Nemesis

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Only once in five weeks, and that by chance, did Maggie Blackburn happen to see Rolfe Christensen—at a performance, in November, in the Conservatory’s concert hall, of the Amsterdam String Quartet. Christensen was stylishly dressed in a russet-red sport coat, black silk ascot tie, checked trousers; with no suggestion of self-consciousness, or even defiance, he loomed tall, bigheaded, at ease amid the crowd, and afterward at the reception talked at length, very cheerfully, with the Amsterdam players, whom he seemed to know fairly well. His complexion was red-mottled and his eyes rather puffy, his hair whiter than Maggie recalled but handsomely brushed, with a sheen as of metal; he was aware of people looking frankly at him, surely whispering of him, but then people had always done so, there was a sort of creaturely satisfaction in being the cynosure of interest and speculation, and in a way Maggie envied him: for in his place, so exposed, so shamed, she could never make a public appearance: the very thought was inconceivable.

  A tale had recently made the rounds that Rolfe Christensen had had a “nervous collapse”—that, in fact, both Brendan Bauer and Rolfe Christensen had had “nervous collapses”—but Christensen’s appearance that evening dramatically contradicted such gossip; and Maggie happened to know that Christensen had been in Paris for a week, in late October, attending a performance of one of his early symphonies, after which he’d flown somewhere southerly and exotic—Tangier, maybe, or Casablanca. (Brendan Bauer, though he’d had no nervous collapse either, was ravaged-looking most days, solitary and obsessed with the case, but meeting twice weekly with a campus psychologist for what was called crisis therapy.)

  During the concert Maggie had found herself, despite her effort to concentrate, repeatedly distracted by the figure of Rolfe Christensen seated several rows in front of her; at the crowded reception she had to fight an impulse to slip away early, and unseen by him, as if believing the two of them could not share the same space, breathe the same air. Maggie had particular reason to think of Rolfe Christensen because, a few days before, her red canary had died at last, of an apparent respiratory infection, and her house was deathly silent. (Since his mate’s death, poor Rex had outdone himself in song, waking Maggie at dawn each day and accompanying her in urgent trills and warbles and prolonged piccololike flights as she practiced piano. His outburst of energy had been explained to Maggie as a natural, instinctive response to his mate’s disappearance, which Maggie had guessed must be the case; there was a melancholy logic to it.) But Maggie had no spirit to replace the canary and had hidden the bamboo cage away in the basement.

  “It’s like a t-t-tomb in here,” Brendan had unthinkingly remarked, when he’d dropped by as he did once or twice a week.

  At the reception Maggie could not fail to note with a shiver how Rolfe Christensen’s gaze skimmed over, passed through with the icy finesse of a razor blade, her. But she was not to be daunted and remained with a little group of friends and colleagues, her head high, her silvery-blond hair wound in braided coils and fastened in place with large tortoiseshell barrettes. She wore a pewter-gray jersey dress just slightly too long in the waist, and her slender neck appeared burdened by several chunky heirloom necklaces, but she was relaxed, even festive, or gave that impression. Said Portia in a laughing undertone, “You really have to admire Rolfe Christensen, don’t you, the man is so without shame,” and Maggie said rather tartly, “Isn’t shame what makes us human?”

  Later, at the cloakroom, as Maggie was putting on her coat, she felt someone help her, and thinking it was one of her friends turned her smiling face upward—to see that it was Christensen himself, smiling down at her mockingly. When Maggie shrank involuntarily from him he smiled more broadly, and said, “I haven’t seen you, Maggie, in a long time, since that lovely party of yours. I hope you’ve been well?”

  “Y-yes,” Maggie said weakly. “I’ve been well.”

  “And so have I,” Rolfe Christensen said, staring. “And so have I.”

  9

  And then, on November 19, the tension of weeks was resolved, though not as Maggie Blackburn had expected.

  She was surprised to receive a telephone call at home in the early evening from Peter Fisher, informing her of the committee’s decision based upon an agreement drawn up, after countless hours of deliberation, by the attorneys Woodbridge and Steadman: Brendan Bauer had consented not to press criminal charges, but Rolfe Christensen would never again teach any students at the Conservatory. His teaching duties were permanently suspended. He would, however, retain his office on campus, his rights and privileges as a faculty member, his rank as Distinguished Professor and Composer-in-Residence.

  Quickly, Maggie said, “And his salary?”

  “I’m afraid so, yes.”

  “His salary?”

  “Yes. His salary.”

  There was a moment’s silence.

  Peter Fisher went on to say that they hadn’t much choice really, for reasons he couldn’t divulge, but Maggie wasn’t listening. Several times she said, “I don’t understand, Peter,” and “I can’t … believe it,” and, dazed, perplexed, “His salary, you say? Rolfe Christensen’s full salary?”

  After they hung up Maggie sat for many minutes listening to the ringing silence of her house, too weak even to feel as if she had been betrayed.

  In recent weeks it had indeed been advanced, as one of the more outrageous and cowardly options open to the Conservatory, that the administration would settle with Rolfe Christensen by relieving him of his teaching duties, hence the man’s direct, presumably contaminating contact with students, but maintaining him at his enormous salary; Maggie Blackburn had impatiently dismissed such cynicism, for it reflected ill upon the administration, prominent among whom was Calvin Gould. He would not consent to such a legal expediency. And now it had come about—and now it was so.

  Her enemy was not to be punished at all. He was in fact to be rewarded for having raped a student.

  Maggie Blackburn had not known how furious she was with Brendan, for whom, she’d thought, she felt such sympathy and pity … but when, the next evening, the young man rang her doorbell, grim and sullen, his plastic schoolboy glasses still mended with adhesive tape, she had an impulse to slam the door in his face.

  But she invited him inside of course, made him one of her absentminded but nourishing little meals, and the two of them sat together in her kitchen, humbled by events, bewildered, not quite knowing what to say. “But how could you have consented to such a thing, Brendan, how could you?” Maggie said, regarding the young man as if she’d never seen him clearly before. “The most shameful sort of … legal expediency.”

  Brendan shrugged his narrow shoulders, wiped his nose roughly with the edge of his hand. He was wearing a frayed corduroy jacket, nondescript trousers, soiled running shoes. The bruise above his eye had faded, but his skin had a raw, abraded look, as if it had been rubbed with sandpaper. Since beginning psychological therapy he spoke with a mockingly eerie, measured detachment about himself, and though he still stammered he did so, Maggie thought, with an air almost of deliberation.

  Maggie repeated her words, for Brendan seemed scarcely to have heard, and again he shrugged, an overgrown sullen adolescent, and said he hadn’t had any choice; there had been no witnesses to the assault; it could be reduced to one man’s testimony against another’s, as both lawyers insisted upon saying repeatedly. If he went to the police, and if the issue came to trial, the publicity would be devastating for everyone, Brendan Bauer included. And there would be other problems too, for Brendan. “Could I be c-c-cross-examined—on the witness stand, by a hostile attorney?—with my gifts of l-l-language?” he said, sneering.

  Maggie said impatiently, “You might have tried. There might not have been any trial; there might have been a settlement out of court.”

  “There is a s-s-settlement out of court.”

  “But in Rolfe Christensen’s favor! In that terrible man’s favor!”

  “He isn’t just t-terrible, he’s—Rolfe Chr-Chr-Christensen.”


  Suddenly they were quarreling, like a sister and a brother who have lived together too long, tried each other’s nerves too systematically. Maggie Blackburn, that most gentle and premeditated of women, lifted her hands in frustration, made a gesture of clamping her palms over her ears. “How could you, Brendan! You! After coming to me, after all we’ve talked of it! After finally going to a doctor! After being brave enough to give your testimony, make your charges, and now you’ve capitulated—”

  “I didn’t have any choice, they were nice to me and s-s-sorry and want me to s-study here, my God they t-t-talked to me for hours, I was worn out, I’d c-c-capitulate to anything; what do you know, Miss Blackburn, M-Maggie, you weren’t there, you weren’t the v-victim, you have a job and a place in the goddamned w-w-world; who are you to tell me what to do!”

  “But now that man is free to do it again and again—he has been rewarded for—”

  “I don’t give a damn if he does it again! Leave me alone!”

  Furiously Maggie said, “You don’t? Truly—you don’t?”

  Brendan Bauer drew the edge of his hand beneath his nose and said, not quite so vehemently, “Why should I?—every man for h-h-h-himself.”

  Maggie was on her feet. “Please leave this house.”

  Brendan stared up at her, squinting, as if he hadn’t quite heard. “What?”

  “Please. Just leave.”

  He rose slowly, uncurving his spine from the wicker-backed kitchen chair, blinking, making an almost visible effort to recover his pride. At first it seemed that Maggie was too upset even to walk him to the door, but her good manners prevailed and she accompanied him, her heart pounding in her chest, her fingers shut into fists, and Brendan said, not contritely or even defensively but as if he were offering a simple, belated explanation, “The person who counseled me most, in private, was the p-p-provost, Mr. Gould. He’s right: I’d never be able to endure a t-t-trial, my family would know, everyone would know, even if I w-won I’d l-l-lose, that’s how ‘sexual harassment’ cases always are: if you win you lose, nobody w-w-wants you around, nobody will hire you, you’re f-f-fouled, you’re disgusting, it’s true. I’m not going to give up my m-music though, I’ve been writing all this time, I’ve been working all this time, Mr. Gould promised that when I came back—”

  Maggie Blackburn ushered her guest out the door and without ceremony shut it after him.

  All this is happening but it is not happening to me.

  The remainder of that night would be a puzzle to Maggie, for she must have entered one of her fugue states, her amnesiac states, within minutes of getting into her car and driving in pursuit of Brendan Bauer. She repented of her harshness, her inhospitality to a guest, she could not comprehend her anger at the young man and felt she must apologize at once, bring him back if possible; he was after all the victim of a brutal assault, he was entirely innocent and required her sympathy; so there was Maggie driving her car rather erratically along Acacia Drive … down the long hill to Grandview, then to Meridian … in the direction Brendan Bauer must surely have gone on his way home. She bit her lower lip; her eyes welled with tears. How could she of all people have been so cruel! It was not like Maggie Blackburn, was it? It was not Maggie Blackburn, was it? Already she had begun to forget the shocking words Brendan had uttered before leaving her house, the world was becoming blurred and muffled as if seen through pigmented glass, her nerves were taut as a half-dozen times she was convinced she saw the young man walking ahead on the sidewalk, a tall thin hurrying figure, yet each time to her keen disappointment it was not Brendan but a stranger, in one case a young black man who grinned derisively at her, and as she drove along Meridian to busy brightly lit State Street she felt the onset of the amnesiac fugue as a high humming in her skull while at the same time (and this was the peculiar thing, this was the mysterious thing) she continued to recognize herself as the agent of action, the core of consciousness, as if seeing herself from a comfortable distance, without emotion, even as, as Maggie Blackburn with her fingers clenched hard about the steering wheel of her Volvo, her face creased with worry, she was feeling the strange empowerment of rage, her blood beat with it, a righteousness deep in her bones, for she was in fact furious with Brendan Bauer without knowing exactly why, she was furious with Maggie Blackburn without knowing exactly why, and driving in the direction of Route 1 she intended to go to Brendan’s apartment building to await him thinking that she would apologize for her rudeness, perhaps she hadn’t irrevocably insulted the young man, but somehow she lost the thread of her concentration and an hour or so later she was driving north on the turnpike seeing signs for New Rochelle and still later she was in a brightly glaring turnpike restaurant drinking a glass of water, swallowing aspirin tablets, “Yes, thank you, I’m all right, I’m certainly all right,” she said, and at another time she saw someone approaching her, emerging from beneath a ragged awning, but she turned quickly away, she was wearing flat-heeled shoes thus could walk swiftly, and in her car on the turnpike she saw lights rising and passing her with an ease that made her sigh for she was safe after all, no one could touch or harm her.

  All this is happening but it is not happening to me.

  She was thinking of that Sunday afternoon several years before, following a recital at the Conservatory when she had given a pinched, inadequate performance of Chopin’s Preludes and had had to confront an audience transformed by delight, friendly smiling faces, rows of applauding hands, and she’d endured the shame of it but slipped away desperate to be gone and later that afternoon—it was late spring, damply warm and sunny—she’d gone to walk in the parkland near the Conservatory, desperate to escape from even her own house, and there in the park she saw, surprised, a figure lying in an open grassy space that might have been a derelict except there were no derelicts in this suburban village were there?—a young or youngish woman in a khaki jacket, shapeless trousers with a front zipper carelessly zipped so that a corner of a white shirt-tail peeked through, frizzy dark hair like a cloud about her head, and as Maggie drew forward fascinated she saw that the woman asleep on the grass was of all people Naomi Gould. She had a small triangular face, a lean flat-chested body, strong cheekbones and heavy brows, and a fleshy attractive mouth. Was she sleeping? Or was she slyly watching Maggie approach through her part-closed eyes? Embarrassed, Maggie said, “Hello? Is it … Mrs. Gould? I’m Maggie Blackburn, a colleague of your husband’s. I believe we’ve never met, but …” and with an irritated gesture the woman who was so very improbably Naomi Gould raised herself on one elbow and said, “Yes,” in a flat chill voice, “we’ve never met,” and turned over lazily as if she were in bed, as if she were indeed a person accustomed to sleeping in public places, and there stood Maggie Blackburn staring down at her beginning to feel how she herself was obliterated, as if erased, as, by degrees, the woman known as Naomi Gould fell back asleep.

  Part II

  10

  Sometime in the late afternoon of November 29, 1988, a young woman sales clerk for Heidi’s Imported Chocolates, 522 East 60th Street, Manhattan, sold two boxes of Austrian gourmet chocolates to a customer who made a distinct impression on her: the customer was a woman of indeterminate age, tall, heavily made up, wearing dark, oversized glasses and a lavender turban that completely covered her head, and a bulky leather coat, and dark leather gloves. She had applied makeup to her face with a theatrical flair, or compulsiveness, so that her very skin looked encrusted; her lips were ruby-red and appeared enlarged. She moved stiffly, even awkwardly, as if she were unaccustomed to her leather boots with their two-inch heel.

  Watching the customer, the young woman sales clerk felt a momentary stirring of the hairs on the nape of her neck. “My first thought was—maybe this was a crazy thought but it went through my head this might be a man impersonating a woman.”

  After some minutes spent critically examining the displays of elegantly packaged candies, the customer drew the sales clerk’s attention by loudly clearing her throat and then
making a gesture of an apparently practiced sort, fingers twirled toward her throat or mouth as if to indicate that she was incapable of speaking (was she a deaf-mute or suffering from some sort of illness? had her vocal cords been damaged or removed?) but that she could communicate by way of sign language, which in fact was the case, for the sales clerk had no difficulty determining which boxes of chocolates she was indicating inside the glass display case, nor was there any difficulty in ringing up the sale since the customer paid cash.

  In all, the transaction probably required less than ten minutes, and the young woman sales clerk for Heidi’s Imported Chocolates would surely have forgotten it forever, except for subsequent events.

  11

  “What is it, Maggie? We’ve all been so curious.”

  Maggie Blackburn found herself eagerly awaited in the departmental office on the morning of Monday, December 5, since an intriguingly large package had come for her in the mail that seemed (or so the secretaries had determined) not to be merely another book. The package was too oddly shaped to fit in Maggie’s narrow mailbox; it was fastidiously wrapped in stiff brown paper with an excessive amount of crisscrossing transparent tape and string; MS. MARGARET BLACKBURN and the address of the Forest Park Conservatory were printed in large block letters, in black ink, on two sides. Quite by chance—for Maggie Blackburn was hardly the sort of person to notice such details—Maggie happened to see that the zip code of the Conservatory was inaccurate by a single digit and that the package was postmarked New York City.

  Gladys Moyer, the administrative assistant, and Louise and Jody, the office secretaries, helped Maggie open the package, for it was like a puzzle, so elaborately tied and taped. Then, amid exclamations, Maggie unwrapped what appeared to be a Valentine’s Day present: a glossy red satin heart-shaped box of chocolates, three dozen in all, in a double-tiered arrangement. Some of the candies were wrapped in gold foil, and each was exquisite as a jewel. Maggie’s immediate thought was that the gift must have come from Matt Springer—for whom else did she know, what other man had there been in recent years who might have so much as considered sending her a romantic gift like this?—but the little card inside the box suggested otherwise. From one of those many grateful pupils of M.B. over the years, J.