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.
I checked Twitter, and there didn’t seem to be much new, but then I checked the Starlet Fever account, and someone had posted Jasmine’s video under every one of the past twenty or so tweets. I wouldn’t be able to ignore this much longer. I texted Lance and told him I’d explain later.
My stomach was a mess. It was time to get to class, time to talk to these kids like I had any idea how the world worked.
23
Since I’m relating what happened those two weeks at Granby pretty much in order, I’m going to tell you something now that I didn’t learn till much later. That morning—as close as I can tell, right around the time I was dropping my plate in the coffee shop’s dish bin—Omar Evans, fifty miles away at the New Hampshire State Prison for Men, was stabbed in the side by a fellow inmate with a four-inch shard of broken glass. It was most likely a case of mistaken identity; Omar didn’t know the man who did it.
The glass entered below his right ribs, and as I walked back up the hill to campus worrying about myself and Jerome and griping about the cold, Omar was taken by prison ambulance—meaning two inmates dispatched with a gurney—to the infirmary.
Around the time I opened the doors to Quincy and felt the blast of the radiator heat, they were examining him visually, probing the wound with instruments. They did no scan to check for organ laceration, no X-ray to check for remaining glass. They cleaned out the cut, sutured him, gave him a tetanus shot and a topical antibiotic and not enough gauze. They told him he’d be allowed 600 milligrams of ibuprofen every eight hours.
Sometime late that morning, as we sat in class discussing him like a character in a movie, he tried to sit up in his infirmary bed and passed out from the pain.
24
In class that day, purple-haired Lola announced, “My uncle says he knows you.”
“Yeah?”
“He was your year. His name is Mike Stiles.”
“Your uncle is Mike Stiles?”
I wondered if Lola had looked through the 1995 yearbook, found the hottest guy there, and was messing with me.
“He’s my mom’s little brother.”
They didn’t appear to be joking. I said, “No way.”
“He said you were cool but scary.”
“Scary! I mean—I wore a lot of black, I guess.”
“Anyways, he says hi.”
I wondered what was happening to my face. It felt hot.
“What’s he up to now?” I asked, although I already knew from the internet—the same google spree that had led me to your Providence school that first time—that he was a professor at the University of Connecticut, specializing in US foreign relations, and that he hadn’t even had the courtesy to grow a dad bod.
Mike hadn’t stood out academically at Granby; either he’d been hiding it, or something clicked in college. Until he joined Camelot, we’d all assumed his brain was made of snow.
He came back from senior Thanksgiving in a full-leg cast, femur shattered in a bike accident, and chose to do the winter musical rather than endure the indignity of PE. It turned out he could sing and act; he beat out the regular theater boys for King Arthur. And he came in humble and sweet, not mugging from the stage, like most jocks did, so everyone knew this was a joke.
His cast came off a week before opening night, and backstage he showed us the pale, hairless skin of his left leg, dared people to touch it.
But by that point, my official crush on Mike Stiles was already over. It had come to an abrupt halt one night the previous spring on an Open Dorm night in Lambeth when Fran and I passed his room (door open the regulation ninety degrees). He sprawled on his bed, long legs toward the door, feet bare. Above him, posters of Kate Moss and Winona Ryder. Waifish girls with hollowed cheeks and plumped lips, girls whose elbows were the widest part of their arms. He wanted a girl he could carry on one shoulder. I understood I was no longer allowed to like Mike Stiles. I was too fat, too messy, too chipmunk-cheeked to like Mike Stiles.
I wasn’t about to tell my students any of this, but for the rest of class I kept looking for any resemblance between Lola’s soft, full face and Mike Stiles’s chiseled one.
Mike Stiles had been prominent on the Dick List, the document Carlotta and Sakina John had started junior year. Carlotta had drawn a remarkable likeness of his face next to the entry about his dick.
I recognize my hypocrisy. I still seethe when I think of Thalia Bingo, but I laugh unguiltily when I remember this document that detailed everything we knew about any guy’s junk. It didn’t matter if the boys went to Granby; if any of us (me, Carlotta, Sakina, Fran, Sakina’s friend Jade, Carlotta’s roommate Dani, who’d pierced her own nose) had any intel, it went on the grid. There were boxes for length, girth, curve, balls.