Why We Lie

by Amy Impellizzeri

  “Honey, sit down.” Jude waved at the seat across from Laila and him and I was tempted to pull up a chair right next to Jude instead. While I was still standing, he went on, “We’ve been talking about some things you aren’t going to be happy about.”

  I took the chair across from the duo reluctantly. “What kinds of things?”

  “Money.” Laila jumped in without hesitation to utter the first words she’d spoken since I had walked into the room. “Specifically this.”

  Laila handed me back a check that had been made out to the campaign by Mena. I had told her she didn’t need to do it, but she insisted. It was a generous amount, so I was confused when Laila pressed it back into my hand, and said, “This isn’t going to work.”

  I looked directly at Jude with challenge in my eyes. I dared him to speak and yet, I promised with my eyes that I was likely to be unhappy about whatever it was he was going to say. “Be very careful, Jude.”

  He nodded, and looked like he was choosing his words carefully. “I know, but Sweetheart, you need to hear this.”

  I looked at Laila and she said, “Make no mistake, Aby. The campaign is indeed running out of money.”

  I knew that was true, but I took the opportunity to make a little dig at Laila anyway. “Laila, I thought you knew how to keep this campaign running on a shoestring budget. We talked about that when you first started.” I looked back at Jude as I said it, hoping for his support as I criticized Laila.

  Laila chuckled without winking, breathing her almond scent across the table at me. “Honey, clearly you are not cut out for a political campaign if you think money is only a topic at the beginning of a campaign.”

  My head whipped and I locked in on Laila. “Are you kidding me right now? Don’t patronize me, Laila. How many campaigns have you actually run? Besides Jude’s? Which you appear to be running into the ground.”

  “Sweetheart,” Jude said it softly and hypnotically, trying to soften the tone of rebuke. The consummate politician, soothing and dispensing diplomacy like it was a chocolate, while sitting on the same side of the table as his campaign manager. I got angry about the seating arrangements again, and even angrier that I was letting such juvenile things bother me at a time like this.

  “It’s fine, Jude. These are testy times, and I wouldn’t be a very good manager if I couldn’t take a little criticism here and there, would I? Aby’s right. This campaign has cost a lot more than you and I ever estimated at its infancy.” Laila was self-deprecating. But still—I felt scolded.

  And indignant about her choice of words.

  At its infancy? You and I? Was she kidding?

  Laila had entered at the campaign’s teenage years—not its infancy. Its infancy were the days Jude and I lay in bed planning and scheming and plotting how we’d be better than all this. How Jude would make a difference and I would use my experience through the Foundation in education and development to make his campaign one of integrity. A success. Jude would use his charm and smarts and gorgeous smile to help me get ahead and do good as well. We’d beat the odds. We’d succeed. And we’d do it together. Honestly.

  And now here was Laila sitting on the same side of the table as Jude claiming to have been part of this thing since its infancy?

  I rolled my eyes childishly, and immediately caught Jude’s disappointed expression. He’d caught me rolling my eyes. And that meant that Laila won yet again.

  I tried a more conciliatory expression. “Ok, I’m listening. What did you want to talk about? Surely you’re not expecting me to ask my boss for even more money?”

  “No!” Laila answered too quickly and too emphatically. My red flags were hurrying up the flagpole.

  She settled in a moment, “We don’t want any money coming from Appletreese or the Treese family at all for that matter. Hasn’t Jude discussed that with you?”

  “That’s what we’re doing now, Laila.”

  I was disappointed that the moment in which Jude seemed to be annoyed with and chastising Laila, coincided with a moment I realized he’d been keeping something from me that he’d only been sharing with Laila. The moment was ruined and I wasn’t able to enjoy it nearly as much as I wanted.

  Laila ignored Jude’s tone and kept right on talking with her haughty voice.

  “We do, however, have options from a new company called Out The Bullies. They’ve set up a super PAC with a half a million dollars and they want to use it to produce ads supporting Jude. They want to counteract the Innovative Media ads for Kylie Rutter. You yourself have a connection to Out the Bullies, yes?”

  “How did you find out all this?” I looked at Jude with doubt and accusation firing in my eyes.

  “Aby, you and Jude pay me to find this stuff out.”

  Oh so now we’re all one big happy team and she works for us. I let the skepticism wash over me while I tried to wrap my head around what Laila was saying.

  I had brought up Out The Bullies to Jude on our first date as a point of connection after I’d read an article in The Washington Truth forecasting that Out The Bullies would be filing an amicus brief in the seminal case Jude was litigating. I didn’t know any more about them than Google had provided at the time, and now my lies were coming back to bite me.

  But I let my indignance overwhelm my guilt in the moment. Why would Jude have shared that information with Laila? And why on earth would Jude be thinking about aligning himself with an internet company?

  One other question plagued me. That’s the one I actually asked aloud.

  “Out The Bullies? Haven’t they been having trouble getting their product to market? Where’d they get the money suddenly?”

  Laila smirked. “Oh, they have money. And they want to donate to Jude. As I said, Aby, you and Jude pay me to find this stuff out.”

  I stared at Laila, willing her to disappear.

  “Jude, please. Why can’t we?”

  I had spent the first part of our ride home in silence. Jude had respected my decision with silence on his part. When we got home, I had exploded with accusations, first accusing Jude of keeping the newly discovered information about Out The Bullies from me and causing the shocking confrontation (“Honey, I promise you, she had dropped all of this on me moments before you walked into the conference room.”), and embarrassingly of having a crush on her. (“Oh Sweetheart, you’re being ridiculous, now.”)

  Then I repeated a familiar plead: “Jude, please. Can’t we finally get rid of Laila?”

  “You know we can’t. I know you hate her—and the way she handled things today was reprehensible. But we pay her for information and strategy—not tact. And she’s truly what we need. She’s got her finger on the pulse of all the key demographics right now: Hispanic, single mothers. She balances out the input from Huck and Finn. She’s got a great female perspective. I need that.”

  I winced. “I’m a woman, Jude.”

  “Baby, stop,”

  “Ugh. I know. She makes me crazy. She’s turned me into this person. I don’t even know who I am. I’m whiny and childish.” Alone with Jude in our own home without Laila present, I was feeling more in control of my emotions and my own narrative. More in control of Jude.

  Until he reminded me that he needed Laila because she was a woman. “Ok. Let’s stop talking politics tonight. For one night. Please.” I offered up a conversation stopper.

  “I totally agree.”

  “You do?” I had said the words, but not meant them. Jude rarely took his campaign hat off.

  “Yes, I do. Why don’t we go upstairs, and take a long bath and turn our phones off and unplug for the night. I think the world can function on its own for a little while, don’t you?”

  “Why yes, Mr. Birch, I do.” I felt a tightness in my chest start to dissipate as Jude reached over on the sofa and caressed my knee the way he might if we were sitting on the same side of the table, which for all intents and purposes, right then, we were.

  A few hours later, I was sitting on the side of the bathtub wrapped in a
towel. “I guess I’m still having trouble wrapping my head around Out The Bullies showing up with money to burn all of a sudden. Is Laila suggesting I reach out to someone there? I didn’t know any of those whistleblowers. I thought that was clear when I told you about Rafe.”

  Jude looked up at me confused. “I thought you said the lawyer boyfriend’s name was Wilson? As in basketballs?”

  Damn his memory.

  I covered my blurt with a cough. “Wilson. Yes. Wrong ex-boyfriend. Sue me, Counselor.”

  I batted my eyes trying to distract him from my mistake. And then I reminded him he was the one at fault, not me. “I never should have shared that story with you, by the way. And you shouldn’t have shared it with her.”

  I tried to hide my nervousness. I’d made the whole thing up. I’d inserted Rafe Wilson (by last name only) into the tall tale on my first date with Jude for no other reason than to malign Rafe. I never expected to be having a follow-up discussion about that lie years later. Jude’s anger at “Wilson’s” dismissal of me had told me all I needed to know about Jude on our first date. And I’d fallen hard. The rest was history.

  But it was a history I might not escape from. After all, I’d opened myself up vulnerably. Would Laila want me to call some imaginary contact at Out The Bullies? I didn’t have any.

  “The bottom line is, I don’t have any contacts over at Out The Bullies that I can call.”

  Of course, I did know more about Out The Bullies than I was letting on, but I couldn’t share that information with Jude or Laila either.

  “No one wants you to call anyone,” Jude said, reaching over and pulling my phone out of my hand. He needn’t have. I wasn’t about to call anyone.

  He continued. “We don’t want to compromise the campaign right now. If Out the Bullies is going to do this legally, they have to do it on their own, without any cooperation from the candidate himself. Besides, I’m not even sure green lighting support by Out the Bullies is the way to go yet.”

  It was me and not Jude who had broken the promise to unplug for the night by bringing my phone into the bathroom to charge it. It pinged a few times with messages and reminders from my day job before I stepped out of the bathtub to turn it off.

  But not before I started scrolling through for a quick message check. Which led Jude to climb out of the tub and use the time to check his own messages on the phone by the bed and just like that, the unplugged time was over. We met up again in bed, damp and naked with our phones fully charged and loaded with new information. New questions.

  Jude traced the scar along my thigh subconsciously as we lay side by side in bed reading campaign memos and the newest propaganda mailings via email from Kylie Rutter.

  Jude stopped tracing me, and shook his phone at me with two hands. “Did you know LessThan is reporting nearly 100 million daily users currently? That puts it in the same game with Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook. This app is poised to become a household name in no time.”

  “I know, it’s crazy.”

  Jude shook his head with disgust. “I don’t understand how an app called ‘LessThan’ could have obtained such popularity—in such a short timeframe.”

  “Jude, forget about the ridiculous name. LessThan promises to actually improve their appearance and grades and social status. Kids and even their parents are buying into the app’s ability to give them a competitive edge in the college process.”

  “Parents? Come on. Who does that? Would your parents have done something like that?”

  My sad expression betrayed me. Jude reached over and smoothed my still wet hair apologetically. “I know you hate to talk about your mom. I’m sorry.” I shook my head, sealing off further conversation about my past the way I always did. The way Jude always let me.

  I searched my memory for something to change the direction of the conversation. “Remember those crazy parents at ‘High Top?’”

  Jude slapped his forehead. “Of course!”

  “You want to know who’s buying LessThan? That’s who.”

  On the eve of the campaign announcement, Jude and I had been having a late-night working dinner at a D.C. bar when we stumbled upon a 15-year high school reunion. A bunch of seeming grown-ups acting like fools, stumbling and slurring as they toasted to their long-gone days at some prep school in Maryland. They’d all met up to celebrate and gloat and compare. Jude and I eavesdropped on them, until we couldn’t help but chime in.

  “So, I overheard you say it was your 15-year reunion. Did you have a nice turn out?” Jude asked by way of an icebreaker.

  “Yeah, about half. I think that’s pretty good for a 15-year reunion. Supposedly attendance at these things picks up a bit after everyone’s kids are old enough to stay home without a babysitter, you know?”

  I nodded and huddled into Jude, oddly disconcerted that my confidence seemed gone in this crowd. At the Foundation, I was present and engaged with donors and our large constituent of children and their working-class families. But this group? They didn’t feel comfortable or familiar at all.

  I listened to the conversation from the periphery. They asked what we did for a living, and Jude answered for both of us. Not exactly accurately, I might note.

  “Oh wow, politics!”

  They gave us some fleeting enthusiasm for the upcoming campaign announcement. Fleeting. After all, this was D.C. Everyone was involved with politics or knew someone who was.

  “Kids?” We shook our heads in unison. Most of the couples were passing around pictures of children in various ages and various costumes—little league uniforms, soccer shin guards, and dance tutus.

  “Susan is taking Portuguese this year. My friend has an au pair from Brazil, so we’re paying her for some lessons—we’re loving how that’s going to look on her college application.”

  “I’m sorry. Susan is how old, again?” I asked. I was having trouble keeping up. And none of these couples looked old enough to have college-aged kids.

  “Nine.”

  “Wait. Did you say nine?”

  “Yes. She’s nine.” Susan’s mom nodded aggressively. “You’d be shocked how important this stuff is at this age already.”

  “I would. I really would,” I replied honestly.

  A perky man and his even more perky-looking wife got up at the end of the table and started a round of goodbyes.

  “Already?” they were asked.

  “We have to leave early. Jeremy has a travel hockey game four hours away tomorrow. Puck drop at 8 am.”

  “My god. That means you have to leave at—“

  “Yeah—probably by 2 am at the latest. We won’t sleep. We’ll go home, pay the sitter, and put the kids right in the car where they can keep sleeping while we drive.”

  “You’re not worried about driving through the night?” I directed my question to the mom.

  “No way,” she said animatedly. “It’s like a high for us—these travel weekends. We caravan and the families—we all like, really support each other, you know. It’s one big extended family. It’s amazing.”

  Are you on meth? I thought but didn’t say out loud. I raised my eyebrows at Jude, and we laughed about these caricatures all the way home. Without children of our own, they seemed a world away from us. They didn’t feel like the people Jude was getting ready to represent, but after reading the LessThan literature, I realized we were being naïve.

  “God. This is so ugly. I’m poring over these reports and I can’t find an Achilles heel.”

  “Jude, why did you tell Laila about my connection to Out The Bullies? I’m not comfortable with you sharing our pillow talk with her. And by the way—I don’t actually know anyone over there, for the record. I know of them. That was the point of that story I shared with you way back when.”

  “Oh yes, Sarbanes Oxley.” I chuckled along with Jude at our long-standing inside joke, but quickly sobered, “No, come on, Jude, tell me why you thought it was ok to share that with her?”

  “Aby, I didn’t. She came up with Out
The Bullies on her own. Her own research. I swear to you. What you and I talk about here is off limits out there.” Jude reached for me and I let him trace all of me and cover me and devour me, but the entire time I was thinking:

  Is Jude really telling the truth? Is Laila really digging stuff up on her own?

  And if so, what else does Laila know?

  Chapter 16

  I woke early the next morning to head into the Foundation.

  Jude was already up and he handed me my favorite travel mug of coffee, milk already stirred in as I headed out the door. I stopped for a quick kiss and a question.

  “Ok, Jude, now that you’ve slept on it. How do you feel about taking the Out The Bullies money? Assuming everything Laila is saying is true. Assuming you’re about to lose if you don’t.”

  He kept stirring his own coffee and didn’t look up at me. So I put my mug down and lifted his face to me. “Look at me, Jude. Laila says they are your last chance. Your last shot to winning this election, and arguably your last shot to politics in this town at all. No one else is lining up with big bank accounts, you know.”

  “Oh, Aby, I don’t know. I don’t want Innovative Media to win. And yet, I don’t want to make that decision for the campaign.”

  And maybe I heard something that wasn’t there, but I thought I heard that he’d rather someone else make the decision for him.

  Whenever the campaign proved to be too intense, I threw myself into my work. That day was no exception.

  I surveyed my large bulletin board filled with brightly colored postits. All part of a mock up for the annual fundraiser I had planned for the Foundation.

  Our after-school programs were working on the third Annual “Pay it Forward” project with me. On the board, the post-its would each be replaced with a similarly brightly colored envelope with a small note inside from one of the students or staff members. The envelopes were numbered 1 through 550, and would bring in $150,000 in just one night.

  For me, it was my most anticipated fundraiser all year. It was easy and fun, and allowed me some fun time with the kids, too, as I worked with representatives of the Foundation’s after-school workshops to secure notes from the kids with pay it forward promises that would be added to each of the envelopes.