It was the one where the witness wasn’t considered credible because six years earlier, she’d accused another man of the same thing, and it was easier to believe she was lying than that lightning loves a scarred tree.
I flung the paper down, went back to Rita, but I couldn’t focus. I could walk to campus and use Granby wi-fi to watch the video, but the combination of dread and cold—every time the door opened a polar draft found me—made that prospect less than appealing.
The croissant they’d warmed for me was astonishingly good. Sourdough with a crackly crust. I dropped crumbs in every direction.
I decided to google you.
Such a riddle, why I’d think to do this right when I’d had proof of slow internet. Why wait so long and then finally look you up when I was most likely to get a 404 error? Almost as if there were things I didn’t want to deal with.
But, lo: Google worked fine. It was only video the wi-fi couldn’t support.
I’d searched you two years back, the night I stayed up googling everyone. Because yes, there you were on the website of a private day school in Providence, and I’d already seen that picture. You looked the same. Perhaps wider in the face. Your hair had lightened, as if someone had dusted you with powdered sugar. There was little else, other than articles from that school’s student paper on the Gilbert and Sullivan shows you’d done, the student trip you’d led to Chicago. It was unsatisfying. No mug shot, no halo, no wedding announcement for you and a former student. I searched for your name plus Thalia’s, but the only results were the Camelot video and a few archived Sentinels.
I tried googling your wife and got nothing—maybe she had a different last name?—so I looked for your kids. From the few times I babysat Natalie and Phillip, I remembered the dark hair and rosy cheeks they’d gotten from you, the electric blue eyes like their mother’s. （We didn’t particularly know your wife, except from afar, wrangling the kids into dining hall booster seats. She was young and pretty—enough so that I imagine Thalia was jealous.） I was fairly confident the Natalie Bloch I found on Facebook, a striking, dark-haired woman in Boston, was your daughter. I felt predatory going through Natalie’s profile. She looked athletic in a bathing suit, in love with the guy next to her.
I clicked out and rescued myself by texting Carlotta: I am in Granby Fucking New Hampshire! She’d known about my trip, had made me and Fran promise to send a selfie. Carlotta, who lived in Philly now, had married the sweetest man you could imagine—the head sommelier for a restaurant group—and they had three perfect children, the youngest a boy with Down’s whom I loved overwhelmingly. I’d been back in close touch with Carlotta since the advent of social media. My generation only missed each other’s twenties.
I wrote: Remember how we always said Denny Bloch was involved with students? Do you think that was true?
She responded a moment later: Haha, we thought so, but probably not? I mean, we thought lots of stuff.
For some reason, this stung. I didn’t want it to be true, but her answer felt dismissive.
I wrote: You don’t think he and Thalia had a thing?
She sent a shrug emoji. Well, okay then.
I had a flash of Carlotta eating with me and Fran every meal sophomore year, but then suddenly that February eating with no one but Sakina John, or, later, sitting for a week with a bunch of girls from the spring hiking trip, her colossal laugh reaching us across the dining hall. Then she’d be back like nothing happened, flirting with Geoff and coming to my room for Cosmo sex quizzes. Then she’d do it again. She didn’t mean to hurt us; she was just a flake.
I tried the video one more time and, to my surprise, it had gathered all its strength, was ready to roll.
Jasmine said, “I was twenty-one, and Jerome Wager walked into the gallery and before his meeting with my boss he wanted a glass of water.”
She explained that she’d felt herself to be a child, she was a child, she was na?ve, so young. And Jerome, aged thirty-six, had been a full-fledged adult. Having married Jerome when he was thirty-nine, I can attest that he was still in most ways a child, as he continues to be. At thirty-nine, the only dinner he could make was eggplant parmesan. He would ruin suede sneakers in the washing machine. He’d never registered to vote. I’m wary of the narrative that suggests men mature so slowly that they pair best with younger women; I just mean that Jerome in particular was not terribly grown-up in his thirties.
Jerome took an interest in her work, Jasmine said to the next person who sat down, a woman with a squirmy toddler. He asked Jasmine about her own art over dinner, told her it sounded exciting. They began sleeping together, he introduced her to friends in the art world, he was a shitty boyfriend. For instance: He broke up with her on her birthday, begged her forgiveness the next morning. He left used condoms on her floor. He told her he hated wearing condoms at all. He ordered a pizza for them, but it had pepperoni, because he’d forgotten she didn’t eat pork. He told her he couldn’t be monogamous. She didn’t like having sex in the morning, but he did, so she agreed to it but didn’t enjoy it as much, and he knew she didn’t enjoy it as much but he still asked for it, and she obliged. Once, he woke her at four in the morning and they had sex because he asked, but she kept drifting off and so he stopped.
I kept waiting for the bombshell, the moment when he would pin her down or hit her or threaten to ruin her career—the thing I wouldn’t recognize as Jerome, that would forever change my sense of him; the thing that would make me divorce him for good and get custody of the kids; the thing that would derail his career and lead to his unanimous public censure. But forty-five minutes in, she was wrapping things up （circling the bench again like a lioness） and it had gotten no worse than undesirable—but consensual—morning sex.
She looked at the camera for the first time, and she said, “Have you ever lost something somewhere, a book or a necklace, and you—it feels like you left an arm back there, or an ear? You’re missing a part of yourself, and—I left a part of myself in Denver in 2003. I left parts of myself all over this country. What I left back there, it was—” And here she made a fist in front of her stomach, and I understood it as a pit, a missing pit in her core. “—I can’t ever find it.”
Fair enough. Her trauma was real. （This was, incidentally, what so many of the Twitter comments said. I see you, Jasmine, and I see your trauma.）
I felt ancient, from some elderly generation that didn’t understand the basics of the twenty-first century. If she’d been my friend back then, I would have coached her to break up with him. I’d have recited a list of his wrongs. I’d have told her she was better than that.
But good God.
I tried to assess if my rage—because it was indeed rage I felt, at Jasmine rather than Jerome—was personal （the loyal pit bull in me） since she’d attacked the father of my children, or if I’d feel this way about any woman who claimed abuse when, Christ, she’d been a consenting adult, she’d had agency, she hadn’t been assaulted, hadn’t been coerced. This didn’t do great things for those of us who’d been through worse. Forget the guy who had sex with me when I was unconscious in college: I could make a better case against Dorian Fucking Culler than she was making against Jerome. I could find Dorian Culler’s wife and demand she denounce him.