flynn_gillian_gone_girl (1) (858987), страница 35
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She was still gorgeous, a woman who chose to agegracefully. She was shaped like some sort of origami creation: elbows in extreme points,a clothes-hanger collarbone. She wore a china-blue sheath dress and had the same pullAmy did: When she was in a room, you kept turning your head back her way. She gaveme a rather predatory smile.“Hello, I’m Jacqueline Collings.”“Mother, this is Amy’s husband, Nick,” Desi said.“Amy.” The woman smiled again. She had a bottom-of-a-well voice, deep andstrangely resonant.
“We’ve been quite interested in that story around here. Yes, veryinterested.” She turned coldly to her son. “We can never stop thinking about the superbAmy Elliott, can we?”“Amy Dunne now,” I said.“Of course,” Jacqueline agreed. “I’m so sorry, Nick, for what you’re going through.”She stared at me a moment. “I’m sorry, I must … I didn’t picture Amy with suchan … American boy.” She seemed to be speaking neither to me nor to Desi.
“Good God,he even has a cleft chin.”“I came over to see if your son had any information,” I said. “I know he’s written mywife a lot of letters over the years.”“Oh, the letters!” Jacqueline smiled angrily. “Such an interesting way to spend one’stime, don’t you think?”“Amy shared them with you?” Desi asked. “I’m surprised.”“No,” I said, turning to him. “She threw them away unopened, always.”“All of them? Always? You know that?” Desi said, still smiling.“Once I went through the trash to read one.” I turned back to Jacqueline. “Just to seewhat exactly was going on.”“Good for you,” Jacqueline said, purring at me.
“I’d expect nothing less of myhusband.”“Amy and I always wrote each other letters,” Desi said. He had his mother’s cadence,the delivery that indicated everything he said was something you’d want to hear. “It wasour thing. I nd e-mail so … cheap. And no one saves them. No one saves an e-mail,because it’s so inherently impersonal. I worry about posterity in general.
All the greatlove letters—from Simone de Beauvoir to Sartre, from Samuel Clemens to his wife,Olivia—I don’t know, I always think about what will be lost—”“Have you kept all my letters?” Jacqueline asked. She was standing at the replace,looking down on us, one long sinewy arm trailing along the mantelpiece.“Of course.”She turned to me with an elegant shrug. “Just curious.”I shivered, was about to reach out toward the replace for warmth, but rememberedthat it was July. “It seems to me a rather strange devotion to keep up all these years,” Isaid. “I mean, she didn’t write you back.”That lit up Desi’s eyes.
“Oh” was all he said, the sound of someone who spied asurprise firework.“It strikes me as odd, Nick, that you’d come here and ask Desi about his relationship—or lack thereof—with your wife,” Jacqueline Collings said. “Are you and Amy notclose? I can guarantee you: Desi has had no genuine contact with Amy in decades.Decades.”“I’m just checking in, Jacqueline. Sometimes you have to see something for yourself.”Jacqueline started walking toward the door; she turned and gave me a single twist ofher head to assure me that it was time to go.“How very intrepid of you, Nick. Very do-it-yourself. Do you build your own deckstoo?” She laughed at the word and opened the door for me.
I stared at the hollow of herneck and wondered why she wasn’t wearing a noose of pearls. Women like this alwayshave thick strands of pearls to click and clack. I could smell her, though, a female scent,vaginal and strangely lewd.“It was interesting to meet you, Nick,” she said. “Let’s all hope Amy gets home safely.Until then, the next time you want to get in touch with Desi?”She pressed a thick, creamy card into my hands. “Call our lawyer, please.”AMY ELLIOTT DUNNEAUGUST 17, 2011DIARY ENTRYI know this sounds the stu of moony teenage girls, but I’ve been tracking Nick’smoods. Toward me.
Just to make sure I’m not crazy. I’ve got a calendar, and I put heartson any day Nick seems to love me again, and black squares when he doesn’t. The pastyear was all black squares, pretty much.But now? Nine days of hearts. In a row. Maybe all he needed to know was how muchI loved him and how unhappy I’d become. Maybe he had a change of heart. I’ve neverloved a phrase more.Quiz: After over a year of coldness, your husband suddenly seems to love you again.You:a) Go on and on about how much he’s hurt you so he can apologize somemore.b) Give him the cold shoulder for a while longer—so he learns his lesson!c) Don’t press him about his new attitude—know that he will con de inyou when the time comes, and in the meantime, shower him with a ection sohe feels secure and loved, because that’s how this marriage thing works.d) Demand to know what went wrong; make him talk and talk about it inorder to calm your own neuroses.Answer: CIt’s August, so sumptuous that I couldn’t bear any more black squares, but no, it’sbeen nothing but hearts, Nick acting like my husband, sweet and loving and goofy.
Heorders me chocolates from my favorite shop in New York for a treat, and he writes me asilly poem to go with them. A limerick, actually:There once was a girl from ManhattanWho slept only on sheets made of satinHer husband slipped and he slidedAnd their bodies collidedSo they did something dirty in Latin.It would be funnier if our sex life were as carefree as the rhyme would suggest. Butlast week we did … fuck? Do it? Something more romantic than have sex but less cheesythan make love. He came home from work and kissed me full on the lips, and he touchedme as if I were really there.
I almost cried, I’d been so lonely. To be kissed on the lips byyour husband is the most decadent thing.What else? He takes me swimming in the same pond he’s gone to since he was achild. I can picture little Nick apping around manically, face and shoulders sunburnedred because (just like now) he refuses to wear sunscreen, forcing Mama Mo to chaseafter him with lotion that she swipes on whenever she can reach him.He’s been taking me on a full tour of his boyhood haunts, like I asked him to forages.
He walks me to the edge of the river, and he kisses me as the wind whips my hair(“My two favorite things to look at in the world,” he whispers in my ear). He kisses mein a funny little playground fort that he once considered his own clubhouse (“I alwayswanted to bring a girl here, a perfect girl, and look at me now,” he whispers in my ear).Two days before the mall closes for good, we ride carousel bunnies side by side, ourlaughter echoing through the empty miles.He takes me for a sundae at his favorite ice cream parlor, and we have the place toourselves in the morning, the air all sticky with sweets. He kisses me and says this placeis where he stuttered and su ered through so many dates, and he wishes he could havetold his high school self that he would be back here with the girl of his dreams someday.We eat ice cream until we have to roll home and get under the covers.
His hand on mybelly, an accidental nap.The neurotic in me, of course, is asking: Where’s the catch? Nick’s turnaround is sosudden and so grandiose, it feels like … it feels like he must want something. Or he’salready done something and he is being preemptively sweet for when I nd out. Iworry. I caught him last week shu ing through my thick le box marked THE DUNNES!(written in my best cursive in happier days), a box lled with all the strange paperworkthat makes up a marriage, a combined life.
I worry that he is going to ask me for asecond mortgage on The Bar, or to borrow against our life insurance, or to sell o somenot-to-be-touched-for-thirty-years stock. He said he just wanted to make sure everythingwas in order, but he said it in a uster. My heart would break, it really would, if,midbite of bubblegum ice cream, he turned to me and said: You know, the interesting thingabout a second mortgage is …I had to write that, I had to let that out. And just seeing it, I know it sounds crazy.Neurotic and insecure and suspicious.I will not let my worst self ruin my marriage. My husband loves me.
He loves me andhe has come back to me and that is why he is treating me so nice. That is the onlyreason.Just like that: Here is my life. It’s finally returned.NICK DUNNEFIVE DAYS GONEI sat in the billowing heat of my car outside Desi’s house, the windows rolled down,and checked my phone. A message from Gilpin: “Hi, Nick. We need to touch base today,update you on a few things, go over a few questions. Meet us at four at your house,okay? Uh … thanks.”It was the rst time I’d been ordered. Not Could we, we’d love to, if you don’t mind. ButWe need to. Meet us …I glanced at my watch.
Three o’clock. Best not be late.The summer air show—a parade of jets and prop planes spinning loops up and downthe Mississippi, buzzing the tourist steamboats, rattling teeth—was three days o , andthe practice runs were in high gear by the time Gilpin and Rhonda arrived. We were allback in my living room for the first time since The Day Of.My home was right on a ight path; the noise was somewhere between jackhammerand avalanche. My cop buddies and I tried to jam a conversation in the spaces betweenthe blasts. Rhonda looked more birdlike than usual—favoring one leg, then another, herhead moving all around the room as her gaze alighted on di erent objects, angles—amagpie looking to line her nest.
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