Gone Girl

I was about to go into blocking position to get the cat when I saw that the front door was open. Carl had said as much, but seeing it was different. This wasn’t taking-out-the-trash-back-in-a-minute open. This was wide-gaping-ominous open.

Carl hovered across the way, waiting for my response, and like some awful piece of performance art, I felt myself enacting Concerned Husband. I stood on the middle step and frowned, then took the stairs quickly, two at a time, calling out my wife’s name.

Silence.

‘Amy, you home?’

I ran straight upstairs. No Amy. The ironing board was set up, the iron still on, a dress waiting to be pressed.

‘Amy!’

As I ran back downstairs, I could see Carl still framed in the open doorway, hands on hips, watching. I swerved into the living room, and pulled up short. The carpet glinted with shards of glass, the coffee table shattered. End tables were on their sides, books slid across the floor like a card trick. Even the heavy antique ottoman was belly-up, its four tiny feet in the air like something dead. In the middle of the mess was a pair of good sharp scissors.

‘Amy!’

I began ru

‘Amy!’

She wasn’t on the water, she wasn’t in the house. Amy was not there.

Amy was gone.

AMY ELLIOTT

SEPTEMBER 18, 2005

– Diary entry –

Well, well, well. Guess who’s back? Nick Du

And then work clobbered him and suddenly it was March and too embarrassingly late to try to find me. (He said.)

Of course I was angry. I had been angry. But now I’m not. Let me set the scene. (She said.) Today. Gusty September winds. I’m walking along Seventh Avenue, making a lunchtime contemplation of the sidewalk bodega bins – endless plastic containers of cantaloupe and honeydew and melon perched on ice like the day’s catch – and I could feel a man barnacling himself to my side as I sailed along, and I corner-eyed the intruder and realized who it was. It was him. The boy in ‘I met a boy!’

I didn’t break my stride, just turned to him and said:

a) ‘Do I know you?’ (manipulative, challenging)

b) ‘Oh, wow, I’m so happy to see you!’ (eager, doormatlike)

c) ‘Go fuck yourself.’ (aggressive, bitter)

d) ‘Well, you certainly take your time about it, don’t you, Nick?’ (light, playful, laid-back)

Answer: D

And now we’re together. Together, together. It was that easy.

It’s interesting, the timing. Propitious, if you will. (And I will.) Just last night was my parents’ book party. Amazing Amy and the Big Day. Yup, Rand and Marybeth couldn’t resist. They’ve given their daughter’s namesake what they can’t give their daughter: a husband! Yes, for book twenty, Amazing Amy is getting married! Wheeeeeee. No one cares. No one wanted Amazing Amy to grow up, least of all me. Leave her in kneesocks and hair ribbons and let me grow up, unencumbered by my literary alter ego, my paperbound better half, the me I was supposed to be.

But Amy is the Elliott bread and butter, and she’s served us well, so I suppose I can’t begrudge her a perfect match. She’s marrying good old Able Andy, of course. They’ll be just like my parents: happy-happy.

Still, it was unsettling, the incredibly small order the publisher put in. A new Amazing Amy used to get a first print of a hundred thousand copies back in the ’80s. Now ten thousand. The book-launch party was, accordingly, unfabulous. Off-tone. How do you throw a party for a fictional character who started life as a precocious moppet of six and is now a thirty-year-old bride-to-be who still speaks like a child? (‘Sheesh,’ thought Amy, ‘my dear fiance´ sure is a grouch-monster when he doesn’t get his way …’ That is an actual quote. The whole book made me want to punch Amy right in her stupid, spotless vagina.) The book is a nostalgia item, intended to be purchased by women who grew up with Amazing Amy, but I’m not sure who will actually want to read it. I read it, of course. I gave the book my blessing – multiple times. Rand and Marybeth feared that I might take Amy’s marriage as some jab at my perpetually single state. (‘I, for one, don’t think women should marry before thirty-five,’ said my mom, who married my dad at twenty-three.)

My parents have always worried that I’d take Amy too personally – they always tell me not to read too much into her. And yet I can’t fail to notice that whenever I screw something up, Amy does it right: When I finally quit violin at age twelve, Amy was revealed as a prodigy in the next book. (‘Sheesh, violin can be hard work, but hard work is the only way to get better!’) When I blew off the junior te

The book party was as schizophrenic as the book – at Bluenight, off Union Square, one of those shadowy salons with wingback chairs and art deco mirrors that are supposed to make you feel like a Bright Young Thing. Gin martinis wobbling on trays lofted by waiters with rictus smiles. Greedy journalists with knowing smirks and hollow legs, getting the free buzz before they go somewhere better.

My parents circulate the room hand in hand – their love story is always part of the Amazing Amy story: husband and wife in mutual creative labor for a quarter century. Soul mates. They really call themselves that, which makes sense, because I guess they are. I can vouch for it, having studied them, little lonely only child, for many years. They have no harsh edges with each other, no spiny conflicts, they ride through life like conjoined jellyfish – expanding and contracting instinctively, filling each other’s spaces liquidly. Making it look easy, the soul-mate thing. People say children from broken homes have it hard, but the children of charmed marriages have their own particular challenges.

Naturally, I have to sit on some velvety banquette in the corner of the room, out of the noise, so I can give a few interviews to a sad handful of kid interns who’ve gotten stuck with the ‘grab a quote’ assignment from their editors.

How does it feel to see Amy finally married to Andy? Because you’re not married, right?

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