flynn_gillian_gone_girl (1) (858987), страница 28
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The“little brown house” story was about my father, and Amy is the only person I’d ever toldit to: that after the divorce, I saw him so seldom that I decided to think of him as acharacter in a storybook. He was not my actual father—who would have loved me andspent time with me—but a benevolent and vaguely important gure named Mr. Brown,who was very busy doing very important things for the United States and who (very)occasionally used me as a cover to move more easily about town.
Amy got tears in hereyes when I told her this, which I hadn’t meant, I’d meant it as a kids are funny story.She told me she was my family now, that she loved me enough to make up for tencrappy fathers, and that we were now the Dunnes, the two of us. And then shewhispered in my ear, “I do have an assignment you might be good for …”As for bringing back the goodwill, that was another conciliation. After my father wascompletely lost to the Alzheimer’s, we decided to sell his place, so Amy and I wentthrough his house, putting together boxes for Goodwill. Amy, of course, was a whirlingdervish of doing—pack, store, toss—while I sifted through my father’s things glacially.For me, everything was a clue. A mug with deeper co ee stains than the others must behis favorite.
Was it a gift? Who gave it to him? Or did he buy it himself? I pictured myfather nding the very act of shopping emasculating. Still, an inspection of his closetrevealed ve pairs of shoes, shiny new, still in their boxes. Had he bought these himself,picturing a di erent, more social Bill Dunne than the one slowly unspooling alone? Didhe go to Shoe-Be-Doo-Be, get my mother to help him, just another in a long line of hercasual kindnesses? Of course, I didn’t share any of these musings with Amy, so I’m sure Icame off as the goldbricker I so often am.“Here.
A box. For Goodwill,” she said, catching me on the oor, leaning against awall, staring at a shoe. “You put the shoes in the box. Okay?” I was embarrassed, Isnarled at her, she snapped at me, and … the usual.I should add, in Amy’s defense, that she’d asked me twice if I wanted to talk, if I wassure I wanted to do this. I sometimes leave out details like that. It’s more convenient forme. In truth, I wanted her to read my mind so I didn’t have to stoop to the womanly artof articulation. I was sometimes as guilty of playing the gure-me-out game as Amywas. I’ve left that bit of information out too.I’m a big fan of the lie of omission.I pulled up in front of my dad’s house just after ten P.M.
It was a tidy little place, agood starter home (or ender home). Two bedrooms, two baths, dining room, dated butdecent kitchen. A for-sale sign rusted in the front yard. One year and not a bite.I entered the stu y house, the heat rolling over me. The budget alarm system weinstalled after the third break-in began beeping, like a bomb countdown. I input thecode, the one that drove Amy insane because it went against every rule about codes. Itwas my birthday: 81577.Code rejected. I tried again.
Code rejected. A bead of sweat rolled down my back.Amy had always threatened to change the code. She said it was pointless to have onethat was so guessable, but I knew the real reason. She resented that it was my birthdayand not our anniversary: Once again I’d chosen me over us. My semi-sweet nostalgia forAmy disappeared. I stabbed my nger at the numbers again, growing more panicked asthe alarm beeped and beeped and beeped its countdown—until it went into full intruderblare.Woooonk-woooonk-woooonk!My cell phone was supposed to ring so I could give the all-clear: Just me, the idiot.But it didn’t. I waited a full minute, the alarm reminding me of a torpedoed-submarinemovie.
The canned heat of a closed house in July shimmered over me. My shirt back wasalready soaked. Goddammit, Amy. I scanned the alarm for the company’s number andfound nothing. I pulled over a chair and began yanking at the alarm; I had it o thewall, hanging by the cords, when my phone nally rang. A bitchy voice on the otherend demanded Amy’s first pet’s name.Woooonk-woooonk-woooonk!It was exactly the wrong tone—smug, petulant, utterly unconcerned—and exactly thewrong question, because I didn’t know the answer, which infuriated me.
No matter howmany clues I solved, I’d be faced with some Amy trivia to unman me.“Look, this is Nick Dunne, this is my dad’s house, this account was set up by me,” Isnapped. “So it doesn’t really fucking matter what my wife’s first pet’s name was.”Woooonk-woooonk-woooonk!“Please don’t take that tone with me, sir.”“Look, I just came in to grab one thing from my dad’s house, and now I’m leaving,okay?”“I have to notify the police immediately.”“Can you just turn off the goddamn alarm so I can think?”Woooonk-woooonk-woooonk!“The alarm’s off.”“The alarm is not off.”“Sir, I warned you once, do not take that tone with me.”You fucking bitch.“You know what? Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it.”I hung up just as I remembered Amy’s cat’s name, the very first one: Stuart.I called back, got a di erent operator, a reasonable operator, who turned o thealarm and, God bless her, called o the police.
I really wasn’t in the mood to explainmyself.I sat on the thin, cheap carpet and made myself breathe, my heart clattering. After aminute, after my shoulders untensed and my jaw unclenched and my hands un sted andmy heart returned to normal, I stood up and momentarily debated just leaving, as if thatwould teach Amy a lesson. But as I stood up, I saw a blue envelope left on the kitchencounter like a Dear John note.I took a deep breath, blew it out—new attitude—and opened the envelope, pulled outthe letter marked with a heart.Hi Darling,So we both have things we want to work on. For me, it’d be my perfectionism,my occasional (wishful thinking?) self-righteousness.
For you? I know you worrythat you’re sometimes too distant, too removed, unable to be tender or nurturing.Well, I want to tell you—here in your father’s house—that isn’t true. You are notyour father. You need to know that you are a good man, you are a sweet man,you are kind. I’ve punished you for not being able to read my mind sometimes,for not being able to act in exactly the way I wanted you to act right at exactlythat moment. I punished you for being a real, breathing man. I ordered youaround instead of trusting you to nd your way. I didn’t give you the bene t ofthe doubt: that no matter how much you and I blunder, you always love me andwant me to be happy. And that should be enough for any girl, right? I worry I’vesaid things about you that aren’t actually true, and that you’ve come to believethem.
So I am here to say now: You are WARM. You are my sun.If Amy were with me, as she’d planned on being, she would have nuzzled into me theway she used to do, her face in the crook of my neck, and she would have kissed me andsmiled and said, You are, you know. My sun. My throat tight, I took a nal look aroundmy father’s house and left, closing the door on the heat. In my car, I fumbled open theenvelope marked fourth clue.
We had to be near the end.Picture me: I’m a girl who is very badI need to be punished, and by punished, I mean hadIt’s where you store goodies for anniversary fivePardon me if this is getting contrived!A good time was had here right at sunny middayThen out for a cocktail, all so terribly gay.So run there right now, full of sweet sighs,And open the door for your big surprise.My stomach seized. I didn’t know what this one meant.
I reread it. I couldn’t evenguess. Amy had stopped taking it easy on me. I wasn’t going to nish the treasure huntafter all.I felt a surge of angst. What a fucking day. Boney was out to get me, Noelle wasinsane, Shawna was pissed, Hilary was resentful, the woman at the security companywas a bitch, and my wife had stumped me nally. It was time to end this goddamn day.There was only one woman I could stand to be around right now.Go took one look at me—rattled, tight-lipped, and heat-exhausted from my dad’s—and parked me on the couch, announced she’d make some late dinner.
Five minuteslater, she was stepping carefully toward me, balancing my meal on an ancient TV tray.An old Dunne standby: grilled cheese and BBQ chips, a plastic cup of …“It’s not Kool-Aid,” Go said. “It’s beer. Kool-Aid seemed a little too regressive.”“This is very nurturing and strange of you, Go.”“You’re cooking tomorrow.”“Hope you like canned soup.”She sat down on the couch next to me, stole a chip from my plate, and asked, toocasually: “Any thoughts on why the cops would ask me if Amy was still a size two?”“Jesus, they won’t fucking let that go,” I said.“Doesn’t it freak you out? Like, they found her clothes or something?”“They’d have asked me to identify them. Right?”She thought about that a second, her face pinched.
“That makes sense,” she said. Herface remained pinched until she caught me looking, then she smiled. “I taped the ballgame, wanna watch? You okay?”“I’m okay.” I felt awful, my stomach greasy, my psyche crackling. Maybe it was theclue I couldn’t gure out, but I suddenly felt like I’d overlooked something. I’d madesome huge mistake, and my error would be disastrous. Maybe it was my conscience,scratching back to the surface from its secret oubliette.Go pulled up the game and, for the next ten minutes, remarked on the game only,and only between sips of her beer.
Go didn’t like grilled cheese; she was scoopingpeanut butter out of the jar onto saltines. When a commercial break came on, shepaused and said, “If I had a dick, I would fuck this peanut butter,” deliberately sprayingcracker bits toward me.“I think if you had a dick, all sorts of bad things would happen.”She fast-forwarded through a nothing inning, Cards trailing by ve. When it wastime for the next commercial break, Go paused, said, “So I called to change my cellphone plan today, and the hold song was Lionel Ritchie—do you ever listen to LionelRitchie? I like ‘Penny Lover,’ but the song wasn’t ‘Penny Lover,’ but anyway, then awoman came on the line, and she said the customer-service reps are all based in BatonRouge, which was strange because she didn’t have an accent, but she said she grew up inNew Orleans, and it’s a little-known fact that—what do you call someone from NewOrleans, a New Orleansean?—anyway, that they don’t have much of an accent.
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