Harder We Fade (7 page)

Getting to know Monica and Loralei was good for me. It was nice to have some girlfriends and feel like there was more to my life than work and home. Not that either of those aspects of my new life with Max were lacking in any way. It’s just that sometimes you need space even from the things you value most.

What I didn’t plan on, however, was the revelation that occurred one day while the three of us were having lunch in Beverly Hills.

We were halfway through our meal when Monica asked about the new production company. I told her how hard Max was working, and she said, “He’s always been a workaholic as long as I’ve known him. But, trust me, I’ve never seen him happier, and it’s not just about the company. I can’t imagine Max ever being giddy about something, but you’ve almost made him that way.”

It was such a sweet compliment, especially coming from someone who had known him for years. I started to thank her, but Loralei spoke first.

“I agree. Even happier than when he was with Ty, and I never thought I’d see that.”

Monica looked at Loralei, then immediately noticed the quizzical expression on my face, and she probably saw me swallow hard, too.

“Oh, sorry,” Loralei said. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“No.” I cleared my throat and reached for my drink, desperately needing to wash away the sudden dryness in my mouth and throat. I’d never felt so jealous in my life. And Max had never mentioned anyone named Ty. “I don’t know who that is.”

The two of them looked at each other, as if they were engaged in some kind of telepathic rock-paper-scissors decision over which one should tell me about her.

Loralei said, “Tyler Morgan. She lived with Max for a year.”

“Just over ten months,” Monica added.

Loralei looked at Monica. “Close enough.” She looked back at me. “Anyway, they were pretty serious. But Max didn’t know she had a secret life going on.”

My stomach sank and I felt like I was going to lose everything I’d just eaten. I tried to keep a stoic look on my face, though. I didn’t want to give them any reason to stop telling the story.

“She was an up-and-coming actress,” Loralei said. “She hadn’t been in anything big yet, but her name was tossed around town for several projects by major directors. And one of those was Max.”

“But it never happened. She was heavily into drugs,” Monica said.

“I don’t know how she hid it from Max all that time,” Loralei said. “Or how she hid it from us. Nobody noticed a thing. Until the end…”

The end.
Those words were so ominous, I feared the worst. That somehow Max had caught her using, or she’d been arrested, or simply bolted and left Max with a broken heart.

“It all happened so fast,” Loralei continued, “everyone was in shock. Definitely not as much as Max, but…she OD’d one night outside a club in LA. Max was on a location shoot in south Florida.”

The waiter came by, dropped off the check, and Monica grabbed it. “So I get the call. I’m still not sure why that happened. But Carl and I went to the hospital and were given the news. Carl called Max and he flew home overnight.”

“Jesus,” was all I could manage, as I looked away from them and watched a droplet of condensation slide down my glass.

“I’ve never heard him say a word about it since,” Monica said.

Loralei’s expression agreed with Monica. “That’s probably why he never told you.”

Yeah, I thought. That could be why. But this was an aspect of Max’s life I wanted to know about. Not just because it was another girl he had loved, but I wondered if he was really, truly over her, and what, if anything, all of it had to do with his need to protect me.

After lunch, alone in my car, I Googled Tyler Morgan. I didn’t want to do that at the table in front of Loralei and Monica. I just wanted the topic to go away at that moment, and it did, but I was still immensely curious about her.

I could only find a few pictures. I immediately started to compare myself to her. She was taller than me, and had lighter hair. Her face had angular features, while mine were softer. In short, we looked nothing alike, and I found some relief in that.

I got to the office and found Max sitting on the couch. Papers were strewn everywhere — next to him, on the table, on the floor — but all in neat stacks, no mess. I’d seen it before. He was in script deconstruction mode, a process he always did that involved actually physically taking a script apart and playing around with rearranging scenes. He had done it a few times with screenwriting software, but gave that up, saying this method made him think better.

He looked up as I stepped into his office. “I thought you were spending the day with the ladies.”

I closed the door behind me, freezing in place as I stared at him.

He moved the papers off his lap and stood. “What’s wrong, Liv?” He could always read my face in a microsecond.

When he got close to me, I threw my arms around his waist, feeling myself enveloped in his strong embrace.

He kissed me on the forehead.

I looked up. “I’m sorry, but I have to know.” I swallowed hard as he looked down at me, a look of extreme concern on his face. “Tell me about Ty.”

Max’s eyes closed instantly as he let out a heavy, long sigh.

“I don’t talk about it.”

“Yeah, I kind of picked up on that.”

He paused, then said, “It’s in the past, Olivia. It doesn’t mean anything anymore.”

“It matters to me.”

“Why?”

I pulled him by the hand and we went over to the couch. Max sat and I lowered myself onto his lap, putting my arms around his neck.

“It’s a part of you,” I said. “I want to know.”

He shook his head.

“Is it too painful?” I asked.

“I told you, it doesn’t matter anymore. I worked through it and I’m over it. It’s like it was never part of my life.”

I got a chill down my spine when he said that. For some reason, I took it as coldly as one could possibly mean it.

“That sounds terrible,” he continued, correcting himself. “I don’t mean it like that. I had to move on, and the only way to do that was to not look back.”

Although the circumstances were different, that’s kind of what I had been doing with regard to Chris. There was nothing harsh about my decision to dismiss Chris from my past, and now I understood that Max didn’t mean it that way about Tyler Morgan, either.

And then, suddenly, without any prompting from me, Max reversed his earlier statement about not talking about her and he opened up. “She lived with me. It wasn’t quite a year. Did they tell you this already?”

“Some of it,” I said.

Max emitted a soft laugh. “Let me guess. Loralei slipped up.”

“How’d you know?”

“She’s always doing shit like that. Be careful what you tell her. I thought about telling you when Krystal was in real trouble.”

I hadn’t even considered a connection between the two. “Is that why you helped her?”

He nodded. “It happens all the time, especially in this town, but because she’s a friend of yours, it was too close to home and I knew if I didn’t try to help it would haunt me.”

“You saved her life.”

“I don’t know about that,” he said.

I pushed back from him, taking his face between my hands. “You did.”

I kissed him and we fell together — Max on his back, me on top of him. It wasn’t sexual, it was purely an emotional moment.

I lay my head on his chest, thinking about all that I’d just learned about him, and decided to let the silence continue for a few moments.

“I love this town,” he said, “almost everything about it. I’ve just seen that too many times, and with her…it was unbearable.”

I watched his face turn to stone as he stared at the window. I didn’t know what to say, which was fine, because I knew I needed to let him proceed at his own comfortable pace.

He looked at me. “I had a problem, Liv. For about six months.” He let it hang there without finishing.

“What do you mean?” I said.

He turned his head to look away from me again.

I put my hand on his chin and turned his head back toward me, and he offered no resistance. “Max, you had a problem…?”

“Coke. I had done my share of weed, but I eventually gave in to the temptation of coke. It was everywhere. Everyone had it, everyone was doing it, everyone was sharing or selling. I was at my weakest point in life. It was just after ‘Circus Daydream’ came out. A few weeks after, actually.”

He was talking about his one and only box-office flop. It was a script he had written hastily at the urging of the studio. Max had told me once that it was in the top three regrets of his professional life. He caved to their demands. They wanted to rush something else out that had his name attached to the project, and “Circus Daydream” was the only thing he had ready to go at the moment.

It was a script he had written when he was nineteen and had never gone back to do a rewrite on it. He made this clear to the studio execs, and they said they’d give him time to do a fresh draft. The time they gave him turned out to be two days. They rushed production, cast a relatively unknown actor for the lead, and the movie tanked upon release. It was one of the worst opening weekends for a highly anticipated summer blockbuster in the studio’s history.

“I was at a beach party in Santa Monica, and the stuff was everywhere. I was drunk and had hit a bong a few times, and then I tried coke for the first time. Before I knew it, that’s all I was doing. Staying up for days on end, missing important phone calls and meetings, lashing out at people — verbally, not physically — and I wasn’t myself. Carl and Anthony took me to a rehab center. I checked in willingly, by the way.”

“My God, Max. I had no idea.”

He huffed out a little laugh. “Yeah, almost nobody does.”

“Your mom?”

He put his head back on the seat. “No, I lied and told her I was on business for a while and that I’d be out of the country. She bought it. I was in rehab for 90 days. That first night was the loneliest night of my life. I stayed up visualizing my entire life being wiped away, everything I had worked so hard for.”

I lowered my head so our faces were close to each other. “You saved Krystal’s life like Anthony and Carl saved yours. Don’t you see that?”

“I just did what I could.”

A few days before flying to Ohio for Christmas, I went to see Max’s mother. Alone.

With things becoming serious between Max and me, I wanted to be a part of his entire world, and for me that meant making an effort to be closer with his mom, someone who was extremely important in his life.

I told Max that I wanted to make it a day trip, treat Paula to lunch, and give her the Christmas gift I’d purchased for her.

So I called Paula that morning and surprised her. I figured she wouldn’t have any plans, as she didn’t do much socially, and she said she’d be excited to see me.

I picked her up at her house and we went to a little restaurant tucked between a shoe store and a nail place in a strip mall.

The place had a wood floor that creaked with each step, and the air was redolent of grilled meat and steamed vegetables. A perky hostess lead us to a table near the front of the restaurant where Paula sat with her back to the window and I sat across from her, with a clear view of the sidewalk and street.

We both ordered salads with grilled salmon chunks and as we ate, she told me more about Max as a child.

“He was always a little introverted and quiet. Did he ever tell you the story about how he didn’t talk until he was four?”

I stopped chewing, surprised, and shook my head.

She laughed lightly. “He made noises and the typical cooing that you’d expect from a baby. But the more his father and I tried to get him to speak, the more he would look at us like we were aliens or something. We became concerned about it, so I took him to the pediatrician.”

“Wow.”

She nodded, sipping her tea. “Yeah, we had just reached a point of panic, I suppose. We knew he wasn’t deaf — he would respond to noises — but we feared maybe it was something neurological. But it wasn’t anything. You know what the doctor told me?”

“What?”

“He said, ‘Maybe he just doesn’t have anything to say.’”

We both laughed at that. Not only because it was a funny comment coming from a medical professional, but because we were talking about Max, whose entire life was built around using words.

Actually, written words more than spoken, now that I thought of it. Maybe that had something to do with him being more comfortable writing words that others would speak.

Then again, he was never at a loss of words when it came to me….

“He’s nothing like that now,” I said, not elaborating any further.

“Oh, no, he’s much different.”

“So, when did he start talking?”

She thought about it for a few seconds as she chewed and then said, “Five and a half. Then he wouldn’t stop. Of course he started to become a little withdrawn and that’s when he started writing.”

I looked out the glass front of the restaurant because a woman walking by caught my eye. Her entire head was wrapped in gauze. I briefly wondered if she had been in some kind of accident, but then when I saw her oversized breasts, I realized that she probably had just had some work done north of her new boobs.

“I’m sure he told you about our life before California?” Paula asked.

“He did.”

A somber look overtook her face like a veil of sadness and regret.

“I’m not going to ask,” I reassured her. “But I’d love to know anything else you’d like to share about Max.”

Her face brightened again. Clearly he was the jewel of her life. She was so proud of him, as well she should be.

“You’re the first young woman he’s introduced me to.”

“Really…”

She said, “I mean, aside from when he was a teenager. He had a girlfriend that we knew, but only somewhat. In California, though, he’s always kept his girlfriends to himself. I’m not sure what that’s all about. I’m a nice person, easy to get along with.”

She really was. “I don’t think it has anything to do with you,” I said. I wondered if he had ever so much as mentioned Tyler to his mother. Maybe it was better that I not find out the hard way.

She lowered her voice and said, “He’s nothing like his father.”

I just looked at Paula, her eyes radiating sincerity.

“I know,” I said. “And for what it’s worth, I really love him.”

Later, when we got back to her house, she made orange spice tea, and told me it was a Christmas tradition with her family that her great-grandmother started. I pretended to like it, but worried a little about future Christmases with her. I’d have to find a way around that. At least she didn’t offer me any fruitcake.

I sat on the couch with a dog on each side of me. I couldn’t have told you which was Zeke and which was Dolly. But who really cared? They were cute and friendly, and the more time I spent at Paula’s house, the more I realized they truly were her live-in family.

“This is wonderful,” she said, as she opened the Christmas gift I gave her. “I’m going to put it right up here.” She walked over to the fireplace and put it on the mantle, just above the three stockings, one of which had my name on it.

The gift was a framed picture of Max and me, taken by Anthony on the night we had the cookout. The Pacific was in the background, the sun was setting, and Max had playfully grabbed me by the waist, dipped me in dramatic fashion, and kissed me. Anthony snapped the picture without us knowing.

It was then that I noticed for the first time, despite having been in her house several times, that the only picture she had displayed in the entire house was one of Max as a baby. There were no other family photos. I wondered if there was a sad reason for that, and figured there probably was.

The way she looked at the picture of Max and me made my heart warm.

Paula said, “I have something for you, too.” She went to the Christmas tree and retrieved a small wrapped box.

“You really shouldn’t have, Paula.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said as she made her way over to the couch and sat down beside me. “I have that stocking with your name on it hung by the chimney with care” — she smiled and winked — “and even though I wish you were going to be here with us, I know how important it is to be with your family.” She held the box out.

I opened my hand and took it. “Thank you.” I started to unwrap the paper, thinking the box was just the right size to hold a watch or bracelet.

But it was neither. I opened the rectangular box to find a sterling silver spoon.

“This,” Paula said, “was Max’s spoon when he was a baby.”

I took a deep breath, suddenly having realized I’d been holding it in. “It’s beautiful,” I said, “but…why?”

Her head turned quickly to look from the spoon to me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean it to sound ungrateful. I’m just…surprised. Don’t you want to keep this?”

“I’ve had it for years, and it’s one of my most precious possessions, but I want you to have it. When Max and I left his father, I didn’t bring much with me. But this was one of those things. In the back of my mind, I thought it might be of value in case we had to sell it. Sterling silver might have fetched a hundred dollars or so, and it would have been good in a pinch, but thankfully I didn’t have to sell it.”

I thought back to Max telling me how he had blackmailed his father before leaving, and that was the money that kept them afloat for a while. I wondered if his mother knew that, but there was no way I was going to ask.

“Oh, no,” I said, genuinely feeling sorry for her, but also at the thought of the two of them trying to make a new life away from the abusive man she married and who fathered the man I loved.

I was feeling a bit unworthy of taking this amazing gift, but I also knew I couldn’t reject it. That would have been an insult of the highest order.

I reached out for her and we hugged.

“I want you to have it,” she said, “because you’re going to be Max’s wife and the mother of his children.”

I pulled back from her, my arms still on her shoulders. I could feel my eyes drying out quickly from being open wide and not being able to blink.

“Relax,” she said. “I don’t know when it’s going to happen. I just know it is. I can read my son. Trust me. And I don’t know when you’ll have your first child. I may not be around to see the day.”