Gone Girl: A Novel (48 page)

“Okay. So, Nick,” Betsy said. “I’ll be frank, yes?”

“Yes.”

“You and TV. Aside from your bar-blog thingie, the Whodunnit.com thingie last night, you’re
awful
.”

“There was a reason I went to print journalism,” I said. “I see a camera, and my face freezes.”

“Exactly,” Betsy said. “You look like a mortician, so stiff. I got a trick to fix that, though.”

“Booze?” I asked. “That worked for me on the blog thingie.”

“That won’t work here,” Betsy said. She began setting up a video camera. “Thought we’d do a dry run first. I’ll be Sharon. I’ll ask the questions she’ll probably ask, and you answer the way you normally
would. That way we can know how far off the mark you are.” She laughed again. “Hold on.” She was wearing a blue sheath dress, and from an oversize leather purse she pulled a string of pearls. The Sharon Schieber uniform. “Tanner?”

Her husband fastened the pearls for her, and when they were in place, Betsy grinned. “I aim for absolute authenticity. Aside from my Georgia accent. And being black.”

“I see only Sharon Schieber before me,” I said.

She turned the camera on, sat down across from me, let out a breath, looked down, and then looked up. “Nick, there have been many discrepancies in this case,” Betsy said in Sharon’s plummy broadcast voice. “To begin with, can you walk our audience through the day your wife went missing?”

“Here, Nick, you only discuss the anniversary breakfast you two had,” Tanner interrupted. “Since that is already out there. But you don’t give time lines, you don’t discuss before and after breakfast. You are emphasizing only this wonderful last breakfast you had. Okay, go.”

“Yes.” I cleared my throat. The camera was blinking red; Betsy had her quizzical-journalist expression on. “Uh, as you know, it was our five-year anniversary, and Amy got up early and was making crepes—”

Betsy’s arm shot out, and my cheek suddenly stung.

“What the hell?” I said, trying to figure out what had happened. A cherry-red jellybean was in my lap. I held it up.

“Every time you tense up, every time you turn that handsome face into an undertaker’s mask, I am going to hit you with a jellybean,” Betsy explained, as if the whole thing were quite reasonable.

“And that’s supposed to make me
less
tense?”

“It works,” Tanner said. “It’s how she taught me. I think she used rocks with me, though.” They exchanged
oh, you!
married smiles. I could tell already: They were one of those couples who always seemed to be starring in their own morning talk show.

“Now start again, but linger over the crepes,” Betsy said. “Were they your favorites? Or hers? And what were you doing that morning for your wife while she was making crepes for you?”

“I was sleeping.”

“What had you bought her for a gift?”

“I hadn’t yet.”

“Oh, boy.” She rolled her eyes over to her husband. “Then be really, really,
really
complimentary about those crepes, okay? And about what you were
going
to get her that day for a present. Because I know you were not coming back to that house without a present.”

We started again, and I described our crepe tradition that wasn’t really, and I described how careful and wonderful Amy was with picking out gifts (here another jellybean smacked just right of my nose, and I immediately loosened my jaw) and how I, dumb guy (“Definitely play up the doofus-husband stuff,” Betsy advised), was still trying to come up with something dazzling.

“It wasn’t like she even liked expensive or fancy presents,” I began, and was hit with a paper ball from Tanner.

“What?”

“Past tense. Stop using fucking past tense about your wife.”

“I understand you and your wife had some bumps,” Betsy continued.

“It had been a rough few years. We’d both lost our jobs.”

“Good, yes!” Tanner called. “You
both
had.”

“We’d moved back here to help care for my dad, who has Alzheimer’s, and my late mother, who had cancer, and on top of that I was working very hard at my new job.”

“Good, Nick, good,” Tanner said.

“Be sure to mention how close you were with your mom,” Betsy said, even though I’d never mentioned my mom to her. “No one will pop up to deny that, right? No Mommy Dearest or Sonny Dearest stories out there?”

“No, my mom and I were very close.”

“Good,” said Betsy. “Mention her a lot, then. And that you own the bar with your sister—always mention your sister when you mention the bar. If you own a bar on your own, you’re a player; if you own it with your beloved twin sister, you’re—”

“Irish.”

“Go on.”

“And so it all built up—” I started.

“No,” Tanner said. “Implies building up to an explosion.”

“So we had gotten off track a little, but I was considering our five-year anniversary as a time to revive our relationship—”

“Recommit to our relationship,”
Tanner called. “
Revive
means something was dead.”

“Recommit to our relationship—”

“And so how does fucking a twenty-three-year-old figure in to this rejuvenative picture?” Betsy asked.

Tanner lobbed a jellybean her way. “A little out of character, Bets.”

“I’m sorry, guys, but I’m a woman, and that smells like bullshit, like mile-away bullshit. Recommit to the relationship,
please
. That girl was still in the picture when Amy went missing. Women are going to hate you, Nick, unless you suck it up. Be up-front, don’t stall. You can add it on:
We lost our jobs, we moved, my parents were dying. Then I fucked up. I fucked up huge. I lost track of who I was, and unfortunately, it took losing Amy to realize it
. You have to admit you’re a jerk and that everything was all your fault.”

“So, like, what men are supposed to do in general,” I said.

Betsy flung an annoyed look at the ceiling. “And that’s an attitude, Nick, you should be real careful on.”

I
am penniless and on the run. How fucking noir. Except that I am sitting in my Festiva at the far end of the parking lot of a vast fast-food complex on the banks of the Mississippi River, the smell of salt and factory-farm meat floating on the warm breezes. It is evening now—I’ve wasted hours—but I can’t move. I don’t know where to move to. The car gets smaller by the hour—I am forced to curl up like a fetus or my legs fall asleep. I certainly won’t sleep tonight. The door is locked, but I still await the tap on the window, and I know I will peek up and see either a crooked-toothed, sweet-talking serial killer (wouldn’t that be ironic, for me to actually be murdered?) or a stern, ID-demanding cop (wouldn’t that be worse, for me to be discovered in a parking lot looking like a hobo?). The glowing restaurant signs never go off here; the parking lot is lit like a football field—I think of suicide again, how a prisoner on suicide watch spends twenty-four hours a day under lights, an awful thought. My gas tank is below the quarter mark, an even more awful thought: I can drive only about an hour in any direction, so I must choose the direction carefully. South is Arkansas, north is Iowa, west is back to the Ozarks. Or I could go east, cross the river into Illinois. Everywhere I go is the river. I’m following it or it’s following me.

I know, suddenly, what I must do.

W
e spent the day of the interview huddled in the spare bedroom of Tanner’s suite, prepping my lines, fixing my look. Betsy fussed over my clothes, then Go trimmed the hair above my ears with nail scissors while Betsy tried to talk me into using makeup—powder—to cut down on shine. We all spoke in low voices because Sharon’s crew was setting up outside; the interview would be in the suite’s living room, overlooking the St. Louis Arch. Gateway to the West. I’m not sure what the point of the landmark was except to serve as a vague symbol of the middle of the country:
You Are Here
.

“You need at least a little powder, Nick,” Betsy finally said, coming at me with the puff. “Your nose sweats when you get nervous. Nixon lost an election on nose sweat.” Tanner oversaw it all like a conductor. “Not too much off that side, Go,” he’d call. “Bets, be very careful with that powder, better too little than too much.”

“We should have Botoxed him,” she said. Apparently, Botox fights sweat as well as wrinkles—some of their clients got a series of underarm shots before a trial, and they were already suggesting such a thing for me. Gently, subtly suggesting,
should
we go to trial.

“Yeah, I really need the press to get wind that I was having Botox treatments while my wife was missing,” I said. “Is missing.” I knew Amy wasn’t dead, but I also knew she was so far out of my reach that she might as well be. She was a wife in past tense.

“Good catch,” Tanner said. “Next time do it before it comes out of your mouth.”

At five
P.M
., Tanner’s phone rang, and he looked at the display. “Boney.” He sent it to voice mail. “I’ll call her after.” He didn’t want any new bit of information, interrogation, gossip to force us to reformulate our message. I agreed: I didn’t want Boney in my head just then.

“You sure we shouldn’t see what she wants?” Go said.

“She wants to fuck with me some more,” I said. “We’ll call her. A few hours. She can wait.”

We all rearranged ourselves, a mass group reassurance that the call was nothing to worry about. The room stayed silent for half a minute.

“I have to say, I’m strangely excited to get to meet Sharon Schieber,” Go finally said. “Very classy lady.
Not like that Connie Chung
.”

I laughed, which was the intention. Our mother had loved Sharon Schieber and hated Connie Chung—she’d never forgiven her for embarrassing Newt Gingrich’s mother on TV, something about Newt calling Hillary Clinton a b-i-t-c-h. I don’t remember the actual interview, just our mom’s outrage over it.

At six
P.M
. we entered the room, where two chairs were set up facing each other, the Arch in the background, the timing picked precisely so the Arch would glow but there would be no sunset glare on the windows. One of the most important moments of my life, I thought, dictated by the angle of the sun. A producer whose name I wouldn’t remember clicked toward us on dangerously high heels and explained to me what I should expect. Questions could be asked several times, to make the interview seem as smooth as possible, and to allow for Sharon’s reaction shots. I could not speak to my lawyer before giving an answer. I could rephrase an answer but not change the substance of the answer. Here’s some water, let’s get you miked.

We started to move over to the chair, and Betsy nudged my arm. When I looked down, she showed me a pocket of jellybeans. “Remember …” she said, and tsked her finger at me.

Suddenly, the suite door swung wide and Sharon Schieber entered, as smooth as if she were being borne by a team of swans. She was a beautiful woman, a woman who had probably never looked girlish. A woman whose nose probably never sweat. She had thick dark hair and giant brown eyes that could look doelike or wicked.

“It’s Sharon!” Go said, a thrilled whisper to imitate our mom.

Sharon turned to Go and nodded majestically, came over to greet
us. “I’m Sharon,” she said in a warm, deep voice, taking both of Go’s hands.

“Our mother loved you,” Go said.

“I’m so glad,” Sharon said, managing to sound warm. She turned to me and was about to speak when her producer clicked up on high heels and whispered in her ear. Then waited for Sharon’s reaction, then whispered again.

“Oh. Oh my God,” Sharon said. When she turned back to me, she wasn’t smiling at all.

I
have made a call: to make a call. The meeting can’t happen until this evening—there are predictable complications—so I kill the day by primping and prepping.

I clean myself in a McDonald’s bathroom—green gel on wet paper towels—and change into a cheap, papery sundress. I think about what I’ll say. I am surprisingly eager. The shithole life was wearing on me: the communal washing machine with someone’s wet underwear always stuck in the rungs at the top, to be peeled out by hesitant pincered fingers; the corner of my cabin rug that was forever mysteriously damp; the dripping faucet in the bathroom.

At five o’clock, I begin driving north to the meeting spot, a river casino called Horseshoe Alley. It appears out of nowhere, a blinking neon clump in the middle of a scrawny forest. I roll in on fumes—a cliché I’ve never put to practice—park the car, and take in the view: a migration of the elderly, scuttling like broken insects on walkers and canes, jerking oxygen tanks toward the bright lights. Sliding in and out of the groups of octogenarians are hustling, overdressed boys who’ve watched too many Vegas movies and don’t know how poignant they are, trying to imitate Rat Pack cool in cheap suits in the Missouri woods.

I enter under a glowing billboard promoting—for two nights only—the reunion of a ’50s doo-wop group. Inside, the casino is frigid and close. The penny slots clink and clang, joyful electronic chirps that don’t match the dull, drooping faces of the people sitting in front of the
machines, smoking cigarettes above dangling oxygen masks. Penny in penny in penny in penny in penny in ding-ding-ding! penny in penny in. The money that they waste goes to the underfunded public schools that their bored, blinking grandchildren attend. Penny in penny in. A group of wasted boys stumble past, a bachelor party, the boys’ lips wet from shots; they don’t even notice me, husky and Hamill-haired. They are talking about girls,
get us some girls
, but besides me, the only girls I see are golden. The boys will drink away their disappointment and try not to kill fellow motorists on the way home.

I wait in a pocket bar to the far left of the casino entrance, as planned, and watch the aged boy band sing to a large snowy-haired audience, snapping and clapping along, shuffling gnarled fingers through bowls of complimentary peanuts. The skeletal singers, withered beneath bedazzled tuxes, spin slowly, carefully, on replaced hips, the dance of the moribund.