous long enough to burn away any concerns of what anyone thinks of him, and claps Pete, hard, on the shoulder.
“I tell you what,” Brian says, shaking his head, “I’m still not sure if your little schtick is on purpose or not—it has to be, right?
But if it is, having met you—then you’re too good at it, man.
It’s unsettling. The ratings for tonight are crazy, and Priyali got our social team to upload the clip right away, and it’s already everywhere.
” Hand still on Pete’s shoulder, Brian peers at him, his expression tightening.
“But if you’re not doing it on purpose, right, then ratings or not, I think maybe I did a bad thing, asking the team to book you.
The sort of thing that wouldn’t sit right with me.
If that’s the case—” And here he swings the jacket off his shoulder, pulls out a business card, and tucks it into the inner pocket.
Ben realizes it’s Pete’s bomber jacket at the same moment, handing it back to Pete, Brian finishes, “Then you give me a call, all right?”
Pete stares, blankly, from Brian to the jacket he, Pete, is now clutching tightly in one hand. “But… I burned your studio down!”
Brian grins. “Nah,” he says, waving a hand.
“It’s seen worse. Anyway, anything’s better than the week we had the horses.
” He nods to Pete, and then, to Ben’s surprise, to Ben, before saying, “Gentlemen.” Then he’s walking away, whistling something under his breath which Ben realizes, in the seconds after Brian vanishes from earshot, is in fact the Late Night Live theme song.
For a moment, they just stand there, the jacket dangling from Pete’s hand, staring after him. Then, because he thinks someone really should, he asks, “Um, Pete? Are you… all right?”
Pete blinks for a second. Then, slowly, he says, “I think… that I’m great.
Because—stay with me now—I must be asleep.
This is all some kind of insane anxiety dream!
And any second now I’m going to wake up, and I’m going to say to myself, ‘Pete, you idiot, I can’t believe you really thought any of that was real, you never have to worry about making a fool of yourself in front of Brian O’Malley, because that kind of thing doesn’t happen to people! ’”
“I regret to inform you that this is reality,” Ben says, hating himself for it a little.
Pete groans. “In that case? I need a drink.”
Ben thinks that’s fair, in the circumstances.
He thinks that if he were Pete, he, too, would want a drink.
Perhaps several drinks. There is the chance that he might want to move past drinking and progress to attempting to sustain an amnesia-inducing head injury, but decides it’s best not to suggest that just now.
Instead, they attempt to get a drink. They try first at the bar nearest to 30 Rockefeller Plaza, which, Ben realizes as they walk in, is an obvious mistake.
Because the whole place banks on its proximity to the building, and the various shows filmed inside, it is often playing those shows for its patrons.
Tonight every screen within is lit up with images of the burning Late Night Live set, Pete’s hapless, trapped expression immortalized next to the dancing flames; when they step inside, Pete blanches, turns on his heel, and walks right back out, which Ben can’t blame him for.
But the next two places they try aren’t much better.
At the first one, they only make it ten feet past the door before someone calls, “Oh my God, wait, that’s him!
That’s the guy from my phone! Dude, we were watching you, you straight up burned that set down—” Ben never finds out the end of this sentence, because he’s too busy following Pete, who had turned tail the minute he heard the words “that’s him.
” And at the third place, they manage to get all the way to the bar without incident, but as they’re halfway through placing their order, the bartender’s face lights up with amusement, and she says, “Holy crap, wait, aren’t you that guy from the—”
“NO!” Pete yells this so loud several bar patrons turn to stare; Ben wishes he could flip some switch that made Pete invisible, or unrecognizable, until he was back to a more even keel. “I’m not anybody, from anything, you don’t know me, you’ve never seen me, goodbye!”
When Ben catches up to Pete this time, he looks frustrated nearly to the point of anguish. That’s why, before he can think better of it, Ben hears himself saying, “Why don’t we just go back to my place?”
It’s not the sort of sentence Ben usually says.
In fact, if he’s going to be entirely honest about it, Ben is more the type to come up with excuses why someone cannot come back to his apartment.
If the place had actually been fumigated as many times as Ben has claimed, it would be an unlivable toxic hazard, killing anyone who stepped foot inside.
But it’s just easier, isn’t it, to claim fumigation, or that a fictional roommate is hosting a party, than it is to tell the truth.
Ben has never found a situation where it was socially acceptable to say, I don’t want you to come back to my apartment because it’s the place where no one bothers me and you’re bothering me.
And, indeed, I don’t want you to come back to my apartment because over the last month and a half every cup and bowl I own has slowly migrated into the general region of my editing desk, is also not, in his experience, a winner.
However, he has in fact asked Pete to come back to his apartment, and when Pete immediately accepts, he looks so relieved that Ben can’t bear to take it back.
Instead, he spends the short walk to the subway trying to behave like a normal person while mentally cataloguing things like the last time he did dishes, or laundry.
He is relieved to remember, feeling like it was a long time ago, that he spent the time between getting home from work and leaving to meet Pete tonight stress-cleaning the place, so it should be in fairly decent shape.
This leaves Ben, on their fifteen-minute ride to his usual subway stop, to instead try to behave like a normal person while thinking histrionic thoughts like, Pete’s going to be in my apartment!
and My apartment is where my bed is! and You know what kinds of things people get up to in beds, Ben, don’t you?
Or has it been so long that you’ve forgotten?
It is, in a word, distracting. Ben’s fairly certain he isn’t pulling off “normal person,” and honestly, he’d be pleased to discover he was even managing “only slightly off-putting.”
Luckily, Pete does not seem in a state to notice.
He spends the subway ride hunched forward, head down to keep his face hidden, all but curled in on himself.
It makes Ben want to hiss and spit at everyone who so much as glances at him, but also, in a horrible, contradictory way, to go soft and soothing, cocoon Pete in a brief but beautiful world a little less punishing than this one.
At very least, it would be nice to give in to the urge to put a hand on Pete’s back, to rub in long, comforting strokes until some of the tension bled away from his shoulders.
Ben doesn’t do that, of course. It would be weird; it would be inappropriate. But he thinks about it, so hard he half expects Pete to see it written on his face, the whole way to the Upper West Side.
When they escape the bowels of the MTA and surface, Pete’s still grayed-out and mostly silent, so Ben simply leads him to the building, welcomes him inside, gestures for him to take a seat on the couch.
Pete does, murmuring thanks and then dropping his head into his hands, groaning softly.
As he has several times in the last half hour, he murmurs, clearly to himself, “Why did I do that? What was I thinking?”
After a moment, Roux, who is usually wary of strangers and sometimes wary of even Ben, comes creeping out from Ben’s bedroom.
She looks assessingly at Pete for a long moment, and then at Ben, as if to say, “You know about the sad guy on the couch, man?” Ben, feeling silly about it, nods subtly to her; then, to his amazement, she leaps onto the couch, steps gracefully under Pete’s arm, and settles comfortably in his lap. After a second, she starts purring.
“Oh!” Pete moves, but carefully, clearly not wanting to startle or unseat her. “Hi, uh—?”
“Roux,” Ben says, staring at her in shock.
Then, seeing Pete lift a hand to pet her, he hastily adds, “Listen, I wouldn’t, she doesn’t usually like…
Oh.” Transfixed in spite of himself, Ben watches as Pete scratches Roux on the back of the head, and then under the chin, and then along the ruff of her neck, all actions that would get Ben mauled six days out of ten. “Wow. I guess—never mind.”
“She’s a nice cat,” Pete says, stroking her absently. She gives Ben a smug look.
“She’s not,” Ben says, still staring at her.
“But she does seem to like you, so. What do I know? Look, you wanted a drink, right? I have—uh,” Ben, abruptly remembering that he does not drink very much and these last few weeks have been an unfortunate, booze-soaked exception, winces.
“Well, um. Actually. As I think about it. We might be looking at, like, a really old bottle of vermouth, or a couple of beers from the back of the fridge?”