Shelby is waiting outside when he gets off work on a Friday night. It’s late, nearly midnight. James is wearing a black coat and a knitted cap and is almost invisible in the dark. “You,” he says when he sees Shelby standing there.
“I didn’t get the tattoo I asked for.”
“Did you come to get your money back?” James grins since the tattoo was free. He starts to walk toward Broadway. Shelby keeps pace alongside him.
“You can buy me dinner if you want to apologize,” she tells him.
“Apologize?” He glances at her and frowns. “Helene’s name isn’t your story.”
“You know my story?”
James shrugs. “I know what it isn’t.”
They’re passing by a Chinese restaurant that doesn’t look half-bad. Shelby pauses to gaze at the menu posted in the window, then she realizes James has walked on. She has to dash to catch up with him. “What was wrong with that place?”
“I don’t eat Chinese food.” James keeps going.
“Seriously? Never?”
“Nope. I lived behind a Chinese restaurant in Queens for a couple of years. I ate there every day. How about this place?”
It’s a bar that serves hamburgers. They go inside the dark tavern and get a booth. Shelby orders a cheeseburger and a glass of white wine. James asks for a Diet Coke and a salad.
“I’m a sober vegetarian,” he explains. “It sounds terrible, I know. Like I’m in a cult. But if you eat the crap they call meat in jail long enough you never want to see the stuff again. And if I drink, I let the monster out of the cage.”
“If I feel, I let my monster out,” Shelby says.
James leans forward. “I’d like to see that.”
While they’re waiting for their food they discuss the best death scenes in their favorite movies. Shelby thinks it’s the bloody death in Alien. She could watch that moment over and over again. James insists it’s Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now.
Then Shelby realizes there’s an even better one. “Actually, the best death scene is Bambi’s mother.”
James laughs. “Did you have to bring up Bambi?” He gulps some Diet Coke. “Did Ben get married that day?”
“I assume so. Why? Do you care?”
“Do you?”
She’s no longer sure. By the time their meals arrive Shelby has realized there is something seriously wrong with her. She can’t eat and she’s ordered another glass of wine, which will make her more tipsy than she wants to be. “Don’t tell me you still want to make amends to Ben?” she says.
“No. I just want to thank him for being stupid,” James says. He has this way of looking at her that gives her chills. Shelby can’t even drink after that.
They leave together and wind up walking down East Seventh Street. This is where he lives. “Can you wait here?” James sounds unsure. Maybe he expects her to take off running. Maybe she should. He’s warned her that he has a monster inside him, but she has one too. She nods and waits on the stoop. She has a shivery feeling, as if she’s stepped into a dream from which she can’t wake. When James comes back outside he’s got a white German shepherd with him. It’s the sort of dog you would find in a dream.
“You didn’t say you had a dog.” Shelby sinks down to pet the shepherd, who is aloof but tolerant, just like the General. Her favorite type. She had always found dogs that dance around desperate for approval annoying. This is a real dog. Dignified, but willing to accept Shelby’s praise when she tells him what a good and gorgeous boy he is.
“His name is Coop,” James tells Shelby as they meander down the deserted street. “I found him near Cooper Union. He was dumped out of a car, half-dead, and there I was, so I figured it was fate.”
The trees look black and the sky is dotted with blue-black clouds. Shelby feels strangely happy walking along in the dim night. There are bats in the tower of a church overlooking a small park. There’s a sprinkling of gold-tinged stars in the sky. They’ve entered a moody, tattooed world, but they laugh as they talk about their worst days at school. For Shelby that day was when she forgot her homework and humiliated herself by crying in front of her entire fourth-grade class. She locked herself in a stall in the girls’ room and wouldn’t come out until the principal asked her mother to talk to her. For James, there are so many horrible incidents he has to list them. The day he was suspended for shooting rubber bands at Ben, of course, and the day his brother set off a cherry bomb in the gym and he took the blame, the day of their fourth-grade photo when the photographer tied him to the chair. There you go, you little shit, the photographer had told him. I was in the navy. See if you can get out of these knots.