The Perfect Liar

by Thomas Christopher Greene

  Though she couldn’t hear a single word, just a murmur that went through the grand old chapel as they moved past.

  They settled into the third row, and at least, Susannah thought, they were on the aisle. Freddy didn’t come. Max tried to reason with him, it was an important rite of passage, something to mark, etc.—but Freddy said, “Look, I didn’t know the dude.”

  Susannah let it go. She couldn’t fight with a teenager. Not today.

  The ceremony was a fog, and an odd replay of the vigil on the green, many of the same speakers, sans Max. After the minister spoke, a beautiful reed-thin older woman rose and walked up to the pulpit. It was David Hammer’s mother.

  With a rich Southern accent she began to talk about her son. Susannah wouldn’t remember her exact words, but at one point she stopped, then her elegant voice cracked as she said, “The cruelest thing in the world is burying your child.”

  When she said that, Susannah lost it. Max put his hand on her back as the tears came forcefully. For the first time that day, Susannah was fully present, looking up at the pained face of a woman she did not know behind the pulpit, hearing the voice of one mother who could have spoken for all mothers with those words.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, MAX returned to his office to find Detective Scott waiting for him in the hallway. He saw her first. She was reading the bulletin board across from his office while she waited, the way all the students did, the posters announcing speakers and vigils and the like, though she was in her trooper uniform, her elaborate hat tucked under one arm.

  Max took a deep breath and then let it go before she sensed him. She turned to him, and as he walked toward her, he smiled.

  “Sorry to show up unannounced.”

  “Not a problem.” Max swept his hand toward his door. “Please, come in.”

  They went into his small office. Max closed the door behind them. He dropped his messenger bag on top of his desk and motioned to the chairs in front of it and she went to one and sat down. He went behind his desk and sat in his chair, as if it were just another office-hours meeting. Detective Scott was taking in the room. The bookcase with the smattering of art and art-theory books, the photo on top of it of Susannah taken on a Manhattan street in winter, her red hair cascading to her shoulders and her eyes bright against the snowy day. The word painting he had done of her years ago above it on the wall, the only one he had ever kept, the word FERAL in bold caps slicing across the middle of the white canvas and through other words written smaller and in different scripts.

  Detective Scott was pretty but severe looking. Her curly black hair was tight to her head and held back by a hair clip at the base of her neck. But her eyes were deep and intense, and now they looked up at Max and he wondered where this was headed.

  “I could have called, but I thought it would be better to talk in person.”

  “I’m glad you came by.”

  “Are you?” She looked at him quizzically.

  “Yes. Phones can be impersonal, don’t you think?” Max tapped his fingers lightly on the desk before correcting himself.

  “I’ll jump to it. The state’s coroner has ruled the death an accidental drowning.”

  Max peered at her. “Did you expect something different?”

  “The drowning part doesn’t surprise me. The accidental is somewhat subjective.”

  “I don’t know what you’re suggesting.”

  She shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter. The good news for you is that the state’s attorney considers this matter closed.”

  Max smiled at her. “You sound disappointed, Detective. By the way, what is your first name? Detective seems so impersonal.”

  “Dolores.”

  “Dolores. I like that.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s old-fashioned. Not a name you hear anymore.”

  “My Puerto Rican mother liked it. It means ‘sorrows.’”

  “Sounds like you’re in the right line of work.”

  “Anyway, I am not disappointed, to answer your first question. I just wonder—”

  “What?”

  “A very fit, very athletic young man just slips. Standing on a rock and he just slips. Doesn’t make a ton of sense, does it?”

  “It was wet.”

  Detective Scott shook her head. “I’ve stood on that rock when it’s wet. Wearing shoes like this.” She lifted up her foot to show him her shiny black shoes, smooth soled on the bottom. “Mr. Hammer was wearing running shoes with good traction. I didn’t feel that it was slippery at all.”

  “I was twenty yards away at least. So I just saw him fall. I didn’t see what led up to it. But it sounds like there is something you want to say, so just say it. We’re both grown-ups here.”

  The detective sighed and stared at Max for a long moment before turning her gaze to the wall, and he watched as her eyes moved up to the canvas full of words.

  “Is that yours?”

  “Yes, early work. I don’t paint anything anymore.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I turned the idea of life modeling on its head. Rather than see form and classical shape, I saw emotion. I did that with Susannah modeling for me, back when we first met. She took off her clothes and lay nude on my couch and I walked around her for an hour and didn’t filter my thoughts—just wrote down what came to me as I studied her. Later, I put them on canvas. Nothing too complicated. Only requires a beautiful woman to disrobe for you.”

  “I imagine that was never difficult for you.”

  “Do you find me persuasive, Dolores?” Max saw her brace a bit at his use of the familiar.

  “Doesn’t matter what I think. Clearly you are good at what you do. Anyway, I won’t take any more of your time. As I said, you can consider this matter closed.”

  Max nodded and watched her stand. “It’s never closed, though, is it? I mean, just because you say so. I have to live with what I saw for the rest of my life. What I failed to do.”

  “Right. There’s that. Have a good rest of the day.”

  Max watched her walk toward the door. “You can leave it open.”

  She stepped out into the hallway and was gone. He went to the window of his office, which overlooked the parking lot. A moment later he saw her emerge from the back door and he watched her walk across the parking lot to her car, which he could tell was a cruiser even though it was unmarked, the big antenna pointing up off the roof a giveaway for anyone who had ever spent time on the streets. It was a narcmobile, Max thought, the language coming back to him as if it had never left.

  “Are you going to look up?” Max said audibly under his breath. “If you look up, you’re not done with this, even if the state says you’re supposed to be.”

  She reached the car, put her hand on the door handle, then stopped. Max watched as her eyes ran up the side of the building, taking in the windows until she reached his.

  THAT NIGHT THEY WERE IN the kitchen and Susannah was cooking and Max was sitting at the island with a glass of wine when he told her Detective Scott had come to see him. Susannah felt her breath catch in her throat but Max continued. What he said was mostly a blur but the long and short of it was that the autopsy had come in, and they had ruled the death accidental, and not suspicious. David Hammer had died from drowning. There would be no more investigation or need to talk to Max.

  Susannah studied his face when he told her this. He was a practiced liar, she now knew, and he was acting casually about the whole thing, as if he had just gotten news that his class schedule had been rearranged, or as if he were talking to a receptionist setting up a dentist’s appointment for a cleaning.

  But all through dinner and then after, Susannah felt an energy coming off him that she had not seen in a long time. He was electric, Max was, a bundle of kinetic energy. She saw it in his eyes, and in his hands across from her at dinner, the clench and release, the three of them eating enchiladas as if they were any American family on a weeknight, talking about work and school and looking at the planner
on the wall filled in with a Sharpie with the week’s coming events.

  As soon as Freddy disappeared, Max did the dishes. Susannah was standing at the counter when he dried his hands on a cloth and came up behind her. He slid his arms under her and leaned down and his mouth was suddenly on her neck and she felt him hard under his jeans and against her ass.

  “Oh, really?” Susannah said.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Freddy could walk in.”

  “Freddy is knee-deep in an alternative world upstairs.”

  Max knew how to get her going. “The garage?” she said.

  “What am I?”

  “The mechanic who fixed my car and I couldn’t pay the bill.”

  “How we going to resolve this problem of ours?” Max said in that working-class New York accent. It never got old for her.

  “Stop it,” she said jokingly, in a tone that showed she didn’t mean it.

  “Never.”

  They moved into the garage, locking the door with the dead bolt behind her. Max bent her over the hood of the Volkswagen, lifted her skirt, and when he pushed inside her, there was that urgency, his hands rough as he held her hips. Sometimes men just needed to fuck, Susannah knew. They needed to let it out, not just the release either, but the whole thing. The feeling of being inside a woman, taking her, the ownership that can come when you agree how and why you let yourself go.

  Afterward and upstairs, they showered and he was gentle with her, this man that she should have been afraid of. He massaged her shoulders while the water ran over both of them. He reached around her and held her by the belly, his fingers over the scars she wore from Freddy that he called beautiful. All scars tell a story. He whispered that he loved her. Susannah kicked her head back and moved into him over and over.

  BUT LATER, AFTER HE FELL asleep, Susannah was restless. Max slept like the dead some nights. She felt alone, even though he was there, and suddenly a deep, inexplicable pang of loneliness swept over her. She looked at the clock. It was eleven-thirty.

  Susannah climbed out of bed and walked down the hallway to Freddy’s room. Light was under the door. She stood outside for a minute, listening, and thought about how children become teenagers and they were like having a tenant. When do you impose yourself?

  She knocked. “Freddy?” she said softly.

  The door opened. He wore baggy shorts and a long T-shirt. “What’s up?”

  “You going to sleep?”

  He shrugged. “Soon, I guess.”

  He didn’t want to talk to her, and it saddened Susannah. It wasn’t long ago that he was her shadow, and now he was swimming away from her, leaving the spawning grounds for the wide ocean, and it was part of growing up, she knew, but it still stung a little bit. Where did her little boy go?

  “Okay.” Susannah reached out and ruffled his hair. “Don’t stay up too late.”

  “I won’t.” Freddy closed the door.

  Susannah went downstairs. All the lights were off except for the light above the stove, the one next to the vent, and it cast a yellow glow out into the kitchen.

  Max’s laptop was sitting on top of the island. She opened it and it came to life and she typed in his password, Susannahlovealways, and it flickered to life. This is trust, she thought, knowing each other’s password, so why are you doing this?

  Susannah clicked on his browser and the Google screen was there and she typed in Max W and pages of results came up. Articles with headlines such as “Artist Makes Splash by Putting Words to Canvas” and “Radical Artist Max W on Why Making Things Is a Waste of Time.”

  Susannah had read all of these before, and now she scrolled past them. She moved down the page, to the next one, and she didn’t know what she was looking for, but then she saw something that caught her eye:

  “Area Family Has Not Given Up Hope in Finding Missing Son.”

  Susannah clicked on it. It was an article, four years old, from a South Carolina newspaper:

  The family of Maxwell Westmoreland of Charleston hopes that their son is still alive and that someone may have knowledge of his whereabouts. Mr. Westmoreland was last seen at the family’s vacation home in upstate New York though he is thought to have disappeared from New York City on or about June 13, 2005. Mr. Westmoreland lived in New York City and was working as an artist, according to the family spokesperson, Clifford Mayes. Prior to moving to New York, Mr. Westmoreland had graduated from the California Institute of the Arts, where he earned both a BFA and an MFA in painting. The Westmoreland family is prominent, with roots deep in South Carolina. The missing man’s grandfather is the late General William Westmoreland, who commanded US forces during the Vietnam War.

  Susannah could barely breathe. She read the short piece again, then looked at the photo of the young man in it, and while there was a resemblance, it was clearly not her Max. But in her head were his words to her that very first night they met: “General Westmoreland was my grandfather.”

  Later he said he was joking and that he didn’t even know who his grandfather was. He said that his grandfather was most likely some professional dirtbag living in a small western New York town. Probably in jail like my dad, Max said. I come from a long line of winners.

  But why, in this case, did this missing man have the same name as her husband, why did he have the same degrees her husband had, and the famous grandfather her husband once joked was his before correcting it? And why did her Max always insist that his degrees never be publicly disclosed? Any bio of him anywhere never mentioned where he went to school.

  “Let them think my education was the streets,” he told her once. “And in reality they were. I learned more about art being homeless than I ever did at an expensive art school.”

  Her head swirled. She stared at the screen. She read that short article again and again as if by doing so it would somehow come into clear relief and Susannah would know what she was looking at.

  She was so engrossed that she didn’t sense Max coming up behind her. He put his hands on her shoulders and she practically jumped out of her skin.

  By the time his fingers were on her skin, it was too late for her to close the laptop.

  Susannah started to shake. Max leaned down next to her. His face rested on her shoulder, his breath was hot on her ear. She knew he was looking at what she had been looking at.

  He spoke softly. “It’s time for a talk, love.”

  MAX BROUGHT SUSANNAH OUTSIDE IN the dark. He led her by the hand. He took her through the kitchen and out into the backyard, down the steps and across the patio. They were barefoot and the grass was dewy on their feet. Max took her across to the far corner of the yard, where a wooden swing sat in front of the rows of peonies that separated their property from the one behind it.

  They sat down on the swing, their feet anchoring it on the ground. They would not be swinging. It was as if Max, holding her hand, felt all of her in his fingers. He could sense that motor starting to run, as if she were a kite about to fly away from him if he didn’t coax her back down to earth.

  Susannah looked up at Max and it was light enough that he could see the shape of her features but not her eyes, which meant she couldn’t see his eyes either.

  “I need to tell you a story. A story you can never tell anyone.”

  “What did you do? I don’t want to know.”

  “It’s probably not what you’re thinking. Please, Susannah, just listen, okay? It’s not a bad story, I promise. It has a happy ending.”

  She was nodding but looking away from him toward the back of their house.

  Over the years, Max had learned that a story can be told in many different ways, especially with a rapt audience. But when the stakes were high, such as at this moment, there were a couple of different schools of thought on how to proceed. Max decided to get the biggest shock out of the way first. Treat it like boot camp, in other words, break her down and then work, slowly, to build her back up.

  “My name is not Max Westmoreland. Well, it is actually. But it
wasn’t always.”

  Her voice got hard. “What is your name?”

  “Phil Wilbur. That’s how I was born.”

  “What else have you fucking lied about?” she said loudly.

  Her agitation was not just in her voice. She was starting to shake.

  “Not so loud. Please. I was born Phil Wilbur. I never wanted to be Phil Wilbur. There is a grand tradition here, Susannah, which I am a part of. A grand tradition of art. Was Iggy Pop born Iggy Pop? David Bowie, David Bowie?”

  “Oh, fuck you. You’re not a rock star, you prick.”

  “You’re right, I’m sorry. I don’t even know how to tell you this!” Max said with enthusiasm. “Really, please. This is beautiful. Okay. Let me try.

  “I ran away from home as a teenager and I lived on the streets. I traveled around and I studied the straight world from the shadows. I looked at it from cities where I sat on sidewalks and begged for money for food and booze. I slept outside.”

  “All this I know. At least that part you have told me.”

  “And it’s all true. So I was thinking of leaving that life when I met a man. He was a few years older than me. He picked me up hitchhiking. His name was Max. He was an artist and a rich kid and he wanted out of his life, too. We became friends. He took me up to this house his family owned in the Adirondacks, this giant old summer place they had built on top of a mountain. We spent this long weekend hanging out. It was the first time I had slept in a bed in years. Max hated his family and he hated his name. He was gay and from this ultraconservative Southern military family. His grandfather, as you read, was General Westmoreland. Every male in his family going back a long way had been military officers. I don’t know, but I related. I really believe sometimes we are born into the wrong identity and have to start over, ourselves, when we are old enough to do it.