flynn_gillian_gone_girl (1) (858987), страница 60
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I immediately phoned Tanner and relayed my conversations with Hilaryand Tommy.“So we have a couple of stories, great,” Tanner said, “this’ll really be great!” in a waythat told me it wasn’t that great. “Have you heard from Andie?”I hadn’t.“I have one of my people waiting for her at her apartment building,” he said.“Discreet.”“I didn’t know you had people.”“What we really need is to nd Amy,” he said, ignoring me. “Girl like that, I can’timagine she’d be able to stay hidden for too long. You have any thoughts?”I kept picturing her on a posh hotel balcony near the ocean, wrapped in a white robethick as a rug, sipping a very good Montrachet, while she tracked my ruin on theInternet, on cable, in the tabloids. While she enjoyed the endless coverage andexultation of Amy Elliott Dunne.
Attending her own funeral. I wondered if she was selfaware enough to realize: She’d stolen a page from Mark Twain.“I picture her near the ocean,” I said. Then I stopped, feeling like a boardwalkpsychic. “No. I have no ideas. She could literally be anywhere. I don’t think we’ll see herunless she decides to come back.”“That seems unlikely,” Tanner breathed, annoyed.
“So let’s try to nd Andie and seewhere her head is. We’re running out of wiggle room here.”Then it was dinnertime, and then the sun set, and I was alone again in my hauntedhouse. I was thinking about all of Amy’s lies and whether the pregnancy was one ofthem. I’d done the math. Amy and I had sex sporadically enough it was possible. Butthen she would know I’d do the math.Truth or lie? If it was a lie, it was designed to gut me.I’d always assumed that Amy and I would have children.
It was one of the reasons Iknew I would marry Amy, because I pictured us having kids together. I remember therst time I imagined it, not two months after we began dating: I was walking from myapartment in Kips Bay to a favorite pocket park along the East River, a path that tookme past the giant LEGO block of the United Nations headquarters, the ags of myriadcountries uttering in the wind. A kid would like this, I thought.
All the di erent colors,the busy memory game of matching each ag to its country. There’s Finland, and there’sNew Zealand. The one-eyed smile of Mauritania. And then I realized it wasn’t a kid, butour kid, mine and Amy’s, who would like this. Our kid, sprawled on the oor with an oldencyclopedia, just like I’d done, but our kid wouldn’t be alone, I’d be sprawled next tohim. Aiding him in his budding vexillology, which sounds less like a study of ags than astudy in annoyance, which would have suited my father’s attitude toward me.
But notmine toward my son’s. I pictured Amy joining us on the oor, at on her stomach, herfeet kicked up in the air, pointing out Palau, the yellow dot just left of center on thecrisp blue background, which I was sure would be her favorite.From then on, the boy was real (and sometimes a girl, but mostly a boy). He wasinevitable. I su ered from regular, insistent paternal aches.
Months after the wedding, Ihad a strange moment in front of the medicine cabinet, oss between my teeth, when Ithought: She wants kids, right? I should ask. Of course I should ask. When I posed thequestion—roundabout, vague—she said, Of course, of course, someday, but every morningshe still perched in front of the sink and swallowed her pill.
For three years she did thisevery morning, while I uttered near the topic but failed to actually say the words: Iwant us to have a baby.After the layo s, it seemed like it might happen. Suddenly, there was anuncontestable space in our lives, and one day over breakfast, Amy looked up from hertoast and said, I’m o the pill. Just like that. She was o the pill three months, andnothing happened, and not long after the move to Missouri, she made an appointmentfor us to start the medical intervention. Once Amy started a project, she didn’t like todilly-dally: “We’ll tell them we’ve been trying a year,” she said.
Foolishly I agreed—wewere barely ever touching each other by then, but we still thought a kid made sense.Sure.“You’ll have to do your part too, you know,” she said on the drive to St. Louis. “You’llhave to give semen.”“I know. Why do you say it like that?”“I just figured you’d be too proud. Self-conscious and proud.”I was a rather nasty cocktail of both those traits, but at the fertility center, I dutifullyentered the strange small room dedicated to self-abuse: a place where hundreds of menhad entered for no other purpose than to crank the shank, clean the ri e, jerk thegherkin, make the bald man cry, pound the ounder, sail the mayonnaise seas, wigglethe walrus, whitewash with Tom and Huck.(I sometimes use humor as self-defense.)The room contained a vinyl-covered armchair, a TV, and a table that held a grab bagof porn and a box of tissues.
The porn was early ’90s, judging from the women’s hair(yes: top and bottom), and the action was midcore. (Another good essay: Who selectsthe porn for fertility centers? Who judges what will get men off yet not be too degradingto all the women outside the cum-room, the nurses and doctors and hopeful, hormoneaddled wives?)I visited the room on three separate occasions—they like to have a lot of backup—while Amy did nothing. She was supposed to begin taking pills, but she didn’t, and thenshe didn’t some more. She was the one who’d be pregnant, the one who’d turn over herbody to the baby, so I postponed nudging her for a few months, keeping an eye on thepill bottle to see if the level went down. Finally, after a few beers one winter night, Icrunched up the steps of our home, shed my snow-crusted clothes, and curled up next toher in bed, my face near her shoulder, breathing her in, warming the tip of my nose onher skin.
I whispered the words—Let’s do this, Amy, let’s have a baby—and she said no. Iwas expecting nervousness, caution, worry—Nick, will I be a good mom?—but I got aclipped, cold no. A no without loopholes. Nothing dramatic, no big deal, just notsomething she was interested in anymore. “Because I realized I’d be stuck doing all thehard stu ,” she reasoned. “All the diapers and doctors’ appointments and discipline, andyou’d just breeze in and be Fun Daddy.
I’d do all the work to make them good people,and you’d undo it anyway, and they’d love you and hate me.”I told Amy it wasn’t true, but she didn’t believe me. I told her I didn’t just want achild, I needed a child. I had to know I could love a person unconditionally, that I couldmake a little creature feel constantly welcome and wanted no matter what. That I couldbe a di erent kind of father than my dad was.
That I could raise a boy who wasn’t likeme.I begged her. Amy remained unmoved.A year later, I got a notice in the mail: The clinic would dispose of my semen unlessthey heard from us. I left the letter on the dining room table, an open rebuke. Threedays later, I saw it in the trash. That was our final communication on the subject.By then I’d already been secretly dating Andie for months, so I had no right to beupset. But that didn’t stop my aching, and it didn’t stop me from daydreaming about ourboy, mine and Amy’s.
I’d gotten attached to him. The fact was, Amy and I would make agreat child.The marionettes were watching me with alarmed black eyes. I peered out mywindow, saw that the news trucks had packed it in, so I went out into the warm night.Time to walk. Maybe a lone tabloid writer was trailing me; if so, I didn’t care. I headedthrough our complex, then forty- ve minutes out along River Road, then onto thehighway that shot right through the middle of Carthage. Thirty loud, fumy minutes—pastcar dealerships with trucks displayed appealingly like desserts, past fast-food chains andliquor stores and mini-marts and gas stations—until I reached the turno for downtown.I had encountered not a single other person on foot the entire time, only faceless blurswhizzing past me in cars.It was close to midnight.
I passed The Bar, tempted to go in but put o by thecrowds. A reporter or two had to be camped out in there. It’s what I would do. But Iwanted to be in a bar. I wanted to be surrounded by people, having fun, blowing osteam. I walked another fteen minutes to the other end of downtown, to a cheesier,rowdier, younger bar where the bathrooms were always laced with vomit on Saturdaynights.
It was a bar that Andie’s crowd would go to, and perhaps, who knew, drag alongAndie. It would be a nice bit of luck to see her there. At least gauge her mood fromacross the room. And if she wasn’t there then I’d have a fucking drink.I went as deep into the bar as I could—no Andie, no Andie. My face was partiallycovered by a baseball cap.
Even so, I felt a few pings as I moved past crowds ofdrinkers: heads abruptly turning toward me, the wide eyes of identi cation. That guy!Right?Mid-July. I wondered if I’d become so nefarious come October, I’d be some frat boy’stasteless Halloween costume: mop of blond hair, an Amazing Amy book tucked under anarmpit. Go said she’d received half a dozen phone calls asking if The Bar had an o cialT-shirt for sale. (We didn’t, thank God.)I sat down and ordered a Scotch from the bartender, a guy about my age who staredat me a beat too long, deciding whether he would serve me. He nally, grudgingly, setdown a small tumbler in front of me, his nostrils ared. When I got out my wallet, heaimed an alarmed palm up at me.
“I do not want your money, man. Not at all.”I left cash anyway. Asshole.When I tried to ag him for another drink, he glanced my way, shook his head, andleaned in toward the woman he was chatting up. A few seconds later, she discreetlylooked toward me, pretending she was stretching. Her mouth turned down as shenodded.
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