“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.”
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.
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