“Do you mind if I sit down?” Detective Scott said.
“Please.”
She sat down on the edge of the bed. “How are you feeling?”
“I’ve had better days.”
She smiled. “I bet.”
“It’s all very surreal.”
“Oh? What is?”
“How your life can change in an instant.”
“Tell me about that.”
Max shrugged. “It hasn’t sunk in.”
“You’re still in shock,” she said softly.
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“How did your life change?”
Detective Scott had kind eyes. Max sensed she was probably excellent at her job, for looking into her dark eyes he found himself almost wanting to tell her all of it, starting with that night in the Adirondacks when he became Max W. She had that way about her.
“One minute it’s a beautiful day. The next moment your friend falls and he’s fighting for his life.”
“That what happened? He fell?”
“Fell? Slipped? I don’t know. I was pretty far away.”
“Were you good friends?”
“No, I barely knew him. We were colleagues. We had just started hanging out, really.”
She nodded at this. “You said ‘your friend.’ But you taught together?”
“In the same department.”
“But you ran together?”
“It was our second time. It was something he did all the time. Trail running. I was new to it. He invited me.”
“So tell me everything you remember.”
Max walked her through it, as he had Susannah, though he started earlier, with how they were starting to become friends, that they seemed to have a lot in common, that David and his lovely wife had come to dinner and there they had talked about running and David was so passionate about it that Max became curious about this idea. Then David invited him and this was their second run together. David chose the spot and was familiar with it and Max had never been there before and didn’t know Vermont well.
As he relayed the events of that morning, their run, how far ahead David was, his turning toward Max, then falling into the water, Max’s attempts to get him out, how strong the current was, like nothing Max had ever before experienced, he was even more pleased with the strength of this story. It was threadless. It was one giant piece of cloth.
When Max finished, Detective Scott turned to Detective Loftus. “Anything I should have asked that I didn’t?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Oh, one more thing. I think they will do an autopsy and all that. But he had some serious marks around his neck. Lots of scratches. Any idea why?”
“There wasn’t much to hold on to,” Max said. “That pool was like a fast, swirling drain. I was grabbing on to whatever I could to try to get him out. At one point, it was only his head above water. I probably got his neck.”
Detective Scott nodded.”Makes sense. I don’t know if we will, but if we have other questions, you will be around? No travel coming up?”
Max remembered the Goldman talk. “Nothing this week. But I have a speech in New York next month.”
“A speech? Are you a politician?”
They both laughed.
“No, no. I give talks on art.”
“Of course, I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“It’s okay. I suppose us academics deserve it.”
“I’m terribly sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you.”
AFTER THEY LEFT, SUSANNAH CAME in and Max could tell she was running hot. He knew her too well. She was doing her best to hide it, but the giveaway, as she sat on the side of the bed and asked him if he was hungry, was her hands. In her lap, she was kneading them together over and over, all her fear visible in those slender fingers that were turning red from her effort.
“Not yet. I’m going to talk to the cameras.”
“Wait, no, why?”
“Because they won’t go away until I do. Don’t worry. It’ll be okay.”
“What did the police say?”
“They just wanted to know what happened.”
“What kind of things did they ask?”
“Just that. Listen, it was a hard day. But this is okay. A terrible thing happened. Sometimes terrible things happen. It was an accident, okay? An accident. We’ll get through this.”
Susannah nodded but looked as if she might hyperventilate.
“One more thing,” Max said. “Do you have a number for Joanie Hammer? I think I should call her. I only have David’s in my phone.”
“I don’t.”
“Can you try to find it?” Max wanted to give Susannah a job, something to focus on.
“Sure.”
Twenty minutes later, still wearing his running clothes, but barefoot and with a big bandage on the side of his head, Max emerged outside the front door. As soon as the door opened, people rushed toward him from the three satellite trucks, cameramen with the cameras on their shoulders following coiffed anchor-types coming across the lawn. Max stepped onto the porch so that they were below him. The two men and one woman each looked around twenty-five years old, and he could see in their faces and the way they held themselves that they were pale imitations of their national counterparts, but that they dreamed of bigger markets. Max knew something about that.
Max stood there and let them come to him. He knew he looked like shit. He looked exactly like a man who had almost drowned, which was precisely the optics the moment demanded.
The camera lights went on and were in his eyes. Questions were shouted that he ignored.
He spoke and they went quiet.
“I want to ask for privacy for me and my family. Our thoughts and prayers are with all those who loved David Hammer. He was a brilliant artist and a great teacher. It is a very sad day. I want everyone in the UVM community to know—”
Max choked up. He felt his voice break and he stopped talking for a moment. Max looked down, away from the bright lights and the eager faces in front of him. He covered his face with his hands and sobbed.
Max lifted his face back up. He took his hand away and let the tears flow.
“I did everything I could to try to save him. I wish I had done more—though I don’t know what that might have been. I am new to Vermont. But that is a very dangerous place: that gorge. When a fit, healthy man can simply fall into water and die, no one should swim there ever. Thank you.”
They shouted questions. But Max tried not to hear them and instead turned and opened the door and disappeared inside and closed it behind him, moving first toward Freddy and ruffling his hair before moving past him. Max took his wife into his arms, brought her fast-ticking heart next to his, and whispered into her ear, “It’s over now.”
THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED WERE the blurriest days of Susannah’s life. It was as if the death of David Hammer were a giant forest fire, consuming all the oxygen for miles around. After Max gave his remarks on the front steps of their house, the press disappeared from their front stoop, though the phone calls continued. No one answered the phone. But, thankfully, the police didn’t come back.
On Tuesday, there was a vigil on the great lawn at the university, and hundreds and hundreds of people came out, a sea of lit candles. They walked up together as a family. Max had asked to say a few words, and a makeshift stage was in front of one of the red stone buildings. The university president, a large man with an impressive head of black hair, spoke first. For a president, he wasn’t a gifted speaker. His words were obviously written for him and came out stilted, but Susannah barely listened anyway. She was focused on Joanie Hammer, standing behind him. She looked so tight. Her face had a look of panic Susannah recognized, as if the mask had been taken off Joanie and underneath was just a raw tangle of fear.
Sometimes Susannah saw a similar look on her own face, in photographs that others had taken when she was unaware of the camera, times when she was at a party and lost in her thoughts, o
blivious that what she projected was pure, unadulterated tension.
On the big lawn, Freddy saw some friends of his and disappeared into the crowd.
Max had left her, too, and was now stage right, waiting to be called. Susannah found herself drifting backward, away from the stage and deeper into the crowd. She realized she was afraid of being seen as the wife of the man who had been with David that day. She didn’t know why this scared her—maybe it was simply the size of the crowd and not wanting eyes on her. If she was asked, she wondered if she would deny it, like Simon Peter from her Catholic childhood.
After the president finished, Max’s boss, Ernst Werner, the chair of the art department, spoke. He was short and had to pull the microphone down to his face. His German accent was thick and clipped. He told a story about the first time he saw David Hammer, how he couldn’t believe this man was the artist he had heard about, someone who was making waves with the ephemeral art he did. Instead, Ernst said, David looked like an accountant from some white-shoe firm. This got a laugh. Then Ernst talked about the teacher David was, how he always had extra time for his students, what a natural he was in the classroom. A selfless, wonderful man. Especially, Ernst said, his voice choking up, when it came to the love of his life, Joanie.
Ernst turned and looked toward her. “He was a model to many of us for how to live and love.”
Ernst turned around and stepped back.
Max came to the microphone, his head still bandaged. Susannah stepped backward and into the darker shadow of a maple tree, leaned against it and looked across the quad to the stage where her husband’s strong face was framed in light.
“Hello, everyone.” Max adjusted the microphone back up toward him. Susannah felt a stir in the crowd at the sound of his voice, as if everyone all at once leaned forward into his words. The power that Max had from a stage, the place he was most at home.
For a moment, Max just stood there, taking everyone in. He had told her once, “Audiences are patient, Susannah, they want you to be slow with them, bring them into your embrace. No matter how big the room, your job is to make it intimate. It’s not a hard trick, but few do it well.”
When he began to talk again, he surprised Susannah by telling the story of David’s final hours. It didn’t seem appropriate, but she could tell people were riveted. The only sound was Max’s voice booming out into the night and the sound of cars moving slowly down Main Street.
“We were in the woods. The air was thick and stifling. The flies were terrible, all over us. But David loved it. He loved every moment of it. He was an unbelievable runner. He moved like a deer through those woods and in that heat. He was a half mile in front of me and there was no way I could keep up with him.”
Suddenly, someone was next to Susannah. She turned and on her left was the state cop, the woman. Susannah didn’t remember her name and almost didn’t recognize her, since she wasn’t in uniform.
As if sensing this, the trooper said, “Detective Scott.”
“I remember.”
“He has a way with words, your husband.”
“David Hammer died the way he chose to live,” Max intoned from the stage.
Susannah nodded. “Yes, he does.”
“I can’t say I knew him well,” Max said. “And many of you know this, but academia can be a hard place to make friends.” Knowing chuckles came from the crowd. “But David lent me his hand in friendship. He reached out and said, ‘Welcome.’ We broke bread together, David and Joanie, and me and my wife, Susannah. I should have done more that day. I should have fought harder. I can’t help but believe that if the situation were reversed, if I was the one that fell, David would have saved me. I have to live with that the rest of my life. But, Joanie: I cannot fathom the depth of your sorrow. I am so sorry.”
Max stopped talking but didn’t leave the podium. He stood there, much as he had done on the stoop of his house in front of the cameras and put his head in his hands. Susannah could not hear him cry but his shoulders shook. Everyone was still and everyone was quiet. Next to Susannah, Detective Scott said nothing.
Then Joanie came up to him from behind, and as if sensing her, Max turned, and he took her in his arms, and for the longest time they just hugged, her face in his shoulder.
Somewhere in the crowd, someone started to clap, then everyone was, the sound of hands clapping growing louder and louder, and for what felt like forever, it didn’t end, the most sustained ovation of Max’s life.
JOANIE DID NOT SPEAK. THE university chaplain closed out the vigil with a prayer, people putting their heads down.
When he finished, Detective Scott turned to Susannah again. “Your husband, did he study theater?”
“No, he’s an artist, why?”
The trooper looked at her in the dark and snuffed out her candle. “Seems like something he’d be good at, don’t you think?”
“I have to find my son.” Susannah turned away from her.
“Susannah.” Susannah stopped. The detective moved toward her, and Susannah braced herself instinctively, but what Scott did was hand her a card. “Call me if you ever want to talk.”
“Why would I want to talk?”
“You feel safe at home?”
“Of course. What kind of question is that?”
“One we’re supposed to ask.” Scott shrugged. “But you do look like a woman with a story to tell.”
“I’m not good at stories.” Susannah put the card in the front pocket of her jeans and turned her back to the trooper and walked toward where she had watched Freddy disappear an hour ago.
A PART OF SUSANNAH DESPERATELY wanted to believe the story that Max had told her, the story that he told to the television cameras at their front door, that he told to the hundreds who gathered in the warm spring night in the shadow of those grand old academic buildings.
She wanted to believe that it was an accident, that David Hammer lost his footing and slipped. But Susannah had seen the look on Max’s face that night they ate out on their porch with the Hammers, and she kept remembering something he had told her when he moved from making his word paintings to giving his talks:
“The power of a story is in repetition. It’s iterative. If you say something enough times, and say it with authority, you will be believed. It’s all in the delivery and in being consistent. Do that, and an audience will lick the words out of your hands like they are their own.”
The memorial service was that Friday at the Ira Allen Chapel on campus. The morning of it, she went for her run. The air was cool and the skies were leaden and gray and it looked like rain. A breeze was blowing off the lake, and as she came down and past it, it looked like the ocean in winter, wide and gray and covered with whitecaps.
As she ran, Susannah kept seeing in her mind David Hammer standing on the rocky riverbank, sweat glistening from the run, looking at Max, who had come down the hill breathing hard. Does Max go for his neck first? Or does he push him in and follow him in after?
On the path along the lake, Susannah stopped running. She stood with her hands on her hips looking out at the water. The ferry was on its way in from Plattsburgh, but otherwise the lake was devoid of boats. On sunny days, the whole stretch toward the mountains was peppered with sailboats, like something out of Matisse. But today, it was just gray.
She stood there looking out and feeling the breeze push her hair away from her face. The funny thing was, she thought, that sometimes—perhaps because you were in love, and make no mistake, she loved this man, really loved him—you could float on the surface of things and not see the dark depths in front of you. As she stood on that walkway, other runners going by and kids like Freddy zooming on their skateboards, it sank in her belly like a stone that her husband had killed another man, another living, breathing human being. Max had snuffed him out of the world as easily as if he were a candle blown out at the end of a vigil.
That first note suddenly seemed like a lifetime ago. But the words were still raw and fresh.
I kno
w who you are.
And this was the thing Susannah knew about panic, about the white bear: sometimes it clouded your judgment so that you could never see what was in front of you. Back when she read the note, she knew that it was creepy, that it was meant for them, and that it felt menacing, a violation of their new home. It never occurred to her, until now, that it might be specific. A bell went off in her head.
“How well do you know him, Susannah?” Rose had said that day at the Standard Grill, so long ago now, in the city life Susannah once led.
Susannah had dismissed the question, since she believed she saw the contours of his heart, and when you know those, is there anything else that really matters?
They were both just orphans in the world when they met, weren’t they?
But then again, what if David Hammer knew something about Max from the time before? The art world was a small place. She remembered David on their porch asking Max about CalArts, though she was so blurry with anxiety that night that she couldn’t remember how he answered any of it. Max didn’t like to talk about the past, which was hardly a crime, though he had a philosophical answer to this as well. Talking about the future was far more interesting, he said.
“Nobody cares who you were,” he said in his talks. “They care who you wish to become. The caterpillar becomes a butterfly. The world doesn’t stop. But it pays attention, for a fleeting moment, to the new beat of wings.”
Maybe David Hammer cared, Susannah thought. Maybe he found out something about Max that he never wanted anyone else to know, not even her. Betrayals come in both big and small forms.
Susannah started to run again. She was headed away from their house, following the shore of the lake north. For a bit she ran as fast as she could, as if she could exorcise these dark thoughts from her mind if only her legs pumped fast enough.
THE MEMORIAL SERVICE WAS PACKED. Susannah pleaded with Max on the way there to sit in the back. She was worried about the crowd, feeling them close in around her, but he was insistent that it was only appropriate that they move up to the front. As they walked down the aisle, Susannah heard the whispering, a distant Greek chorus, as everyone, all at once, seemed to recognize Max. That’s him, the one that was there that day. That’s Max W, the famous artist that everyone is talking about.
The Perfect Liar Page 12