The Oregon Experiment (16 page)

At the corner, waiting to cross the street, he looked at the tattered and sun-bleached announcements stapled to a phone pole. Bands and drum
circles, used mountain bikes, textbooks. A lost chameleon,
8 inches long, green if he’s mellow, black if he’s freaking. Baby boa constrictors, $60, cute! J
OIN
—The Pacific Northwest Secessionist Movement
.

The logging mural in Blodgett Hall looked smaller this morning. The rotunda was full of students, and Scanlon felt that surge of excitement that came with teaching. He climbed the stairs and was turning down the corridor when he heard his name, and through a wave of students he spotted one of his new colleagues, Chuck Patterson, whom he’d met on his campus interview. “You’ve been up early these mornings,” Chuck said with a knowing smile. “The chair mentioned you’d be very prolific this fall.”

What the fuck? Scanlon wanted to say. Could they let him teach a class before tightening the thumbscrews?

“I deliver your newspaper. Six a.m.”

Scanlon laughed.

“You’re on my route.”

Scanlon feared this was not a joke. He flashed to what he remembered of Chuck Patterson from the website. Tenured years ago. No book. Doctorate from … He couldn’t come up with it. “Gets you up and out,” he said.

“
Carpe diem
indeed. Christmas break and summer it’s fantastic. I’m up at five, and by seven my workday’s done.”

Definitely not a joke. “Well, thanks,” he said, clapping Chuck’s arm. “The paper’s always right there on the driveway. Smack in the middle. Every morning.” His senior colleague, a man who would sit in judgment of him for tenure, promotion, and pay raises, was a paperboy.

The office door beside his was open, and the man at the desk jumped up and shuffled to the doorway, limping. “Ron Dexter,” he said.

“Scanlon Pratt.”

They shook hands.

“Radical studies?” Ron said.

“And mass movements. You?”

“Good question. I sort of did McCarthyism, then a little red-baiting in the eighties. But mostly now I plow through the surveys, which—not sure they mentioned funding cuts and class size in your interview—have become
completely
unmanageable.” He’d added this last bit with perverse delight.

He then shadowed Scanlon into his own office next door. “I always liked this office,” he said, limping in. “Those bookcases with the glass
doors, savor them. There aren’t a lot of niceties here. Nothing like you’re used to back east.” With his forefinger and thumb, he delicately pinched the tarnished brass knob on a glass door, opened it a crack, and clicked it shut. Then he leaned his elbows on the windowsill. “And this office has the best view in the department.” He waved Scanlon over. “You see that?”

He was pointing toward the pool.

“From my office, that tree blocks the line of sight. But from here you’ve got a clear shot of the pool patio.” Ron took a moment to formulate his thought: “I like a woman who looks good wet.” He tugged at his wiry gray beard and plopped down in the chair facing the desk. “As you’ll discover, Oregon women have bigger breasts. It must have something to do with Oregon corn,” he said thoughtfully, “which I’m told is genetically altered.”

Scanlon looked at his open door, and Ron read his mind.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Nobody cares what I say. They’ve all written me off.” Then he added, “Have a seat.”

“Actually,” Scanlon said, “I’ve got some prep to do for my ten o’clock.”

“It’s the first day,” Ron countered. “Hand out the syllabus and let ’em go early.” He twisted around in his chair and played with the glass door again. “I tried to move into this office, but Fenton wouldn’t let me. What do you think of him?”

“He seems great,” Scanlon said.

“He’s a cocksucker.”

Scanlon’s eyes again darted to his open door.

“But sure,” Ron went on, “you’ve got to say that. You
should
say that. You should believe it. Only way to get off on the right foot. But you’ll see soon enough.”

How did Scanlon always start off with the wrong crowd? As a kid, every time they moved, on the first day of school he somehow attracted the delinquents, the vandals, the bad attitudes, veered toward firecrackers, spit, and the crash of breaking bottles. This pattern dawned on him around junior high, but he seemed unable to do anything about it. On a school trip to Sturbridge Village he’d wanted to join the kids learning to play the fife on the village green, or pouring silver spoons and grooming horses, but soon found himself with a set of twins from New Jersey smoking cigarettes in the Colonial Inn and shoving ketchup and mayonnaise packets into a butter churn and ramming down on them.

“Well,” Scanlon said, standing. “It’s good meeting you.”

Ron tapped a fingernail on the glass in the bookcase, rattling the pane in its delicate wood mullions. “You get used to the meager provisions,” he said. “Scrubbing your hands raw with powdered Boraxo under the cold tap. There’s no hot water in the whole building. It’s like
The Grapes of Wrath
—you just keep going, find a little pleasure where you can. After a few years in this department, the forty-eight hours it takes to send a fax won’t seem strange at all.”

“I guess I’d better get to work,” Scanlon said.

“Okay, I get it.” Ron stood up and straightened his trousers, but instead of stepping toward the door he moved to the window. “What you’ll notice,” he said, “something we can both enjoy is …” He waved Scanlon over. “Have a look.”

Scanlon didn’t move. “No, I really—”

“Scanlon,” Ron coaxed. “I just want to show you this one thing.”

So again, against his better judgment, he went to the window.

“That red car,” Ron said. “A classic. Nineteen fifty-seven Porsche Speedster. Belongs to our devoted chair, Fenton.”

“Nice,” Scanlon said, in the tone of a conversational closer, pushing back from the window.

Ron took his elbow. “That big tree—”

“You told me. It blocks your view.”

“But what do you think of that branch?”

Twenty feet up, the lowest branch on the tree hung out over the parking lot, leafless and covered with moss. “It looks dead,” Scanlon offered.

“I figure that’s two-thousand dead pounds. And Fenton always parks in that spot on the end. But when that branch comes crashing down …” His face, bright and joyful, was lost in fantasy. Finally, he turned away from the window and left. But only a second later, he stuck his head back in. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said all that.”

“Oh, it’s fine,” Scanlon said, wondering how this man could have ever survived all the hyperawareness of sexual harassment and student grievances.

“Well, just don’t say anything to anybody. If Fenton noticed the dead branch and started parking somewhere else …” He shook his head. “Christ. I’ve been waiting fifteen years for that fucker to fall.”

·   ·   ·

“I’m a new father,” Scanlon told his first class, “so if you see spit-up on my shirt, rest assured it’s not my own.” The students laughed politely. “We’ll study radical action and mass movements in this senior seminar—” his voice caught on “seminar” as he stood at the lectern overlooking thirty mismatched desks, every one occupied “—with a particular focus on secessionism, my current research area.”

He put up his first PowerPoint slide:
Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive … it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government
. Scratching and clicking—pencils, pens, and keyboards. They looked earnest and fresh-faced, healthier than students back east. “Whose quote is this?” he asked.

“Thomas Jefferson?” came tentatively from a woman in the front row. Beside the notebook on her desk, she had a pear, a beautiful, perfect pear with two green leaves curling from the stem.

“And the source?”

“Declaration of Independence.”

“Excellent,” Scanlon said. “From the founding document of our nation right up to the U.S. support of Kosovo, the United States has demonstrated support in principle for secession.” It felt great to be back in the classroom. His first day on tenure track. He didn’t care about waiting two days to send a fax. What was the hurry? Fenton was right: they were lucky to be here. The students were eager and handsome. They looked comfortable, like this morning they’d jogged in the old-growth forest and this afternoon they’d paddle the Deschutes. They’d arrived at the classroom door on longboards and roller blades. The engineering students electrified their Razors and parked them outside Blodgett Hall with the mountain bikes and cruisers. No one raced for trains in Douglas, sat in traffic, or burned up their days commuting.

“What are some reasons for which secession might be justified?” he asked, and at that moment he smelled the sweet meat of pear: she’d taken a bite. As students called out answers—“Economic discrimination,” “Racial,” “Religious,” “Moral impasse”—Scanlon stepped around the lectern, the rugged floorboards squeaking, and stood closer to the woman with the pear. She took another bite, and as she made a note she held up the pear as a waiter holds up a tray, as if she were offering it to him. For two months now they’d been eating fruit from their yard—first the berries and figs, then pears, and just this week the early apples. All of it juicy and sweet, all of it in abundance. A warm breeze blew in the wide-open classroom
windows, carrying the fragrance of the hemlock tree outside. The woman bit again and sucked at the juice. If it ended up taking them a while to get back to New York, well, this could be a good life.

Naomi taped Sammy’s dirty diaper into a ball, shoved it down in the Diaper Genie, and could barely smell the whoosh of extra-sweet baby powder. She’d developed a sinus infection; her nose was stuffed up, and she was taking antibiotics.

And Joey was coming. Scanlon’s mother. “To help.” Naomi’s heart sputtered at the thought. She’d wanted to come for the birth, but Naomi put her foot down. “Come when the baby’s a month old,” she insisted. They’d called to tell Joey she was pregnant, and the birth, still six months away, seemed far off. “Why don’t you stay four or five days?” Naomi offered.

“That’s not enough time to bond,” Joey protested. “And they’re hardly newborns anymore by then.”

“They’re still plenty new,” Naomi noted.

“How about when it’s a week old I’ll come for three weeks?”

“Four weeks old for a week and a half,” Naomi countered.

“Two for two.”

Naomi ground her teeth. “Three weeks old, you come for one. Final offer.”

“Okay,” Joey said with forlorn resignation. “If that’s how it has to be. Practically a toddler before I set eyes on it.”

Six months later, they made their calls from the delivery room: Naomi’s parents, Sam Belknap, Scanlon’s father, and, finally, Joey. When she called back an hour later, after making a plane reservation, she said, “I have to stay ten days. It’s all they could do. Nonrefundable. And not cheap.”

In the hospital bed, with Sammy at her breast and only a few hours old, Naomi had counted out on her fingers the days until her mother-in-law arrived.

And now, nineteen days later, Sammy sleeping on her shoulder, Naomi dusted. She’d done heaps of laundry. She’d taken Sammy to the supermarket to stock up on the cookies and coffee cake that Joey lived on. She ate like an adolescent fantasy. Naomi had surely seen her eat a bite of salmon, maybe even a leaf of lettuce, but her sustenance came from Starbucks
muffins, Pepperidge Farm cookies by the bag, her homemade garbage bread (apparently famous among her circle in East Hartford), all washed down with white Russians and mudslides. Joey weighed a hundred pounds, had never exercised in her life, had permanently tanned skin, and was either heroically healthy—a heart that at sixty-eight was just getting started, a body that would scare off cancer with threats of starvation and hostility—or she was one danish away from a massive coronary.

Scanlon’s father, Geoff, was a lawyer who’d spent most of his career helping companies evade responsibility for their defective products. “It should’ve been lucrative,” Scanlon told Naomi not long after they met, “but my sense is he wasn’t very good at it. Or he was lazy. I’m not sure which. But he’d be at a company for a few years and then he’d tell my mother and me over dinner that we’d be moving on.” Scanlon was never sure, even to this day, if his father got fired all those times or just quit.

They lived in one middle-class suburb after another, all pretty much the same. “Doesn’t really matter if you’re outside Baltimore, Hartford, or Albany. In fact,” he told her, “I sometimes get memories mixed up between the houses, the schools, the groups of friends.” Naomi believed this occurred more often than he realized. He swore that all on the same day, his parents forgot he had a final championship Little League game and weren’t home to drive him so he called neighbors for a ride, but no one stepped up and he had to bike ten miles in blistering heat to the game, arriving in the second inning; that his coach shoved a boy from the other team after a rough collision at home plate, the other coaches running across the field and beating him to a pulp while kids and parents looked on horrified; that the mayor of East Hartford was convicted of embezzlement and their parish priest for flashing old women in the Kmart parking lot; and that a black man, in a case of mistaken identity, was pulled from his car by police on Scanlon’s street and clubbed. Naomi had suffered her own memory confusion with anosmia since she seemed to shelve all memories, even those unrelated to smell, in her olfactory library. Third grade was the smell of chalk dust and Twinkies; fourth grade was Mrs. Hubler’s thick stockings and her snot on the tissues she tucked under her sleeves; seventh grade was the butter and apricot smell of her own blossoming sexuality; Vermont was mint, creosote, body putty; her lost baby was amniotic fluid and blood. With Scanlon’s well-intentioned but average nose, she understood how files might end up scattered on the floor.

During his freshman year of college, his father was working for Virtual-Kombat,
a videogame company in Hartford. Their heavily advertised Beirut Blast had some software defects that became apparent only after 800,000 units had been sold. Geoff helped hammer out a deal in which new units were mailed to every customer.