The Portable Veblen: Shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2016
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2016A laugh-out-loud love story with big ideas - and squirrelsCan squirrels speak? Do snails scream?Will a young couple, newly engaged, make it to their wedding day? Will their dysfunctional families ruin everything? Will they be undone by the advances of a very sexy, very unscrupulous heiress to a pharmaceuticals corporation?Is getting married even a remotely reasonable idea in the twenty-first century?And what in the world is a ‘Veblen’ anyway?
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Fourth Estate
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First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2016
First published in the United States by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC in 2016
Copyright © Elizabeth McKenzie 2016
Elizabeth McKenzie asserts the right to be identified as the author of this work.
A portion of this book appeared in The Atlantic
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008160388
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2015 ISBN: 9780008160401
Version: 2018-09-26
For James Ross Cox
Huddled together on the last block of Tasso Street, in a California town known as Palo Alto, was a pair of humble bungalows, each one aplot in lilies. And in one lived a woman in the slim green spring of her life, and her name was Veblen Amundsen-Hovda.
It was a rainy day in winter, shortly after the New Year. At the end of the street a squirrel raked leaves on the banks of the San Francisquito Creek, looking for pale, aged oak nuts, from which the tannins had been leeched by rain and dew. In muddy rain boots, a boy and a girl ran in circles, collecting acorns, throwing them, screaming with delight in the rain. Children did this every day, Veblen knew, scream in delight.
The skin of the old year was crackling, coming apart, the sewers sweeping it away beneath the roads. Soon would come a change in the light, the brief, benign winter of northern California tilting to warmth and flowers. All signs that were usually cause for relief, yet Veblen felt troubled, as if rushing toward a disaster. But was it of a personal nature, or worldwide? She wanted to stop time.
The waterway roared, as frothy as a cauldron, a heaving jam of the year’s broken brambles and debris. She watched the wind jerk the trees, quivering, scattering their litter. The creek roared, you see. Did water fret about madness? Did trees?
With her walked a thirty-four-year-old man named Paul Vreeland, tall and solid of build, branded head to toe in a forge-gray Patagonia jacket, indigo cords from J. Crew, and brown leather Vans that were showing flecks of mud. Under her raincoat, Veblen wore items of indeterminate make, possibly hand-cobbled, with black rubber boots. She was plain and mild in appearance, with hair the color of redwood bark, and eyes speckled like September leaves.
They stopped at a mossy escarpment in a ring of eucalyptus, redwood, and oak, and a squirrel crept forward to spy.
“Veb,” the man said.
“Yes?”
“I’ve been insanely happy lately,” he said, looking down.
“Really?” She loved the idea of spending time with someone that happy, particularly if insanely. “Me too.”
“Tacos Tambien tonight?”
“Sure!”
“I knew you’d say sure.”
“I always say sure to Tacos Tambien.”
“That’s good,” he said, squeezing her hands. “To be in the habit of saying sure.”
She drew closer, sensing his touching nervousness.
“You know that thing you do, when you run out of a room after you’ve turned off the light?” he said.
“You’ve seen me?”
“It’s very cute.”
“Oh!” To be cute when one hasn’t tried is nice.
“Remember when you showed me the shadow of the humming-bird on the curtain?”
“Yes.”
“I loved that.”
“I know, it was right in the middle, like it was framing itself.”
“And you know that thing you do, when telemarketers call and you sort of retch like you’re being strangled and hang up?”
