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

Then, when Cloris invited him up to her place in Atherton, he wasn’t exactly surprised. He was easing into his new incarnation pretty suavely, he thought. As he followed her white Tesla Roadster up the hill, through the gate, to the house that had been built in the manner of a French château, sandstone covered with ivy, a front door thick and iron strapped, opening like a castle, he felt overwhelmed with fate and consequence. What if she fell in love with him? What if they married? What if the elder Hutmacher took him under his wing and told the world he was a visionary? What if he became president of the company after the old man was gone, and had a private jet? What if he and Cloris became goodwill ambassadors for UNICEF, distributing medical supplies throughout Africa, stopping in dusty towns to confer with Bono and Angelina Jolie? What if everyone from his hometown, Garberville, found out? What if the psycho-bitch mother of his high school girlfriend, Millie Cuthbertson, committed hara-kiri on a bamboo mat, and coyotes paraded her entrails down every street in town?

Cloris showed off her office with its high view of the peninsula, and he lingered to admire a wall of tightly framed photo ops, including, but not limited to Cloris and her father, Boris Hutmacher, with George H. W. Bush, Cloris and her father with Bill and Hillary, Cloris with George W. Bush, Cloris and her father with President Obama, Cloris with Mick Jagger, Cloris with the Dalai Lama, Cloris with the Pope, and …

“Where’s Cloris with god?”

She squeezed his arm.

Certificates of appreciation studded the walls, from charities and boards, medical, environmental, inner city, whippet societies. It seemed there wasn’t anyone Cloris couldn’t be appreciated by.

Just then, the monitor on the desk began to ring like a phone, and Cloris said, “It’s Morris calling. Our weekly Skype. Do you mind?”

“Who’s Morris?”

“My son.”

“I didn’t know you had a son.”

“Yes. Divorced three years ago. He’s eight.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t worry, this will only take a minute,” she said.

“Please, take as long as you want,” Paul said, and he went away to wait.

He let himself out the French doors onto a sweeping sandstone piazza, appointed with various clusters of wrought iron chairs, ceramic pots embossed with fleur-de-lis, and an inverted copper fountain that funneled into the earth. Across the lawn stood a rose arbor, its few leaves yellowed and spotted with black. From there, one could see up the coastal ranges north and south, the Dumbarton Bridge crossing the bay to Fremont, and the San Mateo Bridge beyond. For some reason, all he could think about at that moment was how he was going to tell his status-conscious friend Hans Borg about this. Maybe he’d be in a position to finagle some contracts for Hans, of course he would! He’d send his parents on the big trip they’d always wanted to take, and he’d hire a full-time caretaker to manage his brother, Justin, with an iron fist.

But they would never allow that. Deflated by the inescapable specter of his disabled brother, Paul wandered past the pool and pool house, admiring the château from every angle, until he found himself before a marble goddess skirted by camellia and heard Cloris’s voice through the windows. He could see her fine head before the large monitor in conversation with her son, who appeared to be slightly rotund, wearing a horizontally striped sweater that emphasized his girth. He had reddish hair and a galaxy of freckles, and his sniffles were amplified with sorrowful fidelity.

“I told you I don’t have time for this,” Cloris said.

The boy sobbed.

“Stop it,” Cloris hissed. “Are you trying to punish me? Because I don’t deserve it! I’m onto you and I won’t stand for it!”

Morris cried louder, and Paul stepped back, not wanting to believe his patroness was brutalizing her child. (Maybe the kid was a horrible brat and deserved it? Maybe Cloris, unlike his parents, knew how to exert some discipline?)

“Get me your father. Now!”

The boy disappeared from the screen and Paul leaned forward again, despite himself. A hard-jawed man in a black polo shirt with a sharp cleft between his eyes took the boy’s place.

“Cloris, what are you doing? He’s hurt!”

“Don’t expect me to fix it all from here. He wants to live with you, then be his father!”

“Cloris. Calm down. Morris, go upstairs while I talk to your mother.”

“Don’t let him leave. I don’t want to prolong this. Sit down, both of you!”

Cloris strained toward the screen, so that her nose might have sparked with static. “I want to tell you something, Morris. When my father asks me about his grandson, what am I supposed to say? Well, you know what, I say nothing! I change the subject! That’s because you let me down constantly. I would never tell him the things going on!”

“I didn’t mean to,” cried Morris.

“Stop it. Pull yourself together right now. You’re such a baby. You’ll have to earn my trust in the future, and it won’t be nice and easy, the way everything else comes for you.”

“What can I do?” sobbed the boy, whose cheeks glistened with tears.

Cloris bent, arms crossed over her chest, shouting at the screen. “Do you understand why you are in that school? You are in that school because my father went to that school and because he is on the board of directors of that school and you have every advantage in the world in that school! Do you know how bad it has to be for me to get a call from one of your teachers? You represent this family to the children of everyone who matters in Washington. And this is what happens?”

“Cloris, he’s in second grade.”

“And look at him. He’s at least ten pounds overweight. Morris, are you listening? You are fat. And do you know what that means? Nobody likes little fat boys. Morris? Stop eating junk food!”

“That’s more than enough,” said the boy’s father, and fearing that the conversation was coming to an end, Paul withdrew, in order to rush around the building to the expanse of sandstone, where he affected a casual stance until Cloris joined him again.

“There you are!”

“Nice view.”

“Now, where were we?”

“Everything okay with your son?” Paul asked, innocently.

“Oh. Fine. The long-distance thing isn’t easy,” said Cloris, and to stay on target for the future of his device, he pushed the scene he had witnessed from his mind.

He followed her inside and she brought them drinks on the couch, and shortly, one of her hands was on the cushion near his shoulder, then on his shoulder, finding its way like a garter snake to his ear. She had a thing for the little flange at the front of the ear called the tragus, and she pinched it at least six or seven times.

“You are a gorgeous man,” she said, embarrassing and thrilling him.

After a long session of making out (she tasted of vodka, and her mouth was surprisingly small, her tongue fast and flighty, putting him in mind of kissing a deer, for some reason), she threw herself back on the pillows and said, “I don’t have relationships anymore. But you’re hard to resist.”

“Then don’t,” Paul said, in motion toward her, fueled by instinct.

“I was a very decadent person in my twenties. You have no idea.”

He listened, with a hard tug in his groin.

“I had problems. And then, about five years ago, something shifted.”

“And what was that?”

“It coincided with my work for the company. I suddenly transferred all of that excitation into my professional life.”

“That’s a tragedy,” Paul said, grasping her fingers.

“So now, if I’m spending time with a man, which I’m not, I’m a nun these days, I’m impatient, I think about work, I double-task. I’ll be smiling and thinking about my toes and separating them to aerate them. And I’ll be thinking, there, that’s something I can accomplish until this is over.”

Paul cleared his throat. “Hmm.”

“Is that fair to the man?” she pressed.

“Depends on the man.” He laughed, as he only thought right, though he would never have taken her for a person with tinea pedis.

“Come here,” she said, pulling on his collar.

“I think you’re struggling,” Paul said, with renewed interest in kissing her.

“I am.”

“Maybe someone should help you with your struggle.”

He reached for her skirt, and under it, just long enough to feel that her inner thighs were cold, but with that she jumped up and laughed in an agitated and sophisticated manner, and said, “Come upstairs!” And he followed like a pup.

Her bedroom was vast, with a huge bed that she rolled over in order to rummage in a bedside drawer and retrieve a bronze pipe, tamping it expertly with pungent weed. She took a few long tokes and passed it to Paul, who was so surprised in a bad way that he shriveled. The scent of marijuana was his least favorite odor in the world. Even feces on a shoe smelled better than cannabis resin.

“No, really,” he said, when she pushed the smoking bowl toward him.

She indulged several more times, then flung herself back into the playpen of pillows, kicked off her shoes, sent them flying, and patted for Paul to lie next to her.

“He’s coming out next year,” she gasped.

“Who?”

“Morris,” said Cloris, exhaling loudly. “I have to figure out something fun to do with him. I never get it right. What did you like to do when you were eight?”

“I don’t know, the usual.”

“What’s the usual!” she said, hammering him with a pillow.

“Hey!”

He grabbed one from the multitude of bolsters and puffs at the head of the bed and socked her back.

“Paul!”

He drew himself up on his knees, and moved toward her, as she began to sniffle.

“How can I know the usual, I don’t live with my son, there is no usual.” She sniffed.

“Cloris? You okay?”

After a while she sat up, cross-legged, to dab her face with the sheet. “I get very emotional about him.”

“Why isn’t he with you?”

“That’s old school, Paul,” said Cloris. “We let Morris make his own decisions.”

“Mmm. Best.”

“Anyway, his father can’t have him in the spring and he’ll be here for a while.”

“That’s nice,” Paul said, worried he’d failed to keep things on track. The moment seemed to have passed. He gazed at her bare feet on the bed, wondering what grew between her toes, bound up by his desire to do the right thing in the presence of an heiress, whatever that might be.

“Were you a Boy Scout?” she asked.

“Definitely not.”

“A camp counselor somewhere? A coach?”

“No, no. Not me.”

“You seem like the kind of person boys would admire and imitate. Like my father.”

He tossed it off as if the compliment meant nothing to him, but he wanted to bury it, entomb it, make a shrine of it to worship at for the rest of his life.

“Come here,” she said, and then something happened—it was kind of like having sex with someone but not quite. It was a scratching, raging, rolling catfight of flesh and bone and disclaimer—we both know this doesn’t mean anything—until it was inexplicably over and he was almost heaved off the side of the bed. Then Cloris disappeared for about twenty minutes. Finally he wandered downstairs and bumped into her in the kitchen, dishing up bowls of spaghetti alle vongole, which they soon ate at a long table, discussing business as if nothing had happened. Driving back to his depressing condo just off El Camino in Mountain View later that night, he wondered if he’d just torched his whole career.

(And then he would meet Veblen a few weeks later, and would be so immediately bowled over by his feelings for the smart but spacey, undervalued woman with the handmade clothes and self-cut hair, who typed in the air and loved squirrels, that it would strike him as the closest call in his life.)

When he learned he was off to Washington, D.C., for an interview, his father said, “Terrific, Paul! You can go visit the Wall and see your uncle Richard’s name, can’t you?”

“Dad, I don’t think I’ll have time—”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute. It’s right in the middle of everything, outside, and you don’t have to pay admission or wait in line.”

“Dad, I’m going for an interview. They’re flying me out. If I have time I’ll go, of course. But—”

“Are you saying, Paul, that you’d go all the way to Washington and not visit Richard’s name?”

“I’ve visited it before, with you. I’ve seen it.”

“Oh, I see. You only need to see it once. Paul! Get your priorities straight!”

“Dad, I’ll go to the Wall if I can!” Paul barked back.

“It hurts me to think that we’ve only been there once. You could maybe take some flowers.”

“Do they do that there?”

“I don’t bloody hell care what they do there, you can take him some flowers. You can set them down under his regiment.”

“I’ll try.”

Soon enough he flew to Dulles, riding a cab past the gentle deciduous arms of eastern woodland fringing the highway. Rising into the powder-blue skies like holy temples were the strongholds of such corporations as Northrop Grummon, BCF, Camber, Deltek, Juniper, Scitor, Vovici, Sybase, and Booz Allen Hamilton, while the gentle green grass and low trees waved around them, sprinkled with rusting conifers sick with disease. He heard the overture to a rock opera forming in his head, a rousing confluence of Carmina Burana and Tommy, and had a fleeting fantasy of supporting two careers with his boundless force.

He was taken to a building in Arlington, Virginia, a stone’s throw from the Pentagon, and those on the committee, some with their uniforms and Minotaur heads, jabbing their swollen thumbs through his documents, gave him the once over.

Present were Grandy Moy, Louise Gladtrip, and Stan Silverbutton, all from the National Institutes of Health (NIH); Vance Odenkirk, Willard Liu, and Horton DeWitt, all from the Department of Defense (DOD); John Williams, MD, National Naval Medical Center, Bethesda (NNMC); Lt. Col. Wade Dent, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center (WRNMMC); Brig. Gen. Nancy Bottomly; Reginald Kornfink, committee manager, DOD; Alfred Pesthorn and Cordelia Fleiss, FDA; Col. Bradley Richter, U.S. Army Medical Materiel Agency (USAMMA); and Ms. Cloris Hutmacher.

“Traumatic brain injury in combat has become the number one killer of our troops,” Paul began, gazing down the table. “It was the signature injury of the Iraqi and Afghani campaigns. Warfighter brain injury studies to date include a lot of hopeful breakthroughs on tissue regeneration, but none addresses the need for intervention on the spot, before the cascade of damage begins.”

A few of them actually yawned. He responded passionately:

“Let me get to the point. For the past year and a half I have performed a rigorous study of decompressive craniectomies on lab animals with a tool of my own invention, and I’m ready to translate my results to a Phase III trial—”

“We’ve got a few ‘animals’ for you,” one seasoned bureaucrat broke in, with a bitter snort.

“We’re getting an extended Doberman,” Kornfink said, drumming his pencil on the table.

“What’s that?”

“That’s what I wanted to know, but we’re getting one.”

“How extended is it?”

“I’ve heard of those.”

“I’ll let you know,” said Kornfink. “I’m breeding them. Shelley’s idea for my retirement.”

Suddenly the inert committee appeared to remember why they were there, and returned to Paul, as if nothing had happened.

“Dr. Vreeland, the Department of Defense will consider cooperating with the VA and the licensor to fund this study. How do you propose testing in field conditions?”

Paul said, “The VA in Menlo Park has several vacant buildings which we’ve submitted petitions to use to create field conditions with all relevant noise, light deprivation, smoke, and so on.”

He added, “We’ll also want to invite trained medics to test the procedure in simulated conditions, rather than MDs.” He cleared his throat, and pulled on his collar.

“This is something like a field trach, is that what you’re thinking?” asked Bradley Richter, a sinewy man with dark eyes and a pronounced underbite, reminding Paul of a sea angler with skills adapted to life in the dark deep.

“Yes, sir. Medics easily master tracheotomies in emergency situations. For testing we’d move from cadavers to live volunteers in these aforementioned conditions.”

“By volunteers, are we talking scores less than eight on the Glasgow Scale?”

“We’re looking at a number like that,” Paul said, having been warned by Cloris to keep this vague.

Cloris Hutmacher spoke up. “I’ve already met with Planning at the VA in Menlo Park and they’re ready to lease us Building 301, which is a fifteen-thousand-square-foot structure currently in disuse. Any of the WOO simulator systems would fit there.”

Richter took notes.

Paul cleared his throat. “If we succeed, which I believe we will—”

“People, this is huge,” said Cloris.

“Cloris has an eye for the huge,” pronounced Richter.

Cloris said, “It’s a cusp moment for all of us.”

Paul gazed around the oblong slab, at men and women who’d served the military and had undoubtedly been the trendsetters and thugs of their grade schools.

“This is clearly an opportunity of the highest order,” he heard himself declare. “To serve. My country.” He made methodical eye contact with each person present. “My father’s brother, PFC Richard Vreeland, Company C, Second Battalion Fifth Cavalry, First Cavalry Division, died of blast wounds to his head, chest, both legs, abdomen, and right hand in the ambush at Phu Ninh.” He had never mentioned his uncle’s annihilation to anyone before, and the expediency of doing it now shocked him, yet made him feel like maybe he could be a player after all. The room fell silent. “As soon as this meeting is over, I’m going to visit his name on the Wall. I want this as much for our country as I want it for him.”

A round of backslapping ensued. Cloris told him he was spectacular, and invited him to join some of the committee members for drinks. “Well, I’d like to, but I need to go by the Wall. My uncle,” he added.

“You really meant that?” An admiring glint flashed in her eyes. She was as thin as a whip.

“Of course I did.”

“Come with us now,” Cloris said. “Visit the Wall later.”

“But my flight leaves at nine.”

She whispered, “I won’t tell anyone you didn’t go to the Wall. Come on!”

They went to a noisy bar in Georgetown. Cloris spent her energy speaking closely into the large, open ear of Bradley Richter. Paul perspired heavily and drank too much. He didn’t end up visiting the Wall, but planned to tell his father he had. Or maybe not—maybe he’d tell his father he couldn’t, as he’d said all along. Well, it would make his father happy to think he’d tried. Throw the old man a bone. A cab returned him to Dulles within the hour, and he received the offer the next day by noon.

PAUL RETURNED from his tour of the VA grounds by nine A.M. In the lobby, an elfin woman in a yellow checkered skirt and a white blouse with a pin of a Scottish terrier on the collar stepped out and waved at him like a crossing guard.

“Dr. Vreeland!”

Susan Hinks had soft blond hair and cornflower blue eyes, a fine fuzz of blond on her cheeks, and an expression not of an embryo but of something quite fresh. A voyeur would know how to describe it. “Welcome. It’s great to meet you, Dr. Vreeland!” Her voice was charmingly nasal, with a mild midwestern twang, and her teeth were notably large and clean. “I’m your clinical coordinator and I’ll be providing support in all responsibilities related to the NIH and the DOD and Hutmacher. I’ll conduct follow-up evaluations, watch compliance with protocol, take care of the case reports. I’ll be your liaison with the Investigational Review Board, the IRB. We’ve been completely overwhelmed with volunteer applications—we’ve still got people calling and going around the usual channels to get in.”

Paul felt a surge of pride. “Seriously? Is this trial especially attractive for some reason?”

“Any trial is attractive,” Susan Hinks said. “They have to wait so long for treatment in the system. If they get into a trial, they get a lot of attention.”

He gave her a skeptical look.

“Are you trying to tell me these veterans are willing to get a hole punched in their skulls just to get a checkup?”

Unruffled, she said, “That’s the way it is, Dr. Vreeland. Let me show you what we’ve organized so far. I think you’ll be pleased.”

He’d recently reviewed the latest iteration of the World Medical Association’s policy statement, the Declaration of Helsinki, concerning the ethical principles for medical research involving human studies. Now he wanted to know: Had they followed the declaration to a T? Yes, Hinks told him. Had they filed all the paperwork disclosing his financial interest with Hutmacher?

“Form 3455, done.”

“Well! Great.” He followed her to the elevator, up a floor, down a corridor through some security doors that she opened with a code. A stooped man in a thin flannel shirt and jeans caked with cement pushed the blue button on a water cooler in the hallway; a woman in a butterscotch-colored sweater stood behind him. They eyed him timidly, and retreated to a room with a TV screen. “That’s the family room,” Hinks explained. “Since the volunteers began to arrive, we have some of the families spending all day here, thrilled to take part. Patriots to the bone.”

He winced at her word choice, while she opened a cabinet stocked with sterile aprons, masks, and gloves. “Here you go,” she said, and together they suited up.

The swinging doors let them through.

A gritty light touched on the ward, beds lined up military style. The cold echo of machinery bounced off the walls, along with the rhythmic hiss of chest cavities rising and falling on ventilators. A sharp whiff of ammonia penetrated his mask. Across the room, a nurse changed an IV bag, while an attendant mopped around a bed, gathering a pile of sheets bundled at the foot.

Paul grabbed the chart off the first footboard he came to. Flores, Daniel R. Injured by landmine, north of Kabul. He saw before him a twenty-four-year-old with a youthful hairline and an unblemished brow, missing the eyes, nose, and mouth beneath it. The roots of teeth poked from a band of purple tissue, and a breathing tube disappeared through a hole the size of a Life Saver, secured by a gasket. Where the boy’s arms had once been sprouted two fleshy buds, stippled with splinters of bone.

Paul looked at the chart attached to the next bed. Baker, Jeremiah J. Wounds suffered near Kandahar when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device. The young man’s eyes were open, and Paul bent over to make contact. The pupils were nonreactive. The eyes didn’t see.

“And we have wonderful volunteers who work with the families, a lot of attention, a lot of hope. It’s very uplifting.”

“There’s very little chance of—” He groped for ground.

“Dr. Vreeland, are you all right?”

Men missing parts of themselves forever, here to bolster his reputation and gain. Paul’s throat closed with shame.

“Who volunteered these volunteers?”

“Hartman is the CRO who recruits for us.”

“Could you tell me, what is a CRO?”

“Everything here has an acronym, you’ll get used to it. The CRO is the Contract Research Organization. They get volunteers and help us package our information for the FDA. Hartman is a little corporate but we’ve been very happy with them in clinic.”

He worried briefly about the hollow and ominous description of this corporate entity, and wanted to sputter Seropurulent!, which had been an ironic superlative they used in med school for terrible things that had to be overlooked. (By definition: a mixture of blood and pus.)

“Right. Okay. Have the cadavers arrived?”