Nemesis by Joyce Carol Oates
They moved into the warmly lit living room where the white piano gleamed, dazzling the eye, and Maggie Blackburn, blinking back moisture, saw the piano, and her own living room, as if for the first time.
On the stereo, Glenn Gould was executing three-part inventions. So fierce and so elegant, in other circumstances Maggie and Calvin, both pianists, would have stood transfixed; in these, Maggie was moved to turn off the stereo. And the music was gone, as if forever.
A profound and riddlesome silence washed over them.
Calvin Gould sighed, and flexed his fingers, and said, marveling, “Ah! My namesake, isn’t it?—that lovely lovely touch.” He paused, smiling into a corner of the room. Then he looked at Maggie, and his smile deepened. “It is, isn’t it?”
Maggie seemed not to understand. She was blinking rapidly; she too was smiling.
“Glenn Gould, I mean?”
“Oh, yes, Glenn Gould.”
“That inimitable touch.”
So they talked about Glenn Gould for some minutes, and about Bach. That is, Calvin did most of the talking; but Maggie could be perceived as nodding in agreement, listening intently. Calvin remarked that Bach had always been, for him, for the depth of winter: that was the time he most played Bach and had done so since adolescence.
And Bach was, said Calvin, for difficult phases of the soul—thus he was playing Bach, these days.
When, that is, he had time.
Maggie was nodding, yes, yes.
Her eyes appeared enlarged, perhaps because the day before she’d had her hair cut again, and again it was cropped severely short, both along the sides and in back.
Maggie was wearing an old black sweater and an old pair of slacks. No shoes or bedroom slippers, only warm woolen socks, also black. Clearly, it would be supposed, should something happen to her, that she had not been expecting a visitor at this hour—there were student papers from Music 305 scattered on her sofa and coffee table, there was the cup of camomile tea she had been sipping when the knocker on her front door sounded, all with a look of a Renoir or a Bonnard interior disturbed, its female inhabitant mysteriously missing.
Ever the most gracious of hostesses, Maggie asked her visitor would he care for something to drink. Coffee, wine, beer, Scotch?
Not seeming to hear, Calvin observed that it was a painful thing, a dangerous thing almost, for a pianist not to play the piano every day without fail. “It’s as if you lose touch with your very soul.”
His words were sad, but his voice was forthright, even exuberant.
Maggie nodded yes. Oh, yes.
She asked him a second time if he would care for something to drink, and this time he heard her and said, “No, thank you, Maggie, I can only stay a few minutes; it is late.”
Calvin asked Maggie how she was, how the semester was going for her, how she was bearing up under the strain, and they talked for a while of these matters, and of the police investigation, and of Brendan Bauer, though, again, Calvin did most of the talking, moving about the living room restlessly as he spoke, smiling and glancing around and flexing, still unconsciously, his long powerful pianist’s fingers. His stretch must have been well above an octave—ten keys, even eleven.
Calvin was wearing one of his attractive, expensive, but unmemorable suits. Gray pinstripe, or navy blue. A necktie of some muted shade, nothing at all like Nicholas Reickmann’s splendid ties. The skin across his cheekbones looked tight, and his eyes were ringed, as if thoughtfully, in shadow. When Maggie had gone to the door to let him in she’d seen that his breath was steaming faintly from the cold, and there was the curious illusion now, in her living room, that his breath was still steaming faintly.
But of course that was an illusion. Maggie’s living room was cozily warm.
Still, Maggie was shivering.
She might have wished she was wearing shoes.
Calvin conversationally examined some of the piano music on Maggie’s piano, struck a chord or two, murmured something flattering about the tone, and, reverting to the subject of Bach, said, “It was The Well-tempered Clavier you were playing from, Maggie, when I first heard you. When we first met.”
Maggie said softly, “Yes.”
“Do you remember? I remember.”
Maggie nodded, wordlessly. Examining some photostatted sheets of music on the piano, Calvin didn’t notice.
Maggie cleared her throat like any slightly nervous hostess and asked her guest would he like to sit down? And Calvin smiled at her, perhaps not hearing, and something both urgent and apprehensive shone for an instant in his eyes; and he reverted to the subject of Brendan Bauer … who Calvin was obliged to believe had committed both murders even as Maggie was obliged to believe he had committed neither, her belief predicated solely upon emotion, not logic or hard evidence. Calvin asked, “How is Brendan? I haven’t spoken with him in weeks,” and Maggie said, “I … think he’s fine,” and Calvin said, “You see him frequently, Maggie, don’t you?” and Maggie said, faltering, “Not frequently, exactly … he’s living in Bridgeport now,” and Calvin laughed and said, “But that’s hardly far away!” and Maggie said, “It’s been a terrible strain for him,” and Calvin said emphatically, “It’s been a terrible strain for us all. And, my God, poor Nicky!”
An expression of extreme repugnance crossed his handsome face.
Though she was very distracted, Maggie could see that her friend’s youth had left him sometime this winter: his eyes were those of a man of middle age, and his graying-black hair, so crisply brushed back from his forehead, had begun quite visibly to recede. He looked years older than the man with whom she had spoken, so enigmatically, yet with such an undercurrent of feeling, in the New Haven museum only six weeks before this evening. Only a week before Nicholas Reickmann’s death.
Maggie asked her guest a second time would he like to sit down, and this time Calvin heard her and said quickly, glancing at his wristwatch, “No, thanks, Maggie, you’re very sweet but I just dropped by for a minute or two … wanted to see how you were … are. But you’re fine, I guess? You’re all right?”
“I’m all right.”
“A little on edge.…”
“Yes.”
“You seem to have really extended yourself, in helping him. Brendan Bauer, I mean.”
“He hasn’t anyone else. His own family—”
“Yes, I’d heard.…”
“A nightmare. If the charges are kept at first-degree murder—”
“Yes, but these capital offenses are always negotiated, and in Bauer’s case—white male, middle-class, student, no prior history …”
“But he’s innocent.”
“… statutory mitigating factors his lawyer can argue, such as ‘defendant under unusual and substantial duress’ … ‘victim solicited, participated in, or consented to the conduct which resulted in his death’—you hired a good lawyer for him, I heard?”
“But he’s innocent.”
“No district attorney would ever press for the death penalty, not for Brendan Bauer.”
Calvin had been moving about Maggie’s living room, speaking almost vehemently, as if for ears other than merely Maggie’s. “He’s lucky, after all … Bauer … he must think of himself as damned lucky he didn’t die. When that madman had him, I mean. Tied up like that. Electrical cord, wasn’t it? Like poor Nicky too. Of course, what had been done to him, or almost done, he’d done to Nicky … I mean, Nicholas. That’s the horror of such things. Such perversions. They sink into the bloodstream … like malaria, or AIDS. Doesn’t he ever express that sentiment? Bauer, I mean? That, for all the hell he’s gone through, he’s damned lucky to be alive?”
Maggie seemed not to have heard, she simply stood, staring, one hand rising involuntarily to her chest … where her heart, which had begun beating quickly when the knocking sounded at her door, was beating now very quickly indeed.
“Or doesn’t he confide in you to that degree? Aren’t you … after all … that close?”
Calvin h
Maggie managed to whisper, “No. We’re not close.”
“No? You’re not?”
“No.”
“People seem to think you are.”
“No.”
Maggie’s terror might have shone in her face, in her slack parted lips and dilated eyes, except, perhaps … except she was a professional performer after all, with ways of feigning calm.
She licked her lips and made a wan feminine gesture, a gesture of accommodation. “I suppose you’re right, Calvin.”
Still he was looking at her searchingly, undecided.
“I know I’m right, Maggie.”
By this time neither had any idea what they were talking about, and Maggie would understand later that Calvin had come to her house truly not knowing what to think, what to say, still less what to do; he’d been, in his agitation that was in fact a sort of calm, improvising, as one might at the piano, directed not by logic but by intuition.
In any case it seemed that a crisis had been reached and had passed, for Calvin sighed, smiling at Maggie, and moved in the direction of the door—saying it was late, he was damned sorry to have barged in upon her. And Maggie followed him into the hall. And Maggie heard herself murmur breathless words assuring her visitor that he had not barged in upon her, certainly not; really, he might have stayed for a drink, he was welcome at any time … blushing for the wrongness, and the stupidity, of such a remark; though Calvin hadn’t evidently heard.
“Well, Maggie! Good night.”
“Good night, Calvin.”
“You do have a lovely little house here. Your life … it’s lovely too. Isn’t it?”
Maggie laughed, confused, not required to reply to such a question, and Calvin Gould took up his topcoat but didn’t trouble to put it on; his car was parked at the curb close by. At the door he lingered, reluctant to leave yet needing to leave, looking at Maggie Blackburn again closely, with a kind of inchoate and melancholy desire, saying, “Let’s try to keep in contact, shall we? Of everyone in Forest Park you mean the most to me, Maggie.”
Maggie was gazing at Calvin with wide damp dilated eyes: like, perhaps, any young or youngish unmarried woman surprised in the solitude of her home by any man for whom she has felt a decided erotic attraction and has believed, or has imagined, that this attraction might be reciprocated. Calvin took up Maggie’s hand as if to shake it in parting, but simply held it instead, and at his touch she came perilously close to crying out and did indeed shrink backward, but surely, masculine as Calvin was, and forceful, and aggressive, he might merely have interpreted such a reaction as a sexually repressed woman’s sexual fright.
Calvin Gould amended, “Next to my wife, I should say. Of everyone in Forest Park … everyone else … you mean the most to me, Maggie.”
Maggie Blackburn murmured, “Do I?”
“But your fingers are so cold … you must have low blood pressure, Maggie. Like Naomi.”
“I … I think I do.”
“Do you faint easily?”
“No.”
“You’ve never fainted?”
“I don’t think so.… I don’t remember.”
“Yet you seem so breathless now. So frightened of something.”
“I … I’m not frightened.”
“Of me?”
“No.”
“Not of me?”
“Well … yes … a little, yes.”
“There’s no reason, you know. You know that.”
“Yes, Calvin.”
“You do know it … don’t you?”
“Yes, Calvin.”
“Because I’m enormously fond of you. Because I wish you well.… I’d never harm you.”
“I … I know.”
“Somehow it has happened, over the years, that I don’t have many friends. Friends I can trust. But I feel that I can trust you, Maggie, can’t I?”
“Yes, Calvin. Of course.”
“And you can trust me.”
“Yes.”
“You need a friend, Maggie … in a time like this.”
“Yes.”
“When we don’t know what will happen next. Who will be … touched, next.”
Maggie nodded, wordless.
“Her fingers, and her toes too—Naomi’s, I mean—get icy-cold at times, if the temperature drops only a few degrees. It’s caused by low blood pressure, but the doctors say there isn’t much to be done. She gets lightheaded occasionally, but, like you, she rarely faints. You say you rarely faint?”
“Yes. I mean no. I rarely faint.”
“Yet you seem so frightened, right now.”
“I … I’m not really.”
“You don’t want me to kiss you, I guess?”
“I—”
“Just once?”
“I don’t—”
Calvin Gould framed Maggie Blackburn’s face deftly in his hands and kissed her, just once, on the lips.
“Your lips are cold; you are frightened of me,” Calvin said, apologetically. “I’d never force myself on you, Maggie, please believe me. If you’d like me to leave …”
Maggie’s heartbeat was so gigantic, she was in terror he would feel it and know.
“… of course I’ll leave.”
“Yes, I think …”
“If you want …?”
“… think you should, Calvin.”
“I should? Now?”
“Yes. Please.”
Maggie’s voice quivered on the edge of dissolution.
But this too Calvin might attribute to her womanly apprehension of him as a man, for surely there was a powerful sexual attraction between them.
Calvin’s camel’s-hair coat was draped over his arm, and his hand was on the doorknob. Was he leaving, so soon after having arrived? But why wasn’t he leaving? Maggie Blackburn saw that he smiled at her with his mouth in a way to inspire confidence, it was a smile familiar to her from her most shameless fantasies, yet his mind worked rapidly and coldly trying to determine what she knew, or if she knew or even suspected anything; what he’d meant to say, coming here as he had, with so transparently feeble an excuse … for there was no purpose to Calvin Gould’s driving on Acacia Drive at this hour or any hour, it certainly was not a route to bear him home from the Forest Park Conservatory of Music. Maggie looked into the face of a man who was at that very moment trying to determine what he’d meant to say, or to do, by coming to her. For clearly it was improvisation. And his breath smelled faintly of alcohol.
He said, not accusingly so much as merely quizzically, “I hear you’ve been asking questions about me, Maggie.”
“I … I have?”
In panic she thought, He knows I’ve been to Maine, I’ve seen the birth record.
But it was not that, for of course Calvin could not know about that; it was something else, something lesser, yet that this incident, small as it was and surely insignificant, easily explained away, excited his suspicion—was that not revealing of his state of mind? his shrewdness, finely honed as a knife? Hand still on the doorknob as if he’d been halted in his very movement out the door, Calvin was telling Maggie that his secretary Barbara Matlock happened to remark to him today, this afternoon, that she and Maggie had met in a store in town and got to talking—“And you were asking about Naomi’s operation last month? How well had it gone, and how serious was it?”
“I … I was hoping that—”
“But you’d already asked about the operation, Maggie, hadn’t you? Back in January?”
“I … I did?”
“Didn’t you? Of me?”
Maggie’s heart was beating to suffocation; she simply could not speak.
“Unless that was someone else,” Calvin said thoughtfully. “Maybe I’ve confused you with another woman friend.”
“Yes.”
“Well. Naomi has made a complete recovery. I gather Barbara told you the surgery wasn’t major, it was elect
“I … I see.”
But suddenly the ordeal was over. Calvin opened the door, stepped out into the freezing night air, said, “Good night, Maggie—thanks,” as if nothing were out of the ordinary; and Maggie called after him in a voice thinner than she might have wished, but adequate for the occasion, “Good night, Calvin.”
She could see his breath faintly steaming as he hurried out to the curb, to his car.
It could not have required more than a few seconds for Maggie Blackburn to walk from her front door through the little foyer, through the dining room, and into the kitchen, where there was a telephone and, on her cork bulletin board, the little white card bearing Detective Sergeant David Miles’s telephone numbers: but these seconds seemed to require a good deal of effort, an exertion of will, muscular coordination, neurological strain. She was very close to fainting—she was close to physical collapse.
And yet the danger was past; Calvin Gould had gone.
She’d locked the door behind him. She was safe. She had David Miles’s home telephone number and would call him, and explain … though precisely what she must explain she didn’t, in her state of anxiety, quite know.
Maggie had initially thought, when they were together in the living room, that Calvin had let slip the remark about the electrical cord in order to gauge its effect upon her, because of course no one except Brendan Bauer was supposed to know of his having been tied up at all by Rolfe Christensen, let alone with electrical cord; but it seemed more plausible, on second thought, that the slip had been accidental—Calvin simply had not known that that detail had never entered any public record of the Christensen assault, whether made to the Conservatory committee, of which he’d been a member, or the Forest Park police. Unfortunately, David Miles knew nothing about it either.