“I just meant—”
“I know!” He laughed. “But there is no ‘but’ there.”
I shook my head. “That’s not true. Apparently, I drive you insane. No matter how remarkable I am.”
He began mincing garlic. “It’s just that there is a different version of you that makes it to air.” He stretched out his hand and calmly said, “I need the water chestnuts. If you didn’t eat them all.”
“Of course I didn’t eat them all.” I got up and handed him the container with two or three remaining water chestnuts.
He laughed. “Why are you so upset?”
“I’m not upset,” I replied, clearly upset. “As of now, I just don’t understand why you find it necessary to come into my house and point out everything you think is—”
“I want to be your friend, Hadley!” he shouted, and then he cursed which, to his credit, I hadn’t heard him do very often. Not as often as he always had on To the Max. Certainly not as much as he had on the set of America’s Fiercest Chef. “Though, for the life of me, I can’t really remember why right now. You sure don’t believe in making it easy, do you?”
I knew those last two sentences would resonate later, but I wasn’t there yet. I was still stuck on my observations regarding the foul language he was so well known for.
“Why do you have such a potty mouth?”
Dang it. Why did my Hee Haw conversational tactics always rise to the surface when it was most important that I not be viewed as a sheltered fourth grader? Thankfully he didn’t acknowledge “potty mouth,” apart from the raised corner of his mouth and the amused twinkle in his eye.
“It gets a reaction.”
“A good one?” I pushed.
He picked up his knife—my knife—and resumed his preparation. “I don’t get to just stay home and cook safe dishes that I’ve been making my entire life, Hadley. My entire career, my entire image, is based on this whole To the Max adventurer thing.”
I teetered up on my toes. “Oh! So, it’s an image? Is that what you’re saying? That when the camera is rolling, you flip it on like a switch? How is that any different than what you’re accusing me of?”
He kept cutting onions as he looked up at me and shook his head. “It’s not.” His attention returned to his masterful chopping. “Which is what I was trying to say. Or at least it’s what I was going to try to say, if you ever let me get there. That’s what I thought about last night and this morning. A lot. And so, yeah . . . I meant what I said. I stand by it. But I realized I’m exactly the same. We all are, probably. We probably have to be, to an extent. We just handle it differently. I’m a jerk, you’re the lost Judd sister.”
I had two choices. I could be the girl picking the cut of Wagyu off the floor or I could be the creator of the best dessert the greatest chef of our time had ever tasted.
I cleared my throat and forced myself to sit down calmly. I crossed my legs, composed myself, and said, “Okay, tell me what you mean. I’m Southern, Max. That’s always going to be there.”
“Yes, you’re Southern. And, well . . . at least from this New Yorker’s perspective, you have an accent. A twang, I guess you would say.” He’d said “twang” with as much twang as he could muster, but he’d also smiled a really sweet smile at me. He was forgiven this time. “And it’s endearing. Your real accent, Hadley? It’s sweet and warm and sexier than I care to admit. It has the power to make me feel like we’re living out a Tennessee Williams play. We’re Brick and Maggie, sitting out fanning ourselves on Big Daddy’s porch, lemonade in hand.”
I laughed. “Well, that’s about the nicest criticism I’ve ever received.”
Max shook his head. “That’s not the criticism. The criticism is that the minute a camera is on you, you become a bad community theatre version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”
I settled back into the chair. “Wow.”
I wasn’t looking at him, but I could feel his eyes on me. “I doubt your viewers see it that way. I think I only notice it—and I think it only bothers me—because I know how nice the real version is.”
I took the criticism—which, let’s face it, had been pretty nice, all in all—and processed it through my thoughts. The truth is, he was probably on to something, and I knew it was worth considering further.
“Sorry I overreacted.”
“I told you I’m not very skilled at this sort of talking.” He smiled and then returned his attention to the cutting board. “But, here’s the other thing I was thinking about with all of that. With you it’s something that happens under the lights, until someone yells, ‘Cut.’ When it comes to me, I’m not exactly sure when the public persona and I got all jumbled together. I mean, it was always me, just a more exaggerated version, I guess. A more ‘out there’ version. But at some point I think people began assuming I really lived that wild, reckless, playboy lifestyle all the time. And at some point their assumptions became true.” He added under his breath, “I really don’t know when that happened.”
He was heating olive oil in the pan and grating the ginger, and I finally began to feel calm about the prospect of the lunch. Not the lunch itself, of course. I’d have felt calm about the prospect of a burger. But I watched him and I thought, maybe for the first time, that he and I could actually do this. We could be friends. We could work together. We could be in the same room without jumping down each other’s throats or . . . well . . . being all over each other in any way we shouldn’t be.
“Max?” I began, and he looked up as he added his diced chicken to the pan. “How long has it been since you had a drink?”
He grabbed a wooden spoon from my drawer and tapped it against his knuckles. “Um . . . let’s see . . . I guess about four months. Is that right? Whatever day that was that the network shipped me off to Tranquility Peaks. I had some bourbon on the plane. I guess that was the last time.” He started moving the chicken around in the oil. “Why?”
“Tranquility Peaks?”
His hand—and, therefore, the chicken—stopped moving briefly, but then he picked right back up. But his voice was different. Like the casual comfort was being choked out of him.
“Um, yeah. You know . . . that’s where I . . . well, I thought you knew, actually. During my suspension, I had to—”
“Max, were you in rehab?”
Something resembling amusement skittered across his face. “Not rehab. Anger management.”
Oh. Well, that was good. That explained a lot, actually. The Max I met on the set of America’s Fiercest Chef desperately needed to learn to manage his anger. Clearly, he’d done it. Tranquility Peaks had done a service for the world, I figured.
“That’s great, Max. Really. There should never be any shame in doing work on ourselves and picking up new skills.” His stirring had picked up the pace, and amusement on his face had morphed into visible frustration. “Sorry. I didn’t mean for that to sound so patronizing.”
He shook his head. “It’s not you. It’s just . . . my manager. I think he kind of forgot there are actual human things at play in all of this. He’s always saying, ‘Not rehab, Max. Anger management.’” Max’s voice had risen about two octaves while quoting his manager. “And sure, maybe that’s the better answer for interviews or whatever.”