Nemesis

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Maggie laughed, stung, at this ambiguous remark and went to fetch a drink for her guest, who remained in the living room, humming and clucking to himself, running his bow lightly across the strings of his cello. Is he the murderer? she wondered, another time.

  “Blackmail was his trump card, but alas his downfall as well,” Bill Queller said, taking the glass of Scotch from Maggie and drinking at once, with a deep shuddering sigh. “Not that I know from personal experience because I do not. Our relationship was in no way coercive, for I liked him and he did not like me well enough to wish me to capitulate to him against my will … if you follow my meaning, Maggie, which I sense you do not.”

  “Blackmail?”

  “Blackmails. Partly out of necessity, for his career was always ‘in crisis,’ and partly pour le sport.”

  “Rolfe Christensen was blackmailing people?”

  Bill Queller wagged a warning finger and laughed and said, “Try for instance Si Lichtman, not me. I was perhaps not pretty enough to—um, qualify.” He was on his feet, preparing to leave. He finished his drink in a single swallow and pursed his lips as if he were tasting something vile and seized hold of Maggie’s hand and said in a new, earnest voice, “You don’t judge, Maggie? You’ve been so kind to your young friend what’s-his-name, it requires a truly generous heart, and he is … oh I’m certain! … quite blameless. I am fifty-six years old: my heart is not merely dried out but positively salted. All I have left is my music, my lovely cello, and my … I’d like to say pride but I must mean shame. My public, irrefragable shame.”

  Embarrassed, Maggie murmured, “Oh, Bill, please, I really don’t think—”

  Tartly, Bill Queller said, “Nor do you, dear Maggie, know.”

  Squeezing her hand just a trifle too hard.

  On his way out of Maggie’s house Bill said, “I know you won’t repeat this, dear, especially not to … what is his name—the detective, the one with the unfortunate skin—but sometimes I can’t remember if I did either of the … acts. Sometimes as in a dream where you both know and don’t know, d’you understand? … it seems that I bought the chocolates myself, and—um, the rest; and I (I who cannot bear even to glance at rare roast beef lying on a dinner plate!) seem to have taken a butcher knife, or some sort of knife, to poor Nicky Reickmann whom … I adored. It is all so confusing, isn’t it? But you, dear Maggie: you don’t judge. Do you?”

  At the door, seeing the expression on Maggie’s face, the cellist relented in his ebullience and assured her that they would perform “splendidly” the next day; she was not to fret. “No matter the disintegration within I promise to be ‘Queller’ on the outside,” he said, squeezing Maggie’s hand, again rather hard, and looking her frankly in the eyes. “These public rituals are our sole opportunities, after all, to redeem ourselves—don’t you agree?”

  If Maggie had known that the dedication—To R.C.: with infinite thanks—was there, at the front of Calvin Gould’s 1977 study of Schumann, The Romantic Lyre, she had not remembered it. Though she kept Calvin’s several books prominently displayed on a shelf in her living room, and though they were books which, in fact, she did consult frequently.

  And yet it means nothing, probably, she thought.

  Said Si Lichtman in his nasal, languorous voice, choosing his words with such care that they sounded faintly contemptuous and pausing frequently to pick bits of tobacco, or imagined bits of tobacco, off his tongue, “Shall I be frank? For once? Yes he did. He did exert a kind of … pressure. And now he’s dead I should feel some relief but I don’t, quite. Maybe I will, but I don’t, yet. I suppose it’s because so much is unresolved, and though the police have arrested Brendan Bauer, and very likely the poor young man did commit both murders, there doesn’t seem actually to be any … resolution. It’s like a deliberately thwarted recapitulation, in a symphony, let’s say, and where there should be a release of tension, a reaffirmation of an earlier key, there is, instead, parody … the curse of our modernist times. But to explain Christensen, or to try: most normal people aspire to be liked, even loved; admired, generally. It isn’t simply vanity or pride, it’s a genuine, healthy, human emotion. But not Rolfe Christensen. He preferred being disliked, since it gave him a sense of power. If, for instance, someone was drawn to him—as many were, of course, especially when he was younger: not I, but others—he took a sadistic pleasure in deliberately thwarting the impulse. Why should I submit to your notion of me? he seemed to be asking. I’m more powerful than you; I can’t be controlled by you. He took a positive relish in disemboweling the weak; I believe he actually identified with Wagner, though he professed to scorn German influences. What a monster! And yet he had … has … his defenders: not I, but others.”

  It was the Tuesday following the Sunday of Bill Queller’s disappearance. Maggie was in Lichtman’s office at the Conservatory, where she’d gone to ask her colleague pointedly about Rolfe Christensen and blackmail; Lichtman had hesitated only a moment before beginning to speak. Yes, he knew something of Christensen and blackmail, but Maggie must promise not to repeat what he said.

  “Yes,” said Maggie. “I promise.”

  “I gather that Bill told you … certain things? I didn’t belong to their circle; I’m not even certain there was a circle. Rolfe wanted power in opposition to normal human attachments. But he kept his victims … if that isn’t too strong a word … unconnected with one another. For instance, in my case—did Bill tell you? Did Bill know?—it was a quite accidental discovery of something I’d written that bore an awkward resemblance to something by another baroque specialist. I had a postdoctorate fellowship, I was working on Bach manuscripts, I might have been careless … or desperate … and failed to attribute sources as I should have done. In retrospect, after eighteen years, I don’t truly think it was very important, but at the time I hadn’t tenure; at the time I was extremely vulnerable, and even so much as a suspicion of plagiarism would have ruined my academic career. Composers, of course, especially composers like Christensen, coming at a time when musical inspiration seems to have all but dried up, borrow. But for a music historian, standards are different, purer, and Christensen knew he had me. Ah, he had me!

  “I was twenty-eight when, out of playfulness almost, Christensen began this … persecution; I’m forty-six now. We had a mutual acquaintance—in fact, a mentor of mine at Princeton”—Lichtman named a prominent baroque scholar, now retired—“and there was the perennial threat that Christensen would tell him about my alleged plagiarism if I didn’t cooperate with him in various ways. (Not erotically. I do believe I would have murdered him, if he’d tried to force me into that.) It’s difficult for me to explain how Christensen’s persecution of me was almost good-natured at times, as if it were a sort of mutual joke, a secret rapport; he’d arrange to have drinks with me and go into one of his lyric speeches about how he deserved greater homage from the younger generation of music critics; it was adulation Christensen wanted, enormous respect, for the man truly believed himself a genius. ‘I don’t want to settle for posthumous fame,’ he actually said, once. Rolfe Christensen, that charlatan! Admittedly, he had some talent, but he squandered it, fussy little self-conscious neoclassical pieces, the sort of thing Prokofiev did in 1917, then moved away from. Christensen was always so fearful of criticism, so fawning with people he perceived as having power … though absolutely vicious about them, behind their backs.

  “It was I (and, Maggie, you must never tell anyone!) who was instrumental in getting Christensen his precious Pulitzer Prize, I was one of the three judges on the music committee that year and he put extraordinary pressure on me, and I hadn’t any choice, really, or so it seemed … being a ‘prominent’ musicologist, after all, from the prestigious Forest Park Conservatory, with a reputation that might be damaged by the slightest suspicion of impropriety. For though I now had tenure, I now had a professional reputation to guard. For this favor, the Pulitzer, Christensen was absurdly grateful. It changed his public image overnight; he became respect
able, he became the American composer in certain circles. Suddenly he was receiving commissions, he was chairing award-giving panels in Washington, he was invited to the White House. Very quickly, of course, for such is our capacity for self-delusion, Christensen came to believe that he’d won the prize because he deserved it … even as he knew, with a part of his mind, that he’d won it solely because of me, Si Lichtman, a man who thoroughly detested him!

  “Not long afterward, he lost his teaching job at Stanford, the result of some sort of sordid entanglement with a young music student, and began to put pressure on us to hire him here, as composer-in-residence. ‘I want a position at Forest Park, I deserve a position at Forest Park,’ he said. ‘There’s no one in America who deserves that position more than Rolfe Christensen,’ he actually shouted at me over the phone. And so, eventually, Rolfe Christensen did get appointed here. I didn’t push hard for the appointment but I didn’t oppose it either. Christensen would have known if I had; he would have done his best to ruin me. Well: he came here, as you well know; he tried to behave himself with our students and spent a good deal of time in Manhattan, where he had an apartment in SoHo; the trustees and their wives, the wealthy benefactors and their wives, were all quite charmed by Christensen—he showed his very best face to them, which is, more or less, all that such people require. Until the time of the Bauer incident, when he seems to have lost control entirely, Christensen was no worse and no better than many another prominent artist in a similar position anywhere. You pay the big man, the big name, to be on your faculty, for publicity’s sake, and naturally he does very little in terms of actual teaching; might in fact be on leave every other year or traveling much of the time. The real work of teaching is done by others, as we all know. Do we know!”

  There was a pause. Lichtman said, squinting at Maggie Blackburn through a haze of cigarette smoke, “Maggie, you look so sad … or pained. You did ask me, after all, and so I’m telling you. Things I’ve never wanted to tell my wife, for shame. But if you didn’t want to hear, why did you ask?”

  Put so forcibly, the question was like a mild rebuke.

  “I … I did want to hear, Si. Of course.”

  Maggie’s eyes were stinging from the smoke of Lichtman’s cigarette.

  Is this man the murderer? was not a question one might reasonably pose in terms of Si Lichtman, the highly regarded baroque specialist, the amateur harpsichordist, the good, decent, reliable colleague with the kindly smile, yet the speech he’d just made, in a self-mocking yet somewhat aggressive voice, filled Maggie with a sensation of regret and dismay; very nearly, in its way, with a kind of horror. For the research Maggie had been involved in recently, a species of detection, the writing of letters to friends, associates, former colleagues and students of the late Rolfe Christensen, telephone calls made around the country and even to London, to solicit a sense of the man’s position in the world of music, had suggested to her that there might well be a network of a kind in the profession to which she’d devoted herself, for love: a way in which, secretly, as if in an elaborate game, men systematically protected one another, promoted one another, lied about one another, gave awards, prizes, academic appointments to one another—while, frequently, detesting one another. How was it possible!

  One man, self-described as a former friend of Rolfe Christensen’s but an ongoing acolyte, said, with the assurance that Maggie would keep his identity secret, “Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate. You wouldn’t want Rolfe Christensen as an enemy.”

  (Since Nicholas Reickmann’s murder and Brendan Bauer’s arrest, Maggie had compiled lists: lists of names, some familiar to her, some remotely familiar, others entirely unknown. All were related in some significant way to Rolfe Christensen; some to both Christensen and Reickmann. There was an A list, there was a B list, there was a C list; there was a Forest Park list, a New York City-SoHo list, an Interlaken list, an Aspen list, a Salzburg list, a London list, a Clarkson-School-of-the-Arts-Summer-’83 list—places with which, over the course of his lengthy and varied career, the composer had been associated.)

  As Lichtman spoke, trusting her, Maggie halfway wondered if, in turn, she might trust him: might show him her lists, solicit his opinion.… But, no: Si’s name is among the names of suspects, she thought, on more than one list. He would never forgive me.

  Instead, Maggie heard herself ask a question she had not intended to ask. “Was Calvin Gould centrally involved in bringing Rolfe Christensen here?”

  It was a question to which Maggie already knew the answer. “Yes, of course,” Lichtman said. “As provost, naturally. As Cal was—and is—involved in any high-ranking appointment.”

  “What I mean is, do you think Calvin might have been involved with Christensen in … the way you were? That he might have been blackmailed?”

  Lichtman had lit up another cigarette and now exhaled smoke in derisory streams from his nostrils. Unhesitatingly, he said, “Oh, I doubt it. Cal Gould? Nahhhhh.”

  “You don’t think so.”

  “I don’t, no. Cal just isn’t”—and here Lichtman paused to pick a bit of tobacco, or an imagined bit of tobacco, off his tongue—“the type. Not that pusillanimous, not that passive; not, you know, the victim type.”

  “But neither do you seem, Si, the ‘victim type.’”

  Maggie had not intended to flatter Si Lichtman, still less to sexually flatter him, for the remark seemed to her merely a statement of fact; but Lichtman, long-faced, with big discolored horsy teeth, kindly crinkles about his eyes, smiled broadly at her, and sighed, and said, after a moment, enigmatically, “And neither do you, Maggie Blackburn.”

  The remark would strike Maggie, afterward, as a blend of the aggressive and the flirtatious, but she let it pass now, for she was in her zeal, hardly less than Detective Sergeant David Miles or the late Mr. Blackburn, not to be deflected from her line of inquiry. She leaned forward in her chair, facing Si Lichtman across his desk, and said, in a low, rapid, rather breathless voice, “Calvin Gould wasn’t provost yet, actually, when Rolfe Christensen was appointed here. But was he active in arranging the appointment? Do you remember?”

  Lichtman frowned, and fussed with his pack of cigarettes, and said, “That was—how long ago?—eleven years, twelve? Yes, I’m sure Cal was active; he has always been what’s called active. He gave up piano, and he seems to have given up serious musical scholarship, because they weren’t active enough for him. That is why he was promoted so rapidly and why he’ll be our next president, despite his … well, let’s say his awkward domestic life; his handicap, if it is a handicap, in not having a conventional wife and helpmate, like dear Mrs. Babcock. Still,” Lichtman said, with a look of distaste, as if being forced to see, from this perspective, his own position, “Cal Gould just isn’t the type. He isn’t a coward. I can’t imagine him, an ex-marine, enduring that kind of pressure from someone like Christensen, acquiescing to that kind of coercion. It was shame, sheer shame, I mean the fear of public shame, that kept me under his thumb all those years; no other reason. I might not strike you, Maggie, as a victim, and I hope I don’t strike others that way, including my wife and children, but I am, I suppose, a moral coward about my professional reputation, my standing among my peers, the way my students perceive me—that sort of thing. It’s harder for men, I think, than for women: women may think of themselves as ‘women,’ aliens of a kind in masculine territory; but men never think of themselves as ‘men,’ only as what is given, the norm, the normal. Thus to maintain one’s precious, precarious ego in a field of so many other combative egos is sometimes exhausting.” Lichtman laughed suddenly, baring his teeth in a grimace of a smile. He said, “Maggie, you do look pained. Surely none of this is surprising, really?”

  Maggie thought, Yes, in fact it is.

  She thought, in dismay, Yes. It is.

  Yet she perceived that Si Lichtman, perhaps unconsciously, meant to deflect her from her line of inquiry; so, after a suitable pause, she continued. “But why would Calvin have
been active in bringing Rolfe Christensen, with his controversial reputation, to Forest Park? Calvin is genuinely devoted to the school; he is truly impassioned about it; of all our colleagues he works the longest hours. It can’t be just personal ambition. And why did Calvin protect Christensen last fall, when everyone was prepared for the school to fire Christensen, and when, in fact”—Maggie’s heart pained her: how could she be uttering such disloyal things about the man she respected so much, whom indeed she loved, and who had almost singlehandedly brought her to Forest Park, then had overseen the advancement of her career—“he disliked him intensely?”

  Lichtman stared at Maggie as if seeing her for the first time, and not quite sure whether he liked what he saw. With a negligent shrug of his shoulders, he said, “Oh, politics. Christensen was a name; the school wanted a name; Cal, as provost at least, has to be concerned with public relations—billionaire donors above all. And it was Woodbridge, I’m sure, who swayed the committee into keeping Christensen. His brilliantly petty lawyerly mind.”

  Maggie persisted, for indeed this part of the Christensen case had always perplexed her. “But when I first spoke with Calvin, in his office, the morning after Brendan Bauer came to me with his account of being raped, Calvin’s reaction was immediate—he was angry, he was disgusted, he was incensed. His response was absolutely genuine. He hadn’t any thought of public relations or scandal, only sympathy for Brendan Bauer; but later, after the committee began to meet, he seemed to have changed his mind. As Brendan said, he seemed to be protecting Rolfe Christensen. He counseled Brendan not to press criminal charges.”

  Lichtman said, an edge to his voice, “Cal is an ambitious man; he doesn’t want trouble. I’m sure it was Woodbridge who coerced the committee into its transparently political, cowardly decision. You know how lawyers are: it’s all a game to them, essentially.” He bared his oversized teeth in a grin. “What are you leading to, with your suggestion that Cal was involved with Rolfe Christensen? Are you suggesting that he killed him? Cal, of all people?”