flynn_gillian_gone_girl (1) (858987), страница 47
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I pulled the husband gure out, his limbs bouncingaround excitedly, a dancer limbering up. The wife was prettier, more delicate, andsti er. Her face looked shocked, as if she’d seen something alarming. Beneath her was atiny baby that could be attached to her by a ribbon. The puppets were ancient, heavy,and large, almost as big as ventriloquist dummies. I picked up the male, gripped thethick, clublike handle used to move him, and his arms and legs twitched manically.“Creepy,” Go said. “Stop.”Beneath them lay a piece of buttery blue paper folded over once.
Amy’s broken-kitehandwriting, all triangles and points. It read:The beginning of a wonderful new story, Nick! “That’s the way to do it!”Enjoy.On our mom’s kitchen table, we spread all of Amy’s treasure-hunt clues and the boxcontaining the puppets. We stared at the objects as if we were assembling a jigsawpuzzle.“Why bother with a treasure hunt if she was planning … her plan,” Go said.Her plan had become immediate shorthand for faking her disappearance and framingyou for murder.
It sounded less insane.“Keep me distracted, for one thing. Make me believe she still loved me. I’m chasingher little clues all over Christendom, believing my wife was wanting to make amends,wanting to jump-start our marriage …”The moony, girlish state her notes had left me in, it sickened me. It embarrassed me.Marrow-deep embarrassment, the kind that becomes part of your DNA, that changesyou. After all these years, Amy could still play me. She could write a few notes and getme back completely. I was her little puppet on a string.I will find you, Amy.
Lovesick words, hateful intentions.“So I don’t stop to think: Hey, it sure looks like I murdered my wife, I wonder why?”“And the police would have found it strange—you would have found it strange—ifshe didn’t do the treasure hunt, this tradition,” Go reasoned. “It would look as if sheknew she was going to disappear.”“This worries me though,” I said, pointing at the puppets. “They’re unusual enoughthat they have to mean something. I mean, if she just wanted to keep me distracted fora while, the final gift could have been anything wooden.”Go ran a nger across the male’s motley uniform. “They’re clearly very old. Vintage.”She ipped their clothing upside down to reveal the club handle of the male.
The femalehad only a square-shaped gap at her head. “Is this supposed to be sexual? The male hasthis giant wooden handle, like a dick. And the female is missing hers. She just has thehole.”“It’s a fairly obvious statement: Men have penises and women have vaginas?”Go put a nger inside the female puppet’s gap, swept around to make sure there wasnothing hidden. “So what is Amy saying?”“When I first saw them, I thought: She bought children’s toys. Mom, dad, baby. Becauseshe was pregnant.”“Is she even pregnant?”A sense of despair washed over me. Or rather, the opposite.
Not a wave coming in,rolling over me, but the ebb of the sea returning: a sense of something pulling away,and me with it. I could no longer hope my wife was pregnant, but I couldn’t bringmyself to hope she wasn’t either.Go pulled out the male doll, scrunched her nose, then lightbulb-popped. “You’re apuppet on a string.”I laughed.
“I literally thought those exact words too. But why a male and female?Amy clearly isn’t a puppet on a string, she’s the puppetmaster.”“And what’s: That’s the way to do it? To do what?”“Fuck me for life?”“It’s not a phrase Amy used to say? Or some quote from the Amy books, or …” Shehurried over to her computer and searched for That’s the way to do it. Up came lyrics for“That’s the Way to Do It” by Madness. “Oh, I remember them,” Go said. “Awesome skaband.”“Ska,” I said, swerving toward delirious laughter. “Great.”The lyrics were about a handyman who could do many types of home-improvementjobs—including electrical and plumbing—and who preferred to be paid in cash.“God, I fucking hate the eighties,” I said. “No lyrics ever made sense.”“ ‘The reflex is an only child,’ ” Go said, nodding.“ ‘He’s waiting by the park,’ ” I muttered back automatically.“So if this is it, what does it mean?” Go said, turning to me, studying my eyes.
“It’s asong about a handyman. Someone who might have access to your house, to x things.Or rig things. Who would be paid in cash so there’s no record.”“Someone who installed video cameras?” I asked. “Amy went out of town a few timesduring the—the affair. Maybe she thought she’d catch us on tape.”Go shot a question at me.“No, never, never at our house.”“Could it be some secret door?” Go suggested. “Some secret false panel Amy put inwhere she’s hidden something that will … I don’t know, exonerate you?”“I think that’s it. Yes, Amy is using a Madness song to give me a clue to my ownfreedom, if only I can decipher their wily, ska-infused codes.”Go laughed then too.
“Jesus, maybe we’re the ones who are bat-shit crazy. I mean,are we? Is this totally insane?”“It’s not insane. She set me up. There is no other way to explain the warehouse ofstuff in your backyard. And it’s very Amy to drag you into it, smudge you a little bit withmy lth.
No, this is Amy. The gift, the fucking giddy, sly note I’m supposed tounderstand. No, and it has to come back to the puppets. Try the quote with the wordmarionettes.”I collapsed on the couch, my body a dull throb. Go played secretary. “Oh my God.Duh! They’re Punch and Judy dolls. Nick! We’re idiots.
That line, that’s Punch’strademark. That’s the way to do it!”“Okay. The old puppet show—it’s really violent, right?” I asked.“This is so fucked up.”“Go, it’s violent, right?”“Yeah. Violent. God, she’s fucking crazy.”“He beats her, right?”“I’m reading … okay. Punch kills their baby.” She looked up at me. “And then whenJudy confronts him, he beats her. To death.”My throat got wet with saliva.“And each time he does something awful and gets away with it, he says, ‘That’s theway to do it!’ ” She grabbed Punch and placed him in her lap, her ngers grasping thewooden hands as if she were holding an infant.
“He’s glib, even as he murders his wifeand child.”I looked at the puppets. “So she’s giving me the narrative of my frame-up.”“I can’t even wrap my brain around this. Fucking psycho.”“Go?”“Yeah, right: You didn’t want her to be pregnant, you got angry and killed her andthe unborn baby.”“Feels anticlimactic somehow,” I said.“The climax is when you are taught the lesson that Punch never learns, and you arecaught and charged with murder.”“And Missouri has the death penalty,” I said. “Fun game.”AMY ELLIOTT DUNNETHE DAY OFYou know how I found out? I saw them. That’s how stupid my husband is.
One snowyApril night, I felt so lonely. I was drinking warm amaretto with Bleecker and reading,lying on the oor as the snow came down, listening to old scratchy albums, like Nickand I used to (that entry was true). I had a burst of romantic cheer: I’d surprise him atThe Bar, and we’d have a few drinks and wander through the empty streets together,hand in mitten.
We would walk around the hushed downtown and he would press meagainst a wall and kiss me in the snow that looked like sugar clouds. That’s right, Iwanted him back so badly that I was willing to re-create that moment. I was willing topretend to be someone else again. I remember thinking: We can still nd a way to makethis work. Faith! I followed him all the way to Missouri, because I still believed he’d loveme again somehow, love me that intense, thick way he did, the way that madeeverything good. Faith!I got there just in time to see him leaving with her. I was in the goddamn parkinglot, twenty feet behind him, and he didn’t even register me, I was a ghost.
He didn’thave his hands on her, not yet, but I knew. I could tell because he was so aware of her. Ifollowed them, and suddenly, he pressed her up against a tree—in the middle of town—and kissed her. Nick is cheating, I thought dumbly, and before I could make myself sayanything, they were going up to her apartment. I waited for an hour, sitting on thedoorstep, then got too cold—blue ngernails, chattering teeth—and went home.
Henever even knew I knew.I had a new persona, not of my choosing. I was Average Dumb Woman Married toAverage Shitty Man. He had single-handedly de-amazed Amazing Amy.I know women whose entire personas are woven from a benign mediocrity. Theirlives are a list of shortcomings: the unappreciative boyfriend, the extra ten pounds, thedismissive boss, the conniving sister, the straying husband. I’ve always hovered abovetheir stories, nodding in sympathy and thinking how foolish they are, these women, tolet these things happen, how undisciplined.
And now to be one of them! One of thewomen with the endless stories that make people nod sympathetically and think: Poordumb bitch.I could hear the tale, how everyone would love telling it: how Amazing Amy, the girlwho never did wrong, let herself be dragged, penniless, to the middle of the country,where her husband threw her over for a younger woman. How predictable, howperfectly average, how amusing. And her husband? He ended up happier than ever. No.I couldn’t allow that. No. Never. Never. He doesn’t get to do this to me and still fuckingwin.
No.I changed my name for that piece of shit. Historical records have been altered—AmyElliott to Amy Dunne—like it’s nothing. No, he does not get to win.So I began to think of a di erent story, a better story, that would destroy Nick fordoing this to me. A story that would restore my perfection. It would make me the hero,flawless and adored.Because everyone loves the Dead Girl.It’s rather extreme, framing your husband for your murder.
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