Gone Girl

by Gillian Flynn

(I do wish she hadn’t upstaged my vigil, though—ugly girls can be such thunder stealers),

There is an unfair responsibility that comes with being an only child—you grow up knowing you aren’t allowed to disappoint, you’re not even allowed to die. There isn’t a replacement toddling around; you’re it. It makes you desperate to be flawless, and it also makes you drunk with the power. In such ways are despots made.

In addition to these regulars, a goodly amount of single women straggle through, usually with bruises. Some seem embarrassed, others horribly sad.

She is reading The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. A sci-fi girl. Abused women like escapism, of course.

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 back to the bed.

I still missed my magazine—I hid copies like porn and read them in secret, because I didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for me. I looked up, and both Tanner and Go felt very, very sorry for me.

Tanner had gotten some background on him: He wasn’t the macho Irishman I’d pictured from his name, not a firefighter or cop. He wrote for a humor website based in Brooklyn, a decent one, and his contributor photo revealed him to be a scrawny guy with dark-framed glasses and an uncomfortable amount of thick black hair, wearing a wry grin and a T-shirt for a band called the Bingos.

I have the discipline to kill myself, but can’t stomach the injustice. It’s not fair that I have to die. Not really die. I don’t want to. I’m not the one who did anything wrong.

He can’t resist deflecting any sincerity with a quick line of movie dialogue. I can feel him teetering right on the edge of it. He stops himself.

It’s not enough. I know that, of course. I can’t change my plan. But it gives me pause. My husband has finished the treasure hunt and he is in love. He is also deeply distressed: on one cheek I swear I could spot a hive.

“Sure, like a talking dog who doesn’t want to go to prison.

Desi is a white-knight type. He loves troubled women. Over the years, after Wickshire, when we’d talk, I’d ask after his latest girlfriend, and no matter the girl, he would always say: “Oh, she’s not doing very well, unfortunately.” But I know it is fortunate for Desi—the eating disorders, the painkiller addictions, the crippling depressions. He is never happier than when he’s at a bedside.

The waitress, a plain brunette disguised as a pretty brunette, drops by, sets our drinks on the table. I turn my face from her and see that the mustached curious guy is standing a little closer, watching me with a half smile. I am off my game. Old Amy never would have come here. My mind is addled by Diet Coke and my own body odor.

I’ve always wanted a man to get in a fight over me—a brutal, bloody fight.

The night before, sleepless and nervy, I’d gone online and watched Hugh Grant on Leno, 1995, apologizing to the nation for getting lewd with a hooker. Stuttering, stammering, squirming as if his skin were two sizes too small.

Go walked into the room in flannel boxers and her high school Butthole Surfers T-shirt, her laptop in the crook of an arm. “Everyone hates you again,” she said.

I swear I saw a blank whiteness for just a second, a moment of complete, jarring clarity. I stopped trying to block my father’s voice for once and let it throb in my ears. I was not that man: I didn’t hate and fear all women. I was a one-woman misogynist. If I despised only Amy, focused all my fury and rage and venom on the one woman who deserved it, that didn’t make me my father. That made me sane.

She is absolutely thrilled that Nick isn’t a bad guy after all. Yes, the women of America are collectively sighing.

I find ugly women are usually overly deferential or incredibly rude.

My wife was an insatiable sociopath before. What would she become now?

It was true that I’d had this feeling too, in the past month, when I wasn’t wishing Amy harm. It would come to me at strange moments—in the middle of the night, up to take a piss, or in the morning pouring a bowl of cereal—I’d detect a nib of admiration, and more than that, fondness for my wife, right in the middle of me, right in the gut.

“I don’t even want to ask,” he said. “You two are the most fucked-up people I have ever met, and I specialize in fucked-up people.”

I don’t care about the rebuilding of their pathetic empire, because every day I get calls to tell my story. My story: mine, mine, mine. I just need to pick the very best deal and start writing. I just need to get Nick on the same page so that we both agree how this story will end. Happily.

May I give one example? One night I flew in lobster like the old days, and she pretended to chase me with it, and I pretended to hide, and then we both at the same time made an Annie Hall joke, and it was so perfect, so the way it was supposed to be, that I had to leave the room for a second.

“You two, you’re fucking addicted to each other. You are literally going to be a nuclear family, you do know that? You will explode. You will fucking detonate. You really think you can possibly do this for, what, the next eighteen years? You don’t think she’ll kill you?”