Gone Girl(24)

Except for tonight. I know, I know, I’m being a girl.

It’s five a.m. The sun is coming up, almost as bright as the streetlights outside that have just blinked off. I always like that switch, when I’m awake for it. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I’ll pull myself out of bed and walk through the streets at dawn, and when the lights click off, all together, I always feel like I’ve seen something special. Oh, there go the streetlights! I want to announce. In New York it’s not three or four a.m. that’s the quiet time – there are too many bar stragglers, calling out to each other as they collapse into taxis, yelping into their cell phones as they frantically smoke that one last cigarette before bed. Five a.m., that’s the best time, when the clicking of your heels on the sidewalk sounds illicit. All the people have been put away in their boxes, and you have the whole place to yourself.

Here’s what happened: Nick got home just after four, a bulb of beer and cigarettes and fried-egg odor attached to him, a placenta of stink. I was still awake, waiting for him, my brain ca-thunking after a marathon of Law and Order. He sat down on our ottoman and glanced at the present on the table and said nothing. I stared at him back. He clearly wasn’t going to even graze against an apology – hey, sorry things got screwy today. That’s all I wanted, just a quick acknowledgment.

‘Happy day after anniversary,’ I start.

He sighs, a deep aggrieved moan. ‘Amy, I’ve had the crappiest day ever. Please don’t lay a guilt trip on me on top of it.’

Nick grew up with a father who never, ever apologised, so when Nick feels he has screwed up, he goes on offense. I know this, and I can usually wait it out, usually.

‘I was just saying happy anniversary.’

‘Happy anniversary, my * husband who neglected me on my big day.’

We sit silent for a minute, my stomach knotting. I don’t want to be the bad guy here. I don’t deserve that. Nick stands up.

‘Well, how was it?’ I ask dully.

‘How was it? It was f*cking awful. Sixteen of my friends now have no jobs. It was miserable. I’ll probably be gone too, another few months.’

Friends. He doesn’t even like half the guys he was out with, but I say nothing.

‘I know it feels dire right now, Nick. But—’

‘It’s not dire for you, Amy. Not for you, it never will be dire. But for the rest of us? It’s very different.’

The same old. Nick resents that I’ve never had to worry about money and I never will. He thinks that makes me softer than everyone else, and I wouldn’t disagree with him. But I do work. I clock in and clock back out. Some of my girlfriends have literally never had a job; they discuss people with jobs in the pitying tones you talk about a fat girl with ‘such a nice face.’ They will lean forward and say, ‘But of course, Ellen has to work,’ like something out of a No?l Coward play. They don’t count me, because I can always quit my job if I want to. I could build my days around charity committees and home decoration and gardening and volunteering, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with building a life around those things. Most beautiful, good things are done by women people scorn. But I work.

‘Nick, I’m on your side here. We’ll be okay no matter what. My money is your money.’

‘Not according to the prenup.’

He is drunk. He only mentions the prenup when he’s drunk. Then all the resentment comes back. I’ve told him hundreds, literally hundreds of times, I’ve said the words: The prenup is pure business. It’s not for me, it’s not even for my parents, it’s for my parents’ lawyers. It says nothing about us, not you and me.

He walks over toward the kitchen, tosses his wallet and wilted dollars on the coffee table, crumples a piece of notepaper and tosses it in the trash with a series of credit-card receipts.

‘That’s a shitty thing to say, Nick.’

‘It’s a shitty way to feel, Amy.’

He walks to our bar – in the careful, swamp-wading gait of a drunk – and actually pours himself another drink.

‘You’re going to make yourself sick,’ I say.

He raises his glass in an up-yours cheers to me. ‘You just don’t get it, Amy. You just can’t. I’ve worked since I was fourteen years old. I didn’t get to go to f*cking tennis camp and creative-writing camp and SAT prep and all that shit that apparently everyone else in New York City did, because I was wiping down tables at the mall and I was mowing lawns and I was driving to Hannibal and f*cking dressing like Huck Finn for the tourists and I was cleaning the funnel-cake skillets at midnight.’

I feel an urge to laugh, actually to guffaw. A big belly laugh that would sweep up Nick, and soon we’d both be laughing and this would be over. This litany of crummy jobs. Being married to Nick always reminds me: People have to do awful things for money. Ever since I’ve been married to Nick, I always wave to people dressed as food.

‘I’ve had to work so much harder than anyone else at the magazine to even get to the magazine. Twenty years, basically, I’ve been working to get where I am, and now it’s all going to be gone, and there’s not a f*cking thing I know how to do instead, unless I want to go back home, be a river rat again.’

‘You’re probably too old to play Huck Finn,’ I say.

‘Fuck you, Amy.’