‘Twas election night, and the votes were in. All day across the city, people blackened in little ovals and dropped ballots into metal boxes. The residents were picking the future leader of the city, or they thought they were. The pundits had predicted, “the race would come down to the wire,” they said. But not a speech would be given. Neither man would be mayor.
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Both Theodore “Teddy” Kelly and Clarence “C.L.” Loving had laughed at the suggestion from their wives, that the two opponents have dinner on the night of the election. Teddy had chuckled, thinking that his wife Rebecca was making, what would be for her, a rare joke. Plus, Rebecca knew how much he despised C.L., she’d been privy to his numerus rants about how his “socialist welfare policies disguised as innovations” would bankrupt the city. It was entirely preposterous, Teddy despised C.L., they were bitter rivals, and election night was most commonly spent gathered in a downtown hotel suite with family and friends, staring at the television news. Teddy wanted to be sitting amongst his family and friends as the votes were counted, not at dinner with C.L. But Rebecca had insisted, and so Teddy agreed.
C.L. reciprocated Teddy’s loathing, he thought Teddy was the perfect embodiment of the powerful oligarchy that had been in control of the city for as long as anyone could remember. Teddy represented everything C.L. had fought his entire life against, from his time as a clerk accepting parking ticket payments to his time as the city’s finance director, the job he had before he decided to run for mayor. Crystal had been the one that’d convinced him to run, after hearing his numerous speeches on how mismanaged the policies and budget of the city were. He wanted to restructure it all, reprioritize the people, and he wanted to do all of it at the expense of Teddy and his powerful friends. So, when Crystal told him he’d be attending the dinner, that she’d organized the entire meal with Rebecca already, and Teddy had agreed, he did laugh, but he also had no choice but to attend, because Crystal had already agreed for him.
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And so, they sat in complete silence, occasionally exchanging awkward glances across the table with each other, but mainly they both stared to one side where the news coverage of the election results was playing on mute.
Neither knew why their wife had insisted on this, they didn’t even stay, just escorted their respective husband into the neutral hotel suite in the hotel that both the campaigns were occupying on election night, and they left.
There was no benefit of having this dinner, to either of their campaigns, the votes were in and simply being counted. Anything they did, at this point, didn’t really matter in either of their eyes. One of them would be mayor, and one would not. It was as simple as that. But it wasn’t.
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“You know,” Teddy sipped his wine, “I really think I won that second debate, but those idiots on all the stations, both sides, say that you won . . . I can’t get any of my people to give me a straight answer as to why,” he said.
C.L. looked over, snorted, and said “Because you surround yourself with buffoons who just agree with you, I’ve seen that staff of yours, what do you just hire the pretty people who like you?”
“HA, no no, I just hire the pretty ones, and they all end up liking me. It helps when I actually pay them.”
“Ha, ok well played, but we don’t all have your personal war chest to dip into, I paid my people what I could. And you lost that debate because I can do one thing that you can’t: authenticity. It was on the economy, come on, you are way too rich to be able to talk to this city about the economy.”
“Well sure, but even with all with all your focus studies, your goody-two-shoes public servant persona, and manufactured authenticity, my money still gave you a run, hell they’re saying it’s still too close to call.”
C.L. shuddered, he could not lose to this guy, please don’t make me give a concession speech tonight where I have to say nice things about him please, he thought. But he was here, and this may be the only honest conversation these two politicians can ever have, maybe that’s why their two wives had suggested this. “Ok, I’ll bite, you have all this money, and you spend it on this mayoral election to run against me, the civil servant who wants to be mayor to help people, tell me why you gave me so much trouble here, please.”
“That’s what you don’t get, still you don’t get it, people like the status quo! You’d muck it all up, and it’d end up worse than ever before. People need something to work and strive for, you can’t just hand it to them,” Teddy smirked.
“You’re so full of it, you just don’t want things to change because the status quo helps you and all your donors that have all the power, it doesn’t actually help the people of this city. I want to help them, and you’ve spent this entire campaign tearing me down, calling me a ‘communist,’ a ‘socialist,’ and everything in between, all just to scare people.”
Teddy abruptly stood, and pointed his lanky finger, “don’t you dare take the high ground for another moment! You’ve taken every cheap shot you could, this entire campaign, you’ve dragged my good name through the mud as much as I have yours, that’s the game we play kid.”
C.L. put his hands up, like Teddy was holding him up. Teddy stared him down, for a few slow seconds, and then abruptly walked to a window other end of the suite with his wine in hand. C.L. gathered his wine and moved to the suite’s couch on the other side, turned the volume up on the television, and they didn’t speak for a while.
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Teddy and C.L. sat like that for hours, Teddy staring out the window and C.L. watching the television, both of them listening to the pundits and waiting for the election results. Meanwhile, Rebecca and Crystal had had their own dinner, celebrating the end of the campaign and their misery.
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Rebecca and Crystal met backstage during the first debate, after seeing each other from a distance during the beginning of the campaign. They were both cast by the public as the dutiful wives, who were sitting in the background of the campaign and supporting their wives. But that was not the case.
In fact, they each were the brains of their respective husbands’ campaigns. Each policy proposal, position, and sound bite was run through them, and they had both been the ones to convince their respective husbands to run for mayor. Every idea each campaign had, and every strategy each campaign executed came from one of them. Teddy and C.L. thought they were running the show, the idiots, but they were actually just regurgitating the opinions of their wives. Teddy and C.L. were nothing but wind-up dolls, constantly wound up and deployed by their wives.
And each woman had thought they were alone, that the other side the man was running the show, until they were too proximate not to speak to each other backstage at that first debate. They began to vigorously debate, while their husbands were on stage spewing their predetermined jabs, they had the true debate backstage. It was the most fun each of them had had in years, so they continued, in passing moments, but then via text messages, and long phone calls. From that day forward, they had their own campaign, but in private. Their husbands continued their sham, and while, their husbands despised each other, Rebecca and Crystal became fond of each other. They did not nearly agree on anything, but they were kindred spirits, relating to how they each had to hide behind the man in their life.
That’s when the plan began to form, the woman set up this dinner and decided to take power.
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C.L. looked down at his phone and saw a message from Crystal: “Don’t forget to have dessert before you come back to our suite! ” Teddy had been given the same message, but earlier, Rebecca had said, “just get through the meal, and don’t forget dessert, and then you can come back and watch the results with us.”
On seeing this message, C.L. stood, and while walking back over to the table said to Teddy, “well how about dessert, and then we’ll see how long this takes.” He uncovered the last plate on the table, and saw two brownies, each labeled with a little toothpick flag of their campaign. He picked up the plate, grabbed his campaign brownie, and handed the plate to Teddy who had walked over. They goofily smudged their brownies together, toasted their campaign, and happily ate the arsenic laced brownies their wives had prepared.
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Rebecca and Crystal had thought it all through, the two men would be discovered dead on the floor shortly after ingesting their desert, and it wouldn’t come back to them. They would both play the widow, condemn the assassination of their respective husband by some criminal organization that would never be found, and no one would ever look at the wives for the crime. After a very short mourning period, they would each pick up the campaigns of their husband for the run-off election. And the real campaign would begin.