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.
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.