flynn_gillian_gone_girl (1) (858987), страница 78
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“It doesn’t surprise me,all the rumors that are going about. But we need to forget all that. If we are to goforward. And we will go forward. All of America wants us to go forward. It’s the storythe world needs right now. Us. Desi’s the bad guy. No one wants two bad guys. Theywant to like you, Nick. The only way you can be loved again is to stay with me. It’s theonly way.”“Tell me what happened, Amy. Was Desi helping you all along?”She ared at that: She didn’t need a man’s help, even though she clearly had neededa man’s help. “Of course not!” she snapped.“Tell me. What can it hurt, tell me everything, because you and I can’t go forwardwith this pretend story.
I’ll ght you every step of the way. I know you’ve thought ofeverything. I’m not trying to get you to slip up—I’m tired of trying to outthink you, Idon’t have it in me. I just want to know what happened. I was a step away from deathrow, Amy. You came back and saved me, and I thank you for that—do you hear me? Ithank you, so don’t say I didn’t later on. I thank you.
But I need to know. You know Ineed to know.”“Take off your clothes,” she said.She wanted to make sure I wasn’t wearing a wire. I undressed in front of her,removed every stitch, and then she surveyed me, ran a hand across my chin and mychest, down my back. She palmed my ass and slipped her hand between my legs, cuppedmy testicles and gripped my limp cock, held it in her hand for a moment to see ifanything happened. Nothing happened.“You’re clean,” she said. It was meant as a joke, a wisecrack, a movie reference we’dboth laugh at.
When I said nothing, she stepped back and said, “I always did likelooking at you naked. That made me happy.”“Nothing made you happy. Can I put my clothes back on?”“No. I don’t want to worry about hidden wires in the cu s or the hems. Also, we needto go in the bathroom and run the water. In case you bugged the house.”“You’ve seen too many movies,” I said.“Ha! Never thought I’d hear you say that.”We stood in the bathtub and turned on the shower.
The water sprayed my nakedback and misted the front of Amy’s shirt until she peeled it o . She pulled o all herclothes, a gleeful striptease, and tossed them over the shower stall in the same grinning,game manner she had when we rst met—I’m up for anything!—and she turned to me,and I waited for her to swing her hair around her shoulders like she did when she irtedwith me, but her hair was too short.“Now we’re even,” she said. “Seemed rude to be the only one clothed.”“I think we’re past etiquette, Amy.”Look only at her eyes, do not touch her, do not let her touch you.She moved toward me, put a hand on my chest, let the water trickle between herbreasts. She licked a shower teardrop o her upper lip and smiled.
Amy hated showerspray. She didn’t like getting her face wet, didn’t like the feel of water pelleting heresh. I knew this because I was married to her, and I’d pawed her and harassed hermany times in the shower, always to be turned down. (I know it seems sexy, Nick, but it’sactually not, it’s something people only do in movies.) Now she was pretending just theopposite, as if she forgot that I knew her.
I backed away.“Tell me everything, Amy. But first: Was there ever a baby?”The baby was a lie. It was the most desolate part for me. My wife as a murderer wasfrightening, repulsive, but the baby as a lie was almost impossible to bear. The babywas a lie, the fear of blood was a lie—during the past year, my wife had been mostly alie.“How did you set Desi up?” I asked.“I found some twine in one corner of his basement. I used a steak knife to saw it intofour pieces—”“He let you keep a knife?”“We were friends. You forget.”She was right. I was thinking of the story she’d told the police: that Desi had held hercaptive. I did forget. She was that good a storyteller.“Whenever Desi wasn’t around, I’d tie the pieces as tight as I could around my wristsand ankles so they’d leave these grooves.”She showed me the lurid lines on her wrists, like bracelets.“I took a wine bottle, and I abused myself with it every day, so the inside of myvagina looked … right.
Right for a rape victim. Then today I let him have sex with me soI had his semen, and I slipped some sleeping pills into his martini.”“He let you keep sleeping pills?”She sighed: I wasn’t keeping up.“Right, you were friends.”“Then I—” She pantomimed slicing his jugular.“That easy, huh?”“You just have to decide to do it and then do it,” she said. “Discipline. Followthrough.
Like anything. You never understood that.”I could feel her mood turning stony. I wasn’t appreciating her enough.“Tell me more,” I said. “Tell me how you did it.”An hour in, the water went cold, and Amy called an end to our discussion.“You have to admit, it’s pretty brilliant,” she said.I stared at her.“I mean, you have to admire it just a little,” she prompted.“How long did it take for Desi to bleed to death?”“It’s time for bed,” she said. “But we can talk more tomorrow if you want. Right nowwe should sleep.
Together. I think it’s important. For closure. Actually, the opposite ofclosure.”“Amy, I’m going to stay tonight because I don’t want to deal with all the questions ifI don’t stay. But I’ll sleep downstairs.”She cocked her head to one side, studied me.“Nick, I can still do very bad things to you, remember that.”“Ha! Worse than what you’ve already done?”She looked surprised. “Oh, definitely.”“I doubt that, Amy.”I began walking out the door.“Attempted murder,” she said.I paused.“That was my original plan early on: I’d be a poor, sick wife with repeated episodes,sudden intense bouts of illness, and then it turns out that all those cocktails her husbandprepared her …”“Like in the diary.”“But I decided attempted murder wasn’t good enough for you.
It had to be bigger thanthat. Still, I couldn’t get the poisoning idea out of my head. I liked the idea of youworking up to the murder. Trying the cowardly way first. So I went through with it.”“You expect me to believe that?”“All that vomit, so shocking. An innocent, frightened wife might have saved some ofthat vomit, just in case. You can’t blame her, being a little paranoid.” She gave asatisfied smile. “Always have a backup plan to the backup plan.”“You actually poisoned yourself.”“Nick, please, you’re shocked? I killed myself.”“I need a drink,” I said.
I left before she could speak.I poured myself a Scotch and sat on the living-room couch. Beyond the curtains, thestrobes of the cameras were lighting up the yard. Soon it would no longer be night. I’dcome to find the morning depressing, to know it would come again and again.Tanner picked up on the first ring.“She killed him,” I said. “She killed Desi because he was basically … he was annoyingher, he was power-playing her, and she realized she could kill him, and it was her wayback to her old life, and she could blame everything on him. She murdered him, Tanner,she just told me this. She confessed.”“I don’t suppose you were able to … record any of it somehow? Cell phone orsomething?”“We were naked with the shower running, and she whispered everything.”“I don’t even want to ask,” he said. “You two are the most fucked-up people I haveever met, and I specialize in fucked-up people.”“What’s going on with the police?”He sighed.
“She foolproofed everything. It’s ludicrous, her story, but no moreludicrous than our story. Amy’s basically exploiting the sociopath’s most reliablemaxim.”“What’s that?”“The bigger the lie, the more they believe it.”“Come on, Tanner, there’s got to be something.”I paced over to the staircase to make sure Amy was nowhere nearby. We werewhispering, but still. I had to be careful now.“For now we need to toe the line, Nick.
She left you looking fairly bad: Everything inthe diary was true, she says. All the stu in the woodshed was you. You bought the stuwith those credit cards, and you’re too embarrassed to admit it. She’s just a shelteredlittle rich girl, what would she know about acquiring secret credit cards in her husband’sname? And my goodness, that pornography!”“She told me there was never a baby, she faked it with Noelle Hawthorne’s pee.”“Why didn’t you say—That’s huge! We’ll lean on Noelle Hawthorne.”“Noelle didn’t know.”I heard a deep sigh on the other end. He didn’t even bother asking how. “We’ll keepthinking, we’ll keep looking,” he said. “Something will break.”“I can’t stay in this house with that thing.
She’s threatening me with—”“Attempted murder … the antifreeze. Yeah, I heard that was in the mix.”“They can’t arrest me on that, can they? She says she still has some vomit. Evidence.But can they really—”“Let’s not push it for now, okay, Nick?” he said. “For now, play nice. I hate to say it,I hate to, but that’s my best legal advice for you right now: Play nice.”“Play nice? That’s your advice? My one-man legal dream team: Play nice? Fuck you.”I hung up in full fury.I’ll kill her, I thought. I will fucking kill the bitch.I plunged into the dark daydream I’d indulged over the past few years when Amyhad made me feel my smallest: I daydreamed of hitting her with a hammer, smashingher head in until she stopped talking, finally, stopped with the words she suctioned tome: average, boring, mediocre, unsurprising, unsatisfying, unimpressive.
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