The Lying Game – The New York Times

Sometimes my friend and I play a game.

New York. June. Eighty degrees.

We’re speaking in conspiratorial tones at a two-top table in the back corner of the Odeon, the Jay McInerney restaurant.

Martini, burger, Cosmopolitan, Caesar salad split two ways.

“Let’s go downtown,” my friend says.

“Babe,” I respond, “we are downtown. This is TriBeCa.”

My friend laughs. I know what kind of downtown she is talking about. She is talking about the smattering of dives where everyone is holding a Red Stripe and the music is loud and bad. Where the girls — the ones who are not us — are wearing low-rise jeans, Mom’s Tom Ford Guccis. They’re hitting the vape pen, and it tastes like battery acid and celery and wet dog and grape.

These girls keep getting younger and younger, until they are all born in the 2000s. My friend and I were born in the ’90s. One day we realized we were wading through the marshes that are the back half of our 20s.

On the night I meet him, I am newly crowned 27. I am wearing a white linen vest, blue skirt, black bra. I am stationary in the flesh, to quote Grace Paley. Sometimes when I look in the mirror I think: I am built like a gun. What I am really trying to say is that I may have a few things figured out, but I still love our game.

My friend and I decide: Pick a man out of the crowd and tell him a lie. It cannot be a mean lie. It cannot be a lie that will hurt anyone. But it can be crazy. It can be a little offensive.

When we get to Clandestino, we walk right in. I know a trick about how to get to the front of the line on a Friday night: Be a girl.

My friend orders our drinks. We survey the scene. Every man at this bar, in recent years, has become a bro. They’re either Australian or they’re wearing boat shoes. Sometimes both. We are looking for our man and we find him. He is standing there all alone. I am standing there all alive. He does not look sullen. Neither do I.

“Let’s go up to him,” I say to my friend.

We have no plan other than that we are going to lie to him.

She taps him on the shoulder. “It’s crowded here,” she says.

The man responds like this: “Yeah.” He has an unplaceable accent. He is wearing little wire rim glasses. He is wearing the pants of a painter.

“I’m from Serbia,” I chime in. “Liza, from Belgrade.”

My name is not Liza, and I am not from Serbia. I am a little bit Slavic, but my family has been in the United States for over a century, so at this point I would just say that I am American.

The man laughs. I lay it on thick. I open my mouth and say more facts about Serbia, a country I have not been to. I say this in an accent that I think sounds Serbian, but I am not sure because I do not know anyone from there.

I can’t figure out if he knows I am lying, so I touch his arm.

At this point, my friend has backed off. Not because I have taken the lie too far (I have) but because I am flirting. Because I have realized this man with the slight accent is sweet. I have realized that we listen to the same post-punk bands. That he likes the work of the Marxist cultural theorist Mark Fisher. That he is a visual artist and that when he laughs he sounds like someone who started smoking at age 8.

He asks if we want to go to a second location. On the walk to the punk bar around the corner, I tell my friend I’m having trouble keeping up the bit.

She says, “Why did you have to pick Serbian?”

At the punk bar I buy beers for everyone and become increasingly distressed by the magnitude of my lie. I tell my friend I need to go to the bathroom, which is code for: Let’s talk about why I told this insane lie to this guy whom I want to maybe kiss.

“Just tell him,” she says.

I decide to come clean. Because the key part of this game is that when you break character you must have humility.

In my normal voice and cadence I tell him everything. That I was lying and that I am sorry, but sometimes it’s fun to mess with random men at bars because it is a Friday night and you are on the Lower East Side and your skirt is tiny and you’ve had a martini and a Cosmo and a beer and another beer and part of the fun of being young is allowing yourself to be someone else for a night and I’m actually a novelist so I’m addicted to turning my life into narrative and, no, my book isn’t out yet, and as I am saying all of this he starts laughing and then he kisses me.

We decide to go back to his apartment. We take two trains to a part of Ridgewood inhabited by recent European arrivals. The sex is awkward but sweet, the kind that two drunk (but not too drunk) strangers have. I fall asleep without removing my makeup or jewelry.

When I wake up the next morning we kiss for a bit. Coffee, I think. I ask him where to get it. He tells me the name of a coffee shop.

“I have got to go,” I say.

He hands me his iPhone and asks me to put in my number. But at that moment I know I will never see him again. That’s how the game works. Even if you come clean, you get to be someone else for one night only.

It’s not the first time I’ve done something in order to write it down. And it won’t be the last. It’s not such a bad thing, to play a game. It’s not such a bad thing, to turn your life into narrative. To be a writer on a mission.

As I walk out his door, I am no longer Liza from Serbia. I am Sophie on the morning after. I am Sophie walking to the coffee shop. I am Sophie waiting for a bus that never arrives. I am something different, feral and pure. I am inhabiting the whole of my body. And all of this feels thrilling and good.

Sophie Kemp is the author of the forthcoming novel “Paradise Logic.” Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The Paris Review, Granta and other publications.