The Oregon Experiment (10 page)

“Mmm,” she said into the pillow, curling an arm around his knee. “I have to pee so bad.”

He took a big sip of lemonade and clinked the ice again. She winced, reaching up to still the glass. “That’s not helping.”

“Well, then go,” he said, “and come back,” which she did, and they sat facing each other cross-legged, kissing between sips.

“I have some news,” she said.

“You’re pregnant?”

“My nose is back.”

“What?”

“My nose.” She was beaming.

“But how?”

“I think it’s related to this.” She pressed her palms into her belly. “I’ve had hints of smells since Cape Cod.”

“You didn’t say anything.”

“I didn’t trust it. Couldn’t believe it.”

“So that’s when it started?”

“No. Just since we got to Douglas it’s really back.”

“Oh my God.” He hugged her and wiped the tears from her cheeks. “I want to celebrate,” he said. “Dinner. Wine.”

“You’re drinking for two now,” she said. She touched his hand, steadying it. “You’re shaking.”

“I’m stunned. This is so wonderful.” For the first time since he’d known her, she fully possessed her peculiar genius. There was suddenly more of her, like when she got pregnant: a deeper, more complicated woman to love.

“Pizza,” she said. “I’ve been craving it.” She kissed him. “With smelly things. Kalamata olives, garlic, basil.”

“We’ll go to that place,” he said, cupping his hand between her legs.

“Yes.”

“The one by campus. You love that place, right?” He felt a sort of give beneath his fingers—softening, opening. Smells would be a new connection between them. “And for pie, that other place,” he said. “By the river with the beautiful view.”

“Marionberry pie with ginger ice cream,” she said. “And a decaf latte.”

She scrambled to her knees and plucked the mint from her glass, took it between her lips, pushed him on his back, and settled over him—a plunge that left them both short of breath.

“I want to experiment,” she murmured, her hands planted on his chest. They rocked together, her weight rolling from her hips up and over her hard belly to the points of her palms, like she was rolling over a yoga ball, then she pushed into his chest and rolled back down to straddle him. “With our lovemaking, with smells,” she said, and bit through a stem and pressed two leaves of mint between his lips. “Hold it there.” She sucked at the mint, her wonderful belly rolling into his, gasping inhalations through her nose. “All these new smells out here to experiment with.”

“The sexy smells of Oregon.”

“The Oregon experiment,” she said, throwing back her head and closing her eyes. “The two of us.”

Scanlon’s own eyes were wide open. He wanted to look, to run his gaze over her contours, to get lost in the beautiful landscape of her body. Her breasts had already been lovely, and now they were bursting. He brushed his fingertips over her nipples, bigger and darker in these last months, then laid his hands on her belly—full of their baby, their love. He studied the long scoop of her throat, her lips pursed as her breathing sharpened, her fingertips digging into the skin of his chest, her heavy eyelids, her nose and cheeks, her kinky hair—like snakes or flames—growing in more fully, like everything else in his wife, this beautiful woman who men had been carving into stone for two thousand years.

The next day, on their backyard patio, Naomi tried to focus on Blaine’s husband but was distracted by the broken windowpane in the garage. Cool must, grass clippings, gasoline in a plastic jug, and the tinder of old lumber poured through the sharp-edged hole. “Of course, when we arrived in Douglas,” Roger was saying, “autumn of eighty-four, there was no Chez Paul’s, no Grotto, no brew pub, not even a decent pizza to be had in town.”

“My only point,” Naomi said, “is should a twenty-four-dollar entrée be served by someone who calls you ‘guys’?”

Roger took a slow sip of his drink, then stared at the wedge of lime. Blaine looked at Naomi quizzically, as she might stare at a hopper who’d just leaped.

“Oysters,” Scanlon said, easing the silence. “We had Kumamotos and Yaquinas last weekend. East Coast oysters are nubs of rubber by comparison.”

He asked Roger and Blaine how they prepared their oysters, and they talked of flavored oils, oyster kebobs, bacon-wrapped, and pepper pan-roasted. A bird swooped down on the marionberries, tugged at the vine, and lighted on a branch above their heads, a berry pinched in its beak.

Roger sipped his drink and set the glass back down on the concrete slab by his feet. “Steller’s jay,” he said. “As you probably know.”

Naomi’s mouth was full of chicken salad. The bird was much brighter blue than any jay she’d ever seen, with a striking black head and mohawk. “I’ve noticed them but didn’t know what they were called.”

“Sometime,” Roger said, “I’ll take you down to the wetlands. Some of the best birding in my life is ten miles from here.” Naomi’s face must have betrayed her because he quickly added, “If you have an interest.”

He was a nice man, more reserved than his wife, and older too, maybe sixty, but no less athletic. He had large strong hands and strappy muscles tensing beneath the weather-roughened skin of his arms. His airy white dress shirt, pressed by the cleaners, hung above khaki pants full of pockets and zippers.

“Of course we never thought we’d stay here more than a few years,” Blaine said.

“It’ll be a wonderful place to raise your children,” Roger said.

God, what if they were here that long? What if he got tenure but couldn’t land an offer back east? She and Scanlon would come to appreciate the restaurants; they’d imagine growing old here, grateful they lived in Douglas and not down the road in Tangent or Burnt Woods, Boring, Shedd, or Drain. Their kids would grow up boastful, “born and raised” Oregonians. There’d be 4-H. Her daughter would go on dates in proud pickups. A son in vo-ag and the high-school pistol club. Or they’d move to a commune in the hills—her son’s life spent juggling and sewing bells to his floppy velour jester’s hat, her daughter worshipping the moon and
making art with her menstrual blood. Would her daughter have a baby of her own at nineteen?

Naomi had already surrendered one baby to a life that was out of her control; she would raise the rest of her children as
she
chose.

The Adirondack chair tipped too much weight onto her lower spine, so she shimmied forward and sipped her lemonade, tuning back to the conversation as Scanlon touched her arm and said, “We love it here.”

Blaine and Roger gazed at him, open and engaged. They were comfortable.

She flashed on the first time she’d ever seen Scanlon—at a party in New York thrown by an industry friend whose husband worked for the mayor. Scanlon was telling a joke to six or eight people, and she watched, thinking he was handsome, then charming. Dark curly hair, broad shoulders, a habit of touching two fingers to his chin when he paused for timing. His audience leaned in, eagerly waiting for what came next. He sipped his wine, as if he’d never let the punch line go, then delivered it—irreverent and crude—and everyone broke into laughter, including one woman who wasn’t apt to find much humor in “bitch.” But he’d won them over—Naomi too—and she decided she’d meet him before the night ended. When she did, she was surprised to find he didn’t work at city hall, having met plenty of men who used their bright eyes and quick smiles to win sympathy and votes. He’d be a good leader, though, she thought. And she’d been seduced, even aroused, to learn he was an academic, using his charm not for money or power but to engage students, and for jokes at parties, and to unknowingly attract her.

She’d had no sense of smell for over a year when she agreed to go to the party, only because her friend, a nose, promised her it was her
husband’s
party,
his
friends. Most of Naomi’s were noses, a few were chefs, one tasted for a wine importer and wrote off and on for
Wine Spectator
. By this time, she could barely taste food. Good wine, except for the numbing effect, was wasted on her. Hoppy porters she could taste, and she appreciated the fizz. “The kale’s yummy,” Naomi had said, mostly to herself, one night at dinner, and the conversation immediately shifted. “Can you really taste it?” one friend asked. “For me the smell of the sesame’s a big part of the flavor,” another observed. “What
does
it taste like? To
you
?” asked another. They intended no malice. To them, Naomi was a curiosity. A subject to explore. And, she felt as months passed, an oddity. Pitiable. She
couldn’t bear to be around them and made more frequent excuses until she was seeing no one except her father, who drove into the city once a week to take her out. She was drowning in loss.

That year her baby’s birthday was harder than ever—a ten-year-old boy—and with the loss of her nose, the one frayed connection she had to him had been severed. She’d heeded the advice of doctors and adoption counselors that she not hold him after he was born but now knew that had been a mistake. She hadn’t realized how quickly they’d snatch him away, or how empty that would leave her. She’d also agreed to a closed adoption—no names, no contact—choosing file 372-NY because “mother” was a middle-school art teacher and “father” was a journalist. They enjoyed cross-country skiing and European travel, and had three long-haired Dachshunds; they’d built an oven from clay in their backyard for baking bread; they lived in the state of New York.

Naomi had not seen her baby. She hadn’t smelled him. She possessed only a tear-hazed memory of a lump in a blanket passed between hands, the sound of a confused cry, and the odor of her amniotic fluid and blood. Because this was all she had to know and remember him by, the bodily smell of his birth came to represent her baby. Each month her menses conjured a visit, bringing not only a sense of loss and regret but also a comfort and even joy that she’d come to rely on. Losing her nose felt like losing her baby all over again.

When she thought back to those first weeks with Scanlon, she mostly remembered him from a distance, as she’d first seen him—across the living room engaging strangers with a joke, across a busy café delightedly penning questions in the margins of student essays, or through the doorway of his kitchen on a Sunday morning competently scrambling eggs in the nude with a quick wrist and a dash of salt as she lay curled up in his bed, warm, cared for, ravished.

He’d saved her, and she fell in love with him for it. But throughout those years she’d remained disconnected from her sensuous life. Scanlon remained fine to look at—from a distance or up close—but the spark of newness faded quickly, which she attributed to her useless nose, marooned career, and the futile longing she felt for her baby. Of course, she reasoned, the rush of falling in love was bound to lose its surge, just as the rush of her entire life had diminished to a trickle. But Scanlon was the best thing in it. Naturally their lovemaking became less exciting to her, even as he revealed that it became better and better for him; if she couldn’t smell him, she
couldn’t know him, couldn’t fully connect with him. When she got her nose back, she’d convinced herself, their love and passion would roar back to envelop her.

“The Pacific leaping frog,” Blaine was saying. “That’s a misnomer. He inhabits only a tiny region, a few hundred square miles in the Oregon coast range. A true leaper. The males are especially powerful. No one understands how they can leap as far as they do.” She hesitated, then leaned in conspiratorially. “I’m on to something, though. Between the base of the leg muscle and the testicles there’s a tiny gland that produces a hormone that seems to supercharge the muscle the instant before it springs. And the hormone … what a smell it has. Incredibly powerful. It makes us all a little loopy in the lab.”

“What’s it smell like?” Naomi asked, suddenly fascinated.

“I can’t say. I’ve never smelled anything like it.”

“But if you had to. If I held a gun to your head.”

“A gun?” Unzipping a pant leg, Roger paused. On his left leg he was now wearing shorts; on his right, long pants.

“It’s unpleasant,” Blaine said. “
Very
strong.”

Naomi’s hands were in fists. “But what does it make you think of?”

Blaine didn’t shrink in the face of this challenge from a trailing spouse but rose to it with greedy pleasure. “Like a chemical that could make five grams of muscle propel a ninety-gram reptile nearly three meters. Like exertion. Adrenaline. Drive and desire and hunger coiled up in the groin.”

“Language, dear,” Roger quietly scolded, though Blaine was obviously pleased with herself.

“I’d like to take you up on your offer,” Naomi told her. “I’ll drop by your lab.”

Their plates were empty. Scanlon returned from inside the house with fresh drinks, setting a cold glass in Naomi’s hand and sitting beside her with his arm over the back of her chair. He was perspiring.

Over the years, much as she created fragrances from memory, she’d invented smells for Scanlon. The few times he’d picked up someone’s guitar and played, he’d smelled of spruce and oak. When he shoved a man in a subway car who’d had his hand in Naomi’s purse, pinning him to the door with a fistful of his shirt and throwing him onto the platform at the next stop, she’d smelled powerful base notes of cloves, creosote, body
putty, and mineral oil. Kissing her in the park was dried maple leaves and honey. In bed, his mouth on her neck, nudging, nuzzling, then his first thrust inside her—rich sweet tobacco and musk. As he gathered up the pieces of a woman morose and purposeless in her sour apartment, he was a steady onshore breeze, low tide, on a hot night. She’d invented things so real they became his smell; they became
him
.

The passion would blossom, she’d convinced herself. When she got her nose back. But her nose
was
back. His scalp and skin were in the dusty family: canvas stored in the basement, pages of a book pulled from a garage-sale box, a stranger’s wool sweater. From his crotch: steamy rain on a hot sidewalk. None of it was bad, or offensive, or even unpleasant. But all of it belied the dashing visuals of the man whose self-possession could command a room. The man who’d saved her. It was like he was a different person. As if she’d lost him.