The Perfect Liar

by Thomas Christopher Greene

  One night after one of these sessions, Susannah walked out into the spring night and waited across Fourth Street from his office. She wasn’t positive—he was secretive about these things—but she thought she was his last patient of the day. She stood there for about fifteen minutes, then he came out the door, shuffling with that odd walk of his. He didn’t look across the street but instead headed right, and she followed him from the other side. He didn’t go far. Halfway down the block he stopped and went into the Slaughtered Lamb Pub.

  In her head, Susannah counted to fifty. When she reached it, she crossed the street and went to the door of the bar and opened it. The small wooden tables inside were half-full and so was the bar, with Joseph sitting by himself partway down, reading a tattered paperback with a tumbler of brown liquor in front of him. He bent forward as he read, getting close to the page, as if the reading glasses on the end of his nose didn’t quite work. With time she would find this habit of his endearing.

  So engrossed was he in the book that he didn’t look up as she slid onto the stool next to him, tight enough that he had to shuffle a bit to his left to let her in, which he did without glancing in her direction.

  Once she sat, Susannah turned and studied his oblivious face for a moment. His gaze didn’t waver from his book, and she could see the little tufts of gray hair in his ears. She was so close to him that she could have just leaned forward and kissed the smooth flesh of his cheeks, the place where the lines were starting to frame his mouth. She could smell his aftershave, like mint.

  Then the bartender was in front of her. “Something to drink?”

  “I’ll have what he’s having.” She pointed to the tumbler in front of Joseph.

  “Jack neat,” the bartender said.

  “Susannah,” Joseph said, her voice getting his attention. “What are you doing here?”

  She turned fully to him now, and he glared at her. “Hi, Joseph.”

  “You can’t be here.”

  She looked around in mock surprise. “Why not? It’s a public place, isn’t it?”

  “We talked about this when I began seeing you. I gave you my rules on if we see each other in public. There are ethical obligations. We are not friends. We cannot be friends.”

  “I don’t want to be your friend, Joseph.”

  He gave her that famous hard stare of his, one she had seen before, over the glasses perched on his nose, as if, should he glare at her, she would just suddenly bend to his will, stand up, throw a ten on the bar for her untouched drink, and walk out into the spring evening.

  But something else was in that look because she had seen it before from him, how he took her in sometimes with his eyes when he thought she didn’t notice.

  She didn’t budge, and Joseph turned back to his book and pretended she wasn’t there. They sat in relative silence, the bar conversations and hum of the restaurant around them. Susannah liked just being close to him like this, as if she could hear him thinking, that deep, delicate mind whirring like a clock.

  When he finished his drink, Susannah thought he would pay and leave, but he ordered another, and she did, too, and when he took a pull off his whiskey, he looked at her and Susannah boldly said, “Take me home with you.”

  “That’s not a good idea.”

  “There are other therapists. I can see someone else.”

  “That’s hardly the point.”

  “Take me home with you.”

  That night in his book-lined West Village loft, he screwed her the way she imagined only an older man could. He was not like the college boys she had been with before, who treated sex like some kind of sport or a race, climbing on her like a rabbit and just going.

  Instead he undressed her, savored her, talked to her in that deep, soothing voice, and loved her slowly and beautifully. Afterward, they lay in his big bed with the windows open to the blare of the city, Joseph on his back breathing hard, her right hand running over his hairy broad chest as she dove her face into the crook of his arm and smelled his tired body.

  A week later Susannah left her high-rise dorm and moved in with him. Once a week she visited his office as she had before, and they pretended they were not lovers, that they did not live together, that she did not want to be his wife.

  For those fifty-five minutes he was her therapist, and he challenged her, and sometimes she pushed back. But their life at home always seeped in and it was different. Most important to Susannah, though, her panic receded. When she was with Joseph, it always did, as if he were some giant placebo she popped into her mouth. Just hearing his voice calmed her, and in those early years together he owned her completely. One moment Susannah was all wild pony, and the next she was channeling the passive compliance of her Spanish mother, and Joseph knew how to get her there.

  He saw right through her. One time they were in session, early summer, and they had been living together for a few months. Outside the windows of his office it was pouring hard, a late-afternoon thunderstorm and dark like winter. Susannah had been talking about her parents, how they didn’t understand why she would want to go to art school, why anyone would even think that becoming a painter was an option.

  Her parents were immigrants who left Madrid when she was six and her sister was eight and brought them to Queens for a job where her dad drove a delivery truck. Her parents were deeply Catholic, and all through high school not a single boy had ever made it past the doorway of their small house. Her mother went to Mass every single morning. Her father went on both weekend mornings.

  Susannah knew the things they hoped for her, and none of them involved whom she quickly became, the girl who in high school smoked pot and hung out with black boys with dreadlocks. She was the girl who only wanted to draw things, not study. She found everything else boring and distracting. She embodied everything her parents feared about coming to America.

  Why couldn’t she be more like her big sister, Cristina, who studied accounting and had already found a good man, a fellow Spanish striver named David who had his eyes on Wall Street and doing something with his life? On making a family? How could she tell her parents that what they had, the life, the beliefs, the closed tiny world, was exactly what she was running from? That she only believed in Jesus on Sundays and then only for a moment, when Susannah found herself staring at him suspended above the altar and something about the sadness in his downward-turned face on the cross spoke to her, not as God but as a sad-eyed man?

  A few weeks before, Cristina had come to visit her in the city. She had made the mistake of telling her about Joseph, for Susannah loved him and wanted her sister to know, and even though she saw in Cristina’s face the sharp look of disapproval, she pressed forward. That night, after Cristina left, Susannah’s father called her.

  “End it,” he said in Spanish, “Or don’t come back here.”

  “I love him.”

  “End it or don’t come back, Susannah.”

  “You should meet him, Papa.”

  “The man is my age. You are a child. It is sick and wrong. End it, Susannah.” He hung up.

  Sitting in Joseph’s office later, they were talking about this, and suddenly Joseph’s eyes narrowed and he gave her that look, the questioning one he had.

  “You are taking your birth control?”

  “What kind of question is that? Of course I am.”

  “I haven’t seen you take it.”

  “What the fuck are you saying? That I am trying to get pregnant?”

  Joseph shrugged, as if this were no big deal. “Some women do it, you know. They do it to accelerate things, to make them more serious. I want you to know I would be very upset, Susannah.”

  She started to cry, more in anger than in sadness. She rose out of her chair. “Is this what you think of me? Is this really who you think I am?”

  “Sit down.”

  “Don’t you tell me what to fucking do.”

  She left, out into his waiting room, down the rickety wooden stairs, and through the door to Fourth Street
and the falling rain.

  ANOTHER TIME JOSEPH GAVE HER a bunch of tests, to establish a baseline, he said, including one, a questionnaire, he called “the ‘fuck you’ test.” The higher you scored on it, the less likely you were to say “fuck you,” or so he said. It had a more technical name but she didn’t remember what it was. It measured both conformity and leadership, she remembered. On conformity she scored only 2 percent on a scale of 100, which meant she was very likely to say “fuck you,” and he should have known that, she thought, and that what followed was his fault.

  After that afternoon fight in his office, he wanted to watch her take her birth control at night, and he was vigilant about it. Each night before bed he waited for Susannah to slip that small white pill on her tongue and swallow it, looking at her with some kind of paternalistic pride, in her view, as if she were a child.

  That look of smug self-satisfaction on his face made her pretend a month later she had her period, and instead of the white pills, one day after another she took the little red ones instead, the fake ones you popped just to stay in the routine.

  During that time and on those summer nights with the sounds of the city filling her ears, Susannah rode Joseph as if it were her job.

  And that was the thing about it. She was only twenty-one, and with all the wisdom of that age she wasn’t thinking about a baby, or a life, but only about getting pregnant. It wasn’t conscious, this act, and as impossible as that sounds, it was simply about not wanting Joseph, or anyone else, telling her what to do. Susannah couldn’t abide that, which was why she went to art school in the first place and why she graded high on the “fuck you” test.

  She knew she was pregnant long before she confirmed it, and long before she told Joseph. Susannah felt that baby growing in her like a plant. It reminded her of when she was a kid and her father would tell her not to eat watermelon seeds, that if she did, inside her belly a watermelon would grow and take over her whole insides, leaves growing up toward her mouth. Susannah used to believe that, and sometimes in the bedroom she shared with Cristina, Susannah would lie under the covers at night and imagine what that would feel like. Her father said it to make her laugh or maybe to scare her, but it did neither. Susannah loved the idea that she could make fruit.

  For sixteen weeks she harbored this secret. Her belly rounded out, her breasts got bigger and sensitive, and Joseph didn’t notice at all. He did notice that a calm had come over her, as if the fire and the anger she had carried like a cross had somehow been—extinguished is the wrong word—turned into love.

  Susannah loved Joseph more and took care of him, and he in turn began to show her a kindness that went beyond his interest in her body and dissecting her mind. Some mornings those days before his first appointment they would lie in bed for hours, both awake, curled into each other like sleeping puppies.

  Then she told him.

  His fury showed in his balled-up fists and the vein prominent on his forehead, and for a moment she thought he might strike her.

  “Abort it.”

  She shook her head. “I won’t. I am Catholic.”

  He laughed at this. “Catholic? Oh, come on. Being raised Catholic doesn’t make you Catholic. We’re not having a baby.”

  “You’re right. We are not. I am.”

  In that moment, she saw something that she had not previously known to be true. Joseph needed her as much as she needed him. All along, she had felt as if he owned all the power, that she lived in his place, not theirs; that he was healing her, and not her, him. But in truth, he didn’t want to lose her. He couldn’t imagine losing her. Susannah found something sad in seeing this in him, all his supremacy fading from his knowing black eyes and leaving a paunchy middle-aged man in its place.

  A healthy big baby boy with a thatch of black hair and dark Spanish eyes came that following February. She named him Ferdinand, after her favorite children’s book, about the bull that doesn’t want to fight and only wants to smell the flowers. She named him Ferdinand but she called him Freddy, and she realized that while she thought she had been in love before she had a baby, she had not. Not even close.

  Susannah was entirely unprepared for what she felt. In Freddy’s first months, sometimes it overwhelmed her and she couldn’t stop crying. For all his years of listening in treatments, Joseph had no way of understanding why she was inconsolable, for it was definitely closer to joy than sadness, but somewhere in the ambiguous middle between those poles.

  On Easter Sunday of that year she bundled up Ferdinand and took him in a cab out to Queens. It was the end of March and the day was sunny but unseasonably cold. Her family didn’t know she was coming. When the cab went over the bridge from Manhattan, the East River gray below them, she looked out the window to the small web of neighborhoods, tiny houses upon tiny houses, where her family had moved to from Spain when she was child.

  Susannah had the cab drop her off a few houses away from the small ranch house that her parents owned. She wore a scarf covering her hair, a bright red one, and a long overcoat, and cradled Ferdinand in her arms, his tiny body within the warmth of her coat. He had fallen asleep on the ride and was just waking up, beautiful and sleepy eyed and not yet asking for milk.

  When she reached the front of the house, she stopped for a moment. She knew that with the scarf on her head she was virtually unrecognizable. Even though the day was bright and sunny, her parents’ house was on the shady side of the street, and through the picture window she saw her sister, Cristina, in front of the dining room table, setting it for dinner. Behind her was her husband, David, holding their toddler, Susannah’s nephew, Jorge, whom she had never met. Her father, short and stout with his head of thick gray hair, was tousling the boy’s hair. Her mother, as usual, was invisible, no doubt in the kitchen, tending to a roast leg of lamb, her potatoes, stained red with paprika, in a cast-iron pan on the stovetop.

  Susannah walked up the driveway. Up the cement path to the metal screen door, the same one that had always been there, a giant X over the faded glass, the one that slammed shut when it closed. Behind it the storm door was a solid pale yellow, no windows. She looked at the glowing orange circle around the doorbell, then down at Ferdinand, his big dark eyes open and wet and looking back at her. Then she rang the doorbell.

  She heard footfalls. The door swung open and it was Cristina, and Susannah watched her face go strange when she saw the son in Susannah’s arms.

  “Susannah. What?”

  But before Susannah could answer, her father was there, shorter than her sister, his shirt with his name on it, his thick gray hair pushed off to the right side, and his wrinkled olive face. He looked from Susannah’s face down to Ferdinand.

  “Papa,” Susannah said. “This is your grandson.”

  “That’s not my grandson,” he spat back.

  “He came out of my body.”

  Her father shook his head. His eyes were dark. “Not in my house, Susannah. You are not welcome here.”

  She began to cry, and her sister, now behind her father, did as well. Her father loved children and Susannah did not expect this cruelty. Behind them Susannah saw her small mother in her apron, and despite the wanting and the sadness in her eyes, Susannah knew her mother was no help at all. Her mother didn’t even bother to move forward.

  “Papa, we’re here for Easter.”

  He closed the door and she heard the turn of the lock, and on cue Freddy started to scream. Her baby was hungry.

  They moved away from the house and to the curb, where she sat down and in the cold day opened her coat and unbuttoned her blouse to give her son a nipple. She felt the release into his mouth like a shudder. She leaned her face down into his wet black hair while he sucked and she wiped her tears on his tiny head.

  They were in New York City, on a neighborhood street, one of the most densely populated places on earth. In the distance she heard the rumble of cars on the expressway somewhere above them. But the street itself was holiday quiet. Everyone was inside. Behind them s
tood her childhood home. In front, across the river, lay Manhattan. In six years Joseph would die of a heart attack, making Susannah a widow at twenty-seven. But in that moment watching her baby nurse, she decided that the world would always be just the two of them, her and Freddy, and that was okay. What else did they need?

  Thirteen years later, Max walked into a party.

  MAX WAS ABOUT TO GO onstage in Chicago when Susannah called to tell him about the note. He stood next to this graduate student from the Art Institute watching the big theater-style space slowly fill up. She was a pretty brunette who had been assigned as his handler and who had, the night before at the dinner the faculty threw for him at the chair’s house, made it abundantly clear without saying anything that if he wanted to take her back to his hotel, she would be more than willing to open her legs. When he was younger, Max might have taken her up on it, but one of the greatest gifts of getting older, he thought, was learning discipline. Deferring gratification can be a pleasure unto itself.

  His phone started to vibrate in his pocket, and when he pulled it out, it was Susannah. He declined the call, and a moment later it rang again. They had an agreement that if either of them needed to reach the other one urgently, they would call twice in rapid succession. That said, the only time they had ever used this was during a fight, when one of them disappeared to cool off. It wasn’t really the intent, but they did it anyway. No one ignored a Bat-Signal, Max thought. But now, as far as he knew, they weren’t fighting, so he answered.

  “Hey, baby, I’m about to go on. All okay?”

  Her words came out in a torrent. A blur of nonsense at first, something about running in the rain, and Max thought, She is having one of her bouts and I can’t deal with this now. He needed to have his head in the right space. The stage was in front of him, only a few feet away, waiting for him, the place he belonged more than any other. Then Susannah was talking about some note, and when she read what it said, she suddenly had his attention.