Gone Girl

Amy with soft, manicured fingers. Tossing her in the trunk of his vintage roadster and taking her … antiquing in Vermont. Desi. Could anyone believe it was Desi?
    ‘Desi lives not far away, actually,’ I said. ‘St. Louis.’
    ‘Now, see ?’ Rand said. ‘Why are the cops not all over this?’
    ‘Someone needs to be,’ I said. ‘I’ll go. After the search here tomorrow.’
    ‘The police definitely seem to think it’s … close to home,’ Marybeth said. She kept her eyes on me one beat too long, then shivered, as if shaking off a thought.

AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
    AUGUST 23, 2010
    – Diary entry –
    S ummer. Birdies. Sunshine. I spent today shuffling around Prospect Park, my skin tender, my bones brittle. Misery-battling. It is an improvement, since I spent the previous three days in our house in the same crusty pajama set, marking time until five, when I could have a drink. Trying to make myself remember the suffering in Darfur. Put things into perspective. Which, I guess, is just further exploiting the people of Darfur.
    So much has unraveled the past week. I think that’s what it is, that it’s all happened at once, so I have the emotional bends. Nick lost his job a month ago. The recession is supposed to be winding down, but no one seems to know that. So Nick lost his job. Second round of layoffs, just like he predicted – just a few weeks after the first round. Oops, we didn’t fire nearly enough people . Idiots.
    At first I think Nick might be okay. He makes a massive list of things he’s always meant to do. Some of it’s tiny stuff: He changes watch batteries and resets clocks, he replaces a pipe beneath our sink and repaints all the rooms we painted before and didn’t like. Basically, he does a lot of things over. It’s nice to take some actual do-overs, when you get so few in life. And then he starts on bigger stuff: He reads War and Peace . He flirts with taking Arabic lessons. He spends a lot of time trying to guess what skills will be marketable over the next few decades. It breaks my heart, but I pretend it doesn’t for his sake.
    I keep asking him: ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’
    At first I try it seriously, over coffee, eye contact, my hand on his. Then I try it breezily, lightly, in passing. Then I try it tenderly, in bed, stroking his hair.
    He has the same answer always: ‘I’m fine. I don’t really want to talk about it.’
    I wrote a quiz that was perfect for the times: ‘How Are You Handling Your Layoff?’
    a) I sit in my pajamas and eat a lot of ice cream – sulking is therapeutic!
    b) I write nasty things about my old boss online, everywhere – venting feels great!
    c) Until a new job comes along, I try to find useful things to do with my newfound time, like learning a marketable language or finally reading War and Peace .
    It was a compliment to Nick – C was the correct answer – but he just gave a sour smile when I showed it to him.
    A few weeks in, the bustling stopped, the usefulness stopped, as if he woke up one morning under a decrepit, dusty sign that read, Why Fucking Bother? He went dull-eyed. Now he watches TV, surfs porn, watches porn on TV. He eats a lot of delivery food, the Styrofoam shells propped up near the overflowing trash can. He doesn’t talk to me, he behaves as if the act of talking physically pains him and I am a vicious woman to ask it of him.
    He barely shrugs when I tell him I was laid off. Last week.
    ‘That’s awful, I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘At least you have your money to fall back on.’
    ‘ We have the money. I liked my job, though.’
    He starts singing ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want,’ off-key, high-pitched, with a little stumbling dance, and I realize he is drunk. It is late afternoon, a beautiful blue-blue day, and our house is dank, thick with the sweet smell of rotting Chinese food, the curtains all drawn over, and I begin walking room to room to air it out, pulling back the drapes, scaring the dust motes, and when I reach the darkened den, I stumble over a bag on the floor, and then another and another, like the cartoon cat who walks into a room full of mousetraps. When I switch on the lights, I see dozens of shopping bags, and they are from places laid-off people don’t go. They are the high-end men’s stores, the places that hand-tailor suits, where salespeople carry ties individually, draped over an arm, to male shoppers nestled in leather armchairs. I mean, the shit is bespoke .
    ‘What is all this,