The Perfect Liar

by Thomas Christopher Greene

  “Hello.” She held out her hand. “I’m Susannah.”

  “Max.” He took her hand in both of his, a newly practiced gesture, looking her in the eye.

  “Max?”

  “Max W.”

  “Just W? Is that short for something?”

  “It used to be.”

  “Well, you are mysterious, Max W. Can I get you a drink?” In her voice now Max heard the trace of an accent, European, Spanish maybe, and the way she said his name, the focused enunciation on her tongue, felt vaguely sexual.

  “Do you work here?”

  “I work for Lydia. Come, the bar is this way.”

  The room contained a particular class of New York intelligentsia, some of whom he recognized. All the novelists from Brooklyn named Jonathan were here, with their blocky glasses, and that ancient New Yorker art critic held court in one corner. And there was Lydia herself, instantly recognizable, seated on a white couch near the large window overlooking the park with her latest protégé, a young black graffiti artist who went by the moniker G Spot, sitting handsomely next to her.

  Lydia, according to one of the art rags, had discovered him tagging in a subway and started him working on canvas. He was the latest It boy and was for the obvious reasons being pitched by her as the next Basquiat.

  “Let me buy you a drink,” Max said to Susannah as they reached the bar.

  “They are free.”

  “I know that.”

  The bartender, who looked like a male model, with brushed-back black hair and the perfect five o’clock shadow, a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway up his impressive biceps—Curls for girls, Max thought—handed them each a glass of champagne.

  As they stepped away from the bar, Max held his glass to hers. “Cheers.”

  They moved toward the far wall, less crowded, where a painting caught Max’s eye. From one of the books that he had studied for moments exactly like this, he recognized it, an early de Kooning, a famous painting of a woman, slightly cubist in its inspiration, and as they moved close to it, Max saw that even though it was sixty or more years old, the paint still looked wet, as if the artist himself, long dead, had made those oil brushstrokes hours ago.

  “Are you an artist?” Susannah asked him.

  “Yes.”

  “Ah, I took you for a filmmaker.”

  “How come?”

  “The all-black,” she said with a sweep of her hand, taking in his body.

  He laughed. “No. But can you imagine having this in your house?”

  Now it was her turn to laugh. “You haven’t seen the half of it.”

  “I imagine not.”

  “How do you know Lydia?”

  “Well, I shouldn’t tell you this. But I don’t.”

  “But you got invited.”

  He leaned in close to her, though he didn’t have to, the room was full of voices and noise, the low undercurrent of piped-in jazz that he had not heard until now. “Can you keep a secret?”

  “That depends.”

  “Don’t call security, but I am crashing.”

  It was a gambit, this honesty, but if she took it, which he hoped she would, it was the kind of thing that could bring them together. Max looked her right in the eyes and they were astonishing, her eyes, such a deep golden brown and big. She did not look away but instead leaned up toward him with her soft, accented voice and said, “Why are you doing that?”

  “I wanted to meet Lydia.”

  “Well, you are about to do that, it appears.”

  And there was Lydia Garabedian, sliding up silently next to the two of them, her signature gray hair cut into a bob, her small dark eyes, her clothes, also a signature, white and flowing and loose.

  “Susannah, who is this?”

  Before Susannah could answer, Max pivoted so that he faced Lydia, and he looked down at this tiny woman who ruled the art world, who gave Jeff Koons, they said, the idea for the balloon sculptures, and who once told Damien Hirst that he should think about something primitive, a shark perhaps. For two decades she had been the great arbiter of taste for an entire universe of opinion.

  “Max W.”

  She tilted her head slightly as if taking this in. “I think I’ve heard of you.” Max did his best not to smile at this, since it was impossible. “Though I can’t remember where. What is it you make?”

  “I used to be a painter. Now I play with words and people.”

  “So you’re a writer?”

  “No, I am an artist. It is complicated. When the time is right, I would like to show you more. But I have to ask you, since you collect. What is your favorite piece of art that you own?”

  “For that you need to come into the bedroom with me.”

  Max gave her his best flirty grin. “Is that right?”

  “Follow me, Mr. Max W.”

  Lydia wove him skillfully through her party, leaving Susannah behind. Lydia took him through the expansive living room into a wide, windowless, and dark-wood lined dining room covered in drawings, some of which Max also recognized—sketches by Robert Rauschenberg. At the swinging doors to the kitchen, they went right down a narrow hallway and then into a large bedroom, a canopied bed in the middle of it, the shades open to the falling snow over the park.

  For a moment Max thought she was perhaps going to lift that billowy long white skirt of hers, some kind of play she made for younger men, as in This is the only art you need to know, but she said, “It’s over here, above my bed.”

  As they both moved down the side of the bed to get a better look, Max saw a small painting of the sun, unadorned, floating big and yellow in a sea of a blue.

  “I bought it for a dollar in a Tibetan market.”

  Max smiled at her as if this were the coolest thing, and not the cliché he considered it to be, the rich Western woman who could have any piece of art choosing this as her favorite. Behind it all was the statement of power, her telling Max that she alone got to decide what had value. She had taken this exact same walk many, many times, he knew, and had said these exact words to many others.

  “I can see why you like it.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “The simplicity.”

  “Yes. You are right. Now come this way.”

  They headed toward the windows, across the bed, and Lydia stopped now in front of another painting, small and rectangular, almost entirely in blue, a woman standing against a wall.

  “Now, this is my second-favorite painting.” Lydia smiled.

  Here again was the power, and the irony of it all, the contrast, for Max had studied enough to recognize the author’s hand, a Picasso, Blue Period.

  Lydia must have seen the look on his face, for she quickly said, “Would you like to be alone with it for a moment?”

  “That’s a terrible idea. I might slip it into my coat. I always secretly wanted to be an art thief.”

  Lydia laughed and he did, too, though Max was only partially joking. For if he thought he could have gotten it out of there and then found a way to move it, which given its profile would have been impossible, he might have considered it.

  Instead Lydia led him back out to her party and left him after making introductions to a group from Egypt, of all places, who were academics from what Max could tell, critics, and they had a pleasant enough conversation, though while they talked, Max looked past them to where Susannah stood in a small group, staring at her until she felt the heat of his eyes and had no choice but to return his gaze, which she did with a wry, nervous smile.

  In time Max headed to the bar for another drink. He stopped behind Susannah, and sensing his presence, she began to turn her head when he leaned down toward her, his breath on the back of her neck.

  In a soft whisper, Max said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  “I can’t yet,” she whispered back.

  Forty minutes later they were on the elevator down to the lobby, then out into the snowy night.

  “One drink at my place,” Max had said, and
she had said okay to this, telling him she couldn’t be long, that she had a teenage son at home, something that normally was a deal breaker for him—no husbands, no wives, no kids, was his rule—but tonight he put it aside.

  At the corner of Seventy-fourth, Max flagged down a cab, a luxury for him. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been in a cab. They rode slowly in the dark down the snowy avenues, one third the length of the city to Alphabet City.

  Max believed he had the gift to read people. He imagined he could often tell what they desired even before they knew it themselves. So when they came up the four flights of stairs to his studio apartment, one high-ceilinged room with books piled everywhere, some primitive paintings he had made on the walls, his bed a double mattress on the floor separated from the rest of the room by hanging tapestries, he led Susannah to the lone, visibly used low-slung midcentury couch and told her to wait there while he made them both a drink.

  Max returned with a little of the only thing he had, some kind of dark rum, in small mason jars with single ice cubes. He handed hers to her.

  “What is it?”

  He told her. Before she could take so much as a sip, he said, “Take off your clothes.”

  She laughed. “Excuse me?”

  “I want you to model for me.”

  “What makes you think I would do that?”

  Everything about you, he wanted to say.

  Some women want to be watched, to be gazed upon, and to have men drink them up with their eyes. She was one of them; Max saw it in her face. Her job now was to protest a bit before she relented.

  “You have modeled before.”

  “Yes, but in college. That was forever ago.”

  “Well, then you know what to do.”

  “Yes, I should leave.” She didn’t move from her spot.

  “But you don’t want to.”

  “Tell me what the W is short for.”

  “Westmoreland.”

  “Why don’t you use that?”

  “Because my grandfather was a war criminal.”

  “Your grandfather?”

  “General Westmoreland. He led the army in Vietnam.”

  “Nobody knows that.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “Okay.”

  “Can you take off your clothes, please?”

  Susannah looked around the room. Max saw her mind whirring with the possibilities, weighing her options, the pitting of raw desire against practical concerns. She brought the rum to her lips and sipped its molasses sweetness, and he knew he had her. She wasn’t going to leave; she was going to cross this divide with him.

  “It’s very bright in here. And I have mom tits.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Still, it’s so bright.”

  “I have candles.”

  Max went to the cabinet above the sink and took out some beeswax candles he had left there, half-burned but in holders, and brought them out and placed them on the coffee table and lit them. He then dimmed the main light switch partway, enough that the candlelight now licked up the walls in hiccups toward the ceiling.

  “Okay.”

  “I can’t believe I am doing this.” Susannah shook her head.

  “Just a body. After all, what is the physical?”

  “What are you going to do? Draw?”

  “Take notes.”

  “Notes?”

  “It’s my process.”

  “It’s like a nude beach.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m talking to myself,” she said. “You just have to do it all at once.”

  She was magnificent. The way she stood, turning her back to him, reaching behind her to deftly unzip herself, the wriggling out of her red dress, the unsnapping of her bra, the sense of weight lifted, the pile of clothes on the floor, her panties the last, falling softly on the pile with a release of her fingers.

  She turned back to Max, letting her arms fall to her side. He shamelessly took her in, as he knew she wanted him to. Her heavy breasts, the slope of her belly, the spiderweb of stretch marks above her narrow waist, the curve of her, the golden hue of her thighs.

  “How do you want me?”

  “Lie down please. Your head propped up on your elbow.”

  For the next forty-five minutes he moved around her with a pencil and a notepad, studying her as if she were a problem to be solved. He arranged her different ways. She gave in to it fully, as he suspected she might, since after all, hard as it might be to believe, this was more about her than it was about him.

  What Max did with everything he learned—the strength of her, the fragility of her, the perfection, the flaws, all of it colluding as one to become the singular her, the singular Susannah—didn’t matter so much as that she was the art, just as he thought of himself as the art.

  Mostly what he did was write down phrases. She stands feral like a deer. Eyes, wet, sad, hiding. She hates her nose and is wrong for hating it. Does she even know what love is? Scars profound and narrative, each tangled one of them.

  And so on.

  The next day Max would take those phrases and put them all over a big, stretched-out canvas. He would adorn them with swirls of white and black paint so that the words floated in a sea of it. Poetry? Painting? Or was it the fraudulent bullshit of a man without much natural talent trying to make his way?

  He would leave that to others to decide, but he thought that a life lived well had a lot in common with sleight of hand. Make them look one way, and they won’t even know what it is they are seeing. They will believe you. The assumption is always to believe. When you got right down it, that was the only thing Max believed.

  Eventually, that night, it was Susannah who came to him. He would remember the flush in her face when she rose off the couch, having had enough of his earnest attention. How she moved into him, lifting her head up to his, their lips colliding while his hand, on the small of her back, brought her closer. Max took her to bed.

  They fucked slowly and patiently, gentle waves slapping on a beach. After, they lay together for a while in silence, and Max saw no darkness in her that first night, not even when they stood outside and said goodbye in the chill with the snow tumbling down. He saw only the light she had within her, bright as the moon, and he wanted to see her again. Only with time would he learn that we all have light, and we all have dark. Sometimes it’s up to us which side wins. And sometimes it is not.

  SUSANNAH’S BEST FRIEND FROM NEW YORK, Rose, used to repeat this joke about how women know if they are going to fuck a man as soon as they shake hands. Susannah always thought it was just that—a joke—until the night Max walked into Lydia’s. He was gorgeous. Not in the usual ways either. He was tall and had a good jaw. But he was also bald or, at least, had shaved what might have been left. The day after, Susannah called Rose and said he was the Ed Harris bald-man exception, and everyone says that but in this case it was true.

  It was something about his hands on hers. Susannah always loved a man’s hands the most. His big hands felt electric. And then there was how he stared at her. She never felt more solid, less translucent, than when he looked at her.

  She wasn’t looking for a man. She had basically given up on that. People think New York must be easy for women—so many men! Men of all kinds and types, but more women than men are in New York. Susannah had been married for a long time. But then Joseph died and the idea of someone else was impossible to imagine. It took everything she had just to learn how to breathe again.

  Susannah met Joseph when she was an art student at Pratt. Later, she would say he saved her life. She had been having panic attacks and didn’t even know what they were. Sometimes she thought that her heart was going to explode in her chest: a bomb about to go off and the shrapnel like exploding stars destroying all of her. She was convinced she was going to die.

  One night after she smoked a joint with friends, it came on like a storm. She snuck away by herself and walked to St. Vincent’s Hospital, and the nurs
es left her in the waiting room for four hours, as if there was nothing wrong. Her heart was pounding out of her chest and she could not stop crying, but they did not care. From their perspective, Susannah was a twenty-one-year-old woman saying she was having a heart attack when she was probably just stoned.

  Almost to placate her, she thought, they eventually brought her into a room and hooked her up to an EKG machine. The Indian doctor told her she was suffering from anxiety. He said, go home and get some sleep. And tomorrow go to the college health center and ask to see a therapist.

  That is how Susannah met Joseph. He was her therapist. He was forty-nine years old, slightly heavy, and stood only five foot six. But he had a great head of curly dark hair gone to salt and pepper on the sides, intense black eyes, and he spoke with such assurance about everything. His voice was calming like a metronome. Susannah loved his voice and she loved how he used words. She couldn’t get enough of his voice. Just the sound of it was enough for her to feel at ease, to stop being aware of her heart.

  Others might have said that she fell under his spell. Some of her friends from that time went even further and suggested, though less directly to her, that he had exploited her; so typical, an older man in a professional role of authority taking advantage of a young woman. Rose, who was most direct with Susannah, even said that she worried that Susannah had Stockholm syndrome, where the kidnap victim falls in love with her captor.

  Susannah would have said those points of view insulted her role in how things evolved, for she made the first move. She was the one who persuaded Joseph to ignore his ethical obligations. Later, he would say he didn’t have a choice. Susannah had seduced him.

  How could he have possibly said no? You might be able to say no to beauty once, Joseph said, but you cannot say no to it the second time.

  She had been in therapy with him for a month, twice-weekly sessions that she looked forward to more than anything else in her life then. He was teaching her how to live. Susannah gave herself over completely to his soothing voice, his calibrated words, and after their first session she told herself that she would do whatever he asked.

  She hungered for his attention. She hated how fast that fifty-five minutes went, and she would often stare over his shoulder at the clock on the bookcase, trying to will it to slow down. Just let me be here longer, please.