Authors: Gillian Flynn
‘Moved from where?’
‘New York.’
‘City?’
‘Yes.’
She pointed upstairs, asking permission without asking, and I nodded and followed her, Gilpin following me.
‘I was a writer there,’ I blurted out before I could stop myself. Even now, two years back here, and I couldn’t bear for someone to think this was my only life.
Boney: ‘Sounds impressive.’
Gilpin: ‘Of what?’
I timed my answer to my stair climbing: I wrote for a magazine (step), I wrote about pop culture (step) for a men’s magazine (step). At the top of the stairs, I turned to see Gilpin looking back at the living room. He snapped to.
‘Pop culture?’ he called up as he began climbing. ‘What exactly does that entail?’
‘Popular culture,’ I said. We reached the top of the stairs, Boney waiting for us. ‘Movies, TV, music, but, uh, you know, not high arts, nothing hifalutin.’ I winced:
hifalutin
? How patronizing. You two bumpkins probably need me to translate my English, Comma, Educated East Coast into English, Comma, Midwest Folksy.
Me do
sum scribbling of stuffs I get in my noggin after watchin’ them movin’ pitchers!
‘She loves movies,’ Gilpin said, gesturing toward Boney. Boney nodded:
I do
.
‘Now I own The Bar, downtown,’ I added. I taught a class at the junior college too, but to add that suddenly felt too needy. I wasn’t on a date.
Boney was peering into the bathroom, halting me and Gilpin in the hallway. ‘The Bar?’ she said. ‘I know the place. Been meaning to drop by. Love the name. Very meta.’
‘Sounds like a smart move,’ Gilpin said. Boney made for the bedroom, and we followed. ‘A life surrounded by beer ain’t too bad.’
‘Sometimes the answer
is
at the bottom of a bottle,’ I said, then winced again at the inappropriateness.
We entered the bedroom.
Gilpin laughed. ‘Don’t I know that feeling.’
‘See how the iron is still on?’ I began.
Boney nodded, opened the door of our roomy closet, and walked inside, flipping on the light, fluttering her latexed hands over shirts and dresses as she moved toward the back. She made a sudden noise, bent down, turned around – holding a perfectly square box covered in elaborate silver wrapping.
My stomach seized.
‘Someone’s birthday?’ she asked.
‘It’s our anniversary.’
Boney and Gilpin both twitched like spiders and pretended they didn’t.
By the time we returned to the living room, the kid officers were gone. Gilpin got down on his knees, eyeing the overturned ottoman.
‘Uh, I’m a little freaked out, obviously,’ I started.
‘I don’t blame you at all, Nick,’ Gilpin said earnestly. He had pale blue eyes that jittered in place, an unnerving tic.
‘Can we do something? To find my wife. I mean, because she’s clearly not here.’
Boney pointed at the wedding portrait on the wall: me in my tux, a block of teeth frozen on my face, my arms curved formally around Amy’s waist; Amy, her blond hair tightly coiled and sprayed, her veil blowing in the beach breeze of Cape Cod, her eyes open too wide because she always blinked at the last minute and she was trying so hard not to blink. The day after
Independence Day, the sulfur from the fireworks mingling with the ocean salt – summer.
The Cape had been good to us. I remember discovering several months in that Amy, my girlfriend, was also quite wealthy, a treasured only child of creative-genius parents. An icon of sorts, thanks to a namesake book series that I thought I could remember as a kid.
Amazing Amy
. Amy explained this to me in calm, measured tones, as if I were a patient waking from a coma. As if she’d had to do it too many times before and it had gone badly – the admission of wealth that’s greeted with too much enthusiasm, the disclosure of a secret identity that she herself didn’t create.
Amy told me who and what she was, and then we went out to the Elliotts’ historically registered home on Nantucket Sound, went sailing together, and I thought:
I am a boy from Missouri, flying across the ocean with people who’ve seen much more than I have. If I began seeing things now, living big, I could still not catch up with them
. It didn’t make me feel jealous. It made me feel content. I never aspired to wealth or fame. I was not raised by big-dreamer parents who pictured their child as a future president. I was raised by pragmatic parents who pictured their child as a future office worker of some sort, making a living of some sort. To me, it was heady enough to be in the Elliotts’ proximity, to skim across the Atlantic and return to a plushly restored home built in 1822 by a whaling captain, and there to prepare and eat meals of organic, healthful foods whose names I didn’t know how to pronounce. Quinoa. I remember thinking quinoa was a kind of fish.
So we married on the beach on a deep blue summer day, ate and drank under a white tent that billowed like a sail, and a few hours in, I sneaked Amy off into the dark, toward the waves, because I was feeling so unreal, I believed I had become merely a shimmer. The chilly mist on my skin pulled me back, Amy pulled me back, toward the golden glow of the tent, where the Gods were feasting, everything ambrosia. Our whole courtship was just like that.
Boney leaned in to examine Amy. ‘Your wife is very pretty.’
‘She is, she’s beautiful,’ I said, and felt my stomach lilt.
‘What anniversary today?’ she asked.
‘Five.’
I was jittering from one foot to another, wanting to
do
something. I didn’t want them to discuss how lovely my wife was, I wanted them to go out and search for my fucking wife. I didn’t say this out loud, though; I often don’t say things out loud, even when I should. I contain and I compartmentalize to a disturbing degree: In my
belly-basement are hundreds of bottles of rage, despair, fear, but you’d never guess from looking at me.
‘Five, big one. Let me guess, reservations at Houston’s?’ Gilpin asked. It was the only upscale restaurant in town.
You all really need to try Houston’s
, my mom had said when we moved back, thinking it was Carthage’s unique little secret, hoping it might please my wife.
‘Of course, Houston’s.’
It was my fifth lie to the police. I was just starting.
I
am fat with love! Husky with ardor! Morbidly obese with devotion! A happy, busy bumblebee of marital enthusiasm. I positively hum around him, fussing and fixing. I have become a strange thing. I have become a wife. I find myself steering the ship of conversations – bulkily, unnaturally – just so I can say his name aloud. I have become a wife, I have become a bore, I have been asked to forfeit my Independent Young Feminist card. I don’t care. I balance his checkbook, I trim his hair. I’ve gotten so retro, at one point I will probably use the word
pocketbook
, shuffling out the door in my swingy tweed coat, my lips painted red, on the way to the
beauty parlor
. Nothing bothers me. Everything seems like it will turn out fine, every bother transformed into an amusing story to be told over dinner.
So I killed a hobo today, honey … hahahaha! Ah, we have fun!
Nick is like a good stiff drink: He gives everything the correct perspective. Not a different perspective, the correct perspective. With Nick, I realize it actually, truly doesn’t matter if the electricity bill is a few days late, if my latest quiz turns out a little lame. (My most recent, I’m not joking: ‘What kind of tree would you be?’ Me, I’m an apple tree! This means nothing!) It doesn’t matter if the new
Amazing Amy
book has been well and duly scorched, the reviews vicious, the sales a stunning plummet after a limp start. It doesn’t matter what color I paint our room, or how late traffic makes me, or whether our recycling really, truly does get recycled. (Just level with me, New York, does it?) It doesn’t matter, because I have found my match. It’s Nick, laid-back and calm, smart and fun and uncomplicated. Untortured, happy. Nice. Big penis.
All the stuff I don’t like about myself has been pushed to the back of my brain. Maybe that is what I like best about him, the way he makes me. Not makes me feel, just makes me. I am fun. I am playful. I am game. I feel naturally happy and entirely satisfied. I am a wife!
It’s weird to say those words. (Seriously, about the recycling, New York – come on, just a wink.)
We do silly things, like last weekend we drove to Delaware because neither of us have ever had sex in Delaware. Let me set the scene, because now it really is for posterity. We cross the state line –
Welcome to Delaware!
, the sign says, and also:
Small Wonder
, and also:
The First State
, and also:
Home of Tax-Free Shopping
.
Delaware, a state of many rich identities.
I point Nick down the first dirt road I see, and we rumble five minutes until we hit pine trees on all sides. We don’t speak. He pushes his seat back. I pull up my skirt. I am not wearing undies, I can see his mouth turn down and his face go slack, the drugged, determined look he gets when he’s turned on. I climb atop him, my back to him, facing the windshield. I’m pressed against the steering wheel, and as we move together, the horn emits tiny bleats that mimic me, and my hand makes a smearing noise as I press it against the windshield. Nick and I can come anywhere; neither of us gets stage fright, it’s something we’re both rather proud of. Then we drive right back home. I eat beef jerky and ride with bare feet on the dashboard.
We love our house. The house that
Amazing Amy
built. A Brooklyn brownstone my parents bought for us, right on the Promenade, with the big wide-screen view of Manhattan. It’s extravagant, it makes me feel guilty, but it’s perfect. I battle the spoiled-rich-girl vibe where I can. Lots of DIY. We painted the walls ourselves over two weekends: spring green and pale yellow and velvety blue. In theory. None of the colors turned out like we thought they would, but we pretend to like them anyway. We fill our home with knickknacks from flea markets; we buy records for Nick’s record player. Last night we sat on the old Persian rug, drinking wine and listening to the vinyl scratches as the sky went dark and Manhattan switched on, and Nick said, ‘This is how I always pictured it. This is exactly how I pictured it.’
On weekends, we talk to each other under four layers of bedding, our faces warm under a sunlit yellow comforter. Even the floorboards are cheerful: There are two old creaky slats that call out to us as we walk in the door. I love it, I love that it is ours, that we have a great story behind the ancient floor lamp, or the misshapen clay mug that sits near our coffeepot, never holding anything but a single paper clip. I spend my days thinking of sweet things to do for him – go buy a peppermint soap that will sit in his palm like a warm stone, or maybe a slim slice of trout that I could cook and serve to
him, an ode to his riverboat days. I know, I am ridiculous. I love it, though – I never knew I was capable of being ridiculous over a man. It’s a relief. I even swoon over his socks, which he manages to shed in adorably tangled poses, as if a puppy carried them in from another room.
It is our one-year anniversary and I am fat with love, even though people kept telling and telling us the first year was going to be so hard, as if we were naive children marching off to war. It wasn’t hard. We are meant to be married. It is our one-year anniversary, and Nick is leaving work at lunchtime; my treasure hunt awaits him. The clues are all about us, about the past year together:
Whenever my sweet hubby gets a cold
It is this dish that will soon be sold
.
Answer: the torn yum soup from Thai Town on President Street. The manager will be there this afternoon with a taster bowl and the next clue.
Also McMann’s in Chinatown and the Alice statue at Central Park. A grand tour of New York. We’ll end at the Fulton Street fish market, where we’ll buy a pair of beautiful lobsters, and I will hold the container in my lap as Nick jitters nervously in the cab beside me. We’ll rush home, and I will drop them in a new pot on our old stove with all the finesse of a girl who has lived many Cape summers while Nick giggles and pretends to hide in fear outside the kitchen door.
I had suggested we get burgers. Nick wanted us to go out – fivestar, fancy – somewhere with a clockwork of courses and name-dropping waiters. So the lobsters are a perfect in-between, the lobsters are what everyone tells us (and tells us and tells us) that marriage is about: compromise!
We’ll eat lobster with butter and have sex on the floor while a woman on one of our old jazz records sings to us in her far-side-of-the-tunnel voice. We’ll get slowly lazy-drunk on good Scotch, Nick’s favorite. I’ll give him his present – the monogrammed stationery he’s been wanting from Crane & Co. with the clean sans-serif font set in hunter green, on the thick creamy stock that will hold lush ink and his writer’s words. Stationery for a writer, and a writer’s wife who’s maybe angling for a love letter or two.
Then maybe we’ll have sex again. And a late-night burger. And more Scotch. Voilà: happiest couple on the block! And they say marriage is such hard work.
B
oney and Gilpin moved our interview to the police station, which looks like a failing community bank. They left me alone in a little room for forty minutes, me willing myself not to move. To pretend to be calm is to be calm, in a way. I slouched over the table, put my chin on my arm. Waited.
‘Do you want to call Amy’s parents?’ Boney had asked.
‘I don’t want to panic them,’ I said. ‘If we don’t hear from her in an hour, I’ll call.’
We’d done three rounds of that conversation.
Finally, the cops came in and sat at the table across from me. I fought the urge to laugh at how much it felt like a TV show. This was the same room I’d seen surfing through late-night cable for the past ten years, and the two cops – weary, intense – acted like the stars. Totally fake. Epcot Police Station. Boney was even holding a paper coffee cup and a manila folder that looked like a prop. Cop prop. I felt giddy, felt for a moment we were all pretend people:
Let’s play the Missing Wife game!