flynn_gillian_gone_girl (1) (858987), страница 54
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My brain sometimes goes too fast for my own good. I wasthinking of the girl’s split lip, her sad, pre-owned vibe, and then I was thinking of abuseand prostitution, and then I was thinking of Oliver!, my favorite musical as a child, andthe doomed hooker Nancy, who loved her violent man right until he killed her, and thenI was wondering why my feminist mother and I ever watched Oliver!, considering “AsLong as He Needs Me” is basically a lilting paean to domestic violence, and then I wasthinking that Diary Amy was also killed by her man, she was actually a lot like—“I’m Nancy,” I say.“Greta.”Sounds made up.“Nice to meet you, Greta.”I oat away.
Behind me I hear the shwick of Greta’s lighter, and then smoke waftsoverhead like spindrifts.Forty minutes later, Greta sits down on the edge of the pool, dangles her legs in thewater. “It’s hot,” she says. “The water.” She has a husky, hardy voice, cigarettes andprairie dirt.“Like bathwater.”“It’s not very refreshing.”“The lake’s not much cooler.”“I can’t swim anyway,” she says.I’ve never met anyone who can’t swim. “I can just barely,” I lie. “Dog paddle.”She ru es her legs, the waves gently rocking my raft. “So what’s it like here?” sheasks.“Nice.
Quiet.”“Good, that’s what I need.”I turn to look at her. She has two gold necklaces, a perfectly round bruise the size ofa plum near her left breast, and a shamrock tattoo just above her bikini line. Herswimsuit is brand-new, cherry-red, cheap. From the marina convenience store where Ibought my raft.“You on your own?” I ask.“Very.”I am unsure what to ask next. Is there some sort of code that abused women use witheach other, a language I don’t know?“Guy trouble?”She twitches an eyebrow at me that seems to be a yes. “Me too,” I say.“It’s not like we weren’t warned,” she says. She cups her hand into the water, lets itdribble down her front. “My mom, one of the rst things she ever told me, going toschool the first day: Stay away from boys.
They’ll either throw rocks or look up your skirt.”“You should make a T-shirt that says that.”She laughs. “It’s true, though. It’s always true. My mom lives in a lesbian villagedown in Texas. I keep thinking I should join her. Everyone seems happy there.”“A lesbian village?”“Like a, a whaddayacallit. A commune. Bunch of lesbians bought land, started theirown society, sort of. No men allowed. Sounds just freakin’ great to me, world withoutmen.” She cups another handful of water, pulls up her sunglasses, and wets her face.“Too bad I don’t like pussy.”She laughs, an old woman’s angry-bark laugh.
“So, are there any asshole guys here Ican start dating?” she says. “That’s my, like, pattern. Run away from one, bump into thenext.”“It’s half empty most of the time. There’s Je , the guy with the beard, he’s actuallyreally nice,” I say. “He’s been here longer than me.”“How long are you staying?” she asks.I pause. It’s odd, I don’t know the exact amount of time I will be here.
I had plannedon staying until Nick was arrested, but I have no idea if he will be arrested soon.“Till he stops looking for you, huh?” Greta guesses.“Something like that.”She examines me closely, frowns. My stomach tightens. I wait for her to say it: Youlook familiar.“Never go back to a man with fresh bruises. Don’t give him the satisfaction,” Gretaintones. She stands up, gathers her things.
Dries her legs on the tiny towel.“Good day killed,” she says.For some reason, I give a thumbs-up, which I’ve never done in my life.“Come to my cabin when you get out, if you want to,” she says. “We can watch TV.”I bring a fresh tomato from Dorothy, held in my palm like a shiny housewarminggift. Greta comes to the door and barely acknowledges me, as if I’ve been dropping overfor years. She plucks the tomato from my hand.“Perfect, I was just making sandwiches,” she says. “Grab a seat.” She points towardthe bed—we have no sitting rooms here—and moves into her kitchenette, which has thesame plastic cutting board, the same dull knife, as mine. She slices the tomato.
A plasticdisc of lunch meat sits on the counter, the stomachy-sweet smell lling the room. Shesets two slippery sandwiches on paper plates, along with handfuls of gold sh crackers,and marches them into the bedroom area, her hand already on the remote, flipping fromnoise to noise. We sit on the edge of the bed, side by side, watching the TV.“Stop me if you see something,” Greta says.I take a bite of my sandwich. My tomato slips out the side and onto my thigh.The Beverly Hillbillies, Suddenly Susan, Armageddon.Ellen Abbott Live. A photo of me lls the screen. I am the lead story.
Again. I lookgreat.“You seen this?” Greta asked, not looking at me, talking as if my disappearance werea rerun of a decent TV show. “This woman vanishes on her ve-year weddinganniversary. Husband acts real weird from the start, all smiley and shit. Turns out hebumped up her life insurance, and they just found out the wife was pregnant. And theguy didn’t want it.”The screen cuts to another photo of me juxtaposed with Amazing Amy.Greta turns to me. “You remember those books?”“Of course!”“You like those books?”“Everyone likes those books, they’re so cute,” I say.Greta snorts. “They’re so fake.” Close-up of me.I wait for her to say how beautiful I am.“She’s not bad, huh, for, like, her age,” she says. “I hope I look that good when I’mforty.”Ellen is filling the audience in on my story; my photo lingers on the screen.“Sounds to me like she was a spoiled rich girl,” Greta says.
“High-maintenance.Bitchy.”That is simply unfair. I’d left no evidence for anyone to conclude that. Since I’dmoved to Missouri—well, since I’d come up with my plan—I’d been careful to be lowmaintenance, easygoing, cheerful, all those things people want women to be. I waved toneighbors, I ran errands for Mo’s friends, I once brought cola to the ever-soiled StucksBuckley.
I visited Nick’s dad so that all the nurses could testify to how nice I was, so Icould whisper over and over into Bill Dunne’s spiderweb brain: I love you, come live withus, I love you, come live with us. Just to see if it would catch. Nick’s dad is what thepeople of Comfort Hill call a roamer—he is always wandering o . I love the idea of BillDunne, the living totem of everything Nick fears he could become, the object of Nick’smost profound despair, showing up over and over and over on our doorstep.“How does she seem bitchy?” I ask.She shrugs.
The TV goes to a commercial for air freshener. A woman is spraying airfreshener so her family will be happy. Then to a commercial for very thin panty linersso a woman can wear a dress and dance and meet the man she will later spray airfreshener for.Clean and bleed. Bleed and clean.“You can just tell,” Greta says. “She just sounds like a rich, bored bitch. Like thoserich bitches who use their husbands’ money to start, like, cupcake companies and cardshops and shit. Boutiques.”In New York, I had friends with all those kinds of businesses—they liked to be able tosay they worked, even though they only did the little stu that was fun: Name thecupcake, order the stationery, wear the adorable dress that was from their very ownstore.“She’s definitely one of those,” Greta said. “Rich bitch putting on airs.”Greta leaves to go to the bathroom, and I tiptoe into her kitchen, go into her fridge,and spit in her milk, her orange juice, and a container of potato salad, then tiptoe backto the bed.Flush.
Greta returns. “I mean, all that doesn’t mean it’s okay that he killed her. She’sjust another woman, made a very bad choice in her man.”She is looking right at me, and I wait for her to say, “Hey, wait a minute …”But she turns back to the TV, rearranges herself so she is lying on her stomach like achild, her chin in her hands, her face directed at my image on the screen.“Oh, shit, here it goes,” Greta says. “People are hatin’ on this guy.”The show gets underway, and I feel a bit better.
It is the apotheosis of Amy.Campbell MacIntosh, childhood friend: “Amy is just a nurturing, motherly type ofwoman. She loved being a wife. And I know she would have been a great mother. ButNick—you just knew Nick was wrong somehow. Cold and aloof and really calculating—you got the feeling that he was definitely aware of how much money Amy had.”(Campbell is lying: She got all googly around Nick, she absolutely adored him. ButI’m sure she liked the idea that he only married me for my money.)Shawna Kelly, North Carthage resident: “I found it really, really strange how totallyunconcerned he was at the search for his wife. He was just, you know, chatting, passingthe time. Flirting around with me, who he didn’t know from Adam.
I’d try to turn theconversation to Amy, and he would just—just no interest.”(I’m sure this desperate old slut absolutely did not try to turn the conversationtoward me.)Steven “Stucks” Buckley, longtime friend of Nick Dunne: “She was a sweetheart.Sweet. Heart. And Nick? He just didn’t seem that worried about Amy being gone. Theguy was always like that: self-centered. Stuck-up a little. Like he’d made it all big in NewYork and we should all bow down.”(I despise Stucks Buckley, and what the fuck kind of name is that?)Noelle Hawthorne, looking like she just got new highlights: “I think he killed her. Noone will say it, but I will. He abused her, and he bullied her, and he finally killed her.”(Good dog.)Greta glances sideways at me, her cheeks smushed up under her hands, her faceflickering in the TV glow.“I hope that’s not true,” she says.
“That he killed her. It’d be nice to think that maybeshe just got away, just ran away from him, and she’s hiding out all safe and sound.”She kicks her legs back and forth like a lazy swimmer. I can’t tell if she’s fucking withme.NICK DUNNEEIGHT DAYS GONEWe searched every cranny of my father’s house, which didn’t take long, since it’s sopathetically empty. The cabinets, the closets. I yanked at the corners of rugs to see ifthey came up. I peeked into his washer and dryer, stuck a hand up his chimney.
I evenlooked behind the toilet tanks.“Very Godfather of you,” Go said.“If it were very Godfather, I’d have found what we were looking for and come outshooting.”Tanner stood in the center of my dad’s living room and tugged at the end of his limetie. Go and I were smeared with dust and grime, but somehow Tanner’s white buttondown positively glowed, as if it retained some of the strobe-light glamour of New York.He was staring at the corner of a cabinet, chewing on his lip, tugging at the tie, thinking.The man had probably spent years perfecting this look: the Shut up, client, I’m thinkinglook.“I don’t like this,” he nally said. “We have a lot of uncontained issues here, and Iwon’t go to the cops until we’re very, very contained.
My rst instinct is to get ahead ofthe situation—report that stu in the shed before we get busted with it. But if we don’tknow what Amy wants us to nd here, and we don’t know Andie’s mind-set … Nick, doyou have a guess what Andie’s mind-set is?”I shrugged. “Pissed.”“I mean, that makes me very, very nervous. We’re in a very prickly situation,basically. We need to tell the cops about the woodshed. We have to be on the front endof that discovery. But I want to lay out for you what will happen when we do.
And whatwill happen is: They will go after Go. It’ll be one of two options. One: Go is youraccomplice, she was helping you hide this stu on her property, and in all likelihood,she knows you killed Amy.”“Come on, you can’t be serious,” I said.“Nick, we’d be lucky with that version,” Tanner said. “They can interpret thishowever they want. How about this one: It was Go who stole your identity, who gotthose credit cards.
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