“What do you mean?”
He made a tent of his fingertips. “I mean you can’t necessarily decide where it stops. I don’t know if you ever heard the expression, but it’s like, uh, having relations with a gorilla. You don’t stop when you decide. You stop when the gorilla decides.”
“I never heard that before,” she said. “It’s cute, and I sort of get the point, or maybe I don’t. Is Howard Bellamy the gorilla?”
“He’s not the gorilla. The violence is the gorilla.”
“Oh.”
“You start something, you don’t know where it goes. Does he fight back? If he does, then it goes a little farther than you planned. Does he keep coming back for more? As long as he keeps coming back for it, you got to keep dishing it out. You got no choice.”
“I see.”
“Plus there’s the human factor. The boys themselves, they don’t have an emotional stake. So you figure they’re cool and professional about it.”
“That’s what I figured.”
“But it’s only true up to a point,” he went on, “because they’re human, you know? So they start out angry with the guy, they tell themselves how he’s a lowlife piece of garbage, so it’s easier for them to shove him around. Part of it’s an act but part of it’s not, and say he mouths off, or he fights back and gets in a good lick. Now they’re really angry, and maybe they do more damage than they intended to.”
She thought about it. “I can see how that could happen,” she said.
“So it could go farther than anybody had in mind. He could wind up in the hospital.”
“You mean like broken bones?”
“Or worse. Like a ruptured spleen, which I’ve known of cases. Or as far as that goes there’s people who’ve died from a bare-knuckle punch in the stomach.”
“I saw a movie where that happened.”
“Well, I saw a movie where a guy spreads his arms and flies, but dying from a punch in the stomach, they didn’t just make that up for the movies. It can happen.”
“Now you’ve got me thinking,” she said.
“Well, it’s something you got to think about. Because you have to be prepared for this to go all the way, and by all the way I mean all the way. It probably won’t, ninety-five times out of a hundred it won’t.”
“But it could.”
“Right. It could.”
“Jesus,” she said. “He’s a son of a bitch, but I don’t want him dead. I want to be done with the son of a bitch. I don’t want him on my conscience for the rest of my life.”
“That’s what I figured.”
“But I don’t want to pay him ten thousand dollars, either, the son of a bitch. This is getting complicated, isn’t it?”
“Let me excuse myself for a minute,” he said, rising. “And you think about it, and then we’ll talk some more.”
While he was away from the table she reached for his book and turned it so she could read the title. She looked at the author’s photo, read a few lines of the flap copy, then put it as he had left it. She sipped her drink — she was nursing this one, making it last — and looked out the window. Cars rolled by, their headlights slightly eerie in the dense fog.
When he returned she said, “Well, I thought about it.”
“And?”
“I think you just talked yourself out of five hundred dollars.”
“That’s what I figured.”
“Because I certainly don’t want him dead, and I don’t even want him in the hospital. I have to admit I like the idea of him being scared, really scared bad. And hurt a little. But that’s just because I’m angry.”
“Anybody’d be angry.”
“But when I get past the anger,” she said, “all I really want is for him to forget this crap about ten thousand dollars. For Christ’s sake, that’s all the money I’ve got in the world. I don’t want to give it to him.”
“Maybe you don’t have to.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t think it’s about money,” he said. “Not for him. It’s about sticking it to you for dumping him, or whatever. So it’s an emotional thing and it’s easy for you to buy into it. But say it was a business thing. You’re right and he’s wrong, but it’s more trouble than it’s worth to fight it out. So you settle.”
“Settle?”
“You always paid your own way,” he said, “so it wouldn’t be out of the question for you to pay half the cost of the cruise, would it?”
“No, but—”
“But it was supposed to be a present, from him to you. But forget that for the time being. You could pay half. Still, that’s too much. What you do is you offer him two thousand dollars. I have a feeling he’ll take it.”
“God,” she said. “I can’t even talk to him. How am I going to offer him anything?”
“You’ll have someone else make the offer.”
“You mean like a lawyer?”
“Then you owe the lawyer. No, I was thinking I could do it.”
“Are you serious?”
“I wouldn’t have said it if I wasn’t. I think if I was to make the offer he’d accept it. I wouldn’t be threatening him, but there’s a way to do it so a guy feels threatened.”
“He’d feel threatened, all right.”
“I’ll have your check with me, two thousand dollars, payable to him. My guess is he’ll take it, and if he does you won’t hear any more from him on the subject of the ten grand.”
“So I’m out of it for two thousand. And five hundred for you?”
“I wouldn’t charge you anything.”
“Why not?”
“All I’d be doing is having a conversation with a guy. I don’t charge for conversations. I’m not a lawyer, I’m just a guy owns a couple of parking lots.”
“And reads thick novels by young Indian writers.”
“Oh, this? You read it?”
She shook her head.
“It’s hard to keep the names straight,” he said, “especially when you’re not sure how to pronounce them in the first place. And it’s like if you ask this guy what time it is he tells you how to make a watch. Or maybe a sun-dial. But it’s pretty interesting.”
“I never thought you’d be a reader.”
“Billy Parking Lots,” he said. “Guy who knows guys and can get things done. That’s probably all Tommy said about me.”
“Just about.”
“Maybe that’s all I am. Reading, well, it’s an edge I got on just about everybody I know. It opens other worlds. I don’t live in those worlds, but I get to visit them.”
“And you just got in the habit of reading? The way you got in the habit of working out?”
He laughed. “Yeah, but reading’s something I’ve done since I was a kid. I didn’t have to go away to get in that particular habit.”
“I was wondering about that.”
“Anyway,” he said, “it’s hard to read there, harder than people think. It’s noisy all the time.”
“Really? I didn’t realize. I always figured that’s when I’d get to read War and Peace, when I got sent to prison. But if it’s noisy, then the hell with it. I’m not going.”
“You’re something else,” he said.
“Me?”
“Yeah, you. The way you look, of course, but beyond the looks. The only word I can think of is class, but it’s a word that’s mostly used by people that haven’t got any themselves. Which is probably true enough.”
“The hell with that,” she said. “After the conversation we just had? Talking me out of doing something I could have regretted all my life, and figuring out how to get that son of a bitch off my back for two thousand dollars? I’d call that class.”
“Well, you’re seeing me at my best,” he said.
“And you’re seeing me at my worst,” she said, “or close to it. Looking to hire a guy to beat up an ex-boyfriend. That’s class, all right.”