Nemesis by Joyce Carol Oates
So utterly simple a thought, it might have been overlooked.
Wiping at her eyes, Maggie spooned earth back into and on the miniature grave. My first task of the day is done, she thought.
Maggie Blackburn’s house stood on an acre and a half of land in a residential area of Forest Park of older single-family homes; to the rear was undeveloped property, trees, outcroppings of rock, a deep meandering stream about the size of a ditch. It was a place of birds: jays, cardinals, starlings, red-winged blackbirds, crows: the luminous air of morning was filled with the sounds of their calling and singing, of which Maggie became only gradually aware. And then she could hear little else.
So many birds, a seemingly inexhaustible supply!
Yes, it was the wisest strategy, to drive all sentiment from her heart.
By midday, in any case, her spirits had lifted. She’d played piano for two hours: Chopin mazurkas, preludes, impromptus, Bach two-part inventions, miscellaneous pieces by Ravel that gave the unsettling impression of having neither beginnings nor endings but of having existed, always.
Midafternoon, just as Maggie was about to go out the door, the telephone rang; but when she went to answer it, no one spoke. “Hello?” she said. She could hear, or believed she could hear, someone at the other end of the line; she seemed to feel a rippling or shuddering, a very nearly convulsive agitation, as of a person trying to speak but unable. “Hello? Who is it? Is someone there?” Maggie asked. She hung up the receiver and waited for the phone to ring again, but it did not.
In Philadelphia, when Maggie had taught at the Curtis Institute and lived in an apartment close by the University of Pennsylvania, she’d been troubled from time to time by mysterious, somewhat threatening telephone calls; since moving to Forest Park she’d had fewer of these, though her name was listed in the telephone directory, as M. Blackburn. The most upsetting episode had involved a former piano student of hers, an enormously gifted but emotionally unstable fifteen-year-old boy who had had to drop out of the Conservatory for reasons of health; he’d moved back home with his family but telephoned Maggie at regular intervals, talking incoherently, once informing her that he was going to slash his wrists with a razor while she was on the phone with him.… She had had to break the connection and call the police, and though the boy hadn’t been serious about slashing his wrists, in fact denied to police that he’d threatened to do so, Maggie was involved, caught up in the emergency, agitated and insomniac for weeks afterward. Yet she had not, as friends urged her, changed her telephone to an unlisted number; she hadn’t wanted, as she thought of it, to become anonymous. Thus there remained the neuter M. Blackburn in the Forest Park, Connecticut, telephone directory for anyone to call who wished to call. And when the phone at that number was answered, the voice there was unfailingly light and melodic, lifted in hope.
It was a two-mile walk to the Conservatory, a walk which, on Sundays especially, Maggie Blackburn very much enjoyed. At such times she wasn’t required to hurry (though she always walked swiftly—she loved the pump of blood to her heart, the sensation of leg muscles, tendons, sinews springing into startled life); there were no classes and no students and few colleagues; she was free to spend a lazy, pleasurable hour or two in her office answering mail, writing memos, planning the upcoming week’s work. Going to the Conservatory she took a route along Acacia to Juniper; on her way home she took a slightly longer, hillier route by way of Juniper, Littlebrook, and a stretch of beautiful wooded parkland … Littlebrook, past the handsome Georgian house owned by Rolfe Christensen that was said to be exquisitely if eccentrically furnished (Maggie had never been invited to one of Christensen’s infrequent soirees: the composer did not like her, seemed to have decided before they met that he would not like her, though he was courteous enough to Portia and others in Maggie’s circle.) This afternoon, nearing five-thirty, in the wanly coppery autumn sunshine, the house at 2283 Littlebrook looked particularly impressive and remote; the Venetian blinds on the front windows, upstairs and down, were drawn, and Christensen’s white BMW was not in the drive. Maggie passed on the far side of the street, for she felt shy in the very vicinity of the house.
What had Christensen muttered in her ear the evening before, in jest, as, at one point during the party, he’d passed close by her, his blood-heavy face screwed up into a wink? “Don’t look so fearful, dear: I’m not infectious!” Had he really said those words, or had Maggie imagined them? It was Christensen’s social style to utter such things, outrageous, sometimes obscene, sometimes nonsensical, in such a low voice that his listeners blinked, bewildered, never certain they’d heard what apparently they’d heard and usually too intimidated by the man to ask him to repeat himself. So Maggie hadn’t known and had not remembered the teasing remark until now.
She thought, hurt, Why does he dislike me, despise me? I’ve done him no harm.
(In fact, Maggie Blackburn had probably done him harm, or had in any case insulted him, simply by concentrating her piano performances on traditional “great” composers and never having once played a work by Rolfe Christensen.)
The much-publicized appointment of Rolfe Christensen to the Forest Park Conservatory of Music had not been in itself controversial, but controversy had certainly arisen when, in 1984, the school gave Christensen a highly endowed chair at a yearly salary rumored to be above $150,000 for teaching a single master’s class in composing each semester. Christensen’s adversaries on the faculty argued that, as a composer, he was decidedly of the second rank; he’d done some good early work but that was far behind him now, and students often complained of his indifference to them, his highhandedness and contempt. Christensen’s powerful supporters (among them the president, the provost of the Conservatory, and the Board of Trustees) insisted that he was an important contemporary American composer of the stature of Copland, Thomson, and Barber and that numerous students over the years had expressed great admiration for him and gratitude at being allowed to come in contact with a man of his reputation. After all, Rolfe Christensen had won the Pulitzer Prize, hadn’t he?
In the end, after months of subterranean quarreling, Christensen was installed in his chair, and the event garnered a good deal of publicity for the Conservatory. Since Calvin Gould had been involved, Maggie would not have thought to criticize the appointment. She supposed, yes, people were probably jealous of Christensen, certainly of his reputation, and no one among his contemporaries could be objective about him.
Maggie left Littlebrook and entered the park, so inwardly absorbed that if, from time to time, passersby waved to her or called out her name, she rarely heard. Her piano students, sighting her at such times, her forehead creased, her eyes scanning the ground, assumed she was hearing music in her head, ceaseless music, mesmerized by a dream keyboard and by the skillful maneuverings of her fingers. Sometimes they were correct.
There was a figure near a rear corner of Maggie Blackburn’s house, on the paved walk between the house and the garage: it looked as if whoever it was might be hiding from the street. Maggie turned hesitantly up the driveway, staring. The visitor, or trespasser, was not yet aware of her approach and was behaving strangely, as if agitated or deranged—walking with exaggerated stiffness in a tight circle, head deeply bowed, thin shoulders hunched. His movements were jerky and uncoordinated, and he appeared to be talking to himself, muttering. Without thinking that this person might be dangerous, Maggie called out, “Yes? Who is it?”
The young man turned, and she saw to her amazement that it was Brendan Bauer, to whom she hadn’t given a thought since he’d left her house the evening before in the company of Rolfe Christensen.
“Brendan? What on earth has happened to you?” Maggie cried.
It was evident that something extreme had happened. Brendan Bauer, staring and blinking at her as if, for a confused moment, he didn’t know who she was, had the dazed, cringing, yet unfocused look of a man who has been in an accident. He appeared to have aged years. His skin was of the color and texture of cu
“Of course,” Maggie said. She would have taken his arm to steady him and lead him into the house, but she sensed that he would not want to be touched.
Inside, Maggie invited Brendan to sit down. But it seemed he could not, or would not, be seated. He walked about gawky and stiff-legged, running his hands swiftly through his spiky hair. There was a curious sheen to his eyes, and the flesh about them was puffy as if he’d been crying. But when Maggie asked, “Did you hurt yourself, Brendan? Are you in pain?” he made an impatient noise meant to indicate no.
For some minutes he wandered about the living room, peering at bookshelves, then at the music on the piano. While Maggie stood in the doorway not knowing what to do or to say, Brendan leafed through her piano books nodding and murmuring to himself, as if this were a social visit and he, the brash young composer, was behaving just a bit eccentrically.
He leaned over the keyboard and very deliberately struck a single note: C two octaves above middle C.
“N-n-nice t-tone,” he said.
He played chords with both hands, not well, rather clumsily.
“P-p-pure like c-crystal,” he said.
Maggie said, a little more forcibly, “You look terrible, Brendan. Please—what has happened?”
Brendan Bauer seemed not to hear. Or, hearing, he chose to ignore her.
He was bent stiffly over the keyboard depressing chords, bass and treble, up and down the keyboard, stridently. Maggie thought, He is mad. Something has driven him mad.
Aloud she said, “Shall I call a doctor? Shall I take you to the emergency room?”
Without glancing around he said, “N-n-no. No.”
Maggie paused. Then, inspired, she said, “Shall I make us some coffee?”
Brendan murmured what sounded like “Yes.”
Maggie fled to the kitchen to prepare coffee—instant coffee, out of a tin—while the young composer played chords, seemingly at random, in varying tempos. Yet there was a logic to the chords’ succession, an echo of Charles Ives; perhaps this was one of Brendan Bauer’s original compositions.
The sound of Maggie’s own piano being played apart from her was disorienting, as if she were herself in two places. The effect was uncanny and made her hands shake.
When she returned to the living room with the coffee things and a plate of macaroons, Brendan appeared more subdued. He thanked her. He said he wouldn’t stay long. Again he declined to take a seat, as if sitting might pain him or place him at a disadvantage; he stood beside the piano, leaning an elbow on it. Maggie could not help staring at the lurid bruise above his left eye and the raw red scratches on his cheeks.
In the baggy long-sleeved jersey, his hair lifting in tufts from his head, Brendan looked both childlike and violated, and Maggie’s heart went out to him. She recalled his somewhat clumsy attempt to revise minor details of his academic history, and his intense embarrassment upon being found out. Now she resisted the impulse to question him, for she saw that his eyes behind his thick lenses were reddened with hurt and outrage.
He was surprisingly hungry—eating up all the macaroons Maggie offered him and drinking coffee heavily sweetened with sugar and cream. Maggie provided him with leftover canapes from the party, which he ate voraciously as well. His hands visibly shook.
For approximately a half hour, as if this were indeed a casual social visit, or as if he had forgotten its specific purpose, the young composer spoke ramblingly yet excitedly of various subjects. His stammer was less severe and sometimes vanished altogether. Composers he admired, Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Janáček; his current work on a “cycle of anti-art songs”; his parents’ bewilderment with him, and their tacit dismay; an experience he’d had in the seminary in St. Louis when in the midst of a period of intense fasting and prayer he’d suddenly heard music, distinctly heard music, so beautiful and powerful he’d burst into tears.
“Because I knew the music was God,” Brendan said, looking hopefully at Maggie. “I mean, G-G-God was the music.”
Maggie recalled that long ago, in another lifetime, it seemed, she had had a similar experience, during a Lutheran church service in St. Paul. She must have been about eleven years old at the time, and very much caught up in her piano lessons. While the congregation prayed aloud a bubble of sound had seemed to emerge from the very air, a cascade of infinitely beautiful piano notes, which the child Maggie had been convinced others must hear but did not acknowledge. Until this moment she had not recalled that curious incident in years.
Mistaking her expression for one of doubt, Brendan said defensively, a bit sullenly, “I suppose you think I’m c-crazy, huh?”
Maggie said, “Oh, no! No, I don’t.”
Brendan smiled, or smirked. “But maybe I am crazy.”
There was a brief silence. Brendan had set his coffee cup down, brushed crumbs from his mouth and the front of his jersey, as if preparing to leave. Maggie said, suddenly, “Was that you who telephoned, a few hours ago?”
Quickly he said, “N-no,” not meeting Maggie’s eye.
She supposed he was lying. But he would have to be granted the lie.
There was another silence. In the bay window of Maggie’s little dining room her canary, Rex, began to sing. The young composer listened and said, “One of my aunts had a c-canary too. It’s amazing, isn’t it. It’s”—he pressed his mended glasses against the bridge of his nose and looked for a moment merely baffled—“amazing. Of course,” he said, almost derisively, or self-mockingly, “they can’t vary their song.”
Maggie let the remark pass and said, “Shall I take you to a doctor, after all? The emergency room of the Medical Center?”
“N-no. I told you no.”
“Then why have you come here?”
“To inform you that I-I-I’m n-n-n-not”—and here Brendan Bauer’s stammer overcame him for several convulsive seconds, until, virtually spitting, he managed to get the words out—“starting classes tomorrow. I’m thinking of g-g-going back h-h-h-h—”
Maggie cried, “Brendan, what? But why?”
“M-m-made a m-m-m-mistake—”
“But why?”
These many minutes the young composer had been on his feet, slouching beside the piano, leaning an elbow against it, shifting his weight nervously from leg to leg, from one side of his body to the other. Now and then he winced with pain. His curdled skin was damp with an oily perspiration, and the edges of his pale grim mouth glittered with saliva. He looked, to Maggie’s alarmed eye, not mad precisely but maddened; barely restraining his rage; yet at the same time frightened, cringing, broken, on the humiliating edge of tears. But now he laughed harshly and spat the words at her as if somehow she were to blame: “I-I-I’ve been r-r-r-raped.”
“Raped!”
And that possibility, not simply that Brendan Bauer blamed Maggie Blackburn for the horror perpetrated upon his body but that she was, in part, however unintentionally, to blame, Maggie was never to forget. It would be one of the profound shocks of her life.
“I should k-k-kill myself for letting it happen … it was m-m-my own fault … let the bastard do it … c-c-couldn’t stop him … he was so strong, he was a m-maniac … tied me up … I was terrified he’d k-k-kill me … strangle me … he threatened … said he’d ruin my c-c-career if … if I … oh Christ I’m so ashamed … I want to die … why didn’t I fight him harder … why didn’t I kill him … now it’s too late!”
Stiff-legged, grimacing with pain, Brendan Bauer paced about Maggie Blackburn’s living room. He would not allow Maggie to comfort him; not even to touch him when, like an aggrieved child, he burst into tears. Maggie protested, “Don’t say such things, Brendan,” but he ignored her, waved her off. She said, “If you’ve been injured, Brendan, if you’re in need of medical care—”
“N-no. No.”
“Rape is a serious criminal offense, the police will have to be—”
“No.”
He screamed at her to silence her, and Maggie acquiesced.
She thought, I must not persecute him further, he has suffered enough.
She was also somewhat fearful that, in the frenzied state the young man was in, he might turn violent against her.
For the next several hours, suppressing much of what she felt of shock, anger, disgust, incredulity, and an immediate wish that Rolfe Christensen be publicly exposed and punished, Maggie Blackburn gently coaxed out of Brendan Bauer an account of what had happened to him the night before; a disjointed, rambling, frequently incoherent and interrupted narrative, as if the distraught young man could not bear to tell his story outright but had to circle it, and back away, and circle it again, and approach it, yet again back away, shuddering with rage, frustration, self-loathing. Repeatedly he broke off his story to say, “I’m so ashamed,” and “Why didn’t I f-fight him harder?” and “I wish I was dead,” and “Why didn’t I kill him!”
Maggie regarded him with anxious sympathy. Tears formed in her own eyes, and her heart knocked hard in her chest. It seemed to her that she had never witnessed another person so upset, so consumed by passion; there was a kind of perverse grandeur in it, of which, she was sure, she would never herself be capable. At the same time she reasoned that, when this wave of hysteria subsided, Brendan would be more tractable and allow her to get him professional help. He would certainly have to be examined by a doctor; he would certainly have to go to the police. The loathsome Rolfe Christensen must be exposed, publicly tried, punished.… And to think that he had approached young Brendan Bauer in Maggie’s own house, at a social gathering she herself had devised!