“You’ve lived here, what, Mr. Dunne, two years?” she asked.
“Two years September.”
“Moved from where?”
“New York.”
“City?”
“Yes.”
She pointed upstairs, asking permission without asking, and I nodded and followed her, Gilpin following me.
“I was a writer there,” I blurted out before I could stop myself. Even now, two years back here, and I couldn’t bear for someone to think this was my only life.
Boney: “Sounds impressive.”
Gilpin: “Of what?”
I timed my answer to my stair climbing: I wrote for a magazine (step), I wrote about pop culture (step) for a men’s magazine (step). At the top of the stairs, I turned to see Gilpin looking back at the living room. He snapped to.
“Pop culture?” he called up as he began climbing. “What exactly does that entail?”
“Popular culture,” I said. We reached the top of the stairs, Boney waiting for us. “Movies, TV, music, but, uh, you know, not high arts, nothing hifalutin.” I winced: hifalutin? How patronizing. You two bumpkins probably need me to translate my English, Comma, Educated East Coast into English, Comma, Midwest Folksy. Me do sum scribbling of stuffs I get in my noggin after watchin’ them movin’ pitchers!
“She loves movies,” Gilpin said, gesturing toward Boney. Boney nodded: I do.
“Now I own The Bar, downtown,” I added. I taught a class at the junior college too, but to add that suddenly felt too needy. I wasn’t on a date.
Boney was peering into the bathroom, halting me and Gilpin in the hallway. “The Bar?” she said. “I know the place. Been meaning to drop by. Love the name. Very meta.”
“Sounds like a smart move,” Gilpin said. Boney made for the bedroom, and we followed. “A life surrounded by beer ain’t too bad.”
“Sometimes the answer is at the bottom of a bottle,” I said, then winced again at the inappropriateness.
We entered the bedroom.
Gilpin laughed. “Don’t I know that feeling.”
“See how the iron is still on?” I began.
Boney nodded, opened the door of our roomy closet, and walked inside, flipping on the light, fluttering her latexed hands over shirts and dresses as she moved toward the back. She made a sudden noise, bent down, turned around—holding a perfectly square box covered in elaborate silver wrapping.
My stomach seized.
“Someone’s birthday?” she asked.
“It’s our anniversary.”
Boney and Gilpin both twitched like spiders and pretended they didn’t.
By the time we returned to the living room, the kid officers were gone. Gilpin got down on his knees, eyeing the overturned ottoman.
“Uh, I’m a little freaked out, obviously,” I started.
“I don’t blame you at all, Nick,” Gilpin said earnestly. He had pale blue eyes that jittered in place, an unnerving tic.
“Can we do something? To find my wife. I mean, because she’s clearly not here.”
Boney pointed at the wedding portrait on the wall: me in my tux, a block of teeth frozen on my face, my arms curved formally around Amy’s waist; Amy, her blond hair tightly coiled and sprayed, her veil blowing in the beach breeze of Cape Cod, her eyes open too wide because she always blinked at the last minute and she was trying so hard not to blink. The day after Independence Day, the sulfur from the fireworks mingling with the ocean salt—summer.
The Cape had been good to us. I remember discovering several months in that Amy, my girlfriend, was also quite wealthy, a treasured only child of creative-genius parents. An icon of sorts, thanks to a namesake book series that I thought I could remember as a kid. Amazing Amy. Amy explained this to me in calm, measured tones, as if I were a patient waking from a coma. As if she’d had to do it too many times before and it had gone badly—the admission of wealth that’s greeted with too much enthusiasm, the disclosure of a secret identity that she herself didn’t create.
Amy told me who and what she was, and then we went out to the Elliotts’ historically registered home on Nantucket Sound, went sailing together, and I thought: I am a boy from Missouri, flying across the ocean with people who’ve seen much more than I have. If I began seeing things now, living big, I could still not catch up with them. It didn’t make me feel jealous. It made me feel content. I never aspired to wealth or fame. I was not raised by big-dreamer parents who pictured their child as a future president. I was raised by pragmatic parents who pictured their child as a future office worker of some sort, making a living of some sort. To me, it was heady enough to be in the Elliotts’ proximity, to skim across the Atlantic and return to a plushly restored home built in 1822 by a whaling captain, and there to prepare and eat meals of organic, healthful foods whose names I didn’t know how to pronounce. Quinoa. I remember thinking quinoa was a kind of fish.