Gone Girl

by Gillian Flynn

Do not blame me for this particular grievance, Amy. The Missouri Grievance. Blame the economy, blame bad luck, blame my parents, blame your parents, blame the Internet, blame people who use the Internet.

Yes, we thought we were being clever New Yorkers—that the name was a joke no one else would really get, not get like we did. Not meta-get. We pictured the locals scrunching their noses: Why’d you name it The Bar? But our first customer, a gray-haired woman in bifocals and a pink jogging suit, said, “I like the name. Like in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Audrey Hepburn’s cat was named Cat.”

It is a January party, definitely, everyone still glutted and sugar-pissed from the holidays, lazy and irritated simultaneously.

It feels nice, after my recent series of nervous, respectful post-feminist men, to be a territory.

“Wow.” My sister cocked her head back. She’d been a bridesmaid, all in violet—“the gorgeous, raven-haired, amethyst-draped dame,” Amy’s mother had dubbed her—but anniversaries weren’t something she’d remember. “Jeez. Fuck. Dude. That came fast.” She blew more smoke toward me, a lazy game of cancer catch. “She going to do one of her, uh, what do you call it, not scavenger hunt—”

That my parents, two child psychologists, chose this particular public form of passive-aggressiveness toward their child was not just fucked up but also stupid and weird and kind of hilarious.

Give me a man with a little fight in him, a man who calls me on my bullshit. (But who also kind of likes my bullshit.)

(“This place is so white, it’s disturbing,” said Amy, who, back in the melting pot of Manhattan, counted a single African-American among her friends. I accused her of craving ethnic window dressing, minorities as backdrops. It did not go well.)

I didn’t ask if I could go home. I had them take me to Go’s, because I knew she’d stay up and have a drink with me, fix me a sandwich. It was, pathetically, all I wanted right then: a woman to fix me a sandwich and not ask me any questions.

I like to think I am confident and secure and mature enough to know Nick loves me without him constantly proving it. I don’t need pathetic dancing-monkey scenarios to repeat to my friends; I am content with letting him be himself.

(“I hate them all, just by name,” said Amy, a grave judge of anything trendy. When I mentioned that the name Amy was once trendy, my wife said, “Nick, you know the story of my name.” I had no idea what she was talking about.)

I remember once declining cherry pie at dinner, and Rand cocked his head and said, “Ahh! Iconoclast. Disdains the easy, symbolic patriotism.” And when I tried to laugh it off and said, well, I didn’t like cherry cobbler either, Marybeth touched Rand’s arm: “Because of the divorce. All those comfort foods, the desserts a family eats together, those are just bad memories for Nick.”

Except for tonight. I know, I know, I’m being a girl.

Five A.M., that’s the best time, when the clicking of your heels on the sidewalk sounds illicit. All the people have been put away in their boxes, and you have the whole place to yourself.

Being married to Nick always reminds me: People have to do awful things for money. Ever since I’ve been married to Nick, I always wave to people dressed as food.

It’s a very female thing, isn’t it, to take one boys’ night and snowball it into a marital infidelity that will destroy our marriage?

Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative).

I don’t know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.

And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don’t have genuine souls.

He used the eraser end of a pencil to pick up a pair of women’s underwear (technically, they were panties—stringy, lacy, red—but I know women get creeped out by that word—just Google hate the word panties).

To a house in Missouri by the river where we will live. It is surreal, and I’m not one to misuse the word surreal.

Maybe it was the journalist in me, but facts were facts, and people didn’t get to turn Amy into everyone’s beloved

The moral to the story being: Mr. Binks was a cheating dickweasel, but, you know, marriage is compromise.

I should add, in Amy’s defense, that she’d asked me twice if I wanted to talk, if I was sure I wanted to do this. I sometimes leave out details like that. It’s more convenient for me. In truth, I wanted her to read my mind so I didn’t have to stoop to the womanly art of articulation. I was sometimes as guilty of playing the figure-me-out game as Amy was. I’ve left that bit of information out too.

I’m a big fan of the lie of omission.

“This is very nurturing and strange of you, Go.”

When a commercial break came on, she paused and said, “If I had a dick, I would fuck this peanut butter,” deliberately spraying cracker bits toward me.

My twin was a staunch believer in the easiest way. No relaxation tapes or whale noises for her; pop a pill, get unconscious.

I’m making the best of a really bad situation, and the situation is mostly bad because my husband, who brought me here, who uprooted me to be closer to his ailing parents, seems to have lost all interest in both me and said ailing parents.

So I don’t tell her what I have found on Nick’s computer, the book proposal for a memoir about a Manhattan magazine writer who returns to his Missouri roots to care for both his ailing parents. Nick has all sorts of bizarre things on his computer, and sometimes I can’t resist a little light snooping—it gives me a clue as to what my husband is thinking.

Imagine the jacket copy: People behaved mostly well and then they died.

I’d written her a dirty valentine that I could already see splashed across the news, me rhyming besot with twat.

I could feel her girl-brain buzzing, turning Amy’s disappearance into a frothy, scandalous romance, ignoring any reality that didn’t suit the narrative.

I swallow a quick gust of anger: I used to have more than a little cash of my own, but I gave it to your son.

You don’t ever want to be the wife who keeps her husband from playing poker—you don’t want to be the shrew with the hair curlers and the rolling pin. So you swallow your disappointment and say okay. I don’t think he does this to be mean, it’s just how he was raised. His dad did his own thing, always, and his mom put up with it. Until she divorced him. He begins his lie. I don’t even listen.

I actually agreed with her, but I couldn’t bear to hear the words aloud, from Go. I had to discredit them.

Me, the nice working-class guy, taking on the spoiled rich kid.

He wasn’t the dismissible fop I’d been hoping for. Desi seemed the definition of a gentleman: a guy who could quote a great poet, order a rare Scotch, and buy a woman the right piece of vintage jewelry. He seemed, in fact, a man who knew inherently what women wanted—across from him, I felt my suit wilt, my manner go clumsy. I had a swelling urge to discuss football and fart. These were the kinds of guys who always got to me.

I’d look in the fridge and find she’d peeled and sliced his grapefruit for him, put the pieces in a snap-top container, and then I’d open the bread and discover all the crusts had been cut away, each slice returned half naked. I am married to a thirty-four-year-old man who is still offended by bread crusts.

“Can’t that kid go get validation somewhere else?” I groused to Go the other night. She said I was just jealous that my father figure liked someone better. I was.

Go sat quietly, the orange of the streetlight creating a rock-star halo around her profile.

Item 12: Wrap the first clue in its box and tuck it just out of the way so the police will find it before dazed husband thinks to look for it. It has to be part of the police record. I want him to be forced to start the treasure hunt (his ego will make him finish it). Check.

As a child, I got a vibrant pleasure out of this: just me, just me, only me.

People liked him. Women loved him. I thought we would be the most perfect union: the happiest couple around. Not that love is a competition. But I don’t understand the point of being together if you’re not the happiest.

I was probably happier for those few years—pretending to be someone else—than I ever have been before or after. I can’t decide what that means.

“It’s not a phrase Amy used to say? Or some quote from the Amy books, or …” She hurried 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 ska band.”

I changed my name for that piece of shit. Historical records have been altered—Amy Elliott to Amy Dunne—like it’s nothing. No, he does not get to win.

So that’s just an example. Of patience, planning, and ingenuity. I am pleased with myself; I have three hours more until I reach the thick of the Missouri Ozarks and my destination, a small archipelago of cabins in the woods that accepts cash for weekly rentals and has cable TV, a must. I plan to hole up there the first week or two; I don’t want to be on the road when the news hits, and it’s the last place Nick would think I’d hide once he realizes I’m hiding.

Would Cool Girl Amy be able to do that? To research each week’s current events, to cross-consult with my old daily planners to make sure I forgot nothing important, then to reconstruct how Diary Amy would react to each event? It was fun, mostly.

This is the hardest part: waiting for stupid people to figure things out.