The Perfect Liar

by Thomas Christopher Greene

  Afterward, they fell apart and they stood breathing hard and staring at each other like adversaries. Max looking deep into her brown eyes and Susannah looking deep into his and he broke it first by laughing. He started to laugh and she did, too, her hands on her hips, her whole body convulsing with laughter.

  They went to the bed and they both fell back on it, side by side and onto their backs, not looking, like some corporate trust exercise. Susannah rolled into the crook of his arm. Max put his arm around her shoulder and she cuddled into him.

  For a moment they didn’t talk. They were still breathing hard.

  Susannah said, “I killed him.”

  “I know.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I believed Freddy. I could just tell. He didn’t make it up. And it wasn’t some kind of repressed-memory thing where he imagined it and you couldn’t tell what was real.”

  “Yes,” Susannah said softly. “I can’t believe he has carried this with him.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “Kill Joseph?”

  “Yes.”

  “He was cruel.”

  “Oh, you never said.”

  “There was no point. He was dead. Don’t you think children should be able to mythologize their fathers?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t know mine. Only saw him once.”

  “Freddy never knew. He was too young.”

  “Tell him. Tell him about the cruelty. Freddy just wants to know the truth about things. He will believe you.”

  Susannah looked up at the ceiling. She looked at the fan, which wasn’t moving and which she never liked anyway—she never understood ceiling fans. They looked silly and didn’t do much.

  She nodded, more to herself. “Okay. I will.”

  THAT NIGHT SHE AND FREDDY walked together out of the neighborhood and over to the university, where they sat under a big oak tree and looked down the hill to the city below them and the lake beyond it. Susannah made him look at her and she told him she loved him, loved him more than anything, and for that reason she had never told him the truth about his father. But Freddy was old enough now and didn’t deserve to be gaslighted about it, not anymore.

  She talked for a while. It felt good to talk, an unburdening she didn’t know she needed until she was doing it. These stories she had never told anyone in their entirety, not even Rose.

  She told her son that, when she met Joseph, she was in crisis and he knew how to calm her down. He was her doctor. For that reason, she fell in love with him but soon that love turned into a prison.

  “He had a big gifted mind, your father. But he was not a good man. He trapped me. He played with my head until I didn’t know who I was anymore. He wouldn’t let me breathe.”

  “Why didn’t you just leave?”

  Susannah sighed. “I asked myself that same thing for years. But he had brainwashed me into thinking I couldn’t. That there was nowhere I could go, and that no one would believe me if I told them why I left. Who was going to believe me, an art-school dropout? When you had the Harvard Ph.D. telling you what was really happening? And I was the one with the history of mental illness.”

  “So you killed him?”

  Susannah sighed. She took her time with this one. The night was warm and even though they were in the middle of the city, there was no moon and the stars arced away from the two of them and over the lake.

  “Technically yes.”

  “Technically?”

  “I helped him die. Have you heard of assisted suicide? Where people are sick and they want to die to end the pain?”

  “Is that what he wanted?”

  “He was sick, Freddy. His heart wasn’t good. He wasn’t healthy. Yes, I put a pillow over his mouth, but only for a minute. A healthy man would have been fine. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I did it and I’m sorry most of all you had to see it.”

  Susannah started to cry and the tears that came were real, she hadn’t planned on this part, and something about it was so genuine that she saw Freddy’s look change, his own big brown eyes, the eyes of her father, not her eyes and not Freddy’s father’s, eyes that skipped a generation, of her father that never knew him and only saw him once, a lifetime ago on a doorstep in Queens. This made her cry more, and suddenly it was Freddy who was consoling her.

  “Mama.” It had been a long time since he had called her this. He put his arms out for her and she said, “Oh, my baby, my baby boy,” and he said, “Don’t call me that,” but she did anyway and she brought him close to her.

  Around them people walked by in the dark. The stars were overhead. To their left, cars went down the slope of Main Street to the restaurants and the clubs. And none of it mattered.

  THEN NORMALCY DESCENDED AS EASILY as after a thunderstorm. It was as if the weather just needed to break, shake off the humidity, and suddenly it was glorious, beautiful summer.

  Freddy finished out the school year, Susannah felt a clarity she didn’t know she was capable of, and on a hot Thursday afternoon in June, Max took a plane to New York City to open for Bon Jovi and speak to his largest room ever, and one full of bankers.

  He felt strong. Coming over the Queensboro Bridge in the town car they had waiting for him, he could look down and see the neighborhood where Susannah had grown up—but his focus was not there, it was on the big city in front of him, the buildings rising like castles across the river.

  This is how to travel, Max thought. Get off the plane and a chauffeur is waiting with a sign that says MAX W. He takes your bag and you sink into the soft leather seats in the back of a large car.

  The driver took him to the Ritz-Carlton on Central Park South. It was a lovely day in the city, not too hot for the time of year, and a little after eleven-thirty in the morning Max climbed out of the cab. His talk was at three. The driver said he would pick Max up at two-fifteen for the ride down to West Street and the Goldman Sachs offices.

  They had gotten Max a suite on the eighteenth floor, big windows with views of all Central Park.

  “Holy shit,” Max said to himself after the bellhop had closed the door and left him alone. He wanted to bring Susannah but she was sensitive to the mending of things with Freddy. Max wanted to say that perhaps the best way to mend with Freddy was to go away. Space is a healer. But he left her alone. That said, the room was astonishing—a separate large living room, three televisions, a sitting area for eight or so, and a bedroom with a king bed, a huge bathroom covered in marble. This was how the rich traveled—or artists if Goldman was paying.

  Max went to the window. He had never seen the park from this height before. The trees from above looked as if they were painted, golden green, and the people and the horse-drawn carriages moving on the pathways looked like toys. Max had slept in the park many times back in the day—often up in trees, which made it easier to avoid detection. It was a practiced art, sleeping in trees, knowing how to stay still, to not roll over, for to roll over meant you would fall and get badly hurt. Some nights it would storm in the middle of the night and the rain would fall in sheets and he would wake to it, soaking him, making the branches of whatever tree he had found to suit his body slick with it. He had never thought much about the buildings that framed the park. They might as well have been on another planet. They were heights that could not be scaled. Now here he was, at the top.

  He ordered a room-service lunch. A steak frites, hold the frites, Cobb salad, a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and a bottle of Pellegrino.

  It was good to be Max. He ate voraciously. The wine tasted like raisins. He paced around the hotel room and stared down at Columbus Circle and the city that stretched north toward the Bronx.

  At quarter to two, he showered and dressed in his standard outfit, the white T-shirt, the jeans, the black sneakers. The car waited for him when he emerged out of the hotel, and Max smirked a little bit when the doorman holding the car door open for him to slide in the back said, “Have a good afternoon, Mr. W.”

  The car drove down Fifth Av
enue in the midafternoon crawl of traffic. The streets slammed with people, many with oversize shopping bags. The cavalcade of commerce was all around him, commerce that artists normally stood in some measure in opposition to. But not Max, at least not secretly: for life was leading him to the most hallowed halls of capitalism, where they were going to pay him fifty thousand dollars to tell a bunch of suits how to be better versions of themselves.

  But then again, Max thought, looking out the window at the throngs he, as a gutter punk, used to mock, who better to do that? If it was the American dream they were selling, who embodied that more than he did?

  At the Goldman Sachs building, Max was brought up to the third floor and then to a back room, which was to be his greenroom. They had water and snacks and other things for him.

  The woman responsible for him was otherworldly beautiful, mixed race with a wild thatch of hair and caramel eyes.

  “Anything you need?” she asked.

  Max shook his head. “I have everything.”

  And he did. He had everything.

  Ten minutes later, he walked into a giant room, full of desks everywhere, but also full of people standing, thousands and thousands of men and women all dressed to the nines in beautiful suits. There was a small stage, a single microphone. Max climbed onto the stage and they began to clap, and they clapped more, and soon all he could hear was the steady and unceasing drone of their applause. He smiled big and wide and walked to the center of the stage and took the microphone off its stand.

  Max looked out into the crowd and let the applause go. They were so pretty, all those people filling this magnificent room. Masters of the universe, thought Max. So fucking pretty, the lot of them. On top of the world they were, and now he was, too.

  He permitted himself a long, long pregnant pause.

  “Be the art. For you are the art.” He dropped the microphone to his side for a second and just smiled and took in the room. He had them already.

  WHILE MAX WAS IN NEW YORK, Susannah dropped Freddy off at the skate park down at the edge of the lake and next to the railroad tracks. The beautiful day was sunny and mild, with a warm wind coming off the lake. She sat in the car for a moment and watched him, so independent this boy of hers, the board under his arm as he walked away from her. A group of similar-age kids were swooping around the wooden bowl, doing tricks off the edges. She watched Freddy reach them and put his board down on the edge, balance his feet, and she held her breath as he zoomed down toward the bottom, his arms out from his sides like wings. He was out of her view for a second before rising up again on the side, turning skillfully and shooting back down again.

  You can’t keep him in a bubble, Susannah, she told herself.

  She drove to the big cooperative market in the middle of town. They were low on fruit and bread and milk and she had this idea of cooking something elaborate, even though it was only going to be Freddy and her for dinner. She had not eaten much other than her morning smoothie and it was always a bad idea to go food shopping when hungry. She went over ideas in her head and settled on roasting a rack of lamb if they had it. In her mind it was more winter food, but she was imagining smearing it with mustard and rolling it in bread crumbs and then slicing it through the bones, perfectly medium rare, and the two of them indelicately picking up those lollipops of meat and nibbling on the gamy pieces closest to the bone. She would rub the roast with rosemary and garlic, too, and scatter more rosemary sprigs around the pan so that the whole kitchen filled with the rich smell of them. Max was certainly eating at some three-star restaurant on his night there. Maybe that was why she wanted to cook something fancy. Was she being competitive?

  Susannah didn’t like grocery stores. She much preferred the open farmers’ market. She hated lines, and while this co-op could get busy, if she hit it at the right time, she could often make it through quickly. The middle of the afternoon, as it was now, or midmorning during the school year, were the only times she would generally go. If she went at lunch, it was crowded with people getting sandwiches, and forget about coming in at five o’clock when everyone got off work and was rushing through to buy food for dinner.

  Coming in the door, Susannah got a cart and came into the produce section and began to move up and down the small aisles, looking for what was good, shopping like an old Spanish woman, shopping like her mother. The asparagus were tempting but looked past their prime, but then she saw the smallest broccoli florets, from a local farm, and they were the brightest of greens and looked as if they had just been plucked from the soil.

  She was filling a plastic bag with these when she felt a hand on her shoulder and a woman’s voice saying into her ear in Spanish, “I know you have a story to tell.”

  Susannah turned quickly and there was the detective, Susannah couldn’t remember her name—Scott? Wilson? something like that, something bland and white sounding—and Susannah almost didn’t recognize her in street clothes, tight-fitting jeans and a T-shirt, her hair down, shiny and curly to her shoulders. Susannah had not before thought of her as pretty, or as having a life outside of the uniform, but now suddenly it dawned on Susannah that the woman probably had an entire life outside of her work, maybe children at home and a husband, or perhaps a wife. This was Vermont. And she was pretty, surprisingly so. Her skin smooth and nut brown, a slightly lighter shade than her eyes.

  Susannah didn’t like this intrusion. Max said it was over. She looked at the woman. “I don’t tell stories, Detective.”

  “Dolores. That’s my name when I’m not working.”

  “You act like you’re working.”

  “I’m shopping.”

  “Well, me, too … Excuse me.” Susannah pushed her cart past Dolores.

  “Susannah. Wait.”

  Susannah stopped.

  “Let me buy you a coffee.”

  Susannah imagined this, the two of them sitting together, holding cups of lattes in both hands in front of their faces, looking at each other. This came with a pang of remembrance, of New York and of Rose, of what it meant to have women friends you could talk to.

  Susannah surprised herself by saying, “Okay.”

  Dolores smiled. “Great.”

  They found an uncrowded aisle in which to park their carts, pushing them against a row of paper towels. In the front of the store, set off from the rest, was a small café—a barista counter and a smattering of wooden tables. Dolores bought two iced lattes and they found a two-top next to the window and sat down.

  Dolores had an intelligent face, Susannah thought—something about her eyes, large and chocolate brown, almost without white. They looked both kind and knowing.

  “How do you like Vermont?” Dolores asked.

  “It’s been great. I mean, other than what happened. That was a nightmare.”

  “Do you miss New York?”

  “Some things about it. But mostly no. It’s good for Freddy here. I used to worry so much about him. Do you have kids?”

  “Not yet. I’m not sure I want them. I keep thinking something is wrong with me for thinking that.”

  “Well, I don’t want any more,” said Susannah with a small laugh. “One was enough for me. But it is a beautiful thing. Especially when they are little. Now, it’s different.”

  “Freddy is from your first marriage?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is his dad? In New York?”

  “No, he died ten years ago. He was older. A psychologist.”

  “Ah. I thought I would be a psychologist. It was my major at the university.”

  “I didn’t know you went to the university.”

  Dolores laughed. “Don’t act so surprised. Yeah, came here from the Bronx. That first year was really hard. I was so homesick. And so cold.”

  “But you stayed.”

  “It got easier. And I fell in love with Vermont. I hate traffic. It’s easy here.”

  “It must be weird being a cop.”

  “My father was a cop. NYPD. I never thought I would be. We all b
ecome our fathers or our mothers, don’t you think? Girls usually their mothers. I went the other way, I guess.”

  Susannah considered this. She saw her mother, small and mousy, old-fashioned, her house a hearth to silently tend to. Susannah pictured her gruff, strict father, leaving every morning for work, how proud he was. Was she either of them? She didn’t think so.

  “Are you married?”

  “Not yet. And yes, I’m straight. If you were wondering. People always wonder about female cops. Just haven’t met the right one yet. Vermont is a hard place to date, you know?”

  “I bet.”

  “Where did you meet Max?”

  Susannah told her the story instinctively, the way she had always told it, though as soon as she said he had crashed the party pretending to be someone else, she regretted it, innocent though it was, but with everything she knew now she worried she was allowing this woman, this cop, a window into her husband that could be dangerous.

  “He swept you off your feet then.”

  “Pretty much.” Susannah nodded.

  “It’s a beautiful story, every girl’s dream. See? I told you: you did have a story to tell.”

  Susannah looked at her phone, at the time. “I should go. Thanks for the coffee.”

  “By the way, how is Max holding up? You know, with all this. He seemed pretty broken up.”

  “He’s okay. I think he will live with it forever. Like anyone would.”

  “Just imagine how Joanie Hammer must feel. Her love just taken away from her like that.”

  Susannah was aware of Dolores’s eyes on her and she met them. She saw them searching her face and she determined not to give her anything. She needed to be outside.

  “Thanks again for the coffee.” Susannah stood up.