by Vi Keeland
Equally as much, I wanted the topic of Chris to go away. This was supposed to be a fantasy getaway weekend. It had started that way, but Max’s worries about Chris had derailed it. I needed to get things back on track.
“Tell me more about you.”
He looked at me. “What do you want to know?”
I thought about it for a second, then said, “Everything.”
“That’s a lot.”
“Are we in a hurry?”
Max smiled and sipped from his wine. Then he told me his life story.
Chapter Thirteen
It turns out he, too, was from the Midwest. So we had that in common. That day I met him and later went to research him on the Internet, I hadn’t seen any birth info, other than his age. His Wikipedia page had been mostly professional data, which interested me then, but now I needed to know more about Max the man, not Max the Hollywood big-shot.
He was an only child; his father was a men’s clothing salesman, his mother a teacher, both of whom wanted Max to go to college and obtain a business degree. But Max had no interest in that.
Most of his teen years were spent in movie theaters and libraries, absorbing film and literature. He was totally enthralled with the idea of a cast of characters and a story coming out of seemingly nowhere. He said he could remember nights in bed, staring at the ceiling, in complete wonderment that great movies and great books began with a blank page, and someone’s thoughts and wishes and desires filled the pages in the form of the characters and a story.
Something from nothing. Even the bad movies and bad books were the products of someone’s hard work and imagination, so in Max’s mind they deserved his respect, even if they didn’t personally appeal to him.
He began filling notebooks with ideas—plots, characters, scenes—all a big jumble of things that flowed from his mind when pen hit paper. It’s how he spent the vast majority of his free time. Even some of the time that he was supposed to be studying.
When he turned sixteen, he stopped going to church, to the great disappointment of his parents. It wasn’t that he was rejecting his upbringing so much as he had a new focus. All he wanted to do was write, and any time he spent not doing that was, in his mind, wasted time. When he announced his desire to stop spending two or three hours every Sunday at the church, a huge argument erupted, and he left home for three days.
“I had to go back. I had no money, and home was where the food was,” he told me with a grin.
His parents were happy to have him home, at least for the first night. The next day they began to issue instructions: more schoolwork, less time playing around with what his father called “time-wasting writing,” and the obligatory demand to keep going to church.
Max gave in. He kept going to church, but spent most of the time writing in his head. That’s when he realized he had a memory like a steel trap—he could write in thoughts, even edit in thoughts, and when he got home he would frantically scribble them down in a whirl of excitement.
“It was a rush,” he said. “The fact that I could do that was just more proof to me that I was born to be a writer.”
So it all worked out for the time being. Then came the inevitable battle with his parents over where he would go to college. They, of course, wanted him to go to a local state school, where his father would have gone if he’d had the intelligence and the money back when he was Max’s age. Max was unyielding in his desire to go to film school. His parents said there was no way they were going to pay for him to go all the way to UCLA, where Max wanted to start his undergrad work and then apply to the film school for his junior year, as the admission requirements stated.
His parents hadn’t even wanted him to apply to UCLA, but he’d sent off the application along with the fee, paid for out of his savings from his part-time job at the movie theater.
It was during this argument that his parents confessed to taking his UCLA application out of the mailbox all those months ago. Max couldn’t believe it.
Alone with his dad one afternoon while his mother was at the grocery store, Max confronted him. “Stop hitting mom.”
Max’s father turned to face him. “What are you going to do about it?”
Max stepped closer to his father, and looked down at him. By this time in his life, Max was about an inch taller than his father. He also outweighed him by at least twenty pounds—all of it muscle.
“Touch mom again and you’ll find out what I’m going to do about it.”
Max’s father laughed, but said nothing.
“And there’s always the police,” Max added.
“So,” his father said, “what are you going to do? Blackmail me?”
Max just laughed and left the room. His father had been such an asshole to him, never giving Max the freedom he wanted or needed, always treating him like he was incapable of doing anything right, taking his belt to Max, or swatting him with the back of his hand, which stung due to Max’s father’s fake college class ring (an item he wore to impress people). Well, now that had all changed. Max had the upper hand on his father.
Max knew what he had to do, and he hatched his plan over the next couple of weeks.
He would leave home, taking the three hundred and sixty-one dollars he had to his name, and hitchhike halfway across to the country to Hollywood. But that probably wouldn’t be enough.
He’d never thought of blackmailing his father before he himself raised the possibility. Now it was looking like a damn good idea. Especially since Max had something else on his father. So, two days before Max skipped town, he went to the store where his father worked and said he needed five-thousand dollars.
His father didn’t ask any questions. He simply wrote the check. After all, what was he going to say when Max told him he knew about Annette and Roberta, the two women his father had had affairs with (Roberta was still in the picture, as far as Max had been able to determine). Max’s dad didn’t even look shocked, didn’t ask how Max knew.
When Max was leaving the office, he turned around and looked at his father. His dad’s eyes were weary, and he appeared to have given up all hope of having a normal relationship with his son.
Two days before his seventeenth birthday, Max told his mother to pack her favorite stuff, but only two bags. On the morning of his birthday, after his father left for work, Max and his mother boarded a Greyhound bus. It was bound for southern California. It was on this bus ride that Max’s mother said she always wanted him to do what he wanted, and only agreed with his father because of the hold he had on her. Max said he knew all along.
Over the next three years, Max worked in movie theaters, restaurants, and gas stations, while he finished high school. His mother got a job as a teacher’s assistant at a middle school.
He finally landed a job that interested him: as a PA announcer on a tourist bus. He had impressed the owner of the tour bus company with his vast, almost obsessive knowledge of Hollywood. This led to him making a connection with someone who worked as a junior production assistant at MGM studios. His foot was in the door.
Max started leaving his original scripts lying around the studio—in various conference rooms, mail-slots, under windshields of cars parked in spots that were marked with the names of bigwigs.
That’s how he sold his first script. He was a true self-made screenwriter, without an agent, and all before he had turned twenty years old.
By the time he was twenty-five he had three blockbuster films, an Oscar nomination, and the next step was moving into directing and producing. But he hadn’t been happy since.
“And,” he told me, “to this day I’ve never told my mom that I knew about my dad’s cheating.”
“You could have ruined him.”
He nodded his head. “I know. But it would have ruined my mom, too. But she’s happy now. She lives in Thousand Oaks. Not too far from me, but not too close, either. She didn’t want to be right in the heart of all the Hollywood action.”
“And your dad?”
“Hav
en’t heard anything about him in years.”
We were getting tired of sitting at the table, so Max suggested we take a walk through the vineyard. It occurred to me that throughout the whole story he had just told me, he didn’t mention any girlfriends.
Chapter Fourteen
Rather than go out to eat, Max grilled salmon and made a giant salad, and we ate on the floor of the lodge. The original plan was to have an evening picnic, but the weather brought an unexpected—and rare—rain shower.
Max’s culinary skills turned out to be as impressive as everything else he did. The food was delicious, and the setting was romantic. Just the two of us sitting on a large blanket, a roaring fire going, and Harry Connick Jr. tunes providing the soundtrack.
Later, Max wowed me again. But this time we were in his bed. I had three orgasms to his one, and I teased him later that it seemed like a fair ratio.
Sunday morning, I woke to an empty bed. I called out for Max, thinking he might be in another room, but got no response. I got out of the bed, wrapped the sheet around me, walked through the den, and looked out on the large deck. No Max to be seen.
I looked around for a note. Nothing.
I was beginning to worry when I heard the door open and he came in, sweaty and catching his breath. “Morning.”
“Hey. Where were you?”
“Went for a run. I was about a mile away when I realized I should have left a note in case you woke up. Sorry.”
I moved toward him.
“I’m all sweaty.”
“I don’t care,” I said, wrapping my arms around him. The sheet dropped to the floor, leaving me standing there naked.
Max kissed me on the cheek, pushed me away gently, looked me up and down and said, “You’re wearing my favorite thing.”
Before I could respond, I heard my cell phone ringing. I got it out of my purse. It was Krystal calling. If she hadn’t been my roommate, I might have just let it go to voicemail. But I answered it.
“Are you okay?” she blurted.
“I’m fine. Why?”
“You haven’t been here all weekend. I was getting worried.”
I didn’t have the speakerphone on, but the volume was loud enough and the room was quiet enough so that Max could hear Krystal. I looked at him and rolled my eyes. Krystal, worried about me? I was surprised she even noticed I was gone.
“Nothing to worry about. I’m in Napa.”
“Ohhh, nice. With Max?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’ll let you get back to doing him—I mean, I’ll let you get back to him.” She laughed.
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll be home later sometime today.”
We stayed in Napa for lunch and went on a private tour of one of the oldest wineries in the area, escorted by the founder’s grandson who looked to be about Max’s age or early thirties at the most. His wife joined us, and more than once I caught her looking at Max in a way that was pretty risky considering her husband was standing right there.
It might have bothered me at some point in my life. Maybe even just a few weeks ago. But I was getting more comfortable in the feeling that Max wanted me and only me, so I didn’t care how she looked at him. Plus, the way Max was holding on to me made me think he noticed it, too, and might have been reassuring me.
It sounds ridiculous, I know. After all, what could he have possibly done? Lost me somewhere on the grounds of the winery, found a way to distract her husband, and gone off somewhere private and fuck her?
But Max knew how uneasy I was. I had expressed to him in no uncertain terms that I doubted my ability to keep up with his style of life. So far, though, I’d been doing just fine. But I still like to think his tight hold on me was a signal…not so much for her, but for me.
On the plane ride home, I raised the subject I had avoided the day before and asked him about his love life.
“I thought we were going to nap on the way home,” he said.
“When did we decide that?”
“We didn’t. I did.”
“Okay,” I said. “Well, I veto the idea. So start talking.”
He was good natured about me being so forward. Which is exactly what I expected. Otherwise I wouldn’t have gone there.
Max’s first girlfriend was a girl named Denise. They were fifteen when they started dating, and sixteen when they had sex. It was the first time for both of them. Max admitted to being a fumbling ball of nerves during the act, and to freaking out when he saw a spot of blood on the sheet when Denise got up to go to the restroom afterward.
“Cherry-popper,” I said, hitting him lightly on the shoulder.
“You say that like I’m guilty of something.” He looked at me, an uncharacteristically sheepish look on his face.
“Well, aren’t you?”
“No more than the guy who popped yours,” he retorted. “Why don’t you tell me about him?”
“No, no. You go on.”
He laughed. “That’s what I thought.”
I didn’t want to talk about the time I lost my virginity. It was unremarkable. Actually, quite a boring story. I was older than Denise had been when she lost hers, and the guy was no Max Dalton. God, how I wished it had been Max that night….
I let go of the fleeting thought and focused on the rest of his story….
Denise cheated on him with a wide receiver on the football team. He never spoke to her again. Shortly after that, he met Katherine, and within two months they were talking marriage and kids. This was during his junior year in high school, and Katherine was much like my sister—wanting to get married young, have kids, settle down. Max played along for a while, figuring there was no harm and that he wasn’t leading her on. After all they were teenagers.
Their relationship ended when he left town, of course.
Once in California, he dated, but nothing serious. Mostly surfer girl groupies, the bleach-blonde bunnies who kick up sand all day while fit, tanned, athletic boys show off their board skills. Max wasn’t that great at surfing but, he said, the girls liked him anyway.
“Yeah, I bet,” I said. “Who could resist you?” I squeezed his bicep.
“Turns out a lot of girls could.”
“Oh, go on…”
“There’s nothing really interesting,” he said. “I haven’t been serious with anyone in quite a while.”
“Do you want to get married?”
He looked at me. “Are you proposing?”
I blurted out an indelicate laugh. “You know what I mean.”
“Yeah. Marriage? I don’t know. I guess it’s just a matter of being with the right person.”
“Well, sure.”
“No,” he said. “I mean the desire. How can someone just want to get married? I think you really only have that desire when you’re with the right person. Nobody knows if they want to be married, as some kind of abstract idea. You don’t know what it’s like, and if you’re not with someone you’d marry, how can the thought even be serious?”
There was a pause and I guessed he was waiting for me to answer. “I think you’re over-thinking it.”
“Hmm. Maybe. All that matters is that you’re here.”
We were quiet the rest of the way back to Los Angeles. We hit some turbulence about ten minutes out, but otherwise it was a smooth flight.
Smooth in the physical sense, at least. Emotionally, things were a little rocky.
I didn’t want the weekend with Max to end. Tomorrow would mean back to the grind. And while I loved the work I was doing, it would be an extreme understatement to say I was distracted by thoughts of being with Max all the time.
On the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, I was a little nervous about Max being so vague and dismissive about his relationships with women during recent years. I knew it was probably nothing more than him sparing me lurid tales of encounters with Hollywood’s hottest, horniest, and most desperate female starlets and socialites.
If that’s what he was doing, then he did the right thi
ng. I really didn’t want to know about those women. All I wanted to do was see where this was going with Max. And, so far, he’d given me no real reason to be afraid. He had done and said absolutely nothing to make me feel like I wasn’t enough for him.
I mentally kicked myself for letting my negativity and self-doubt cap off such a wonderful weekend.
Chapter Fifteen
Krystal wasn’t there when I got home. She hadn’t mentioned it on the phone earlier, but I guessed she had to work.
It was a little after 5pm so I decided I should do my regular Sunday check-in with my parents. Mom answered on the first ring. Dad got on the other extension. They asked how my week went, and I filled them in, minus the little jaunt up the coast with Max Dalton, of course.
They were having their kitchen remodeled, so I had to listen to about ten minutes of Mom describing precisely what the contractor was going to do, with Dad piping in every thirty seconds or so complaining about the cost of the new counters, cabinets, and pretty much everything else. A little bickering ensued and Mom finally said they should have that discussion when they’re not on the phone with me. Thank God.
“Is Grace around?”
“She’s just put the baby down. Let me get her,” Mom said.
I really needed to talk to my sister. I’d been putting it off all weekend. I knew if I had called her Friday night, I would have been so angry I probably would have said something I regretted. But now, enough time had passed where I could probably have a rational conversation with her.
When Mom and Dad dropped off the line and it was just Grace, I said, “Did you tell Chris where I was?”
“What? No! I told you I just said LA.”
“Then he stalked me.”
“He what?”
I said, “Chris showed up at my apartment door Friday night.”
“Holy shit.” The surprise in her voice was genuinely fearful and then changed to regret. “I’m so sorry.”