flynn_gillian_gone_girl (1) (858987), страница 2
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But it looked like ourmother would beat him there. About six months, maybe a year, she had. I could tell thatGo had gone to meet with the doctor by herself, taken her studious notes in her slovenlyhandwriting, and she was teary as she tried to decipher what she’d written.
Dates anddoses.“Well, fuck, I have no idea what this says, is it a nine? Does that even make sense?”she said, and I interrupted. Here was a task, a purpose, held out on my sister’s palm likea plum. I almost cried with relief.“I’ll come back, Go. We’ll move back home. You shouldn’t have to do this all byyourself.”She didn’t believe me. I could hear her breathing on the other end.“I’m serious, Go. Why not? There’s nothing here.”A long exhale.
“What about Amy?”That is what I didn’t take long enough to consider. I simply assumed I would bundleup my New York wife with her New York interests, her New York pride, and remove herfrom her New York parents—leave the frantic, thrilling futureland of Manhattan behind—and transplant her to a little town on the river in Missouri, and all would be fine.I did not yet understand how foolish, how optimistic, how, yes, just like Nick I was forthinking this. The misery it would lead to.“Amy will be ne. Amy …” Here was where I should have said, “Amy loves Mom.” ButI couldn’t tell Go that Amy loved our mother, because after all that time, Amy still barelyknew our mother.
Their few meetings had left them both ba ed. Amy would dissect theconversations for days after—“And what did she mean by …”—as if my mother weresome ancient peasant tribeswoman arriving from the tundra with an armful of raw yakmeat and some buttons for bartering, trying to get something from Amy that wasn’t onoffer.Amy didn’t care to know my family, didn’t want to know my birthplace, and yet forsome reason, I thought moving home would be a good idea.My morning breath warmed the pillow, and I changed the subject in my mind. Todaywas not a day for second-guessing or regret, it was a day for doing.
Downstairs, I couldhear the return of a long-lost sound: Amy making breakfast. Banging wooden cupboards(rump-thump!), rattling containers of tin and glass (ding-ring!), shu ing and sorting acollection of metal pots and iron pans (ruzz-shuzz!). A culinary orchestra tuning up,clattering vigorously toward the nale, a cake pan drumrolling along the oor, hittingthe wall with a cymballic crash. Something impressive was being created, probably acrepe, because crepes are special, and today Amy would want to cook somethingspecial.It was our five-year anniversary.I walked barefoot to the edge of the steps and stood listening, working my toes intothe plush wall-to-wall carpet Amy detested on principle, as I tried to decide whether Iwas ready to join my wife.
Amy was in the kitchen, oblivious to my hesitation. She washumming something melancholy and familiar. I strained to make it out—a folk song? alullabye?—and then realized it was the theme to M*A*S*H. Suicide is painless. I wentdownstairs.I hovered in the doorway, watching my wife. Her yellow-butter hair was pulled up,the hank of ponytail swinging cheerful as a jump-rope, and she was sucking distractedlyon a burnt ngertip, humming around it.
She hummed to herself because she was anunrivaled botcher of lyrics. When we were rst dating, a Genesis song came on theradio: “She seems to have an invisible touch, yeah.” And Amy crooned instead, “Shetakes my hat and puts it on the top shelf.” When I asked her why she’d ever think herlyrics were remotely, possibly, vaguely right, she told me she always thought the womanin the song truly loved the man because she put his hat on the top shelf.
I knew I likedher then, really liked her, this girl with an explanation for everything.There’s something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterlycold.Amy peered at the crepe sizzling in the pan and licked something o her wrist. Shelooked triumphant, wifely. If I took her in my arms, she would smell like berries andpowdered sugar.When she spied me lurking there in grubby boxers, my hair in full Heat Miser spike,she leaned against the kitchen counter and said, “Well, hello, handsome.”Bile and dread inched up my throat.
I thought to myself: Okay, go.I was very late getting to work. My sister and I had done a foolish thing when weboth moved back home. We had done what we always talked about doing. We opened abar. We borrowed money from Amy to do this, eighty thousand dollars, which was oncenothing to Amy but by then was almost everything. I swore I would pay her back, withinterest. I would not be a man who borrowed from his wife—I could feel my dadtwisting his lips at the very idea. Well, there are all kinds of men, his most damningphrase, the second half left unsaid, and you are the wrong kind.But truly, it was a practical decision, a smart business move. Amy and I both needednew careers; this would be mine.
She would pick one someday, or not, but in themeantime, here was an income, made possible by the last of Amy’s trust fund. Like theMcMansion I rented, the bar featured symbolically in my childhood memories—a placewhere only grown-ups go, and do whatever grown-ups do. Maybe that’s why I was soinsistent on buying it after being stripped of my livelihood. It’s a reminder that I am,after all, an adult, a grown man, a useful human being, even though I lost the careerthat made me all these things.
I won’t make that mistake again: The once plentiful herdsof magazine writers would continue to be culled—by the Internet, by the recession, bythe American public, who would rather watch TV or play video games or electronicallyinform friends that, like, rain sucks! But there’s no app for a bourbon buzz on a warmday in a cool, dark bar. The world will always want a drink.Our bar is a corner bar with a haphazard, patchwork aesthetic. Its best feature is amassive Victorian backbar, dragon heads and angel faces emerging from the oak—anextravagant work of wood in these shitty plastic days. The remainder of the bar is, infact, shitty, a showcase of the shabbiest design o erings of every decade: anEisenhower-era linoleum oor, the edges turned up like burnt toast; dubious woodpaneled walls straight from a ’70s home-porn video; halogen oor lamps, an accidentaltribute to my 1990s dorm room.
The ultimate e ect is strangely homey—it looks less likea bar than someone’s benignly neglected xer-upper. And jovial: We share a parking lotwith the local bowling alley, and when our door swings wide, the clatter of strikesapplauds the customer’s entrance.We named the bar The Bar. “People will think we’re ironic instead of creativelybankrupt,” my sister reasoned.Yes, we thought we were being clever New Yorkers—that the name was a joke noone else would really get, not get like we did.
Not meta-get. We pictured the localsscrunching their noses: Why’d you name it The Bar? But our rst customer, a gray-hairedwoman in bifocals and a pink jogging suit, said, “I like the name. Like in Breakfast atTiffany’s and Audrey Hepburn’s cat was named Cat.”We felt much less superior after that, which was a good thing.I pulled into the parking lot. I waited until a strike erupted from the bowling alley—thank you, thank you, friends—then stepped out of the car.
I admired the surroundings,still not bored with the broken-in view: the squatty blond-brick post o ce across thestreet (now closed on Saturdays), the unassuming beige o ce building just down theway (now closed, period). The town wasn’t prosperous, not anymore, not by a longshot. Hell, it wasn’t even original, being one of two Carthage, Missouris—ours istechnically North Carthage, which makes it sound like a twin city, although it’s hundredsof miles from the other and the lesser of the two: a quaint little 1950s town that bloateditself into a basic midsize suburb and dubbed it progress. Still, it was where my momgrew up and where she raised me and Go, so it had some history. Mine, at least.As I walked toward the bar across the concrete-and-weed parking lot, I lookedstraight down the road and saw the river. That’s what I’ve always loved about our town:We aren’t built on some safe blu overlooking the Mississippi—we are on theMississippi.
I could walk down the road and step right into the sucker, an easy threefoot drop, and be on my way to Tennessee. Every building downtown bears hand-drawnlines from where the river hit during the Flood of ’61, ’75, ’84, ’93, ’07, ’08, ’11. And soon.The river wasn’t swollen now, but it was running urgently, in strong ropy currents.Moving apace with the river was a long single- le line of men, eyes aimed at their feet,shoulders tense, walking steadfastly nowhere. As I watched them, one suddenly lookedup at me, his face in shadow, an oval blackness.
I turned away.I felt an immediate, intense need to get inside. By the time I’d gone twenty feet, myneck bubbled with sweat. The sun was still an angry eye in the sky. You have been seen.My gut twisted, and I moved quicker. I needed a drink.AMY ELLIOTTJANUARY 8, 2005DIARY ENTRYTra and la! I am smiling a big adopted-orphan smile as I write this.
I amembarrassed at how happy I am, like some Technicolor comic of a teenage girl talkingon the phone with my hair in a ponytail, the bubble above my head saying: I met a boy!But I did. This is a technical, empirical truth. I met a boy, a great, gorgeous dude, afunny, cool-ass guy.
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