Nana gives a little wave. “Happy travels!”
After hanging up, Mae turns to Hugo. “Well, that’s Nana. She’s—”
“Brilliant,” he says with a grin. “Let’s make sure I’m there when you call her from Denver, so I can hear the rest of her tips.”
This train is bigger than the last, with two floors and an observation car at one end. An attendant named Duncan—a short white man with bright red hair—leads them to their compartment, which is about the same as the last, two seats and a fold-down bunk at the top.
But this time, when he leaves them, there’s no awkward silence or uncertainty. This time, as soon as he’s gone, Hugo takes a step forward and puts a hand on her elbow, and Mae tips her head up to look at him, and they smile at each other like they’re the holders of some great secret.
“You still have sand in your hair,” she says, reaching up to brush it away, but before she can finish, he’s folded her into his arms, and they’re kissing again.
Mae has wanted to do this all morning. Sitting across from him at the diner, walking beside him along Michigan Avenue, lying next to him on the beach: it was underneath and around every other thought, a persistent drumbeat beneath every gesture, every word, every look.
She knows this can’t last—whatever it is; that a few days from now, they’ll be getting off at different stations, going in different directions. But she doesn’t care. Because for now, they have this: a happiness so big it doesn’t leave room for worries.
When Duncan returns, he has to clear his throat several times before they realize he’s standing in the hallway. They break apart so quickly that Hugo nearly falls back against his seat, and Duncan stares hard at his notepad, trying not to laugh.
“Sorry to interrupt, but will you two be joining us for dinner tonight?”
After they’ve made their reservations, Mae’s phone buzzes, and she grabs it before Hugo can see the long row of exclamation points that Priyanka has sent, followed by a second text that says Call me.
“I’m gonna make a quick call,” she says to Hugo. “So I’ll just—”
“No, you stay here,” he says. “Meet me in the observation car when you’re done.”
On the way out, he leans to give her a kiss on the cheek, and then she waits until she hears his footsteps on the metal staircase to call. All Mae says when she picks up is hi, but this is enough to make Priyanka immediately start laughing.
“What?” Mae asks, grinning into the phone.
“Nothing. It’s just that I can practically hear you smiling. It’s so unlike you.”
“Hey! I smile.”
“Yeah, but hardly ever about a boy.”
Mae flops back onto the seat and puts her feet up on Hugo’s. “So how’s college life?”
“No way. We’re talking about you first. Tell me everything.”
And so she does. By the time she gets to the part where they kissed last night, Priyanka is laughing again. “Only you would use your grandmother’s line to get a guy to kiss you,” she says. “Bet you don’t think those movies of hers are so unrealistic anymore, huh?”
“This isn’t like that,” Mae says. “It’s just a fling.”
“It is not.”
“How do you know?”
“Because a fling suggests it doesn’t mean anything,” Priyanka says. “And I can tell that it does.”
“No, a fling is a measurement of time. And this has an expiration date.”
Priyanka sighs. “Stop being so…you.”
“What does that mean?” Mae asks, indignant.
“Just that it’s okay to give in and enjoy it. You’re on a train making out with a guy you barely know. It’s romantic.”
Mae laughs. “A week ago, you thought he was going to kill me.”
“Well, he didn’t. And you sound really happy. So don’t overthink it. Just—”
The line goes dead, and when Mae lowers her phone, she sees that there’s no service anymore. She waits a few minutes, and when it doesn’t return, she sends a quick text: Sorry I lost you. But I’m off to go enjoy it. Aren’t you happy I’m taking your advice?
It bounces back, but there’s nothing to be done about that now, so she winds her way through the other sleeper cars, past the dining room, where the tablecloths are already out, and into the observation area. Hugo is in one of the seats facing out toward the huge rounded windows that reach all the way up to the ceiling, and when Mae sits down beside him, he turns to her with a smile.
“How’s your friend?”
“Good. We got cut off.”
“Hopefully not before you had a chance to tell her all about me,” he says with a grin, and she punches his arm.
“Someone’s pretty full of himself.”
He laughs. “Someone was told this morning that he’s a good kisser.”
“Someone had better be careful about getting a big head.”
“Someone will try his best,” Hugo says, propping his feet up on the ledge and looking out the enormous windows at the houses whipping past. “This’ll be brilliant when we’re in the mountains, won’t it?”
Mae nods and takes her camera out of the bag on her lap, ready to capture the changes in scenery as they head west, first through Iowa and Nebraska, and then on to Denver, which they’ll reach tomorrow morning.
“I think I’ve already spotted some good potential interviews,” Hugo says. “As your assistant director, I feel like I should get first crack at choosing one this time.”
She laughs. “That’s a pretty big promotion for someone who couldn’t stop talking through the shots yesterday. What are your salary requirements?”
To her surprise, he leans in to give her a quick kiss, then sits back, looking pleased with himself. “I think we’re all squared away now. Unless you’d like to discuss some sort of raise.”
She grabs the front of his shirt, pulling him back toward her, and this time she kisses him in earnest. When they sit back again, she’s grinning like crazy, and so is he.
“I’d say you’re off to a good start,” she says. “What else you got?”
Hugo nods at an older black couple sitting a few seats away. They have a tablet propped on a tray beneath the window; it shows a digital map with a blue dot that’s following their route. They’ve also got binoculars, a compass, and two packs of Starburst. “You should ask them. Clearly, this isn’t their first rodeo.”
The way he says rodeo is so charming that Mae feels desperate to kiss him again. It’s enough to make her want to write a list of funny American words—dude and zonked and cotton candy—and have him recite them all afternoon. But instead she begins to adjust the settings on her camera. “Good call.”
“So what do you do with these, anyway?”
She glances up at him. “What do you mean?”
“Your films. Do you post them somewhere? Have screenings? Send them around to your friends? If my name’s going to be in lights, I need to know where I can find it.”
“I have a website,” she says, still tinkering with the dials. “I put my favorites up there.”
“What about the rest?”
She shrugs. “I learn from them and move on.”
“So you could spend weeks—”
“Months.”
“—on a film and then never show it to anybody?”
“Sure. If I’m not happy with it.”
“How often does that happen?”
“Often,” she says with an air of resignation. “I have a folder on my computer called Rejects that’s alarmingly full. Sometimes you get to the end and the magic just isn’t there.”
“Is that what happened with USC?”
“That was different.” Mae looks over at the couple with their maps and gadgets; the man holds out a stick of Starburst, and the woman takes one off the to
p. “You know when you think you’re about to eat a pink Starburst, but you realize too late it’s an orange one?”
Hugo smiles. “I like the orange ones.”
“Well, you’re just weird, then,” she says, giving him a playful kick. “But I don’t. And I really thought I was sending USC a pink one.”
“You have no idea what went wrong?”
There’s a part of her that wants to tell Hugo what Garrett said. But every time she thinks about it, she feels such irritation at the critique—Impersonal! Seriously?—that she can barely concentrate. She tried to watch the film one more time the night before she left, already composing the text she’d send to Garrett—which involved a certain number of actuallys—but in the end, she didn’t work up the nerve. Now there was a word attached to the failure, something too specific to ignore, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to see it through his eyes. Even so, the rebuttals continue to scroll through her head, stubborn and persistent.
“No idea,” she says to Hugo, who doesn’t look convinced but also doesn’t press the issue.
They’re well out of the city now, the houses getting farther apart as the train moves across the state. The windows have a slightly yellow tint, turning everything sepia toned, making it feel like they’ve fallen into one of Nana’s old movies.
Mae looks around the car. There are people playing a board game at one of the tables, a kid teaching his grandfather how to take a selfie, two men drinking beers and talking about this year’s wheat crop, a young couple reading their books. All of them on their way somewhere, barreling across the country in this long metal tube.
“I really would love to see it,” Hugo says, and she turns back to him, a little dazed.
“What?”
“Your film.”
“Oh,” she says with a frown. “I don’t think so.”
“Would you at least tell me what it’s about?”
“Hugo…”
He doesn’t look the least bit put off. “Will I have a guess, then? Is it about a dancing platypus?”
“What?” She lets out a surprised laugh. “No.”
“Is it about a porcupine who can’t find his way home?”
“Not exactly.”
“Is it about the first man to win a bowling tournament with a tennis ball?” he says with a grin. “Or a woman who swallows a piece of gum and discovers a gum tree in her stomach years later? Or a girl who runs away to Antarctica and becomes best friends with a walrus? Or a boy with a scar on his forehead who goes off to a wizarding school?”
Mae is shaking her head. “I’m pretty sure that last one’s been done before.”
“I’ve got it,” Hugo says, his face brightening. “Is it about you?”
“No,” she says, and her smile slips. “Not exactly.”
He looks at her closely, so closely that she finds herself shifting beneath his gaze. “Well then,” he says, “maybe that’s the problem.”
As they near Iowa, the land lengthens out like someone took a rolling pin to it, flat and low and endless. Hugo can’t get over all the cornfields, miles and miles of them as far as he can see. They ripple in the wind like they’re made of water, full of whirlpools and eddies, and he wishes he could stick a hand out the window and let it pass over the feathery tips.
Mae is at the far end of the car, chatting with a couple about her film, and when Hugo closes his eyes for a second, the thought bubbles up again: I don’t want to go back.
It fizzes inside him, bright as a sparkler.
A crow flies by out the window, coasting effortlessly at the same speed as the train, and he realizes his mind is already tiptoeing in that direction, spinning over an imaginary globe.
It wouldn’t be forever, he thinks, and the arguments begin to line up in his head then, one by one, a blindly hopeful procession.
People take gap years all the time. And he’s got money saved, some from summer jobs and some from when the six of them modeled for a local department store as children (a deeply embarrassing chapter of their lives). It’s not a lot, but he could do it on the cheap, find discount flights and stay in hostels, live off bowls of peanuts in random pubs if he had to. He’s already proved he can get himself from London to Denver, at the very least. (Wallet aside.)
Maybe he could simply defer his scholarship and start uni the following autumn, graduate a year behind the others, give himself a chance to try something new before then, to take what he’s felt this week and carry it with him over the course of a whole year.
Because that’s the thing: it’s only been a few days, but already he feels entirely different. And now that he knows, how can he do anything but keep going?
The idea flutters in his chest like a bird in a cage, and he looks around for Mae, suddenly eager to tell her. At the end of the busy car, she’s sitting at a table with a Hasidic couple, her notebook open in front of her as she listens to them, and he smiles to himself, struck once again by her passion. But then he imagines trying to explain this to her without it sounding like he’s just going to skive off for a year, and he can feel his excitement start to wilt.
Mae knows exactly what she wants, and that’s never been Hugo’s strong suit. Now that he’s found something, now that he’s got a plan—or at least the start of one—he wants to be sure of it before telling her.
They spend the rest of the afternoon doing interviews: an economics professor from Idaho who was recently widowed, a family from Singapore on their first trip to America, a mother and daughter who are making a pilgrimage to Salt Lake City. A few people decline, and one even laughs in their faces. Another—a grizzled white man with a long beard—simply gives them the finger. But most people have stories to tell and are eager to share them.
The couple they saw earlier—Louis and Katherine—turn out to be celebrating their recent retirements, and they’re in it for the long haul: Washington, DC, all the way to San Francisco.
“Then what?” Mae asked, and Katherine smiled.
“Exactly.”
At the end, Hugo couldn’t resist posing one last question. “So what’s your favorite color Starburst?”
“I like the red and orange ones,” Louis said, “and she likes the pink and yellow ones.”
“Which is how you can tell we’re perfect for each other,” Katherine added.
At dinner, Hugo and Mae are seated across from two white women in their fifties, Karen and Trish, sisters on their way back from visiting their mother in Iowa.
“Does she live on a farm?” Hugo asks, because from what he’s seen of the state so far, that seems to be all there is. But they both laugh at this.
“Where are you from, darlin’?” Trish asks. She has curly blond hair and very red lipstick, and she’s wearing a shirt with little sequins on it. Her sister, Karen, is more muted; she has the same color hair, but hers hangs long and straight, and she has glasses and very little makeup on. They both peer at him with open curiosity from across the table.
“England,” he says, and to his surprise, they both say “Aww” and scrunch up their noses in a way someone might when they’ve come face to face with a kitten.
He can feel Mae watching him with amusement, but he doesn’t look at her, because if he does, he knows he’ll be distracted by how she purses her lips when she’s thinking about something, or how the dress she’s wearing today—a yellow so sunny that he can’t stop looking at it—inches up when she sits down, and how even though she’s so much shorter than he is, her legs somehow seem to go on forever in it.
“Have you ever been?” he asks the sisters, who both laugh.
“No, we’ve never bean,” Karen says, mimicking his accent. “But maybe one day. I’d sure like to see that castle. What’s it called? The one where the queen lives.”
“Buckingham Palace,” Hugo says. “But that’s in London. I’m from a place called Surre
y, which isn’t too far from there.”
“So how did you end up on a train in Iowa?”
“How does anyone end up on a train in Iowa?” Mae jokes, and they both turn their attention to her.
“You’re not from England,” Karen points out.
“No, I’m from New York. But also not the city.”
“How did you two meet?”
“It’s a long story,” Hugo says, reaching for Mae’s hand underneath the table. She clasps his back, and he feels an instant warmth spread through him. Outside, the sun has dipped low, casting long shadows on the fields of corn. They pass a herd of cows huddled close, a road with a dusty pickup truck lumbering by, a small town with an American flag waving high above the buildings. It all feels unreal somehow, sliding past like this, as if it’s part of a film montage.
Once they’ve ordered—a steak for him, some sort of chicken dish for her—they hand back their menus. The sisters are on their second glass of wine each, and Trish winks at them from across the table. “If you’d just spent six days with our mother, you’d be drinking too.”
Karen lifts her glass. “Amen.”
“So what’s England like?” Trish asks.
Hugo shrugs. “You know, mostly just tea and crumpets. That sort of thing.”
He’s only teasing, of course, but they both nod very seriously. “Do you go to college here or there?” asks Trish.
“Neither,” he says. “Yet.”
There must be something in his voice that warns her off a follow-up question, because she nods and turns to Mae. “How about you?”
“I start at USC next week,” she says. “That’s where I’m headed now.”
“Well, isn’t that wonderful,” Trish says, then nudges Karen. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”
Karen nods. “Wonderful. My three are still little, but I’d love it if they got into somewhere like that one day. Or somewhere in England,” she says, looking over at Hugo. “Do you miss it?”
He grins at her. “Would it be absolutely horrible if I said no?”
Field Notes on Love Page 13