She bites her lip, waiting for more, her eyes round and hopeful that this is leading to forgiveness.
“Anyway, we set out one afternoon, I must have been ... fifteen, so I guess Leo was eight, maybe nine. And he insisted he was old enough to mark the trees, to take the lead and ensure that we could find our way back.”
She nudges her head up just a little, like she already knows what’s coming next. “Oh boy,” she whispers.
“Yeah.” I raise my eyebrows. “Exactly. Needless to say, Leo was never a Boy Scout—”
“In any sense of the word,” she says.
“And we got completely turned around. Couldn’t find our way back; it was just a total disaster. We fell asleep under a tree, and then it started to rain, like the way that it rains in Vermont in the summer, so Leo took off all his clothes and I was screaming at him about how we were going to die, and he started dancing like he was on fire, shouting at the sky about it being a rain dance and how he was beckoning the gods to send down more.”
At this, she manages a laugh. “That does sound like Leo.”
“Anyway, it turned out that we didn’t die—”
“Obviously.”
“And we hiked back in the morning. We usedmyold markings to figure it out.” I grin. “And my mom was in a complete panic—my dad had already left to go back to the city, but my mom was flipping out, and all night, I had planned to sell Leo out, but once we got home, I realized that this was like, the best story ever. That we got lost and did a rain dance and camped out and made it back on our own, and that I wouldn’t have traded it for the world.” I consider it and snort. “It’s something that when he ever gets married, I’m gonna use in my toast.”
“Something about a metaphor about getting lost in the forest but finding the trees?”
I laugh now too. “Something like that.” I slide next to her in the trunk.
“So one day, you’ll use this in a speech about how much you had to learn from your wonderful wife?”
“Or one day, maybe you’ll use it to remember to fill up the tank when I tell you?” I kiss her nose.
“And maybe on that same day, you’ll acknowledge that a little adventure never killed anyone?”
I grin. “We haven’t made it through the night.”
I lower the back seat, and she finds a blanket that we bought at a swap exchange in Sedona. We rest our heads on our duffel bags, and Monster snores and keeps us warm. We sleep. We survive. No coyotes eat us after all.
When we wake in the morning, a truck slows and offers to double back with gas—it turns out the next town is only three miles east, and we fill our tank, and we leave this hiccup by the side of the road where it belongs.
We find a diner for a breakfast of eggs and bacon, which she eats only because our dinner was dry cereal found in our bag of snacks.
“Maybe one day you’ll write this into your script for me,” she says, breaking off a piece of the strip of bacon, savoring it under her tongue. “Not that dreadful Lily Marple.”
She means this as a rib, as something we’ve wrestled and can now leave behind, just like last night’s fight.
I sip my coffee and nod. I’d like that. To slow down, to create something just for my beautiful wife who is so stubborn that she doesn’t fill the gas tank but also allows us to sleep under the stars, to outstretch our hands and feel like we can nearly reach the Big Dipper.
“Yes,” I say. “Maybe one day I will.”
24
TATUM
OCTOBER 2010
I’m in New York only for the weekend and a day. A quick in and out to do a junket forAs You Like It, which is on all the awards lists, though no one has actually seen anything other than rough-cut footage, some scenes here and there. But the industry is abuzz with a David Frears–Tatum Connelly reunion, after all the awards heat withPride and Prejudice, and buzz in Hollywood is just about all you need to convince people that something is real.
Daisy convinces me to meet her for a drink downtown at Harbor, the hottest, newest nightclub with a rotation of celebrity guest DJs. She’s back in the city for the month—New York Copsis shooting on location to attempt to capture the grit that they have lost over the years by filming on a soundstage in Burbank, and she texts me relentlessly until I agree to venture south of Bowery to meet her.
I call Ben before I pull myself from the bedding at the Four Seasons. It sounds like I’ve woken him, though he’s three hours earlier.
“Asleep?” I ask when he picks up on the third ring.
