The Portable Veblen (36 page)

“When?”

“Last night when I called you!”

It took her a few moments to place it, and placing it caused her to turn pink. “Oh! Paul, no. It’s not what you think at all.” She climbed out of bed and put her hands on his shoulders. “You mean, I answered, but didn’t talk to you? You heard me talking?”

“How can you laugh?”

“I wasn’t talking to a person. It was the squirrel.”

Paul looked up, wrinkling his nose like a snout. “Please. God.”

“No, it’s true.”

“Stop it.”

“The one we caught in the trap, Paul. I took it along to let it go.”

He drew back resentfully, and began to hack.

“Handsome?”

“He is.”

He looked savage. “That’s sick!”

“It’s no big deal, I was amusing myself.”

“In a motel with a squirrel?”

She told him about trying to find the right place to release the squirrel, finally bringing him back here instead. He thought her daft and desperate, it was clear. And there was much mortification in being caught unawares. Yet so much better than being caught with another man.

“Laugh, Paul, laugh.”

“I’m trying.” He looked rumpled and slack, an old coat on a hook. “Imagine it from my side. I really thought—you were talking to some guy in a motel. I thought it all last night. All today.”

“Paul.” Offense was mandatory. “Why didn’t you call me back?”

“I mean, you asked if he was
married,
what’s that supposed to mean?”

Veblen said, “Well, he’s not. He’s divorced.”

She rose, put on her robe, passed the place where Thorstein Veblen was supposed to be to absorb his empathy. His own relationships had brimmed with difficulty and misunderstanding. Where had he gone? She found him wedged behind the bookcase, the glass cracked over his face. “Oh, no! How did this happen?”

“So you prefer animals to human beings!” Paul called out.

“Maybe some,” she said sadly, laying the portrait down.

“Then talk to squirrels all you want, if that’s your thing. Become the next Beatrix Potter.”

“I don’t actually want to be the next Beatrix Potter.” (She had read the artist’s biography and found the woman a bit too repressed to be her hero.)

“Talk to the little fucker all you want, see if I care. Maybe I’ll find some cute little gopher wench to spend time with.”

“You do that!”

“So where’s the other man now?” he asked, clearly bluffing about gopher wenches.

“I told you, I let him go, somewhere he’d be happy.”

“He’s out of our lives?”

“Does he have to be?”

She warmed milk in a heavy pan, spooned in cocoa, poured it into her favorite blue mugs, trying to remember what else he might have overheard.

“Here,” she offered.

“I’ve suffered a trauma,” Paul said, slumped at the table.

“I’m sorry, Paul.”

He raised his head slightly.

“Veb, I went out of my mind while you were gone. I went on a bender.”

“Sorry.”

“I’m recalibrating,” he said, gasping. “You were hanging out with a squirrel. Great.”

“That’s right.”

Paul made a sound like a growl. “Can I say something, without you taking it the wrong way?”

“I guess.”

“Is it possible you’re a little stressed out?” One of his legs began to bob with nervous spasticity.

Was she? She counted on herself to withstand everything. And yet, who said she had to? What would happen if she broke down now and then? And why had she just spent a whole day and night feeling utterly carefree, and now here was Paul, hassling her?

“I felt fine until you got here.”

“Maybe there’s something you want to tell me,” Paul said impatiently.

“Like?”

“Like about
mood-enhancing medications
?”

“Well.” This was a surprising change in tack. “Okay, what about it?”

“I don’t care, but why didn’t you tell me? Don’t you trust me?”

“What, have you been going through my stuff?”

“Of course not,” Paul said. “I saw you take some once, but I didn’t say anything.”

She looked around, wondering what else he’d seen. “Did you come over and punch Thorstein Veblen?”

Paul squinted at her. “Are you insane?”

She hated that he said that, hated it.

“You’re supposed to be happy right now, that I wasn’t talking to a guy in a motel. Not interrogating me or implying I’m insane.”

“I’m happy,” Paul said sullenly.

“Really happy, maybe ecstatic, like jumping up and down.” His whole bearing looked distorted, as if he’d spent the day folded up in a box.

He drank the rest of the cocoa, setting the empty mug on the table with a clap. “There’s something else,” he said.

And that was when he told her about DeviceCON, and about the premature release of his device, and the unorthodox use of the Animal Rule.

“Oh, Paul!” Veblen said. “Oh, I’m sorry, that’s horrible.”

“I know it’s horrible. Would you stop shrieking?”

“I’m not shrieking!” she shrieked. “Maybe you should call
60 Minutes
!”

“What are you . . . Stab Cloris in the back after everything she’s done for me? Don’t you understand how hard I’ve worked for this?”

“So you’re just going to go along with it?” How he felt about this was everything—it was dire.

“Why do you make everything so black-and-white?”

“You know, Cloris might be nice to you, but you know what she’s like? I’m just going to say it. She’s like an ichneumon fly. Thorstein Veblen said captains of industry are like ichneumon flies. They jump on fuzzy, friendly caterpillars and lay eggs in them, and then the eggs hatch and the larvae eat the caterpillars from the inside out.”

ICHNEUMON FLY.

“I’m really glad I’m getting to see this side of you,” Paul said.

“Well, I hope you’ve been able to see the ruthless side of Cloris Hutmacher.”

“Oh, so ruthless she’s letting us have our wedding at her house, that’s really ruthless!”

“Who needs her big fat stupid house?” Veblen yelled.

“Oh, really? You have someplace better?”

“Anywhere would be better!”

Paul shook his head. “You are so
limited
. I had no idea.”

“Limited,” Veblen said, fighting back tears. “Well, if I’m so limited, then what are you doing here?” In a gesture her mother had spent years training her to make, she said, “Leave, then! Don’t be here with the limited person. Go!”

For a moment it looked like he might say something. But he didn’t. He turned the knob and went out into the night.

•   •   •

S
HE RAN OUTSIDE,
saw his car turn the corner at the creek.

End the attachment
.

“No!”

She heard it in the trees
. End the attachment.

She stood still as the moon poured silver over the rooftops, and had the sensation of tasting air. The air was supposed to matter. There was so much you could gorge on in a nanosecond.

She feared him, she feared everyone, she feared herself the most.

“I can’t get married,” she said out loud. The world accommodated her voice. “What was I thinking?”

      18

T
HE
CURS

T
he bed of a tortured soul is always in shambles by morning. Blankets thrown to the floor, sheets twisted like ropes. Paul’s phone buzzed, waking him from a painful dream about returning to high school to graduate and being given a plastic garbage bag to wear as his gown. His eyes had crusted over, and his pillow was drenched with drool.

“Yeah?” he managed, unhinging his jaw.

“Paul? It’s Susan Hinks.”

Paul sat up in his bedroom in Mountain View, disoriented, rubbing his eyes with his fists. He’d spent very little time at his own place in the past few months; it was as if his life before Veblen filled him with shame, as if in those days he’d been a clown with a naked backside, having darts thrown at his ass cheeks by laughing chimps and frat boys.

Now he remembered. He’d called Hinks late last night, said to call him back, no matter what time. So he jumped up to get his
blood pumping and asked what she knew about the release of his device.

Nothing. But she’d received a message from senior management at Hutmacher yesterday afternoon announcing some kind of adjustment in the trial. She was to take today off until she received further instructions. That’s all she knew.

“Susan, you’ve coordinated other trials. Has this ever happened before?”

“They’re all different, Dr. Vreeland.”

“But is it—have we done everything—right?”

“I hope so! I really have tried to do a good job.”

“It’s okay, Susan. You did a great job. I wasn’t saying—”

“Just last week I sent the binders to everybody on the IRB, and over to Hutmacher, and I checked all the permissions and release forms for the human study a few days ago, and all our supplies are stocked and I returned the cadavers and we just had a pizza party with the families of the volunteers, and—”

He reassured her further, told her he’d go to the VA right away and find out what was going on.

He got up, made some coffee, took eight hundred milligrams of Advil, ran his hands through his hair, started the shower, opened his mouth, lost his balance, fell against the cold tiles. He remembered how the manager proudly referred to them as “honed Italian marble” when he showed Paul the apartment, along with the other architectural details meant to appeal to what Veblen had told him Thorstein Veblen called the
emulation instincts
of the striving classes, such as heated towel racks, clubby brass plumbing fixtures, a Jacuzzi bath, and a cedar sauna. How many nights had he spent alone here with frozen pizza and a remote control? Nights trying
to make plans with scattershot calls. Weekends so vast they felt like a graveyard of bones.

Yes, he was in hate with the world that morning, livid with loneliness. He’d written Veblen a ten-page letter during the night, full of remorse and regret and declarations of his love. But the gremlin of anger made him tear it up and grind it in the disposal in his sink, because he had no idea what he was dealing with. Was their current state of alienation an ethical dispute, or was the ethical dispute a front for some deeper problem she had with him, some ultimate horror she’d experienced during his family’s visit, some glimpse she’d had of him when he’d least expected it, which revealed him to be a loser and a fraud?

Cheater! Cheater! Cheater!

But he wasn’t. Cloris was trying to make him cheat, but he would not!

Maybe a hired sniper would fell him before the day was through. Or maybe some Hutmacher henchman would drive him off the road so it looked like an accident. They’d think of something.
They had their ways.

Then he was shredding El Camino, wishing he could vaporize everything in his path. He honked at a wobbly cyclist, feeling great stress, which was manifesting in a body rash, itching, and the sensation that saliva was oozing between his lower teeth, necessitating the jutting of his lower jaw like a catch tray.

He’d heard it said that every man needed a friend he could turn to if he had a body to dispose of, and for Paul, Hans was the one who’d be there with the bag.

Hans knew the real him, verruca vulgari and all. In high school, after Millie was sent away, he and Hans formed a gluey allegiance;
Paul realized that Hans’s penchant for self-inflation rose from his neglect by a world-class set of jerks, his parents, and decided he was worth knowing. Hans was the only person alive who’d ever sided with him about his brother, Justin, without an ounce of guilt. He had a supersized capacity for hatred, as elastic as a colon, as vaulted as a cathedral, as open as a prairie sky, and so was therefore able to hate Justin with an amplitude even greater than Paul’s, spending many hours coming up with twisted accidents that could befall him, making Paul laugh to the point of pain.

It was Hans he called when he first found Millie on the fledgling Internet, back in 1999. In those days, he used a primitive search engine called Alta Vista, and results were spotty. (She’d evidently married a veterinary student and by now they had three children and took up space in Portland.)

No, there was only one person he could call at a time like this, and Hans picked up on the second ring.

“Hey,” Paul said heavily.

“Hey, what’s happening?”

“I need to talk.”

And Paul launched in. Everything, Cloris, the trial, his fight with Veblen.

“Oh, man,” said Hans. “Nip this in the bud or she’ll have you by the balls the rest of your life.”

“But her reaction was sincere, and she’s right.”

“Sincere is the worst. Sincere is how they get your balls. I’d say, ‘Babe, don’t go all pro forma on me, this isn’t about right and wrong, it’s about
us
against
them
.’ And remind her there’s no true purity in the world.”

A small detail had been worming its way through his mind since that evening he’d spent with Cloris Hutmacher, something he’d been unwilling, until now, to unsheathe. He said to Hans, “Question. If you were with a woman, and you’re making out, you’re already in her bedroom, and suddenly she tells you she has athlete’s foot and thinks about it while she’s having sex, what would that communicate to you?”