Nemesis Read online

  “Poor sweet Nicky: so unsuspecting, when we left him, of what was to come: the last glimpse I had of him, saying goodbye to Dabney and me, he was smiling, his eyes were shining—I must confess we’d been a bit rowdy, laughing till tears ran down our cheeks at naughty old Rolfe’s cavortings on tape, and Nicky showed us some porno mags he’d discovered in a drawer, I mean tacky, I mean tacky tacky tacky but so funny. So Nicky was a bit giggly still, and a bit high, hugging Dabney and me good night, waving at us from the door, I swear he didn’t look twenty-one years old; he was wearing a turtle-neck sweater, I forget the exact color but it was very attractive, and there was the little diamond in his ear, his sort of Nicky trademark, he’d had his hair cut the day before in SoHo at this place where the hairdresser was allegedly in love with him, and his hair looked—well, it was the kind of hair, razorcut at the sides of the head, tufted and full on top, and this bold shiny-plum shade, the kind of hair, you know, that makes a statement. And Nicky Reickmann, over all, was the kind of personality who makes a statement. So to think of him, poor Nicky, the most alive and the most electric and the most spectacular of anyone at that proper old dull old Conservatory of Music, to think of him surprised and betrayed by someone he trusted, by a sort of friend, and his throat cut—slashed in that dreadful way—to think of him, of it, just leaves me faint: and all I can hope is that at the end, when he saw it was inevitable and he couldn’t escape, Nicky Reickmann lost consciousness and just never revived. And just never, ever revived.”

  17

  “Oh, Maggie—what on earth have you done to yourself?”

  The first person to remark upon the severe change in Maggie Blackburn’s appearance, at least to Maggie Blackburn’s face (for others had seen her walking across campus and may have expressed their opinions, blessedly out of earshot), was Mrs. Moyer, the administrative assistant, who exclaimed unthinkingly, as Maggie entered the office, and stared at her with a look of dismay and disbelief and something almost of a mother’s disapproval: “Your hair, your lovely hair, oh, why?” Even the secretaries, Louise and Jody, who were much younger than Mrs. Moyer and whose hair too was cut fairly short (Jody’s in particular: it was growing out from a brutally stylish cut so abbreviated as to have resembled, weeks ago, a marine crewcut), were visibly restrained in their enthusiasm; though, loyally, they said that they preferred Maggie’s hair so much shorter—it looked “great,” it looked “young.”

  Maggie laughed, though deeply embarrassed and confused, and said, “I—I thought it was time,” and, not much liking so many rude, assessing eyes upon her, “time for a change.” Her tone was an odd commingling of apology, regret, excitement, even defiance.

  She got her mail from her mailbox and turned to leave, her cheeks flushed scarlet, and poor Gladys Moyer, realizing how tactless she’d been, followed her out into the corridor (for after all, the extraordinary plaited hair, the silvery-gold hair that must have fallen to Maggie’s waist and had not been cut for years, was gone, irrevocably), and said, trying to smile, this kindest of women, “You’re right, dear, it is a change, and it’s very attractive really and, and—it will certainly be less trouble to care for than the other.”

  Again Maggie laughed, rather tartly. She said, “Yes, I’m counting on that.”

  But when, later that day, Portia MacLeod saw Maggie Blackburn, Portia gasped audibly and cried, “Oh, my God, Maggie! You”—as if, unknown to her, Maggie were a “you” of comic dimensions, a being widely known for eccentric if not self-damaging behavior: perhaps even a public responsibility, like a wandering idiot. For it was not simply the case that Maggie Blackburn’s hair was extremely short but that, apparently, she had cut it herself, with a scissors.

  Portia MacLeod, another kindly woman but far more importunate than Gladys Moyer, insisted on arranging for Maggie to have her hair cut properly, by Portia’s own hairdresser, whom she telephoned immediately and so pleaded with and bullied—“Henri: if I say this is an emergency, this is an emergency”—that by six o’clock that evening Maggie looked, yet again, different: her mutilated hair now a graceful, sunnily gleaming cap curved about her head like a cloche; her high pale forehead no longer exposed but partly hidden beneath a wing of silvery-gold hair. And now her large limpid bluish-gray eyes appeared to distinct advantage, and her neck was long, columnar, striking—the proverbial swan’s neck. So pleased was Portia with this transformation, as if it were her own handiwork—which, in a way, it was—she refused to allow Maggie to pay the hairdresser herself. She waved away Maggie’s protests and said, “Now you do look lovely. Not quite like yourself of course but—lovely.”

  Maggie turned her head from side to side, regarding herself critically in the mirror. She said, “But this is me, isn’t it?” Portia would recall afterward that her friend asked this question not in jest but as if hopeful of an answer.

  As the women were parting, Portia happened to remark that she’d heard, from Calvin Gould, that his wife had been scheduled for surgery that morning (this was Monday, January 16), and she wondered how it had turned out and how serious the surgery was? Maggie said she didn’t know but that she was surprised (she was surprised) that Calvin had mentioned it to Portia, since he had seemed to want to keep the information confidential. “Calvin told me,” Maggie said, not quite liking how these words sounded in her mouth, “that Naomi dreads the possibility of people talking about her.”

  Portia said carelessly, “Oh, I think Cal has mentioned this to a number of people. The surgery, I mean. It must be that he’s anxious. In fact, he has seemed anxious lately—not really his usual self. Since that—that terrible murder. I suppose, as provost, he deals with pressures we don’t know about, and it is all so public, we’ve all been so exposed.”

  Hesitantly, Maggie said, “Do you know much about Naomi Gould? Have you ever met her?”

  Portia said, “I did actually shake the woman’s hand, once. At a dinner at the Babcocks’, years ago. She was very quiet all evening—stubbornly quiet, I thought—hiding away behind dark glasses, and her hair all frizzed and in her face, hardly trying to disguise the fact that she was bored with us all. Cal has said vaguely that she’s an artist, but I’ve never seen anything of her work, have you? No one has! After the Babcocks’ dinner Byron told me (you know Byron has a brother who’d had a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of twenty?) he thinks Mrs. Gould must have some sort of neurological impairment, or maybe it’s biochemical. It’s more than simply psychological. For instance, she said so little at dinner, and when she did it seemed very studied, deliberate, as if she has to concentrate on each of her words separately; speech doesn’t come naturally to her. And her eyes—there seems to be something unfocused about her vision—or maybe it’s just that one eye is slightly out of alignment with the other. This might help to explain why the woman is so reclusive and indifferent to us all—to our invitations. But she is attractive in her strange way, I’ve always thought. Like someone not wholly domesticated, though there’s that edge of cynicism to her too. Actually, I haven’t seen Naomi for years. Have you seen her recently, Maggie?”

  Maggie said, “No.” And then added, vaguely, “Not close up.”

  Portia went on speculatively, “I was wondering if Cal happened to mention that she was spending a night or two in the Medical Center so that I might be inclined to send flowers or a card, or even call. But I don’t think that would be appropriate since we aren’t friends; we aren’t even acquaintances. I have the idea that Naomi would resent well-wishers, don’t you, Maggie? She’d think us simply inquisitive. But did you send anything?”

  Maggie had certainly not sent anything to Naomi Gould in the hospital; she had not so much as thought of it.

  Embarrassed, she told Portia, “I—I’m sure you’re right, Portia. It wouldn’t be appropriate, under the circumstances.”

  Why had Maggie Blackburn cut off most of her splendid hair, residents of Forest Park wondered: why so abruptly, and why now? Though few of them were forward enough to ask her point-blank.
>
  When they did, Maggie said, “Oh, it was time. For a change.”

  In fact, Maggie did not know why she’d done anything so extreme and so out of character. Though she was by nature a deeply introspective person, susceptible to long periods of brooding, and worrying, and rehearsing, and revising, there was a sort of potent emptiness at the core of her vision, or perhaps it was a blinding light; and this impairment (if that was what it was) allowed her to think obsessively, often futilely, around the margins of one of her actions, yet prevented her from seeing it directly. Or from seeing herself.

  Years ago, as an undergraduate, Maggie had been astounded to be told, by a friendly roommate, that she, Maggie Blackburn, was a person of “absolute integrity”: in fact, Maggie had always known herself weak, vacillating, and malleable.

  And when from time to time her undergraduate students wrote of her, on their course evaluation sheets, that Miss Blackburn was “an excellent teacher, but cold and aloof,” she wanted to protest; she was too modest to conceive of herself as an “excellent” teacher, but surely she wasn’t “cold and aloof.”

  Maggie had never made any rational decision to cut her hair or to do something irrevocable to it. But on the Friday following the Sunday of her meeting with Calvin Gould in the art museum, she was lecturing on Erik Satie in her “Contemporary European Music” course, and sitting at the piano to demonstrate, for her class of eighty students, certain principles of parodic repetition in Satie’s work, when, though she was more or less at ease in her teacherly role (for which she dressed scrupulously in a gray jersey suit, a silk scarf at her throat, her hair as always plaited and wound about her head), she felt a braid of her hair begin to uncoil and shift, slow and heavy as a snake. How had the pins and the mother-of-pearl combs, so fastidiously positioned, come loose? Maggie ignored the slipping braid and hoped that her students (who invariably stared at her when she sat at the piano to demonstrate points of her lecture, as if the musical notes issued not from the piano as an instrument to reproduce sound, nor yet from Maggie Blackburn’s well-practiced fingers, but in some mysterious way from Maggie Blackburn herself) would ignore it too; she continued to play and then rose, with no haste, and secured the braid in place and continued with the lecture; and that night while undressing for bed she felt a flame pass swiftly over her of sheer frustration, and rage, and a wish to do injury, and before she quite realized what she was doing she had taken up a pair of scissors and lifted a handful of her long thick hair and begun cutting.

  Throwing down the first shredded handful, Maggie heard herself sob, “There! Done! Can’t be undone!”

  Maggie had not heard from Calvin Gould since Sunday, since their disturbing conversation, but then she had not realistically expected to hear from him; and deliberately—discreetly—stayed away from a lecture-recital on campus, on Wednesday evening, that Calvin Gould would have attended. But she thought of his strange, shocking words a good deal, in fact, obsessively; and though she remained convinced that Calvin must be mistaken about Brendan Bauer (what had Calvin said of poor Brendan? The young man might be considered “dangerous”?), she did not telephone Brendan to ask after him, nor did she invite him to her house for a casual meal, as she sometimes did, sensing his loneliness. She filled the week—days, evenings, waking hours—with work: for is not work, of all human occupations, the most satisfying, the most narcotic? The elder, deaf Beethoven, cocooned in a world of silence that was yet a world of sound—his sound—was the paradigm of all artists, Maggie thought. His genius had perhaps little to do with the transcendental effort of his being.

  So Maggie worked through most of that long week and stayed home, alone, every evening; and though, on Monday, by way of her dear friend’s kindness, she looked eminently presentable, she declined an invitation to go out to dinner with friends to a local restaurant, preferring to work. So the day and the night of January 16 passed without event in Maggie Blackburn’s life, even as its catastrophic events, for others, would forever alter her life; and it was not until the morning of January 17—unnervingly early: 6:45 A.M.—that the call came from Brendan Bauer.

  The young man did not identify himself, for there was hardly any need.

  “M-M-Maggie? I-I-I-I’ve been arrested!”

  Sleepy-headed, rather more annoyed initially than surprised, Maggie asked, “Brendan? What do you mean? Why? What on earth has happened?”

  (She was thinking, What bad luck he is! Though surely she must have meant, What bad luck he has!)

  Brendan’s stammer had not been so pronounced since that Sunday in September; he seemed very nearly to be choking, gagging. It was excruciating simply to hear him. In the interstices of his struggle Maggie could hear others’ voices, even distinct words. Shouts. Was Brendan in police custody? Had David Miles assembled enough evidence to arrest him? Maggie had two immediate and contradictory thoughts: if that was so, Calvin must love her, for having warned her that Brendan was a murderer; if that was so, Brendan was surely innocent, and Maggie must help him.

  She said, “Excuse me? Brendan? I can’t quite understand. What has happened? Who has been killed?”

  And then, finally, his words wetly explosive in her ears, Brendan Bauer told her.

  18

  That day—Monday, January 16, 1989—had been, for Brendan, one of his days of “strangeness.” But not until nearly midnight had it defined itself as the very worst of such days.

  Since boyhood, Brendan had occasionally experienced pockets of time he called, for lack of a better term, “strange.” He spoke of them to no one, certainly not to his parents or his parish priest; he seemed to know that such experiences were not common to others and that it might be to his disadvantage to share them. They were dreamlike both in the sense of being unreal and yet of being painfully vivid; characterized by an almost unbearable lucidity and an excitement verging upon euphoria, an underlying conviction of the arbitrariness of all things—which stimulated in him, like certain hallucinogenic drugs, both horror and ecstasy. At such times Brendan stared hard at everything he could see, people, objects, gradations of light and shadow, and listened yet harder, to the ceaseless waterfall of sound, sound, sound dinning in his ears, and he would shiver, and swallow hard, and think, But why this? Why this? And why now?

  For all things could so very easily be other than they were. Or, in fact, be extinguished into nothing—nothingness.

  At times such revelations made him mildly ill, but at other times they had the curious effect of being inspiring, stimulating—in a way very nearly erotic, visceral—so that Brendan wanted—how yearningly!—to compose music; whether in acknowledgment of or in defiance of such revelations, he did not know. In his early twenties he had come across a quotation in George Orwell’s 1984 that he felt described this condition: The landscape that he was looking at recurred so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain whether or not he had seen it in the real world.

  Thought Brendan Bauer, shuddering, yes.

  That afternoon, for instance, he happened to witness an accident on Route 1: a spectacular four-car collision almost directly in front of Ajax Car Wash, where he was working. One instant the highway traffic was moving at its customary rhythms; the next there came the sounds of horns, brakes, screeching tires—as one car passing another somehow sideswiped that car, and ricocheted, and skidded across two lanes of traffic into another car, and there was a sensation as of fabric violently rent, the surface of the physical world torn away and the stark white bones of what lay beyond exposed. And so suddenly! And so without warning! Along with several of his co-workers Brendan ran out to see if he could be of help, there were injured people in at least two of the cars, the vehicles were smashed fairly badly, and Brendan found himself comforting a youngish woman in a fleece-lined parka splashed with blood as, weeping hysterically, she staggered to the side of the road, spitting blood, her fingers in her mouth working at something until she pried loose a tooth and removed it from its bloody socket to stare at it—and Brendan stared t
oo—held like a miniature trophy in the palm of her hand.

  Police and emergency vehicles arrived within minutes, fortunately. The injured were borne off amid a jubilation of sirens. The mutilated automobiles were hauled away. The accident had occurred at 4:15 P.M., and by 5:15 P.M. traffic on Route 1 was moving with its usual jagged smoothness, and the strangeness of the day, though Brendan knew it was there, was no longer visibly evident.

  A light, feathery snowfall began, at dusk.

  Brendan Bauer, that tall gawky schoolboy of twenty-seven, thin-limbed, myopic behind his thick-lensed glasses, had astonished himself by not only liking his job at Ajax Car Wash (this first manual labor of his life) but by proving competent at it. He who had never dared or even wished to participate in school sports, since earliest memory a figure of physical uncertainty, an emblem of masculine weakness, had learned to hook cars to jerkily moving conveyor belts to be borne into the car wash; had learned to wield wads of paper towels and chamois cloths for cleaning windshields, and large stiff-bristled brushes for cleaning the filthy undersides of cars, and powerful hoses squirming in his hands like snakes—all in the often-freezing air and without (as his high school coworkers would say) fucking up that much. So competent and intelligent was Brendan that the car wash manager entrusted him with cash and credit card transactions, and there was even talk of promoting him to managerial rank if and when the present manager moved on. The work, the repetitiveness of the work, the brainlessness underlying it—human beings, flesh, blood, and bone, assisting a largely automated process, primarily metal—and the jets of water! and the spray! and the steaming air!—percussive noises, hisses, occasional horns, his young co-workers’ near-constant mutterings (“Fuck it!” “Hey man—fuck that shit!” “Whadja fucking do?”) that might be affable, or furious, or neutral, a kind of rude music but music nonetheless, and in the background, always in the background, never not in the background through all the hours of the day, the pitiless sounds of a Hartford radio station playing Top Ten singles and albums with a brass-voiced disc jockey and strident and endlessly repeated advertisements—all this in its strangeness was somehow exhilarating to the young composer, as if it were proof of a world, the world, that might have obliterated him but had not. At Ajax Car Wash it was always present tense. Customers came in, and customers were served. And customers paid. And customers drove away, their cars now splendidly gleaming. You did your work and you were paid and next day you returned at the same time and you were paid (and occasionally there were tips) and so the hours passed, and the days, and though his muscles and joints and very bones sometimes ached, and he had a perpetual head cold, Brendan found that he could lose himself happily in such mechanized labor as he had never been able in other jobs (at the Book Mark, for instance) apparently more suitable for him; he could detach himself from the cacophony of noises on all sides and think his own thoughts and compose his own music, a counter-music to the other, and supremely his.