“Amazing,” I said. “I almost wouldn’t even call it pizza.”
“Healthiest kind there is. More wine?”
I nodded but didn’t speak, having taken another bite already.
We enjoyed a few moments of silence and then I asked Max if he still wrote movies.
He looked at me and frowned. “All the time.”
“Are you going to make any of them?”
Max sipped his wine, set it on the table, and a heavy sigh left his mouth. “Probably not.”
“Why?”
“I just write for myself now. I think I’ve said all I wanted to say in my movies that got made.”
There was something on his face that told me he didn’t want to talk about it. Maybe a kind of regret, or remorse, or…maybe exhaustion.
“I’m not sure how much longer I’m going to do this,” he said. And quickly, he added, “But that’s between you and me.”
I wondered if the movie he was making with our client, Jacqueline Marthers, would be his last. I had read the script and thought it would make an amazing movie. To think that I had played some small part in the creation of what may be Max Dalton’s last movie was thrilling and chilling at the same time.
More importantly, though, was the fact that he had apparently shared a secret with me. He trusted me enough to tell me he was thinking about getting out of the business. There was no way I’d breach his confidence.
“Okay,” I said, “so you write for yourself. Do you have all these scripts lying around somewhere?”
“Not lying around.” He smiled. “I keep them all in a desk drawer. Which,” he added, “is locked, so don’t think about stealing them and selling them on eBay.”
“What?!”
Max laughed heartily. “God, you’re fun to tease, you know that?”
“We have good banter.”
“Yes, we do.”
He lifted his wine, we clinked glasses, and drank.
We spent at least another lazy hour there, looking out over the vineyard, looking at each other, making mostly small talk. That is, until he brought up Chris.
“What’s he capable of?”
I shrugged. “What do you mean?”
“You told me what he did that night, but is there more?”
“No.”
His eyebrows rose. “Honest?”
“Honest. And I’d rather not talk about him right now.”
“Olivia, if I’m going to protect you, I need to know—”
“I don’t need you to protect me,” I said, a bit more acidly than I had intended. “If he comes back, I’ll call the cops.”
Max shook his head. “They won’t do anything. At least not until he crosses a major line and tries to hurt you, or actually hurts you.”
I knew he was right. Plus, there was the whole aspect of keeping this from my family.
By this time, however, now that Chris had showed up in L.A., I began to think there probably was more depth to his obsessively controlling anger. But what was I going to do? Express that fear to Max? Then what? I didn’t exactly know what Max was capable of, either. I really just wanted Chris to go away, back to Ohio, and stay there.
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.
THREE
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.