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