Nemesis

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “We must see to it,” Maggie said passionately, “that that terrible man is exposed and punished. Rape is a criminal felony, after all, and Rolfe Christensen is a rapist.”

  Maggie had no intention of going home—for she had a senior honors seminar to teach, and a luncheon meeting, and an arduous afternoon of piano instruction, two students per hour from three o’clock until six—but she was relieved that Calvin was going to take charge; she knew now that justice would be done.

  Calvin Gould, his necktie loosened, his expression grim, walked Maggie Blackburn through his secretary’s office and out into the hall. The administration building was housed in a former private home, an English Tudor mansion built by a multimillionaire industrialist in the early 1900s and donated, along with two hundred acres of wooded land, to the Conservatory; at the end of every hallway in the house, and on staircase landings, stained glass windows gave to the atmosphere a churchly yet exotic tone. Walking Maggie toward one of these windows, Calvin was saying in a low voice, as if he were speaking aloud, “I’m shocked by this but not, I suppose, entirely surprised … considering Rolfe Christensen’s reputation.”

  Seeing Maggie’s expression, Calvin said quickly, “Not that he has done anything of this magnitude before, that I know of. Certainly not with—or to—a Conservatory student.”

  “But he has done … things?”

  Calvin chose his words carefully. “He has been complained of now and then. And there have been rumors of … rather ugly episodes … in London, and at the Salzburg Festival … and when I was a scholarship student at Interlaken, in 1967 I think—did you know I was a serious pianist then, Maggie?—Christensen had been there the summer before, and there were tales told of him, his drinking, his behavior, a story of an incident being hushed up, something fairly serious involving a young man. But of course things like that are unsubstantiated. No formal charges, no arrests. Nothing official. You can’t judge a man of Christensen’s stature by way of rumors.” Calvin was frowning hard, and Maggie saw that one of his eyelids had begun to twitch. His eyes were a deep wary brown, so dark that pupil and iris were one. “Can’t judge without evidence. And he is gifted, or was. He is Rolfe Christensen. People dislike him, then come around to liking him: ‘Isn’t he a character!’ they say. ‘Isn’t he something!’ As if genius is allowed anything, and Christensen is a genius. Remember how Nick Reickmann came around to defending him, after that early trouble between them?”

  Early trouble? Maggie Blackburn was again perplexed. “But the men are such good friends now, aren’t they?”

  “They’re … friends, of a kind. I don’t know how good, or how intimate. Of course, Christensen can have intimates who aren’t friends. But when Nick first came here he complained that Christensen was harassing him; he went so far as to bring a formal complaint of ‘sexual harassment’ to our committee. We had some closed hearings, and things were smoothed out, and I’d assumed that everyone knew, more or less; Nick wasn’t exactly secretive about it himself. He was very angry. He isn’t after all a natural victim like this poor Bauer boy.”

  Maggie was sorry that Brendan Bauer should be so casually defined, or dismissed, but she let the remark pass, for she was quite shaken, and in a way ashamed, that she seemed so unaware of what was taking place in her own community, among her colleagues. She wondered if people shielded her from upsetting news or whether they did in fact inform her, or spoke of such things in her presence, but she somehow failed to hear. She passed a hand over her face and asked Calvin, “Should I have known of these things? Of Rolfe Christensen’s reputation? In order to protect students from him?”

  As if taking pity on her, or moved to sudden sympathy with her limited perspective, Calvin Gould laughed and squeezed Maggie’s hand in parting and said, “For God’s sake, Maggie, no: don’t start blaming yourself. You have, after all, your own life.”

  Walking away, out of the building and into silvery autumn sunshine, Maggie tried to think what Calvin could possibly mean by those words.

  You have, after all, your own life.

  The first time Maggie Blackburn had seen Calvin Gould was on the occasion of a lecture he gave at the Curtis Institute of Music, years before. At that time Calvin was a youngish man in his early thirties with hair trimmed short and wiry like a terrier’s; he’d stood ramrod straight behind the lectern, tense yet not exuding nervousness; a deck of note cards between his fingers from which he took cues, speaking lucidly, always smoothly, shifting each card to the back of the deck as he progressed. His delivery was assured but not complacent, and he seemed to know virtually everything about his subject, which was Franz Schubert. (Maggie was particularly struck by the observation that Schubert was a “born composer,” a genius who required no development: thus his death at age thirty-one was not premature in the way that, for instance, Verdi’s death would have been premature at age eighty.) After the lecture she had been drawn forward irresistibly to meet Calvin Gould; to confront something the man embodied, or which shone through him.

  Sometimes, recollecting that day, Maggie distinctly remembered the presence of the elusive Naomi Gould, dark-haired and frowning, who sat at the rear of the auditorium during Calvin’s lecture; sometimes Maggie had no memory of the woman at all.

  There must be a deep erotic bond between husband and wife, Maggie thought, resigned. For there seemed so little else, of companionship, or sympathy.

  “Please tell us what happened between you and Rolfe Christensen,” Calvin Gould instructed Brendan Bauer, who was sitting, ill at ease, shamefaced, deathly pale, in Calvin’s office, at one end of a conference table facing Calvin, the Conservatory’s attorney, Andrew Woodbridge, and the five-member committee on ethics and faculty responsibility. “Everything you say will be held in strictest confidence.”

  So Brendan Bauer told his story another time. It was less disjointed than it had been in the telling to Maggie Blackburn, but still the young composer was subject to brief stammering lapses, and his mood swung between anger and despair, lucidity and incoherence, certainty and defensiveness. He had shaved that morning with a badly shaking hand and in the process had nicked his jaw in several blood-stippled places; the bruise above his left eye, a rich plum-purple, pulsed with hurt and indignation.

  Brendan Bauer told his story and endured questions.

  These seven men and women, strangers to him, were sympathetic … or so it seemed.

  The precise nature of the sexual assault?

  “R-r-rape.”

  But could he … elaborate?

  “M-m-male r-rape.”

  Meaning … forcible anal penetration?

  Eyes shut, Brendan Bauer shook his head yes. “That is … the clinical term.”

  And did he try to escape, during those six and a half hours of captivity?

  “I was too t-t-terrified, thought he would … k-kill me.”

  And Christensen had no idea that Brendan Bauer was … resistant? In these circumstances, after having been drinking, there was no possibility of … a misunderstanding?

  “N-no. No.”

  So Brendan Bauer told his ugly story through that afternoon, told and retold it. Doubled back on himself. Repeated himself. Excused himself to use a men’s lavatory. Several times he seemed unable to continue, but he did continue, grim and resolute. He blew his nose, he sighed, he yawned, he hunched forward and hid his face in his hands. His little audience of two women and five men exchanged quick glances of alarm and pity from time to time, for it was clear to them that he had suffered a considerable trauma.

  Only at the end of the afternoon, however, did Brendan seriously lose control.

  “Why? To hear one of his c-c-compositions. ‘Adagio for Piano and Strings.’ I didn’t want to go … but I wanted to … wanted to go … I was f-f-flattered … sure I was. Serves me right, doesn’t it? Drinking and I don’t know how to drink, and he fed me chocolates … chocolate-covered truffles, my God … I’d never seen anything like them before … vomited up, later. Aquavit and Sco
tch. I was drunk. ‘You like pain, don’t you, Bren dan?’ he said. Twisted my arm till I screamed. Took off my clothes, s-s-straddled me on the … bed. Hurt me. Pounded himself in me. When I screamed he pushed my face in the pillow … he screamed … I was s-s-suffocating … then the vomiting began. ‘I’ll kill you, cocktease,’ he said. So strong. Angry. Why did he h-hate me? Why … want to hurt me? My punishment for leaving the s-s-seminary … cemetery … ‘sin of pride’ … ‘pride of intellect’ … he joked about graves out back.… ‘Do you want to be buried out back with the other cockteases?’ he said.… I fainted … didn’t have any strength … things he did like in a … dream … things I’ll never tell anyone. Then in the morning he drove me home, anxious to get r-r-rid of me. He was wearing a fresh shirt, a necktie … hat on his head … like nothing was wrong. ‘I wouldn’t tell anyone about this Bren dan’ … thought I was bleeding inside … up inside … couldn’t look at him … those dead eyes … ‘I can help you with your career, Bren dan,’ he said, ‘or I can squash you flat like a …’ Why didn’t I kill him when I had the chance? Why didn’t I—”

  Quickly, as if to silence him, Calvin Gould laid a hand on Brendan Bauer’s narrow shoulder, as the others stared. Calvin said, “You’ll be all right now, Brendan. You’re safe, now.” Those several hours, telephone calls were being placed at regular intervals to Rolfe Christensen’s home and to his office at the Conservatory; every half hour Calvin Gould’s administrative assistant, Mrs. Mills, would knock at his door to inform him that Christensen hadn’t yet been located. Stanley Spalding, the chairman of Christensen’s department, reported that he hadn’t seen Christensen yet that day; nor had Bill Queller, or Nicholas Reickmann, or Si Lichtman, with whom he sometimes had lunch in the faculty dining room. “Mr. Queller thinks Rolfe Christensen might be out of town,” Mrs. Mills said. “But he doesn’t know where he is or when he might be back.”

  Flushed with anger, Calvin Gould said, “We’ll send Christensen a letter, then, certified mail, and instruct him to contact us as quickly as possible.”

  Calvin Gould offered to drive Brendan Bauer home after the meeting. At first, Brendan declined, with thanks, saying he’d rather walk; then, ruefully, he said, yes maybe he’d better accept a ride. He wasn’t in any condition to walk two or three miles and though he’d been in Forest Park, Connecticut, for a week—“It s-s-seems more like six months!”—he didn’t yet know his way around. He had no idea in which direction was his “home.”

  Andrew Woodbridge accompanied Calvin and Brendan as they walked across campus to Calvin’s parking lot. He was urging Brendan, as he’d urged him intermittently that afternoon, to go to the campus infirmary, at least, if he was still reluctant to be examined at the Medical Center; it would be in Brendan’s best interests, if his charges against his assailant were to be fully validated. “We certainly believe your account,” Woodbridge said, in his even, impassive voice, “but it would be helpful, from a more clinical standpoint, to have a medical report with which Christensen might be confronted. You were saying earlier you might even press criminal charges?”

  After his brief breakdown, Brendan had hidden himself away in a men’s lavatory and seemed to have washed his face, wetted and combed his stiff unruly hair, adjusted his clothing. His face was still parchment-pale and he carried himself with only the slightest suggestion of pain, but his eyes behind the thick lenses were darting rapidly about as if, in the open air, in the midst of young men and women students who were strangers to him, he expected to be pointed out, curiously stared at.

  Vaguely Brendan said, “I … don’t know.”

  “About the criminal charges?”

  “About a-a-anything.”

  Calvin Gould joined Andrew Woodbridge in urging Brendan to be examined; he’d be happy to drive him to the infirmary, he said, and to accompany him inside, if … if Brendan should so wish. And there was the matter of psychological counseling too: “In such cases,” Calvin said, choosing his words carefully, “I believe that psychological counseling is always recommended.”

  “Yes,” Woodbridge said, with paternal energy, “yes, it certainly is.”

  But Brendan Bauer was not to be persuaded.

  After a moment he said sharply, “Look: I don’t want to be touched. By any doctor or … anybody. And I don’t need any damn ‘psychological counseling’ because I’m not crazy, I’m not unbalanced, I’m not suicidal. Got it?”

  The older men fell apologetically silent and did not persist.

  After Woodbridge parted from them, Brendan said to Calvin Gould, with a sardonic smile, “Hah! Just like the others, up in your office! I caught that.”

  Calvin Gould asked, “Yes? What?”

  “He—him—I don’t remember his name—he walked away without shaking hands with me. Like the rest of them. They fear I am infected,” Brendan said, laughing bitterly, “and that it can be transmitted by hand.”

  Calvin Gould protested weakly, “I really don’t think … I don’t think that’s it, at all.”

  Brendan merely laughed.

  They walked to Calvin’s car, and Calvin was intensely aware of the young man: this tall gangling slope-shouldered youth, with a schoolboy seminarian’s prim face, ill-fitting clothes, and glasses crudely mended with adhesive tape: how was it possible that another man, even so presumably decadent and reckless a man as Rolfe Christensen, should be attracted … sexually, violently … to him?

  He must have been unknowingly regarding Brendan with a look of fascination, loathing wondering fascination, for the young man said, grinning, “Hey, don’t worry, Mr. Gould: you won’t have to t-t-t-t-touch me either.”

  Which meant, of course, when Calvin dropped Brendan off at his apartment building, that he certainly did shake hands with him: briskly, warmly, without an instant’s hesitation.

  7

  Where had Rolfe Christensen disappeared to? No one knew, not even his closest and presumably most intimate friend, the cellist Bill Queller, whom so many people telephoned, or sought out, to inquire after Christensen’s whereabouts that he quickly cultivated a neutral, guarded tone: “I’m afraid I have no idea where Rolfe is. I’m sorry—I simply don’t.”

  After a day or two adding, with the slightest edge of defensiveness, “And I am telling the truth.”

  Nicholas Reickmann too had to contend with queries, which made him distinctly uncomfortable. Perhaps he was remembering how, as they’d all left Maggie’s party on Saturday evening, he watched Rolfe lead that sweet-faced stammering young graduate student off in the direction of his car, had a thought, a warning thought blunted by alcohol, and in the next instant dismissed it. Nicholas said, “Certainly I have no idea where Christensen is: why would I?”

  By this time, though all involved had been sworn to the strictest confidentiality, a tale had begun to spread in Forest Park—and even in some quarters in Manhattan—that something extreme had happened involving the composer Rolfe Christensen. In one version of the story Christensen was the aggressor, in another the victim. Who can explain the genesis of such stories—rumors wispy and insubstantial as vapor at the start, rapidly broadening, deepening, taking strength until the entire landscape is obscured by smoke and the air fevered with crackling flame? Each of the members of the committee on ethics and faculty responsibility was the sort of person who respected confidentiality and could not conceivably have told anyone about Brendan Bauer and his accusations; neither Calvin Gould nor Andrew Woodbridge, fearful of scandal, would have told a living soul; Maggie Blackburn certainly did not tell anyone; and it was inconceivable too that Brendan Bauer, in a state of dread of being found out and identified as the victim of a rapist, would have told anyone. Yet within forty-eight hours of Maggie Blackburn’s initial conversation with Calvin Gould, rudiments of the scandal were known in Forest Park.

  Monday evening at eight o’clock the telephone rang in Maggie’s home, and it was her friend Portia: “Maggie, my God, have you heard—about Rolfe Christensen and one of our new graduate fell
ows?”

  The certified letter sent to Rolfe Christensen at his Littlebrook address could not be delivered; and even after Christensen finally returned home, late in the evening of September 26, and learned, by way of a quick telephone call to Bill Queller, what the situation was, how grim, how grave, how seemingly inescapable, the composer would haughtily refuse to sign for it. Discovering several postal notices in his mailbox, along with his regular mail, Christensen tore them to bits in a fury.

  All of September 27, a Tuesday, and September 28, Rolfe Christensen spent incommunicado in his home, unplugging his telephone and refusing to answer his doorbell. By now it was known in Forest Park that he had returned, but how could he be forced to speak with the Conservatory administration? Then, boldly, with theatrical extravagance, Rolfe Christensen drove to campus in a Bond Street-tailored gray flannel suit worn with an emerald silk ascot tie, his dove-gray fedora riding the crest of his large head, calmly ignoring the stares of students as he passed. (Did they know already? Had that lying little wretch Bower or Bowen or Brauer spread tales of him already? Or were these young people simply acknowledging Rolfe Christensen’s admired presence in their midst, driving along the curving lanes of the Conservatory campus in his familiar white BMW?)

  Except for a token glass of wine or two, Rolfe Christensen had had no alcohol that day; but he showed a seasoned drinker’s flushed, damply swollen face as he stormed (“stormed” was the only adequate word) into the administration building and into the provost’s office, without so much as a glance at the provost’s secretary. He yanked open the door to Calvin Gould’s inner office and, paying no mind to the fact that Calvin had a visitor, he loudly demanded, “Just what is going on here, Gould? Just what the hell are you people saying about me behind my back?”