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

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

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

“Where’s Cloris with god?”

She squeezed his arm.

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

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

“Who’s Morris?”

“My son.”

“I didn’t know you had a son.”

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

“Oh.”

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

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

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

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

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

The boy sobbed.

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

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

“Get me your father. Now!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I didn’t mean to,” cried Morris.

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

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

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

“Cloris, he’s in second grade.”

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

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

“There you are!”

“Nice view.”

“Now, where were we?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He listened, with a hard tug in his groin.

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

“And what was that?”

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

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

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

Paul cleared his throat. “Hmm.”