Nemesis

by Joyce Carol Oates

  He is a monster, Maggie thought, trembling. And I never guessed.

  In all, Brendan had been a “captive” of Christensen’s for approximately six and a half hours. The assault began suddenly, with no warning, at about midnight; the actual rape (the details of which Brendan did not supply) must have taken place an hour later, in Christensen’s bedroom, on his king-sized bed with its “gray, rubberized sheet”; though Brendan pleaded, begged, wept, screamed, Christensen refused to let him go, and through the night there were subsequent assaults, sadistic episodes, numberless threats of torture, death … for the man was a madman, a sexual maniac.

  “He did th-things I can’t say … I’d never t-t-tell anyone … he hurt me, bad … he’s very strong … he’s big, heavy … must weigh t-t-two hundred th-thirty pounds … played at strangling me … laughed at me … said I wanted it too … I’d led him on … saying I knew … knew what … what would happen … saying I was a … c-c-c-c-cocktease … laughed at me the more t-terrified I was … I was so scared … paralyzed … like all the strength was gone … I was sure I was going to die … I begged him … I told him … I’ve never done anything like this before I told him I’m not gay I told him … he didn’t listen … it was all him, what he wanted … grunting and drunk and … a maniac … in his bed … in the bathroom … I passed out I guess … I don’t k-know all that happened … I was drunk too … he got me drunk … at one point he made me drink … forced whiskey down my throat … roaring and laughing … pretended I wasn’t hurt … or scared … like the bleeding too … was a joke … ‘Tears too are a lubricant,’ he said … ‘Blood too’ … like it was all a joke … I was vomiting in the bed … he didn’t like that … he s-s-straddled my … hips … he yanked at my … hair … grunting and screaming … a pig, a hog … I started vomiting … he dragged me into the bathroom … he pushed my head down to the toilet … banged my head on the porcelain rim … he was furious with me … hit and kicked me … then dragged me somewhere else … collapsed on top of me … he’d black out I guess then wake up again … sometimes just a few seconds he’d be out … I tried to crawl out from under him … but he’d wake up … not fully awake but enough to stop me … I couldn’t get my hands free … I c-c-couldn’t get free … then in the morning he woke up and seemed almost sober … like he was sorry or worried … not repentant but worried … real worried … guilty … tried to behave as if it was just … what happened was just … a … something mutual … I didn’t challenge him … I just wanted to … get away … all I thought about was getting away with my … life … he saw I was hurt gave me something for the b-b-bleeding … said it was my own fault … driving me to my apartment he started th-th-threatening me again … ‘I wouldn’t tell anyone about this Brendan,’ except the bastard, the filthy son of a bitch, he’d always say ‘Bren dan,’ like my name was funny … Bren dan … ‘I wouldn’t tell anyone about last night Bren dan or you’ll regret it you little cocktease you’ll be out of here so fast you won’t know what happened conniving little cunt Bren dan’ … so he let me out … I went to my place … collapsed … it was about six-thirty in the morning … I fainted … I guess I fainted … I didn’t know where I was, thought I was back in … the seminary … bells ringing … thought I heard the master of novices t-talking to me … I couldn’t get up for p-p-prayer … I dragged myself to the bathroom at one point … I took some aspirin … ran some bathwater … tried to soak in it … the pain was … it’s … I’m ashamed … so ashamed … my life is over … I want to die … I couldn’t stop him … why couldn’t I stop him? … I was so weak, so … scared … he threw himself on me … just … like an animal … he’d played the tape of his ‘Adagio for Piano and Strings’ and … I looked up at him … and … it wasn’t just he was drunk … he was … he … oh Jesus if I’d known … if I’d acted fast enough … but I didn’t know … didn’t know … nobody warned me … I don’t want to live … I don’t deserve to live … the pig! the filthy pig! why didn’t I kill him when I had the chance!”

  Maggie was on her feet, pleading. “Brendan, you must let me drive you to the Medical Center—you’ve been injured! And you must let me call the police!”

  “N-no.”

  “I think I will have to insist. You came to me, and I will have to act. For your own good. This is a serious, criminal—”

  “I said no.”

  Beginning to lose patience, Maggie said, “Rolfe Christensen tied you up, didn’t he? Kept you captive? Assaulted you? Repeatedly? And you don’t want to press charges against him?”

  “He—he didn’t tie me up,” Brendan said. “Did I say that? I didn’t say that.”

  He stepped back from Maggie. She saw how the long loose sleeves of his cotton jersey covered his wrists, fell nearly to his fingers. “Your wrists?” she said. “Your ankles? With rope?”

  “It was my own fault, I’ll l-l-live with it. I—I’m not staying here.”

  “But we can’t let that terrible man, that monster, get off freely, go on to victimize others—”

  “What do I care about others?” Brendan Bauer said bitterly. “Nobody cared about me.”

  “What do you mean, Brendan?”

  “Inviting me here! Inviting students here! And him—here!”

  “But I didn’t know—”

  “God damn you! God damn you all! You must have known! Why didn’t somebody warn me!”

  Later that evening Maggie prepared a meal for Brendan and herself and invited the stricken young man to spend the night in her guest room if he wished, but Brendan preferred to return home—“home” being his two-room efficiency apartment in a building on Route 1, on the outermost edge of affluent Forest Park. Though Maggie continued to argue her case, he refused to allow her to drive him to the Medical Center, nor would he allow Maggie to call the police. No. Anything but that.

  “If you change your mind about pressing charges … it would be helpful to have been examined by a doctor,” Maggie said gently. “And you might, you know, change your mind.”

  Brendan Bauer was staring at a vase of white roses on one of Maggie’s tables without seeming to recognize them. He said, shuddering, “I’m too h-h-humiliated.”

  And: “I can’t risk anyone knowing, back h-h-home—my family—relatives—in Boise. They’d never understand. They’d never forgive me. They never approved of my studying music at Indiana and they’d never believe that I’m not h-h-h-h-”—and here his stammer became a physical struggle—“homosexual.”

  Carefully Maggie said, “Morally and legally, it should not make the slightest difference, should it—whether Rolfe Christensen assaulted a gay man or not? Surely the law protects us all equally?”

  Brendan gave a groan, hid his face in his hands, and began to sob.

  Maggie Blackburn quickly retreated to her kitchen.

  I must not persecute him further, she thought.

  And she supposed it was so, that, in the impersonal judgment of the police and of the criminal justice system, even, no doubt, in the eyes of Rolfe Christensen himself, a sexual assault upon a gay victim would seem less criminal than the identical assault upon a straight victim.

  While Maggie prepared one of her frequent meals, an omelette stuffed with stir-fried vegetables and sprinkled with basil, the young composer leaned over her piano striking chords: affectless near-inaudible chords reminiscent of Satie: his rage was temporarily quelled. Maggie was thinking of Calvin Gould, who must be notified as quickly as possible of this terrible incident … though perhaps she should wait to see him in the morning. The school would have to be informed that one of its tenured faculty members had not only violated regulations forbidding sexual relationships between faculty and students but had committed a criminal act, or acts; if Brendan Bauer would not consent to file the complaint, perhaps Maggie Blackburn could do it in his place? She felt as if she herself had been violated, or had barely escaped violation; she certainly felt soiled.

  What had Christensen said to her, stretching his fleshy
lips in a mock smile: Don’t look so fearful, dear: I’m not infectious!

  It made Maggie Blackburn feel slightly ill, that he should have joked, so coarsely, of AIDS.

  For perhaps Rolfe Christensen was infected …?

  When Maggie and Brendan sat down to Maggie’s hastily prepared little meal, which she served at the kitchen table, in an alcove of her small, attractive, old-fashioned kitchen, neither spoke of what was uppermost in their minds, as if by tacit consent. They talked instead of neutral matters, or of music; or were silent. And after an initial hesitancy Brendan ate the meal with appetite … with, Maggie was thinking, a boyish appetite, ducking his head toward his plate.

  The young man was a boy, in his manner, in his lack of experience. Only close up, studying his eyes, might one guess he was an adult man in his late twenties; an adult man who gave the appearance of being clumsily at odds with his body.

  Of course, Maggie thought, he has been a seminarian: he’d intended to become a Catholic priest. Did they not take vows of poverty, chastity, obedience? Was it not their wish to remain celibate for life?

  Later, when Maggie drove Brendan to his apartment building several miles away, he sat stiffly in the seat beside her, leaning his weight, subtly, to one side of his buttocks; of which Maggie was well aware, and suffused with sympathy for him, and anger, and a sense of powerlessness. She understood that many rape victims refuse to report having been raped; she believed she would not behave in so self-defeating a way, but perhaps she wasn’t in a position to judge—for how does one know what one will do, with what desperation one might behave, in such extreme circumstances? in such circumstances for which nothing in one’s life has been an adequate preparation?

  Gently, for she did not wish to provoke him, still less to torment him, Maggie asked, as they approached the neighborhood of his apartment, “Shall I telephone you in the morning, Brendan? And we’ll go to the provost or the dean together?”

  He shrugged wearily, as if the entire subject was suddenly of little interest to him.

  He said, “I shouldn’t be troubling you, Miss Blackburn. It’s my own fault; it’s my l-l-life.”

  His voice was so flat, Maggie had to resist the impulse to reach out and squeeze his hand.

  Maggie stopped her car in front of the apartment building in which Brendan lived; into which, only a week before, he’d moved. It was an absolutely featureless building of five stories constructed flush to the sidewalk. For a moment Maggie and the young composer sat motionless, silent, as if there were more to say; but both were dazed with exhaustion. Maggie saw that his face visibly sagged and that the white adhesive tape on the bridge of his glasses glowed smudgily, like a blind third eye.

  She said softly, “If—if you want to, telephone me at any time. If—”

  “Thank you, Miss Blackburn,” Brendan said, stirring to get out, loosening his long legs, “I don’t deserve anybody being so n-n-nice to me.” Before Maggie could protest he went on, in an almost bemused voice, “Shouldn’t have come here, I guess—”

  Maggie had not quite heard, and misunderstood. “But why? I’m your faculty adviser, Brendan, I’m your friend; where else should you have gone?”

  “I mean,” Brendan said miserably, “I shouldn’t have left the seminary. I’m being p-p-punished for leaving.”

  Maggie did not protest this statement, though she wanted to. Instead she asked a question which, in ordinary circumstances, she would not have been bold enough to ask of someone she knew so slightly. “Why did you leave, Brendan?”

  “I … I ceased to believe.”

  “In God?”

  “In … all of it.”

  “I see.”

  Brendan Bauer was poised stiffly, his hand on the car doorknob. Outside on Route 1 traffic passed in a steady yet capricious stream. In a voice vague and rambling with exhaustion he said, “But I believed in something still … like God. But not … their God. Myself as a p-p-priest of that God. I believed, though; I believe … in something. Like a brick wall. The way a brick wall if it’s there is there. It stops you d-d-dead whether you believe in it or not.”

  Maggie Blackburn would wonder, afterward, at the certitude with which she said, so simply, “Yes.”

  6

  “Assaulted? Do you mean … sexually?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid I—”

  “Raped?”

  “Yes, I—”

  “Rolfe Christensen raped one of our graduate students?”

  “Yes, he came to me … his name is …”

  “Are you serious? Is this so? Rolfe Christensen raped one of our graduate students?”

  “… Brendan Bauer, the composition student … from Idaho—”

  “How could he! Christensen! After all the school has done for him! After all I’ve done for him!”

  It was Monday morning, shortly after nine o’clock. Maggie was standing in Calvin Gould’s office, the door shut, contemplating her friend’s stricken face, forced by his extreme reaction to realize how rarely in her life she found herself the bearer of dramatic, let alone shocking, news … how rarely she had so pronounced an effect upon another’s emotions. Never before had she seen Calvin Gould, that poised, even guarded man, display such surprise and dismay; never had she heard his voice so angry. His accent seemed more emphatic, as if it were a function of his anger. He said, “If what this young man Bauer says is true, we have a very serious situation here.”

  Maggie said, “It must be true. Brendan certainly isn’t lying.”

  She told Calvin of Bauer’s visit with her the day before; summarized his remarks; described his appearance and behavior. That morning too at four o’clock he’d telephoned her—to tell her that he wanted to withdraw immediately from the Conservatory, and would his tuition and fees be refunded?—and Maggie had tried to reason with him, advising him not to act rashly. “Before he hung up he said, ‘One thing I won’t do: I won’t commit suicide!’ He was stammering so I almost couldn’t make out his words.”

  Calvin Gould, having drawn a handkerchief out of his pocket, began to wipe his face slowly with it, staring at Maggie. He said, “Is he the one who stammers so badly? Brendan Bauer? I remember speaking with him, briefly, at your party.”

  He paused. He shivered with disgust.

  “Isn’t it just like a … a man like Christensen … to pick on someone weak … like him.”

  Maggie said, “After we talked on the phone I was so worried about him, I called him back, and we talked quite a while longer … at least an hour. Once or twice Brendan burst into tears but he kept assuring me he wasn’t going to hurt himself: he wouldn’t give that bastard the satisfaction, he said. I tried to convince him that even if he withdrew from the Conservatory temporarily, he should remain in the area so that he could make use of the school’s resources; even if he refused to go to the police or the Medical Center, he should file an official complaint with the administration. I offered to pick him up this morning and bring him here, to talk with you, but he said he couldn’t … he couldn’t talk with anyone until he was ready.”

  “He hasn’t seen a doctor? He hasn’t been examined?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Or the police?”

  “He seems terrified of going to the police.”

  Calvin paced about his office, his handkerchief crumpled in his fist. He said, “Sometimes in such cases the complainant simply withdraws, and the case evaporates. There isn’t any case, really, without testimony.”

  “We can’t let that happen,” Maggie said.

  “No, we can’t. We can’t.”

  “If you knew how distraught Brendan is.…”

  “I can imagine.”

  Like the majority of his fellow senior administrators and executives, Calvin Gould had all but inured himself to revelations of a startling nature; to problems, indeed emergencies, which he was expected to resolve without disagreeable publicity. It was rumored of him that his Vietnam War experience had well prepared him for such civilian occasions an
d that his marine training had carried over into his professional life: he was deft, canny, and unsentimental. (In fact, Maggie Blackburn knew that Calvin Gould had been in the marine corps for less than two years—he’d signed up, impetuously, aged nineteen, but had been allowed an honorable discharge for unspecified reasons; he had never served in Vietnam at all, in any capacity.) But Calvin was genuinely distressed, even agitated, by Maggie’s news, as Maggie would afterward recall; his immediate response was one of intense sympathy. He said, “The danger is that something more could happen: Bauer might try to hurt himself. If he insists he isn’t suicidal that might mean the reverse.”

  So, at Calvin’s suggestion, Maggie telephoned Brendan Bauer from his office. At first, as the phone rang at the other end of the line, Maggie thought it was already too late. Then Brendan answered, cautiously; his voice was raw and frightened, his stammer subdued. Maggie said, “I’m here in the provost’s office, Brendan, and Mr. Gould and I are both very concerned. We think you should come to talk with him … file a complaint.… Everything will be kept strictly confidential, we promise.”

  There was a brief silence. Then Brendan said, to Maggie’s surprise, “I … I w-will. I’ve been thinking it over. Maybe I’ll go to the p-police too. I hate that filthy bastard’s guts.”

  Arrangements were made for Brendan to come, by taxi, to Calvin Gould’s office, at noon; by early afternoon, Calvin would have summoned the Conservatory’s committee on ethics and faculty responsibility and would have contacted Andrew Woodbridge, the school attorney, so that he could sit in on the interview. “So you can go home, Maggie, if you want,” Calvin said. “You look as if … this has been a considerable strain on you.” He smiled at her, uncertainly. What did he see in her face, in her eyes? Maggie Blackburn was a beautiful woman whom intense feeling made more beautiful still.