Nemesis by Joyce Carol Oates
He splashed a generous amount of Scotch into each of the glasses and gave one to Maggie.
He said, “I’m one of Forest Park’s secret drinkers, did you know? But of course not: I’m secret.”
He swallowed a mouthful of Scotch, and sighed, and smiled at Maggie, and said, “It’s best that way. As much secret as you can.”
Maggie turned a face to her captor that was too pale, stark, gaunt to be a face of beauty. She had a look both attentive and dazed. Slowly, the little blood bead began to form again on her lower lip, and this time Calvin tossed her a crumpled handkerchief—a white linen handkerchief embossed with the initials CSG—which she was reluctant to soil. “Use it. Keep it. I don’t need it,” Calvin said indifferently.
This white linen handkerchief, stained with her own blood, Maggie Blackburn would keep for the remainder of her life. How like lovers, such intimacy.
It might have been recognized by a neutral witness that Calvin Gould was in a crisis of indecision: he sat, but was continually shifting about in his chair; he drank, but quickly, with an expression of distaste. Within minutes his voice became slurred. “If I could trust you, Maggie … but I can’t. Like with Nicky. It was too late, with him.… He knew, he’d read the diary.… He promised me he’d never tell anyone, never so much as hint of it to anyone; he begged me, poor Nicky, just to take the diary and the letters and anything I wanted and destroy them and no one would know—and I wanted to believe him; I was sympathetic—but it’s too painful a life, it wears you down, knowing there are people who have power over you. It’s easier to make an end of it, somehow.”
Quietly Maggie said, “I hope you won’t hurt me, Calvin. You know I’ve always been your—”
“I don’t have any friends. No one knows who I am.”
“I’ve always been … sympathetic.…”
Calvin said, grimacing, “You wouldn’t be, though, dear Maggie: if you knew. The way I killed Nicky, for instance.”
There was a brief chill silence.
“I hadn’t wanted to kill him, I liked him … very much. He was a form of myself, I’d thought. When I went to Christensen’s house that night to see him it was … like this. Like this visit with you. I went to talk with Nicky Reickmann and to see what might happen. In fact, Nicky had invited me over. He was absolutely trusting. He was a truly generous man. I suppose he felt a certain kinship with me in the matter of Christensen, though our experiences were hardly comparable since I was seventeen years old when Christensen seduced me and Nicky Reickmann was an adult, fully experienced man who wasn’t seduced at all but agreed to some sort of transaction, or series of transactions, for the advancement of his career … and it worked, for Christensen kept his promises, most of the time: that was part of his legend. His ‘immortality.’ So it was a total surprise to Nicky, a profound shock, that I turned out to want more than just the evidence to destroy; I wanted the witness to the fact of the evidence dead. He swore he would tell no one and I believed him, actually … but that wasn’t enough. I didn’t want anyone to know. And anyone who knew, I wanted dead.”
Calvin paused, and looked at Maggie, who was staring at him with an expression of hopelessness, and said, with a shrug of his shoulders, “I’m not happy with the way things have turned out but I hadn’t any choice. Once you begin a certain action it’s necessary to complete it … bring it to an end. So you become an actor, and you yourself are watching. A performer. Watching your hands. At a distance. It’s prescribed beforehand … someone else has written it. I don’t believe that up until the very moment I cut his throat Nicky Reickmann truly thought it would happen, that anyone ‘nice’ as Calvin Gould could do anything so brutal to him, and it may be that he died not believing it. He’d been so cooperative, talking Brendan Bauer into coming to Christensen’s house, doing exactly as I instructed him; he must have known there was a purpose to my request, but he didn’t allow himself to wonder what it was. And then of course it was too late. I killed my friend the way you’d slaughter an animal: it’s a matter of hydraulics almost: how to get the life out of the living organism with as much dispatch as possible.”
Calvin poured another several inches of Scotch into his glass. He said, “You’re not drinking, Maggie. Not keeping me company.”
Maggie was holding the glass in both hands, and both hands were resting in her lap. For otherwise her severe trembling might have spilled the liquid.
In his slurred, pitying voice, Calvin went on. “What am I going to do with you, Maggie? Or with us? We might go for a ride together tonight … d’you think? There’ve been times in my life, my life and my sister’s, when I’d about made up my mind to bring things to an end; driving along a highway, a kind of crazy elation would come over me. How easy to die, to let speed accomplish it for you! And the death isn’t ruled suicide, merely accident. I’ve come close, and the peculiar thing is, my close calls weren’t related in any way I could determine to anything upsetting in my life at the time; for instance when I was promoted to provost here, and everyone was congratulating me, and I felt optimistic about the future, right about that time I thought, This is your opportunity to escape, no one would ever guess. But I didn’t do it. I hung on. There’s something contemptible, isn’t there, about hanging on.… I don’t blame you for looking at me in disgust.”
Quickly Maggie said, “I … I’m not—”
“You are exactly as you appear to be, and always have been; and I … I’m something very different. ‘He is as repulsive as Rolfe Christensen,’ you’re thinking.”
“No, Calvin, I—”
Calvin leaned forward suddenly, as if playfully, and touched Maggie: circled her left wrist with his fingers, forefinger and thumb. “Every time I’ve seen you play the piano I’ve wanted to do that. How fine-boned you are … you don’t have the necessary strength, do you, for pressing your own advantage. Or for playing piano really passionately, as it sometimes needs to be played. I remember your telling me when we first met that you’d decided to withdraw from the Van Cliburn competition—you hated that kind of competing, you said. And I thought, She doesn’t have the strength for it, that’s all. Whereas I had the strength but not the talent. Or the faith in myself.”
Stooping before Maggie, so very unexpectedly, yet matter-of-factly, Calvin Gould circled his forefinger and thumb around Maggie’s ankle as well. And she sat very still, gazing down at Calvin’s damp face, his eyes that were rimmed with black, his mouth that seemed quizzical, working. Now he might kill her, now he might do anything at all with her, any action on his part was permissible; she could only hope—as perhaps Nicholas Reickmann had hoped—for mercy.
He said, squinting up at her, his eyes faintly bloodshot, “Why did you intrude, Maggie? Why did you check up on me? How did you know it might be—me?” He sighed and settled back on his chair, glass raised to the level of his grinning teeth. “I wish you hadn’t.”
Maggie said slowly, for her words were in fact a revelation to her, “I seemed to know that the deaths had to do with you, Calvin. Because of inconsistencies in things you said, and things you did … nothing that would have meant much to anyone who didn’t know you. But I knew that something was wrong. I knew. And I couldn’t accept that you were responsible because I was in love with you.”
Calvin laughed and said, aggressively, “Oh, you were? You think you were? But only because you didn’t know me, Maggie.”
“The woman you called your wife, whom I’d always thought was your wife of course, as everyone did … is someone I’ve been aware of for years. Because, as I said, I was in love with you.” Maggie paused and dabbed at her mouth with the stained white handkerchief. In her queer emotionless state, which was perhaps a state of absolute resignation, as before death, she still could not bring herself to look up at Calvin Gould at this moment, for her words seemed to her not embarrassing, merely piteous. “So I thought of her, of ‘Naomi Gould.’ Even when I didn’t want to think of her, I thought of her; I was mildly obsessed by her. Why her and not me
Calvin said, flatly, “Nor do I. She had nothing to do with any of this.”
“After Nicholas died—”
“She didn’t, you know. She had nothing to do with any of this.”
“After Nicholas died, it came back to me how explicit you’d been about your wife having surgery. She’d been scheduled for that day, she would have been in the hospital that night, the night Nicholas was killed. It came to me then, and again I don’t know why—the thought wasn’t serious, really, just something that flew into my head—that ‘Naomi Gould’ was the only one of us who has an alibi that is unshakable. And this made me wonder why ‘Naomi Gould’ would need an alibi, or why someone might imagine she would need one. And it occurred to me that if she had sent the poisoned chocolates to Rolfe Christensen, with or without your knowing, at the time of the second murder you could protect her by … by arranging things as you did.”
“My sister knew nothing about any of this, I assure you. I sent the poisoned chocolates, and I cut Nicholas Reickmann’s throat.” Calvin shifted impatiently in his chair. “I hope you haven’t told anyone else about this, Maggie.”
Yet Maggie persisted. “And the person who bought the chocolates was a woman, according to the sales clerk in the store; or a man who might have been in disguise as a woman. That couldn’t have been you, Calvin. You could never have disguised yourself as a woman.”
The word “Calvin” hung oddly, almost musically, in the air. It seemed to have acquired an elegiac tone.
Calvin said, “What of Brendan Bauer, the obvious suspect? What of Bill Queller? He’s gone.”
Maggie said, “I never suspected Brendan but I did suspect Bill Queller, for a while. But it was your behavior that—”
“Being gone,” Calvin said with a grunting sort of laugh, “as he is, Queller is maybe the guilty party, after all. And not me. And maybe the man will stay gone.”
Maggie looked searchingly at Calvin, but his expression was unreadable.
He can’t have killed him too! she thought.
She said, faltering, “I didn’t want to think these things. About ‘Naomi.’ About you. I tried not to think them. Just as I’d never wanted, all these years, to be so … obsessive about the woman I believed to be your wife. I told myself I wasn’t jealous or envious. I told myself I had my own life to live. And it was … it is … a happy life. But I couldn’t seem to help it. Thinking about you and her. And then I would see her sometimes, accidentally, and it was always an experience that was disorienting … because, seeing her, the woman I believed to be your wife, it wasn’t that I was reminded of you so much as that, seeing her, I was seeing you. In a woman’s shape.”
Calvin said, smiling, though without mirth, his eyes cold, “Yet we don’t look that much alike, my sister and me. Not any longer.”
Maggie said, “No. You don’t. Superficially, you don’t. You aren’t identical twins, of course; you don’t really look alike, I know. But I happened to see the two of you together when you were leaving the museum that day, I was standing at a second-floor window looking down, and there was something about your bone structures, your profiles, the way you held your heads, the way you were walking, and the way you seemed to be oblivious of each other, as if you hadn’t any need to communicate. It went through me like an electric shock, seeing you … even though I didn’t know what I’d seen. And tried immediately to put it out of my mind.”
Calvin said, almost jeeringly, “Did you! It’s too bad you didn’t succeed.”
Maggie sat for a moment, silent. She was gripping the glass of Scotch so hard that her knuckles drained of blood.
She was thinking, Is there nothing I can do, no way of escaping him? Tricking him, overpowering him, appealing to his sense of … But she did not know to what, in Calvin Gould, she might appeal. The horror was, she did not know the man at all.
Hesitantly she asked, “What happened to your sister, Calvin? To make her so …”
“So strange, so unsocial? It didn’t exactly happen,” Calvin said, shifting restlessly in his chair, “I caused it. I tried to kill her, when we were twelve years old. Of course,” he said quickly, squinting at Maggie, “I didn’t know what I’d done at the time. Caroline knew, but I didn’t. She always knows, and I never do. That’s been the pattern of our twinness all our lives.”
“Not that I know about twinness. I don’t! I’m not morbid-minded. That isn’t my nature. Caroline made a study of twinness but I never did, I wasn’t interested, I’m not morbid-minded, ask anyone who knows me. I’m a professional man; I move from A to B to C with my eye on X, Y, Z. To Caroline, being twins was something sacred and inviolable, which is why she loathed anyone who came between us if she knew about him or her … if she even sensed the fact of another presence. But I was different. I am different. I set out to be normal and I am normal. As you say, we’re not identical twins. Hardly! At the most, we’re sister and brother. I’m older than Caroline, I’m much larger and stronger physically, and better coordinated; I have different character traits and talents … of course. My personality is the antithesis of hers. I don’t believe she has any personality at all.
“I’ve been—I’ve tried to be—a man of action, a man of the world. When I was nineteen, I enlisted in the marines … though that didn’t work out as I’d hoped. (They gave me an honorable discharge.) When I was twenty-six I was married to a beautiful young woman named Naomi, part English and part Malaysian … though that didn’t work out either as I’d hoped. I met my wife in Rome, the year I had a fellowship to the American Academy there, and we traveled for fifteen months, in Italy, Greece, northern Africa, Turkey; then something went wrong between us, she fell in love with another man, or in any case disappeared with another man, into Afghanistan. She might be living today or she might be dead. I’d heard she’d died of a drug overdose, but I don’t know. I made inquiries, but not extensively. I came back home because by this time my parents were dead and my sister was hospitalized and I thought I’d take care of her until she was better and I could straighten out my own life professionally.… Why are you looking at me so strangely, Maggie? Do I surprise you?”
Calvin Gould smiled his bitter, satisfied smile.
Maggie said, perplexed, “You were married …? To a woman named Naomi?”
“And maybe I still am, I don’t know,” Calvin said carelessly. “There is no connection between my life in the United States and my life with her, back in the 1970s; we were only together fifteen months. We weren’t, I suppose you might say, compatible. Sexually adjusted. She was headstrong and very independent, very experienced, and I was … rather shy … stricken … feeling always inadequate … because of what had happened to me, what had been done to me. Hadn’t I been made into a woman? It seemed to me that a real woman could tell and would be disgusted. But I don’t know. I never knew. Possibly my marriage would have disintegrated anyway. My wife didn’t take fidelity very seriously.…
“I came back to the States. I was desperate to reestablish my professional career as a musicologist, a theorist, and a teacher of music; if I couldn’t be a performer I wanted to devote myself to music anyway; and I was feeling guilty about my sister, who seemed to have had a breakdown, some sort of nervous collapse, around the time of my marriage. It was my intention to get her out of the hospital and take care of her until she was well … but it didn’t quite work out that way because Caroline never got what might be c
Maggie said faintly, “That’s … extraordinary.”
Calvin laughed. “Yet it felt ordinary. Both my parents had died, and we hadn’t any relatives to speak of, at least no one who would know of our lives away from Maine, or care. And my professional colleagues would hardly be suspicious: why would they? People are trusting, if they like you. They believe nearly anything if it’s plausible. ‘Naomi Gould’ was a woman who had had some health problems, that was all—no conventional faculty wife, but not exactly an embarrassment. It might have been that, over the years, I deeply resented my life and resented her—my twin—but it was my destiny, and I accepted it. Until last fall, when things began to go bad.”
Maggie asked, “And why was that? Why last fall?”
“You know. Him. What he’d done to Bauer, and … all the upset. And I was at the center of things. What an irony! It was the past being replayed, and instead of Calvin Gould there was Brendan Bauer, and I … I began to get … distracted. And he came to me—Christensen, I mean—he actually came to me to boast of it. To boast! The pig! He talked of his ‘little adventure’ as if he thought I would be impressed, or amused, or, who knows, sexually aroused … but he was frightened too, because he knew he’d gone too far this time. (So I knew about everything: I knew about the tape he’d recorded and the electrical cord. I knew things Brendan Bauer himself had apparently forgotten.) About all this, the Christensen affair, I never spoke to my sister … but somehow she knew. She knew what I felt. She knew about him from the past, though I’d never told her exactly what had happened to me in Interlaken, and she seemed to know about Brendan Bauer. My emotional life is somehow connected with Caroline, it’s as if we are a single person, a single organism, sharing a nervous system, memory, instincts … but nothing else. We don’t know each other, really. She’s jealous of my work, my colleagues, my friends; she resents anything that isn’t her. I hate the connection between us, I’ve always hated it … but there it is. I couldn’t escape her if I wanted to, and she couldn’t escape me. As long as we’re both …” Calvin’s voice trailed off, as if thought, or strength, had failed him.