Gone Girl

smiling scampishly while urging people to visit the Ice Cream Shoppe. It was one of those stories you dine out on, at least in New York, because no one else could match it. No one could ever say: Oh yeah, me too .
    The ‘visor hat’ comment was a little inside joke: When I’d first told Amy I played Huck, we were out to dinner, into our second bottle of wine, and she’d been adorably tipsy. Big grin and the flushed cheeks she got when she drank. Leaning across the table as if I had a magnet on me. She kept asking me if I still had the visor, would I wear the visor for her, and when I asked her why in the name of all that was holy would she think that Huck Finn wore a visor, she swallowed once and said, ‘Oh, I meant a straw hat!’ As ifthose were two entirely interchangeable words. After that, any time we watched tennis, we always complimented the players’ sporty straw hats.
    Hannibal was a strange choice for Amy, however, as I don’t remember us having a particularly good or bad time there, just a time. I remember us ambling around almost a full year ago, pointing at things and reading placards and saying, ‘That’s interesting,’ while the other one agreed, ‘That is.’ I’d been there since then without Amy (my nostalgic streak uncrushable) and had a glorious day, a wide-grin, right-with-the-world day. But with Amy, it had been still, rote. A bit embarrassing. I remember at one point starting a goofy story about a childhood field trip here, and I saw her eyes go blank, and I got secretly furious, spent ten minutes just winding myself up – because at this point of our marriage, I was so used to being angry with her, it felt almost enjoyable, like gnawing on a cuticle: You know you should stop, that it doesn’t really feel as good as you think, but you can’t quit grinding away. On the surface, of course, she saw nothing. We just kept walking, and reading placards, and pointing.
    It was a fairly awful reminder, the dearth of good memories we had since our move, that my wife was forced to pick Hannibal for her treasure hunt.
    I reached Hannibal in twenty minutes, drove past the glorious Gilded Age courthouse that now held only a chicken-wing place in its basement, and headed past a series of shuttered businesses – ruined community banks and defunct movie houses – toward the river. I parked in a lot right on the Mississippi, smack in front of the Mark Twain riverboat. Parking was free. (I never failed to thrill to the novelty, the generosity of free parking.) Banners of the white-maned man hung listlessly from lamp poles, posters curled up in the heat. It was a blow-dryer-hot day, but even so, Hannibal seemed disturbingly quiet. As I walked along the few blocks of souvenir stores – quilts and antiques and taffy – I saw more for-sale signs. Becky Thatcher’s house was closed for renovations, to be paid with money that had yet to be raised. For ten bucks, you could graffiti your name on Tom Sawyer’s whitewashed fence, but there were few takers.
    I sat in the doorstep of a vacant storefront. It occurred to me that I had brought Amy to the end of everything. We were literally experiencing the end of a way of life, a phrase I’d applied only to New Guinea tribesmen and Appalachian glassblowers. The recession had ended the mall. Computers had ended the Blue Book plant.Carthage had gone bust; its sister city Hannibal was losing ground to brighter, louder, cartoonier tourist spots. My beloved Mississippi River was being eaten in reverse by Asian carp flip-flopping their way up toward Lake Michigan. Amazing Amy was done. It was the end of my career, the end of hers, the end of my father, the end of my mom. The end of our marriage. The end of Amy.
    The ghost wheeze of the steamboat horn blew out from the river. I had sweated through the back of my shirt. I made myself stand up. I made myself buy my tour ticket. I walked the route Amy and I had taken, my wife still beside me in my mind. It was hot that day too. You are BRILLIANT . In my imagination, she strolled next to me, and this time she smiled. My stomach went oily.
    I mind-walked my wife around the main tourist drag. A gray-haired couple paused to peer into the Huckleberry Finn House but didn’t bother to walk in. At the end of the block, a man dressed as Twain – white hair, white suit – got out of a Ford Focus, stretched, looked down the lonely street, and ducked into a pizza joint. And then there we were, at the clapboard building that