DAY 1. 8:58 A.M.
Before Ariel steps out into the street, she adjusts her posture, and hardens her face, armor to dissuade the male gaze, or discourage uninvited interactions, or at least minimize them. For a brief while she had been quick with the middle finger, the muttered profanity, the hostile retort, biting her tongue only when she had no obvious escape route, or no witnesses. But she knew that the combative responses never made the situation better, and sometimes made it much worse. And in a small town like hers, any of those men, even complete strangers in passing cars, might become enemies she’d have to confront again someday in a dark parking lot, on a deserted beach, in her own home.
So Ariel swallows her pride and suppresses her militant instincts, aiming instead for evasion, for de-escalation, for appeasement, an indignity to be sure, but preferable to aggravated assault, or worse. Because the men who aggressively proposition women on the sidewalk are the same men who hit women, who rape them, who beat them to death with tire irons.
*
The strong morning sun is bouncing off the hotel’s bright white fa?ade. Ariel glances down the hill, toward where John would be if he were at his client’s offices, which are somewhere near the massive Pra?a do Comércio, with its imposing arch dominating one side and the miles-wide estuary spreading away from the other. This main square was once the beating heart of Portugal, one of the most important commercial centers in Europe, of the entire world. Not anymore. These days business is done in glass-clad towers in farther-flung neighborhoods.
The pra?a is to the south. Ariel heads north, up the steep slope of Bairro Alto, through the narrow streets strung with party lights and laundry lines, dish towels and soccer jerseys flapping above clusters of tables in front of cervejarias and tabernas, hole-in-the-wall convenience stores, boutiques selling sneakers, sardines, a mind-boggling array of items made from cork.
It’s Monday morning. The city is coming to life quicker than it had over the weekend, with stores opening and cafés filling, with people strolling to work on sidewalks made of mosaics, leafy trees everywhere, walls graffitied with names and initials and peace signs and big toothy smiles and cartoon dogs. No guns, no RIP notices, no gangster signifiers. Lisbon’s graffiti is a reflection of exuberance, not despair.
Ariel walks with her phone in her palm, hitting the home button again and again, swiping across the screen, receiving nothing and nothing and yet more nothing.
The bakeries are all open, emitting different aromas, the butter-and-sugar richness of pastry from one and the flour and yeast from another, these European smells, which like sidewalk seafood markets and fresh-juice vendors are not part of life back home. America has other food smells; most involve animal flesh or deep-fry.
Ariel continues to climb the steep hill, her legs growing tired. She feels a twinge in her left ankle, the one she sprained last fall when she was knocked over by someone’s Labrador on the village green. That injury was just the latest insult: the thumb jammed by a heavy carton of books, the rotator cuff torn while changing a light bulb, the plantar fasciitis in both feet just because, the compressed disk in her neck for the same unfair nothing of a reason.
“What can I tell you?” the chiropractor said. “Welcome to middle age.”
For a while Ariel kidded herself that someday she’d be rid of all these nuisances: the tendon will heal, the new orthotics will work, regular yoga will mitigate the back pain, this or that will get better, then all will be fine. But it has now been years of uninterrupted overlapping complaints, and Ariel is coming around to accepting that she’ll never again be completely pain-free. It’ll be one minor injury after another, augmented by occasional major ones, plus increasingly severe illnesses, an unrelenting deterioration leading to an ultimate demise. Like climate change, a trend that goes in only one direction and culminates in inevitable catastrophe, with no alternative endings.
She realized that whatever she was going to do, ever, she needed to start doing it.
*
Lisbon’s steep hills offer vistas everywhere—the medieval castle over there, the warren of the old town beneath, the big bend in the wide river, the Golden Gate–esque bridge spanning the narrows. From up here Lisbon looks massive, so many neighborhoods, spread so far.
Ariel has grown unaccustomed to cities. When things fell apart for her in New York it was wholesale, it was everything, and she no longer wanted any part of the city—all the people, all the men, the constant oppressive press of it all. She left behind the loudness, the crowds and smells and generalized sensory assault, the bigness of everything. She barely visits cities anymore, just a business trip or two per year for a couple of nights apiece, when she enlists her mom to come up from South Carolina to take care of George and the dogs, as she’s doing now.
Ariel tries calling John again, gets the same nonresponse again: straight to voicemail.
She gazes across the street at her destination. She doesn’t want to do the thing she needs to do now, doesn’t want to start the unpleasantness. This reminds her of a moment last winter, she’d just about fallen asleep when her chest was suddenly hurting, and her whole body felt cold. She groped for her phone, hit her best friend’s number with fingers that were alarmingly numb.
“Ariel?” Sarah’s voice was croaky with sleep. “What’s wrong?”
“I think.” Ariel could barely gather the breath to speak. “Need. ER.”
She didn’t want an ambulance, she’d heard horror stories about unreimbursed costs.
“Oh my God I’ll be right over.”
George reclined in the back of Sarah’s Subaru wearing a parka over pajamas, clutching Teddy, while Ariel shivered in the passenger seat, increasingly terrified as they approached the hospital where her life might be forever changed: She could be having a heart attack, an aneurysm, who knew. She was a young woman—relatively—and the symptoms of life-threatening illness were familiar to her only from TV and movies. Ariel had no idea what her body was really trying to tell her. She needed an interpreter, and body interpreters worked at hospitals.
Within seconds of arriving at the ER she was wheeled down a bright corridor on a gurney, people asking her name and birthdate over and over, tests and more tests, a dye pumped through her circulatory system, hours passing, George dozing in a waiting room next to a vending machine, the repetition of the horrifying phrase “pulmonary embolism,” until finally at two-thirty in the morning a doctor strode to her bedside with a sense of purpose and a grin; Ariel was unclear if it was of reassurance or relief.
“Ms. Pryce, you have pneumonia.”