Maxed Out (7 page)

I bury my hands in my lap and clench my knees. He’s right. There’s
no way this can work. It seems so stupid and unfair.

“That’s us right now,” he continues. “We’ve been told
exactly what will happen – we understand exactly what will happen – and we
still want to go through with this.”

I’m trying my best not to cry in front of him.

“I’ve been thinking about this all week,” he says, slowly. “I
finally asked Ramirez why he never believed us when we told him things.”

“Because he’s an idiot,” I say.

“He said, ‘Coach, there’s just some things in life you gotta
try. You can’t go through life trying not to make mistakes. You just gotta make
sure that the ones you make are worth it.’”

“Breaking his arm for a tackle was worth it?”

“It secured us a spot in the playoffs last year,” Max says. He
pauses and looks at me for a second. I can hardly dare to breathe. “I think
that making the mistake of trying to make you happy for as long as I can is
worth it,” he finishes.

I catch a glimpse of happiness before it crumbles. This is
exactly what I’ve been dying to hear him say for days, but when he says it, all
I’m left with is this terrible bitter sinking feeling. It’s like all of my
uncertainties about this relationship came bubbling up at once, now that I’ve
made up my mind to commit to it. We don’t do this kind of thing, Max and I.
We’ve avoided such sappy romantic idealism and stuck to logical analysis and
discussion and openness. If we get back together under these terms, it won’t be
the relationship we had. We’ll be throwing away all that we’ve worked for all
these months when we solved our problems rationally, together. This is Max
throwing his heart at me and hoping for the best. This is the kind of thing we
both hate.

Tiffany would have a field day with this. When I was moping around
this week or daydreaming about this exact moment earlier today I didn’t care
about any of this stuff. I just wanted Max back. Now that he’s within my reach,
I don’t want him. My guidance system is tragically human. Goal is possible;
abort mission, it says. Go fail at something else.

Just like that, everything snaps into place. I’m
enlightened; I’ve hooked into the Cerebro of my love life and I’m finally
understanding the shape of it all. I’ve never had the goal of staying with Max.
He was the one who was out of my league and not my type when I was on a slump
and I’ve been trying to make him dump me ever since. Everything that worked
about our relationship was the result of a desperate battle between my rational
side and my subconscious desire for failure, with Max being far more reasonable
about the whole thing than he had any right to be. We didn’t work out because
of our rules and open discussions about everything, we worked out in
spite
of them – maybe not in spite, perhaps, since our understanding of how each
other felt certainly helped when we did get into fights, but I certainly didn’t
enter into a lengthy discussion of marriage on our second date with any of that
in mind. Part of me just wanted him to dump me so I could go back into my
slump. Not because I enjoyed sitting alone on the couch eating ice cream and
watching sitcom reruns, but because it was safe. Because I never had to worry
about being rejected, or having to work to accommodate someone else, or be
embarrassed about my habits or concerned what anyone thought about anything at
all.

I’ve gotten a taste of that again over the past few days.
Jeremy was cute, sure, but he wouldn’t challenge me. I decided I wanted our
brief fling to happen. I was in charge the entire time. I was the one who
called it off. At no point would I have ever had to make any sort of effort to
do anything to maintain a relationship with him: he was a toy. I would have
discarded him when I grew tired of playing. I might have gone through some of
the motions of pretending to care, perhaps, but it would have been purely for
the sake of performance.

What Max is asking me to do is to go back to what’s probably
been the only two sided, adult relationship I’ve had in my life. I’m scared.

“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” I say, slowly.

 “So we’re back together?” he asks.

I only hesitate for a split second. “Yes.”

Max smiles. He looks incredibly relieved.

“I’m glad I never got my stuff out,” I say. It’s a bit of an
effort not to bolt, but I’ve been dealing with harder challenges all my life.
Forcing myself to make good decisions is easy by comparison.

“So what happened with Jeremy?” Max says.

“He turned out to be a bit less of a jerk than I thought
previously and I was on rebound,” I say. “You interrupted us before anything
actually happened between us.”

I catch the briefest glimpse of anger on Max’s face as he
composes a response, but it fades quickly. “I meant at work,” he said. “We were
broken up; I would be an idiot if I held any grudges over your sex life during
the past week. What did he do that made him seem less like an asshole?”

“You don’t believe me,” I say.

“I’ve said like three times I don’t care what happened,” Max
says.

“You wouldn’t keep bringing it up if you actually didn’t
care. You’re emotionally invested. That’s okay. Nothing happened, really. I
wouldn’t lie to you like that.”

Max shakes his head. “I really don’t care. You can tell me
if something happened, but I’d rather you keep it to yourself.”

This is incredibly frustrating. “I just –“

“I don’t want to know,” he says.

“—told you exactly what happened,” I say, ignoring him. “Why
don’t you believe me?”

“Why do you care if I believe you if I’m okay with it?” he
says.

“Because we’ve always been about trust and honesty and
talking our way through these things,” I say. “What changed?”

“We talked about things honestly and decided to break up,”
Max says. “Remember? We weren’t working.”

“We weren’t working? That’s news to me. I thought you just
got a promotion so you didn’t think you’d be able to dedicate enough time to
the relationship.”

Max stares intently at his plate.

“Was that why we were breaking up?” I ask, suddenly furious.
“Was it because you thought we weren’t working and not because we wouldn’t have
any time together?”

“It was mostly because we wouldn’t have any time,” Max says,
slowly.

“Mostly?”

“I’ve just been really unsatisfied lately. I’ve been
juggling too many things.”

“You think I’m a ball you can drop?”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” he says, flustered. “I just
feel like I’m not able to put enough time into everything that matters.”

“So you’re saying I don’t matter.”

“You matter a lot, I just feel like I can’t afford to take
time away from other things to spend it with you.”

“So I don’t matter.”

Max is getting more agitated by the minute. “Look, I’m not
going to quit my job for you, okay?” he says. “That’s what it’s coming down to.
I have a finite amount of time. I can either work or spend it with you, and if
I don’t attend to one for twenty hours a day I lose it. I’ve been catching a
lot of flak lately from the rest of the staff about how I’m not spending as
much time at work as they are. My job is great. This is what I’ve wanted to do
my whole life – I’ve got a great position on a great team, I make good money,
and I love what I do. I’m not willing to give that up right now. Not for you.”

“This has never been a problem before,” I say.

“This has
always
been a problem,” he says. “There’s a
reason all the other guys at work are either single or married. I’ve been
constantly catching flak at work since we started dating. I’ve just gotten
tired of dealing with it.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Because you’ve been worth it,” he says.

“Which is why you dumped me,” I say, holding my ground. I’m
not going to let him make my emotions go all topsy-turvy that easily.

“There was a roadblock in our relationship and I couldn’t
find a way around it,” he says. “I was already time crunched and I’m going to
be working more in the future. What did you expect me to do?”

“So what changed?” I ask. I find myself incredibly nervous
suddenly. I’m pretty sure I know what’s coming up.

“I talked to some of the guys at work and they pointed
something out – “

“No,” I say.

“—it’s only the single guys that are expected to pull –“

“No. No. No. Stop. Bad idea. No.”

He doesn’t listen.

“—these sorts of ridiculous hours, the married ones –“

“I realize you’ve rehearsed this but I’m going to turn you
down, you can stop,”

“—get a free pass on that, which got me thinking –“

“Max, I will
not
marry you,” I say.

He looks hurt. “Would you let me finish?” he says.

“God no,” I say. “You just told me you wouldn’t quit your
job for me and now you want to buy me a rock and expect I’ll spend the rest of
my life with you? Fuck yourself.”

“You don’t seriously think that your income would support
both of us, do you?”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” I say. “You aren’t
willing to make sacrifices for me. You’re just willing to put up with mild
annoyances. Call me a romantic, but if I get married, it’s going to be to
someone that’s going to stick with me no matter what, not someone who wants
less hours at work and a tax break.”

“I really do love you, Jeanine,” he says. “I think we’re
great together.”

I sit and think for a while. Normally I’d dismiss this out
of hand but I want to make sure I don’t burn any bridges here needlessly. Marrying
Max wouldn’t really be that bad – I like the guy a lot, he makes a lot of
money, the sex is good, and we haven’t had any issues living together so far.

Still, he’s done a really shitty job of impressing me here.

Something Tiffany said a while back strikes me.

“How long have your parents been married?” I ask.

“They divorced when I was 8,” he says.

“We’re not getting married,” I say.

“Because of my parents?”

“Because it isn’t serious to you. You’re doing this because
it’s the only way you can keep us together, not because you want to spend the
rest of your life with me.”

“I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

“It’s a secondary consideration. You’d be willing to.”

“I think I know why I’m doing this,” he says.

When he puts it like that he just seems like an ass. It doesn’t
help that he’s wrong – I’ve learned a dozen times over that people deceive
themselves about their motivations. I don’t want to get caught up on a silly
detail, though, so I ignore it. “If you didn’t get special consideration from
work for getting married would you still want to marry me?” I say.

“Of course. Mind you, it’s in my contract that if I’m
married I get an extra three nights a week off and --”

I interrupt him. “So you’d marry me under your old hours.”

“Yes.”

“The same hours that you broke up with me over because you
felt like you were stretched too thin.”

He hesitates a fraction of a second here. “Yes.”

“We’d stay together forever?”

“Of course.”

“You’d agree to sign a pre-nup giving me all of your assets if
we divorced for any reason and half of your income thereafter?”

“That’s ridiculous,” he says.

“If we were together forever it wouldn’t matter.”

Max squirms. “That’s completely unfair. What if you had an
affair? How do I know you’re not just in it for the money?”

“If you don’t trust me why would you want to marry me?”

He opens his mouth as if to respond before comprehension
dawns, and then he sits there, slack jawed, eyes unfocused in contemplation. I
get up and grab my things. This is as good a stopping point as any, I figure.
These ideas will need time to sink in and I’ve got some things of my own to
think about.

I pause at the door and turn for a moment. “Goodnight, Max,”
I say. “We can talk more tomorrow.”

He looks incredibly crestfallen.

Back at Renee’s again, I spend the night trying not to feel
bad. It doesn’t work. Logically, I stand behind all of my reasoning entirely, but
I can’t shake the thought that Max and I were good together. I don’t want to
hurt him any more than I already have. Maybe being willing to get married, to
be tied down to me, is sacrifice enough. Maybe I’m asking too much.

Renee is out doing something somewhere with someone (likely
dinner with Will) so I’m left alone with my thoughts for far too long. Eventually,
I get tired of arguing with myself about Max and my mind starts to wander. When
it gets to Jeremy I can’t help but remember the story he was talking about
earlier, the one with the conspiracy and the gold vault and the maps. Ten
minutes later I’ve used every journalistic resource at my disposal to pull up a
satellite map of Europe with infrared and radar overlays. I cross-reference
this with a list of historical holdings of the Rothschild family and one very
complex query later I’ve narrowed my search radius down to what’s still a
disgustingly large portion of land. Even if I’m a bit more stringent with my
criteria and I only look at areas that that were owned by them or their
affiliates for more than a year, I’m still looking at like a quarter of the
continent. Manual searching is going to be impossible.

It’s going to be a battle of wits, then. Where would I hide
a vault? Jeremy never gave a specific date that I recall, but it’s a reasonable
assumption that this would have been constructed pre-satellite imaging. This
means it won’t be disguised very well. I try playing with the contrast and
cross-referencing regular area maps to look for anything that seems out of
place but this gets me nowhere – not like you’d need a very big vault to hold
all of the world’s gold, anyway; the stuff is valuable largely because it’s
rare. It would be easy to just build something over or around it to disguise
the location. Depending on what that thing is, there could be tactical
advantages as well – a military base over the vault could guard it
unintentionally. Or a bank. Or anything else with security --protecting a
museum isn’t that different from protecting a bank, and there’d be no suspicion
about wanting to keep the exact floor plan of a museum secret. My journalistic
training screams at me as I proceed to skim down all of the locations mentioned
in
The DaVinci Code
with no basis to back it up, but I can’t imagine the
Rothschilds being that melodramatic and I don’t find anything to suggest
otherwise. It would be something small, I’d imagine, and with their government
connections a military base would be more likely than anything else. Maybe. I
don’t eliminate the other possibilities as I weight options for a script to
sort locations by likeliness. Checking things manually will take forever. This
way at least I’ll be looking at more suspicious areas first.