Still laughing, he put on his reading glasses, pulled out his phone and thumbed around. He said, “I’m texting you a link.” It descended with a vibration from the top of my screen, and I clicked through to Twitter, a tweet with a video thumbnail. A svelte woman with light, long tangled hair sat on a bench, hands frozen midgesture. The tweet read, I’m watching the genius @wilde_jazz and blood is BOILING. Listen to what predator Jerome Wager put her thru. @CGRgallery plz don’t provide a platform for this man’s spring show. It was dated two days ago.
“So I have to watch,” I said. “I’ll have to answer for this myself. This isn’t the kind of thing to spare me from.”
I knew better than to expect an apology for not alerting me sooner. He said, “Once you watch, tell me what you think. Honestly. I—you know I was never perfect. I was drinking more back then, and I think she expected me to be faithful when that wasn’t my understanding. But these people are trying to get me fired.”
“From the college?” I asked—a dumb question, because although most of Jerome’s income came from commissions and sales, teaching one class a term at Otis College was his only actual job.
“I guess because she was college-aged?” he said. “Although she wasn’t in college! And I wasn’t teaching yet.”
I said, “Jerome, this doesn’t make sense.” He nodded, but I meant it more as a question. There wasn’t enough there to make the story work. Either he wasn’t telling me everything, or he was missing the point, oblivious—like so many men had proven themselves over the past year of reckoning—to what he’d done.
Now that I was on Twitter, Jerome’s face floated in a postage stamp in my screen’s corner. I typed his name into the search box and found dozens of similar tweets—a stack of the same video thumbnail, frozen in the same moment.
And several results down: my own Twitter handle. After the 2016 election I’d decided to detox by checking my account only once a week, mostly to schedule promotional posts for Starlet Fever. But someone was tagging me, writing, Hey @msbodiekane, when will you address your husband’s predatory behavior? More and more allegations coming out. Now is NOT the time for silence.
“What other allegations?” I asked, as if he could see my screen. “They’re saying—”
“I interrupted someone on a panel once,” he said. “A Black woman. I don’t remember, and it’s probably true, but—I don’t know. That kind of thing. Listen, you should just watch the video.”
“Will this affect the kids?”
“It’s the art world,” he said. “Some people are talking, but it’s not school parking lot fodder. I don’t think. Is it? Jesus.”
I asked what time it was, even though I knew; I just wanted him to realize.
“Oh, Bo, I’m sorry. I—you were right, I have not actually slept. I’ll get the kids to school and then I’ll sleep.”
“You’re okay, right?” I said. “You’re not, like—”
“You don’t need to rush back and hide the sharp stuff. But I can’t imagine I’ll keep the job. I’m not worth the hassle. What sucks is once they fire me it’ll all sound more legitimate. Artist canned after allegations. That’s so concrete.”
I told him I’d text later, and I told him I loved him—something we did so rarely since he’d moved next door that now it carried more meaning. But it came out strange. I had questions. Over the past few years, I’d pulled away from the current iteration of Jerome, the Jerome whose shine had worn off. We’d grown apart: This was easy and socially acceptable to say. But that morning, my legs cold in the bed, I felt myself pulling away from even the earliest version of him I’d known. What did I not know, and when did I not know it?
It was an uncomfortable echo of the way I’d had to recast every memory of Omar, twenty-three years back. And the way, over the past day, I’d been turning memories of you in the light, looking at their ugly backsides, the filthy facets long hidden.
I’d love to be one of those people who complain when things change. But no one around me was changing; here was my entire high school, preserved in amber. The only thing changing was my vision—like the first time I put on glasses and looked in wonder at the trees, and felt inexplicably betrayed. Those clearly delineated leaves had been there all along, and no one ever told me.
In the bathroom, I scrolled through the tweets again, saw that the only one he seemed to have replied to was the one tagging me. Bodie Kane and I separated a few years ago, he wrote. Please leave her out of it. He was classy. Or at least I’d always thought so.
22
I needed something stronger than dining hall drip coffee, and so I walked, hair damp, to the Lower Campus entrance and down Crown Street, whited out with salt. There’s a newish indie place there that smells like toast and displays Granby student art. I’d been relying too much on caffeine that week, but how else would I stay upright?
I sat at the counter and put on my giant headphones and started the video on my laptop. Jasmine Wilde was luminous, a forest nymph walking under trees in a flowing brown dress, hair like the Millais painting of Ophelia. She approached a bench in a city park, the surrounding trees not casting enough shade to suggest that we’d stumbled upon her in a clearing, but still telegraphing woods, nature, purity. The first full minute was just her circling the bench and finally sitting, each sound so crisp that it felt intimate, the brush of a lover’s clothes next to your ear. A lanky, graying man eventually perched beside her. He looked self-conscious, as if someone off-screen had just invited him to sit, made him sign a consent form, and he had no idea what he was in for.
She said, “Do you remember what it is to be twenty-one?”
The man said, more to the camera than to her, “Uh, yes.”
And then the video froze to buffer. I skipped back, but this time it wouldn’t even start.
“Yeah,” said the same server who’d given me the wi-fi password, “it works but it’s real slow. I’d just let it load awhile.”
The video was forty-eight minutes long, and I still had two hours till class. I’d already ordered a latte and a croissant so I stayed and waited for the video and tried to compartmentalize, halfheartedly drafting part of a Rita Hayworth script.
The satin negligee she wore in her famous Life pinup photo sold from Sotheby’s in 2002 for nearly twenty-seven thousand dollars. I hadn’t been able to find anything on the buyer, hoped it was a lovely gay man with an Old Hollywood collection, someone who’d appreciate it in the least creepy way.
A USA Today lay on the counter, smeared with someone else’s coffee, the front page devoted to the same story that had been on the news the other night. The one where the men finally told about the priests, decades later, and everyone lauded their bravery. The one where the women came forward after five years, and everyone asked why they hadn’t spoken sooner.
The waitress saw what I was reading. She said, “You’d think if she was all that troubled, she’d have told the producer.”
It was the one where fifteen women accusing the same man of the same thing was too much of a coincidence; they must have coordinated their stories.