Gone Girl

Chapter One

Nick Dunne
the day of
 
When I think of my wife, I always think of her head. The shape of
it, to begin with. The very first time I saw her, it was the back of the
head I saw, and there was something lovely about it, the angles of it.
Like a shiny, hard corn kernel or a riverbed fossil. She had what the
Victorians would call finely shaped head. You could imagine the
skull quite easily.
 
I’d know her head anywhere.
 
And what’s inside it. I think of that too: her mind. Her brain, all
those coils, and her thoughts shuttling through those coils like fast,
frantic centipedes. Like a child, I picture opening her skull, unspooling
her brain and sifting through it, trying to catch and pin down
her thoughts. What are you thinking, Amy? The question I’ve asked
most often during our marriage, if not out loud, if not to the person
who could answer. I suppose these questions stormcloud over every
marriage: What are you thinking? How are you feeling? Who are
you? What have we done to each other? What will we do?
 
My eyes flipped open at exactly six a.m. This was no avian fluttering
of the lashes, no gentle blink toward consciousness. The awakening
was mechanical. A spooky ventriloquist- dummy click of the lids:
The world is black and then, showtime! 6- 0- 0 the clock said— in my
face, first thing I saw. 6- 0- 0. It felt different. I rarely woke at such a
rounded time. I was a man of jagged risings: 8:43, 11:51, 9:26. My
life was alarmless.
 
At that exact moment, 6- 0- 0, the sun climbed over the skyline of
oaks, revealing its full summer angry- god self. Its reflection flared
across the river toward our house, a long, blaring finger aimed at me
through our frail bedroom curtains. Accusing: You have been seen.
You will be seen.
 
I wallowed in bed, which was our New York bed in our new house,
which we still called the new house, even though we’d been back here
for two years. It’s a rented house right along the Mississippi River,
a house that screams Suburban Nouveau Riche, the kind of place
I aspired to as a kid from my split- level, shag- carpet side of town.
The kind of house that is immediately familiar: a generically grand,
unchallenging, new, new, new house that my wife would— and did—
detest.
 
“Should I remove my soul before I come inside?” Her first line upon
arrival. It had been a compromise: Amy demanded we rent, not buy,
in my little Missouri hometown, in her firm hope that we wouldn’t
be stuck here long. But the only houses for rent were clustered in
this failed development: a miniature ghost town of bank- owned,
recession- busted, price- reduced mansions, a neighborhood that closed
before it ever opened. It was a compromise, but Amy didn’t see it that
way, not in the least. To Amy, it was a punishing whim on my part, a
nasty, selfish twist of the knife. I would drag her, caveman- style, to a
town she had aggressively avoided, and make her live in the kind of
house she used to mock. I suppose it’s not a compromise if only one of
you considers it such, but that was what our compromises tended to
look like. One of us was always angry. Amy, usually.
 
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. I used to be a writer. I was a writer who wrote about TV
and movies and books. Back when people read things on paper, back
when anyone cared about what I thought. I’d arrived in New York in
the late ’90s, the last gasp of the glory days, although no one knew it
then. New York was packed with writers, real writers, because there
were magazines, real magazines, loads of them. This was back when
the Internet was still some exotic pet kept in the corner of the publishing
world— throw some kibble at it, watch it dance on its little leash,
oh quite cute, it definitely won’t kill us in the night. Think about it: a
time when newly graduated college kids could come to New York and
get paid to write. We had no clue that we were embarking on careers
that would vanish within a decade.
 
I had a job for eleven years and then I didn’t, it was that fast. All
around the country, magazines began shuttering, succumbing to
a sudden infection brought on by the busted economy. Writers (my
kind of writers: aspiring novelists, ruminative thinkers, people whose
brains don’t work quick enough to blog or link or tweet, basically old,
stubborn blowhards) were through. We were like women’s hat makers
or buggy- whip manufacturers: Our time was done. Three weeks after
I got cut loose, Amy lost her job, such as it was. (Now I can feel Amy
looking over my shoulder, smirking at the time I’ve spent discussing
my career, my misfortune, and dismissing her experience in one sentence.
That, she would tell you, is typical. Just like Nick, she would
say. It was a refrain of hers: Just like Nick to . . . whatever followed,
whatever was just like me, was bad.) Two jobless grown- ups, we spent
weeks wandering around our Brooklyn brownstone in socks and pajamas,
ignoring the future, strewing unopened mail across tables and
sofas, eating ice cream at ten a.m. and taking thick afternoon naps.
 
Then one day the phone rang. My twin sister was on the other
end. Margo had moved back home after her own New York layoff
a year before— the girl is one step ahead of me in everything, even
shitty luck. Margo, calling from good ole North Carthage, Missouri,
from the house where we grew up, and as I listened to her voice, I
saw her at age ten, with a dark cap of hair and overall shorts, sitting
on our grandparents’ back dock, her body slouched over like an old
pillow, her skinny legs dangling in the water, watching the river fl ow
over fish- white feet, so intently, utterly self- possessed even as a child.
Go’s voice was warm and crinkly even as she gave this cold news:
Our indomitable mother was dying. Our dad was nearly gone— his
(nasty) mind, his (miserable) heart, both murky as he meandered
toward the great gray beyond. But it looked like our mother would
beat him there. About six months, maybe a year, she had. I could tell
that Go had gone to meet with the doctor by herself, taken her studious
notes in her slovenly handwriting, and she was teary as she tried
to decipher what she’d written. Dates and doses.
 
“Well, fuck, I have no idea what this says, is it a nine? Does that
even make sense?” she said, and I interrupted. Here was a task, a
purpose, held out on my sister’s palm like a plum. I almost cried with
relief.
 
 “I’ll come back, Go. We’ll move back home. You shouldn’t have to
do this all by yourself.”
 
She didn’t believe me. I could hear her breathing on the other end.
 
“I’m serious, Go. Why not? There’s nothing here.”
 
A long exhale. “What about Amy?”
 
That is what I didn’t take long enough to consider. I simply assumed
I would bundle up my New York wife with her New York interests,
her New York pride, and remove her from her New York parents—
leave the frantic, thrilling futureland of Manhattan behind— and
transplant her to a little town on the river in Missouri, and all would
be fine.
 
I did not yet understand how foolish, how optimistic, how, yes,
just like Nick I was for thinking this. The misery it would lead to.
 
“Amy will be fine. Amy . . .” Here was where I should have said,
“Amy loves Mom.” But I couldn’t tell Go that Amy loved our mother,
because after all that time, Amy still barely knew our mother. Their
few meetings had left them both baffled. Amy would dissect the conversations
for days after—“And what did she mean by . . . ,” as if my
mother were some ancient peasant tribeswoman arriving from the
tundra with an armful of raw yak meat and some buttons for bartering,
trying to get something from Amy that wasn’t on offer.
 
Amy didn’t care to know my family, didn’t want to know my
birthplace, and yet for some reason, I thought moving home would
be a good idea.
 
My morning breath warmed the pillow, and I changed the subject in
my mind. Today was not a day for second- guessing or regret, it was a
day for doing. Downstairs, I could hear the return of a long- lost sound:
Amy making breakfast. Banging wooden cupboards (rump- thump!),
rattling containers of tin and glass (ding- ring!), shuffling and sorting
a collection of metal pots and iron pans (ruzz-shuzz!). A culinary
orchestra tuning up, clattering vigorously toward the finale, a cake
pan drumrolling along the floor, hitting the wall with a cymballic
crash. Something impressive was being created, probably a crepe,
because crepes are special, and today Amy would want to cook something
special.
 
It was our five- year anniversary.
 
I walked barefoot to the edge of the steps and stood listening,
working my toes into the plush wall- to- wall carpet Amy detested on
principle, as I tried to decide whether I was ready to join my wife.
Amy was in the kitchen, oblivious to my hesitation. She was humming
something melancholy and familiar. I strained to make it out— a folk
song? a lullabye?—and then realized it was the theme to M*A*S*H.
Suicide is painless. I went downstairs.
 
I hovered in the doorway, watching my wife. Her yellow- butter
hair was pulled up, the hank of ponytail swinging cheerful as a jumprope,
and she was sucking distractedly on a burnt fingertip, humming
around it. She hummed to herself because she was an unrivaled
botcher of lyrics. When we were first dating, a Genesis song came on
the radio: “She seems to have an invisible touch, yeah.” And Amy
crooned instead, “She takes my hat and puts it on the top shelf.”
When I asked her why she’d ever think her lyrics were remotely, possibly,
vaguely right, she told me she always thought the woman in the
song truly loved the man because she put his hat on the top shelf. I
knew I liked her then, really liked her, this girl with an explanation
for everything.
 
There’s something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and
feeling utterly cold.
 
Amy peered at the crepe sizzling in the pan and licked something
off her wrist. She looked triumphant, wifely. If I took her in my arms,
she would smell like berries and powdered sugar.
 
When she spied me lurking there in grubby boxers, my hair in full
Heat Miser spike, she leaned against the kitchen counter and said,
“Well, hello, handsome.”
 
Bile and dread inched up my throat. I thought to myself: Okay, go.
I was very late getting to work. My sister and I had done a foolish
thing when we both moved back home. We had done what we always
talked about doing. We opened a bar. We borrowed money from Amy
to do this, eighty thousand dollars, which was once nothing to Amy
but by then was almost everything. I swore I would pay her back,
with interest. I would not be a man who borrowed from his wife— I
could feel my dad twisting his lips at the very idea. Well, there are all
kinds of men, his most damning phrase, the second half left unsaid,
and you are the wrong kind.
 
But truly, it was a practical decision, a smart business move. Amy
and I both needed new careers; this would be mine. She would pick
one someday, or not, but in the meantime, here was an income, made
possible by the last of Amy’s trust fund. Like the McMansion I rented,
the bar featured symbolically in my childhood memories— a place
where only grown- ups go, and do whatever grown- ups do. Maybe
that’s why I was so insistent on buying it after being stripped of my
livelihood. It’s a reminder that I am, after all, an adult, a grown man,
a useful human being, even though I lost the career that made me
all these things. I won’t make that mistake again: The once plentiful
herds of magazine writers would continue to be culled— by the
Internet, by the recession, by the American public, who would rather
watch TV or play video games or electronically inform friends that,
like, rain sucks! But there’s no app for a bourbon buzz on a warm day
in a cool, dark bar. The world will always want a drink.
 
Our bar is a corner bar with a haphazard, patchwork aesthetic. Its
best feature is a massive Victorian back bar, dragon heads and angel
faces emerging from the oak— an extravagant work of wood in these
shitty plastic days. The remainder of the bar is, in fact, shitty, a showcase
of the shabbiest design offerings of every decade: an Eisenhowerera
linoleum floor, the edges turned up like burnt toast; dubious
wood- paneled walls straight from a ’70s home- porn video; halogen
floor lamps, an accidental tribute to my 1990s dorm room. The ultimate
effect is strangely homey— it looks less like a bar than someone’s
benignly neglected fixer- upper. And jovial: We share a parking
lot with the local bowling alley, and when our door swings wide, the
clatter of strikes applauds the customer’s entrance.
 
We named the bar The Bar. “People will think we’re ironic instead
of creatively bankrupt,” my sister reasoned.
 
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.”
 
We felt much less superior after that, which was a good thing.
I pulled into the parking lot. I waited until a strike erupted from
the bowling alley— thank you, thank you, friends— then stepped
out of the car. I admired the surroundings, still not bored with the
broken- in view: the squatty blond- brick post office across the street
(now closed on Saturdays), the unassuming beige office building just
down the way (now closed, period). The town wasn’t prosperous, not
anymore, not by a long shot. Hell, it wasn’t even original, being one
of two Carthage, Missouris— ours is technically North Carthage,
which makes it sound like a twin city, although it’s hundreds of miles
from the other and the lesser of the two: a quaint little 1950s town
that bloated itself into a basic midsize suburb and dubbed it progress.
Still, it was where my mom grew up and where she raised me and Go,
so it had some history. Mine, at least.
 
As I walked toward the bar across the concrete- and- weed parking
lot, I looked straight down the road and saw the river. That’s what
I’ve always loved about our town: We aren’t built on some safe bluff
overlooking the Mississippi— we are on the Mississippi. I could walk
down the road and step right into the sucker, an easy three- foot drop,
and be on my way to Tennessee. Every building downtown bears
hand- drawn lines from where the river hit during the Flood of ’61,’75,
’84, ’93, ’07, ’08, ’11. And so on.
 
The river wasn’t swollen now, but it was running urgently, in strong
ropy currents. Moving apace with the river was a long single- fi le line
of men, eyes aimed at their feet, shoulders tense, walking steadfastly
nowhere. As I watched them, one suddenly looked up at me, his face
in shadow, an oval blackness. I turned away.
 
I felt an immediate, intense need to get inside. By the time I’d gone
twenty feet, my neck bubbled with sweat. The sun was still an angry
eye in the sky. You have been seen.
 
My gut twisted, and I moved quicker. I needed a drink.