AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
APRIL 28, 2011
– Diary entry –
Just got to keep on keeping on, that’s what Mama Mo says, and when she says it – her sureness, each word emphasized, as if it really were a viable life strategy – the cliche′ stops being a set of words and turns into something real. Valuable. Keep on keeping on, exactly! I think.
I do love that about the Midwest: People don’t make a big deal about everything. Not even death. Mama Mo will just keep on keeping on until the cancer shuts her down, and then she will die.
So I’m keeping my head down and making the best of a bad situation, and I mean that in the deep, literal Mama Mo usage. I keep my head down and do my work: I drive Mo to doctor’s appointments and chemo appointments. I change the sickly water in the flower vase in Nick’s father’s room, and I drop off cookies for the staff so they take good care of him.
I’m making the best of a really bad situation, and the situation is mostly bad because my husband, who brought me here, who uprooted me to be closer to his ailing parents, seems to have lost all interest in both me and said ailing parents.
Nick has written off his father entirely: He won’t even say the man’s name. I know every time we get a phone call from Comfort Hill, Nick is hoping it’s the announcement that his dad is dead. As for Mo, Nick sat with his mom during a single chemo session and pronounced it unbearable. He said he hated hospitals, he hated sick people, he hated the slowly ticking time, the IV bag dripping molasses-slow. He just couldn’t do it. And when I tried to talk him back into it, when I tried to stiffen his spine with some gotta do what you gotta do, he told me to do it. So I did, I have. Mama Mo, of course, takes on the burden of his blame. We sat one day, partly watching a romantic comedy on my computer but mostly chatting, while the IV dripped … so … slowly, and as the spunky heroine tripped over a sofa, Mo turned to me and said, ‘Don’t be too hard on Nick. About not wanting to do this kind of thing. I just always doted on him, I babied him – how could you not? That face. And so he has trouble doing hard things. But I truly don’t mind, Amy. Truly.’
‘You should mind,’ I said.
‘Nick doesn’t have to prove his love for me,’ she said, patting my hand. ‘I know he loves me.’
I admire Mo’s unconditional love, I do. So I don’t tell her what I have found on Nick’s computer, the book proposal for a memoir about a Manhattan magazine writer who returns to his Missouri roots to care for both his ailing parents. Nick has all sorts of bizarre things on his computer, and sometimes I can’t resist a little light snooping – it gives me a clue as to what my husband is thinking. His search history gave me the latest: noir films and the website of his old magazine and a study on the Mississippi River, whether it’s possible to free-float from here to the Gulf. I know what he pictures: floating down the Mississippi, like Huck Finn, and writing an article about it. Nick is always looking for angles.
I was nosing through all this when I found the book proposal.
Double Lives: A Memoir of Ends and Beginnings will especially resonate with Gen X males, the original man-boys, who are just beginning to experience the stress and pressures involved with caring for aging parents. In Double Lives, I will detail:
? My growing understanding of a troubled, once-distant father
? My painful, forced transformation from a carefree young man into the head of a family as I deal with the imminent death of a much loved mother
? The resentment my Manhattanite wife feels at this detour in her previously charmed life. My wife, it should be mentioned, is Amy Elliott Dunne, the inspiration for the best-selling Amazing Amy series.
The proposal was never completed, I assume because Nick realized he wasn’t going to ever understand his once-distant father; and because Nick was shirking all ‘head of the family’ duties; and because I wasn’t expressing any anger about my new life. A little frustration, yes, but no book-worthy rage. For so many years, my husband has lauded the emotional solidity of midwesterners: stoic, humble, without affectation! But these aren’t the kinds of people who provide good memoir material. Imagine the jacket copy: People behaved mostly well and then they died.
Still, it stings a bit, ‘the resentment my Manhattanite wife feels.’ Maybe I do feel … stubborn. I think of how consistently lovely Maureen is, and I worry that Nick and I were not meant to be matched. That he would be happier with a woman who thrills at husband care and homemaking, and I’m not disparaging these skills: I wish I had them. I wish I cared more that Nick always has his favorite toothpaste, that I know his collar size off the top of my head, that I am an unconditionally loving woman whose greatest happiness is making my man happy.
I was that way, for a while, with Nick. But it was unsustainable. I’m not selfless enough. Only child, as Nick points out regularly.
But I try. I keep on keeping on, and Nick runs around town like a kid again. He’s happy to be back in his rightful prom-king place – he dropped about ten pounds, he got a new haircut, he bought new jeans, he looks freakin’ great. But I only know that from the glimpses of him coming home or going back out, always in a pretend hurry. You wouldn’t like it, his standard response any time I ask to come with him, wherever it is he goes. Just like he jettisoned his parents when they were of no use to him, he’s dropping me because I don’t fit in his new life. He’d have to work to make me comfortable here, and he doesn’t want to do that. He wants to enjoy himself.
Stop it, stop it. I must look on the bright side. Literally. I must take my husband out of my dark shadowy thoughts and shine some cheerful golden light on him. I must do better at adoring him like I used to. Nick responds to adoration. I just wish it felt more equal. My brain is so busy with Nick thoughts, it’s a swarm inside my head: Nicknicknicknicknick! And when I picture his mind, I hear my name as a shy crystal ping that occurs once, maybe twice, a day and quickly subsides. I just wish he thought about me as much as I do him.
Is that wrong? I don’t even know anymore.
NICK DUNNE
FOUR DAYS GONE
She was standing there in the orange glow of the streetlight, in a flimsy sundress, her hair wavy from the humidity. Andie. She rushed through the doorway, her arms splayed to hug me, and I hissed, ‘Wait, wait!’ and shut it just before she wrapped herself around me. She pressed her cheek against my chest, and I put my hand on her bare back and closed my eyes. I felt a queasy mixture of relief and horror: when you finally stop an itch and realize it’s because you’ve ripped a hole in your skin.
I have a mistress. Now is the part where I have to tell you I have a mistress and you stop liking me. If you liked me to begin with. I have a pretty, young, very young mistress, and her name is Andie.
I know. It’s bad.
‘Baby, why the fuck haven’t you called me?’ she said, her face still pressed against me.
‘I know, sweetheart, I know. You just can’t imagine. It’s been a nightmare. How did you find me?’
She held onto me. ‘Your house was dark, so I figured try Go’s.’
Andie knew my habits, knew my habitats. We’ve been together a while. I have a pretty, very young mistress, and we’ve been together a while.
‘I was worried about you, Nick. Frantic. I’m sitting at Madi’s house, and the TV is, like, just on, and all of a sudden on the TV, I see this, like, guy who looks like you talking about his missing wife. And then I realize: It is you. Can you imagine how freaked out I was? And you didn’t even try to reach me?’
‘I called you.’
‘Don’t say anything, sit tight, don’t say anything till we talk. That’s an order, that’s not you trying to reach me.’
‘I haven’t been alone much; people have been around me all the time. Amy’s parents, Go, the police.’ I breathed into her hair.
‘Amy’s just gone?’ she asked.
‘She’s just gone.’ I pulled myself from her and sat down on the couch, and she sat beside me, her leg pressed against mine, her arm brushing against mine. ‘Someone took her.’
‘Nick? Are you okay?’
Her chocolatey hair fell in waves over her chin, collarbone, breasts, and I watched one single strand shake in the stream of her breathing.
‘No, not really.’ I gave her the shhh sign and pointed toward the hallway. ‘My sister.’
We sat side by side, silent, the TV flickering the old cop show, the men in fedoras making an arrest. I felt her hand wriggle into mine. She leaned in to me as if we were settling in for a movie night, some lazy, carefree couple, and then she pulled my face toward her and kissed me.
‘Andie, no,’ I whispered.
‘Yes, I need you.’ She kissed me again and climbed onto my lap, where she straddled me, her cotton dress slipping up around her knees, one of her flip-flops falling to the floor. ‘Nick, I’ve been so worried about you. I need to feel your hands on me, that’s all I’ve been thinking about. I’m scared.’
Andie was a physical girl, and that’s not code for It’s all about the sex. She was a hugger, a toucher, she was prone to running her fingers through my hair or down my back in a friendly scratch. She got reassurance and comfort from touching. And yes, fine, she also liked sex.
With one quick tug, she yanked down the top of her sundress and moved my hands onto her breasts. My canine-loyal lust surfaced.
I want to fuck you, I almost said aloud. You are WARM, my wife said in my ear. I lurched away. I was so tired, the room was swimming.
‘Nick?’ Her bottom lip was wet with my spit. ‘What? Are we not okay? Is it because of Amy?’
Andie had always felt young – she was twenty-three, of course she felt young – but right then I realized how grotesquely young she was, how irresponsibly, disastrously young she was. Ruinously young. Hearing my wife’s name on her lips always jarred me. She said it a lot. She liked to discuss Amy, as if Amy were the heroine on a nighttime soap opera. Andie never made Amy the enemy; she made her a character. She asked questions, all the time, about our life together, about Amy: What did you guys do, together in New York, like what did you do on the weekends? Andie’s mouth went O once when I told her about going to the opera. You went to the opera? What did she wear? Full-length? And a wrap or a fur? And her jewelry and her hair? Also: What were Amy’s friends like? What did we talk about? What was Amy like, like, really like? Was she like the girl in the books, perfect? It was Andie’s favorite bedtime story: Amy.
‘My sister is in the other room, sweetheart. You shouldn’t even be here. God, I want you here, but you really shouldn’t have come, babe. Until we know what we’re dealing with.’
YOU ARE BRILLIANT YOU ARE WITTY YOU ARE WARM. Now kiss me!
Andie remained atop me, her breasts out, nipples going hard from the air-conditioning.
‘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 fuckfest 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 fuck, 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 fuck-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 fuck 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.
When I thought about Andie, my stomach didn’t hurt the way it did with my wife – the constant dread of returning to my own home, where I wasn’t welcome.
I began imagining how it might happen. I began craving her touch – yes, it was like that, just like a lyric from a bad ’80s single – I craved her touch, I craved touch in general, because my wife avoided mine: At home she slipped past me like a fish, sliding just out of grazing distance in the kitchen or the stairwell. We watched TV silently on our two sofa cushions, as separate as if they were life rafts. In bed, she turned away from me, pushed blankets and sheets between us. I once woke up in the night and, knowing she was asleep, pulled aside her halter strap a bit, and pressed my cheek and a palm against her bare shoulder. I couldn’t get back to sleep that night, I was so disgusted with myself. I got out of bed and masturbated in the shower, picturing Amy, the lusty way she used to look at me, those heavy-lidded moonrise eyes taking me in, making me feel seen. When I was done, I sat down in the bathtub and stared at the drain through the spray. My penis lay pathetically along my left thigh, like some small animal washed ashore. I sat at the bottom of the bathtub, humiliated, trying not to cry.
So it happened. In a strange, sudden snowstorm in early April. Not April of this year, April of last year. I was working the bar alone because Go was having a Mom Night; we took turns not working, staying home with our mother and watching bad TV. Our mom was going fast, she wouldn’t last the year, not even close.
I was actually feeling okay right at that moment – my mom and Go were snuggled up at home watching an Annette Funicello beach movie, and The Bar had had a busy, lively night, one of those nights where everyone seemed to have come off a good day. Pretty girls were nice to homely guys. People were buying rounds for strangers just because. It was festive. And then it was the end of the night, time to close, everybody out. I was about to lock the door when Andie flung it wide and stepped in, almost on top of me, and I could smell the light-beer sweetness on her breath, the scent of woodsmoke in her hair. I paused for that jarring moment when you try to process someone you’ve seen in only one setting, put them in a new context. Andie in The Bar. Okay. She laughed a pirate-wench laugh and pushed me back inside.