Robbie says, “Ah, she—Thalia Keith passed away in 1995.”
“Oh!” Dane says. “I’m sorry to hear that. I just started working here, and that’s not in our records.”
Robbie says, “That’s odd. Yeah, you should cross her off your list.”
Dane says, “Can you tell me more about that? More details? I’d love to update our files.”
There’s a pause, Robbie catching on. He says, “I’m hanging up now.”
I first met Robbie when we were put in the same freshman orientation group, playing games on the quad in groups of twelve, trying to knock pegs down with Frisbees. There were kids who made Frisbee look like ballet. I didn’t know how to throw one （who would have taught me?） and was initially mortified. But Robbie, with no patronizing, showed me how to throw the disc. He was patient, called me by my name, which no one else had bothered learning yet.
You have to understand: He wasn’t a ski star till it snowed. In August, he was just another new arrival—a semicute one, symmetrical and clear-skinned in the manner of adolescent TV stars. Dark hair, nose upturned, chin sharp. That tattered Red Sox cap. The only way to see the ski team compete was to take the fan van and stand for hours in the snow, which would be awkward if you weren’t dating a skier. But we all absolutely knew who was good, and by winter of freshman year we’d seen Robbie’s picture in the Sentinel, goggled and helmeted, shredding the mountain.
By the time Thalia started dating him, late in the fall of junior year, he had a reputation for being a player, for callously breaking hearts, for drunkenly crashing Ronan Murphy’s car over Thanksgiving break.
He wasn’t a perfect boyfriend. He sat back and laughed as Dorian Culler told “Thalia jokes,” which were retellings, essentially, of dumb blonde jokes, but with Thalia as the punch line. （“What did Thalia say when she found out she was pregnant? I wonder if it’s mine.”） Thalia screamed at Robbie one night, in the dining hall, for not stopping his friend, not standing up for her.
Robbie wasn’t mean to anyone; it was more that he tended to pass through the halls like a Zamboni, gliding straight ahead and expecting everyone to move out of his way.
It made me proud that he’d been kind to me right off the bat, that we’d always been cordial. He didn’t have time for everyone. But once, unprompted, he’d been kind to me.
I left a comment under the video: Robbie was nicer than you think. And Thalia never would have dated you.
21
I’m not sure I fully slept after that. My phone pinged with a text from Jerome at seven （the crack of dawn in LA） asking the dosage for Leo’s anxiety medicine. I had the CVS app, so I brought the prescription up and screenshotted it back to Jerome, who absolutely had the same app and could have done this himself.
A minute later he FaceTimed from his laptop. I was ready to answer some question about where the pharmacy was, but the Jerome on the screen was a mess. His eyes were red, his silver hair sticking up in sweaty sprigs.
I said, “Have you not even been to bed yet?”
I watched him sink into his giant leather chair. If he’d been about to give me bad news about the kids, he’d have been panicked, not resigned. This was something else—but still, I climbed back in bed, pulled the covers over my bare legs. I said, “What?”
Jerome said, “You really haven’t been on Twitter, have you. Oh, Jesus. So, I think I’ve been, ah—I got canceled, as they say.”
It took a moment to register, and I doubted he was using the term correctly. I asked where the kids were （still asleep） and then I said, “What did you do?”
“Well. Fifteen years ago.” His eyebrows rose, as if this detail alone should get me on his side. “When I was living in Denver.”
This was right before we’d met. I nodded, wished he could simply hand me a write-up of the whole fiasco so I could skim to the end.
“I was showing at Peter’s old gallery.”
Peter Boll was someone I could see getting canceled. He had a vibe.
“And there was—you know, we used to call them gallery girls. Probably not okay to say anymore. There was a young lady working as Peter’s assistant.”
I said, “Jerome, what did you do?”
“I dated her! We dated! Consensually!” He threw his arms up. “We dated for, I’d say six months. On and off. Casually, but—well, casually as in not committed. It was tumultuous. She was twenty-one.”
I did the math. Fifteen years ago, Jerome would have been thirty-six, because right now I was forty, and Jerome had eleven years on me. When we met, I knew Jerome had dated women my age before, but I also knew his longest relationship had been with a woman eight years his elder, and I figured it balanced out. He wasn’t only interested in power, or in girls with no body mass. He was a flirt, I knew that and liked it. But never creepy. His method was to grin, crinkle his eyes, bite his lip, caress the bowl of his wineglass. Not to rub shoulders or talk to boobs or hover with onion breath.
He said, “I’m sure I still have amorous emails in my old Yahoo! account.”
“Jerome,” I said. “What happened?”
He sighed and brought a coffee cup into view, stared into it without drinking. “This woman, her name is Jasmine Wilde. Real name. She’s a performance artist in Brooklyn now. And her, ah—apparently her new piece is about me.”
“What do you mean ‘piece’？”
“A performance piece. She sits on a park bench and starts talking, just to anyone who’ll stop and listen. She goes for a couple hours.”
“That’s the plot of Forrest Gump.”
He looked blank for a second and then started wheezing with laughter. Far more than my observation merited.
When he stopped, I said, “Should I google this, or what’s the gist?”
“Ah. Okay.” He wiped at the tears he’d laughed out. “I mean, what she’s accusing me of, is dating her. When I was thirty-six and she was twenty-one.”
“There’s got to be more to it.”
“Sure. Sure. She’s saying that because I was a successful artist, which—was I successful, fifteen years ago? I suppose in her eyes, but I was broke, I was just starting out. To me, the gallery is the power! They handle the sales and money and I’m the monkey in the cage! Anyway, she’s saying I had power, because she worked at the gallery and I was successful. So even if she didn’t see it at the time, apparently that means the relationship was predatory.”
“Was it?”
“I just told you it wasn’t!” Jerome’s voice could go startlingly shrill. “I broke up with her a few times, and finally she broke up with me. I introduced her around, I got her some connections, which I saw as being a good boyfriend, but apparently now that’s grooming.”
“Grooming, like a pedophile?”
Jerome flinched. “Jesus, Bodie. I guess, yeah.”
“And she’s . . . talking about this on her park bench?”
He started laughing again, desperately. He said, “I’m sorry, I’m just—”
“You’re picturing her with the white suit, aren’t you. And the box of chocolates.”