"I can't work with air. I need provable facts. Evidence."
"If I were dead, that would be the kind of evidence you're looking for."
"That's evidence only that you're dead. The body might show how you came to be dead, and if it wasn't from natural causes, we'd still need evidence as to who did it. Rapists don't leave fingerprints on their victims."
"I get it," she said. "Rape is an inconvenient crime. It's hard for whiz-bangs like you to lay out the meat and potatoes and know how you're going to win your case before you start. You don't like to take chances!"
"Miss Widmer, it's you who'd be taking chances. You're the one whose life is going to get pulled apart on the witness stand. Do you know how many rape cases end in conviction? Very, very few."
"It's your conviction I want right now."
"I'm not the jury."
"Juries are audiences. You're the actor who convinces them, aren't you?
Why am I sitting around taking crap from this kid?
"Mr. Thomassy," she said, "I bet you feel more comfortable with robbery or murder…"
"Yes I do!"
"You men are capable of working both sides of that street. You can rob and be robbed, you can kill, and you can be killed. But when it comes to rape we're not equal because you can rape us and we can't rape you and that's why you don't know how I feel!"
"Now take it easy."
"Easy? What are women to do? We've got this opening a thousand loonies out there are trying to get into, and most of them aren't afraid to try because men have been getting away with it for centuries. She was seducing me, they say. Look at the provocative clothes she was wearing, they say. Look at the way she was walking around half-naked, she was asking for it, they say. Right? All women ask for it. Right Mr. Thomassy?"
"Some do."
"Even supposedly nice guys like you believe those arguments. Next you'll tell me there are SM freaks who say they like to be forced. That's another lie. They like to pretend to be forced. If one of those scenes turns into a real rape, I mean an uncontrollable rape the woman can't do anything about, you'll see how quickly her kink unkinks. Nobody likes real violence done to them! And besides, we're not talking about an occasional freak with special tastes. We're talking about the great majority of women who thrive on tenderness and affection and can't get the message through to male lunkheads that we don't want to be raped any more."
"Men get raped, too," I said.
"In jail."
"Right."
"Well at least those rapists are in jail, and that's where I want Koslak!"
It was then, behind her strident syllables, I began to remember my father's voice.
Francine continued, "What do you men expect us to do if we live alone, get behind double locks on the door, not let anyone in where we live, put a sign on the door, go away, no soliciting, no neighbors, no visiting hours from anybody? Should I buy a gun? Should I use it? Or is it that you guys want me to be tempted to marry some idiot just so I won't be a vulnerable woman living alone?"
George, my father had said, you have hair above your privates, there is something you must know. Wait till your mother goes to sleep.
"And," said Francine, "what are we supposed to do out in the street, carry a machine gun?!"
I was thirteen when my father decided to have that talk with me. My mother, complaining of a headache, drifted off to bed soon after dinner. I remember I was whittling something in front of the fireplace when Papa touched my shoulder — I hadn't heard him come up behind me — and I dropped the knife with a clatter.
"Pick it up," he said.
I picked up the knife. My instant fantasy was to stick it into him.
"Close the blade," he said. I felt he could read my mind.
"Put it away, George," he said.
I pocketed it. Only then did he pull the rocking chair so that we were sitting side by side, staring into the fire, more comfortable for both of us because we could look at the fire instead of each other.
"I am going to talk to you about sex," he said in that smoke-dry voice that resonated with authority.
I waited.
"Sex is very important. Like horses."
This was before he had given up on me and horses.
"Men," he said, "have a thing like a stick."
I could feel him glancing sideways at me.
"A woman," he continued, "has in front a hole for the stick, you know this?"
I nodded.
"That is sex," he said.
I heard no further sound, not even his breathing. After a bit, I turned just enough to glimpse his leathered visage. He was floating in a memory somewhere. Suddenly he sensed my intrusion and turned toward me. I quickly averted my gaze back to the fire. I felt I had embarrassed him.
"I have more, George."
My mind whirred with the possibilities: more about the stick and the hole? How women get pregnant? How masturbation can bring on blindness?
"Your mama," he said, then stopped.
I imagined his leather face over my mother's, her submissive expression, he with his nightshirt pulled up exposing his flat buttocks, she with her nightgown pulled to her waist.
"Your mama was not my first wife."
At thirteen I was a champion of overheard conversations. With my ear against the bedroom wall I had heard snatches. And the jangling of the brass bed that had given me my first guilty erections.
"You did not know this?"
"No," I lied.
From the depths of his chest came a sound of remembered regret, a sigh of such profound dimensions that I couldn't imagine what words were to come after.
"In my sixteenth summer in the land of Ararat I took in a Catholic ceremony a girl named Shushan Harossian as my wife. She was a cousin of a cousin from Zeytoon, very beautiful dark hair, a face like an olive blossom. Her three brothers and her father and mother were taken from Zeytoon by the Turks into the desert and that was that. She was hidden by a priest who arranged for her to be taken by a merchant to us in Marash for safety.
"When we see each other, it was an explosion of love, and everyone believes that living in the same house we will not be able to keep from each other, so we are quickly married.
"Our marriage was not a week old when the Turks come, three thousand soldiers crying out La ilaha ill-Allah uhammed Rasula-llah. There is no other God but one God and Mohammed is his prophet. The Turks let it be known that any Armenian who deserts his Christ will be spared. Perhaps there were cowards. I knew none. We prayed, we offer our devotion to God, then my father hurries my mother and the younger children to the church, it is a sanctuary he says. But I have heard of the burning of churches. I plead with my father to let Shushan and me hide in the cellar, where the small treasures of our family are hidden away under rugs. My father calls me a fool of love, he says we will die at the hands of the Turks, and he slams the door so that it shakes the house, as he runs after my mother and the younger children to the church of their salvation.
"Shushan, obeying her bridegroom's instructions, puts bread and cheese away in the cellar. Then, when the shouting is already very near, Shushan suddenly says we have not locked the door behind my father! I say they will break any door that is locked. But Shushan, without my permission, leaves the sanctuary of the cellar. I can hear them, I shout 'Come back, come back!' but it is too late. A Turk pushes open the door. He is tall and has a pock-marked face. He sees Shushan and she scurries away from the direction of the cellar door in order not to reveal my hiding place. The Turk cries to his comrades that the infidels have left an angel behind. They come, six or seven of the beasts. Two of them hold her on the floor as she struggles, my heart bursts because I can see everything from a crack in the cellar door, and the leader opens his pants, his stick is curved like a scimitar, and he falls to his knees, and Shushan screams as he leans forward, shoving his stick like a madman."