Gone Girl

You came back and saved me, and I thank you for that – do you hear me? I thank you, so don’t say I didn’t later on. I thank you. But I need to know. You know I need 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 my chest, down my back. She palmed my ass and slipped her hand between my legs, cupped my testicles and gripped my limp cock, held it in her hand for a moment to see if anything happened. Nothing happened.
    ‘You’re clean,’ she said. It was meant as a joke, a wisecrack, a movie reference we’d both laugh at. When I said nothing, she stepped back and said, ‘I always did like looking 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 cuffs or the hems. Also, we need to 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 naked back and misted the front of Amy’s shirt until she peeled it off. She pulled off all her clothes, a gleeful striptease,and tossed them over the shower stall in the same grinning, game manner she had when we first 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 flirted with 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 her breasts. She licked a shower teardrop off her upper lip and smiled. Amy hated shower spray. She didn’t like getting her face wet, didn’t like the feel of water pelleting her flesh. I knew this because I was married to her, and I’d pawed her and harassed her many times in the shower, always to be turned down. ( I know it seems sexy, Nick, but it’s actually not, it’s something people only do in movies .) Now she was pretending just the opposite, 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 was frightening, repulsive, but the baby as a lie was almost impossible to bear. The baby was a lie, the fear of blood was a lie – during the past year, my wife had been mostly a lie.
    ‘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 into four 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 her captive. 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 wrists and 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 my vagina looked … right. Right for a rape victim. Then today I let him have sex with me so I had his semen, and then 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. Follow through. 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 now we should sleep. Together. I think it’s important. For closure. Actually, the opposite of closure.’
    ‘Amy, I’m going to