Field Notes on Love(38)

“No,” he says quickly. “Of course not.”

“I wouldn’t have,” she says, eager for this to be understood. “That was…”

“What?” he asks with a smile.

“Not like me.”

“Me either,” he says, and when she gives him a skeptical look, he holds up his hands. “Honestly. I’m not some kind of player who meets random girls on trains and then snogs them in hotel rooms. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. Really.”

He’s so good-looking that she finds this hard to believe, and he must see it in her face, because he leans forward across the table.

“Okay,” he says, “you want to know the truth?”

Mae nods.

“The truth is that Margaret was the first and only girl I’ve ever kissed.”

“Seriously?” she asks, surprised by this.

“Seriously. We met when we were fourteen and basically were together ever since.”

“Wow.”

He looks down at his plate, scraping at the syrup with his fork. “Yeah.”

“Was it really different, then?” Mae asks. “With me?”

“What?” he says, letting out a laugh. “I can’t answer that.”

    “I’m just curious. From a purely scientific perspective.”

He shakes his head. “You’re mad.”

Mae shrugs. “If it helps, it was really different for me.”

“It was?” he asks, looking pleased. But then he furrows his brow. “In a good way?”

She nods. “In a very good way.”

He grins, and then they both return to their food. But they can’t help casting glances at each other every now and then, both of them smiling. Under the table, his knees bump against hers, and she feels the ripple of it travel straight up into her chest, where it bobs around like something lovely and weightless and bright.

After a little while, he nods. “It was different for me too.”





After brunch, they walk down Michigan Avenue. They’ve left their bags at the hotel, but Mae still has her trusty camera with her, and whenever they pass something noteworthy—the greenish river or the ornate building made of limestone or a little boy in a pirate’s hat—Hugo waits while she pauses to capture some footage.

“B-roll,” she says.

He gives her a mystified look. “What’s that?”

“Just extra footage to intersperse with the interviews.”

He can’t help smiling. “I like it when you talk film. You sound very impressive.”

“Well, it’s not my first rodeo.”

“Is that another movie thing?”

“No,” she says, laughing. “It just means I’ve done this before.”

“Right. So tell me: How does the B-roll fit into the rodeo?”

Mae shakes her head at him, but he can see that it lights her up, talking about this film.

“Well, I don’t want the interviews to feel stagnant,” she says. “Part of the story is the train itself: where it’s going, where it’s come from. So I’m trying get some shots along the way to weave in: people passing by, birds flying overhead, the light changing over the city. Plus, any major landmarks and cool sights and stuff like that.”

    Hugo steps in front of the camera with a grin. “Do I count?”

“As a landmark?” she says, pointing it away from him. “No.”

“How about as a cool sight?” He leans closer to her as people stream around them on the sidewalk. “I don’t know if you know this, but I’m very, very cool.”

When she laughs, it feels to Hugo like he’s won some sort of prize.

“That might be true,” she says, “but you still don’t make the cut.”

“Why not?” he asks as they start to walk again, weaving past some people taking selfies in front of the river. “I’m part of the trip too.”

“Yeah, but the film is about the interviews. Not us.”

He smiles at the word us. “But you’re the one doing the traveling. It’s your journey.”

“It’s not,” she says, looking over at him sharply. “It’s theirs. That’s the whole point.”

“But surely there must be documentaries that include the filmmaker?”

She frowns at the sidewalk. “Maybe,” she says after a moment. “But this isn’t one of them.”

“Why couldn’t it be?”

This time she’s the one to stop. Her eyes are shiny, and her hair is tangled from the wind. She seems to be deep in thought, and while he waits, Hugo counts the freckles on her nose.

“Because,” she says eventually, and there’s an intensity to the words, “I don’t know how to be on both sides of the camera.”

Hugo almost makes a joke about the simple logistics of this—You just take two steps to the left!—but he can see how pained she looks, so he stays quiet. There’s more he’d like to know, but he can almost see the window closing, something in her face shifting, and then she turns and begins to walk again. He follows her, both of them silent, until they pass a huge grayish building, where Hugo notices a rock embedded in the side, and he nearly trips over her as he hurries to take a closer look.