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

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СКАЧАТЬ cried louder, and Paul stepped back, not wanting to believe his patroness was brutalizing her child. (Maybe the kid was a horrible brat and deserved it? Maybe Cloris, unlike his parents, knew how to exert some discipline?)

      “Get me your father. Now!”

      The boy disappeared from the screen and Paul leaned forward again, despite himself. A hard-jawed man in a black polo shirt with a sharp cleft between his eyes took the boy’s place.

      “Cloris, what are you doing? He’s hurt!”

      “Don’t expect me to fix it all from here. He wants to live with you, then be his father!”

      “Cloris. Calm down. Morris, go upstairs while I talk to your mother.”

      “Don’t let him leave. I don’t want to prolong this. Sit down, both of you!”

      Cloris strained toward the screen, so that her nose might have sparked with static. “I want to tell you something, Morris. When my father asks me about his grandson, what am I supposed to say? Well, you know what, I say nothing! I change the subject! That’s because you let me down constantly. I would never tell him the things going on!”

      “I didn’t mean to,” cried Morris.

      “Stop it. Pull yourself together right now. You’re such a baby. You’ll have to earn my trust in the future, and it won’t be nice and easy, the way everything else comes for you.”

      “What can I do?” sobbed the boy, whose cheeks glistened with tears.

      Cloris bent, arms crossed over her chest, shouting at the screen. “Do you understand why you are in that school? You are in that school because my father went to that school and because he is on the board of directors of that school and you have every advantage in the world in that school! Do you know how bad it has to be for me to get a call from one of your teachers? You represent this family to the children of everyone who matters in Washington. And this is what happens?”

      “Cloris, he’s in second grade.”

      “And look at him. He’s at least ten pounds overweight. Morris, are you listening? You are fat. And do you know what that means? Nobody likes little fat boys. Morris? Stop eating junk food!”

      “That’s more than enough,” said the boy’s father, and fearing that the conversation was coming to an end, Paul withdrew, in order to rush around the building to the expanse of sandstone, where he affected a casual stance until Cloris joined him again.

      “There you are!”

      “Nice view.”

      “Now, where were we?”

      “Everything okay with your son?” Paul asked, innocently.

      “Oh. Fine. The long-distance thing isn’t easy,” said Cloris, and to stay on target for the future of his device, he pushed the scene he had witnessed from his mind.

      He followed her inside and she brought them drinks on the couch, and shortly, one of her hands was on the cushion near his shoulder, then on his shoulder, finding its way like a garter snake to his ear. She had a thing for the little flange at the front of the ear called the tragus, and she pinched it at least six or seven times.

      “You are a gorgeous man,” she said, embarrassing and thrilling him.

      After a long session of making out (she tasted of vodka, and her mouth was surprisingly small, her tongue fast and flighty, putting him in mind of kissing a deer, for some reason), she threw herself back on the pillows and said, “I don’t have relationships anymore. But you’re hard to resist.”

      “Then don’t,” Paul said, in motion toward her, fueled by instinct.

      “I was a very decadent person in my twenties. You have no idea.”

      He listened, with a hard tug in his groin.

      “I had problems. And then, about five years ago, something shifted.”

      “And what was that?”

      “It coincided with my work for the company. I suddenly transferred all of that excitation into my professional life.”

      “That’s a tragedy,” Paul said, grasping her fingers.

      “So now, if I’m spending time with a man, which I’m not, I’m a nun these days, I’m impatient, I think about work, I double-task. I’ll be smiling and thinking about my toes and separating them to aerate them. And I’ll be thinking, there, that’s something I can accomplish until this is over.”

      Paul cleared his throat. “Hmm.”

      “Is that fair to the man?” she pressed.

      “Depends on the man.” He laughed, as he only thought right, though he would never have taken her for a person with tinea pedis.

      “Come here,” she said, pulling on his collar.

      “I think you’re struggling,” Paul said, with renewed interest in kissing her.

      “I am.”

      “Maybe someone should help you with your struggle.”

      He reached for her skirt, and under it, just long enough to feel that her inner thighs were cold, but with that she jumped up and laughed in an agitated and sophisticated manner, and said, “Come upstairs!” And he followed like a pup.

      Her bedroom was vast, with a huge bed that she rolled over in order to rummage in a bedside drawer and retrieve a bronze pipe, tamping it expertly with pungent weed. She took a few long tokes and passed it to Paul, who was so surprised in a bad way that he shriveled. The scent of marijuana was his least favorite odor in the world. Even feces on a shoe smelled better than cannabis resin.

      “No, really,” he said, when she pushed the smoking bowl toward him.

      She indulged several more times, then flung herself back into the playpen of pillows, kicked off her shoes, sent them flying, and patted for Paul to lie next to her.

      “He’s coming out next year,” she gasped.

      “Who?”

      “Morris,” said Cloris, exhaling loudly. “I have to figure out something fun to do with him. I never get it right. What did you like to do when you were eight?”

      “I don’t know, the usual.”

      “What’s the usual!” she said, hammering him with a pillow.

      “Hey!”

      He grabbed one from the multitude of bolsters and puffs at the head of the bed and socked her back.

      “Paul!”

      He drew himself up on his knees, and moved toward her, as she began to sniffle.

      “How can I know the usual, I don’t live with my son, there is no usual.” She sniffed.

      “Cloris? СКАЧАТЬ