Gone Girl(122)

I told Amy it wasn’t true, but she didn’t believe me. I told her I didn’t just want a child, I needed a child. I had to know I could love a person unconditionally, that I could make a little creature feel constantly welcome and wanted no matter what. That I could be a different kind of father than my dad was. That I could raise a boy who wasn’t like me.

I begged her. Amy remained unmoved.

A year later, I got a notice in the mail: The clinic would dispose of my semen unless they heard from us. I left the letter on the dining room table, an open rebuke. Three days later, I saw it in the trash. That was our final communication on the subject.

By then I’d already been secretly dating Andie for months, so I had no right to be upset. But that didn’t stop my aching, and it didn’t stop me from daydreaming about our boy, mine and Amy’s. I’d gotten attached to him. The fact was, Amy and I would make a great child.



The marionettes were watching me with alarmed black eyes. I peered out my window, saw that the news trucks had packed it in, so I went out into the warm night. Time to walk. Maybe a lone tabloid writer was trailing me; if so, I didn’t care. I headed through our complex, then forty-five minutes out along River Road, then onto the highway that shot right through the middle of Carthage. Thirty loud, fumy minutes—past car dealerships with trucks displayed appealingly like desserts, past fast-food chains and liquor stores and mini-marts and gas stations—until I reached the turnoff for downtown. I had encountered not a single other person on foot the entire time, only faceless blurs whizzing past me in cars.

It was close to midnight. I passed The Bar, tempted to go in but put off by the crowds. A reporter or two had to be camped out in there. It’s what I would do. But I wanted to be in a bar. I wanted to be surrounded by people, having fun, blowing off steam. I walked another fifteen minutes to the other end of downtown, to a cheesier, rowdier, younger bar where the bathrooms were always laced with vomit on Saturday nights. It was a bar that Andie’s crowd would go to, and perhaps, who knew, drag along Andie. It would be a nice bit of luck to see her there. At least gauge her mood from across the room. And if she wasn’t there then I’d have a fucking drink.

I went as deep into the bar as I could—no Andie, no Andie. My face was partially covered by a baseball cap. Even so, I felt a few pings as I moved past crowds of drinkers: heads abruptly turning toward me, the wide eyes of identification. That guy! Right?

Mid-July. I wondered if I’d become so nefarious come October, I’d be some frat boy’s tasteless Halloween costume: mop of blond hair, an Amazing Amy book tucked under an armpit. Go said she’d received half a dozen phone calls asking if The Bar had an official T-shirt for sale. (We didn’t, thank God.)

I sat down and ordered a Scotch from the bartender, a guy about my age who stared at me a beat too long, deciding whether he would serve me. He finally, grudgingly, set down a small tumbler in front of me, his nostrils flared. When I got out my wallet, he aimed an alarmed palm up at me. “I do not want your money, man. Not at all.”

I left cash anyway. Asshole.

When I tried to flag him for another drink, he glanced my way, shook his head, and leaned in toward the woman he was chatting up. A few seconds later, she discreetly looked toward me, pretending she was stretching. Her mouth turned down as she nodded. That’s him. Nick Dunne. The bartender never came back.

You can’t yell, you can’t strong-arm: Hey, jackass, will you get me a goddamn drink or what? You can’t be the asshole they believe you are. You just have to sit and take it. But I wasn’t leaving. I sat with my empty glass in front of me and pretended I was thinking very hard. I checked my disposable cell, just in case Andie had called. No. Then I pulled out my real phone and played a round of solitaire, pretending to be engrossed. My wife had done this to me, turned me into a man who couldn’t get a drink in his own hometown. God, I hated her.

“Was it Scotch?”

A girl about Andie’s age was standing in front of me. Asian, black shoulder-length hair, cubicle-cute.

“Excuse me?”

“What you were drinking? Scotch?”

“Yeah. Having trouble getting—”

She was gone, to the end of the bar, and she was nosing into the bartender’s line of vision with a big help me smile, a girl used to making her presence known, and then she was back with a Scotch in an actual big-boy tumbler.

“Take it,” she nudged, and I did. “Cheers.” She held up her own clear, fizzing drink. We clinked glasses. “Can I sit?”

“I’m not staying long, actually—” I looked around, making sure no one was aiming a cameraphone at us.