Nemesis

by Joyce Carol Oates

  After several more days of angry resistance, Rolfe Christensen finally consented to meet with the seven men and women who had heard Brendan Bauer’s confidential testimony; but brought along with him, unexpectedly, an attorney named Steadman, a trim, muscular man in his forties with shiny dark eyes and a mustache that looked as if it had been penciled in lightly on his upper lip. Steadman’s manner was knowing, sardonic, and brisk; he seemed very much at home with this case, as he called it, of “crude character assassination and attempted blackmail.”

  Steadman said, singling out Calvin Gould and Andrew Woodbridge for his particular attention, “We will establish what the evidence is here, and we will consider whether grounds for slander or libel exist.”

  For it was Rolfe Christensen’s contention that there had been no sexual assault against Brendan Bauer: no rape: only an “innocent erotic interlude” following an evening of companionable drinking, an interlude of a familiar, unexceptional sort indulged in by two mutually consenting adults.

  After all, the complainant was hardly a child, or even an undergraduate. “We’ve learned that he isn’t nearly so young as he pretends to be,” Steadman said, “but is in fact pushing thirty.”

  “Brendan Bauer is twenty-seven years old,” Woodbridge said, as if conceding a point. “He is an adult by the statute. But that doesn’t exempt him from protection against physical assault, as you well know. And even if ‘rape’ were not the issue here, the Forest Park Conservatory of Music adopted strict guidelines in 1984 regarding sexual harassment of students by members of the faculty. The student in question contends—”

  “He is a liar,” Christensen said. “A liar, an opportunist, a conniving little”—he shuddered and reconsidered his words and said—“nonentity.”

  Rolfe Christensen’s account of the evening and night of September 17 conformed to Brendan Bauer’s in certain general ways but differed radically in others. Christensen did acknowledge that he had met, and befriended, the young composer at Maggie Blackburn’s party; that they had gone to Christensen’s house together, primarily to listen to a tape of Christensen’s “Adagio for Piano and Strings”; yes, there had been some drinking—but not an excessive amount; yes there had been the “erotic interlude”—but Bauer had initiated it, and Bauer had extended it, and Bauer had all but confessed, in the morning, when Christensen was driving him home, that he did such things now and then to punish himself, for he was one of those who took pleasure from pain and had had to leave the seminary for this reason.

  Andrew Woodbridge said skeptically, but politely, “Why, then, did the young man go to the home of one of our faculty members and tell her in a state of hysteria what had happened to him? Why has he come to us?”

  Rolfe Christensen drew breath to speak, but his attorney Steadman spoke for him. “That isn’t a question my client is bound to answer. The burden of proof is on you. This is not a trial, or even a hearing, and if serious accusations are made against Mr. Christensen please be advised that we will respond with serious countermeasures.” He paused, and smiled, and with a glance at Rolfe Christensen, who sat grim and impassive beside him, said, “And if Mr. Christensen’s public reputation is damaged by any of this, for instance by slanderous rumors emanating from this office, the measures will be serious.”

  “Surprised to feel these fingertips on my arm … turned to see a fey sort of youngish man … smiling … pressing rather close … no mistake about his intention and of course we’d both been drinking … flattered me I suppose talking about my music but I didn’t really sense it … not by nature a suspicious, still less a paranoid sort of personality. So I invited this—Brower, is it?—Bauer … back to the house with me … he wanted to see my music studio … wanted to hear my ‘Adagio for Piano and Strings’ … we got along rather well I was thinking … he was most affectionate … I see now in retrospect that it was the most crass sort of … the most coldblooded sort of … hypocrisy … opportunism … but at the time how did I know! how did I know! … though I might have guessed, considering the way he stood marveling at my photographs … my citations, awards, and such … hands on his hips rather suggestively … cockily … his eyes practically aglow with excitement I seem to have mistakenly imagined was for me … for my work … though in fact he did praise the ‘Adagio’ effusively … a work of genius he called it … he was high … spoke of having smoked some hashish before coming to the reception … pushing himself onto me rather aggressively but how did I know, how did I know! I seem to have been a victim of my own … failure to be suspicious. And so this Brower, or Bauer, is it … well, naturally … I do have certain inclinations … tastes … I am human … I don’t apologize for myself … see no need to defend myself … this Bauer was certainly forthright … fey and simpering as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, in public … and then in private very different … very different … I’ve witnessed such transformations in the past but I am always surprised when they occur. And so we … there was … as I’ve said there was this ‘erotic interlude’ … in the young man’s insistence upon it I was overcome … lost my sense of … propriety you might say … for he wasn’t identified quite yet in my mind with being a student … yes, he was enrolled in my seminar, true, but at the time I didn’t know that … the first class hadn’t met … I admit I was susceptible … I was drinking … I am human … I simply lost all track of what was happening, lost all track of time, and even where we were … it must have been hours … I was unconscious for some of the time … I believe he did it deliberately, urged me to exhaust myself … expend myself … later after he was gone I discovered he’d been prowling through the house … going through drawers … my personal correspondence … my financial records, jewelry … a tie clip seems to be missing … an inscribed copy of a book by Lenny Bernstein … some trinkets and mementos from travel … so humiliating! outrageous! But at the time I had no idea of course, not the slightest … he’d encouraged me to ‘play rough’ as he called it … he was certainly rough … uninhibited … shameless. Not at all the way he advertises himself … hardly! But then in the morning … when the giddiness had worn off … when he was inspecting his bruises … the devious little hypocrite claimed he couldn’t remember most of what had happened … claimed I’d gotten him drunk … began to rant and sob about sin … leaving the seminary … the s-s-s-seminary. And being punished by God.”

  Only at the end did Rolfe Christensen betray some of the emotion he was feeling as, cruelly, yet with a ferocious sort of humor, he mimicked Brendan Bauer’s stammer and glanced at his male colleagues with a wink of complicity, as if confident they wouldn’t be able to resist laughing.

  But there was silence. A startled silence. One of the women rose to leave, with the excuse that her migraine headache was so painful she could no longer see or hear or think clearly.

  In that heartless fashion, unsurprising in retrospect but wholly unanticipated at the time, thus deeply upsetting to Calvin Gould and the others, Rolfe Christensen defended himself against the charges that were to be brought against him.

  Even during a ninety-minute interrogative period Christensen managed to speak with restraint and conviction. Though it was clear that he and his attorney had rehearsed their salient points, down to the precise phrasing of certain key sentences, Christensen seemed to grow increasingly sincere; he was the very image of a vain, aging man, susceptible to flattery, both humiliated and outraged by what had befallen him at the hands of a manipulative young person. “If Rolfe Christensen is lying,” Calvin Gould said, marveling, to Andrew Woodbridge, after the session was adjourned, “he gives the uncanny impression of not knowing he is lying.”

  Said Woodbridge, grimly, wiping his face with a tissue, “The man is mad. Sick and mad. He creates a sort of madness around him.”

  No one believed Christensen, of course. For he was the man he was; his colleagues knew him; his shadowy reputation preceded him.

  At the same time, his account of the “innocent erotic interlude” was qui
te convincing. He told it, and retold it, and insisted upon it, exactly as he would have done were it true. And he was Rolfe Christensen, after all: the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and the most distinguished faculty member of the Forest Park Conservatory of Music.

  8

  Through her life, beginning as a young girl in St. Paul, Minnesota, expected to perform flawlessly at the piano for the admiration (and gratification) of her family, Maggie Blackburn had been susceptible to feelings of unreality. All this is happening, she might think, but it is not happening to me. Such thoughts assailed her during piano recitals; and afterward, when she had to face out into an audience of applauding strangers; and during intimate conversations, with men in particular, which always took her by surprise. These incursions of unreality had the effect of dream remnants incompletely recalled during the day: they were haunting, at times very much so; they could not be confronted head on (for dreams, the products of unconsciousness, resist definition by consciousness), yet they were undeniably present.

  For some reason Maggie began to feel this way about the Christensen-Bauer case, as it came quickly to be known in Forest Park. The numerous hearings—meetings—negotiations taking place in October seemed to her mysteriously, and disagreeably, involved with her own life, though for the most part they occurred at a considerable remove from it. She was asked to attend a single session, to give her testimony about Brendan Bauer’s visit, but apart from that she had nothing to do with the committee’s protracted discussions and knew only what Brendan reported to her (though with the passage of weeks Brendan himself did not know a good deal, for the official committee met in secret, and it was rumored that negotiations were a matter of the two attorneys determining some sort of decision), and what tales, lurid, airy, improbable, contradictory, circulated in Forest Park. “These things are happening,” Maggie instructed herself, “but they are not happening to me.”

  Still, Maggie could not shake off the conviction that, in coming to her home that afternoon, in appealing to her for help, Brendan Bauer had not so much initiated a bond between them as confirmed one. From the first, when the tall self-conscious stammering young man had come into her office at the Conservatory, Maggie had felt there was something special—fated?—about him. It was not that she liked him—for, indeed, Maggie Blackburn was one of those teachers who feel a good deal of affection for their students, as if in a way they were all nieces or nephews, thus all special; she did not like Brendan Bauer nearly so much as she’d come to like other students over the years, her devoted and industrious piano students. “I feel responsible for Brendan,” Maggie told people who wondered why, apart from the general outrage the community felt at Christensen’s unconscionable behavior, Maggie should care so much, be so emotionally involved. “I feel as if … I might have prevented it somehow,” she said. At such times her forehead creased into worry lines and her large pale eyes appeared unfocused.

  Said Portia MacLeod, dryly, “The only certain way of preventing Rolfe Christensen from misbehaving is to take an ax to him.”

  Portia’s remark was meant to be both amusing and shocking, as many of Portia’s more extreme remarks were meant, and the intimate gathering of like-minded friends before whom she had uttered it responded with appropriate laughter.

  Except, pointedly, for Maggie Blackburn—who stared off worriedly into space, fists bunching her oyster-white linen slacks at the knees, clearly not having heard.

  What had really happened between the two men?

  And what action, if any, would the Conservatory take against its most prominent figure?

  Because of the seriousness of the Christensen-Bauer incident, which still threatened to become a criminal case, thus involving the school in what would surely be an ugly public scenario, the original seven-member committee on ethics and faculty responsibility had been expanded to include the Dean of Faculty, the Dean of Students, the Director of Humanities, the Composition Department Chairman, the Head of Psychological Services, and two students—one a graduate student, the other an undergraduate. This unwieldy group met several times a week through much of the autumn, their meetings closed, and conducted without the presence of either Rolfe Christensen or Brendan Bauer. Negotiating in tandem with the committee, but conferring too in private, the attorneys Woodbridge and Steadman were also involved, and their protracted deliberations too were in strictest confidence. Yet men and women in Forest Park talked of little else.

  In theory, no one was supposed to know about the incident at all. Members of the committee were awkwardly obliged to pretend that their committee did not exist; or, if it did exist, that it possessed no agenda. And though Brendan had been repeatedly assured from the first that his name would not be released, somehow, who knows how, within days of his initial meeting with the committee, the name Brendan Bauer was known by virtually everyone in the Forest Park community and freely batted about. Was this faceless and anonymous composition student who was in fact not a student (Brendan had temporarily withdrawn from the Conservatory with a vague hope of registering again in January) a rapist’s victim? A blackmail-minded troublemaker? A disgruntled boyfriend of Rolfe Christensen’s? A total stranger to Rolfe Christensen? One of Rolfe Christensen’s “most brilliant, most promising” composition students? Was he a rawboned farm-boy from Iowa or Nebraska or a seminarian from Montana? A Gay Rights advocate from New York City? Even those few people who had actually met and spoken with the young graduate student speculated extravagantly about him and about what had really happened between the two men in Rolfe Christensen’s house.

  Hearing these rumors and being, in fact, asked to verify some of them, Maggie felt sickened, helpless, trapped into suggesting, by the vehemence with which she denied them, that she knew the true story—a story so lurid and scandalous she dared not speak of it. “It’s in everyone’s best interests not to spread rumors,” Maggie said earnestly. “The poor young man—” And she stopped, forced herself to stop. For she was already too closely associated with the case, and with Brendan’s accusations against Christensen, to risk involving herself still further.

  In some quarters—misogynist rather than gay—it was believed that Maggie Blackburn was a militant feminist who had launched a personal vendetta against Rolfe Christensen; with the complicity of one of her students, she had maneuvered the elder composer into being suspended from his job. (The fact was, Rolfe Christensen had been suspended from his teaching duties for the fall term, pending the decision of the committee—but he had been suspended at full pay.) Friends in Forest Park shielded Maggie from such preposterous rumors, but friends and acquaintances elsewhere began to telephone her to ask what was happening. One evening Maggie’s undergraduate roommate, now a professor of musicology at Stanford, telephoned to ask, in alarm, “Maggie, do you have any idea what people are saying about you?”

  Feeling suddenly faint, Maggie said, stammering, “About m-me?”

  Brendan Bauer finally, if belatedly, consented to be examined by a doctor, a private physician with an office on Route 1 of whom no one had heard, and this medical report was made available to the committee, for whatever worth it provided. Consequently the rumor began to spread anew—it was mid-October now—that Rolfe Christensen’s victim was going to go to the police; yet a counter-rumor immediately followed, surely initiated by Christensen’s attorney, Steadman, that Rolfe Christensen intended to bring a civil suit against both Brendan Bauer and the Conservatory for slander, defamation of character, and breach of contract. On the morning that Maggie met with the committee, this issue appeared to be uppermost in their minds; no one said so explicitly, but Maggie sensed that her colleagues, even Calvin Gould and Andrew Woodbridge, even the somewhat abrasive Dean of Faculty Peter Fisher, were beginning to be intimidated by Steadman (who had a history, it was learned, of winning large lawsuits for his clients) and had become, however subtly, less sympathetic with Brendan Bauer. She said, her voice trembling, “But we know—we all know—what happened. I’ve told you exactly what Brendan to
ld me, as much as I remember of it, and I—I’m morally certain—I’m absolutely convinced that everything he says is true, that there are things Brendan has not even wanted to say that would add to his—to the case. And we must not”—here Maggie’s voice shook almost painfully—“abandon him.”

  Maggie Blackburn spoke with such uncharacteristic passion, there seemed a sort of pale, radiant flame about her; her fine-boned, beautiful face was luminous, her normally colorless eyes alert and shining. As if empowered by conviction—by a righteousness that was in fact right—she seemed even to take no special notice of Calvin Gould, in whose presence she was customarily subdued and self-effacing. And, indeed, Calvin regarded Maggie with an expression of extreme interest, as if he had never seen her before; as if she were a woman entirely new to him.

  Maggie went on. “I’ve counseled Brendan to go to the police. He’s fearful of the publicity and a possible trial—but he knows he should go through with it, he says he knows what he should do. I realize that you are all concerned with the reputation of the school, but it seems to me wrong, it seems to me unconscionable, it seems to me criminal, that Rolfe Christensen, because of his stature, should be absolved from charges of rape, and assault, and God knows what all else—keeping that terrorized young man captive in his house, threatening his life.”

  So Maggie Blackburn spoke, and she did not know if it was a good sign, or a troubling one, that the members of the committee, most of them well known to her, did not argue; sat listening respectfully, even grimly, to her; asked only a few questions and seemed satisfied with her answers, as if everything she had to say, everything she knew, were already known to them.

  Only afterward did she recollect how Calvin Gould had looked at her. He was, himself, rather more the worse for wear—fatigued, unusually taciturn, remote. As the most powerful member in that little assemblage he had seemed, for the time at least, to have abdicated his role; others spoke, others asked questions, while Calvin sat with his elbows on the table, turning an inexpensive ballpoint pen between his fingers, frowning, staring at her. She thought, He will see to it that justice is done.