Is that what the agent had said? Does it even matter? “Yes.”
More clicking and clacking and pounding and frowning. “Middle seat is okay?”
*
After another near-sleepless night, this one at a friend’s empty house, Ariel called a taxi early on Monday morning, before she had a chance to change her mind.
“Where to?”
“The police station.”
She sat in the back of the cab, considered the answers she’d give to the inevitable questions she didn’t want to receive, today or tomorrow or in the future, in depositions and courtrooms, in front of large banks of microphones and cameras.
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.
*
“Hey,” Jefferson calls out. “I got something: Pryce just bought a ticket in the Seville airport. A flight to New York, connecting in Brussels, departing in just under two hours.”
“Seville?” Nicole Griffiths sets a timer on her phone, presses START. She stands. “And the husband?”
“No records yet. Do we have anyone in Seville?”
“I don’t think so,” Griffiths says as they march down the quiet hall; at this hour they have the embassy to themselves. “No one who can handle this.”
Griffiths raps on a door loudly, and waits a couple of seconds before opening the door to see Antonucci rubbing his eyes, but still lying down. His beaten-up face looks even worse after another night of swelling.
“We’re going to Spain,” Griffiths says.
“Can I have five minutes?”
“You can have one.”
*
“Charlie Wolfe?” The policeman squinted at Ariel. “The Charlie Wolfe?”
This was already off to a bad start. “That’s right.”
“You’re saying that Charlie Wolfe, uh, assaulted you? Sexually?” At the time, Charlie wasn’t yet famous, not in the New York Times sense, the People magazine sense. But definitely in the Hamptons magazine sense. They were in the Hamptons.
“Yes.”
“At his party? On Saturday night?”
“Correct.”
“We had someone there … I think it was Flintie.”
“You mean a police officer was actually at this party where I was assaulted?”
“Well, not at the party. But for events such as Mr. Wolfe’s, with the celebrities, the bigwigs, we assign someone to hang around. Not like in the driveway, which might, y’know, alarm guests. But in a nearby spot, to dissuade troublemakers. Or to intervene in any trouble that isn’t, um, dissuaded.”
“I see. Well, Saturday night’s troublemaker was the host, and the trouble was rape, and Flintie’s presence didn’t dissuade it.”
Officer Pulaski stared at Ariel, then exhaled long and slow, trying to figure out how to respond. What he came up with was, “Oh boy.”
Ariel had asked to see a female cop, but there were apparently none on duty who could’ve taken her statement.
“Are you sure?”
“Am I sure what? That he raped me?”
“That the sex you had was, um, nonconsensual.”
“I’m positive.”
“And you’re sure that it was Mr. Wolfe?”
“Absolutely.”
“You know him?”
“I’ve known him for years, I’ve seen him on dozens of occasions. He does business with my husband.”
“Oh boy.” Pulaski was shaking his head while writing. Then he put his pen down, and took a deep breath, and looked up again at Ariel. “Before we take another step, I need to ask something.”
“Yeah?”
“Are you sure you really want to do this?”
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. She did not want to pollute the pond she swam in, a pond in which Charlie was one of the biggest fish. She did not want to make enemies of Charlie’s friends, their wives, people she’d need to see day in and day out, the hush when she’d enter a room, the turned heads, the whispers. She already felt like an outsider, nibbling at the edges of society; her status wouldn’t survive this. She’d be ostracized.
So no, she did not want to do this. But was it really an option to do nothing?
Ariel didn’t know what she was going to do about her husband, about her whole life, about what type of person she was going to be, and not be. But she did know that if there’d ever be any hope of prosecuting Charlie Wolfe, at any point, she needed to make this report today, and undergo the rape kit to preserve the physical evidence—the evidence of her own body, the evidence of his.
She was no stranger to the statistics. She knew that at the very moment when Charlie Wolfe was assaulting her, the same violent crime was being committed against hundreds or thousands of other women across the United States, to fifteen-year-olds and fifty-year-olds, to white women and Black women and rich women and poor women, to straight women and gay women and women who aren’t sure, to drunk women and sober women, to women who’d smoked pot and women who’d been roofied, women at frat parties and house parties and pool parties and birthday parties, women on futons and love seats and the backseats of Honda Accords, all across the country, more than three hundred thousand American women are raped every single year, more than the total number of US soldiers killed since the end of World War II—in Korea, in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in every armed conflict, combined. A forever war, and these are the casualties. Ariel is one of them.
Somebody needed to do something about this. In fact, everybody needed to do something about this.
“No,” Ariel said. “I definitely don’t want to do this. But I have to, don’t I?”
*
“This is the dress you were wearing?” the nurse asked Ariel, who’d had the presence of mind to bring along the clothing she’d worn on Saturday night. The dress was rolled up tight in a Ziploc, where it looked tiny, could be a handkerchief in there. Her panties barely anything, not much more than some shoelaces.
“Anything else?”
She shook her head. “It was hot.”
“Men don’t rape women because of clothes,” the nurse said. “You don’t need to justify yourself.”
Ariel nodded.
“Not to me,” the nurse added. Ariel knew exactly what she meant.
*
“Have you had consensual sex in the past seventy-two hours?”
Seventy-two? This was Monday morning, so seventy-two hours ago was—when?—Friday morning. So Friday night was within that window.