The Portable Veblen

11 THE SPEECHLESS OTHERS

In April the days warmed fully, demanding new exploits. A thinning scrim of wildlife rustled in the coastal mountains’ hidden gullies and groves. Bobcats, coyotes, raccoons, skunks, and possums still foraged the damp forests above the peninsula, between the ocean and the bay.

By contrast, Palo Alto was now a community of unimaginable material wealth and prestige, and traces of old, humble Palo Alto were growing scarce. What others wished to raze, Veblen cherished. What others saw as rundown, Veblen saw as real.

Such as the spot eight miles from town, up on the ridge where Thorstein Veblen had dragged the chicken coop to build his getaway, and where she and Paul now stood. Paul was filming her with his phone. Veblen’s contact at the Norwegian Diaspora Project, Aksel Odegaard, had expressed interest in some video content in a general announcement to all contributors.

“Vi står på toppen av den gamle La Honda Road, nær Skyline Drive, i San Mateo County, California,” Veblen said, speaking to the camera, and though the presentation had to be in Norwegian, she would provide an English transcript as well. “Under oss er Silicon Valley”—Paul panned the peninsula—“where fortunes are being made every day in the technology sector. But I wonder how many people here stop to remember that Thorstein Veblen, best known for his searing critique of society in The Theory of the Leisure Class, came to the small town of Palo Alto in 1906 to teach at the young campus named for the beloved son of the railroad baron Leland Stanford, who’d contracted typhoid and died on a conspicuously unnecessary but status-prescribed grand tour of Italy. Not many, I bet.

“Mr. Veblen was a true renegade, and had seen enough of the jockeying for power and money that goes on in the institutions of our higher learning. To get away from it all, he spent as much time as he could in a cabin just up here—” Veblen indicated the ridge, feeling stirred by their proximity to this history. “The cabin was built from a chicken coop he carried up the mountain in a cart pulled by his horse Beauty, where it sat for years suspended between two giant redwood stumps.” Now she had Paul zoom in on a photo of the cabin she’d found in the Stanford library after work one day.

“Han ble urettmessig oppsagt from the University of Chicago and would soon be unfairly dismissed from Stanford as well. So he skewered academia in his book The Higher Learning, initially subtitled A Study in Depravity. He loved to think about how conventions solidified and spread. He was passionately curious. He loved the out of doors and wrote nearly every day on the seasonal progress of trees and flowers. He wrote about everything from anthropology and economics to the squandering of the American frontier, even about the mass scalping of the fur-bearing mammals, which was pretty farsighted in those days. He honored animals and plants by calling them the speechless others. He showed his stepdaughters how they could walk through a cornfield and hear corn grow. He was misunderstood when it came to his personal life, which was sticky and complex, and he was too stubborn and gallant to try to set the record straight. En fascinerende og mystisk person.” And she held up her hands to stop the camera. Paul looked depressed for some reason.

FORMER CHICKEN COOP/CABIN OF THORSTEIN VEBLEN.

“Was that okay?” she asked, secretly hoping he was impressed with her language skills.

“Sounded Norwegian enough,” Paul said. “It just makes me wonder.”

“Wonder what?”

“I don’t know. Just makes me wonder.”

They walked along the grassy ridge, quiet except for the occasional car or bicyclist passing by on the narrow road below. She was staring at the back of his strong, pumping calves, which suddenly seemed to have a different personality from the rest of Paul. At last, over his shoulder, he said, “Are you committed to having a really strange life?”

She laughed. “Probably. What do you mean?”

“You seem to admire strange and difficult lives more than upright, successful ones.”

She felt good after making the video, ready to take him on. But there was another reason she’d brought him here: it was the perfect place for the wedding. After all, it was time to decide.

“Maybe,” she admitted. “Isn’t this place pretty?”

“Remember that comment your mother made, about how you’d really surpassed her, something like that?” Paul pressed on.

“When?”

Left, right, left, right. The calves were angry calves.

“During lunch? It was bizarre. It was when we talked about house hunting.”

She remembered vaguely. “What about it?”

“Just wondering what it meant.”

“I don’t know, what do you think it meant?”

Paul stopped and turned, clearly distressed. “Somehow I got the sense she’s jealous of you, and that you try to avoid having her feel that way because it ruptures the equilibrium you’re desperate to maintain for some reason. And that maybe you feel like you have to have a strange life so that you don’t surpass her.”

She cringed further, wondering if it could be true. But it wasn’t. She truly admired the underdogs and outsiders who felt free to be themselves. “I don’t think so,” she replied, begrudging her willingness to discuss it.

Paul began to walk backward, facing her, as if lit up by a pressing concern. “When you were a kid, how often would you see your father?”

“Once a year, for two weeks.”

“Did you look forward to your visits with him?”

“Not at all.”

“Don’t kids from divorced families pine for the parent they see least?” he asked, pulling his collar away from his neck.

“I think I’ve told you, I used to be scared to visit Rudgear,” she said.

“How come? Too normal?”

“Hey! What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I met your mother and stepfather for the first time last week. It makes sense that we’d talk about things a little.”

True enough, every visit was a rich cube of bouillon, so full of compressed flavors, it could be enough to make a soup to feed on for days.

“As long as it’s in the right spirit.”

“Doesn’t that go without saying?”

They continued along the ridge. Cattle stood on nearby hillocks, grazing with their baseball glove lips in the new carpet of clover. “So why were you afraid to visit him?”

She cleared her throat, trying to gather an explanation. It was all a heaving mess in her memory banks. “Well, he was super scary.”

“Really? He didn’t think you were adorable and lovable?”

“No,” Veblen said, matter-of-factly. She wondered what that would have been like. “I was repugnant and snivelly.”

“No way!”

“Way. I cried all the time. And have you ever cried so hard you start doing this hiccuping thing? But it’s not really hiccuping, it’s sort of like this—” She imitated the little gasps that had been such a big part of her life then.

“So you didn’t want them to get back together?”

“Who?”

“Your mother and father.”

“Oh my god, no!” Her face crinkled up over such nonsense. “Never crossed my mind. Ever. Couldn’t imagine them together.”

“Interesting,” Paul said.

“Why are you asking about my father, right after meeting my mother?”

Paul took his time answering. At last, he said, “Just wondered what your alternatives were.”

“Alternatives? What are you trying to say?”

“What do other people say when they meet your mother? Have you introduced other people to her?”

She couldn’t quite find a reply.

“You must know, you must have noticed — I mean, with all due respect — she’s a classic hypochondriac. Right?”

“You think that?” Veblen’s voice cracked, as did her peaceable domestic fantasies, which suddenly seemed cracked to begin with. No one would ever embrace her mother. No one will ever love me because of her. She was impaled on the truth of it.

From the ridge where they stood, she could see the roads and arteries lined with greening trees. Across the valley the Diablo mountains ran grassy and fault wrinkled, like brain matter. All the defining features of the world she’d been inhabiting just fine before Paul showed up. It was so much work, getting along! She felt deflated, a balloon skin on the ground.

“It’s the way she actualizes her identity through her health problems I’m talking about.”

“So she’s not the average suburban housewife—” This was her standby, frayed with overuse. Her voice continued to crack.

“She’s unique, yes, but — it’s hard to watch Linus squirming under her thumb. Don’t you think?”

Veblen felt like attacking him, tearing the sinew from his bones. “That’s not squirming. They love each other.”

“Um, you know, I’m scared if that’s your idea of love. He doesn’t know if he’s coming or going.”

Her throat went dry. Something was happening, in which she felt herself abandoning her body, traveling away. “What a horrible thing to say.”

“It’s scary, as a male, to see something like that,” he added. “I mean, I just want to know what you think is normal. Remember when we were all sitting around the table? You hardly said a word, like you were terrified.”

The more he said, the worse it became.

“I’ve been thinking about this a lot the past few days. I want to be open and free to talk about our feelings. I’ve had to bottle up a lot of stuff in my life.”

“I see,” said Veblen, far, far away. On a steamer bound for a penal colony, waving a long farewell, with a small white hankie wet with snot and tears.

She glanced at him briefly, striding ahead, trying to leave him behind. How could they have the wedding here now? Here was a special place ruined by this vile conversation, burnished into all she saw.

“Veb, to see it as a positive, your mother’s a fascinating case, and together we can face her.”

They returned to Paul’s car, speechless and other, and drove back to Tasso Street in silence. He followed her up the path to the demure little building, as spare as a human could construct.

She fumbled with her keys.

“Let’s say it’s all biological, that her amygdala is huge and swollen. Her cingulate system is probably in tatters. The prefrontal cortex inflamed, the basal ganglia shriveled—”

Inside, the air was stale. She threw her purse onto the sofa and watched the down feather of a dead goose spiral up, then float languidly in the air for a moment, as if the goose could still fly.

“And look, that’s not you. You’re nothing like that,” he offered, peaceably.

“Ha. I’m just waiting until we’re married.” She said it bitterly, wondering what would happen if her beastly streak ever emerged, for surely that would send him running and she could stop worrying about all this connection crap and be a self-ensnared spinster for the rest of her days. It was only a matter of time — she’d lose her temper, she’d bare her teeth, she’d bite him like a jackal—

“Actually, I like her! And I’ll have a good relationship with her,” Paul said speedily. “You’ll see.”

She was opening windows, no longer listening.

“Come on.”

She shrugged, exposed down to the synapses. All blackness. Nothing left to see.

“Veb, did I ever tell you how I became interested in neurology?”

“Can’t say that you did,” she said stiffly.

“Kind of painful,” Paul continued. “I was spending all my time in the library to get away from the freaks at home, and the librarian took me under her wing. Mrs. Brown. She was a stern old bag who pitied me, I think. I was all over the place. So one day she handed me the Life picture book called The Mind—up to that point I’d mostly been reading science fiction, but The Mind was even weirder. I remember seeing this one page, ‘Isolated Human.’ A Princeton student in a lightless chamber with no sound, his hands in gloves. I think the guy went totally crazy after thirty or forty hours. Then there were the chapters on perception and memory, but the part I was really interested in was the part on madness! All these nineteenth-century sketches of mental patients and exorcisms from the Middle Ages. And a list of phobias! Ophthalmophobia, fear of being watched. Catagelophobia, fear of being ridiculed. Nyctophobia, fear of the dark; ergophobia, fear of work; even phobophobia, fear of phobias! It was scarier than science fiction.”

“So? That doesn’t sound painful.”

“But it was painful to be young and pitied, to need solace like that, you know?”

“Mmm. How come you didn’t become a psychiatrist?”

Paul nodded. “Right, that’s the thing. I did a psychiatric residency. In my review I was told I was ‘too reactive’ to the patients. Which maybe was true. Their pathologies had little hooks that got into me and set me off—”

“Like with my mother?”

“Basically,” Paul said. “It’s true, I overreact when something feels off.”

More was expected of her, her usual engagement replete with queries and analysis and a kind of domestication of the topic so that it became like a furry pet with a life of its own, all of which he had come to depend on. The way a cat depends on your petting it when it purrs. The purring forces you to keep petting. Even after you’re tired. Even after you want to move on. Veblen had been detained countless hours on neighborhood walks, not sure when to break away, by purring cats.

“You sure do.”

(Maybe she had to embrace someone who did not embrace her mother. Maybe that was a bigger challenge than finding someone who liked her mother.)

“I’m sorry I upset you,” Paul said. “I really am.”

• • •

OR MAYBE it was time to pull away. She prepared a fast dinner for them, peeling garlic, chopping very ripe tomatoes that trailed seeds over her hands. They barely spoke, having little fuel for niceties. The furnace banged and she couldn’t wait to crawl under her covers and close her eyes.

“Smells good,” Paul ventured, finishing up a beer. “What are we having?”

“Arrabbiata.”

“Perfect. The food of anger,” he joked.

“And bread from the bakery.”

“Good touch.”

“And lima beans.”

They ate over her small table in silence. When the back of the forearm picked up crumbs, it was time to bring out the sponge. She stared at a crease in Paul’s neck.

“Veb?”

She shook her head. “So my mother is off.”

“Veb, I’m sorry.”

She indicated indifference with a toss of her head, but she could not remember a time anyone had apologized to her, ever. “Want some more?”

“Yes, it’s delicious. You’re an awesome cook and a totally sexy, gorgeous woman.”

He was so transparent. She was about to dish up a mean, sauceless clump, but checked herself and threw in a moist part.

Later, clearing the plates, she said, “Paul, have you ever felt sorry for the last lima bean on the plate?”

“No,” he said.

“The one that doesn’t get eaten, and gets scraped into the trash?” For she really did feel sorry for it, sitting there, having grown plump, been picked and cooked, for nothing.

“Why should I feel sorry for it?”

“Little did it know, all that, just to end up in the garbage.”

“I don’t believe it can think.”

“I guess I’m projecting onto it.”

“We all end up in the garbage, sooner or later.”

Veblen plucked up the lone lima bean and swallowed it whole.

“The gulf I feel between us, right now, is huge,” she uttered.

“That happens to all couples,” Paul said quickly.

“And do they recover, and get close again?”

“Of course they do.”

“They don’t break up because of it?”

Paul came over and hugged her warmly. “Veb.” When she didn’t reply he said, “This, what we have, means everything to me. I don’t want anything to happen to us.”

“Like what?”

“Well, I’ve seen what can happen.”

She pulled away, feeling an honest stab of jealousy. “I hope this has something to do with our chemistry, not your learning curve.”

“You are so quick to pounce on any reference to women in my past. It’s amusing.”

“I’ll work on that,” she replied, though there hadn’t been all that many.

“You do that.”

“I will. But what was her name again — Millicent Cuthbertson or something?”

“Millie.”

“Millie. Cute.”

He shrugged.

“If we have a daughter, we’ll have to name her Millie, then,” said Veblen, perversely.

“You’re weird.”

“Where is she anyway?”

“I don’t know!”

“You haven’t Googled her?”

“She’s not a high-profile type.”

“Why, does she work temp?”

“No. I don’t want to talk about her, okay?”

“Because it was such true love, it’s too painful?”

“No! What a freak.”

She started to laugh, the way she liked to laugh at mysterious jokes that not even she understood. Strangely, Veblen had never thought of her mother as a hypochondriac before. But could you be a hypochondriac if you genuinely had health problems? And what if it were true, what would it mean? Wouldn’t it mean that all the stuff she and Linus had done for her mother was for nothing?

“You’re going to give me hell, aren’t you? For the rest of my life,” Paul said, hopefully.

She liked that idea. Maybe she could get away with acts of insolence once in a while.

• • •

THEN IT WAS a noisy, squirrelous night. The trap was nothing to the squirrel. He would not be trapped!

Fists hit walls, shoes hit ceiling. Veblen told Paul to put cotton in his ears.

And for the record, she took devious pleasure in the squirrel’s mayhem. She could not say why.

“Veb? You okay?” he asked at one point, after the lights went out.

“Yeah. I’m tired.”

“You’re shaking.”

“Just a chill.”

“Want me to warm you up a little?”

“Sure.”

He reached over and rubbed her shoulders. “How come you’re not wearing your ring?”

For it was back in its velveteen shell.

“I’m getting used to it, don’t worry.”

“You hate it, don’t you?”

“It’s okay, Paul.”

“I want you to want to wear it, that’s all.”

“I’ll get used to it,” she said, sighing.

“Let’s get another one,” Paul said.

After a pause, she said, “Let’s just sleep.”

“Okay,” Paul said. “Sleep well. Love you.”

Her throat blocked. “Love you too.”

She shuddered and coughed. She had said the dreaded “Love you” instead of “I love you,” and feared it marked a terrible turning point. To drop the pronoun was surely more than a time saver. She had a hunch that when couples stopped saying “I love you” and said the more neutered, quippy “Love you” instead, something had gone awry, leading to a quick succession of deterioration scenarios and other horrors of intimacy that need not be part of every union — she would not let them be.

She walked in her sleep that night, and found herself damp with sweat at her dresser, trying to shake open a drawer.