Gone Girl(53)

‘Baby, what we’re dealing with right now is I need to make sure we’re okay. That’s all I need.’ She pressed against me, warm and lush. ‘That’s all I need. Please, Nick, I’m freaked out. I know you: I know you don’t want to talk right now, and that’s fine. But I need you … to be with me.’

And I wanted to kiss her then, the way I had that very first time: our teeth bumping, her face tilted to mine, her hair tickling my arms, a wet and tonguey kiss, me thinking of nothing but the kiss, because it would be dangerous to think of anything but how good it felt. The only thing that kept me from dragging her into the bedroom now was not how wrong it was – it had been many shades of wrong all along – but that now it was actually dangerous.

And because there was Amy. Finally, there was Amy, that voice that had made its home in my ear for half a decade, my wife’s voice, but now it wasn’t chiding, it was sweet again. I hated that three little notes from my wife could make me feel this way, soggy and sentimental.

I had absolutely no right to be sentimental.

Andie was burrowing into me, and I was wondering if the police had Go’s house under surveillance, if I should be listening for a knock at the door. I have a very young, very pretty mistress.

My mother had always told her kids: If you’re about to do something, and you want to know if it’s a bad idea, imagine seeing it printed in the paper for all the world to see.

Nick Dunne, a onetime magazine writer still pride-wounded from a 2010 layoff, agreed to teach a journalism class for North Carthage Junior College. The older married man promptly exploited his position by launching a torrid f*ckfest of an affair with one of his impressionable young students.

I was the embodiment of every writer’s worst fear: a cliche′.

Now let me string still more cliche′s together for your amusement: It happened gradually. I never meant to hurt anyone. I got in deeper than I thought I would. But it was more than a fling. It was more than an ego boost. I really love Andie. I do.

The class I was teaching – ‘How to Launch a Magazine Career’ – contained fourteen students of varying degrees of skill. All girls. I’d say women, but I think girls is factually correct. They all wanted to work in magazines. They weren’t smudgy newsprint girls, they were glossies. They’d seen the movie: They pictured themselves dashing around Manhattan, latte in one hand, cell phone in the other, adorably breaking a designer heel while hailing a cab, and falling into the arms of a charming, disarming soul mate with winningly floppy hair. They had no clue about how foolish, how ignorant, their choice of a major was. I’d been planning on telling them as much, using my layoff as a cautionary tale. Although I had no interest in being the tragic figure. I pictured delivering the story nonchalantly, jokingly – no big deal. More time to work on my novel.

Then I spent the first class answering so many awestruck questions, and I turned into such a preening gasbag, such a needy f*ck, that I couldn’t bear to tell the real story: the call into the managing editor’s office on the second round of layoffs, the hiking of that doomed path down the long rows of cubicles, all eyes shifting toward me, dead man walking, me still hoping I was going to be told something different – that the magazine needed me now more than ever – yes! it would be a buck-up speech, an all-hands-on-deck speech! But no, my boss just said: I guess you know, unfortunately, why I called you in here, rubbing his eyes under his glasses, to show how weary and dejected he was.

I wanted to feel like a shiny-cool winner, so I didn’t tell my students about my demise. I told them we had a family illness that required my attention here, which was true, yes, I told myself, entirely true, and very heroic. And pretty, freckled Andie sat a few feet in front of me, wide-set blue eyes under chocolatey waves of hair, cushiony lips parted just a bit, ridiculously large, real breasts, and long thin legs and arms – an alien f*ck-doll of a girl, it must be said, as different from my elegant, patrician wife as could be – and Andie was radiating body heat and lavender, clicking notes on her laptop, asking questions in a husky voice like ‘How do you get a source to trust you, to open up to you?’ And I thought to myself, right then: Where the f*ck did this girl come from? Is this a joke?

You ask yourself, Why? I’d been faithful to Amy always. I was the guy who left the bar early if a woman was getting too flirty, if her touch was feeling too nice. I was not a cheater. I don’t (didn’t?) like cheaters: dishonest, disrespectful, petty, spoiled. I had never succumbed. But that was back when I was happy. I hate to think the answer is that easy, but I had been happy all my life, and now I was not, and Andie was there, lingering after class, asking me questions about myself that Amy never had, not lately. Making me feel like a worthwhile man, not the idiot who lost his job, the dope who forgot to put the toilet seat down, the blunderer who just could never quite get it right, whatever it was.

Andie brought me an apple one day. A Red Delicious (title of the memoir of our affair, if I were to write one). She asked me to give her story an early look. It was a profile of a stripper at a St. Louis club, and it read like a Penthouse Forum piece, and Andie began eating my apple while I read it, leaning over my shoulder, the juice sitting ludicrously on her lip, and then I thought, Holy shit, this girl is trying to seduce me, foolishly shocked, an aging Benjamin Braddock.

It worked. I began thinking of Andie as an escape, an opportunity. An option. I’d come home to find Amy in a tight ball on the sofa, Amy staring at the wall, silent, never saying the first word to me, always waiting, a perpetual game of icebreaking, a constant mental challenge – what will make Amy happy today? I would think: Andie wouldn’t do that. As if I knew Andie. Andie would laugh at that joke, Andie would like that story. Andie was a nice, pretty, bosomy Irish girl from my hometown, unassuming and jolly. Andie sat in the front row of my class, and she looked soft, and she looked interested.