The Portable Veblen (5 page)

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. The sharing of simple meals and discussing the day’s events, of waking up together with plans for the future, things that feel practically bacchanalian when you’re used to being on your own.

•   •   •

A
ND 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

N
EWS
I
S
M
ARKETING

T
he 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?”