Nemesis

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Over the eight months of their romance Springer was intrigued, and teased, by the fact that Maggie kept a certain distance between them; gracefully disarmed his questions; did not so much as hint that she might like their relationship to become more permanent, or even more defined. Asked where she had gone over a weekend, Maggie might murmur vaguely, “Oh, visiting relatives,” and change the subject. Or, her forehead lightly creased, her bluish-gray eyes opened wide in an expression of sincerity, yet evasive in their gaze, “Oh, doing research.” She was writing an essay on Schoenberg’s Piano Pieces, op. 19, experimental works for which, as she said, she felt no temperamental kinship yet hoped to understand. Such detachment Matt Springer found, for a time, irresistible.

  Then, abruptly, it was over. Maggie simply went too far. Two weeks before her father died she’d returned to her house on Acacia Drive to discover, prominently taped to her front door, a letter from Springer chiding her—teasingly, bullyingly—for having neglected to tell him she was going away; he’d been telephoning for days, out of worry and stubbornness, had even called colleagues of Maggie’s to see if they knew her whereabouts. Reading this, Maggie burst into tears and tore the letter to bits; and, a half hour later, when Springer called, his tone both charming and importunate, Maggie interrupted. “I won’t be spied upon! How dare you! What right do you have! I’m not a woman”—and here wild words tumbled from her mouth, wholly unbidden, irrevocable—“I’m not a woman who is spied upon!”

  Matt Springer heard her out but made certain he had the final crushing word: “In my opinion, Maggie, you’re hardly a woman at all.”

  3

  It was at Maggie Blackburn’s house on Acacia Drive, on the evening of September 17, 1988, at the large party Maggie gave to introduce new faculty and graduate fellows to the Conservatory community, that Rolfe Christensen and Brendan Bauer met; thus, this innocent occasion, an annual, semiofficial gathering hosted by Maggie in her capacity as director of the Music Education Program for Advanced Students, would generally be considered, in Forest Park, the catalyst for all that followed.

  Maggie Blackburn’s fatal party.

  Not that the two radically different composers—the fifty-nine-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winner Christensen and the wholly unknown twenty-seven-year-old novice Bauer—would not have met eventually but that, at another time, in other, more sober circumstances, Christensen would surely not have behaved as he did. Nor would the young man from Idaho, having by then heard something of Christensen’s reputation, have gone off so unquestioningly with him.

  Maggie was in her second year as director of the program, and this was the second time she was to give the party. Yet the prospect still rather unnerved her, for she was an inexperienced hostess and swung between dread and euphoria in planning it. Like many deeply introverted people she imagined herself “most herself” in gay, festive, noisy, gregarious, unthinking surroundings; she imagined too, though she rarely practiced it, that she possessed some special talent for bringing like-minded individuals together and providing an atmosphere that might allow them to become friends. And there was the more selfish hope too that she, who spent so much time alone, in her head and in her music, might establish some new, unexpected rapport with another person.

  (Indeed there was one individual, a man, a colleague and a friendly acquaintance, among the sixty or so invited guests whom Maggie did await with special anticipation: anticipation and apprehension. This man’s presence in her home, to which he rarely came—for he was married, and his wife disliked social evenings—would give to her ordeal as hostess a powerful secret purpose; whatever the party yielded for others, its emotional center, for Maggie Blackburn, would reside in this man.)

  September 17, a Saturday, was prematurely chill and autumnal; a glassily bright day of high, sporadic winds. Preparing food for her guests, far too much food, as, the previous year, energized by nerves, she’d prepared far too much, Maggie drifted into one of her intense but undefined states: there was a hallucinatory vividness to all that she saw, heard, tasted, smelled. The friendly near-constant chirping and tittering of her canary pair in their smart bamboo cage, the occasional exuberant arias of the male, seemed to her fraught with musical meaning. And such beauty! And consolation! The very wind in the trees behind the house and along the house’s gutters had an eerie melodic sound … oboes, bassoons—the bassoon in its yearning upper register, the very start of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Maggie’s heart filled with longing. She did not now regret having been cajoled, perhaps coerced, into her time-consuming administrative position. It was healthy for her to do such things. Since Matt Springer there had been no other man, no romance. And, since the death of her father, no “mystery.”

  An hour before the party was to begin, and Maggie was upstairs changing her clothes, the telephone rang; she lifted the receiver with apprehension, knowing it could only be one of her guests saying he wouldn’t be able to make it after all, and through the sudden suffocating pounding of her heart she heard a familiar voice. “Naomi seems not to be feeling well, I’m afraid … won’t be able to … tonight.… But I can.… I hope that’s agreeable?” and Maggie quickly murmured, faint with relief, “Oh, yes, Calvin, yes of course,” happening to catch sight of her white face in a mirror close by, ghastly white, and the eyes swimming with panic, grateful that Calvin Gould could not see it. For that face revealed all. Maggie Blackburn’s soul, tremulous in her eyes, revealed all.

  Maggie hung up the receiver, and her hands were shaking.

  His voice. In that fraction of an instant before Calvin Gould explained the reason for his call Maggie had gazed in sick helplessness down the long tunnel of an arduous social evening to no purpose except its own execution. “But he is coming,” she whispered aloud. “He is coming.” She recalled that, the previous year, shortly before her party was scheduled to begin, Calvin had telephoned with a similar excuse; and she knew by way of Portia MacLeod and others that such last-minute cancellations for the reclusive Mrs. Gould, always made with an air of sincere regret, were pro forma in Forest Park. (“It isn’t clear whether Naomi Gould is agoraphobic,” Portia said, “or whether the woman simply dislikes us.” But Maggie had rarely seen Mrs. Gould at any Conservatory function, even concerts of exceptional interest. Though Calvin Gould was provost of the school and a highly regarded musicologist who frequently lectured at universities and music conservatories, his wife simply declined to accompany him.)

  Downstairs, Maggie checked her generous supply of food and drink another time and removed the canaries’ cage from its place in a bay window of her dining room, to carry it into a room at the rear of the house, out of harm’s way. The canaries fluttered their wings and scolded, immediately alert. They were tropical birds, thus delicate, for all their tireless energy, and a blast of cold air could kill them within minutes; the noise of a party would badly agitate them. Maggie had named the male Rex—he was a flamey-orange red-factor from Germany and an extraordinary singer; the female, whose melodic titterings could not be called singing, Maggie had named Sweetpea: she was an American canary, pale yellow, a lovely hue, with subtle, near-invisible white gradations on her wings and tail feathers. The canaries were a mated pair but had thus far produced no offspring; Maggie, who had never before owned birds and would not have supposed she would be interested in owning birds, had bought them for herself, impulsively, in the summer of 1986. After the death of her father and the abrupt defection of Matt Springer.

  The two events were blended in her imagination, like disparate notes struck on a vibrating, pedal-depressed piano.

  By degrees the pace quickened.

  For a time Maggie stationed herself at her front door, welcoming her guests, smiling so hard it seemed her brittle face must break. She was wearing black—why? A silken black wool dress with long sleeves, loose in the bodice and waist as if it belonged to another person, and its skirt awkwardly cut: too formal for the occasion and not, despite its quality, very flattering: Portia MacLeod sighed, seeing.
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  After a while Portia brought her friend a glass of wine and urged her away from the door and into the party. “Do you think things are going well enough?” Maggie asked anxiously. “Shouldn’t I be making more of an effort to introduce people?”

  “It’s a lovely party,” Portia said. “People can introduce themselves perfectly well. Why don’t you relax, Maggie?”

  Maggie’s enormous eyes appeared glazed and her face was unevenly flushed, a hectic ruddiness imposed upon its pallor. She said, “Oh, I am, Portia—I am. Relaxed.”

  One of the early arrivals, amid a carload of graduate fellows, was Brendan Bauer, a new student whom Maggie had registered a few days previously and with whom, in her office at school, she’d had a lengthy conversation. Shy, thin, fidgety, his eyes round behind round, rather thick lenses, he stepped into Maggie Blackburn’s front hall and thrust a bouquet of flowers at her, stammering hello and thanking her for inviting him, as if, in the midst of so many others, he could imagine himself singularly honored. He wore a crudely cut brown suit with boxy shoulders; black loafers; a narrow, dead-black necktie of—was it simulated leather? He’d come to Forest Park by a circuitous route: a Catholic seminary in St. Louis, before that an incomplete year in law school in Seattle, before that musical studies (theory, composition, musicology) at Indiana University, with some interruptions. Maggie Blackburn, in her official role, considering his application, had caught him out in a minor falsification of his record, perhaps an inadvertent error (involving credits and dates), and for this Brendan Bauer had apologized, profusely. His hometown was Boise, Idaho, and he’d never been in the East. His stammer was mild yet it seemed to embarrass, even to anger, him. In Maggie’s office, where they had discussed the courses Brendan would be taking, the opportunities he would have to work, as a composer, with vocalists, but also with computers and synthesizers, he’d squirmed miserably in his seat as several times his voice failed; and Maggie, who knew that one must never upset or insult a stammerer by supplying a word for him or assuring him, “That’s all right, I know what you mean,” sat silent, waiting for the young man to continue. There is a subtle tyranny exerted by some seemingly handicapped persons, and Maggie Blackburn was not the sort to resist.

  At her party, Brendan clung close to her for a time, before easing out, as if into treacherous waters, into the crowded living room and dining room. Talking with other guests, Maggie found herself watching the young man in his ill-chosen clothes, knowing why, as others spoke so readily, and asked questions of one another, and burst into peals of laughter, he stood more or less silent, guarded. Though Brendan Bauer was twenty-seven he was a very young twenty-seven: from a short distance he might well have been mistaken for a boy of sixteen or seventeen. He had a narrow fox face with intelligent if squinty features, fox-colored hair that grew limply over his shirt collar; when finally he ventured into speech, within Maggie’s hearing, in a conversation with Maggie’s colleague Nicholas Reickmann and the twenty-year-old soprano prodigy Cecilia Ch’en, a beautiful Chinese-American from Hong Kong, his manner was excitably grim, yet in its way charming. Maggie liked Brendan Bauer though she was relieved he’d left her side. She saw in him, in his eager yet retreating attitude, in his somber, plain, intense face, even in the slope of his thin shoulders, something of herself: he might have been a younger brother of hers, a distant cousin. She seemed to perceive that he would prove a problem to the school, as, now and then, with a sort of statistical regularity, students did, yet of this, in the noise and gaiety and distraction of her party, she certainly did not think.

  “Great party, Maggie! First rate!” Nicholas Reickmann slipped an arm, gallant, fleeting, around Maggie’s shoulders as he eased past, drink in hand. “Very decent wine!” Rolfe Christensen muttered, close behind Nicholas. Maggie glanced up at Christensen in surprise: she had assumed he wasn’t coming tonight, since he hadn’t troubled (as he had not troubled the previous year, when he’d stayed away) to respond to her invitation. Christensen was a big burly figure in a plaid sport coat; his silvery-gray hair grew thick above his forehead, with a metallic brilliance; sober, he was coldly gentlemanly; after a few drinks he cultivated a glamorous-thuggish style and could be enormously, if sometimes cruelly, entertaining. Approaching sixty, with a large, heavy, red-veined face, Christensen had lost the attractiveness of his youth yet was empowered with the jaunty, slightly overbearing manner of one whom nature has privileged. Usually, Rolfe Christensen ignored Maggie Blackburn or looked pointedly through her; now, in passing, drink in one hand and cigar in the other, he winked at her and gave her a sliding sort of smile, or grimace—smiling at people with whom he did not want to waste time was difficult for him.

  “Whatever else might be said of me,” Christensen had once boasted, at a Forest Park dinner party, “I am not a hypocrite.”

  Maggie watched Nicholas Reickmann and Rolfe Christensen make their way, elegantly shoulder their way, through the crowded living room, with the intention apparently of talking with Christensen’s longtime friend Bill Queller. Nicholas Reickmann was a young woodwind instructor in his early thirties, tonight, as always, vividly dressed; he wore a turquoise suede jacket, a red and white polka-dot shirt open at the throat, oyster-white trousers, glossy shoes with a Cuban heel. Despite certain excesses of behavior, Nicholas was a very nice young man: warm, courteous, amusing; an excellent musician and a reliable teacher; and unfailingly friendly to Maggie Blackburn, with whom, on committees, he was often an ally. When Nicholas first joined the faculty at Forest Park several years ago it was Rolfe Christensen who had immediately and somewhat jealously befriended him—an intense sort of friendship, as Portia MacLeod observed, that would soon burn itself out. And so seemingly it had: its intensity, at least. Yet the two men remained amicable; in a way, at such gatherings, allies of a kind.

  A warm hand descended on Maggie’s shoulder and her cheek was kissed—Jamie Katz. And here, with a hug and another kiss, was Barbara Katz. And Si Lichtman and his wife. And Andrew Woodbridge. And Stanley Spalding. And Katherine Nash. And Morley Nash. And Maggie Blackburn, sipping wine, in a euphoric haze, heard her own laughter erupting in peals, startled and girlish. She found herself the recipient of so many animated greetings, so many handshakes, embraces, kisses, it seemed that she might be, despite her self-doubts, a well-liked woman, perhaps even a very well-liked woman: a fact she must file away for serious consideration at another time.

  She saw him, at the far end of the living room, deep in conversation with the beautiful soprano Cecilia Ch’en, and her heart went cold.

  But no, it was not he; it was Stanley Spalding, who, from a certain angle, resembled him. Dark hair, profile. A way of leaning his elbow against the wall.

  He was not coming after all.

  Yet in her strange invulnerable state, giddiness bubbling along her veins, she did not mind.

  How extraordinary: to realize she did not mind.

  Why, she was invulnerable as the hide of one of those scaly reptilian mammals, ugly little devils … armadillos, were they?

  “What on earth are you laughing at, Maggie?” Portia asked.

  “Armadillo,” Maggie Blackburn said, weak with hilarity. “So funny.”

  Suppose Maggie suffered one of her amnesiac fugues at her own party, beneath her own roof, and woke dazed and uncomprehending after everyone had gone home? Maggie laughed, wiped at her eyes, then at something peculiar that had dribbled down the front of her tasteful black dress (caviar off a Finn Crisp cracker?), and vowed through gritted teeth that would not be.

  She accepted a damp goodbye kiss from one of her colleagues Fritzie Krill, with the scratchy shoeshine-black whiskers and the pirate’s gold stud in his left ear, laughing, vowing that would not be.

  Seeing Maggie in the front hall waving after her guests who were leaving early, Byron MacLeod said to Portia, “Maggie really is a fine woman, isn’t she,” as if the issue were debatable, and there was a maddening condescension in his tone; thus Portia said, “Oh, Christ! You men!”
and turned away. And Byron, who meant only well, stared in astonishment after her.

  Maggie Blackburn was not drunk, nor was she consumed with anxiety that one of her guests had failed to arrive. Not at all. In fact she no longer checked the time. Her wristwatch went unconsulted, twisted around her wrist and upside down.

  Talking perfectly coherently, indeed very intelligently, about the difficult Beethoven piece she and her colleague William Queller, the cellist, were scheduled to perform together in the chapel, in December, “A beautiful, beautiful piece of music,” Maggie said, her eyes misting over. Bill Queller, smooth bald head, amused eyes, nasal voice like a woodwind, said, “I think of it as a problem to be solved, and suggest that you think of it that way too. If we want to get on together.”

  Bill was a friend of Rolfe Christensen’s, one of the composer’s few intimates in Forest Park. It occurred to Maggie that, yes, probably yes, these men shared a common disdain for her … for which she was not to blame? Or was?

  The party was scheduled to begin at six and end at eight.

  At seven-forty, when it was almost too late, and indeed Maggie had given up, Calvin Gould did arrive—breathless, with an air of impatience—an important man: provost of the Conservatory, highly regarded musicologist. He did not kiss Maggie’s burning cheek, too formal a man for such a gesture, but he did squeeze her hand, harder than might have been necessary, pressing one of her outsized antique rings into her flesh. But Maggie did not wince. Her eyes shone in simple girlish joy. Calvin Gould, who’d shaved hurriedly, dressed hurriedly, for a social event to which perhaps he had not much wanted to come, apologized to his hostess for being late, and for his wife’s absence, and smiled one of his tense twitchy smiles, saying, as his eyes dropped to take in the whole of her dress, “How lovely you look tonight, Maggie!”