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.
‘I just had the most fantastically awful date, and you have to have a drink with me.’ Snowflakes gathered in the dark waves of her hair, her sweet scattering of freckles glowed, her cheeks were bright pink, as if someone had double-slapped her. She has this great voice, this fuzzy-duckling voice, that starts out ridiculously cute and ends up completely sexy. ‘Please, Nick, I’ve got to get that bad-date taste out of my mouth.’
I remember us laughing, and thinking what a relief it was to be with a woman and hear her laugh. She was wearing jeans and a cashmere V-neck; she is one of those girls who look better in jeans than a dress. Her face, her body, is casual in the best way. I assumed my position behind the bar, and she slid onto a bar stool, her eyes assessing all the liquor bottles behind me.
‘Whaddya want, lady?’
‘Surprise me,’ she said.
‘Boo,’ I said, the word leaving my lips kiss-puckered.
‘Now surprise me with a drink.’ She leaned forward so her cleavage was leveraged against the bar, her breasts pushed upward. She wore a pendant on a thin gold chain; the pendant slid between her breasts down under her sweater. Don’t be that guy, I thought. The guy who pants over where the pendant ends.
‘What flavor you feel like?’ I asked.
‘Whatever you give me, I’ll like.’
It was that line that caught me, the simplicity of it. The idea that I could do something and it would make a woman happy, and it would be easy. Whatever you give me, I’ll like. I felt an overwhelming wave of relief. And then I knew I didn’t love Amy anymore.
I don’t love my wife anymore, I thought, turning to grab two tumblers. Not even a little bit. I am wiped clean of love, I am spotless. I made my favorite drink: Christmas Morning, hot coffee and cold peppermint schnapps. I had one with her, and when she shivered and laughed – that big whoop of a laugh – I poured us another round. We drank together an hour past closing time, and I mentioned the word wife three times, because I was looking at Andie and picturing taking her clothes off. A warning for her, the least I could do: I have a wife. Do with that what you will.
She sat in front of me, her chin in her hands, smiling up at me.
‘Walk me home?’ she said. She’d mentioned before how close she lived to downtown, how she needed to stop by The Bar some night and say hello, and did she mention how close she lived to The Bar? My mind had been primed: Many times I’d mentally strolled the few blocks toward the bland brick apartments where she lived. So when I suddenly was out the door, walking her home, it didn’t seem unusual at all – there wasn’t that warning bell that told me: This is unusual, this is not what we do.
I walked her home, against the wind, snow flying everywhere, helping her rewrap her red knitted scarf once, twice, and on the third time, I was tucking her in properly and our faces were close, and her cheeks were a merry holiday-sledding pink, and it was the kind of thing that could never have happened in another hundred nights, but that night it was possible. The conversation, the booze, the storm, the scarf.
We grabbed each other at the same time, me pushing her up against a tree for better leverage, the spindly branches dumping a pile of snow on us, a stunning, comical moment that only made me more insistent on touching her, touching everything at once, one hand up inside her sweater, the other between her legs. And her letting me.
She pulled back from me, her teeth chattering. ‘Come up with me.’
I paused.
‘Come up with me,’ she said again. ‘I want to be with you.’
The sex wasn’t that great, not the first time. We were two bodies used to different rhythms, never quite getting the hang of each other, and it had been so long since I’d been inside a woman, I came first, quickly, and kept moving, thirty crucial seconds as I began wilting inside her, just long enough to get her taken care of before I went entirely slack.
So it was nice but disappointing, anticlimactic, the way girls must feel when they give up their virginity: That was what all the fuss was about? But I liked how she wrapped herself around me, and I liked that she was as soft as I’d imagined. New skin. Young, I thought disgracefully, picturing Amy and her constant lotioning, sitting in bed and slapping away at herself angrily.
I went into Andie’s bathroom, took a piss, looked at myself in the mirror, and made myself say it: You are a cheater. You have failed one of the most basic male tests. You are not a good man. And when that didn’t bother me, I thought: You’re really not a good man.
The horrifying thing was, if the sex had been outrageously mind-blowing, that might have been my sole indiscretion. But it was only decent, and now I was a cheater, and I couldn’t ruin my record of fidelity on something merely average. So I knew there would be a next. I didn’t promise myself never again. And then the next was very, very good, and the next after that was great. Soon Andie became a physical counterpoint to all things Amy. She laughed with me and made me laugh, she didn’t immediately contradict me or second-guess me. She never scowled at me. She was easy. It was all so fucking easy. And I thought: Love makes you want to be a better man – right, right. But maybe love, real love, also gives you permission to just be the man you are.
I was going to tell Amy. I knew it had to happen. I continued not to tell Amy, for months and months. And then more months. Most of it was cowardice. I couldn’t bear to have the conversation, to have to explain myself. I couldn’t imagine having to discuss the divorce with Rand and Marybeth, as they certainly would insert themselves into the fray. But part of it, in truth, was my strong streak of pragmatism – it was almost grotesque, how practical (self-serving?) I could be. I hadn’t asked Amy for a divorce, in part, because Amy’s money had financed The Bar. She basically owned it, she would certainly take it back. And I couldn’t bear to look at my twin trying to be brave as she lost another couple years of her life. So I let myself drift on in the miserable situation, assuming that at some point Amy would take charge, Amy would demand a divorce, and then I would get to be the good guy.
This desire – to escape the situation without blame – was despicable. The more despicable I became, the more I craved Andie, who knew that I wasn’t as bad as I seemed, if my story were published in the paper for strangers to read. Amy will divorce you, I kept thinking. She can’t let it linger on much longer. But as spring faded away and summer came, then fall, then winter, and I became a cheating man of all seasons – a cheat with a pleasantly impatient mistress – it became clear that something would have to be done.
‘I mean, I love you, Nick,’ Andie said, here, surreally, on my sister’s sofa. ‘No matter what happens. I don’t really know what else to say, I feel pretty …’ She threw her hands up. ‘Stupid.’
‘Don’t feel stupid,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what to say either. There’s nothing to say.’
‘You can say that you love me no matter what happens.’
I thought: I can’t say that out loud anymore. I’d said it once or twice, a spitty mumble against her neck, homesick for something. But the words were out there, and so was a lot more. I thought then of the trail we’d left, our busy, semi-hidden love affair that I hadn’t worried enough about. If her building had a security camera, I was on it. I’d bought a disposable phone just for her calls, but those voice mails and texts went to her very permanent cell. I’d written her a dirty valentine that I could already see splashed across the news, me rhyming besot with twat. And more: Andie was twenty-three. I assumed my words, voice, even photos of me were captured on various electronica. I’d flipped through the photos on her phone one night, jealous, possessive, curious, and seen plenty of shots of an ex or two smiling proudly in her bed, and I assumed at one point I’d join the club – I kind of wanted to join the club – and for some reason that hadn’t worried me, even though it could be downloaded and sent to a million people in the space of a vengeful second.
‘This is an extremely weird situation, Andie. I just need you to be patient.’
She pulled back from me. ‘You can’t say you love me, no matter what happens?’
‘I love you, Andie. I do.’ I held her eyes. Saying I love you was dangerous right now, but so was not saying it.
‘Fuck me, then,’ she whispered. She began tugging at my belt.
‘We have to be real careful right now. I … It’s a bad, bad place for me if the police find out about us. It looks beyond bad.’
‘That’s what you’re worried about?’
‘I’m a man with a missing wife and a secret … girlfriend. Yeah, it looks bad. It looks criminal.’
‘That makes it sound sleazy.’ Her breasts were still out.
‘People don’t know us, Andie. They will think it’s sleazy.’
‘God, it’s like some bad noir movie.’
I smiled. I’d introduced Andie to noir – to Bogart and The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, all the classics. It was one of the things I liked best about us, that I could show her things.
‘Why don’t we just tell the police?’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t that be better—’
‘No. Andie, don’t even think about it. No.’
‘They’re going to find out—’
‘Why? Why would they? Have you told anyone about us, sweetheart?’
She gave me a twitchy look. I felt bad: This was not how she thought the night would go. She had been excited to see me, she had been imagining a lusty reunion, physical reassurance, and I was busy covering my ass.
‘Sweetheart, I’m sorry, I just need to know,’ I said.
‘Not by name.’
‘What do you mean, not by name?’
‘I mean,’ she said, pulling up her dress finally, ‘my friends, my mom, they know I’m seeing someone, but not by name.’
‘And not by any kind of description, right?’ I said it more urgently than I wanted to, feeling like I was holding up a collapsing ceiling. ‘Two people know about this, Andie. You and me. If you help me, if you love me, it will just be us knowing, and then the police will never find out.’
She traced a finger along my jawline. ‘And what if – if they never find Amy?’
‘You and I, Andie, we’ll be together no matter what happens. But only if we’re careful. If we’re not careful, it’s possible – It looks bad enough that I could go to prison.’
‘Maybe she ran off with someone,’ she said, leaning her cheek against my shoulder. ‘Maybe—’
I could feel her girl-brain buzzing, turning Amy’s disappearance into a frothy, scandalous romance, ignoring any reality that didn’t suit the narrative.
‘She didn’t run off. It’s much more serious than that.’ I put a finger under her chin so she looked at me. ‘Andie? I need you to take this very seriously, okay?’
‘Of course I’m taking it seriously. But I need to be able to talk to you more often. To see you. I’m freaking out, Nick.’
‘We just need to sit tight for now.’ I gripped both her shoulders so she had to look at me. ‘My wife is missing, Andie.’
‘But you don’t even—’