The Portable Veblen: Shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2016
Elizabeth McKenzie
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2016A laugh-out-loud love story with big ideas - and squirrelsCan squirrels speak? Do snails scream?Will a young couple, newly engaged, make it to their wedding day? Will their dysfunctional families ruin everything? Will they be undone by the advances of a very sexy, very unscrupulous heiress to a pharmaceuticals corporation?Is getting married even a remotely reasonable idea in the twenty-first century?And what in the world is a ‘Veblen’ anyway?
Copyright (#ulink_815995bc-1e86-5c18-939c-8f2e6b7bbc63)
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.4thestate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2016
First published in the United States by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC in 2016
Copyright © Elizabeth McKenzie 2016
Elizabeth McKenzie asserts the right to be identified as the author of this work.
A portion of this book appeared in The Atlantic
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008160388
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2015 ISBN: 9780008160401
Version: 2018-09-26
Dedication (#ulink_24671c13-b7d0-56b1-89b5-3de718e234dc)
For James Ross Cox
Epigraph (#ulink_20710070-35f9-5b27-ba5a-fa0481ffc1b1)
“If you love it enough, anything will talk with you.”
—G. W. CARVER
CONTENTS
Cover (#ufdeb3ace-1aa8-53a3-b6e1-4252c45e57ce)
Title Page (#u32b658c7-9f5c-5796-b430-c17a5c975a67)
Copyright (#u3f6d689c-d76d-5f95-b144-3208f664a613)
Dedication (#u98e50b41-1607-5266-af4d-d79094149e06)
Epigraph (#u06c33a8a-b3bc-564d-a37b-0d2b3bbb7ca4)
1. END THE ATTACHMENT! (#u7df283a0-97f1-5f6f-889f-c34036111665)
2. SAUERKRAUT AND MACE (#uca1daf64-84b5-55e9-9144-acdf07c515d9)
3. NEWS IS MARKETING (#u4b7318a8-72e1-5cab-b7d6-02caefc97ffb)
4. NOTHING ABOUT YOU IS BAD (#u1a69b05a-0e0b-5b79-b14d-df9a66000119)
5. PLIGHT OF THE BOOKWORM (#litres_trial_promo)
6. ART IS DESPAIR WITH DIGNITY (#litres_trial_promo)
7. RELEASING THE TOOL (#litres_trial_promo)
8. EIGHT KNOTS (#litres_trial_promo)
9. THE STOIC GLACIER METHOD (#litres_trial_promo)
10. WAR CASH (#litres_trial_promo)
11. THE SPEECHLESS OTHERS (#litres_trial_promo)
12. THE PASSENGER YEARS (#litres_trial_promo)
13. THE ANIMAL RULE (#litres_trial_promo)
14. THE NUTKINISTAS (#litres_trial_promo)
15. I MELT WITH YOU (#litres_trial_promo)
16. NEVER THE SAME AGAIN (#litres_trial_promo)
17. OFFENSE IS MANDATORY (#litres_trial_promo)
18. THE CURS (#litres_trial_promo)
19. MAYBE YES, MAYBE NO (#litres_trial_promo)
20. SOMETHING BAD MUST HAVE HAPPENED (#litres_trial_promo)
21. CAN YOU PATENT THE SUN? (#litres_trial_promo)
22. THE MAN-SQUIRREL DEBATE (#litres_trial_promo)
23. HELLO IN THERE (#litres_trial_promo)
24. DOOMED TO WONDER (#litres_trial_promo)
25. THE CYBORG (#litres_trial_promo)
26. WE CAN BE TOGETHER (#litres_trial_promo)
27. SEE FOR YOURSELF (#litres_trial_promo)
Appendices (#litres_trial_promo)
Appendix A (#litres_trial_promo)
Appendix B (#litres_trial_promo)
Appendix C (#litres_trial_promo)
Appendix D (#litres_trial_promo)
Appendix E (#litres_trial_promo)
Appendix F (#litres_trial_promo)
Appendix G (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Picture Permissions (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Elizabeth McKenzie (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
1 (#ulink_edfbd15a-278b-559c-9ffc-6cd770ab4ea3)
END THE ATTACHMENT! (#ulink_edfbd15a-278b-559c-9ffc-6cd770ab4ea3)
Huddled together on the last block of Tasso Street, in a California town known as Palo Alto, was a pair of humble bungalows, each one aplot in lilies. And in one lived a woman in the slim green spring of her life, and her name was Veblen Amundsen-Hovda.
It was a rainy day in winter, shortly after the New Year. At the end of the street a squirrel raked leaves on the banks of the San Francisquito Creek, looking for pale, aged oak nuts, from which the tannins had been leeched by rain and dew. In muddy rain boots, a boy and a girl ran in circles, collecting acorns, throwing them, screaming with delight in the rain. Children did this every day, Veblen knew, scream in delight.
The skin of the old year was crackling, coming apart, the sewers sweeping it away beneath the roads. Soon would come a change in the light, the brief, benign winter of northern California tilting to warmth and flowers. All signs that were usually cause for relief, yet Veblen felt troubled, as if rushing toward a disaster. But was it of a personal nature, or worldwide? She wanted to stop time.
The waterway roared, as frothy as a cauldron, a heaving jam of the year’s broken brambles and debris. She watched the wind jerk the trees, quivering, scattering their litter. The creek roared, you see. Did water fret about madness? Did trees?
With her walked a thirty-four-year-old man named Paul Vreeland, tall and solid of build, branded head to toe in a forge-gray Patagonia jacket, indigo cords from J. Crew, and brown leather Vans that were showing flecks of mud. Under her raincoat, Veblen wore items of indeterminate make, possibly hand-cobbled, with black rubber boots. She was plain and mild in appearance, with hair the color of redwood bark, and eyes speckled like September leaves.
They stopped at a mossy escarpment in a ring of eucalyptus, redwood, and oak, and a squirrel crept forward to spy.
“Veb,” the man said.
“Yes?”
“I’ve been insanely happy lately,” he said, looking down.
“Really?” She loved the idea of spending time with someone that happy, particularly if insanely. “Me too.”
“Tacos Tambien tonight?”
“Sure!”
“I knew you’d say sure.”
“I always say sure to Tacos Tambien.”
“That’s good,” he said, squeezing her hands. “To be in the habit of saying sure.”
She drew closer, sensing his touching nervousness.
“You know that thing you do, when you run out of a room after you’ve turned off the light?” he said.
“You’ve seen me?”
“It’s very cute.”
“Oh!” To be cute when one hasn’t tried is nice.
“Remember when you showed me the shadow of the humming-bird on the curtain?”
“Yes.”
“I loved that.”
“I know, it was right in the middle, like it was framing itself.”
“And you know that thing you do, when telemarketers call and you sort of retch like you’re being strangled and hang up?”
“You like that?”
“I love it.” He cleared his throat, looked down at the ground, not so much at the earth but at his footing on it. “I am very much in love with you. Will you marry me?”
A velveteen shell came up from his pocket, opening with a crack like a walnut. In it gleamed a diamond so large it would be a pill to avoid for those who easily gag.
“Oh, Paul. Look, a squirrel’s watching.”
But Paul wouldn’t even turn, as if being watched by a squirrel meant nothing to him.
“Oh my gosh,” she said, examining the alien stone, for which she’d never yearned. “It’s so big. Won’t I smash it into things, won’t I wreck it?”
“Diamonds can’t be smashed.”
“I can’t wreck it?” she asked, incredulously.
“You can’t wreck anything. You only make things great.”
Her body quickened, like a tree in the wind. Later, she would remember a filament that passed through her, of being glad she had provided him happiness, but not really sure how she felt herself.
“Yes?” the man said.
The squirrel emitted a screech.
“Is that a yes?” Paul asked.
She managed to say it. Yes. Two human forms became as one, as they advanced to the sidewalk, the route to the cottage on Tasso Street.
Behind them, the squirrel made a few sharp sounds, as if to say he had significant doubts. As if to say, and she couldn’t help translating it this way: There is a terrible alchemy coming.
SUCH WAS THE engagement of Veblen Amundsen-Hovda, independent behaviorist, experienced cheerer-upper, and freelance self, who was having a delayed love affair with the world due to an isolated childhood and various interferences since. At thirty she still favored baggy oversized boy’s clothes, a habit as hard to grow out of as imaginary friends.
That night in her cottage the squirrel paced the attic floor. Rain pelted the rooftop and a low-pressure system whipped the tall trees the town was named for. When his acorn lost its flavor, the squirrel hurled it in a fit of pique, and Paul banged on the wall from below.
You want a piece of me? Only bottled-up jerks bang on walls from below.
The squirrel had his resources. All he had to say was End the attachment and the leaves would fall. It was an important job in autumn to visit all the ones he’d planted and stare down their boughs. End the attachment. The trees went bare. The days grew short and cold.
THAT NIGHT IN BED, she fell upon Paul with odd ferocity, as if to transform or disguise the strange mood that had seized her. It worked. Later, holding her close, Paul whispered, “You know what I’ll remember forever?”
“What?”
“You didn’t say ‘I’ll think about it’ when I asked you. You just said yes.”
She felt the joy of doing something right.
Overhead came a Virginia reel of scrapes and thumps, embarrassing at this juncture, as would be a growling intestine under the sheets.
“Do you think it’s rats?” Paul asked.
“I’m hoping it’s squirrels.”
“This town is infested with squirrels, have you noticed?”
“I’d rather say it’s rich with squirrels.”
“The rain’s driving them in,” Paul said, kissing her.
“Or they’re celebrating for us, prancing with joy.”
He butted her gently. “My parents are going to be blown away. They’ll say I don’t deserve you.”
“Really? No way.”
“What’ll your mother say?” Paul wanted to know.
“Well, that it happened fast, and that she’ll have to meet you, immediately if not sooner.”
“Should we call and tell them?”
“Tomorrow.”
She had an internal clock set to her mother’s hunger for news, but sometimes it felt good to ignore it.
“What about your father?” Paul asked.
“Hmm. He’ll just say we’ll never be the same.”
“We’re old enough not to care what our parents think, but somehow we do,” Paul admitted, philosophically.
“That’s for sure.”
“Because they allowed us to exist.”
She had once concluded everyone on earth was a servant to the previous generation—born from the body’s factory for entertainment and use. A life could be spent like an apology—to prove you had been worth it.
Pressed against him, aware of the conspicuous new ring on her hand catching on the sheets, she jolted when he uttered in his day voice: “Veb, those noises don’t bother you?”
Not wanting to be mistaken for a person who resides obliviously in a pesthole, she explained, “I have this strange thing. If someone around me is bothered by something, I feel like I’m not allowed to be bothered.”
“Not allowed?”
“It’s like I’m under pressure from some higher source to remain calm or neutral, to prevent something terrible from happening.”
“That’s kinda twisted. Do you spend a lot of time doing that?”
She reflected that leveraging herself had become a major pastime. Was it fear of the domino, snowball, or butterfly effect? Or maybe just a vague awareness of behavioral cusps, cascading failures, chain reactions, and quantum chaos?
“It’s instinctive, so I don’t even notice.”
“So we’ll never be able to share a grievance?”
“Oh! I’ll work on it, if sharing grievances means a lot to you.”
He sniffed. “I don’t think it’s unreasonable to dislike the sound of gnawing rodents near our bed.”
“True.” She laughed, and kissed his head.
IN THE NIGHT she reflected that the squirrel was not gnawing—in fact, maybe it was orchestrating a master plan.
And Paul, she would discover, had many reasons to object to any kind of wild rumpus heard through walls, but had yet to understand the connection.
And she herself could withstand more than her share of trespasses by willful beings.
These embedded differences were enough to wreck everything, but what eager young couple would ever believe it?
IN THE MORNING, moments after Paul went out to buy pastries, a fluffy Sciurus griseus appeared on her bedroom sill. Its topcoat was charcoal, its chest as white as an oxford shirt, its tail as rakish as the feather in a conquistador’s cap. The western gray sat with quiet dignity, head high, shoulders back, casting a forthright glance through the window with its large brown eyes. What a vision!
She sat up in bed and it seemed quite natural to speak to the animal through the windowpane, though it had been a long while since she had known any squirrels. “Well, then! You’re a very handsome squirrel. Very dignified.” To her amusement, the squirrel lowered its head slightly, as if it understood her and appreciated the compliment. “Are you living upstairs? You’re a noisy neighbor, and you kept Paul up all night long!” This time, the squirrel picked up its head and seemed to shrug. A coincidence, surely, but Veblen hiccuped with surprise. And then the squirrel reached out and placed one of its hands onto the glass, as if to touch the side of her face.
“Oh! You’re really telling me something!” She extended her hand, but the new ring seemed to interfere, flashing and cold on her finger. She pulled it off and set it on the nightstand. With her hand unadorned, she felt free to place the tips of her fingers on the glass where the squirrel’s hand was pressed. The squirrel studied her with warm brown eyes, as if to ask: How well do you know yourself, and all the choices you could make? As if to tell her, I was cut loose from a hellish marriage, and I want to meet muckrakers, carousers, the sweet-toothed, and the lion-hearted, and you don’t know it yet, but you are all of these.
“I—what?” Veblen said, mesmerized.
Then, with a flick of its tail, it dashed away.
She jumped out of bed and threw on her robe and hurried out the back to see where it went, spying nothing but the soft winter grass and the growing wands of the lilies, the wet brown bed of needles beneath the Aleppo pine, the weathered fence line filigreed by termites, the mossy stones by the garage, the lichened roof. She was proud of her humble cottage on Tasso Street.
Then she went back inside and grabbed her phone to spring the news on her mother. Nothing being fully real until such springing. And nothing with her mother ever simple and straightforward either, and that was the thrill of it. A perverse infantile thrill necessary to life.
Linus, her stepfather, answered. “Hello?”
“Oh, hi, Linus, morning! Can I talk to Mom?”
“She’s asleep, dear. I’d say try in another few hours.”
“Just wake her up!”
“Well, she had a hard night. Had a reaction to the dye on a new set of towels we brought home. She’s been flat out since yesterday afternoon.”
“That’s sad. But I need to talk to her,” Veblen said, grinding some coffee.
“I’m afraid to go in there, you know how she gets. I’ll open the door a crack and whisper.”
Veblen heard the phone moving through space, then her mother’s cramped voice issuing from her big, despotic head obviously at an angle on a bolster. She was never at her best in the morning.
“Veblen, is something wrong?”
“No, not at all.”
Out the window, young moths flitted from the tips of the juniper. A large black beetle gnawed the side of the organ pipe cactus, carving a dwelling of just the right size in the winter shade.
“What is it?” asked her mother.
“A squirrel just came to the window and looked in at me.”
“Why is that so exciting?”
“It held out its paw. It made direct contact with me.”
“I thought you were over that. Dear god. Do Linus and I need to come down and intervene?”
Melanie C. Duffy, Veblen’s mother, was avid at intervening, and had intervened with resolve in Veblen’s life at all points, and was especially prone to anxiety about Veblen’s physical and mental health and apt to intervene over that on a daily basis.
“Oh, forget it. Maybe it was trying to see my ring.”
“What ring? I’m trembling.”
Veblen blurted: “Paul asked me to marry him.”
Silence.
“Mom?”
“Why did you tell me about the squirrel first?”
She found herself in earnest search of an answer,before snapping out of her childhood habit of full accountability.
“Because you like to know everything.” She pulled her favorite mugs from the cupboard, wondering when Paul would get back.
“It’s very odd you told me about the squirrel first. I haven’t even met this man.”
“I know, that’s why I’m calling. When can we come up?”
“You said at Christmas it was nothing special.”
“No, I didn’t. I just didn’t want to talk about it yet.”
“Didn’t you have any sense of wanting my input?” And such an ironic question it was, for there had already been so much input, so much.
“Of course. That’s the point.” She held the phone tenderly, as if it were an actual part of her mother.
“I feel excluded from the most important decision of your life.”
“No, Mom, I’m calling you first thing because you’re the most important person to me.”
There followed a silence, for her mother tended to freeze up and ignore compliments and love, and court instead all the miffs and tiffs she could gather round, in a perpetual powwow of pity.
“Well. Did you say yes for all the right reasons?”
The coffeemaker gurgled and hissed, a tired old friend doing its best. “I think so.”
“Marriage is not the point of a woman’s life. Do you understand that?”
“By now.”
“Do you love him?”
“I do, actually.”
“Is everything between you, good, sexually?”
“Mom, please! Boundaries or whatever.”
“Don’t say boundaries like every teenage twerp on TV.”
It bothered Veblen’s mother that most people were lazy and had given up original thought a long time ago, stealing stale phrases from the media like magpies. Fair enough. The problem was that her mother always overstated her points, ruining her credibility. Veblen had learned to seek out supporting evidence to give her mother’s unique worldview some muscle, and in this case she’d found it in the writings of the wonderful William James: “We must make searchratherfor the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct.”
“Okay, Mom. That’s private. Better?”
“Yes. It’s very important, and it’s also important to avoid hackneyed phrases, especially snide ones, which sound very déclassé.”
Veblen pressed on. “We have things in common with his family and they seem really nice.”
“A nice family counts for a lot, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. What do you tell him about me?”
She could hear her mother scratch her scalp, raking dead skin under her nails. “Good stuff. You’re hard to sum up. That’s why we have to meet.”
“I don’t know, Veblen. Nobody likes me when they meet me.”
Veblen replied faithfully, “No, not true.”
“Historically it’s quite true. Especially doctors. Doctors abhor me because I don’t kowtow to them.”
“He won’t be your doctor, he’ll be your son-in-law.”
“I’ve never met a doctor who didn’t wear the mantle of the doctor everywhere.”
Veblen shook her head. “But he’s in research, it’s different.”
From bracing them in defense since girlhood, her guts were robust, her tolerance for adversity high. By clearly emphasizing all that was lacking in others, by mapping and raising to an art form the catalog of their flaws, Veblen’s mother had inversely punched out a template for an ideal human being, and it was the unspoken assumption that Veblen would aspire to this template with all her might.
“It’s very interesting that you’ve chosen to marry a physician,” her mother noted, with the overly crisp diction she employed when feeling cornered.
“There are a lot of physicians in the world,” Veblen said.
“We’re not paying for a big wedding. It’s a complete waste.”
“Of course I know that.”
“He’ll expect one if he’s a doctor. They’re ambitious and full of themselves!”
“There’s only one answer to this—to come visit right away,” Veblen pressed.
“He’ll have a field day, spinning all kinds of theories about me.”
“This is happy news, Mom! Would you please cool it?”
“What does Albertine think of all this? I suppose you’ve told Albertine all about it?”
“No, I haven’t told anybody, I already said that.”
In the background she could hear Linus consoling.
“Linus is asking me to calm down,” Melanie said. “He wants to check my blood pressure. Who will you invite?”
“To the wedding? We haven’t thought about it yet!”
“We have no friends, which is humiliating.”
Why was it suddenly humiliating, after years of hiding away from everybody? Veblen watched a single hawk circling just below the clouds.
Linus’s voice came on the line. “Your mother’s face is flushed and her heart is racing.”
“A little excitement won’t hurt.”
“I need both hands now, I’m going to say good-bye. You’ll come see us soon?”
“We’ll come soon,” said Veblen.
SHE WASHED DOWN tabs of Vivactil and citalopram. The coffee was piping hot. She twisted a clump of her hair. What was that list again? Muckrakers, carousers, the sweet-toothed, the lion-hearted?
Sometimes when Veblen had a deadline for a translation she couldn’t tell anyone she had a deadline because it was work she wasn’t paid for, and furthermore, it wasn’t a real deadline, it was a self-imposed deadline. What kind of deadline was that? Could Paul appreciate her deadlines? It would mean a lot to her if he could.
Paul didn’t know she took antidepressants, but she also didn’t talk about what toothpaste or deodorant she used (Colgate and Tom’s).
And he didn’t realize she hadn’t graduated from college either. That embarrassed her, and was probably something he should find out soon. It simply hadn’t come up. Since when you marry you are offering yourself as a commodity, maybe it was time to clear up details of her product description. Healthy thirty-year-old woman with no college degree. Caveat emptor.
In spite of her cheerfulness in the presence of others, one could see this woman had gone through something that had left its mark. Sometimes her reactions seemed to happen in slow motion, like old, calloused manatees moving through murky water. At least, that’s how she’d once tried to explain it to the psychiatrist who dispensed her medications. Sometimes she wondered if she had some kind of processing disorder. Or maybe it was just a defense mechanism. One could see she was bruised by all the dodging that comes of the furtive meeting of one’s needs.
FOR SEVERAL YEARS before meeting Paul, Veblen had steered clear of romantic entanglements, haunted by runaway emotions and a few sad breakups in the past. “No one will ever understand me!” she often cried when feeling sorry for herself. Sometimes it was all she could do not to bite her arm until her jaw ached, and take note of how long the teeth marks showed. She had made false assumptions in those early experiences, such as that love meant becoming inseparable, and a few suitors came and went, none of them ready for all-out fusion. She began to realize she hadn’t been looking for a love affair, but rather a human safe house from her mother. A legitimate excuse to be busy with someone else. An all-loving being who would ever after uphold her as did the earth beneath her feet.
She came to recognize her weaknesses through these trial-and-error relationships, and lament that she had them. In a tug-of-war of want and postponement she continued with her deeply romantic beliefs, living in a state of wistful anticipation for life to become as wonderful as she was sure, someday, it would.
Veblen’s best friend since sixth grade, Albertine Brooks, smart and training as a Jungian analyst in San Francisco, had been alarmed by the sudden onslaught of Paul: Veblen, she felt, had unprocessed shadows, splitting issues, and would be prone to animus projections and primordial fantasies with destructive consequences. But Veblen only laughed.
Over the years, they had discussed, almost scientifically, the intimate details of their romances—for Veblen starting with Luke Hartley in the back of the school bus returning from a field trip to the state capitol. Sure, he’d paid heaps of attention as they marched through the legislative chambers, standing close and gazing raptly at her hair, even plucking out a leaf. Sure, he asked her to sit with him on the bus. Yet it wasn’t until the last second, when he touched her, that she believed he might have feelings for her. She told Albertine about his milky-tasting tongue and roaming, hamsterlike hands, and then Albertine prepared her for the next step, of unzipping his pants. And with Albertine’s pragmatic voice in her ear, that’s what she attempted next time she and Luke were making out on the athletic field after school. A difficult grab under his weight, shearing her skin on the metal teeth—as she grasped his zipper he pushed her away and groaned, “Too late.”
Too late? Wow. You had to do it really fast or a guy didn’t want anything to do with you. She pulled away, staring dismally over the grass, a failure at love already.
But Albertine said later, “No, you dummy. He meant he’d already ejaculated!”
“Huh?”
“What were you doing right before?”
“Just rolling on the lawn, kissing.”
“Okay, exactly.”
“You mean—”
“Yes, I mean.”
“Oh! So that’s good?”
“Good enough. It could have been better.”
In that instance, Albertine helped Veblen overcome her habit of assuming fault when someone said something cryptic to her.
“So you think he’s still attracted to me?” she asked.
“Yes, Veblen.”
“Wow. I thought it meant I blew it.”
“He wished you blew it.”
Veblen wrinkled her nose. “But you don’t actually blow on anything, do you?”
“No,” said Albertine, pityingly.
Albertine had, for her part over the years, partaken of a number of gritty encounters that had led to a surprising lack of heartbreak. Veblen could never dive in with someone like that and not feel anything. She’d always admired Albertine, who put her ambitions before her family or guys, and didn’t cling to anybody but Carl Jung.
She frequently lent Veblen books to help with her psychological development, but none of them seemed to address the central issue: Veblen’s instinctive certainty that the men who asked her out would not understand her if they got to know her better.
Then along came Paul. Little more than three months ago they had been strangers at the Stanford University School of Medicine, Veblen a new office assistant in Neurology. There, every morning, she took to her desk wedged between the printer and the file cabinet, threw her bag into a drawer, pulled out her chair, logged in. Horizontal ribs of light flickered across her desk, signaling her last allotment of morning. Later the sun would hit the handsome oak in the courtyard and make its sharp leaves shimmer. In between, she’d harness her fingers and drift away, typing up the minutes from the Tumor Board or a draft of one of the doctors’ professional papers or case notes. She was amazingly good at dissociating, alleged to be unhealthy, but which she had found vital to her survival over the years.
Across the office sat Laurie Tietz, a competent, muscular woman of forty with a pursed mouth that looked disapproving at first, but really wasn’t. Veblen felt uncomfortably watched the first time Paul stopped by to see her, but no, it was only the set of Laurie’s lips. Veblen liked her, despite being captive to her daily conversations with her husband about their home improvements and shopping lists. “Pick up some cheese and light bulbs today, don’t forget. Love you.”
That was the part she hated—when Laurie said “Love you.”
Dr. Chaudhry would arrive carrying his briefcase and a Tupperware tub filled with snacks made by his wife. He was a small, quiet man with large round eyes, a shaggy mustache covering his lips, slightly bent aviator glasses, and broken embroidery sticking up like ganglia from the fabric of his white coat. Lewis Chaudhry, MD.
From her desk on any given day, she could see squirrels hurling themselves through the canopy of the trees, causing limbs to buckle and sweep. She started to realize that squirrels were the only mammals who lived right out in the open near humankind. Despite this aura of neighborliness, recipes for squirrels were included in the Joy of Cooking. Was this a curious case of misplaced trust?
That was the day Chaudhry approached her with a manila envelope—the “envelope of destiny” she and Paul came to call it.
“Do you know where to find the research labs?” Chaudhry asked her.
“Sure.”
“Find Paul Vreeland. Then tell him the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
Veblen raised her eyebrows. “Wouldn’t that be kind of—awkward?”
“Tell him it’s coming from me.”
She still wasn’t crazy about the idea. “Why? What did he do?”
“He had a great opportunity here and he’s throwing it away.”
“Gee, that’s too bad.”
“He is not the first,” Chaudhry said.
That hall, with its sharp smells and vibrations and a high number of bins for hazardous waste, was unknown territory for her. At last someone directed her to Vreeland’s lab, and she entered after knocking a few times without response. Curled over a buzzing table saw, with his dark hair hanging over his safety goggles, he looked every bit a mad scientist absorbed by his master plan.
“Dr. Vreeland?” She cleared her throat. “Hello? Excuse me!”
Her nostrils contracted from the stench of singed flesh. Maybe she tottered or blanched. He glanced up and ripped off his goggles, his elbow sending a row of beakers off the table while the saw screeched on, spraying a curtain of red mist onto his lab coat and the wall.
“Oh shit!” Glass snapped and crackled under his soles as he threw the switch on the saw and covered the gory mess with a blue apron. An ominously empty cage sat atop the stainless steel slab. “Sorry, I didn’t hear you come in. God.”
“Yeah, sorry, I knocked, I wasn’t sure—”
He insisted it was his fault, not hers, he didn’t mind that she came in, hours would go by when no one came in, he’d get wrapped up and forget the time, and when she asked what he was doing he began to explain his work, mentioning apologetically that small mammals were suited to neurological research because one could easily expose the cortex, apply special dyes or probes or electrodes directly, to observe the activities of neurons and test for humans, and in his case, for the men and women of the armed forces, who needed breakthroughs fast.
“Basically I’m moving toward a breakthrough for brain injury treatment,” he concluded, smoothing down his hair, and it was at that moment she realized how adorable he was. “I’m a little obsessed right now. I dream about it at night.”
“Is that all you dream about?” she asked.
He might have blushed. “Well, maybe I need a new dream,” he said, with an endearing look on his face.
“Oh, well. Sorry to cause such a ruckus,” she said, wondering why she had to sound so weird. Who said ruckus these days? “It was for this,” she said, handing him the envelope.
“Oh, from Chaudhry. Finally.”
As he glanced into the envelope, she picked up the product literature for the Voltar bone band saw.
“Wow, are these features really great or something?”
“What features?”
She read them off: “Diamond-coated blade has no teeth and will not cut fingers! Cleans up quick and easy! Wet blade eliminates bone dust! Splash guards and bone screens included!”
“It’s always a little shocking to see the commercial underbelly of research,” he agreed. He had dimples, and friendly eyes. “There’s this whole parallel consumer reality in the medical and defense industries; it takes some getting used to.”
And right there, Veblen had been lobbed one of her favorite topics: the gargoyle of marketing and advertising. “I believe it. But what’s weird about this—marketing is supposed to kindle the anticipatory daydream, supposedly the most exciting phase of acquisition. But here, what would be the daydream?”
“Freedom from bone dust, of course—which is very exciting. Look at this thing,” he added, springing over to open a drawer from which he removed a two-and-a-half-inch disk that resembled the strainer for a shower drain. “This is the titanium plate we screw on after a craniotomy.”
“Oh, really?” From the sleeve she read: “Reconstruct large, vulnerable openings (LVOs) in the cranium! Fully inert in the human body, immune to attack from bodily fluids! Cosmetic deformity correction to acceptable levels!”
They both laughed nervously.
“Weird.Are ‘large, vulnerable openings’ so common they need an acronym?” she asked, suddenly blushing.
“Um, yes, as a matter of fact, they are.”
“Oh.”
“And it’s good,” he added.
“Why?”
“Well, I mean, if the LVO is the result of a procedure to improve the condition, then it’s good.” He tossed the plate back into the drawer, and went to the sink to wash his hands.
“I’ve seen those at the hardware store for about ninety-five cents,” Veblen said.
“Try between two and three thousand for us.”
“That’s crazy!”
“Yeah. So. I was about to take a break. Want to get something in the café?” he asked, looking away.
“Oh? Sure, why not.”
They had coffee and oatmeal raisin cookies together, on the palm-potted atrium where the staff went for air. This was early October, warm and bright. Veblen wore a thin sweater inside the hospital, but peeled it off, conscious of her freckly arms, wondering if the invitation to the café meant he liked her. She was still afraid to assume such things.
“What do you do here?” he asked.
“Administrative-type stuff,” said Veblen. “I move around. I was in Neonatology for a year and a half, Otolaryngology almost three years, and this is my third week in Neurology.”
“Are you—going into hospital administration?”
“No, this is just for now. I do other stuff, like I’m pretty much fluent in Norwegian so I do translations for this thing called the Norwegian Diaspora Project in Oslo.”
“Wow, that’s interesting. Are you Norwegian?”
She was Norwegian on her father’s side, and further, she’d been named after Thorstein Bunde Veblen, the Norwegian American economist who espoused antimaterialistic beliefs and led an uncommon and misunderstood life. (A noble nonconformist. A valiant foe of institutions and their ossified habits of mind.) The Diaspora Project had a big file on Thorstein Veblen, and thanks to her, it was getting bigger all the time.
“And I’m a major typer,” she added. “Like, I’ll type the lyrics of a song while I’m listening to it.” Why had she said this? It was only a side pocket of her whole entity.
“So you’re—the typing type.”
“I see myself more as a publisher.” Then it was a matter of explaining how as a somewhat obsessive child she’d carry her portable typewriter around in its case, was never without it really, paying visits to neighbors down the road, teachers and friends, to type up poems, recipes, memories, anecdotes, whatever the person had to share, in order to present them with the supporting documents of their consciousness. A traveling scribe.
“One of those old manuals in a case?” He looked at her, intrigued. “Wasn’t it heavy?”
“I didn’t notice. It was covered with stickers.”
“Like a hippie guitar case.”
“Yeah, but inside it smelled like a hundred years old. Every time I’d open it I’d feel like I was in another world.”
This was a sure badge of her youthful dorkdom. But she felt what she said meant something to him, or could. He asked the usuals, but without the pat cleverness so detestable in flirts. He was no flirt. She learned he’d done his residency at UCSF, gotten the fellowship at Stanford, all the markers of success, and now Hutmacher Pharmaceuticals, one of the giants, had picked up the rights to his research and his device, had flown him to Washington, and the Department of Defense was involved. After the New Year, he would be heading a clinical trial at the veterans’ hospital in Menlo Park.
“Wow, that’s great. Is Dr. Chaudhry sad you’re leaving?” She led him on.
“Basically. He’s a good guy. A little play-by-the-rules, but for him it works.”
She thought she understood, had context for Chaudhry’s earlier remarks. Paul was up and coming. Chaudhry was holding on.
He was handsome in a rumpled way, with a great smile. He had the air of an underdog, despite his accomplishments. He seemed sad and sober and boyishly hopeful, all at once. A sparrow swooped at crumbs.
“Need to get back?” he asked.
“Probably.”
“I take hikes in the hills,” he said. “Um, would you like to come along, sometime?”
“Yes, sure.”
Paul had a funny look on his face, and smoothed back his hair again. “How about Saturday?”
They met on Saturday. The stakes were greater. Glimpses of untold vistas lay ahead as they walked with put-on carelessness, kicking rocks and plunging hands in pockets, bumping into each other every now and then. With every step, options jettisoned. Both recognized an affinity, one without an easy name. Maybe the rural surroundings where they had been raised, and hints of great backlogs of family folly. She thought he was more adorable by the moment.
They had dinner together that night.
The first kiss came not unforeseen outside his car, in the moonlight; great long kisses outside her house, the slight rub of his whiskers chafing her face in a kind of rough ecstasy, the cool tip of his nose that brushed her cheeks. He smelled like juniper berries and warm laundry.
“The look on your face when you came into the lab—”
She laughed. “What did I look like?”
“You have a very expressive face, a beautiful face.”
Something was worrying her: “You know, I know it’s important to help the men and women of the armed forces, but you’re not torturing animals, are you?”
“Yes, we’re secretly waterboarding our rodents. It’s hard to pour the water down their little snouts, but as the saying goes, Ve have our vays.”
She pushed him. “They have feelings, just like we do. If only they had a translator.”
He looked at her closely. “Thank you for pointing that out. So what do you think?” he said, stroking her hair. “Should I come in?”
Was it too fast, or should one simply act? “We just met—yesterday.”
“We could play cards.”
“Right.”
“Or not.”
“True.”
He kissed her face, her eyes. “But I’ll leave.”
It seemed he was already there, under her skin. She didn’t know when she’d wanted to kiss someone this much. “It’s okay if you don’t.”
“Oh, if I don’t?”
“Right.”
“Leave?”
“Yes.”
“You mean stay.”
“Stay.”
“Ah.”
“Come on, then.”
“I will. I will come on.”
It was a night of wonders. She was so attracted to him it was scary, and would require management. For the first time, she didn’t tell Albertine everything, or her mother. She kept it all to herself, a milestone of significance.
All along she basked in the big-picture assumptions he made, the lack of ambivalence over whether or not they’d proceed. In three months, they’d become nearly inseparable. His certainty relaxed her, gave her the room to reflect on her own hidden restlessness. When he said things like We’re made for each other. You’re perfect for me, she felt embraced like never before, at last taking the chance to examine the perplexing knot it all produced, without the added fear of losing him.
2 (#ulink_5fe357f4-81ff-59cb-93cf-8c0ef1ca3047)
SAUERKRAUT AND MACE (#ulink_5fe357f4-81ff-59cb-93cf-8c0ef1ca3047)
As it turned out, Paul had gone shopping for more than breakfast.
She watched from the window as he wrestled something from the trunk of his car. Under a clearing sky, a newly minted object threw its shadow onto the walkway, coffin-shaped, about two feet long.
“Oh my god, a trap?” she said, at the door.
“It’s my stated goal to keep pests out of our lives,” he announced, and she thought nervously of her mother.
“What if we don’t agree on what’s a pest?”
“Veb, I got no sleep last night. You should be glad I didn’t get the guillotine kind.”
The packaging boldly proclaimed:
Humanely TRAPS, not KILLS:
Squirrels
Chipmunks
Shrews
Voles
and other Nuisance Critters!
“I hate the word critters!” Veblen said, displacing her negative feelings onto an innocent noun.
He persisted, pointing to the fine print. “Look at this.”
Squirrels can cause extensive damage to attic insulation or walls and gnaw on electrical wires in homes and vehicles, creating a fire hazard.
“Paul, don’t you see, that’s propaganda to motivate you to buy the thing.”
“But it’s true.”
“This morning it came to the window—I think it wants to befriend me,” Veblen said, quite naturally.
“You can make other friends. This squirrel isn’t a character in a storybook. Real animals don’t wear shawls and top hats and write poetry. They rape each other and eat their own young.”
“Paul, that’s an excessively negative view of wildlife.”
Nevertheless, he seized the wooden chair from beside her desk, took it through the bathroom door, and dumped it in the bathtub, to stand on it and shove aside the square of white, enameled plywood covering the opening to the attic. She provided him with the flashlight from her bedside drawer. His thighs flexed like a warrior’s. A strange little riddle began in her head:
The man pops squirrels, the man pops mice—
(What man? Not Paul?)
With a riddle-me-ree he pops them twice;
(Twice? Isn’t once enough?)
He pops his rats with a riddle-me-ree
(Oh no, it is Paul!)
He popped my father and he might pop me.
(How terrible! Was Paul experimenting with squirrels?)
“Nesting materials in the corner,” he yelled. “God. Looks like fur on the beams!”
Was this the stuff married life would be made of, two people making way for the confounding spectacle of the other, bewildered and slightly afraid?
“Paul, did you know, the year Thoreau spent at Walden Pond, he spent a lot of time totally enchanted by squirrels?” If squirrels were good enough for Thoreau, after all, what was Paul’s problem?
“No, I didn’t.”
“Have I told you about the great squirrel migrations of the past?” She steadied the chair.
“You must have been saving it up.”
“Yeah. Squirrels are actually one of the oldest mammals on earth!” she told him, with curious pride. “They’ve been in North America at least fifty million years. That’s a long time, don’t you think? I mean, people brag about their relatives coming over on the Mayflower in 1620, so I think squirrels deserve a little respect, don’t you?”
She could see him scanning the corners of the attic for entry holes, and he didn’t reply.
“Anyway, settlers and townspeople across North America wrote in their diaries about oceans of squirrels that would flood through the fields and over the mountains, as far as their eyes could see! Can you imagine it? It was like an infinite gray blanket. At times, whole tides of them were seen swimming across rivers, like the Hudson, and the Missouri, and the Ohio. Even Lewis and Clark witnessed a migration! In 1803. In southern Illinois in the 1880s, it was reported that four hundred fifty million squirrels ran through this one area, almost half a billion!”
“This is true?”
“Yes! It’s very well documented.”
“Sounds like a Hitchcock movie.”
For the record, she wished he’d said “Wow!” or “Amazing!” or something flavored with a little more curiosity and awe, because those mass migrations had always represented something phenomenal to her.
“The solidarity is what I love about it, all of them deciding it was time to go and then setting out together,” she tried, for she loved Richard Rorty’s writings on solidarity and had no trouble applying it to squirrels.
“Probably in a blind panic, burning with mange.”
“Paul!”
“I don’t have the same feeling about squirrels, Veb.”
This was upsetting for some reason. Although Paul wasn’t the only person who thought squirrels were nasty, furry bastards with talons like birds and the cold hearts of reptiles.
Even Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, a classic of children’s literature, by an introverted woman who generally adored small animals, offered up a pesky idiot-squirrel who riddles a landed authority figure into a fury. But was Nutkin as frivolous as he was made out to be? She had a few theories about that.
“Thorstein Veblen would say people hate squirrels,” she called up to him, “because that’s the only way to motivate expenditures on them—such as buying traps or guns. It’s the same with stirring up patriotic emotionalism, because it justifies expenditures for defense.”
“Uh, what?” He took the sleek apparatus in his grasping hands, then was back on the chair stuffing it somewhere in the dark near the hatch. He said, “I’ll check it every day, you won’t have to think about it. I’ll take it up in the hills where it will live happily ever after. Okay?”
“Whatever, just do it!” she said, biting into her arm.
In addition to biting herself, another way Veblen dealt with emotional distress was to fixate on ideological concerns.
Unhappy that Paul was stuffing a trap into her attic, registering a loss of control that would come with a growing relationship and further compromise, she began to think bitterly about how phenomena in the natural world no longer inspired reverence and reflection, but translated instead into excuses for shopping sprees. Squirrels = trap. Winter’s ragged hand = Outdoor World. Summer’s dog days reigned = Target. Same with traditions—marriage was preceded by the longest shopping list of all, second only to the one after the birth of offspring.
“Paul, take this trap. You impute it with awesomeness because you acquired it and you now believe it’s the crystallization of your desires.”
“Can you bring me a piece of cheese or something?”
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 (#ulink_0bf3d65a-5c2a-5428-b939-320342db8dd9)
NEWS IS MARKETING (#ulink_0bf3d65a-5c2a-5428-b939-320342db8dd9)
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.
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?”
“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 (#ulink_9a1cda8a-b175-5fa3-b41b-f67f7df0d844)
NOTHING ABOUT YOU IS BAD (#ulink_9a1cda8a-b175-5fa3-b41b-f67f7df0d844)
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.
“Is it possible you wouldn’t like anybody I liked, just because?”
“I could see the possibilities. He’s really nice looking, and he’s not as alpha as he wants you to think.”
Veblen tried to explain her mild feeling of doom, how it was like there was some kind of terrible alchemy under way, how it was like she was rushing toward a disaster, and how it didn’t make sense because she was also excited and happy.
“Just be sure it’s not a growing awareness that Paul’s all wrong for you and will ruin your life,” Albertine said, and then asked: “Have you read Marriage: Dead or Alive?”
Veblen said no.
“It’s the magnum opus of Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig. He says marriage is a continuous inevitable confrontation that can be resolved only through death.”
“How great! Does it have to be that way?” pleaded Veblen, feeling worse than ever. “I’ve already had a continuous confrontation that can be resolved only through death, with my mother.”
“Exactly. All the more reason you’re projecting impossible romantic fantasies onto Paul.”
“Who the heck is Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig?” Veblen snarled.
As her friend told her more about the brilliant Jungian and the ponderous message of Marriage: Dead or Alive (“That a decent, responsible society not only allows, but actually encourages, young people in their complete ignorance to bind themselves permanently to the psychological problems which their vows entail, seems incomprehensible. The more life expectancy increases, the more grotesque this situation become …”), Veblen began to see how ill-equipped she was to hack out a life with someone. Anyone! She’d end up bossing him around like her mother or grinding up his stuff in a wood chipper like her grandmother. Not for her. No way!
She’d been with Paul for about four months, without much of a misunderstanding. Her unvoiced needs were in remission, and Paul was impressively constant. Sure, there had been minor disagreements, moments pinched by disappointment over how to treat squirrels or value material possessions, but overall, she felt that Paul fit her romantic ideal as a man and avatar in the world. She found new things to love about him all the time: the way he always, always dropped his wallet when he pulled it from his pocket; the way he made fires in her tiny fireplace, blowing on scraps of wood and pinecones he gathered on walks; the warm smell of his head; the way he was generous and he’d bring beer or wine or cookies to her house whenever he came; how he’d help her with any chore that needed doing; the way he read the paper every morning, completely absorbed; the way he pored through military histories, biographies of generals, and epics about the sea—hearty, manly tales of bravery and adventure. He agreed it was good to avoid grocery carts with wadded tissues in them. He loved tacos as much as she did. If she sneezed, he’d laugh and say she sneezed like a cat. He took her to classical music concerts and knew all about the composers and the works. When she said she couldn’t go out to a movie or a concert because she had to meet a deadline for the Diaspora Project, he didn’t make a word of complaint.
Look at how tiny their troubles were! One recent evening the winds came barreling through the Golden Gate, down the peninsula from the north, unusually frigid and fierce, tearing flowers from their stems, clearing dead wood from the treetops, and then it hailed. Ice pellets scarred fresh young leaves and made drifts under the rain gutters, and children ran outside to gather them, and screamed in surprise when they discovered how they froze their hands. It was a night for comfort food, and Veblen prepared turkey meatballs for dinner, well seasoned with rosemary and sage, under a tangy homemade ragù, along with artichoke risotto and a salad, but when she mentioned she’d used turkey he blanched, as if she’d revealed she’d made them with grasshoppers or grubs. During the meal, he appeared to devour what was on his plate so fast he had to go to the kitchen several times to get more.
“Mmm, delicious,” he kept saying. “Turkey balls rule.”
“Not bad,” Veblen said.
“But let’s not have them too often, though, or else they’ll lose their impact.”
“Okay,” said Veblen.
Later that evening, as she was cleaning up, she opened the trash container, and sitting on top, almost in rows as if arranged for viewing, were the turkey balls Paul pretended to have consumed. She started to laugh and asked why he didn’t say something. “Alternately, you could have hidden them better, and I never would have known.”
He said he was sorry, that he hadn’t wanted to spoil dinner.
“But you wanted me to find them later?”
“Mmm. I meant to come back and cover them. I spaced out. Sorry.”
The passive-aggressive lapse seemed duplicitously boyish and charming, but Albertine had been quick to tell her it was a missed opportunity for individuation.
After all, it was unrealistic to expect Paul to be her twin, to think they would react the same way in every situation, always be in the same mood, though there was no denying she craved that. She must withstand all differences, no matter how wrenching and painful. For instance, Paul didn’t like corn on the cob. Of all things! How could a person not like fresh, delicious corn on the cob? And how could she not care?
“I don’t like biting the cob and the kernels taste pasty to me,” Paul had told her.
“Pasty? Then you’ve had really bad corn. Good corn isn’t pasty.”
“Don’t get mad. It’s not like corn is your personal invention.”
“But it’s impossible. Everyone likes it.”
“People with dentures don’t like it.”
“What are you trying to say? Do you have dentures?”
“No! I’m just saying they are a sizable slice of the population.”
“Not anymore. These days most people get implants.”
“Not in rural areas.”
“Okay, fine, whatever! But eating corn together, we’ll never be able to do that?”
“I like other vegetables!” Paul practically yelled.
“Corn is more than a vegetable, it’s practically a national icon.”
“I’m unpatriotic now?”
“If you don’t like corn, it means I’ll probably stop making it. We won’t go on hunts for the best corn stands in summer, driving all over until we find them. You won’t be motivated to shuck it for me. The sound of me gnawing on it will annoy you, so I’ll stop having it. It’ll gradually become a thing of my past, phased out for good.” Veblen was almost ready to cry, and she had reason. Anything and everything her mother disliked had been phased out of her life for good.
“So it’s me or the corn?”
Then she snapped out of it, and they laughed about it, and she came to understand that this recognition of otherness would occur over and over until death they did part, that she couldn’t despair every time it occurred, and that anyway, Paul wasn’t a dictator like her mother … yet it was clear that your choice of mate would shape the rest of your life in ways you couldn’t begin to know. One by one, things he didn’t like would be jettisoned. First squirrels, then turkey meatballs, then corn, then—what next? Marriage could be a continuing exercise in disappearances.
NO TIME TO THINK about this now, for they had reached the long driveway of Veblen’s childhood home, the handle of the hammer, flanked by elephant-sized hummocks of blackberry vines, where Veblen used to pick berries by the gallon to make pies and cobblers and jam. She’d sell them at a table by the road, and help her mother make ends meet. In the fall she put on leather gloves to her elbows to hack the vines back off the driveway, uncovering snakes and lizards and voles. In the spring the vines would start to come back, the green canes growing noticeably by the day, rising straight like spindles before gravity caused them to arc. They grew on the surface the way roots grow underground, in all directions, overlapping, intertwined. The blackberries defined her life in those days—their encroaching threat, their abundant yield. All her old chores came to mind as they rolled up the drive to the familiar crunching of the tires on gravel.
“I never would’ve imagined you growing up somewhere like this,” Paul announced.
“Really?”
“Really.”
No time to think about this either, for Veblen saw her mother advancing out of the house in her best pantsuit, an aqua-colored Thai silk number beneath which new (as in twenty-five years old but saved in the original box for special occasions) Dr. Scholl’s white sandals flashed. She wore them with wool socks. Linus too came out coiffed and ironed, in a blue oxford shirt. They appeared normal, attractive, almost vigorous.
Yet how stiff and formal Veblen’s mother’s posture was, and how tall she stood! She had nearly six inches on her daughter.
Maybe everything would be fine!
“You must be Dr. Paul Vreeland,” her mother said, in a formal style of elocution heard mostly on stage. “Melanie Duffy.”
“Linus Duffy,” said Linus, joining in the hand-grasping ritual.
“We have prepared a nice light lunch to eat outside. Paul, if you would be so kind as to help Linus move the table into the sunshine, we’ll sit right away.”
The men took off behind the house, as the women went inside.
Veblen smiled. “Mom, you look pretty.”
“I’m absolutely miserable,” her mother said, with the men out of earshot. “My shoulders are buckling under the straps of this bra, and my neck is already ruined. I never wear a bra anymore. I despise my breasts. They’re boulders. The nerve of god to do this to women! I’m going to be flat on my back with ice as soon as you leave.”
“You don’t have to wear a bra for our benefit. Take it off. Be yourself.”
“No man wants to see a woman with her breasts hanging down to her navel.”
“Take the straps off your shoulders, then.”
“I’ll try that.”
“I love your suit.”
“Paul’s very good-looking,” her mother said. “But I haven’t sensed the chemistry yet.”
“We’ve been here for five minutes.”
“I hope he’s not in love with himself,” Melanie said. “Oh, good lord.”
Melanie was looking at the ring. They both started to laugh.
“Don’t hold it against me,” Veblen said.
“What was he thinking?” Melanie said. “It’s not you at all.”
“Yeah, I’m trying to get used to it.”
“It’s the ring of a kept woman. Come in the kitchen, I need your help.”
The oatmeal-colored tiles, the chicken-headed canisters, the wall-mounted hand-crank can opener over the sink, gears and magnet always mysteriously greasy, all were in place as they had been for years, and Veblen was proud of her mother’s artwork on the walls around the table—the abstracts in oil and pastels, of landforms and waterways and rocks, sure-handed and dreamy. She sniffed the scent of linseed oil, and from the cupboards a trace of molasses.
Her mother removed a casserole dish from the oven, her hot mitts clenched around it. “This is a delicious recipe I discovered recently using artichoke hearts and bread crusts and just a little Asiago cheese and butter,” her mother said. “Very special.”
“Nice.” Veblen cracked open a head of red leaf lettuce. Her favorite part was the center of baby leaves, and she removed it quickly before her mother could see and ate it.
“Before I forget, I have a strange lump on the back of my neck. Will you look at it, please? Linus doesn’t have an eye for this sort of thing.”
“How about later after we’re out of the kitchen?”
“Now!” her mother said.
Veblen placed the lettuce on the counter, and parted her mother’s hair with her wet hands. She saw a dime-sized swelling. “Yes, you have a little bump here, does it itch?”
“No. Is it red?”
“Pinkish.”
“Is it indurated?”
“What’s that?”
“Is it hard, with clearly defined margins?” asked her mother.
Veblen squinted at the bump. “You tell me.”
“Is the texture peau d’orange?”
“What’s that!” Veblen asked, exasperated.
“The texture of orange peel.”
Veblen squinted again. “I’d say it’s more like the skin of an apple, or maybe a pear. Maybe Paul can look at it,” she said, sighing.
“As long as he doesn’t talk down to me, that’s all I ask,” her mother said.
Veblen finished making the salad and brought it out like a victim. Linus had furnished Paul with a beer.
“Local brew, one of those designer jobs,” said Linus.
“I taste some lemon,” Paul said, nodding.
“We make our own blackberry wine on good years.”
“How is it?”
“Sweet, nice for a dessert wine. We end up with thirty bottles or so, give them to friends. I’ll send one home with you.”
“Great,” Paul said. “Love dessert wine, especially with some nice Gruyère.”
“I like it with pie.”
“Luncheon is served,” called Melanie, bringing out the casserole and placing it on a woven Samoan mat on the table. “Paul, I want you here. Veblen, at the head. Linus, would you open that special bottle of champagne?”
“Right,” said Linus, returning to the kitchen.
“No, out here!” Melanie yelled. “Watching the cork fly is festive.”
Linus shuffled back with the bottle, untwisting the wires around the cork.
“Don’t aim it at us!” Melanie cried.
“It’s not ready yet.”
“You’re aiming it at us!”
Linus turned toward the house.
“Not at the wall! We want to watch the cork fly! Turn around.”
Linus turned and began to wiggle the cork.
“Wait, you need a cloth.”
Veblen handed him a napkin to put under the neck of the bottle. Paul tapped his fork on the table. The cork popped, and shot all of about three feet.
“Bravo!” Melanie cried. “Now, let’s make a toast to your visit. May there be many more!”
Glasses clinked and Paul and Veblen smiled at each other across the table. If Paul were gracious about this day, she’d love him forever.
“Paul, we’re certainly impressed by your research project,” Melanie said. “I imagine you’re already heavily involved, preparing to dig in?”
“Absolutely,” Paul said. “I’m getting a lot of support from Hutmacher, basically anything I want. We’re going to get off to a good start.”
“There’s got to be a bucket load of red tape for those babies,” said Linus.
“More than I realized,” Paul said.
“Several of my medications are made by Hutmacher,” Melanie added.
“Hurrah!” Paul said gamely, raising his glass.
“And Veblen tells us you’ve been looking at houses?”
“Oh. That’s kind of a hobby. Looking. I was pretty much raised on a commune, by the way.”
“Are you planning to have a commune?”
“No, the opposite, I want to live behind a gate that no one can get through.”
“You’ve got to escape the way you were raised,” Linus said. “Boy, do I know it.”
“I just want you to know that Veblen is going to be living in comfortable surroundings,” Paul said.
Melanie said, “Well, Veblen, you’ll really have surpassed me. I don’t know if Veblen has mentioned it, but I’m very interested in medical matters, having a complicated history myself. You can never be too prepared when dealing with the health care system, wouldn’t you agree?”
“That’s right. Patients really need to advocate for themselves these days,” Paul said.
“That’s a refreshing attitude.”
“I know you’ll find it difficult to believe, but most doctors feel that way.”
Veblen’s mother dished out steaming mounds of her creation. “I’ve received atrociously condescending treatment over my recent migraine business,” she said. “It’s a wonder cads like these stay in practice.”
“What seems to be the nature of the condition?” Paul asked, and Veblen’s dread distributed itself through her limbs.
“Well, starting four years ago, just after my yearly flu shot, I experienced an array of symptoms ascribed to migraine equivalence or transient ischemia. Obviously, and as you know, many known foods and chemicals precipitate the condition.”
“Absolutely,” Paul said. “Sodium benzoate, cyclamates, chocolate, corn—”
“Peas, pork, lamb, citrus, onion, wheat, pears, the list goes on. Symptoms of mine have included imagery, hypothermia, aphasia, a feeling of rotating. Further, I’ve had facial paralysis, paralysis of the upper limbs, and narcolepsy. I don’t believe this fits in the typical migraine profile.”
“Well, I wouldn’t call it typical,” Paul said, hesitantly.
“Now, I have learned in time that a middle-aged woman with unusual symptoms can easily be labeled a crackpot, a psychosomatic case, a malingerer. Further, my general physician recently told me I’m ‘too observant.’ How can I agree with that? If not me, who, then?”
Veblen was breathing rapidly.
Paul looked at Veblen and said, “Yes, patients need to be proactive.”
“I can’t tell you how pleased I am to hear a doctor say that!”
“Now, the cause could be nonorganic—” Paul began.
Veblen winced.
“Nonorganic? Psychosomatic, is that what you’re saying?”
“No, not in that sense—”
“What do you mean? If a migraine falls outside their specialty, many physicians don’t realize that it is no longer considered psychosomatic.”
Veblen said, woodenly, “Mom, let’s eat.”
“I can’t speak for ‘many physicians,’” Paul said, “but I’m a neurologist and—” He stopped abruptly to sip his champagne, temples pulsating. His jaw was seizing like a tractor, and Veblen’s stomach ached. “You sound like you know more about it than I do,” he said, mildly.
Perfect answer!
“That’s very likely true, which is a sad story in itself. I have this central stationary scotoma when in hot or warm showers, and with exercise. I see a blur, followed by an irregular opaque gray area. Rest restores normal sight. But if I walk on a cold day, the central scotoma is lighted and nonmoving.”
“Interesting,” Paul said.
“Oh, another piece of the puzzle!” Melanie exclaimed, almost gaily. “Two years ago, I found an area on my chest that was dead—numb without feeling. Located right here—” She pointed to an area at the top of her left breast. “It was about five by five centimeters. That large! It remained dead until about six months ago, when suddenly … Remember, Linus, I realized that my dead spot had feeling again. Is that related?”
“Mmm. Could be,” Paul said.
With that, Melanie swiveled in her chair and reached for a few typed sheets of paper that had been stapled together, hidden behind a ceramic bowl full of miniature pinecones.
“This is a complete list of my medical history,” she announced.
Paul looked surprised. “My, arranged almost like a CV!” he said.
“You don’t need to ridicule me,” Melanie said, making Veblen jump up and retreat into the kitchen, breathing short and fast. She bit her forearm so hard she left teeth marks in it.
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