Nemesis

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The reason Calvin had come to see her, revealed only at the door, had been to determine why Maggie had made inquiries regarding Naomi Gould, the woman he called his wife—which testified to the heightened paranoia the man must be feeling. To suspect Maggie of suspecting him, or him and his “wife,” how desperate he must be!—how dangerous!

  Even so, Maggie tried to console herself: Calvin wouldn’t hurt you. He wouldn’t hurt you.

  He had kissed her, hadn’t he?—but his lips were cold, hard, without love, a kind of interrogation, and his fingers framing her face had been viselike, tight enough to cause discomfort. How many times you’d dreamt of that man kissing you—and so he has! Poor fool!

  Maggie shuddered. It would have been so easy for Calvin’s hands to drop to her throat, and squeeze, and squeeze, and squeeze the life out of her.

  In the kitchen a single muted bulb burned above the electric stove, but Maggie did not want to switch the brighter overhead light on, reasoning that, should Calvin be somehow observing her, he could not see her clearly, or her actions … though at the same time she knew, or was fairly certain, that Calvin had driven away in his car and that she was safe. What can I tell David Miles? What sense will any of this make? She had the detective’s card in her fingers but her fingers had lost nearly all sensation, and the card fell to the floor and she stooped clumsily to pick it up … a wave of dizziness struck her … and the music in her head was, so unexpectedly, a blast of Charles Ives, that din of rival musics, Sunday brass bands, the unlovely cacophony of the outside world. Maggie fumbled for the card and snatched it up, panting … wondering if perhaps she’d imagined everything, and Calvin Gould who was her friend had simply dropped by for the purpose he’d told her, to see how she was, and how she was bearing up under the strain. Already she was forgetting what he’d said about Brendan having been tied up, tied with electrical cord, and even if she wasn’t forgetting perhaps there was a rational explanation for his knowing, perhaps in fact without informing her Brendan had told the committee or had told Calvin in private and had afterward forgotten … what then? How would it seem if Maggie Blackburn called the police, in a semihysterical state, and accused Calvin Gould, the provost of the Forest Park Conservatory of Music, of murder?

  And how would it seem if she revealed the fact, astonishing in itself but not, in itself, incriminating, that the woman with whom Calvin Gould lived, and whom he presented to the world as his wife, was not his wife but his sister—his twin sister, baptized Caroline Gould?

  For so Maggie had discovered on her trip to Bangor, Maine, where Calvin Gould had been born. The fact had not aroused her suspicion so much as confirmed it, for she’d known, or had guessed, that “Naomi” was related by something far deeper than a mere marital bond to Calvin Gould.

  But what of this can I tell David Miles? What sense will any of it make?

  These minutes, Maggie Blackburn stood indecisively, the detective’s card in her fingers. She stood in her dim-lit kitchen in front of the telephone on the wall, staring into space, thinking, or trying to think. She knew that Calvin Gould was a murderer but in what did her “knowledge” consist, seeing the fact in his eyes, when he’d allowed her to look deeply, intimately, into them, as into a lover’s eyes? Yet at the same time she could not seriously believe that the man was a murderer—could she?

  If you ever think you’re in danger, please call.

  Maggie Blackburn had decided to telephone David Miles when, to her surprise, the telephone began ringing; she took up the receiver hoping it might—somehow—be help; but there came instead that high, nasal, breathless voice, that so familiar voice. “Hello, M-Maggie? This is Brendan”—overloud and anxious in her ear, and boyishly emboldened as if with drink. “I’m calling to say that I … I love you, Maggie, and I want to be with you … spend the rest of my life with you. I know I’m not worthy of you … no one is … but I would try to be a better man, Maggie … I promise. I … I know this is unexpected, you’re probably … shocked … but I hope you aren’t offended. Maggie, I’ve never been in love before, I’m so miserable and so happy!”

  Maggie heard the sounds of her young friend’s earnest words, rather than their specific sense, blazing past her like sparks.

  “Maggie? Are you … all right? Did I upset you?”

  Maggie said quickly, “I can’t talk at the moment, Brendan. I … I’m sorry.”

  “You aren’t angry with me, are you?” He paused, and Maggie could hear him swallowing hard in an effort to forestall a spasm of stammering. “Maggie, I … love you.”

  Even as Brendan spoke, repeating what he’d said to a woman who scarcely heard him and, hearing him, could feel only a commingling of dismay and exasperation, there was a sound at the door: the kitchen door, which opened out into the rear of Maggie Blackburn’s garage: where it seemed suddenly, someone was standing, peering into the kitchen.

  Maggie stared, helpless.

  It was Calvin Gould: at the door, rapping on the window-pane, three distinct raps with his bare knuckles.

  “Sorry, Brendan, I … can’t talk now, I … someone is here, a … visitor.”

  “But Maggie—”

  Maggie quickly hung up. For there was Calvin Gould at her rear door, asking to be let in. Again.

  And had she any choice but to open the door and let him in?

  She went to the door, unresisting. She might have been reasoning that, given the social circumstances of her relationship with Calvin, there could be no reason for her to refuse to open this door for him. Thus, if she refused, her odd behavior would have to be interpreted as springing from a new, previously unexamined premise. After all, Calvin was enormously fond of Maggie: Hadn’t he told her so? Hadn’t he kissed her? He might simply have left his gloves behind, might have forgotten to tell her something of a professional nature.

  She might have been reasoning too—for so the stiff staring expression on her face suggested—that, should she refuse to open the door, should she run panicked into another part of the house, upstairs for instance, to her bedroom where there was a telephone, Calvin would simply break the window, reach inside, and let himself in.

  So Maggie Blackburn, of her own volition, opened a door for the second time that night to Calvin Gould—and knew, as the man stepped inside, in the instant before he kicked the door shut and gripped her shoulders and began to shake her violently, that she had made a mistake.

  “Maggie! Damn you! You!”

  25

  In the aftermath of having seen a production of Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle, at the age of nineteen, Maggie Blackburn had endured a night of terrifying dreams, vivid in memory even after fifteen years: she had been trapped, like Bluebeard’s importunate young bride, Judith, in a hideously protracted and indefinable drama, a drama of her own instigation seemingly, yet beyond her control; the very substance of the air she breathed had turned gelatinous, music made material. So the nightmare of her several hours with Calvin Gould in the late evening of February 22, 1989, was similarly protracted and indefinable, a drama to be explicated only in retrospect when it would be perceived that, for Calvin Gould, the dilemma lay in indecision: in not knowing whom he should kill, Maggie or himself or both; or whether in fact he was compelled by circumstances to kill another person at all.

  Repeatedly he said, baffled, angry, “So you know, don’t you. You know, somehow … but how?”

  And: “If I could trust you! But I can’t trust you … can I? Can I trust you, Maggie?”

  And: “No one can prove anything. Not about Naomi, and not about me. But why is it you? Of all people … why you?”

  He was mad; or, if not mad, maddened: a man accustomed to supreme control of his life, now provoked beyond endurance.

  Pacing about Maggie’s living room flexing and unflexing his fingers, regarding her with bright dilated eyes. He muttered to himself and to her; his hair was disheveled, his shirt collar open; he appeared drunk—yet bitterly calm, beneath his distraction. “You did go up to Maine,
didn’t you? I’d heard that and I could hardly believe it! You! Maggie Blackburn! Of all people! Forcing me to—do what I have to do!”

  For the first half hour or so Maggie protested in tears that she didn’t know what Calvin meant, had no idea to what he was referring—the murders?—but why did he imagine she suspected him? Yet, clearly, Calvin could see the terror and guilt in her face; and she trembled almost convulsively, hunched in a corner of her sofa, believing herself doomed. Until at last, exhausted, she burst into tears, and Calvin stood over her, where he’d pushed her roughly down, and he took up both her hands in his, saying, with almost a lover’s solicitude, “So you acknowledge it, then: you know I killed both men,” and Maggie, sobbing helplessly, beyond all pretense by this time, even if the effort might prolong or even save her life, said, “Not both. Not you.”

  She would think afterward that, on that evening, she had made no blunder that was not in a sense one with the blunder of that first glass of wine drunk at her own party months before, in this house, thus lulling her suspicion, deadening her judgment, yet stoking her romantic yearning and stimulating her to drink a second glass, and a third … harmless in themselves except, in retrospect, to blame for that hour’s dereliction of moral duty with its repercussions forever afterward: as, in her mind’s eye, Rolfe Christensen another time walked with young Brendan Bauer out her front door, hand on his shoulder, face ruddy with high spirits, appetite. And so, a dreamlike sequence of events, rapid in summary, like playing cards rippling out of a shuffled deck, bringing Maggie Blackburn to this impasse of February 22, 1989, in her own living room, and the frighteningly laconic, even affable confession Calvin Gould was making to her of having poisoned Rolfe Christensen, a crime which, in fact, he had not committed, by way of explaining the necessary murder of Nicholas Reickmann, which he had.

  “I was seventeen. That summer at Interlaken. And I knew nothing. I may have heard of the word ‘homosexual’ but I knew nothing. In my family no one would ever have spoken of anything so … physical. In fact, no one spoke of love. It would have been acutely embarrassing … it is. I was attending a private high school in Bangor, a boys’ school, since my parents were trying to separate my sister and me as much as they could.… I’d had about nine years of piano lessons by then and everyone thought I was extremely talented … you know how small-city musical circles are. Yes, you must know. I seem to have thought I was pretty good, I knew I wanted a musical career but I couldn’t gauge how talented I was, really, or whether I had the nerves for it, and I never did know since it all ended.… He ended it: my hope to be a concert pianist. There I was one July afternoon playing Liszt in a young pianists’ competition at Interlaken, where I had a summer scholarship for some absurd sum—three hundred dollars, I think—but it was enormous to me, and I’d never been so frightened and so excited, and there he was, Rolfe Christensen himself, the composer, the man everyone deferred to, and somehow I was named first in the competition; I’d played Liszt’s Funérailles as if my life depended upon it. I can’t imagine what I sounded like, so many years ago. But he claimed to admire my playing. Oh, he was filled with praise … all sorts of amazing words. He would arrange for me to have a scholarship to Juilliard if I wanted one, just a snap of his fingers and I’d be in. I was simply in awe of the man. I was in a fever of … of awe.

  “At the age of seventeen I was very shy, but arrogant too. Shy with others and arrogant in private. I had to think exaggerated thoughts about myself in order to avoid thinking the other … low, vicious, angry thoughts. Because there was always my sister, my twin, for whom things hadn’t turned out well.

  “So it was summer, and Interlaken, hundreds of miles from home, and there were so many talented young musicians, so many I should have been jealous of, and intimidated by, but Rolfe Christensen liked me, took me out to dinner, talked with me as if I were someone important. And one night in town we had champagne, there was something to celebrate so we celebrated it with champagne, and there we were back at his hotel room, and … and I didn’t remember afterward exactly what happened except it was something physical and shameful and … and irrevocable. And it was going to happen again.

  “And afterward, Christensen had this strange power over me. Not just the threat of telling others … though there was always that threat, up to the day of the man’s death and in fact beyond his death … but another kind of power too: the power of forcing a victim into complicity. That was the true shame of it. It was as if he’d turned me into a woman.

  “I lost control, just once. Started a fire. The last week of the summer session. I’d never done anything like that before in my life … but it had to be done. Not because I hoped to kill him but I had to let him know I was capable of killing him any time I wanted. And that impressed him, that scared him. Always afterward he would allude to that night, the fire in the hotel, the fire trucks, the excitement … all because of him. ‘It’s for life, Calvin,’ he’d say. ‘It’s a sacred bond neither of us can break.’ He had this diary he kept—he’d showed it to me. And what he wrote in it, about me. We were never really lovers again after that summer because he was afraid of me—I was too fierce for him, he said—but he kept in touch with me, traveled to see me for years afterward, when I was in college at Syracuse and afterward … he said he’d never let me go. ‘I never let any of you go, Cal vin, you are part of my living immortality.’ It made me almost physically ill, the way he spoke to me in this mocking singsong when he was drunk. At Syracuse he’d telephone. ‘Cal vin,’ he’d say, ‘do you know what I’m doing to you now, Cal vin Gould? And now? And now …?’ I didn’t dare hang up. I hated him, the pig, but I didn’t dare hang up. He had such power over me, I didn’t dare make an enemy of him.

  “He had many lovers, of course. He always had lovers. But he hung on to them all, or nearly, because he was terrified of dying. He did truly live in awe of music, of great musicians and transcendent geniuses like Mozart, he knew he was inferior to such greatness but all of his life, I mean on the surface of his life, he denied it … played the role of the man of genius himself. So he needed his protégés as collaborators. He needed us too to reward now and then, to get scholarships for, special grants, awards, jobs. A network of young men. Young men gradually growing up. He was a pig, he was loathsome and vicious, but he was kindly too … he needed that too, to complete himself; he thought of himself as a legend in the making. After I arranged for him to come to Forest Park, the one thing I’d vowed I would never do, give in to his wheedling and his threats and his cajoling, after that, when he was settled in here and damned grateful to be settled in, he told me I had earned my place in the legend of his life and that his biographers would speak of me in glowing terms.

  “When he did what he did to Brendan Bauer, and when he boasted of it afterward to me, I knew he had to die. And so he died. Fags die. And Nicky too—he didn’t deserve it but he got in the way. Too bad!”

  Calvin Gould laughed suddenly. During this long monologue he’d dragged a chair to a position in front of Maggie Blackburn; he was sitting with his elbows on his knees, leaning forward. He spoke harshly, yet with satisfaction; with the air of a man tasting his words and taking pleasure in their bitterness. Maggie stared at him, wondering if he were mad. And what madness was, if it could be so logically stated.

  Maggie’s features were thin, sharp, pointed; her skin was waxy-white and translucent, her eyes glazed. She might have been perceived as a woman of delicate sensibility whom extreme fright had drained of appropriate emotion. Nor did her black sweater, her nondescript dark slacks, her feet in black woolen socks seem appropriate to the occasion.

  Calvin said, with an impatient gesture, as if embarrassed, “Your mouth, Maggie: it’s bleeding. Wipe it.”

  In the kitchen when they’d struggled briefly, rather more blundering together in surprise and alarm than truly struggling, Calvin must have struck Maggie a blow to the mouth without knowing what he did, nor could Maggie have remembered being struck. Now, touching her lips,
she was confused seeing blood on her fingers.

  She thought, I don’t want to die.

  It seemed to her inescapable: If he touches me again he won’t be able to stop. He’ll kill me.

  Then the telephone began ringing, and Calvin got to his feet at once, as alerted as if someone were at the door. “Better answer it, Maggie,” he said, yanking her up from the sofa, “and tell whoever it is you can’t talk now.”

  His strong fingers closed about her upper arm, Calvin Gould walked Maggie Blackburn briskly into her kitchen, and when she lifted the receiver to her ear, murmuring, “Yes? Hello?” he brought his head against hers so that he could hear the voice at the other end of the line. How close. How familiar. How like a lover, such intimacy. He cradled Maggie’s head tightly in the crook of his arm; his forearm straining against her throat gave her a sensation of mild strangulation.

  The caller was Brendan Bauer. Of course.

  And the young man was upset, of course; in a state of intense excitement; sounding anxious and solicitous and, unless Maggie imagined it, a little drunk. Maggie told him in a surprisingly level voice that she couldn’t talk at the moment, it was late, they could talk in the morning, and Brendan seemed to accept this, but asked, before hanging up, “Are you angry with me, Maggie? Did I say something I shouldn’t have said?” and Maggie said, “No, no, Brendan”—on the verge of tears—“why can’t you let me alone!”

  Brendan murmured something abject and apologetic and then the line was dead.

  Calvin Gould hung up the receiver.

  They returned to the living room, to the lighted corner of the room, this time with a bottle of Scotch and two glasses, for Calvin needed a drink, he said, a drink to steady his nerves. He asked Maggie if she and Brendan Bauer were lovers, and Maggie shook her head no, of course they were not lovers, and Calvin said, well, love can be one-sided, maybe it’s best that way—“One-sided: like a mirror showing only your face.” And he laughed, drawing his lips back from his teeth, mirthlessly but loudly.