The Oregon Experiment (32 page)

Scanlon knocked and pulled open the door. The air was greasy with warm butter; Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons
played over the stereo.

“Come aboard!” his father shouted, then laughed and gave him a bear hug. “I’ve passed through Oregon any number of times. Always on the coast, though. Beautiful state.” The microwave dinged, and he pinched the steaming bag by the corners, spilling popcorn into a stainless steel bowl. “Can I fix you something?” he asked, by which he meant a drink, by which he meant rum and Coke, by which he meant rum and Diet Pepsi.

“A small one, sure.”

Geoff poured three fat fingers of Bacardi into a tumbler, plunked in a few ice cubes, then emptied out a can of Diet Pepsi. “Congratulations,” he said, chinking his glass against Scanlon’s. “Sammy’s a champ.”

“So you’ve seen them?”

“Naomi looked pretty frazzled. Figured I’d best leave her be for the night.”

His father had nailed it: Naomi wanted to be left alone. But that’s not a marriage.

Scanlon took a big swallow of the icy sweet drink. “You said you couldn’t come till Christmas.”

“I had to see the grandson, so I tended to certain matters in a more timely manner.” He then packed his mouth with popcorn, and as Scanlon noted the resemblance between his father and himself—cheeks and nose crowding his eyes when he stretched open his mouth for another handful—he wondered if an observer would’ve called the feeding frenzy with Sequoia and the scones erotic or just gluttonous.

When Geoff finally swallowed, he said, “What a town you’ve got here,” and Scanlon knew there were reasons other than his grandson that he’d shown up a month early. “As I came over the river downtown, a bunch of kids dressed in black were giving me the finger, and one of them threw a stone at my rig.”

“It’s not usually like that,” Scanlon said. “Did you hear about the Seattle kid on trial?”

He shook his head, mouth stuffed.

“He got sentenced today. Some of the local anarchists are making a fuss.” He paused. “It’s a wonderful town.” Despite Geoff’s sustained midlife crisis—twenty years and going strong—and the fact that since his parents’ divorce he hadn’t looked up to his father as he hoped his own son always would, Scanlon was conscious of his desire to impress the old man. He still sought his father’s approval.

When Scanlon was growing up, Geoff had been a robust lawyer with a hard-edged, nicked leather briefcase, always dressed in conservative suits, a mid-career, middle-aged man who didn’t necessarily seem happy with his wife but didn’t seem to be looking for happiness or expecting it. He did his job and projected the trappings of a moderately successful career. They had some sort of a family life, Scanlon supposed. He remembered his father making waffles on Sunday mornings and hosting birthday parties at the bowling alley—sitting at the scorer’s table with a Styrofoam coffee cup in one hand and a stubby pencil in the other. He took Joey out to dinner for their anniversary, said grace at Christmas. Scanlon had never seen him drunk, rarely seen him laugh. At each meal he ate one plateful of food with a glass of water, no ice.

While the divorce was in the courts, Geoff called Scanlon at his college
dorm, inviting him out for a steak. Walking into the restaurant Scanlon saw a stranger with an unkempt beard getting up from his table, wearing a Camp Pine Buff T-shirt, sweatpants, and canvas sneakers. His father gave him a hug, the first one he could remember since the second or third grade. His teeth looked less white, even less straight, and hair sprouted from his ears and nostrils. He’d added twenty pounds to his gut and smelled like rum and onion rings.

Once they’d ordered, he showed Scanlon photos of the nudist camp in the Berkshires where he’d spent the summer and fall: rustic cabins from the thirties, old nudists playing badminton, young nudists paddling canoes, boy nudists playing chess, girl nudists reading in the shade, nudist families with hefty moms and dads and bony, bloodless, knock-kneed children. To Scanlon, it all looked vaguely socialist.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Geoff said, “but I assure you it has nothing to do with sex or tits or cunts or any of that.” Scanlon had never once heard his father swear. “In a week you forget you’re naked, and you forget that everyone else is. But more importantly you forget about all the clothing we wear in life. And I
am
speaking metaphorically.” He allowed a preacher’s pause. “What’s a power tie? What’s an elegant suit? What’s appropriate attire? It’s all contrived bullshit. For twenty-five years I’ve been putting up fronts, which requires enormous amounts of energy. When you’re left with just your core self, when you’re interacting with no mediation or societal uniforms or signals and codes, all that energy’s freed up.” He yanked at his T-shirt collar. “You shed everything.”

At the time Scanlon had thought,
Your core self and a million dollars. That’d free up anybody
. This man across the table from him sounded like the vegan airheads living in the co-op house at Scanlon’s college. He was a textbook midlife crisis and nothing more. But while the airheads had gone on to corporate training programs at Goldman Sachs, Geoff was still a nudist, still a dropout.

Despite the cold Oregon rain pelting the aluminum shell of the RV, the temperature inside had to be over eighty. Geoff wore nothing but an old pair of gym shorts and a T-shirt—a conciliatory gesture to the non-nudist general public. Scanlon pulled off his jacket and took a couple big swallows of his drink. “So how’s Parc Elite?”

“Superlative,” Geoff said. For the last fifteen years, he’d lived in a nudist
RV park outside Vegas. “I moved to a new site. More shade, and I put some distance between myself and Kitty. Everybody wins.”

“Admiral Kitty?” Scanlon said. She was a retired naval officer who’d settled in the park a decade ago and hooked up with him.

“Captain,” he corrected. “Not her, though. Kitty the mortgage broker. Bitch Kitty.” Geoff fingered the last kernels of popcorn from the bottom of the steel bowl, then topped off both their drinks. “She made a fortune in the refinancing boom, and now she thinks she’s queen of the park.”

Scanlon swigged. It was getting even hotter. He peeled off his sweater. Through buttery popcorn and rum, Sequoia’s smell rose off his body.

“She thinks she owns people,” Geoff said. “Very controlling. Wants to tell people how to spend their time.”

A photo of both bands—America and Horse With No Name—still hung above Geoff’s chair; four huge stereo speakers were mounted in the corners, upholstered with red shag carpet; the bar was made from smoky mirrors, a bear pelt covered the bed. All of it had the orgiastic reek of the era of guiltless free love.

The CD had ended, and Geoff told him to pick something out. “I should go on inside,” Scanlon said. “Naomi will be wondering.”

“She’ll figure it out,” Geoff said. “Put on some music. Anyway, by the looks of her an hour ago, she’s deep asleep.”

It was late, but he didn’t teach until ten o’clock tomorrow. When he stood up, his face flushed with rum and he had to reach out to grab hold of a cabinet to steady himself. “Can’t you turn the heat down?”

“Hey,” Geoff said,
“mi casa, mi casa.”
He spun the cap off the rum bottle and cracked a fresh can of Diet Pepsi.

Scanlon pressed the CD they’d been listening to back in its case and put on
America’s Greatest Hits
. Sweat trickled down the inside of his thigh, still sticky with Sequoia. He tinked the ice cubes around in the glass his father handed him and took a long, cool drink.

“So anyway,” Geoff said, “Bitch Kitty is telling everybody I’m not Parc Elite material. Turns out there’s a morals clause in the association charter. I’m charged with licentiousness and moral turpitude.”

“I thought she was your … whatever you call them. Lady friend.”

“She was. But with this gold mine she’s made on refinancings, she’s become a tyrant, and meanwhile this very fine woman, Kitty Wright—”

“Captain Kitty,” Scanlon said.

“No, this is someone else. Just moved into the park a few months ago.”

“There’s
three
Kittys?”

Geoff pursed his lips, nodding. “This new Kitty, what a gal. She retired early—a schoolteacher—and slipped into the park in a little class-C Breezeline and set up housekeeping. She’s a soft-spoken little mouse of a thing. Cute as a mouse. First time I met her, she invites me into her Breezeline, and there’s a real honest-to-God gold harp standing in the middle of the floor, and she sits on a velvet-covered stool and plays it for me, moving her hands over the strings like conjuring angels. You wouldn’t be surprised if she sprouted wings.”

Geoff said this last bit like a self-conscious drunk veering from loose toward sauced. But he was also putting on a show, another act in a twenty-year performance meant to prove that he, not his son, was the wild one, the free spirit.

He twirled the ice in his glass. “I’m so glad I met her nude for the first time. That’s how I saw who she really was—the brainy harpist on the verge of spreading her wings. When she’s dressed in her straight brown khakis and square-cut shirts, and with her chopped-off hair and blunt features, she looks like a clothespin.

“But nude, her eyes brighten and her nose sharpens. Her collarbones and shoulder blades are as fine as bone china. Her feet curl over the harp pedals, and her lips quiver. When she tips her head to direct her ear at the heart of the sound, her mousy hair falls across her cheek. And those pointy little tits of hers. Little mouse tits that I—”

“Dude,” Scanlon interrupted. “Stop.”

Geoff froze in a drunken grin. “My point is … Take your mother.”

“No,” Scanlon said. “Let’s not, thank you.”

His father breathed a sigh of resignation that filled the silence. “One for the road? It’s early yet.” When Scanlon nodded, Geoff stepped precariously to the stereo to push Play for another spin of America, then to the fridge for ice. “Your mother was always a skinny little broad.”

“I don’t need to hear this,” Scanlon told him.

“My point is …” He furrowed his brow, comically trying to coax his point from memory. “Clothes gave your mother some shape. Lent her figure some character. But stripped naked she was a rusty nail.”

“Really, Dad,” Scanlon said. “Can it.”

“It’s just I’ve become an explorer with an eye for variety. Captain Kitty? A hard-body. A quarter would bounce off her gut. The only nudist I ever heard of who puts clothes
on
for sex. Says my chest gets too sweaty.
Says if she doesn’t wear a shirt she has to pick my body hair out of her skin. Before sex she rolls on antiperspirant. Very regimented, sexually. Recognize your objective, tuck your chin, lead with your shoulder, get the job done. Left, right, left. Afterward, break camp and police the area.”

They’d both slipped farther down in their chairs, and Scanlon was nursing his drink. He’d had enough. Too much. He had to take a shower—a long, soapy shower—before sneaking into bed with his wife. He had to give Sammy a kiss. God, what had he done?

“Now Bitch Kitty,” Geoff said. “Talk about
with
clothes versus without. When the clothes come off—” he shook his head “—it’s like a landslide. Everything that was pointing up now’s pointing down. Not unsexy, mind you. Just takes a moment to adjust to the current switching directions. In her more serene moods it’s like riding a barge. But usually …” He shook his head again. “You’re familiar with sumo?”

“It’s to your credit you survived,” Scanlon said.

“To survivors!” Geoff shouted, raising his glass.

Pressing his own icy glass to his forehead, Scanlon thought of how he’d always believed—taken for granted, really—that he’d be better than his parents. But tonight he’d cheated on his wife while she nursed their baby and rocked him to sleep. He’d fucked Sequoia, and he’d loved it. He’d loved how much she wanted him. She’d looked deep into his eyes, her face beaming with desire, and she’d gripped his hips and pulled him to her. To be desired. A woman whimpering, wet, and moaning at his hand. It was a lifetime ago that his wife had responded to his touch like that. Climaxing, Sequoia swatted the spice rack to the floor. And through all of it, from the oven rocking and banging, to the taste of sweat on her lips, to the particular undulating, hot-syrup tug of her sex, he was no better than his father.

“About before,” Geoff said. “You know, your mother. Don’t get me wrong. She had a bit of kick to her. Sexually, I mean. But what’s strange is that we were married twenty-five years—and this is related to being a nudist and getting to know someone from their core on out. I mean, I lived with your mother day after day, but if she’d phone me in the office or just came to mind for some reason—” he looked into his empty glass like a crystal ball “—I could never place her face.”

She was awakened by the hard beat of a stereo—a car pounding by, she thought. But then, through the closed windows, over Sammy’s heavy
breathing and the light patter of rain, she heard the raucous singing of her husband and father-in-law: “… Ventura Highway in the sunshine, where the days are longer, the nights are stronger thaaan mooooonshine …” Two houses down, the dog heard it too and joined in howling. The stereo bumped up even louder. Sammy lifted his head, looked at her bleary-eyed in the darkness, spit up on her shoulder, and dropped back to sleep. It was two a.m.

Like torture, she lugged herself from bed, laid Sammy in his bassinet, and parted the blinds on the front window. Light blazed from the RV. The dog barked. With each beat from the stereo, the storm window rattled in its aluminum frame.

She was tired, and had been for three months. She allowed herself to admit this without guilt. Sammy was an intense baby with intense immediate needs. He was never a little hungry, a little bored with his exersaucer, a little chilled. He never had a touch of a cold or a little gas. He was sixteen pounds of desire and sensation, and he knew his mother was his source of satisfaction. She loved that about him, but he exhausted her. She’d hoped to maintain the creative zone through the night and pick up again in the morning with the frog juice, but now at two o’clock, it was clear that tomorrow was shot.