flynn_gillian_gone_girl (1) (858987), страница 3
Текст из файла (страница 3)
Let me set the scene, because it deserves setting for posterity (no,please, I’m not that far gone, posterity! feh). But still. It’s not New Year’s, but still verymuch the new year. It’s winter: early dark, freezing cold.Carmen, a newish friend—semi-friend, barely friend, the kind of friend you can’tcancel on—has talked me into going out to Brooklyn, to one of her writers’ parties. Now,I like a writer party, I like writers, I am the child of writers, I am a writer.
I still lovescribbling that word—WRITER—anytime a form, questionnaire, document asks for myoccupation. Fine, I write personality quizzes, I don’t write about the Great Issues of theDay, but I think it’s fair to say I am a writer. I’m using this journal to get better: to honemy skills, to collect details and observations. To show don’t tell and all that otherwritery crap.
(Adopted-orphan smile, I mean, that’s not bad, come on.) But really, I dothink my quizzes alone qualify me on at least an honorary basis. Right?At a party you nd yourself surrounded by genuine talented writers, employed at highpro le, respected newspapers and magazines. You merely write quizzes for women’s rags.When someone asks what you do for a living, you:a) Get embarrassed and say, “I’m just a quiz writer, it’s silly stuff!”b) Go on the o ense: “I’m a writer now, but I’m considering somethingmore challenging and worthwhile—why, what do you do?”c) Take pride in your accomplishments: “I write personality quizzes usingthe knowledge gleaned from my master’s degree in psychology—oh, and funfact: I am the inspiration for a beloved children’s-book series, I’m sure youknow it, Amazing Amy? Yeah, so suck it, snobdouche!Answer: C, totally CAnyway, the party is being thrown by one of Carmen’s good friends who writesabout movies for a movie magazine, and is very funny, according to Carmen.
I worryfor a second that she wants to set us up: I am not interested in being set up. I need to beambushed, caught unawares, like some sort of feral love-jackal. I’m too self-consciousotherwise. I feel myself trying to be charming, and then I realize I’m obviously trying tobe charming, and then I try to be even more charming to make up for the fake charm,and then I’ve basically turned into Liza Minnelli: I’m dancing in tights and sequins,begging you to love me. There’s a bowler and jazz hands and lots of teeth.But no, I realize, as Carmen gushes on about her friend: She likes him. Good.We climb three ights of warped stairs and walk into a whoosh of body heat andwriterness: many black-framed glasses and mops of hair; faux western shirts andheathery turtlenecks; black wool pea-coats opped all across the couch, puddling to theoor; a German poster for The Getaway (Ihre Chance war gleich Null!) covering onepaint-cracked wall.
Franz Ferdinand on the stereo: “Take Me Out.”A clump of guys hovers near a card table where all the alcohol is set up, tippingmore booze into their cups after every few sips, all too aware of how little is left to goaround. I nudge in, aiming my plastic cup in the center like a busker, get a clatter of icecubes and a splash of vodka from a sweet-faced guy wearing a Space Invaders T-shirt.A lethal-looking bottle of green-apple liqueur, the host’s ironic purchase, will soon beour fate unless someone makes a booze run, and that seems unlikely, as everyoneclearly believes they made the run last time. It is a January party, de nitely, everyonestill glutted and sugar-pissed from the holidays, lazy and irritated simultaneously. Aparty where people drink too much and pick cleverly worded ghts, blowing cigarettesmoke out an open window even after the host asks them to go outside.
We’ve alreadytalked to one another at a thousand holiday parties, we have nothing left to say, we arecollectively bored, but we don’t want to go back into the January cold; our bones stillache from the subway steps.I have lost Carmen to her host-beau—they are having an intense discussion in acorner of the kitchen, the two of them hunching their shoulders, their faces toward eachother, the shape of a heart.
Good. I think about eating to give myself something to dobesides standing in the center of the room, smiling like the new kid in the lunchroom.But almost everything is gone. Some potato-chip shards sit in the bottom of a giantTupperware bowl. A supermarket deli tray full of hoary carrots and gnarled celery anda semeny dip sits untouched on a co ee table, cigarettes littered throughout like bonusvegetable sticks.
I am doing my thing, my impulse thing: What if I leap from the theaterbalcony right now? What if I tongue the homeless man across from me on the subway?What if I sit down on the oor of this party by myself and eat everything on that delitray, including the cigarettes?“Please don’t eat anything in that area,” he says. It is him (bum bum BUMMM!), but Idon’t yet know it’s him (bum-bum-bummm). I know it’s a guy who will talk to me, hewears his cockiness like an ironic T-shirt, but it ts him better. He is the kind of guy whocarries himself like he gets laid a lot, a guy who likes women, a guy who would actuallyfuck me properly.
I would like to be fucked properly! My dating life seems to rotatearound three types of men: preppy Ivy Leaguers who believe they’re characters in aFitzgerald novel; slick Wall Streeters with money signs in their eyes, their ears, theirmouths; and sensitive smart-boys who are so self-aware that everything feels like a joke.The Fitzgerald fellows tend to be ineffectively porny in bed, a lot of noise and acrobaticsto very little end. The nance guys turn rageful and accid. The smart-boys fuck likethey’re composing a piece of math rock: This hand strums around here, and then thisnger o ers a nice bass rhythm.… I sound quite slutty, don’t I? Pause while I count howmany … eleven.
Not bad. I’ve always thought twelve was a solid, reasonable number toend at.“Seriously,” Number 12 continues. (Ha!) “Back away from the tray. James has up tothree other food items in his refrigerator. I could make you an olive with mustard. Justone olive, though.”Just one olive, though. It is a line that is only a little funny, but it already has the feelof an inside joke, one that will get funnier with nostalgic repetition. I think: A year fromnow, we will be walking along the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset and one of us will whisper, “Justone olive, though,” and we’ll start to laugh. (Then I catch myself.
Awful. If he knew I wasdoing a year from now already, he’d run and I’d be obliged to cheer him on.)Mainly, I will admit, I smile because he’s gorgeous. Distractingly gorgeous, the kindof looks that make your eyes pinwheel, that make you want to just address the elephant—“You know you’re gorgeous, right?”—and move on with the conversation. I bet dudeshate him: He looks like the rich-boy villain in an ’80s teen movie—the one who bulliesthe sensitive mis t, the one who will end up with a pie in the puss, the whipped creamwilting his upturned collar as everyone in the cafeteria cheers.He doesn’t act that way, though.
His name is Nick. I love it. It makes him seem nice,and regular, which he is. When he tells me his name, I say, “Now, that’s a real name.”He brightens and reels o some line: “Nick’s the kind of guy you can drink a beer with,the kind of guy who doesn’t mind if you puke in his car. Nick!”He makes a series of awful puns. I catch three-fourths of his movie references. Twothirds, maybe.
(Note to self: Rent The Sure Thing.) He re lls my drink without me havingto ask, somehow ferreting out one last cup of the good stu . He has claimed me, placeda ag in me: I was here rst, she’s mine, mine. It feels nice, after my recent series ofnervous, respectful post-feminist men, to be a territory. He has a great smile, a cat’ssmile. He should cough out yellow Tweety Bird feathers, the way he smiles at me.
Hedoesn’t ask what I do for a living, which is ne, which is a change. (I’m a writer, did Imention?) He talks to me in his river-wavy Missouri accent; he was born and raisedoutside of Hannibal, the boyhood home of Mark Twain, the inspiration for Tom Sawyer.He tells me he worked on a steamboat when he was a teenager, dinner and jazz for thetourists. And when I laugh (bratty, bratty New York girl who has never ventured tothose big unwieldy middle states, those States Where Many Other People Live), heinforms me that Missoura is a magical place, the most beautiful in the world, no statemore glorious.
His eyes are mischievous, his lashes are long. I can see what he lookedlike as a boy.We share a taxi home, the streetlights making dizzy shadows and the car speeding asif we’re being chased. It is one A.M. when we hit one of New York’s unexplaineddeadlocks twelve blocks from my apartment, so we slide out of the taxi into the cold,into the great What Next? and Nick starts walking me home, his hand on the small ofmy back, our faces stunned by the chill. As we turn the corner, the local bakery isgetting its powdered sugar delivered, funneled into the cellar by the barrelful as if itwere cement, and we can see nothing but the shadows of the deliverymen in the white,sweet cloud.
The street is billowing, and Nick pulls me close and smiles that smile again,and he takes a single lock of my hair between two ngers and runs them all the way tothe end, tugging twice, like he’s ringing a bell. His eyelashes are trimmed with powder,and before he leans in, he brushes the sugar from my lips so he can taste me.NICK DUNNETHE DAY OFI swung wide the door of my bar, slipped into the darkness, and took my rst realdeep breath of the day, took in the smell of cigarettes and beer, the spice of a dribbledbourbon, the tang of old popcorn. There was only one customer in the bar, sitting byherself at the far, far end: an older woman named Sue who had come in every Thursdaywith her husband until he died three months back.
Now she came alone every Thursday,never much for conversation, just sitting with a beer and a crossword, preserving aritual.My sister was at work behind the bar, her hair pulled back in nerdy-girl barrettes,her arms pink as she dipped the beer glasses in and out of hot suds.
![](https://s.studizba.com/z.php?f=/templates/si/i/noavatar.png&w=100&h=100&t=1"){kind=avatar}
