Absolutely True Lies

by Rachel Stuhler

  “It sounds like fun,” I said. “Count me in.”

  “Since I’m disappearing tomorrow, I should probably go back to work today. Although . . .” He paused, smiling at me again. “I’d rather not.”

  “It is a beautiful day,” I agreed. “It’s almost a crime to be stuck at work on a gorgeous Roman afternoon.”

  “That’s true, but I’m enjoying the company, too.”

  “Me, too,” I replied. “But you won’t like me very much if I get you fired. So scat.”

  “Will you be at the hotel later?”

  The question seemed unnecessary to me. At least for the next week, I lived at that hotel. Of course I’d be there later. “Yup.”

  “Maybe I’ll see you,” he said, offering a wave as he turned and walked away.

  • • •

  I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering up and down the streets of Rome, finally sightseeing the way I’d been dreaming about for days. I stopped for gelato at Giolitti and ate until I thought I might have given myself diabetes. I made myself order only the flavors I didn’t know, working my way through chestnut and a strange coconut until I got to a cream variety that made my eyes roll back up into my head. Then with my change, I walked to the Trevi Fountain and made so many wishes the magic fountain fairies probably tuned me out.

  It was a busy, hot afternoon, and the fountain was crowded. I knew I should make my wishes, force some poor stranger to take my picture, then vacate my spot for another anxious tourist, but I couldn’t do it. Right at that moment, sitting on the stone ledge, I felt intoxicated by the city. Even a bulldozer driven by a hot Italian man couldn’t have moved me from that seat.

  I watched nuns in full habits eat ice cream and priests with expensive briefcases chatter away on their cell phones. There was something surreal and hazy about this place, despite the graffiti on nearly every block. For the first time in a very, very long while, I wasn’t worried about anything. And as I threw coin after coin in the fountain, I wished for things I didn’t even know I wanted. A book deal, the love of my life, to lose twenty pounds, and to finally make my mother proud of me. I know the popular wisdom is that voicing your wishes cancels them out, but I don’t believe that. I think that all too often, we don’t get what we want because we’re too afraid to put it out there. And on my perfect Roman afternoon, I wasn’t afraid of anything.

  I realized that for the last eighteen months, I’d lived in a limbo of my own creation. Doing the work required of me, but never an ounce more. And it wasn’t because I had a poor work ethic, I was just too terrified to hope for anything more. All the dreams of a successful writing career had been shoved as far back in my head as I could manage, and I’d purposely focused only on the step right in front of me. If I only worried about my next paycheck, I couldn’t obsess about how this or that article would further my career. Or wouldn’t.

  And in the last month, my concern had been if I could do the job, not whether I actually wanted to. The song “Take the Money and Run” had been playing on loop in my brain and I wasn’t even worried about finishing the autobiography, only about doing enough to get the next check.

  But those silly coins, all ten of them, signaled a new era in my life, and I knew it the instant they left my hand. Not only could I do this job, I could be good at it. I knew I could. Though I wasn’t allowed to talk about my work, I was fairly sure the ghostwriting community was small and the right people would know what I’d done. Above and beyond that, if I could pry the rest of the checks out of Jamie’s greedy little fingers, that money would give me the freedom to do what I wanted for at least a year (much more if the book sold well).

  As my last coin dropped into the fountain, I knew that I was done with the status quo. This isn’t to say that I had any idea what was going to happen next. On the contrary, I was acutely aware that choosing this job had thrust me into a perfectly uncertain world, and not just for the duration of my work with Daisy. But I had a strange feeling that no matter what happened, it would all work out for the best.

  The sun was setting before I finally began heading back to the hotel. I was enthralled with this place, though a little confused by not having heard a single word I understood since lunchtime. As I walked, I watched the endless adoring couples heading out for dinner, hand in hand. I couldn’t remember the last time I had experienced that feeling, or if I ever really had.

  I’d had boyfriends, to be sure, but none of them had really knocked my socks off. This isn’t to say they weren’t lovely human beings (my taste runs toward the monogamous, vanilla guys), but no one had ever made me breathless and dizzy. And I didn’t count Vaughn’s effect on me because it wasn’t real. Or at least, I didn’t know if it was real. Anyone can make you swoon. It’s when that first flush of attraction has passed and their touch still makes you weak that it counts for something.

  Maybe I was naïve and searching for some ideal that didn’t exist. It wouldn’t be the first time. But I’ll wager I wasn’t the first woman filled with promise and hope by a simple stroll through the Eternal City. Or the last.

  • • •

  When I got back to the hotel, I had a message from Vaughn. Rather than call him back, I just walked up to his room, which turned out to be exactly one floor above mine. The door was open as I approached, and I could see that he was talking on both the room phone and his cell at the same time.

  “We’ll be wrapped by ten tomorrow night, just like we promised,” he said into his cell phone. Then, into the room phone, “Make sure you don’t send any knives up with that. Seriously, no knives. I’ll find out if you forget.”

  I knocked softly and he waved me in. Vaughn patted the bed, gesturing for me to sit down next to him, but I chose to take a seat over by the balcony. I wasn’t yet comfortable enough for the bed.

  After a few minutes, he said, “All right, take care,” and hung up both phones. I still don’t know if those last words were to one of the callers or both. “Hey, you,” he said, finally looking up at me.

  “Hey, yourself.”

  “Sorry about lunch today. It got a little weird on set.” Vaughn wiped a hand across his eyes and I could see how worn out he was.

  “No problem,” I said. I almost asked about the knives, but everyone was obviously trying to keep sharp objects away from Daisy. “I know you were busy. Ben ended up taking me to lunch.”

  Vaughn’s eyebrows went up. “You had lunch with Benji?”

  I had to ask Ben why everyone called him that. He was this somber, intelligent guy and the crew had given him a dog’s nickname. It didn’t make any sense to me. “Yeah, we went to Maccheroni. It was amazing, you would have loved it.”

  “I had dry, tasteless macaroni and cheese for lunch,” he said. Then he looked truly pained, and I had to hope he wasn’t so in love with food that a bad mac-and-cheese meal could inspire such a reaction. Then again, I’m really one to talk. I’d almost stabbed Vaughn just for eyeing my dessert. “We flew six thousand miles to get the same catering we could have had in L.A.”

  “I was about to go get something to eat. You hungry?”

  “God, yes,” he said, almost leaping to his feet. “I hear there’s this place down by the Spanish Steps—” And then his cell phone rang. Vaughn looked at the screen and groaned. “Ah, damn.”

  “It’s no big deal,” I promised. “We’ll talk later.”

  “No, really. Just let me take care of this and then we’ll go.”

  I was dubious, but I decided to give Vaughn the benefit of the doubt, so I remained where I was.

  “What is it, Jamie? I was about to go out for dinner.” From the tone of his voice, Vaughn didn’t think much of Daisy’s manager, either. Then he clenched his teeth and his face lost most of its color. “You’re kidding me . . .” Vaughn listened for a few more sentences, growing wearier by the second. “What exactly did she break?”

  At this point,
I stood up, knowing that dinner was out of the question. Vaughn looked up at me with that apologetic expression I’d now seen twice that day. “Like I said,” I whispered. “No big deal.”

  I patted Vaughn on the shoulder as I walked by, and he grabbed my hand and held me there for a second. “Will you . . .” he whispered, pulling the receiver away from his mouth a bit, “go to dinner with Benji instead?”

  Vaughn sounded awfully territorial for someone who hadn’t even staked a claim. I was certainly attracted to him, but I was already getting tired of his noncommittal behavior. “I’ll probably order room service and work. It’s what I should have done, anyway.”

  “Oh. Cool.” Despite his obvious exhaustion, Vaughn smiled a little. Then he remembered he was on the phone with Jamie, who had apparently continued to yammer in his absence. “Yeah, yeah, calm down. I’ll go talk to someone at the front desk and write a check. No, we will not get thrown out of the hotel.”

  Good night, I mouthed, heading out of the room.

  Vaughn waved to me but didn’t turn around. For someone who’d seemed so concerned about me just a moment ago, he appeared to have already moved on to other matters.

  • • •

  Though it took every ounce of my willpower, I did exactly as I had promised, returning to my room and my long-standing stalemate with my laptop. With Ben’s words ringing in my ears, I finally sat down at the desk and booted up my computer. I had just been overthinking things. I could do this.

  As soon as the blank page popped up, I prepared for the rush of terror and indecision, but I forced my brain back to our first working session in Miami, when I had asked Daisy about school. I couldn’t write “My mom’s got all that crap,” so instead, I typed—

  Everyone always asks me how I got started in this business, but it all happened so quickly, I don’t really remember. One day I was just a regular kid in my school’s talent show and the next, people were handing me scripts and taking my picture.

  Once the first paragraph was done, I just kept going. By eleven, I was up to thirty-three pages and gaining confidence by the minute. I wrote until my wrists ached and then slumped into bed, happy and relieved. Ben had been right—this wasn’t rocket science after all. In my own little way, I had conquered Daisy Mae Dixson.

  • • •

  I was again awoken by the little girls singing “Date Night,” but on this morning, I didn’t mind nearly so much. If I did have a complaint, it was that they could at least have switched to one of Daisy’s other songs. I was starting to hear “Date Night” in my sleep.

  Ben and I met in the lobby at eight and snuck out of the hotel like we were two teenagers on our way to elope.

  “I don’t know why we’re being so secretive,” he said, laughing.

  “Because these vultures will hook you with their claws and devour you if they find out you’re on your way to have fun,” I replied. “You’re working, Ben, you have to be miserable.” I checked to make sure the coast was clear, then grabbed his elbow and pulled him through the lobby. “Now come on, we have a date with the Pope.”

  In the last twenty-four hours, I’d grown quite accustomed to coming and going in front of the hormonal hordes. Once they saw it wasn’t Daisy, they went back to their songs or stories or braiding each other’s hair. But on this morning, one teenager (who was at least two years too old to be a Daisy Dixson fan) gasped at the sight of me. At first I thought I was imagining things, but then the girl tried to grab my arm and yelled, “Cugina, cugina!” It sounded like a dirty word, even in Italian, and I was relieved when Ben removed the girl’s hand and swiftly guided me through the crowd.

  I was still shaken up as we rode the subway to Vatican City. “What in the hell do you think that means? Cugina?”

  “Cousin,” Ben answered. “Cugina means cousin.”

  If he spoke fluent Italian, I was going to kill myself. I couldn’t even bring myself to ask the question. “Oh.” I nodded. “Perez Hilton thinks I’m Daisy’s pregnant, alcoholic cousin.”

  Ben gave me a look, trying to figure out how much—if any—of it was true. I knew the look because I’d seen it twice now, with both Vaughn and Camille. “I assure you, I am not pregnant, an alcoholic, or related to Daisy in any way.”

  “That’s pretty weird.”

  “I know.” It was nice to be around someone who recognized the insanity of everything instead of just acting like it was completely normal. The people in Daisy’s life spent all of their time trying to pretend a straitjacket was really a ball gown. The scary part was that there were moments I was starting to believe it.

  “I can’t say I’m terribly surprised.” Ben laughed. “They all do whatever they want and the rest of us have to deal with the consequences. Last season, Jonathan Adler lent us a lamp for one of the main sets, and Daisy just decided to take it home. It was a seven-hundred-dollar lamp that wasn’t even available for sale to the public yet, not to mention that we didn’t own it, either. But she liked it, so your little friend Vaughn got out his magic checkbook and made the problem go away.”

  “I think she broke hotel furniture or something last night,” I told him. “I was supposed to have dinner with Vaughn, but he had to smooth over some trouble with the hotel staff.”

  Ben listened to what I had to say, but waited a few seconds before speaking again. “You know what? We are two thoughtful, reasonably intelligent human beings. Just for today, let’s pretend we’re any other tourists in Rome. We’ll turn off our phones and pretend we’ve never heard the name Daisy Dixson.”

  “Can we be spies?” I asked. “And give ourselves spy names?”

  Ben stared at me, trying to decide if I was serious. “You are an interesting woman” was all he said.

  • • •

  I wasn’t really kidding about the spy names (hey, why not?), but when it became clear that Ben wasn’t receptive to the idea, I just reveled in being Holly for the day. Not someone’s employee or lackey, just me.

  We spent the entire morning at the Vatican, even kissing the Pope’s ring. I bought my mother a blessed rosary, hoping it would make up for my recent lack of phone calls, and along with Ben, marveled at the strange grandeur of the world’s only religious city-state. If St. Peter’s Basilica is any indication, God is a really big fan of gold leaf. We have that in common.

  Though I wanted to keep my emotions in check in front of this man I barely knew, I found myself overwhelmed a number of times that day. First by Michelangelo’s Pietà, depicting the Virgin Mary holding the dead Jesus in her arms, and then again when we finally reached the Sistine Chapel. I say “finally” because the museum around it is a labyrinth of signs and stairs that seem to go on for miles. I had almost given up when I set one foot inside the chapel and inhaled so deeply I almost passed out. The masterpiece was like nothing I’d ever seen before, nor would I even trust myself to describe it with any measure of accuracy. It was, quite simply, breathtaking.

  By 1:00 P.M., I was light-headed and overwhelmed, and I was grateful that Ben recognized this without having to be told. We found a small restaurant for lunch, stuffed ourselves with pasta, and then found some more gelato. I was already full up to my ears, but the thought of just passing by the ice cream shop was unacceptable, so I shoved down more food and hoped I wouldn’t have to vomit into a nearby trash can.

  In the afternoon, we explored Castel Sant’Angelo and the residential neighborhood of Trastevere. Rome is such a tourist attraction, I never really thought about the people who call the city home. We sat in a park and talked as school let out for the afternoon, flooding the swing sets and benches with giggling children. The mothers stood by chatting, sometimes offering a snack or doctoring a small wound. It was unlike anything I’d seen in the United States. I know that we have a million parks, but there’s such a cliquey atmosphere to our neighborhood interactions. I grew up in a small town and knew the names of maybe ten percent
of the people on my block, and I certainly never would have thought to strike up conversations with most of those folks. Here it was like every mother was a sort of parent to every child, regardless of how well she knew him or her. The sense of community in this tiny Roman enclave made me never want to leave. Three times, one of the mothers walked by and nodded to us, each time with a “hello.” I couldn’t figure out how they knew we were American, but we were highly amused by it.

  I’d love to say I recall every detail of that day, but I don’t. Ben and I walked and walked, and talked and talked, for twelve full hours. And try as we might, we couldn’t see everything in one day. We both wanted to visit the Colosseum, but by the time we made it back to that part of town, the tours had shut down for the day. It was after eight when we realized that our legs were numb and our stomachs were empty.

  We stumbled back toward Piazza Navona and stopped for pizza at Montecarlo, a boisterous place brimming with college students and locals. We took seats in the back and worked our way through the greatest margherita pizza I’ve ever tasted. By this point, the waistband of my jeans was cutting off the circulation to my legs, but I didn’t care. If I gained twenty pounds in Rome, it would be worth it.

  When the waiter approached with the check, I asked to see the dessert menu.

  “Oh, dear God,” Ben moaned, laughing. “You cannot be serious. If we eat anything else, we’ll need to have our stomachs pumped.”

  “We’re in one of the greatest cities in the world. I think it’s actually illegal here to skip dessert.”

  Before he could talk me out of it, I ordered a piece of ricotta cheesecake and chocolate mousse. This earned a fresh round of groaning, but Ben didn’t stop me.

  “So . . .” he asked the instant the waiter was out of earshot, “is it true you’re dating Vaughn Royce?”

  I glanced up from my coffee, unsure how to answer that question. “Where did you hear that?”

  “Sharla. She said the two of you had been hanging out since Miami.”