The Perfect Liar

by Thomas Christopher Greene

  “Should I call the police?” she said, almost pleading, wanting Max to solve it for her, to fulfill her need for everything to have an easy solution, a pill you could take to make it go away.

  “Wait, wait. What did it say again?”

  She told him: “‘I know who you are.’”

  “No. Don’t call anyone, okay? It’s nothing, really. I’m sure of it. Listen, I’ve got to go, honey. And I’ll be home tonight and we can talk?”

  “Okay, Max,” she said, her voice suddenly frail.

  He hung up and slid the phone back into his pocket. He turned to the student in front of him. “Sorry about that.”

  A moment later, the faculty chair of the art program was next to him, a slender young Malaysian woman named Li. “Ready, Max?”

  “Always,” he said with a thin smile, though he didn’t believe it anymore.

  “Great.” She bounded onstage, and her introduction came to him in pieces: Max W was one of the significant voices in art today, and he was transforming the very understanding of what it meant to be a cultural producer. His work had been …

  Then Max walked slowly up the stairs to the wide stage, stopping to hug Li, taking her tiny body in his arms for a moment as if they knew each other better than they did, even though he had only met her for the first time last night. It was all part of the theater. The applause washed over him like warm rain. Max went to the podium and removed the microphone from its stand and looked out to the sea of faces. He waited for the silence, and a moment later it came. The room went still. He stared out at them and he didn’t speak right away. This was the moment he loved, playing with the audience, the tease of knowing they wanted to hear his voice and he was going to make them wait.

  But today something else was at work. Those words that Susannah had told him over the phone were burrowing like a worm into his mind. Max saw them floating in the air in front of him.

  I know who you are.

  Someone was fucking with him, and he was going to find out who. But first he had to get through this talk. Okay, he told himself, energy. Bring the energy.

  Max walked to the middle of the stage and stopped. He smiled broadly. “You are the art. We are the art. Everything you have ever learned is total bullshit. Listen. Listen to my story. Listen to the story I am about to tell you.”

  He felt the warm embrace of hundreds of people leaning into his words. He allowed it to engulf him for a moment, a summer breeze pushing him back, and then he leaned back into them.

  ON THE FLIGHT HOME MAX sipped vodka on ice and looked out the window at the thick dark clouds. He was new to academia, but eight months was plenty of time to see it was a thicket of petty jealousies and politics, tiny turf battles over things of insignificance. And nothing was worse than being popular and current, especially among an aging faculty. Max knew his hiring was controversial. Breaking new ground will always piss off the status quo.

  But why leave a note? If someone were on to him, wouldn’t the person just go to the chair of the department or even the provost of the university and say, This is what I found out? The university would have no choice but to fire Max. Though the appointment was just one piece of the puzzle—the talks and the word paintings were far more lucrative—it was the foundation, the agency Max needed to be Max W. It conferred legitimacy on the entire enterprise. If it went away, everything he had worked to create would unravel. And if someone had really started to dig, well, then, it would all be over.

  MAX THOUGHT SOMETIMES THAT IT was all as simple as his having been born wrong. He was born into the wrong family, into the wrong name, and into the wrong identity. He didn’t become a fraud, in his view, but emerged into the world that way fully formed.

  He was born Phil Wilbur in the tiny western New York town of Interlaken, located between two Finger Lakes, Seneca and Cayuga, a sad little town full of broken people that once he left he never returned to.

  His mother, Debbie, had him when she was sixteen, which Max always joked was a clear formula for success. They moved nearly every two years when he was young, but all within the same five-mile stretch of rural highway running between the lakes and through the woods. He was not sure why they moved so much, since each place was the same, some shitty apartment in a drafty old farmhouse.

  Sometimes his mother worked as a waitress and sometimes she cleaned houses, but mostly she drank cheap beer and chain-smoked generic cigarettes and wore pancake-thick blue eye shadow and got sucked into fucked-up relationships with a parade of losers that began, Max guessed, with his dad—whom she pointed out once at the grocery store a couple of weeks before he went to prison for kicking a guy to death outside a bar in Seneca Falls.

  Max’s father knew he was looking at his son, but he didn’t come over and say hello. He looked right through the two of them. The only thing he ever gave Max was his name, which, when Max grew old enough, he didn’t want anyway. Because of this history, when he looked back on it, Max felt as if he had grown up not belonging to anyone or anything, so that when it became time, it was easier to leave.

  One day in the summer Max was sixteen, he and his only close friend, Todd, hitchhiked down the highway to Ithaca. Todd knew a guy down there who sold pot, and the goal was to hitchhike there, score a bag of weed, then spend the day walking around the small city streets looking for girls.

  As it turned out, Todd’s friend didn’t have any to sell, but he got them high and they walked around anyway. Down near the bus station was a group of kids around their age, smoking cigarettes, sitting out front with guitars and signs asking for money, and Todd asked them if they had any green to sell. While they didn’t, that got them into conversation, and Todd and Max ended up spending the day with them, passing flasklike bottles of hobo wine. They were travelers. Crusty punks they called themselves, and when they told Max what they did, move from friendly city to friendly city, warm places in winter, up north in summer, camping where they could, scrapping together money and sharing everything, Max thought it was the most romantic and awesome thing he had ever heard. It beat the shit out of living in a crappy apartment with his mom, who was never around anyway.

  So that night both Max and Todd packed up backpacks, and the next night they slept out under the stars near the railroad tracks and got good and drunk with their new friends. For the next three years, Max traveled with them. They went as far south as Tallahassee, and as far north as Burlington, Vermont, where many years later Max and Susannah and Freddy would make their home.

  The punks lived on the streets and got hassled by the cops and became pros at all kinds of things. Each of the travelers had skills, and Max’s skill was with words. From an early age, he could talk someone into practically anything if he tried hard enough. He was especially good at panhandling. People trusted his face.

  But then one night, in New York City, Max had an awakening. He was about to turn twenty years old, and suddenly the life had lost its appeal. He was tired of being high and he was tired of being hungry and he was tired of fucking in tents where everyone around him could hear. This whole idea of being outside it all, something they talked about all the time with deep pride, how the rest of the world was straight and they were bent, all these sheep moving in a herd down city streets and these travelers doing their own thing, man, suddenly turned for him.

  Max didn’t want to be outside it all. He wanted to be inside it and he wanted to stir it all up. He wanted to figure out how it worked and make it his own.

  This part of the story had become part of his mythology. It was always in his talk. What happened next, though, was certainly not.

  Max with a group of four others had slept that night against a fence in a part of the Hudson Yards where they were starting to build a high-rise. The river was right behind it, and they stayed up talking and drinking and watching the boat traffic, like rich people with a view. Around them was a construction site, and it was a pretty good place to sleep if they didn’t mind waking with the sun and before the crews arrived. Though some
times, such as on this night, they got chased away in the middle of the night by a security truck and scattered quickly, gathering their stuff and running toward the West Side Highway. Usually they would find each other, regroup, and find another place to bed.

  But tonight, for some reason, Max just kept running. He ran up the side of the highway until his lungs started to burn. His friends, including the girl Hannah, this slender wisp of a thing he had been sleeping with for about a month, were somewhere behind him. For once he didn’t care.

  He walked until dawn. There is no trudge like a highway trudge, and by the time the sun came up, Max was on the side of 95 North with his thumb out. It was late June, and the sun even at this time of morning was hot. Cars and eighteen-wheelers were streaming by him, the hard rattle of them, and no one cared about this kid on the highway with a heavy backpack, since nothing says distress more than having your entire life in a bag.

  But then a black open Jeep Wrangler pulled over into the breakdown lane in front of him, and Max ran up on it.

  Behind the wheel was a man a little older than himself. He looked like Max actually, though his eyes were brown and he was almost as pretty as a girl, with long lashes and smooth cheeks and closely cropped hair.

  “Where you headed?”

  “Anywhere north.”

  “Hop in.”

  The air was thick and warm as they drove, and with the sides of the Jeep open the heavy weight of the heat smacked Max in the face.

  “Hey.” The guy driving turned to Max, speaking with a drawl that he would later learn was South Carolina Lowcountry. “I’m Max W.”

  “Phil Wilbur.”

  “Phil, a pleasure.”

  “Just W?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m from Charleston, and my last name, which is Westmoreland, is a big deal down there. The Westmorelands in Charleston are like the first military family. Fucking royalty. Have you heard of General Westmoreland?”

  Max shook his head. “No.”

  “Well, he ran Vietnam. The war. You heard of Vietnam?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, he ran that shit. Some people think he’s a war criminal. Though not in Charleston. He’s a fucking god there. And he was also my grandfather. But since I don’t think killing lots of people is something to be proud of, and if you didn’t notice, I’m also gayer than a picnic basket, I decided I would just call myself Max W. Plus, it sounds cool, don’t you think?”

  Max looked at him. His pretty brown eyes, the way his whole face seemed to laugh when he smiled. “Sure.”

  “Where you going, Phil?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, all right, then. Maybe we just drive then? What do you say?”

  “Sounds good to me.” Shortly after that, Max fell asleep.

  When he woke, they were near Albany, New York. He must have been asleep for at least three hours.

  “I thought about waking you,” Max W said, “but you were snoring like a bear, man. Thought you needed your rest. But hope I didn’t pass your stop.”

  “I don’t have a stop. I’m just traveling.”

  “Yeah? Well, if you want, you can come up with me. Going to my grandfather’s camp in the Adirondacks for a few nights. Place is empty. My family is usually there only in August. Needed to get out of Dodge, you know?”

  Max looked at him, his nice smile. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, man, definitely.”

  “All right.” Max sank back into his seat.

  An hour and a half later they pulled into the most remarkable driveway—if you can call it that—he had ever seen. It was a path through the woods, off the rural highway in Keene, New York, and at first it meandered in a single lane through trees, until it began to climb sharply. An ancient guardrail on the left looked as if it was made of cast iron, and as they went up, the drop-off on that side got steeper and steeper, and to the right of them the hill climbed upward in a forest of spruce and birch.

  “We climbing a mountain?”

  “Fuck yeah,” Max W said. “The camp is at the top of the mountain.”

  “Crazy.”

  Max wasn’t sure what he expected, a cabin maybe, but certainly not the house that greeted them at the end of that winding road. Built on a gentle knoll at the top, the sprawling old dark green wooden house had a giant porch that wrapped around it, full of chairs everywhere, a porch that looked as if it could seat well over a hundred. After they parked, Max turned around, and below them he could see a massive expanse of valley, and all around higher mountains loomed over. Looking down the valley, he felt as if he could see a hundred miles in the distance.

  Inside were thirty-foot ceilings, walls and ceilings paneled with dark brown wood, deer heads on the wall, ornate woodwork, a massive curved staircase, and a fireplace that he could have walked into and stood in.

  “You’re rich, huh?”

  “My great-grandfather on my mother’s side was a famous artist. Funny, right? War criminal on my father’s side, artist on my mom’s. Who do you think I take after? Hudson River School, he was. Heard of it? Lots of famous painters. He built this place in the 1890s. My family has been coming here every summer since.”

  “I’d live here all the time.”

  Max W laughed. “The only heat is that fireplace. And there’s no insulation. Plus, you could never get up the road.”

  “Got any booze?”

  “Tons. Come on.”

  In the big dining room with a chandelier made out of antlers was an old giant hutch, and inside it was a liquor cabinet with dozens upon dozens of bottles of all kinds of things, some of them covered in dust a half inch thick. Max W grabbed a bottle of bourbon, and they went out to the porch with two small glasses, and sitting there, with the long corridor of the valley beneath them, no houses visible, and just the two of them alone on top of a mountain getting drunk, Max suddenly felt the world was vast.

  Max W did most of the talking. He told his story. Like his great-grandfather, he was an artist, too, he said. He had gone to this fancy art school in California to paint and then also did graduate school there. “I got an MFA,” he said with a smile, “which makes me a Master of Fine Fucking Arts.”

  His trust fund allowed him to live in New York in a small apartment and try to crack the art world, as he put it. But lately he had been having doubts about all of it.

  “So much bullshit, Phil, you wouldn’t believe it. The whole gallery system is fucked. It ain’t who you know, it’s who you blow, you know what I mean?”

  Max nodded as if he did, but these were all new words to him.

  “Not sure I even want to paint anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause talent doesn’t matter, man. You see who gets rich and famous, right? It’s never about the art. Well, usually not. It’s who can spin a tale about their art. It’s just fucked up, I tell you.”

  Max found himself considering this, the idea that talent didn’t matter, because he didn’t have any. Later he would consider this more, when the idea of becoming an artist himself would start to take hold of him, like a cold that turns into a virus.

  But he wasn’t there yet. Instead he looked out at the mountains next to this guy he had just met and watched the sun fade from the sky.

  That night they grilled up a bunch of venison from the freezer that they thawed and opened and ate some cans of baked beans, too. The meat was especially good, and Max couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten meat that tasted like that, if ever.

  Max W showed him the house, and the art that had made his great-grandfather famous, some of which hung on those tall wooden walls. He showed him the eight bedrooms, and for the first time in his life Max wondered what it might be like to be rich, to have something like this.

  He could also tell that Max W wanted to fuck him and was warming to different thoughts on how to present the idea. Max wasn’t going to make it easy for him. Max knew all along that was the score, within minutes of getting in the car, but life on the road had taugh
t him that both boys and girls wanted him, something about the energy he gave off, but he also had learned from experience how to defend against it.

  After dinner they sat back out on the big porch next to each other on this long green bench and stared into the dark and smoked a joint. They had big glasses of bourbon and they had finished half of one open fifth and were on a new bottle. They grew quiet after the joint, and for Max this just amplified all the night sounds on the mountain, the shrill cry of coyotes far away, and closer, and more disconcertingly, some kind of grunting that sounded as if it was in the woods right below them. In his mind he pictured some big black bear moving through those trees in the dark, lumbering uphill, before rising up over the porch railing, big head and claws coming toward them.

  “Any bears here?”

  “Just you,” Max W said, leaning in toward him now. This was the moment. Max looked straight ahead and felt him, his lips grazing Max’s cheek and he turned toward him and allowed him to kiss him for the briefest of moments, turning away when he tried to put his tongue in Max’s mouth.

  Max reached down and unzipped his pants and pushed him that way. “That’s all you get.”

  Max W slid down there and looked up at Max. “Well, that’s an awful lot, Phil.”

  THERE WAS NO SPECIFIC MOMENT that Max could recall when he decided to kill him. It wasn’t that night, letting him blow him was the least he could do. And it had nothing to do with his being gay—Max couldn’t have cared less about that. It was just that the more they talked, this small germ of an idea Max had during the middle of that blow job—that he could kill him right now and not a soul would know Max was ever there—began to creep into his mind and it wouldn’t let go.

  Max said he wanted his own room, and Max W showed him to this room upstairs with a big canopied bed and Max said, “I’m serious. No coming in here, tonight, okay?”

  “What part of Southern gentleman wasn’t I clear about?”