Gone Girl

baby.’
    ‘Feels anticlimactic somehow,’ I said.
    ‘The climax is when you are taught the lesson that Punch never learns, and you are caught and charged with murder.’
    ‘And Missouri has the death penalty,’ I said. ‘Fun game.’

AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
    THE DAY OF
    Y ou know how I found out? I saw them. That’s how stupid my husband is. One snowy April night, I felt so lonely. I was drinking warm amaretto with Bleecker and reading, lying on the floor as the snow came down, listening to old scratchy albums, like Nick and I used to (that entry was true). I had a burst of romantic cheer: I’d surprise him at The Bar, and we’d have a few drinks and wander through the empty streets together, hand in mitten. We would walk around the hushed downtown and he would press me against a wall and kiss me in the snow that looked like sugar clouds. That’s right, I wanted him back so badly that I was willing to re-create that moment. I was willing to pretend to be someone else again. I remember thinking: We can still find a way to make this work. Faith! I followed him all the way to Missouri, because I still believed he’d love me again somehow, love me that intense, thick way he did, the way that made everything good. Faith!
    I got there just in time to see him leaving with her. I was in the goddamn parking lot, twenty feet behind him, and he didn’t even register me, I was a ghost. He didn’t have his hands on her, not yet, but I knew. I could tell because he was so aware of her. I followed them, and suddenly, he pressed her up against a tree – in the middle of town – and kissed her. Nick is cheating , I thought dumbly, and before I could make myself say anything, they were going up to her apartment. I waited for an hour, sitting on the doorstep, then got too cold – blue fingernails, chattering teeth – and went home. He never even knew I knew.
    I had a new persona, not of my choosing. I was Average Dumb Woman Married to Average Shitty Man. He had single-handedly de-amazed Amazing Amy.
    I know women whose entire personas are woven from a benign mediocrity. Their lives are a list of shortcomings: the unappreciative boyfriend, the extra ten pounds, the dismissive boss, the connivingsister, the straying husband. I’ve always hovered above their stories, nodding in sympathy and thinking how foolish they are, these women, to let these things happen, how undisciplined. And now to be one of them! One of the women with the endless stories that make people nod sympathetically and think: Poor dumb bitch .
    I could hear the tale, how everyone would love telling it: how Amazing Amy, the girl who never did wrong, let herself be dragged, penniless, to the middle of the country, where her husband threw her over for a younger woman. How predictable, how perfectly average, how amusing. And her husband? He ended up happier than ever. No. I couldn’t allow that. No. Never. Never. He doesn’t get to do this to me and still fucking win. No.
    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 I began to think of a different story, a better story, that would destroy Nick for doing this to me. A story that would restore my perfection. It would make me the hero, flawless and adored.
    Because everyone loves the Dead Girl.
    It’s rather extreme, framing your husband for your murder. I want you to know I know that. All the tut-tutters out there will say: She should have just left, bundled up what remained of her dignity. Take the high road! Two wrongs don’t make a right! All those things that spineless women say, confusing their weakness with morality.
    I won’t divorce him because that’s exactly what he’d like. And I won’t forgive him because I don’t feel like turning the other cheek . Can I make it any more clear? I won’t find that a satisfactory ending. The bad guy wins? Fuck him.
    For over a year now, I’ve smelled her twat on his fingertips as he slipped into bed next to me. I’ve watched him ogle himself in the mirror, grooming himself like a horny baboon for their dates. I’ve listened to his lies, lies, lies – from simplistic child’s fibs to elaborate Rube Goldbergian contraptions. I’ve tasted butterscotch on his dry-kiss lips, a cloying flavor that was never there before. I’ve felt the stubble on his cheeks that he knows I don’t like but apparently she does. I’ve suffered betrayal