Gone Girl: A Novel (9 page)

“What’s going on?” I asked her. “This is my father.”

“You got our call?”

“What call?”

“To come get your father.” She overenunciated, as if I were a dim ten-year-old.

“I— My wife is missing. I’ve been
here
most of the night.”

She stared at me, not connecting in the least. I could see her debating whether to sacrifice her leverage and apologize, inquire. Then my father started up again,
bitch bitch bitch
, and she chose to keep the leverage.

“Sir, Comfort Hill has been trying to contact you all day. Your father wandered out a fire exit early this morning. He’s got a few scratches and scrapes, as you can see, but no damage. We picked him up a few hours ago, walking down River Road, disoriented. We’ve been trying to reach you.”

“I’ve been right here,” I said. “Right goddamn next door, how did no one put this together?”

Bitch bitch bitch
, said my dad.

“Sir, please don’t take that tone with me.”

Bitch bitch bitch
.

Boney ordered an officer—male—to drive my dad back to the home so I could finish up with them. We stood on the stairs outside the police station, watched him get settled into the car, still muttering. The entire time he never registered my presence. When they drove off, he didn’t even look back.

“You guys not close?” she asked.

“We are the definition of not close.”

The police finished with their questions and hustled me into a squad car at about two
A.M
. with advice to get a good night’s sleep and return at eleven for a 12-noon press conference.

I didn’t ask if I could go home. I had them take me to Go’s, because I knew she’d stay up and have a drink with me, fix me a sandwich. It was, pathetically, all I wanted right then: a woman to fix me a sandwich and not ask me any questions.

“You don’t want to go look for her?” Go offered as I ate. “We can drive around.”

“That seems pointless,” I said dully. “Where do I look?”

“Nick, this is really fucking serious.”

“I know, Go.”

“Act like it, okay,
Lance
? Don’t fucking
myuhmyuhmyuh
.” It was a thick-tongued noise, the noise she always made to convey my indecisiveness, accompanied by a dazed rolling of the eyes and the dusting off of my legal first name. No one who has my face needs to be called Lance. She handed me a tumbler of Scotch. “And drink this, but only this. You don’t want to be hungover tomorrow. Where the fuck could she be? God, I feel sick to my stomach.” She poured herself a glass, gulped, then tried to sip, pacing around the kitchen. “Aren’t you worried, Nick? That some guy, like, saw her on the street and just, just decided to take her? Hit her on the head and—”

I started. “Why did you say
hit her on the head
, what the fuck is that?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to paint a picture, I just … I don’t know, I just keep thinking. About some crazy person.” She splashed some more Scotch into her tumbler.

“Speaking of crazy people,” I said, “Dad got out again today, they found him wandering down River Road. He’s back at Comfort now.”

She shrugged:
okay
. It was the third time in six months that our dad had slipped out. Go was lighting a cigarette, her thoughts still on Amy. “I mean, isn’t there someone we can go talk to?” she asked. “Something we can do?”

“Jesus, Go! You really need me to feel more fucking impotent than I do right now?” I snapped. “I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing. There’s no ‘When Your Wife Goes Missing 101.’ The police told me I could leave. I left. I’m just doing what they tell me.”

“Of course you are,” murmured Go, who had a long-stymied mission to turn me into a rebel. It wouldn’t take. I was the kid in high school who made curfew; I was the writer who hit my deadlines, even
the fake ones. I respect rules, because if you follow rules, things go smoothly, usually.

“Fuck, Go, I’m back at the station in a few hours, okay? Can you please just be nice to me for a second? I’m scared shitless.”

We had a five-second staring contest, then Go filled up my glass one more time, an apology. She sat down next to me, put a hand on my shoulder.

“Poor Amy,” she said.

DIARY ENTRY

P
oor me. Let me set the scene: Campbell and Insley and I are all down in Soho, having dinner at Tableau. Lots of goat-cheese tarts, lamb meatballs, and rocket greens, I’m not sure what all the fuss is about. But we are working backward: dinner first, then drinks in one of the little nooks Campbell has reserved, a mini-closet where you can lounge expensively in a place that’s not too different from, say, your living room. But fine, it’s fun to do the silly, trendy things sometimes. We are all overdressed in our little flashy frocks, our slasher heels, and we all eat small plates of food bites that are as decorative and unsubstantial as we are.

We’ve discussed having our husbands drop by to join us for the drinks portion. So there we are, post-dinner, tucked into our nook, mojitos and martinis and my bourbon delivered to us by a waitress who could be auditioning for the small role of Fresh-faced Girl Just Off the Bus.

We are running out of things to say; it is a Tuesday, and no one is feeling like it is anything but. The drinks are being carefully drunk: Insley and Campbell both have vague appointments the next morning, and I have work, so we aren’t gearing up for a big night, we are winding down, and we are getting dull-witted, bored. We would leave if we weren’t waiting for the possible appearance of the men. Campbell keeps peeking at her BlackBerry, Insley studies her flexed calves from different angles. John arrives first—huge apologies to Campbell, big smiles and kisses for us all, a man just thrilled to be
here, just delighted to arrive at the tail-end of a cocktail hour across town so he can guzzle a drink and head home with his wife. George shows up about twenty minutes later—sheepish, tense, a terse excuse about work, Insley snapping at him, “You’re
forty
minutes late,” him nipping back, “Yeah, sorry about making us money.” The two barely talking to each other as they make conversation with everyone else.

Nick never shows; no call. We wait another forty-five minutes, Campbell solicitous (“Probably got hit with some last-minute deadline,” she says, and smiles toward good old John, who never lets last-minute deadlines interfere with his wife’s plans); Insley’s anger thawing toward her husband as she realizes he is only the second-biggest jackass of the group (“You sure he hasn’t even texted, sweetie?”).

Me, I just smile: “Who knows where he is—I’ll catch him at home.” And then it is the men of the group who look stricken:
You mean that was an option? Take a pass on the night with no nasty consequences? No guilt or anger or sulking?

Well, maybe not for you guys.

Nick and I, we sometimes laugh, laugh out loud, at the horrible things women make their husbands do to prove their love. The pointless tasks, the myriad sacrifices, the endless small surrenders. We call these men the
dancing monkeys
.

Nick will come home, sweaty and salty and beer-loose from a day at the ballpark, and I’ll curl up in his lap, ask him about the game, ask him if his friend Jack had a good time, and he’ll say, “Oh, he came down with a case of the dancing monkeys—poor Jennifer was having a ‘real stressful week’ and
really
needed him at home.”

Or his buddy at work, who can’t go out for drinks because his girlfriend really needs him to stop by some bistro where she is having dinner with a friend from out of town. So they can finally meet. And so she can show how obedient her monkey is:
He comes when I call, and look how well groomed!

Wear this, don’t wear that. Do this chore now and do this chore when you get a chance and by that I mean now. And definitely, definitely, give up the things you love for me, so I will have proof that you love me best
. It’s the female pissing contest—as we swan around our book clubs and our cocktail hours, there are few things women love more than being able to detail the sacrifices our men make for us. A call-and-response, the response being: “Ohhh, that’s so
sweet
.”

I am happy not to be in that club. I don’t partake, I don’t get off on emotional coercion, on forcing Nick to play some happy-hubby role—the shrugging, cheerful, dutiful
taking out the trash, honey!
role. Every wife’s dream man, the counterpoint to every man’s fantasy of the sweet, hot, laid-back woman who loves sex and a stiff drink.

I like to think I am confident and secure and mature enough to know Nick loves me without him constantly proving it. I don’t need pathetic dancing-monkey scenarios to repeat to my friends; I am content with letting him be himself.

I don’t know why women find that so hard.

When I get home from dinner, my cab pulls up just as Nick is getting out of his own taxi, and he stands in the street with his arms out to me and a huge grin on his face—“Baby!”—and I run and I jump up into his arms and he presses a stubbly cheek against mine.

“What did you do tonight?” I ask.

“Some guys were playing poker after work, so I hung around for a bit. Hope that was okay.”

“Of course,” I say. “More fun than my night.”

“Who all showed up?”

“Oh, Campbell and Insley and their dancing monkeys. Boring. You dodged a bullet. A really lame bullet.”

He squeezes me into him—those strong arms—and hauls me up the stairs. “God, I love you,” he says.

Then comes sex and a stiff drink and a night of sleep in a sweet, exhausted rats’ tangle in our big, soft bed. Poor me.

I
didn’t listen to Go about the booze. I finished half the bottle sitting on her sofa by myself, my eighteenth burst of adrenaline kicking in just when I thought I’d finally go to sleep: My eyes were shutting, I was shifting my pillow, my eyes were closed, and then I saw my wife, blood clotting her blond hair, weeping and blind in pain, scraping herself along our kitchen floor. Calling my name.
Nick, Nick, Nick!

I took repeated tugs on the bottle, psyching myself up for sleep, a losing routine. Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it. I drank more and continued my mantra.
Stop thinking
, swig,
empty your head
, swig,
now, seriously, empty your head, do it now
, swig.
You need to be sharp tomorrow, you need to sleep
! Swig. I got nothing more than a fussy nap toward dawn, woke up an hour later with a hangover. Not a disabling hangover, but decent. I was tender and dull. Fuggy. Maybe still a little drunk. I stutter-walked to Go’s Subaru, the movement feeling alien, like my legs were on backward. I had temporary ownership of the car; the police had graciously accepted my gently used Jetta for inspection along with my laptop—all just a formality, I was assured. I drove home to get myself some decent clothes.

Three police cruisers sat on my block, our very few neighbors milling around. No Carl, but there was Jan Teverer—the Christian lady—and Mike, the father of the three-year-old IVF triplets—Trinity, Topher, and Talullah. (“I hate them all, just by name,” said Amy, a grave judge of anything trendy. When I mentioned that the
name Amy was once trendy, my wife said, “Nick, you
know
the story of my name.” I had no idea what she was talking about.)

Jan nodded from a distance without meeting my eyes, but Mike strode over to me as I got out of my car. “I’m so sorry, man, anything I can do, you let me know. Anything. I did the mowing this morning, so at least you don’t needta worry about that.”

Mike and I took turns mowing all the abandoned foreclosed properties in the complex—heavy rains in the spring had turned yards into jungles, which encouraged an influx of raccoons. We had raccoons everywhere, gnawing through our garbage late at night, sneaking into our basements, lounging on our porches like lazy house pets. The mowing didn’t seem to make them go away, but we could at least see them coming now.

“Thanks, man, thank you,” I said.