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

“Yes, we have sixty-seven in the locker, and thirty-three arrive later this week. Would you like to see them?”

“No, that’s okay. I’ve seen plenty of cadavers.”

“Then let me show you our new MRI room.”

They went out through the ward on the other side, to a corridor, where Hinks took him into another room to see the sleek and massive multislice Somatom Definition Flash scanner.

“Excellent.” He reached out to pat it.

“Oh, Dr. Vreeland? Is this okay, we only have one technician authorized to operate this machine. So we’ll schedule together on that, okay?”

“Fine. Can we take a look at my office?” he asked.

“Of course, come this way.”

ARMORY SQUARE, 1865.

As they removed their gowns he peered back through the small window into the ward. The wounded forms in the cots looked no different from those he’d seen in photos of Civil War hospitals; he might as well have been peering through the window at Armory Square or Satterlee. The flag jutted from the wall. History repeats, repeats, repeats. By no means a rabid nationalist, as a schoolkid he’d nevertheless revered the custom of setting his hand on his heart and repeating the Pledge every morning, the ritualized blur of sounds. Antootherepublicforwitchitstands … These guys who really did stand for the country would never again stand for themselves.

Indivisible. As a kid he thought it was a stuttered invisible. And that it referred to the flag itself. Kids making pledges on misunderstandings. He’d thought it meant the flag flew invisibly over all.

THAT AFTERNOON Paul sat in his new office, fighting an unwelcome chill. The room was sensibly furnished with a teak desk and credenza, glass-fronted bookshelves that were empty except for the manuals for the computer and printer still packed in boxes on the floor, and a comfortable black leather chair that swiveled and reclined. Well, he’d reached a new high. He had brought his model schooner that he carried with him from desk to desk, and a picture of Veblen taken in San Francisco, which he removed from his briefcase and set on his bare desk. Her face was so trusting. He hoped he hadn’t upset some invisible balance by getting the squirrel trap, for he feared invisible balances lay like booby traps all around him. He loved to fall back into a warm evening in October when they’d pulled off Page Mill Road after a concert at the Almaden Winery and made love in the weeds, and her hair was full of burrs and she didn’t care. He thought at one point he’d been bitten by a snake, and he’d jumped up and she’d laughed. She was braver than he was!

All the more this past weekend, when he’d taken her up to the ski lodge at Tahoe to join Hans and the gang he used to hang with in the city—doctors, architects, financiers. He’d introduced her with satisfaction, and there were toasts to the engagement and plenty of lip service to what a hottie she was, but when they found out she wasn’t on a notable career path, they seemed unable to synthesize her into their social tableau, as if Paul had chosen a mail-order bride. Having Veblen along changed how he saw them; through the loud meals at a big table in which the conversation seemed all status and swag, Paul found himself hyperconscious of their crass concerns. There was Hans bragging about noteworthy CEOs he’d tweaked houses for, Tim the stockbroker gossiping about his favorite start-ups and upcoming IPOs, Daniel the city planner waxing about a welcome wave of demolition and gentrification south of Market, Lola and Jesse droning about furnishing their new place with everything high-end, until he thought if he heard the word high-end one more time he would retch. Hans’s wife, Uma, asked Veblen where she invested, and he heard her mumbling something about a checking account, to which Uma replied, “I’d be happy to review your portfolio and see if there’s anything I could suggest,” whereupon Veblen nodded and backed away, as if being cornered by a wolf.

By the time they said good-bye to everyone, he wondered if he’d ever want to see his old friends again, though Veblen remained cheerful all the way down from the mountains. To prove his loyalty to her, he made fun of Hans and Uma for buying their beautiful three-story Edwardian on Jackson Street in Pacific Heights, then duly gutting the place before moving in so that they had to stay nine months in an apartment, providing them with what could be considered a newlyweds’ adventure and many things to complain about, such as their unreliable contractor and the noisy tenants of the building they were renting in. Veblen appreciated that story, or his attitude about it anyway.

He also told her he saw his friends’ psychic wounds playing out in all this need for validation, and she seemed to like his analysis too.

True, there were things about Veblen that mystified him—her low-hanging job as a secretary, for one. (It wouldn’t seem right, after they married, for her to be a temp. He could support her then, she could look for real jobs, anything she wanted.) And her faith in people! She really believed they’d do their best.

Three large windows looked west to the coastal range, his new horizon. He sat back in his chair and closed his eyes and tried not to start rocking, his default when he was tense. He looked for that flat horizontal line he’d discovered whenever he was in a bad way as a child. With his eyes closed he contemplated the horizontal line as if it were a brilliant sunrise that would light up a terrific new day for him. His muscles relaxed. He brought air down to the bottom of his sternum. He visualized himself not as a weakling but as a dense little torpedo penetrating the bullshit of the world, and that always made him smile.

Good-bye to all he’d escaped. He’d never have fucking duck eggs again, with those bright yellow yolks, he’d have the regular, white, chicken kind, clean on the outside, not caked with green guano. He’d never have smelly beanbag chairs, or any kind of lumpy free-form thing splayed on the ground like a carcass. He’d have heat in his bathroom. He’d never run out of toilet paper, by god, and have to use fucking leaves. He’d have toilet paper stacked to the ceiling. He’d keep his place clean, without smoke or the creeping reek of bong juice. Unlike his parents, he’d never throw open-house parties in which guests could arrive any time of the day or night and stay for the rest of their lives. He wouldn’t have a guest room, period! He’d make barbed jokes about guests smelling like fish, so any potential guest would get paranoid. He’d never wear anything ethnic as long as he lived, he’d shop strictly at Brooks Brothers, down to his shorts. He’d invest in stocks and bonds and have a portfolio statement, not some sticky tie-dyed bag full of limp, resinous cash!

LATER IN THE DAY, there was a knock on his office door.

“Come in!”

Through the door came a short young guy with a goatee and heavily framed glasses. He wore baggy shorts revealing thick, shapeless legs.

“James Shalev,” he said, shaking Paul’s hand. He had a nickel slot between his incisors, which gave him the uncanny appearance of vulnerability and viciousness combined. “Welcome to Greenslopes. I do the VA newsletter and PR, and when you’ve had a chance to settle in, I’d like to do a profile. Mind if I take a quick shot now?”

Paul blinked in the flash.

Shalev took the extra chair and opened his satchel, to present Paul with a short stack of past newsletters. “Here’s what I do. It’s actually considered one of the best hospital newsletters in the country.”

“Yes, it’s impressive,” Paul said.

“We’ve won the Aster four times in the last seven years, honoring excellence in medical marketing. Look, each issue has a theme and variations, but it takes a careful reading to detect it.”

“News is marketing?”

Shalev blinked, as if Paul had just emerged from an ancient pod. “Yes, it is.”

The cover story was about the art exhibition in the lobby, and went on to list the names of the local artists who had contributed. On the inside page was an article on the free shuttle bus that operated continuously between Greenslopes and the Palo Alto Caltrain station. There was a picture of the little shuttle bus. The next page had a continuing feature called “Meet Our Specialists.” This month’s specialist was Dr. Burt Wallman, a psychiatrist who specialized in suicide prevention. Paul restlessly flipped through the pages, not able to detect a theme.

He noted the headline WIDOWS, WIDOWERS HONORED WITH DAFFODILS. It seemed the Daffodil Society of Greenslopes gave symbolic daffodils to the families of vets.

“Did you see it?” asked Shalev.

“See what?”

“You’re picking something up. Try to say what it is.”

“Man’s inhumanity to man?”

“Close. This month’s theme is regeneration, starting over, springtime.”

Paul said, “Why did you write this? As one of the leading clinical trials hospitals for veterans, Greenslopes is proud of the wonderful relationship it has forged with widows …?”

“Nothing wrong with it, is there? Here’s your dependent clause headed by your subordinating conjunction—”

“It implies that the clinical trials create widows.”

Shalev said, “The people in your trial, they’re either brain damaged or brain dead, aren’t they? But nobody stops hoping.”

“Nobody ever said this was about a cure.”

“Have you talked to any of the families?” Shalev prodded.

“What do they think?”

Shalev gathered the pile into his case. “Someone they love is laid out before them, trapped in an endless sleep. You ever loved someone in a coma?”

Paul shook his head.

“From what I’ve seen, when someone you love is in a coma, you simply want to believe. As long as they’re alive, there’s hope.” He snapped the latches on his satchel, and adjusted his glasses. “We had a trial in here last year with big funding, they extracted the essence of a tumor, gave it a whirl in a centrifuge, then injected a concentrated dose back into the patient.”

“Immune therapy, very cutting edge,” Paul said.

“The volunteers went extinct in a matter of weeks. But research-wise, hey, it was a big success. Doctors high-fiving each other all over the place.”

To extract more of Paul’s essence, they made plans to meet again. And after Shalev left him, Paul gauged he’d been spending too much time in the lab. Bedside manners had never been his strong suit. Maybe he could delegate them.

But the greats knew how to handle their patients. Look at the superstar neurologist Oliver Sacks. Patients adored him, stayed in touch for the rest of their lives. Paul recalled an interview in which Sacks said he loved to find the potential in people who “weren’t thought to have any.” That noble sentiment had haunted him since. Surely his commitment to medicine showed that he cared in his own way. Was it his job to deal with magical thinking too?

AND THEN TO TASSO STREET. Veblen had that tendency to try to coax some desired outcome from anything he told her, her face as bright as a daffodil, overpowering him with good cheer. She met him at the door and gave him a kiss. “So, how’d it go?”

“We’ll see,” he said.

“How’s your assistant? What’s she like?”

“Seems efficient.” He went to wash his hands in the sink. His lifelong habit, on the hour. Wash hands. Wash off the world.

“Everything all right?”

Paul grabbed a dish towel and twisted it. “It’s probably not fair to hate her for saying ‘in clinic,’ is it? ‘I’ll see you in clinic.’”

“She dropped the article? What a bitch.”

“Yeah. It sounds clammy and invasive, like she’s breathing on my genitals.”

Veblen backed off, took two beers from the refrigerator, popped the caps. “She’d better not.”

“Thanks.” Bottoms up. The beer tasted bitter, and landed heavily in his gut. “It’s a lot to absorb. They’ve had a big response to our call for volunteers.”

“That’s great, Paul. See? You deserve it.”

“The question remains, what ‘it’ is I deserve.” He sighed. “All these caring families are hanging around. It feels like a lot of pressure. I hope I know what I’m doing.”

“That must be unnerving. Take one day at a time,” Veblen said. “No one expects you to undo the damage of the military industrial complex overnight.”

“Ha!” He snorted. “Are you sure?” He finished his bottle. The foam bubbled on his lips, tickling like root beer and first kisses.

4

NOTHING ABOUT YOU IS BAD

And so, within a few weeks, the visit to Cobb was upon them. Meet the parents. A classic rite of passage, inevitable, except that the irregularities of her mother’s personality held a certain terror for Veblen. (She reminded herself that all humans were flawed, no family faultless, and whatever happened that day, it was part of the rich tapestry of life.) Her mother would surely rise to the occasion this time, wouldn’t she? And Paul, who routinely dissected brains, could surely endure her mother too.

The couple set off early on a bright Saturday, skirting the traffic-ensnarled Bay Area heading north, past the minaret-like towers of the oil refineries at Martinez, past the ghost fleet of warships mothballed away in the Carquinez Strait, discussing the myriad future. There were so many things to talk about when one decided to get married, and Paul had waited to share some exciting news.

“Looks as if Cloris Hutmacher has offered us her house for the wedding,” he said, his voice crackling mostly with pride, but with an undertone of something else.

He told her he’d seen Cloris that week and announced their engagement. And Cloris had leaped right in. She said, why not her place in May? Small pink Cecile Brunners covered the arbor in May. Every guest could pluck one. The light in May was perfect, the days were long. Her caterer was amazing. Sadly, she wouldn’t be there, she’d be away. But wouldn’t it be wonderful? And Paul quickly understood that if she weren’t there, he wouldn’t have to worry about whatever it was that he worried about with his family around. As such, the Hutmacher venue was a feather in his cap, a long pheasant feather, such as those found on the felted hats of Tyrolean yodelers, and as the plucker of it, he wished to be acknowledged as a plucker extraordinaire.

(Which reminded Veblen, as her mind was quick to fly, of her childhood confusion between peasants and pheasants; it seemed brutal, insane aristocrats brought along “beaters” to sweep through the woods clubbing hedgerows and trees to scare them out and gun them down, which was shocking either way, really, but proved the madness of too much privilege.)

“She sure seems to like you,” Veblen said, jealously.

“Purely professional,” Paul said, clearing his throat.

“But you know, I was imagining somewhere outside, maybe in the redwoods.”

Paul said, “Wouldn’t that be kind of funky and messy? Paper plates crumpling in people’s laps, nowhere for the older people to sit—we should think of their comfort too. This would be so easy, and it’s beautiful there.”

“I’ve never seen it.”

“We’ll go soon. And it’s a real connection for us. It’s not some rented gazebo.”

Veblen felt strangely unmoved. She didn’t know Cloris Hutmacher and didn’t want the Hutmacher trademark on their wedding day.

“It’s nice she offered,” she said at last. “But is May too soon?”

“Not for me,” said Paul, and this made Veblen smile with pleasure on the outside, and churn from within. Yet there was something bracing about moving forward fast. One could even believe in fate and unfaltering happiness. “Please acknowledge she’s been great to me.”

“She knew a good thing when she saw it,” Veblen said.

“I guess. But without her connections—”

“You would have made them yourself,” she said, stubbornly.

“You are dangerously optimistic.” Then added, quickly, “I like that, most of the time.”

“When don’t you like it?”

“Let’s see. Did I get phone calls from the Pentagon before I met Cloris? Did I take trips to Washington before I met her? I was puttering around in a lab. I used to wonder what it would have been like if my parents had been part of some inner circle in Washington or New York—what I could have been doing instead.”

“But what you’re doing is great!”

“Yeah, but I would’ve gone to an Ivy League school, I’d have connections, I’d have that feeling of entitlement those people have. Instead, I’ve had to claw every step of the way. Look how hard you’ve had to work, Veb, you’re a temp!”

“Is that bad?”

“Nothing about you is bad. But if we have children, which I hope we will”—he squeezed her hand—“I want them to feel good about themselves from the start.”

Veblen wanted a scrappy kid with grit, and said so.

“Come on,” Paul said, “haven’t you ever felt grateful to someone for helping you?”

Very much so. There was Wickery Krooth, her high school journalism teacher, who covered her contributions with exclamation points, and wrote things like, Yes! I never thought of it this way! Original! You have a knack for finding just the right word. She’d kept in touch with him until he retired. And there was Mr. Bix Dahlstrom, a very sweet Norwegian man in a nursing home in Napa who’d been her language buddy; she’d visited him three times a week for two years, holding his cool hands while they talked, until she showed up one day with her notebook and was told some very sad news.

THE MORNING DRIVE abounded with vistas of rolling hills, green only briefly before they’d go golden, ranch land and half-peopled developments spotting the terrain like outbreaks of inflamed skin. Veblen espoused the Veblenian opinion that wanting a big house full of cheaply produced versions of so-called luxury items was the greatest soul-sucking trap of modern civilization, and that these copycat mansions away from the heart and soul of a city had ensnared their overmortgaged owners—yes, trapped and relocated them like pests.

Discussing the wedding created a perplexing hollow in Veblen. She had picked up a copy of Brides magazine since the whole idea came into play; it wanted to fill her mind with wedding souvenirs and makeovers and cake toppers and what she would wear on her head, but none of that stuff captivated her the way she knew it was supposed to, and she wondered if she should make it an actual goal to start relating to all the bridal fanfare in a more happy-go-lucky way so she wouldn’t miss out on something important. How do you know if you’re stubbornly missing out, or if it’s just not for you and that’s perfectly okay?

It was important for Paul and Albertine to know each other, wasn’t it? Yet getting them together the other night had been a failure. They met at the House of Nanking in San Francisco; Albertine arrived in yam-colored clogs and argyle knee socks, her signature look.

“So you two have known each other since high school?” Paul asked, sounding strangely uncharismatic as he peeled the label off his Tsingtao, making a pile of wet paper pills.

Albertine, dipping a plump pot sticker into chili oil, said, “Sixth grade. If I hadn’t met Veblen I would’ve committed suicide,” and then chomped the pot sticker in a peculiarly mooselike way.

“Whoa,” said Veblen.

“Be prepared, she’s a nut,” said Albertine.

Paul didn’t like having his betrothed described so knowingly, Veblen could tell. Then Albertine led Paul into telling about his school days and the pot growers and narcs surrounding him. It seemed to be going well enough. It was a funny world up there where people lived off the grid and paid for everything in cash. Was it criminal or simply the pioneer spirit? They segued into malfeasance in the medical field, and Paul proceeded to describe the difference between idiocy and evil. Idiocy was the family doctor in Placer County who double-dipped a syringe into a large bottle of Propofol and contaminated it with hepatitis C, only to go on and infect dozens of people from this bottle. Evil was the internist in Palm Springs who stole organs during laparoscopic surgeries on elderly patients and sold them on the black market. It was estimated that he had made off with hundreds of kidneys, lobes of livers, sections of intestine, and even entire lungs before anyone caught on.

“Know thyself. Don’t take up space in a medical program if you haven’t dealt with your issues,” said Albertine, and Paul sat up straighter.

Then Paul said, “Am I right in thinking that in Jungian analysis, most of the training is spent on the self?”

“It’s too bad doctors don’t have that kind of training,” Albertine said, pointedly.

Then on the way home that evening, Paul shocked Veblen by imitating Albertine in a pinched, nasal voice. “We went to school together. We are two wild and crazy girls. We love to wear our big heavy clogs and act crazy in the moonlight.”

“Stop it!” Veblen cried out.

“I’m kidding,” Paul said. “How could I say anything after exposing you to Hans?”

Which led Veblen to realize these friendships were based on a phenotype exchange that occurred only with childhood friends, in which they were simply part of you forever, for better or worse. Veblen had been assigned to the tall, gawky new girl in sixth grade as her Welcome Buddy. In the first few days of their mandated buddy-hood, a boy on the playground was stung by a bee and his foot swelled up like a gangplank. Veblen made an observation about elephantiasis, to which Albertine said, “What’s that?”

“Haven’t you heard of elephantiasis?”

“Why would I? I can’t read your mind.”

“Well, it’s a horrible disease from parasites that makes your body parts look thick and stumpy, like elephant legs,” Veblen pronounced.

“Ha ha ha.”

“It’s not funny, it’s very painful.”

“You’re trying to humiliate me so you can have the power.”

Veblen was intrigued by the girl’s reasoning, as comfortably skewed as her mother’s. “What do you mean?”

“You’re testing to see if I can be manipulated,” Albertine declared, pushing her wire frames up her nose.

“I swear, there’s such a thing,” young Veblen declared, all at once appreciating how elephantiasis could sound as made up as tigerrhea or hippopotomania. They went to the school library and found the disease in the encyclopedia; the new girl shrugged her broom of blond hair and walked off. Veblen refused to believe in the girl’s indifference.

The next day she brought one of her mother’s medical journals to school, an issue chronicling a recent outbreak of elephantiasis in Indonesia. As Veblen calculated, the new girl seemed touched by Veblen’s passion to lift her up on the subject of tropical illness. Not only that, but they discovered their shared inclination to laugh in the face of bizarre and horrible realities they were spared by a twentieth-century California childhood, and they’d been best friends ever since. Almost eighteen years!

STILL, broad-spectrum uneasiness led to a long lunchtime conversation outside the hospital with Albertine only yesterday.

“Why didn’t you like him?” Veblen wanted to know.

“So you’re having doubts.”

“No, but even if I were, it’s normal, right?”

Albertine, who specialized in doubts, who pointed out the shadow side of human nature at every turn, who swore allegiance to ambivalence and ambiguity, whose favorite color was gray, sounded concerned. “What kind of doubts?”

“No, you’re supposed to say ‘Of course! Everyone feels that way!’”

“I don’t have enough information. Maybe you should listen to your doubts this time.”

“Listen to my doubts?”

Albertine described a vitamin salesman from San Bruno she’d doubted a few times before finding out he was a meth freak. Another recent doubt was over a gambling landscaper from Marin. Veblen sensed a note of triumph in Albertine when she described her apperception of the man’s flaws.