“Go ahead,” I said.
He told me all about Liza Carrow and how he had come to have his picture snapped by the paparazzi the other day.
Yes, they dated a few years ago. No, it wasn’t serious. It lasted a short time, and this was before she had landed the role on the soap opera.
I had a heavy, sinking feeling in my stomach as he told me this. Sure, I’d dated before Max and of course he’d dated before me. That was a given. But it was difficult listening to him talk about it now that my feelings for him were becoming so strong. For a few minutes I struggled to wipe my imagination clean of the images of Max fucking her.
Despite the turmoil in my stomach, I drank more wine, and a little more rapidly.
“I didn’t love her,” he said.
That’s the kind of thing someone usually says when they’re denying having the same feelings for someone else that they have for you. Was Max telling me something? If he was, I wished he’d just say it.
He continued: “But I won’t say I didn’t care about her. I still do.”
Oh, God…
“But not in the same way that I used to,” he went on. “When she called and asked if I would have lunch with her, she told me it was important, and that she really needed to talk to someone she could trust. She said she’d run out of options.”
Max took a sip of his White Russian, then reached for another slice of apple.
“She wouldn’t tell me over the phone. So I told her I’d meet her for lunch. We weren’t there long. We actually only had our drinks and an appetizer. The picture you saw was us leaving after only being in there for maybe twenty minutes or so.”
“Why so short?”
Max finished the last sip from his glass. “She told me she doesn’t know who the father of the baby is.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. Could be any one of four or five guys.”
I had a piece of cheese in my mouth but managed to say, “Nice.”
Max sighed and looked at me with a grin. His eyebrows rose a little on his forehead. It was the kind of look someone gives you like they’re warning you: Here comes the crazy part.
“She asked me to say I’m the father.”
“Oh, shit.”
“But I’m not.”
I laughed. “Yeah, I kind of had that figured out already.”
Max smiled. “I’m glad you decided to trust me. I told her no, of course.” He poured more wine in my glass, and got up to fix himself another drink.
“She really thought you’d do it?”
“She’s desperate,” Max said.
Liza told him she didn’t want to face the media scrutiny of not knowing who the father was. And she said there was no way she was going to start a tabloid frenzy by getting the guys she’d slept with to take paternity tests.
“So,” Max said, “I told her it doesn’t matter who the father is. If someone asks, she should just say it’s private and she’s never going to reveal it. That it’s something she’ll only discuss with her child when the time is right. Oh, and I told her she needed to deny it was me. Not that I’ll be in the story for very long. It’s really about her. I just got stuck in the wrong place at the wrong time, and someone happened to know we had dated at some point.”
“But that was before she was famous, right?”
Max smiled. “You’re so smart. That’s one of the things I love about you. I know where you were going with that question, and yeah, I think she might have leaked the lie.”
“What a bitch.”
Max ate.
I sat there thinking not about what we were talking about, so much as what he’d just said: That’s one of the things I love about you. One of the things? What else was there? And did he love me?
THREE
Sunday morning, lying in bed, we talked in depth about the script. Max wanted to know what I really thought of it.
“I told you, I love it.”
“You wouldn’t change anything about it?”
I paused, and that was my downfall.
Max said, “Tell me. It’s okay. I have a thick skin when it comes to my work.”
“Well,” I started, then trailed off…
He had been lying on his back, looking up at the ceiling, but he turned toward me and propped his head up in his hand. “Tell me, Olivia.”
So I told him.
I loved the characters and I loved what he did with them. But there was one aspect of the girl’s reaction at a certain point in the story that I thought would work better if he changed it just a little. It wouldn’t throw the storyline off the rails, but it would add another dimension to the girl, making her motives and hopes and dreams more vivid.
Max rolled over and turned away from me. “I can’t believe you said that. You think my writing sucks. Way to destroy my confidence.”
I moved quickly and grabbed on to his shoulder, turning him back toward me. He had a big smile on his face.
“I’m just kidding,” he said.
I smacked his chest. “Jerk.”
“So now we’re committing domestic violence.”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “And if you fuck with me like that again, it’ll be worse.” I reached down and grabbed his balls.
He chuckled. “Seriously, though, what you said about the script hadn’t even occurred to me.”
“Well, you’re not a woman. But you did a pretty good job with her, otherwise.”
He leaned in to kiss me and when he pulled away I said, “So you see me like you see that character when you wrote her?”
Max nodded. “Weird, huh?”
I didn’t say anything.
“I’ve never believed in fate,” he said. “But honestly, when I was writing that—specifically her character—it was different from all the other things I’d ever written before. Or since, actually. I’ve always had to work on characters for a long time, getting them right, changing things about them. But she was different. She just…came to me…out of nowhere, already perfect.”
I looked up at him.
He kissed me again. “Just like you.”
Later, as we were getting ready to leave to go out on Max’s boat, Krystal came barreling through the front door, looking a little crazed and acting extremely hyper.
She hugged Max, which was odd. Then she started talking rapidly about his movies and how much she loved all of them.
Max was gracious. He either wasn’t freaked out by her tornado-like behavior, or he was hiding it really well.