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

“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.