The Portable Veblen: Shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2016

She trudged into the kitchen, to look for a snack a squirrel might not enjoy. She had an idea.

“Veblen?” he called.

“Coming.”

“A piece of bread is fine.”

“Okay, just a minute.”

Shortly, she carried in a plate with her offering.

“What’s that?” asked Paul, peering down.

“Sauerkraut sprinkled with mace.”

“Why?”

“I hear they love it,” said Veblen.

She heard him set the plate into the trap with a clap.

THEY SPENT the afternoon walking and talking about all they were about to face. It would come back to her later that Paul barely mentioned his family that day. Instead he talked a lot about his vision of their material future—the signing bonus for the trial and stock from Hutmacher Pharmaceuticals would allow them to buy a house. “You don’t want to stay in mine?” she asked, surprised. She loved her house.

HER OWN VISION of the future was of happiness in the air. Something was baking. Children were playing games. There were flowers and substantial trees, and birds were singing in their nests. She was living with someone who was laughing.

Paul gave a sample of laughter.

“That works,” she said.

SHE WAS STILL very pleased with her little house, and how she’d found it.

Nearly five years ago, having finally escaped from home, she’d been sleeping in her old Volvo by the San Francisquito creek and checking out listings by the dozens for days. She’d seen rooms in dingy, greasy-smelling houses in Mountain View, tiny, dark rooms in houses full of guffawing male engineering students, and a room in the house of a high school science teacher filled with exercise machines.

It was a warm night in September, that night. She had a soulful bottle of beer and a slice of pizza on University Avenue, then walked the neighborhood in the glow of dusk, down streets named for famous poets: Lowell and Byron and Homer and Kipling and the tormented, half-mad Italian poet Torquato Tasso. She crunched the sycamore and magnolia and locust leaves on the sidewalk. Just before she reached the end where the street met the arroyo, she passed a small house so overgrown with vines that the windows were no longer visible. The yard was neck-high with weeds and ivy and morning glory, and in the gentle air of evening she heard the flap of a tarp on the roof, laid over the old shingles to protect them from rain. The chimney was missing a few bricks. Swatches of animal hair were mixed in the litter of leaves up the walkway, as if various creatures regularly rolled on their backs there and stretched out in the sun. The site of the abandoned house, or possibly the dwelling of an old eccentric, filled her with warmth and hope, and perhaps because she lingered there thinking how this might be a positive instance of absentee ownership, she fated her meeting with the person who came down the narrow driveway between the two bungalows, from a yard choked with the summer’s industry of honeysuckle and jasmine.

This was Donald Chester, wearing his grubby Stanford sweatshirt stained with motor oil and paint. He was a retired engineer who’d grown up only a few blocks away in the 1930s, and attended the university as a day student before, during, and after World War II. Palo Alto wasn’t always so swank, he told her. Back then, a settlement of hoboes camped around the giant sequoia by the train station, rough wooden shacks on Lytton Avenue housed kids who went without shoes, and rabbits were raised in hutches in the grassy fields behind them for supper. Before the university came in 1896, sheep, goats, horses, and mules grazed on ranch land. And before that, when the Spanish began to deed land grants, tule-gathering tribes swept through the tidal flats in bunched canoes, fleeing missionaries. If his parents, who’d struggled through the Depression eating rabbits and mending their socks until there was no more sock to mend, only the mending, could have seen what happened to dreamy old Palo Alto, they’d get a real kick out of it.

Yes, Donald Chester knew the owner of the wreckage next door. She was an elderly woman who lived in New York with her daughter, who would neither let go of the house she’d lived in as a young bride nor maintain it, and Veblen said that was good. To her it looked enchanted. To which he said, Let’s see what you think after you look inside, and brought out some flashlights. It was one of those magical strokes of luck that a person enjoys once or twice in a lifetime, and marvels at ever after.

She followed him behind the place, where there was a modest garage built for a Model T, with the original wooden door with a sash, hollowed by termites, like cactus wood.

The back door hung loose off its hinges, and a musty odor surrounded them in the kitchen. Old cracked linoleum squeaked underfoot. A bank of dirt had formed on the windowsill, growing grass. But the huge old porcelain sink was intact. And the old tiles, under layers of silt, were beautiful. Donald Chester laughed and said she must have a great deal of imagination. In the living room, water stains covered the ceiling like the patterns in a mosque. She told him about the house in Cobb and the fixing she and her mother did to get it in shape, all by themselves. (She’d been only six when she and her mother moved in, but they’d worked side by side for weeks.) She knew how to transform a place, wait and see. Donald Chester took down her number and said he doubted anything would come of it, but he’d give her a call. And the very next day he did. The widow took a fancy to the idea of a single woman fixing it up. She priced the place nostalgically, a rent about the same as single rooms. Veblen sobbed with disbelief. She’d saved up enough money over the past few years to get the whole thing off the ground.

She loved the tiger lilies, which were out. She kissed them on their crepey cheeks, got pollen on her chin. For the next week, she started on the place at dawn, ripping vines off the windows, digging dirt from the grout, hosing the walls. One day Albertine came down to help. They pried open the windows to let in fresh air and barreled through the place with a Shop-Vac. Another day Veblen climbed onto the roof and tore off the tarp and discovered the leaks, and patched them. It wasn’t rocket science. She cleaned the surface of every wall with TSP and every tile with bleach, and painted every room. Then she rented a sanding machine and took a thin layer from the oak floors, finishing them with linseed oil and turpentine. She kept a fan blowing to dry the paint and the floors all day long.

Donald Chester pitched in. He lent her tools and brought her tall tumblers of iced tea with wedges of lemon from his tree.

“You like to work hard,” he remarked, when Veblen came out of the house one day covered in white dust.

In the kitchen, the old refrigerator needed a thorough scrubbing, but the motor worked, and the old Wedgewood stove better than worked. The claw-foot tub in the bathroom had rust stains, but they didn’t bother her very much. The toilet needed a new float and chain, no big deal. She had the utilities changed to her name. She played her radio day and night, and by the fifth night, give or take a few creaking floorboards and windows with stubborn sashes, the house welcomed her. The transformation absorbed her for months to come, as if she’d written a symphony or a wonderful book or painted a small masterpiece. And she’d stayed on these last five years despite the hell-bent growth all around, conveniently located halfway between each parent in her outpost on one of the last untouched corners of old Palo Alto. One day the widow or her daughter would get an offer they couldn’t refuse. But for now, it was hers.

The two buildings had never been remodeled or added on to, and provided the same standard of shelter as they had when built in 1920, which was plenty good. Now a week did not go by when real estate agents didn’t cram business cards into the mail slots, hoping to capture the deeds and promptly have the little houses bulldozed. She and Donald liked to feel they were taking a stand.

For her first meal on Tasso Street, she boiled a large tough artichoke from Castroville and ate it with a scoop of Best Foods mayonnaise. She took the thistles out of the heart and filled it like a little cup. She listened to an opera on the radio, live from San Francisco, La Bohème. Surrounded by the smell of fresh paint and linseed oil, the smooth floors, the clean glass, the perception of space to grow into, she was too excited to sleep.

As she often was at night now, with Paul beside her. Sharing simple meals and discussing the day’s events, waking up together with plans for the future—these things felt practically bacchanalian when you were used to being on your own.

AND SO WHAT about a wedding? Where, how soon? There was a huge catalog of decisions to make all of a sudden. If you were normal, Veblen couldn’t help thinking. Part of her wanted to do all the normal bridely things and the other part wanted to embrace her disdain for everything of the sort.

That morning a lump of cinnamon twist stuck in her throat. Another gulp of coffee ushered it down. “Paul,” she said. “I’m super excited about this getting married idea. But there’s a lot about me you don’t know.”

“There’d better be,” he said warmly.

“So it makes sense for the tips of icebergs to fall in love, without knowing anything about the bottom parts?”

“Well, you know, I think we’re doing pretty well with the bottom parts.”

She wrinkled her nose.

“But—” She went for something small. “Sometimes I sleepwalk. Did you know that?”

“You haven’t done that so far.”

“And if I’m around free food, I eat too much.”

Paul shrugged. “Okay.”

“Maybe we should go meet my mother soon,” she said, biting a fold of her inner cheek.

“That sounds great,” said Paul. “We definitely should.”

Could he really be so accepting? Or was he just acting that way for now? And in what ways was she acting? Could you look at all interactions that way, as a presentation of the self, an advertisement of sorts?

Oh, cut it out, she told herself.

3

NEWS IS MARKETING

The year was starting well.

The week after Veblen said she would marry him, Paul Vreeland, MD, FAAN, FANA, FACNS (he loved the growing train following his name, all engines, no caboose) reported for the first full day of his trial at the veterans’ hospital known as Greenslopes. Climbing out of his car he stood in the morning chill, tasting the fragrance of his new domain.

The hospital was the centerpiece of this government compound, assigned to the task of supporting the spent men and women of the armed forces. The range of structures told of the ongoing demands on the military, from the dowdy Truman-era offices to the flat cold war bungalows and tin-can hangars to the striking prize-commissioned buildings of recent design. Gophers and moles had the run of the lawn, which was lumpy, riddled with loose mounds of soil. (Paul had recently spotted an excellent two-pronged gopher trap while shopping to eliminate squirrels, and thought he might recommend it to the groundskeeper.) And everywhere the grounds were paced by truculent crows. Two men in worn Windbreakers and baseball caps huddled in wheelchairs beside a Victorian-style cupola, which had been ceremoniously fenced in a pen and surrounded by rosebushes, and bore a plaque bearing the names of a select squadron of the national sacrifice.

Had he been born at another time, been drafted and required to serve, would he have mustered courage? In his lifetime, a man needed a test, and Paul thought: This one is mine. With a crooked smile he imagined the musical that would come of it. Greenslopes! The patients in their hospital gowns would come to life in their cots, and perform spirited ronds de jambe in the aisles.

Just then, a squirrel spiraled down the heavy trunk of the magnolia, nattering across the spotty lawn in fitful, myoclonic jerks. A trail of Fortuna cigarette boxes led his eye to three weary-looking women in white uniforms and blue hairnets lumped on a brick wall in smoke. Then an electric buzz drew his attention to the road, where an obese gentleman careened along in a wide, customized wheelchair, waving an orange flag on a bobbing wand. Along the sidewalk came a woman in a black tank top under her denim jacket, tattoos rising like thunderheads over the mountains of her breasts, carrying a ziplock bag packed with white-bread sandwiches. To lend some decorum to the tableau, Paul stood tall, dusted off his jacket, and turned to take the path from the lot to the main building as a limping janitor pushed a cart across the sidewalk at the drop-off circle.

A low band of cement-colored haze hung snugly over the peninsula. He was early, did not want to stand in front like a doorman; he changed direction, taking a path freshly decked with necky red cyclamen submerged in a carpet of woodchips.

For here he was, the man who would lead Hutmacher into a new era. Under his stewardship, the clinical trials program would surpass all expectations. Here at the VA, the new wing, filling daily with volunteers, would become a model of its kind. Physicians received Nobel prizes for innovations like his. They had body parts named after them, such as Kernohan’s notch and Bachmann’s bundle and the sphincter of Oddi. Not to mention the fissure of Rolando and the canal of Schlemm and the zonule of Zimm! Dr. Vreeland helped eradicate once and for all the effects of traumatic brain injury sustained in combat. Focal or diffuse, of no matter to Vreeland. Among the many types of experimental subjects, Vreeland popularized the use of the squirrel, as they tended to invade attics and make a nuisance and rile up generous-hearted women in their defense!

Heading back into the corporation yard, he passed an earthmover stuck like a mammoth in a lake of mud, and reflected on how until recently he’d been just as mired by the failure of his nerve. That is, until he met Cloris, at the start of a run of unprecedented luck.

There he was at work one ordinary afternoon last September, slumped in the elevator, his cart much like the janitor’s, thinking about how he’d run out of toilet paper that morning and how he’d have to stop to buy more on his way home, with no Veblen in his life, he had yet to meet her, when a tall, blond woman of around thirty-five tripped open the closing doors with her long striding legs and took her place at his side. It was a memory he’d committed to the permanent circuits. The way she leaned over, read his name on his lab coat, and made no foolish sentimental comments about the mixed specimens on his cart always struck him as proof of a giant leap in his sex appeal.

“Dr. Vreeland, why don’t you ask a resident to take your cart?”

He grinned, tossed off something about finding it difficult to delegate.

Her eyes gleamed with the thrill of discovery. “My father says, ‘If you want something done, ask a busy man.’” She had just visited a dear friend, very ill, maybe she should have a coffee before hitting the road, would he like to come tell her about his work? She was with Hutmacher Pharmaceuticals, and loved to keep abreast of the latest developments. He stood taller. At the next floor he jettisoned the cart.

“How long have you been here?” In the cafeteria they settled in plastic chairs.

“My third year. Are you a rep or something?” he asked with a mischievous poke, because industry reps were no longer allowed to do their repping at the School of Medicine, and he’d signed his share of SIIPs (Stanford Industry Interactions Policy), which covered gifts from the industry, access of sales and marketing reps to the campus, and other strategies of coercion the industry was apt to deploy.

“You could say that,” she responded. “You could say I’ve been repping for them since the day I was born.”

Moments later, when he realized over his plain black coffee that he was actually speaking to a Hutmacher, namesake of one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, a modern empire, she a virtual princess, he gulped and scalded his esophagus, and worse, felt his testes shrivel to the size of garbanzo beans. To his shame, he really believed the wealthy were superior. In a Darwinian sense, they had to be. He could read the story of past conquests and brutal takeovers in her bone structure, her long arms and legs, her narrow shoulders, her high cheekbones and forehead, her elegant hands. The marriages that had led to her creation had been of alpha males and glorious females, and you wouldn’t find the peasant’s short calf or hunched trunk among them.

Meanwhile, he descended from a rough mix of Dutch farmers, Belgian carpet salesmen, Irish gamblers, and Presbyterian prigs, and he wondered what use she could possibly have for him.

“But as I said, I’m not here on business. I was visiting a sick friend.”

“I’m sorry,” Paul said.

“Thank you. Now more about you.”

“But—” He laughed at himself. “Shouldn’t you be skiing in Zermatt, or whatever heiresses are supposed to be doing?”

“That’s next January. Tell me about your work!”

Who had ever asked? The subject of his study was his gold reserve, burdening his heart. “Well, I’m working on traumatic brain injury. I’ve been developing a tool.”

“A tool? Tell me more,” said Cloris, with such prosperous vitality he felt all underfunded and desperate and teenaged again.

“To make it short: I’ve found a way medics on the line can take a proactive role in preventing permanent brain injury.”

“That’s terrific,” said Cloris. “How?”

“Well.” Was he pitching his tool? “You want me to tell you now?”

“Please!”

He nodded, and scalded another quadrant of his taste buds. “Let’s see. Where to start. The body’s response, you know, to just about any stimuli, is swelling—”

“I’ve noticed.”

His nostrils flared. “To injury. Like my burned tongue right now. The body swells.”

“Yes, it does, doesn’t it?”

“The blood rushes, it rushes to the—geez.” He laughed, looking down. “Okay. I have no idea what we’re talking about here.”

“Don’t stop.”

He cleared his throat. “So the brain. If the brain is injured and swells, the skull, I’m sure you know”—he made his hands look like a clamp—“holds it in, and—” His neck felt hot. “There’s pressure, lots of pressure.”

“I understand,” said Cloris.

“The pressure builds—”

“—and builds—”

“—cutting off circulation—”

“Oh, my.”

He bestowed a frank, open gaze upon her, and cleared his throat. “Anyway, the cells stop getting oxygen, which sets off a chain reaction called cell suicide, technically called apoptosis, but if a craniotomy—opening up the skull—can be performed immediately, releasing the pressure, to make room for the swelling”—Paul shifted in his seat—“then no more cell suicide, and under the right circumstances recovery is achievable, up to eighty, ninety percent.”

“So how could this be done?”

“Here’s the problem. Say you’re a medic in combat, and you need to get your injured troops to the closest field hospital, but for a thousand reasons, you can’t do it fast enough. This happens all the time. You’ve made your determination of brain injury—”

“How is that done?”

“Nonreactive pupils. Unconsciousness.”

“Sounds like me every morning.”

“Ah.” Paul felt a luxuriant warmth ripple down his thighs. “The point is, it’s not all that high-tech—craniotomies have been practiced for thousands of years. We see burr holes in the skulls of Egyptians, Sumerians, even the Neanderthals—”

“That was for a snack,” she said.

“The point being that long before there were hospital standards and antiseptics—”

“It could be done.”

“Right! And so in emergency situations, medics—”

“Could do just as good a job as the Neanderthals!”

Paul slapped his palms on the table. “Right. And here’s where my work comes in. I’ve devised an instrument that is safe, effective, essentially automatic, for the line medic to use right on the spot.”

“The Swiss Army knife of brain injury?”

“Yes.”

“Something every medic would carry?” she grasped, eagerly.

“That’s my hope.”

“Simple, easy to use?”

“Very.”

“How big is it?”

Paul held up his hands to indicate a tool of about eight inches.

Cloris raised her eyebrows, then entered text in her phone. “What’s it like? Tell me there’s something like it but not as good.”

He knew what she was getting at. The FDA would allow you to bypass a lot of time and red tape using the 510(k) exemption if a device was like something else already approved. “Between you and me, it’s unique. But you could easily say it’s like the Voltar pneumatic hole punch or Abata’s Cranio-locum.”

Her eyes sparkled and he felt wonderful. “Could it save the government money?”

“Oh my god, yes. And obviously, a lot of people’s lives would be much better.”

She leaned forward, to whisper. “What’s your contract situation?”

“I’m up for renewal at the end of the year,” whispered Paul, nervously rocking back in his chair.

“Has the Technology Transfer Office seen this yet?” she asked huskily.

“Funny you ask. I’m just finishing my report for them right now.”

“I see. Can I ask you something?”

“Ask away.”

“If I get back to you in a couple of days, will you let me take the first look?”

“Sure, but—”

“I think it’s a no-brainer.”

“Ouch.”

“What?”

“You said it’s a no-brainer.”

“I practiced that.”

They walked to the hospital lobby together, Paul carrying her tote bag to the door. She gave him a European-style kiss on his left cheek, and his catecholamines soared.

She called in two days, to inform him that Development at Hutmacher was very interested in his device. It seemed that Cloris Hutmacher was a scout for her family’s company, prowling med schools and biotech companies for the latest discoveries that exceeded her company’s resources to discover in their own labs. She could boast of finding a new drug for arthritis at UCLA, and another that blocked harmful proteins within cell walls at UC Santa Barbara, all on her own initiative. Of course, Paul’s device was a high risk Class III and would need to be tested in a clinical trial, but that was no obstacle at all. The VA center in Menlo Park was available as a testing site, and it was possible, in fact probable, that Paul could be the primary investigator in a trial there, making a niche for himself testing other patents relevant to the Department of Defense that were being licensed by Hutmacher. Hutmacher had numerous DOD contracts, she told him, and was dedicated to the men and women of the armed forces. He would be ideal.

Paul thought he would be too, but when he brought it up with his mentor, Lewis Chaudhry, Chaudhry was flatly lacking in enthusiasm.

“This project is nowhere near ready for that, Paul. You have yet to do your randomized study, you’ve had no peer reviews, nothing! Are they planning to piggyback it on a 510(k)?”

Paul admitted they were. “You know what an uphill battle it is to market anything. They’re saying it’s a major breakthrough and they can move it into practical application really fast. Isn’t that worth doing?”

Chaudhry stepped back with thinly disguised contempt. “So, Paul, how big was the gift basket?”

And Paul felt sorry for the stodgy old termagant and went directly to the Technology Transfer Office to work out the details. And when he met Cloris later that week, at the office of Hutmacher’s attorneys, Shrapnal and Boone, in Burlingame, and he was presented with a signing bonus in cash and stock options as well as a huge gift basket filled with bottles of champagne, fancy chocolates, aged wheels of French cheese, and even a sterling silver knife in a blue box from Tiffany & Co., Paul could see no reason not to own the moment.