Well, well, well. Guess who's back? Nick Dunne, Brooklyn party boy,
sugar-cloud kisser, disappearing act. Eight months, two weeks, couple of
days, no word, and then he resurfaces, like it was all part of the
plan. Turns out, he'd lost my phone number. His cell was out of juice,
so he'd written it on a stickie. Then he'd tucked the stickie into his
jeans pocket and put the jeans in the washer, and it turned the stickie
into a piece of cyclone-shaped pulp. He tried to unravel it but could
only see a 3 and an 8. (He said.)
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'd 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'd 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'd resist. They"ve given their daughter's
namesake what they can'd 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'd 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'd 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'd think women should marry
before thirty-five," said my mom, who married my dad at twenty-three.)
