Field Notes on Love

by Jennifer E. Smith

  Hugo gives them a smile, but he can feel it wobble with effort. “It’s okay,” he says. “I’m fine. Really.”

  Poppy is still standing near the door, absently twisting the ends of her box braids. She fixes him with a skeptical look, as if she can see straight through him. Which she usually can. “Hugo.”

  “Really,” he says again. “It’ll be fine.”

  There’s a long silence, in which Hugo stares at his hands to avoid watching the rest of them exchange glances. Finally, Alfie shrugs. “I never liked her much anyway,” he says, which makes Hugo laugh in spite of himself, because they all loved Margaret. If anything, they thought she was out of his league.

  But still, one by one, they join in.

  “Yeah,” says Oscar, who has been hovering on Alfie’s side of the room, never one for drama. He generally tends to prefer the world of his video games to the real one, but now he runs a hand over his twists, cracking a grin. “She was the worst.”

  “A real monster,” Isla agrees, trying to keep a straight face.

  “Remember that time she spilled her drink on you, Pop?” asks George, and for a moment, Poppy hesitates. Of all of them, she’s the closest with Margaret, and Hugo can see that she’s torn. But in the end, she nods.

  “I still haven’t forgiven her for that,” she says gamely. “And now I never will.”

  They carry on like that for a bit, and Hugo does his best to smile, but he’s still thinking about everything that happened and about the itinerary in his hands, and it isn’t until Alfie chimes in that the idea occurs to him and a plan begins to form.

  “Don’t worry, mate,” Alfie says merrily, reaching out to give Hugo’s shoulder a little pat. “There are other Margaret Campbells out there.”

  Mae claps a hand over her eyes as she presses Play, but the moment the film begins, she can’t help peeking through her fingers. There’s the familiar swell of music, then the black screen with the words mae day productions scrawled across it, and then—

  She punches at the keyboard of her computer, and the window disappears.

  Clearly, this is ridiculous. She’s probably watched the film a thousand times, and she’s not even sure that’s an exaggeration. Just a couple of months ago, she’d been practically gleeful about it, filled with a fizzy lightness when she imagined all the praise that would be coming her way. Most of all, she was certain the members of the admissions committee at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts would see its brilliance. How could they not?

  All her life, people have been telling Mae she has talent. She was nine when she made her first short (a stop-motion film about a muffin named Steve who falls in love with a bagel named Bruno), ten when she started hanging around the high school’s A.V. club in the afternoons (too overzealous to realize that her mockumentary about the older kids wouldn’t get a warm reception), and eleven when she got her first real camera—a beautiful Canon DSLR with a 35-millimeter lens and 1.8 f-stop—for her birthday (after threatening to hock all her possessions to pay for one).

  So far, she’s gotten by on passion and determination and an unwillingness to take no for an answer, drafting friends as actors, talking her way into shooting locations, and watching YouTube tutorials for new tricks. Now she was supposed to graduate into the big leagues, finally getting a real education at the best filmmaking school in the world, which is the only thing she’s ever really wanted.

  It just never occurred to her they might not want her back.

  She sets her jaw and faces down the screen again. She hasn’t been able to bring herself to watch since the letter came, the one informing her that she’d been accepted to the university—just not to the film program. But she knows it’s time. If she’s ever going to have a shot at transferring, she’ll have to make another audition film. And if she’s going to do that, she’ll have to figure out what went wrong with the first one. She doesn’t mind learning from her mistakes; in fact, she’s desperate to. She just hates the idea that what once seemed so shiny and impressive will now inevitably look different to her: a bruising collection of flaws and mistakes that will surely hurt even more than the rejection.

  Still, she grits her teeth and presses Play. But as the first image appears—a time-lapse shot of clouds on one of those perfect spring days in the Hudson Valley, the sky so blue it almost looks like a special effect—there’s a knock at the door.

  Mae half turns, pushing her glasses up on her nose. “Yeah?”

  “Want to come down and help me with dinner?” Dad asks, poking his head in. “Not with anything important, obviously, since none of us are quite over the Great Mashed Potato Incident of last Tuesday. But you can always do something menial, like grating cheese, or…” He pauses, noticing her computer, where the screen is still frozen on the clouds. “Ooh,” he says, walking over. “I love this part.”

  “It’s not…,” Mae says, quickly shutting the laptop. “I’m not…”

  But it’s too late. He’s already sitting down on the edge of her bed, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, ready to watch. Right then, with the late-day sun coming through the window, the resemblance between them is clear. They’re both short, with matching freckles and light brown hair and fair skin. Even their reading glasses have the same prescription.

  When Mae was born, her dads did a coin toss to decide whose last name she would get. They’d already agreed to keep the bigger question—which one of them was her biological father—a mystery. But as she got older, it started to become pretty obvious whose swimmers had won the race. Her other dad—Pop—is tall and broad-shouldered and athletic, with jet-black hair and deep blue eyes, about as different from Mae as can be. “Well,” he always says when she trips over her own feet or struggles to reach a high shelf, “at least I won the damn coin toss.”

  Dad claps his hands. “Come on,” he says a little too cheerfully. He’s still wearing his signature tweed blazer, though all he had today was a faculty meeting. “Let’s roll tape.”

  Mae shakes her head. “I think I need to do this alone.”

  “Right,” he says. “Sure. But just to make a counterargument—”

  “Here we go.”

  “—you’ve been trying to do it on your own all summer, and clearly that hasn’t worked. So maybe it would help if you had some moral support.”

  She considers this for a moment, then swivels back around and opens the laptop again. The clouds, almost imperceptibly, start to shift into shapes: a rabbit and a guitar and a wave. Mae leans forward and stops the video again. “Nope. Sorry. Can’t do it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” she says, “I love it. Or at least I did.”

  “Okay, let’s say it’s horrible.”

  “What?”

  “Maybe,” he says, “it’s the worst thing anyone’s ever made. Maybe it’s a colossal failure of a piece of art. A disaster on every imaginable level.”

  She blinks at him. “Is this supposed to be a pep talk?”

  “Just stick with me,” he says. “I’m getting there.”

  “Okay, so…maybe it sucks. If it didn’t, I would’ve been one of the four percent of people accepted to the program. But I wasn’t, and now I don’t know if I can stand to watch it again through their eyes.”

  “Aha,” he says. “That’s just it. Do you know how often my students scoff at the paintings I show them in class? Professor Weber, you do realize that’s just a red square, right? I could do that in my sleep. But the thing is, those kids are being jackasses.”

  Mae laughs. “Are you trying to say that the admissions people at USC are jackasses too?”

  “He’s trying to say that art is subjective,” says Pop, who has appeared in the doorway, still wearing his suit and tie from the gallery. “Just because they didn’t love your film doesn’t mean it’s not great. And just because they had a di
fferent opinion about it doesn’t mean you have to change yours.”

  “Actually,” Dad says with a grin, “I was gonna say the thing about jackasses. But his was better.”

  Pop shakes his head, but he’s still looking at Mae. “You were really proud of that film,” he says with a smile. “I guess I don’t see why that has to be any different now.”

  She glances back at her computer. “Garrett’s always saying—”

  They both let out strangled groans.

  “Garrett,” Dad says, rolling his eyes so hard that Mae worries they might get stuck like that. She knows he’s mostly teasing; they act the same with any boy she brings home. But Garrett’s flashy red car and swanky Park Avenue address haven’t helped matters.

  Pop pushes off the doorframe and walks over to sit beside Dad on the bed, their shoulders touching. “Hasn’t he gone back to the city yet?”

  Mae had met Garrett at the start of summer, when they were the only two people at an art house screening of Cinema Paradiso. She’d seen it a million times, of course; it was her grandmother’s favorite. And though it was a bit sappy for Mae’s taste, Nana was in the hospital at the time, and something about sitting in the darkened theater and watching the flickering screen felt almost reverential, the closest thing she had to a prayer.

  Afterward, she discovered Garrett waiting for her in the lobby, as if they’d planned to meet there. With his square jaw and blond hair, he looked like he should be anywhere else on a Saturday night: at a party or a baseball game or possibly even a movie premiere. Instead he was holding a half-empty bucket of popcorn in the crook of one arm, and he lifted his eyebrows expectantly. “So? What did you think?”

  Caught off guard, Mae studied him for a moment, then shrugged. “Brilliant, if overly sentimental.”

  “Right,” Garrett said, looking thoughtful, “except the sentimentality is intentional. Which is why I think it works.”

  “Even well-intentioned nostalgia can be saccharine.”

  “Only if it’s manipulative,” he argued, “which it’s not in this case.”

  Mae squinted at him. “What are you, a film critic or something?”

  “Aspiring,” he said matter-of-factly. “What are you, an expert in Italian cinema?”

  “Aspiring,” she said with a grin.

  Later, after several cups of coffee, they still hadn’t come to an agreement about the film, but they had managed to get into a heated argument about their favorite directors—Wes Anderson for her, Danny Boyle for him—and at least ten other film-related topics. Mae was in the middle of a rant about the lack of female directors when he leaned over to kiss her. Surprised, she pulled away, made a final point about how the statistics are even worse when it comes to women of color, and then kissed him right back.

  It was never something that was meant to last, and that suited Mae just fine. Garrett lived in the city and was just at his family’s sprawling farmhouse for a couple of months before heading off to Paris, where he planned to study French cinema at the Sorbonne.

  “In French,” he said that first night, and she knew then that he was all wrong for her. But his smile was dazzling and his hair was tousled just right and his taste in films was so ridiculously nostalgic that she was already looking forward to spending the next six weeks arguing with him. Which is pretty much what they did.

  “You just like him because he’s cute,” Dad says. “But he has the personality of a croissant.”

  Mae tilts her head to one side. “Do croissants have bad personalities?”

  “I don’t know. I was just trying to think of something needlessly fancy.”

  “How can a piece of dough be—”

  “You know what I mean,” Dad says, rolling his eyes. “So what did he say?”

  “The croissant?”

  “No, Garrett.”

  “He says it’s impossible to make a great piece of art if you haven’t really lived.”

  Dad snorts. “And I suppose he’s really lived?”

  “Well, he’s been all over the place. And he grew up in the city. Plus, he’s going to the Sorbonne next year.”

  “Trust me,” Dad says, “there are as many idiots there as everywhere else in the world.”

  “Look, he’s not totally wrong,” Pop says more gently. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned after twelve years at the gallery, it’s that sometimes art isn’t a matter of skill or technique. Sometimes it is about experience. So maybe you’ve got some more living to do. But that’s the case with everyone, whether you’ve grown up in a big city or a small town, whether you’re going to school in Paris or not.”

  Mae nods. “I know that. It’s just…”

  “It’s hard,” Pop says with a shrug. “It is. But the hurt and rejection and disappointment? It’ll help you grow as an artist. And it’ll all be worth it when you finally get it right. You know that as well as I do.” He nods in the direction of her computer and gives her a small smile. “So what do you say? One more screening for old times’ sake?”

  This time Mae relents, opening her computer before she can chicken out again. When she first showed them the film last fall, they were eating popcorn and joking around and bursting into spontaneous applause at some of the shots. But now the three of them watch in silence, and when it’s over, nobody says anything for what feels like a very long time.

  Finally, Mae turns to where they’re both sitting on her bed, and they raise their eyebrows, waiting for her to speak first.

  “The good news,” she says, “is that I don’t know what I’d do differently.”

  “And the bad news?” Dad asks.

  She shrugs. “I don’t know what I’d do differently.”

  “You will,” Pop says like it’s a promise, and for a second, Mae can almost picture him as he once was, a struggling painter whose first show sold only two pieces, both of them to a young art professor who happened to be walking by, and who—as he always likes to say—was lured in by the brilliant yellows and greens but stuck around for Pop’s baby blues.

  “And in the meantime,” Dad says, “I guess you’ll just have to do some more living. Which works out pretty nicely with this whole going-off-to-college thing.”

  “I guess so,” Mae says, trying not to think about the course booklet on her desk, all the film classes she’ll be missing out on because of the math and science requirements, the hours she’ll have to spend writing essays on World War II and Shakespearean sonnets and behavioral psychology, when she could be learning how to be a better filmmaker.

  “But before all that,” Pop says, “maybe you could set the table? If we don’t eat soon, your nana is going to have my head.”

  Dad laughs. “Unless you’re still not over the Silverware Drawer Debacle of early June…”

  “You’re the worst,” Mae says, but she doesn’t mind. Not really. In fact, she feels lighter already. The film is behind her now. And everything else is still ahead.

  The travel company is impressively unhelpful.

  “All bookings are nonrefundable—”

  “Yes, and nontransferable,” Hugo says for the third time. “I was just hoping you might make an exception. See, my girlfriend booked the tickets, but we’ve split up now, and I’d still quite like to go, but—”

  “Is your name Margaret Campbell?” asks the customer service representative in a flat, bored voice.

  Hugo sighs. “No.”

  “Well then,” she says, and that’s that.

  Alfie and George are the only two at home that afternoon. Hugo explains his new plan to them, expecting a bit of support, but they both stare at him, gobsmacked.

  “You’re a nutter,” Alfie says. “A complete nutter.”

  George rubs the back of his neck, where his hair is cut into a fade. He still looks incredulous. “Even if someone was mad enough to actually agree to th
is, why would you want to spend a week with a total stranger?”

  “Yeah, you’re always on about what a chore it is to share a room with me,” Alfie says. “Now you don’t mind being stuck in a train compartment for days on end with some random girl?”

  “It would still be better than sharing a room with you,” George points out, and Alfie throws a rugby ball at his head.

  “I’m a delight,” he says.

  Hugo ignores them. He knows how it sounds, this makeshift plan of his. There’s only one real reason to do it: he wants a week on his own before starting uni in the company of his five siblings. Having to share that time with a stranger isn’t particularly appealing. But given the circumstances, Hugo doesn’t see a way around it.

  “I still want to go,” he tells his brothers. “And this is the only way.”

  In the end, they agree to help him write the post, and the three of them huddle around his laptop, cracking up as they spend the afternoon crafting the world’s strangest wanted ad. Though he had to reel Alfie in a bit—“I don’t think it hurts to be open-minded about the sleeping arrangements”—even Hugo has to admit the final result isn’t bad:

  Hello there!

  First of all, I realise this is a bit odd, but here we go. As a result of a breakup (that was not my idea, unfortunately), I’ve found myself with a consolation prize: a spare ticket for a weeklong train journey from New York City to San Francisco. The catch is that I can’t change my ex’s name on the reservation, so I’m sending this out into the universe in case there happens to be another Margaret Campbell who might be interested in rescuing my holiday and getting one of her own in exchange.

  I know what you’re thinking, but I swear I’m not a nutter. I’m a fairly normal eighteen-year-old bloke from England, and I think most people would say I’m a nice guy (references available upon request).

  The train leaves from Penn Station in New York City on August 13 and arrives in San Francisco on August 19, and if you’d prefer not to sit with me, I’ll do my best to sort something with the travel company. Honestly, I just need someone by the name of Margaret Campbell to get us on board, and then the rest is up to you. There are a few nights in sleeper cars with bunk beds, which we may not be able to help, but there are also hotels booked along the way in New York, Chicago, Denver, and San Francisco, which you’re welcome to have to yourself. I’m happy to find somewhere else to stay. All that I ask is that you stick with me long enough to get us both on the train at each stop. We can sort the rest of the details later.