Chapter 9 #4
Pete laughs. It’s not what Ben would call a hearty laugh—it’s thin, and wan, and sounds like he’s forcing it slightly—but it’s better than nothing. “I’ll take a fridge beer, man. Even after that, I don’t think I’m desperate enough to drink your vermouth. Why do you just have vermouth?”
“I’m not usually a big drinker,” Ben admits, unearthing two beers that have surely been in there at least a year.
“But I do make a chicken dish with vermouth that I really like, so I try to keep it on hand. Usually, I’d have red wine, too, because my mother would kill me if I tried to make half her dishes without it, but I’m out right now.
My folks’ll probably send me back with some when I go home for Thanksgiving in a couple of weeks.
” He sits down next to Pete on the couch, passing him one of the cans, and adds, “If that tastes disgusting, don’t say I didn’t warn you; I think I purchased it during a previous presidential administration. ”
“I didn’t know you were going home for Thanksgiving,” Pete says, cracking his beer and taking what looks like an evaluative sip. He shrugs, offers, “Tastes fine to me,” and then adds, “Michigan, right? That’s home for you? Do you go back for Christmas, too?”
“Nah,” Ben says, trying to sound cool and casual, and not at all like his heart is beating faster because Pete remembered where he’s from.
Love, Ben has realized, is above all else so embarrassing, but knowing that doesn’t seem to help.
“Christmas is traditionally a disaster back home? So I prefer to swing by in November, say hello, eat some turkey, and dip back out of town before things start getting tense.” Feeling like he might as well offer a little more context, since Pete is clearly still teetering on the edge of the canyon of despair, he adds, “My dad’s Jewish, and my mom’s Catholic, and they always tried to do all of it, you know?
But in the end, what they really cared about was the restaurant, and each always blamed the other’s holiday for getting in the way, and it—never brought out the best in anyone. It’s easier, like this.”
“Ahh,” Pete says, and sips his beer. “My family is pretty chill about Christmas, but Easter—that’s a bloodbath,” and Ben laughs, encouraged to hear him telling a joke, until he realizes that it isn’t one.
The conversation of holiday family grudges carries them for a few minutes, but Pete’s burst of distracted semi-decent cheer seems to fade away as they go.
Eventually, Ben realizes why, but it’s not until Pete barks out a humorless laugh and says, “God, they’re all going to have seen it.
My dad, my sisters, my sisters’ husbands; when I turn my phone back on, it’s going to be calls and messages and ‘How could you throw water on a grease fire,’ and ‘Don’t you know how this makes us look,’ and—” He cuts himself off, clearly frustrated, and then admits, “You know what? Just once, just one time, I’d like to not be the embarrassing one.
The one who makes everyone else say things like, ‘Wouldn’t want to be you, Petey.
’ Just once I’d love to be able to say that to someone else! ”
Ben drums his fingers on his knee for a moment, considering this. Then, without saying a word, he stands up, walks to his office, picks up his laptop from his desk, types and scrolls for a moment, and then takes a deep breath.
When he returns to the living room and sets the laptop down in front of Pete, Ben says, “I want you to know, okay, that I would not show you this if the circumstances were not so extreme, and that, upon having shown it to you, we will never speak of it again. Do you understand me?”
Pete’s brow furrows in confusion. “What?”
“Do you understand me or not?”
“I mean,” Pete starts, “I do, but what are we—”
Despairingly, Ben says, “I don’t think it’ll take that long for you to figure it out,” and hits play. The screen fills with his teenaged self in a blue Starfleet uniform, a lot of blue eyeshadow, and thick, Vulcan-style eyebrows he’d drawn on with his mother’s eyeliner pencil.
“Oh my God,” Pete breathes, sitting up in sudden, rapt attention, “is this—”
“Yes,” Ben snaps, mortified but willing to do anything that pulls the miasma of anguish from Pete’s expression. “It is my teenage directorial debut, and if you tell anyone we work with that you’ve seen it, or that a copy still exists—”
“I won’t, I won’t,” Pete says, flapping a hand at him. “Shhh, I’m watching.” And Ben, with effort, goes silent. Then, with somewhat more effort, he, too, turns his head and forces himself to watch his life’s most embarrassing work.
He’s surprised and somewhat pleased to find, as the minutes tick on, that it’s not as mortifying as he thought.
The content is awful, of course, but it’s fun, watching it with Pete.
Ben can see the humor in it, from this vantage point, in a way he couldn’t when he was fifteen, or even twenty-five.
But here, as he approaches thirty, the spotty, wildly overeager teenager yelling out sound effects is somewhat hilarious, and Ben finds himself more amused than he would have expected by his antics.
Pete, for his part, tries manfully not to laugh for the first five or six minutes of viewing.
He loses the battle during a particularly overacted moment, letting out a single shout of laughter that becomes a peal when the next take is a brief, extreme, and obviously unintentional closeup of one of Ben’s ears.
By minute fifteen, they are both absolutely howling with mirth, clutching at each other for support, having scared Roux off in a huff some time ago.
“What,” Pete gasps, barely able to get the words out, “what are you doing to that pillow?”
“I’m… Oh, God. Well, I’m supposed to be, uh?
Wrestling it? I see now that that’s not what it looks like.
” This sets Pete off laughing so hard Ben’s a little afraid he’s going to choke on it, and, chuckling through it himself, he offers the best defense he can, which is: “I mean, listen, okay, you try to wrestle a pillow—”
“Oh, I don’t have to,” Pete says, gesturing at the screen. “Because you’ve helpfully showed me exactly what it would look like—oh my God, are you using a banana as a gun?”
“It’s a phaser,” Ben says as loftily as possible, “and it’s set to stun,” and then dissolves into hysteria again the second Pete catches his eye.
And it’s fun, Ben realizes, as they progress through the video.
It’s fun, to watch this with Pete. It’s fun to laugh, gently and without malice, at the person he was when he made it; it’s fun to see Pete laugh, too, entertained by this younger version of Ben in a way that, somehow, doesn’t feel sharp or judgmental or mean.
Ben has spent the bulk of his adult life trying to avoid being known, sliding away from intimacy and closeness the way oil slips through water.
It was easier, he told himself, not to be known.
It was easier to avoid the sting of being found wanting; easier to sidestep having his darkest fears about himself confirmed.
It was easier for him to exist, for him to be Ben, without having to look at the proof that the condition of being Ben was somehow, inherently, a mortifying one.
Letting Pete know him doesn’t feel like that.
Letting Pete know him feels like… like… like the way sometimes, when Ben was a teenager, he’d take his camera out in the woods and stand very still, and after a while, the forest would forgive him his humanity and forget he was there.
They’d come out, the birds and squirrels and chipmunks, and go about their business, as though having assessed him as worthy of knowing their secrets, not dangerous enough to hide from.
The benediction of a chickadee landing on top of his head—that’s what it feels like, showing Pete this video.
Like being chosen as worthy of something rare and singular through some mechanism Ben doesn’t understand, but is desperately grateful for.
It is, all in all, an upsettingly good time. It’s such a good time that Ben would probably stay up half the night worrying about it, except that by the time the video ends he and Pete, exhausted by the day’s events, have both fallen asleep on the sofa.