Two Nights in Lisbon

by Chris Pavone

“Don’t take no for an answer,” his mother had no doubt told him, teaching her son the proper manners of a polite host. “Don’t take no for an answer,” his father had told him, teaching his boy how to succeed in business, in politics, in any profession. “Don’t take no for an answer,” his frat brothers had told him, teaching him to trust his own judgment of what a girl wants, despite what she may say. So now here he is, trying to do all at once, just like he’s been told all his life, by everyone. Chivalry can be just another form of hostility. Chivalry can be the weapon itself.

standard off-the-rack model of cop—mid-forties, thinning hair compensated for with bushy mustache, a bulky frame with twenty extra pounds that sit in the front of his belly, distended in a bulge at the beltline, the way some men carry their middle age and their beer, as if six months pregnant.

Men often try to reframe temper as hysteria, to recast righteousness as overreaction, as hypersensitivity, as irrationality.

America was nothing if not cognitively dissonant. That’s the real hysteria, the national pretense that we’re not what we empirically are.

She’d learned that she wouldn’t be believed, not even by her own parents. She’d learned that she should never be drunk, not even with her close friends. She’d learned that she should never again believe that any boy—any man—was completely trustworthy. She’d learned that there was nothing she could do, no lifetime of lessons she could learn: It was going to happen any goddamned way.

What she chose to be was a person who knows how her house’s plumbing works in a general way. A person who understands the fundamental mechanics of the truck she drives, the farm she owns. She chose to be a person who will research how to do almost anything, then do it—draft a sublease agreement, change a flat tire, repair a leaky faucet, balance books and file taxes, build a tree house and a campfire, reignite a pilot light, tape and spackle and sand and paint a patch of drywall. Also a woman who knows how to defend herself. Even how to kill someone, using nothing but her bare hands.

He can’t possibly know that anything is going to be okay. But that’s what we do sometimes, we lie to each other, even when everyone knows that lying is what’s going on. Sometimes we call this politeness, sometimes we call it optimism, sometimes we call it support, sometimes we call it politics or business or negotiation or public relations or marketing, sometimes we call it just doing our jobs. Sometimes we compound the lies we tell each other with lies we tell ourselves, denying that what we’re doing is lying, or denying that lying is bad, or denying that lying has consequences. Denying that facts are facts. Denying that truth has meaning.

realize that these traits that we admire and envy—youth and beauty and privilege—these are not accomplishments.

there’s a large segment of the male population whose first instinct, always, is to assign blame to someone else—whoever happens to be nearest, or femalest.

How many times did you say no? About ten. But shouldn’t once have been enough? Shouldn’t zero times have been enough? How much alcohol did you consume? Less than one drink. But I’m curious: What number of drinks makes it okay to rape me? How short was your dress? Short. Were you wearing a bra? No. Do you always wear such revealing attire? This is the type of thing that every woman wears to a summer party on a hot night. Were your nipples visible? Probably. How many sexual partners have you had? You mean consensual? That can’t possibly matter. I’ve been raped by just this one, though a few others have tried.

She absolutely did not want to do this. Of course she didn’t, for many reasons, and here was one of them: She didn’t want to confront one man after another, men in authority who’d be skeptical of her claim—skeptical that it was nonconsensual, skeptical that it was sex, skeptical that it was Charlie.

The sexual assault forensic examination was finally coming to an end. There had been swabs and dyes, blood test and urine, vaginal exam and rectal, fluids and tissues, this exam had gone on forever, poked and probed, cold hard instruments and cold dispassionate assessments, Ariel’s humiliation rising and falling and rising again, reporting and then waiting and then repeating her story, describing her injuries, physical and psychological, her movements, her actions. She hadn’t expected this to be an all-day trauma of one intrusion after another. But then again she hadn’t known what to expect; this type of day is not something you think about until you undergo it, it’s not an experience you sit around wondering about.

The only way to make Elaine understand would be to tell her the whole thing, every bit of it. But Ariel has been down that road before, and her mom had responded poorly. There’s no reason to expect a different response the next time. People don’t change, not that much. They just become more like themselves.