Elizabeth McKenzie - The Portable Veblen

“I’ve seen those at the hardware store for about ninety-five cents,” Veblen said.

“Try between two and three thousand for us.”

“That’s crazy!”

“Yeah. So. I was about to take a break. Want to get something in the café?” he asked, looking away.

“Oh? Sure, why not.”

They had coffee and oatmeal raisin cookies together, on the palm-potted atrium where the staff went for air. This was early October, warm and bright. Veblen wore a thin sweater inside the hospital, but peeled it off, conscious of her freckly arms, wondering if the invitation to the café meant he liked her. She was still afraid to assume such things.

“What do you do here?” he asked.

“Administrative-type stuff,” said Veblen. “I move around. I was in Neonatology for a year and a half, Otolaryngology almost three years, and this is my third week in Neurology.”

“Are you — going into hospital administration?”

“No, this is just for now. I do other stuff, like I’m pretty much fluent in Norwegian so I do translations for this thing called the Norwegian Diaspora Project in Oslo.”

“Wow, that’s interesting. Are you Norwegian?”

She was Norwegian on her father’s side, and further, she’d been named after Thorstein Bunde Veblen, the Norwegian American economist who espoused antimaterialistic beliefs and led an uncommon and misunderstood life. (A noble nonconformist. A valiant foe of institutions and their ossified habits of mind.) The Diaspora Project had a big file on Thorstein Veblen, and thanks to her, it was getting bigger all the time.

“And I’m a major typer,” she added. “Like, I’ll type the lyrics of a song while I’m listening to it.” Why had she said this? It was only a side pocket of her whole entity.

“So you’re — the typing type.”

“I see myself more as a publisher.” Then it was a matter of explaining how as a somewhat obsessive child she’d carry her portable typewriter around in its case, was never without it really, paying visits to neighbors down the road, teachers and friends, to type up poems, recipes, memories, anecdotes, whatever the person had to share, in order to present them with the supporting documents of their consciousness. A traveling scribe.

“One of those old manuals in a case?” He looked at her, intrigued. “Wasn’t it heavy?”

“I didn’t notice. It was covered with stickers.”

“Like a hippie guitar case.”

“Yeah, but inside it smelled like a hundred years old. Every time I’d open it I’d feel like I was in another world.”

This was a sure badge of her youthful dorkdom. But she felt what she said meant something to him, or could. He asked the usuals, but without the pat cleverness so detestable in flirts. He was no flirt. She learned he’d done his residency at UCSF, gotten the fellowship at Stanford, all the markers of success, and now Hutmacher Pharmaceuticals, one of the giants, had picked up the rights to his research and his device, had flown him to Washington, and the Department of Defense was involved. After the New Year, he would be heading a clinical trial at the veterans’ hospital in Menlo Park.

“Wow, that’s great. Is Dr. Chaudhry sad you’re leaving?” She led him on.

“Basically. He’s a good guy. A little play-by-the-rules, but for him it works.”

She thought she understood, had context for Chaudhry’s earlier remarks. Paul was up and coming. Chaudhry was holding on.

He was handsome in a rumpled way, with a great smile. He had the air of an underdog, despite his accomplishments. He seemed sad and sober and boyishly hopeful, all at once. A sparrow swooped at crumbs.

“Need to get back?” he asked.

“Probably.”

“I take hikes in the hills,” he said. “Um, would you like to come along, sometime?”

“Yes, sure.”

Paul had a funny look on his face, and smoothed back his hair again. “How about Saturday?”

They met on Saturday. The stakes were greater. Glimpses of untold vistas lay ahead as they walked with put-on carelessness, kicking rocks and plunging hands in pockets, bumping into each other every now and then. With every step, options jettisoned. Both recognized an affinity, one without an easy name. Maybe the rural surroundings where they had been raised, and hints of great backlogs of family folly. She thought he was more adorable by the moment.

They had dinner together that night.

The first kiss came not unforeseen outside his car, in the moonlight; great long kisses outside her house, the slight rub of his whiskers chafing her face in a kind of rough ecstasy, the cool tip of his nose that brushed her cheeks. He smelled like juniper berries and warm laundry.

“The look on your face when you came into the lab—”

She laughed. “What did I look like?”

“You have a very expressive face, a beautiful face.”

Something was worrying her: “You know, I know it’s important to help the men and women of the armed forces, but you’re not torturing animals, are you?”

“Yes, we’re secretly waterboarding our rodents. It’s hard to pour the water down their little snouts, but as the saying goes, Ve have our vays .”

She pushed him. “They have feelings, just like we do. If only they had a translator.”

He looked at her closely. “Thank you for pointing that out. So what do you think?” he said, stroking her hair. “Should I come in?”

Was it too fast, or should one simply act? “We just met — yesterday.”

“We could play cards.”

“Right.”

“Or not.”

“True.”

He kissed her face, her eyes. “But I’ll leave.”

It seemed he was already there, under her skin. She didn’t know when she’d wanted to kiss someone this much. “It’s okay if you don’t.”

“Oh, if I don’t?”

“Right.”

“Leave?”

“Yes.”

“You mean stay.”

“Stay.”

“Ah.”

“Come on, then.”

“I will. I will come on.”

It was a night of wonders. She was so attracted to him it was scary, and would require management. For the first time, she didn’t tell Albertine everything, or her mother. She kept it all to herself, a milestone of significance.

All along she basked in the big-picture assumptions he made, the lack of ambivalence over whether or not they’d proceed. In three months, they’d become nearly inseparable. His certainty relaxed her, gave her the room to reflect on her own hidden restlessness. When he said things like We’re made for each other. You’re perfect for me, she felt embraced like never before, at last taking the chance to examine the perplexing knot it all produced, without the added fear of losing him.

As it turned out, Paul had gone shopping for more than breakfast.

She watched from the window as he wrestled something from the trunk of his car. Under a clearing sky, a newly minted object threw its shadow onto the walkway, coffin-shaped, about two feet long.

“Oh my god, a trap?” she said, at the door.

“It’s my stated goal to keep pests out of our lives,” he announced, and she thought nervously of her mother.

“What if we don’t agree on what’s a pest?”

“Veb, I got no sleep last night. You should be glad I didn’t get the guillotine kind.”

The packaging boldly proclaimed:

Humanely TRAPS, not KILLS:

Squirrels

Chipmunks

Shrews

Voles

and other Nuisance Critters!

“I hate the word critters !” Veblen said, displacing her negative feelings onto an innocent noun.

He persisted, pointing to the fine print. “Look at this.”

Squirrels can cause extensive damage to attic insulation or walls and gnaw on electrical wires in homes and vehicles, creating a fire hazard.