Nemesis

by Joyce Carol Oates

  At least the letter resembled J; it was slightly smudged.

  Mrs. Moyer said, marveling, “Isn’t this lovely! Isn’t it a surprise! Do you know who J is, Maggie? He—or she; I suppose it could be ‘she’—is certainly fond of you.”

  Not fond, Maggie thought. Grateful.

  She turned the card in her fingers, trying to think who J could be, and feeling her cheeks, cool from the out-of-doors, rapidly heat. So much attention embarrassed her (for others were coming into the office, colleagues and students; at this time of the morning the departmental office was a cheerful much-trafficked place); yet of course she was pleased, and touched; at the same time (though she managed to hide this) she could not fail to feel a keen ache of disappointment, for a luxurious box of chocolates from a piano pupil is not quite the same thing as a luxurious box of chocolates from a lover, even a former lover. Maggie thought, Of course it couldn’t be Matt Springer; he has forgotten me entirely as I’ve almost forgotten him.

  The thought struck her: “It’s probably Jennifer Lehman—you all remember Jenny, don’t you?—I got a very nice card from her weeks ago, from London. She said she was coming home for the holidays.”

  So it seemed established, on such slender evidence, that the mysterious J was a 1986 graduate of the Forest Park Conservatory, a gifted young woman pianist currently teaching and studying in London.

  Maggie passed her gift box liberally about, and some eight or ten or twelve people sampled the chocolates, pronouncing them delicious; she would have left the box with Mrs. Moyer and the others, for the rich gourmet chocolates were simply too much for her—she’d inherited from her mother a vague moral disapproval of such extravagant foods—but Mrs. Moyer vehemently protested. She was one of those older, well-intentioned female presences in Maggie’s life who believed that Maggie slighted herself; less intrusive than Portia MacLeod, for she was after all not nearly so close to Maggie, she shared with Portia a conviction that, in her unmarried and presumably loveless state, Maggie had an obligation to reward herself more visibly. “You must take the present home; it’s for you,” Mrs. Moyer said, shutting up the red satin heart and giving it to her. “It wasn’t sent to strangers.”

  Maggie did not see the logic of this but would not quarrel and, chastised, carried the box back with her to her office, where she set it prominently on her desk so that students and colleagues could sample the candies. Maggie’s office, too, as a consequence of her administrative duties, was a much-trafficked place; within a day or so all the chocolates—milk chocolates and bittersweet chocolates and chocolate-covered Brazil nuts and nougats and cherries and creams and liqueurs—were safely gone.

  Rarely did Maggie eat sweets, which she associated with childish, even infantile tastes and desires; but in a weak moment (when dusk had deepened to night, and the wind was blowing icy particles of snow against her office window, and she was still at her desk doing paperwork, answering memos, letters, graduate applications, there being no compelling reason for her to return to her silent, empty house, and the thought Oh, why? passed over her like a shadow)—in a weak moment she ate a single chocolate, one of the plainer ones, a dark rich solid chocolate, chewier than she might have expected, and extremely sweet. Sugar assailed the inside of her mouth as if it were a sort of acid or poison, achingly delicious.

  The taste, which seemed to her faintly obscene, remained with her for hours.

  “We know what that is, Mr. Christensen, at least we think we do!”

  On the afternoon of Thursday, December 8, Rolfe Christensen in his handsome sealskin coat, looking quite rested, even invigorated, dropped by his departmental office to pick up his mail (which accumulated in his absence, often taking up much of a table adjoining the faculty mailboxes); and there awaited him, delivered priority mail that morning, an oblong box of the size and approximate shape of a necktie box but with slightly more thickness. It was heavier than one might have expected and was fastidiously wrapped in stiff brown paper with an excessive amount of crisscrossing transparent tape and string; MR. ROLFE CHRISTENSEN, COMPOSER-IN-RESIDENCE and the address of the Forest Park Conservatory were printed in large block letters, in black ink, on two sides. Whether the zip code for the Conservatory was inaccurate by a digit or not Rolfe Christensen took no time to notice, nor did he trouble to open the intricately secured package himself; Mrs. Moyer, who liked him so much, was happy to open it for him.

  (Though Christensen was certainly the object of jealousy and rancor on the part of certain colleagues, he was unfailingly popular with the female departmental staff, especially with white-haired Mrs. Moyer, whom he effortlessly charmed. Christensen was one of those men, monumental in his own vision, like Wagner or Balzac, who enjoyed his own magnanimity of spirit as it applied to underlings in no way competitive with or even critical of him. Thus good-hearted Mrs. Moyer, fond as she was of Maggie Blackburn, was fonder still of the distinguished Rolfe Christensen and would hear no evil of him from any quarter.)

  While Christensen bemusedly glanced through his other pieces of mail, flipping some envelopes directly into the waste-paper basket without troubling to open them and humming cheerfully under his breath—one of his own, freshly imagined compositions, to be worked into a tone poem cleverly built upon an inverted phrase of Mahler’s—Mrs. Moyer struggled with the package, using a scissors, and tore away the paper, crying, “Ah, look! It is! Just what we thought!”

  But this gift was different from Maggie Blackburn’s: an elegant little candy box resembling an old-fashioned jewel box, made of finely engraved lightweight aluminum and filled with one dozen chocolate-covered white truffles, imported from Vienna.

  Rolfe Christensen quickly set aside his other items of mail and took up the candy box, his face radiating childlike pleasure. It was not simply that he had a weakness for chocolate; he had a weakness for quality, especially ostentatious quality, in any form. But what if the gift was a trick of some kind? What if the chocolates had been tampered with? He examined the little card that accompanied it and read aloud, “From one of those countless grateful former students and devotees of R.C., without question the most brilliant composer of our time. Yours forever, J.”

  “Isn’t that thoughtful! Isn’t that generous!” Mrs. Moyer exclaimed. Her tone was nearly vehement as if, these many weeks, she had been defending the Conservatory’s most prominent faculty member against certain of his detractors and would have liked them to see what he was holding so triumphantly now in his hand. “If you can’t guess who J is, Mr. Christensen, there’s a way you can find out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well—maybe I shouldn’t spoil the fun for you, and let you guess—”

  “You know who sent this?”

  “It’s a piano student who graduated two years ago; she’s studying now in London, and—”

  “But how do you know that?”

  “Because Maggie Blackburn received a gift box of chocolates from her the other day too, wrapped up exactly like yours. Not such fancy chocolates as yours, and not in such a beautiful box, but—”

  Rolfe Christensen’s expression had stiffened, and he no longer appeared quite so delighted. “I see,” he said. “The Blackburn woman—too.”

  “You must have had a student in common: Jennifer Lehman? Do you remember Jennifer? A very sweet young woman, a very talented young pianist.”

  “Oh I’m sure I remember her—I’m sure I will,” Rolfe Christensen said carelessly. “As long as the chocolates are all right.”

  “They’re absolutely delicious. Maggie passed her box around, and we all had some.”

  “Well,” said Rolfe Christensen. “Good.”

  It was clear that the composer was losing interest in his present surroundings. He made no more effort to recall his former student and apparent devotee “Jennifer Lehman” and gathered up his things, preparing to leave. A gentleman of impulsive charitable gestures, he certainly wished it were the case that his gift box was larger, so that he too could pass it around
the office or at least offer a chocolate to Mrs. Moyer, who was always doing him so many small favors; but it was not, and such delicacies were too precious to be squandered on anyone excepting a particular friend or houseguest.

  As Rolfe Christensen, burly, kingly, silvery-haired, swept out of the office, Mrs. Moyer said to her assistant, Louise, “Isn’t he a fine figure of a man! I don’t care what jealous people say about him—I don’t even listen.”

  “Small consolation.”

  Rolfe Christensen was often secretly angry when, in others’ eyes, he appeared most pleased: for life was not a matter of mere surfaces to him, and each gift or award or honor or good notice he received brought with it a fresh and humiliating reminder that such boons came more readily to certain of his rivals; that they came, often, belatedly and even grudgingly to Rolfe Christensen; that they were in fact small consolations for the vaster, less tangible rewards certain of his contemporaries enjoyed—the genuine admiration of the young, the attention of music critics and theorists, the respect of performing artists. It seemed to Christensen a surpassing insult that no major performing artist had ever asked to play a composition of his. “Why then should I go to hear Horowitz, Menuhin, Entremont, Pavarotti? Why should I buy their records?” His friends had long since learned to change the subject.

  So far as the Conservatory was concerned, Christensen felt somewhat more at ease, though still ambivalent. The school was his home, so to speak, when he was in the States. (He spent a good deal of his time each year in Paris, Rome, Tangier.) He was proud of his position—and of his gratifyingly high salary—and would have been mortified to lose them. Thus—perversely, as it seemed to some observers, yet quite naturally, as it seemed to others and to Christensen himself—the composer was in the habit of visiting campus more frequently than ever since the controversial decision of the committee on ethics and faculty responsibility suspending his “teaching duties” but maintaining him as composer-in-residence. He knew that community opinion was divided; he had a vague awareness that there had been several short-lived protests organized—one of them a petition signed by a number of faculty members and sent to President Babcock; another a spontaneous demonstration in front of the administration building, led by graduate students in support of Brendan Bauer (whom most of them had never met)—Bill Queller had even mentioned an unsigned letter sent to The New York Times charging the Conservatory with a cover-up and inviting the newspaper to do an investigative report on the case. (“Let anyone talk who wants to talk,” Christensen said excitedly. “If it gets into print, Steadman and I will slap them with defamation suits.”) He understood that mean-spirited people would always gossip about him, yet that filled him, in a way, with a sense of purpose, even of elation. For Rolfe Christensen was not so easily defeated.

  Since giving his testimony to the committee, and reiterating portions of it countless times, Christensen remembered not what had happened on the night of September 17 between him and young Brendan Bauer but what he’d testified; even within a day or two of the episode he was beginning to forget, as he often did in such situations. (There had been a few such, over the course of Christensen’s varied and vigorous career.) Yes, he supposed he’d played rough with Bauer, or Brower, or Blower, whatever the young man’s foolish name, and perhaps he regretted it, in retrospect at least, not for the hurt he’d caused (in which he did not much believe) but for the hurt he’d experienced and all the hypocritical rant of “ethics” and “responsibility.”

  Yet the fact remained, he and the young man were mutually consenting adults. There had been no crime committed—surely!

  One evening, his friend Bill Queller had surprised him by saying, out of nowhere, “This poor boy—must you persecute him too?” Christensen had been incredulous. “What do you mean, persecute him, persecute him too?” And Queller said, with a forcefulness unusual in him, “Haven’t you been telling the committee he’s a liar, trying to blackmail you?” and Christensen retorted, “How do you know what my defense is? The hearings are closed,” and Bill Queller said, “Just answer my question, Rolfe: must you defame the poor boy too, in addition to having—well, injured him?” And so the men had argued, one of their very worst arguments, and Rolfe Christensen had sent his importunate friend home, and it was weeks before they were on speaking terms again. But Christensen felt he could never again trust Bill Queller, for what is friendship if it is not predicated upon loyalty?

  Calvin Gould was not, strictly speaking, a friend of Rolfe Christensen’s. But the man was loyal.

  As were others, at the Forest Park Conservatory and elsewhere. For Christensen had had indeed a varied and vigorous career.

  “And here I am, still.”

  He was thinking of these matters, smiling to himself, as he strolled in the wintry sunshine, in no hurry, in the direction of his BMW, illegally parked behind the concert hall. Taking note of the wondering eyes of students—the frank stares of some—yet there were invariably those who brightened at the sight of him, the distinguished composer-in-residence, grinning—“H’lo, Mr. Christensen!”—favored students of his of past semesters whose names he might have forgotten but whose attractive faces he had not. And there was Fritzie Krill with his piratical black beard and irreverent eyes, who should have been an ally surely?—yet with a clumsy pretense of being in a hurry, no time for more than a mumbled greeting as he passed, the contemptible little bastard.

  Did Rolfe Christensen’s colleagues think he would, however persecuted, simply go away?

  Did the fools think that, if they chose to ignore him, he would not therefore exist?

  In the BMW, as the motor roared and warmed, Christensen impulsively removed one of the chocolate-covered truffles from the box, unwrapped the gold foil, and tossed it, crumpled, out the window; as he drove along the central campus road he chewed the delicacy, inner concentration intense. He was not addicted to chocolate, of course, but chocolate was an early and abiding love of his.

  Where human beings have failed us, the pleasures of the stomach remain.

  So Christensen devoured one of the chocolate-covered truffles and would, in a sudden rush of appetite, have unwrapped and devoured a second, but there came within moments an eerie counter-sensation, as of the earth shifting on its axis, or of infinite regret.

  Not nausea but a violent and melancholy absence of nausea—an incapability of vomiting.

  A sudden constriction of the chest. Something flamelike, rippling, in his throat, in his chest. And his mouth too, belatedly, though flooded with saliva, began to burn.

  “Help! H-help me!”

  Even as the BMW drifted off the road before the astonished eyes of onlookers, Christensen managed to get the door open, managed to stagger out, and fell to his knees on the snow-stubbled grass, crying for help. He tore at the collar of the sealskin coat; he was gagging, choking, gracelessly heaving, and then, as passersby stared in horror, he began to writhe and convulse on the ground, no longer screaming but only gagging and grunting. He knew then that he had made an irrevocable error, but even as he knew he was incapable of comprehension for the violent clawing and scalding and scouring pain that illuminated his body from within was beyond comprehension; he had not even the language to think I have been poisoned or I am going to die, nor could he hear the soft terrified cries of witnesses: “It’s Rolfe Christensen, isn’t it?” and “Oh, it’s Mr. Christensen!” and “Oh, my God—is it Rolfe Christensen?”

  In this convulsive agony, his face red and swollen as a tomato about to burst, his eyes bulging in their sockets, Rolfe Christensen no longer resembled himself or any person he had ever imagined he might be.

  By the time an ambulance from the Forest Park Medical Center arrived, Christensen was no longer conscious; by the time the ambulance delivered him to the emergency room of the Medical Center, he had sunk into a deep coma.

  And by the time Maggie learned of the episode, at 6:45 P.M.—she had been rehearsing, with Bill Queller, the Beethoven sonata for cello and piano they were sche
duled to perform at a Conservatory recital in two weeks, the two of them hidden away in one of the soundproof practice rooms in Phillips Hall—Christensen was dead. His heart had stopped during the emergency room procedure and no effort of resuscitation could bring it back.

  Hearing the astounding news, Maggie whispered, “Oh—oh, no,” and for a moment seemed to lose consciousness, though she was able to remain on her feet. Her first sensation was not one of horror but of simple incredulity laced with guilt, as in a child who cannot comprehend that his deepest wish may have been granted, because it is his wish, and because it lies lodged so deep.

  12

  I did not do it.

  I did not calculatingly inject a dozen chocolate-covered truffles with poison and mail them to Rolfe Christensen with the intention of killing him.

  I might have said I wanted to kill him. But I don’t remember.

  I might have said I wanted to kill him but I don’t remember, and if I said those words I didn’t mean them and if in the madness of saying them before witnesses I seem to have meant them I didn’t commit the murder. I did not.

  For hours he’d been waiting for the footsteps in the corridor and the knock on his door, and when at last, shortly before midnight, the police came for him, he gave himself up unprotestingly to their authority, grown exhausted by that time, physically depleted, broken. His limbs were trembling and his teeth faintly chattering and his stammer was bad … very bad … so like a muscular spasm that the police officers regarded him with looks of frank alarm. Was Brendan Bauer an epileptic, was he about to have a convulsion? He meant only to say, to explain, Yes I am Brendan Bauer, yes I know you have my name, yes I’ll go with you and answer your questions but I am innocent, I am the victim and this is a mistake and I am innocent, but the helpless gagging sounds that issued from his mouth were scarcely recognizable as words.