The Oregon Experiment (33 page)

Zipping her raincoat, she slipped her bare feet into Scanlon’s boots and stepped out into a cold mist. They’d already turned the volume down and were no longer singing. Even the dog had gone quiet. Still, she trudged down the driveway and stepped off the curb onto a plastic stool. The RV smelled like aluminum and like the highway—diesel fumes, dusty tar, and grease splatters. “Vo
lump
tuous,” she heard Geoff say. Grasping the door handle—“I’ve never found Naomi sexier”—she stopped. It wasn’t Geoff, but Scanlon—his voice gravelly and slurred. “Vo
lump
tuous and soft and womanly.”

She yanked open the floppy door and stepped inside. The air was too warm. Syrupy. As she climbed the steps, she saw Geoff in profile, tipping back his head with a glass balanced on his nose. Scanlon was slouched in a chair, his eyes sagging and his face slightly rearranged, vaguely Cubist, like it always got when he was drunk.

“What are you doing up?” he said. His shirt was unbuttoned down his chest.

“Have a seat,” Geoff said. “Fix her a drink, son.”

Scanlon looked up at her, smiling, a sweating glass resting on the point
of his hip bone. His mouth seemed to migrate up his cheek and his eyes seesawed, as if
she
were the drunk one. She desperately needed to sleep. Sammy would be awake in two hours, famished. And she didn’t want her husband coming inside between now and then and waking her up. She’d never felt so exhausted, so emptied out.

It wasn’t until she saw a bead of sweat running down Scanlon’s face that she realized how hot it was in the RV. Sweltering. Beneath her pajamas and the raincoat her skin felt wormy. She could hardly get a breath. “Sister Golden Hair” came on the stereo, and a memory that she hadn’t thought of in years appeared in her mind with astounding clarity: twenty years old, alone in a little beach cottage on Long Island that belonged to the parents of her roommate, who was supposed to meet her there but got sick and called to say she couldn’t come. At first Naomi was disappointed, but then she ate spaghetti, left the dishes in the sink, stacked some old albums on the record changer, and sat in the dark on the tiny deck looking out at the stars in the black sky over the ocean. And what she remembered, standing here exhausted between these two drunk men, was that other than her friend in bed with a fever in New Rochelle, no one in the world knew where she was. She remembered “Sister Golden Hair,” the sound of the surf, the vast sky, and the feeling of being completely, luxuriously alone.

Now she was standing in the ocean, the water weirdly, soupy hot, and a wave pushed against her legs and almost knocked her over. She caught herself, only to be tugged by an undertow she couldn’t resist, and her feet were swept from beneath her, and she was buckling, falling toward Scanlon, and he lurched up from the chair, his arms beneath her …

And there on the floor, her head in Scanlon’s lap, she was awake, or could have been, but she didn’t want to be. She fell back to the cottage on Long Island, sinking low in a chaise longue on the ramshackle deck, cocooned in darkness. And then she slipped further back—weak from labor, her skin slick, a tiny pink hand reaching out of the blanket, Joshua crying for his mother. But instead of receiving her baby into her arms she touched her vagina and brought her hand to her nose, holding the smell of his birth. Half-conscious now, she sensed that bodily pool of comfort, then sank beneath its surface.

Chilly water pinpricked her face and she turned her head to the side, curling deeper into the cocoon, trying to forestall her return to the present. But the icy water drew her back—now a spray she couldn’t ignore—and she smelled the rain and the wet driveway. She was being carried,
hooked under her knees and shoulders. She opened her eyes. Her father-in-law held her legs, lurching side to side as he back-stepped up the driveway, carrying her back to the house, her baby, this life.

She shot awake. In bed. Four a.m. The fragrance of rosemary shampoo: Scanlon had showered. Remembering that she’d fainted, her head cradled in Scanlon’s lap, she now lifted the covers to a warm whoosh of smells: before showering he’d tried to rinse it off in the hot tub, but her erotic earthiness had clung to him, and he’d brought her into their bed. Sequoia had been wearing jasmine. Her smell was tangy. Citrus. Her period might have just ended, her hair unwashed. They’d both perspired. No trace of latex. She’d been baking.

A
t ten-thirty in the morning, when Scanlon rushed into the kitchen and clattered the kettle on the stove, she didn’t turn from the window. “I’ve gotta bolt to my class,” he said, “then I’m meeting my father for lunch and showing him around town.”

Naomi sighed. “Not very well,” she said, staring through the drizzly gray where Horse With No Name listed toward the curb. “I got woken up in the middle of the night by a couple of drunks. But thanks for asking.”

“I’m really sorry,” he said. “I had no idea we were being so loud.”

She looked at him: a towel hung low on his hips, the dark hair on his stomach was wet, obscene. He carried with him the smell of oatmeal soap and his shampoo, but she had no doubt that even after a hot tub and two showers, if she got close enough, down on her knees, she’d detect the citrus markings of Sequoia.

“What’s he doing here?” she said.

“On the run from a woman.”

Was there filial pride in his tone? Swagger? “Well, I’m too tired to deal with him. You two can go out for dinner.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of him. You just take care of yourself.” He
pressed a filter into the cone and measured out the coffee. He still hadn’t met her eye. “You fainted again. Have you asked the doctor about it yet?”

She turned over a page of the
New York Times
, the Arts section, spread on the table in front of her. His coffee trickled from the cone into the mug—a black and fuchsia mug with a loopy whorled handle that had appeared one day in their cupboard. “I need sleep,” she said. “Sammy, too, if he’s going to get over this cold.”

“Sammy’s got a cold?”

“For two days. While you’ve been occupied. With research.”

He squatted beside the bouncy seat, then reached for a napkin on the table and wiped Sammy’s nose. The baby snorted, then coughed. With a hand on Sammy’s leg—all wrapped up in fleece—Scanlon lowered his voice: “Sorry about waking you up. Try to get some rest today. I’m kind of worried about you fainting all the time.” He stood up, dropped the cone in the sink, splashed milk in his coffee.

“Where’d that mug come from?” she asked.

He took a sip—“Isn’t it beautiful?”—then held the mug out for her admiration. “The shape and the balance, the fit of the handle in your hand, the perfect lip.” He thrust the mug at her. “Want to try?”

“Where’d you get it?”

His hesitation reeked of guilt. “Sequoia.”

“She made it herself?”

“Not sure.”

And the lies begin, she thought, the small lies that build the levee, a fistful at a time, around the big lie. She looked down at the newspaper and read a review of a movie that would never come to Douglas, then read it again, over and over, until he came back through the kitchen cradling the mug. She searched his face for remorse but could see only exultance.

“Is it raining?” he said, tying his shoes. Perky, chatty.

“Do I look like a cloud?”

And then he was gone, out of the house, and she put her face in her hands and cried.

But Sammy was sucking on his toes and needed a bath, so after a time she blew her nose, cranked up the oven, and opened its door to take the chill out of the kitchen. Then she scrubbed the sink and filled it with warm water. Sammy loved a bath, never fussed, and seemed, if it was possible at three months, to anticipate it with an eager desire.

She dragged his bouncy seat closer to the oven and unsnapped his onesie, tugging out his stubby arms, and the whole time he grinned, staring into her face with eyes full of love and trust. She sealed up his diaper, dropped it in the garbage, and lifted him by the torso, his delicious fat rolling over her fingers like she was holding up a mound of pizza dough. When she dangled his toes in the water, he shrieked with delight. Intending to kick his feet, he flailed his arms. She lowered him into the sink, splashing, drooling, cackling, his eyes still pinned on hers.

The hundreds of times she’d smelled baby shampoo, it always brought her to a specific place: her first weeks back from France, before she’d found an apartment, spending a night with absurdly rich friends in their co-op on East 73rd, showering in the children’s bathroom, using the baby shampoo from the windowsill in the shower, the window open a few inches and letting in the smell—comfort and complacency—of the Upper East Side.

She sloshed the washcloth around Sammy’s neck, behind his ears, and under his arms. She bent him forward over her hand and scrubbed his back. He giggled as she washed between each of his toes. She could imagine a life in New York with Sammy. Just the two of them.

The kitchen was getting hot. Splattered chicken fat burned on the oven racks, and finally she no longer smelled Scanlon.

She patted him dry on the counter, then used the blow-dryer, Sammy trying to grab the flow of warm air. She dressed him in a clean onesie and carried him into the couch for the cruel irony she’d come to dread: nursing him was the deepest connection she’d ever felt with another soul, and the worst pain she’d ever known.

He nuzzled through her flannel pajamas, and already she felt the sharp pinch. He latched on and the pain clawed her breast and raked through every hollow and corner of her body, tears spilling down her cheeks and falling onto Sammy’s golden face. He gazed up at her, and the pain eased off. Her husband had forfeited all claims on her body.

He’d received a dozen calls in his office from newspapers around the state. Everyone had seen him last night on TV. He’d given short phone interviews and felt a rush of success.

But just before lunch Fenton followed him into the men’s room and took the urinal beside him: “I didn’t get that article yet.”

“Busy morning,” Scanlon said. “Statewide interest—”

“Don’t yank my chain, Pratt. I mentioned to the dean yesterday that you were sending me a draft. Do you want me to tell him that being director of a bunch of wingnuts has, as he already fears, compromised your productivity as a scholar?” He zipped up and punched the flush.

“It’s on my home computer. I’ll have to e-mail it from there.”

Slowly washing his hands under cold water with the powdered Boraxo, Scanlon thought Dexter was wrong. You don’t get used to it. You get the hell out. But he’d never get another job without something to show for his time in Oregon.

The phone was ringing as he opened his office door: a reporter from Bend, asking all the wrong questions, entirely missing the significance of Panama’s sentence, lacking even a basic understanding of radical action and mass movements.

He hung up and gazed out the window toward the pool, the patio chairs stacked under a tarp for the winter. He’d write the goddamn piece himself. It was
his
story,
his
ideas. He Googled the
Oregonian
features editor, then called and left a message. In the state’s biggest newspaper, he would have a proper venue. It wasn’t the scholarly article Fenton wanted, but it should keep the dean at bay.

Then he called his father and told him how to get to campus. They’d go to lunch, but first they’d swing by the demonstrations. He left his office with a notebook and a pen.

His father was waiting by the gates to the old quad, a spot where photos were taken for the website and brochures, the campus’s equivalent of a pretty receptionist. A neat elongated quadrangle with classical brick buildings, it was every bit as attractive as anything at Harvard, Mount Holyoke, or UVA. Scanlon had seen pictures of the old quad even before he came for his interview. He’d imagined a beautiful office tucked under the eaves of one of these buildings, with a leaded French dormer window and a fireplace with a drafty flue. But this was the administration’s province—the president, the provost, deans, associate deans, alumni relations, public relations, the university master planners. He almost never set foot here.

From campus, they walked downtown. The rain began to fall and they both pulled up their hoods. They passed the public library, then walked
along a paved path through the park. Food Not Bombs had taken over the gazebo, and standing in the wet grass outside it were dozens of anarchists, rain pelting their paper plates and their hunched shoulders. Stark and deathly, like a scene from a German movie.

“There’s not usually so many,” Scanlon said. “They’re here to protest that guy’s sentencing.”

“They don’t look like they have any protest in them,” Geoff said. “How do you people live up here?”

“It’s not so bad. It’s usually more of a
misting
rain.” It was pouring down at the moment. “There’s more annual rainfall in Houston—accumulation, that is—than in Douglas.” He was repeating the meaningless things people had told him that had nothing to do with the fact that the rain was oppressive.

A block from the courthouse they heard drums and chanting, and as they got closer the scene on the square was impressive—easily three or four times yesterday’s crowd. Rain-streaked banners held up on poles denounced Panama’s harsh sentence. Effigies—the judge? prosecutor? governor?—were tossed around a mosh pit pushing up against the metal barriers and the line of police. Dreadlocked hippie kids in dirty tie-dye and harem pants beat on bongos. Anarchists with buzz cuts and any sort of hair sculpture—blue and green and jet-black mohawks, Circle-A’s shaved or tattooed onto their skulls. Like yesterday, there was a festival mood, but it felt different—more impassioned chanting by the neo-hippies, and a more unsettling quiet among the anarchists.

“This feels explosive,” Scanlon told his father. The volatility in the air was the sort of thing a dog might smell.

“Is this some kind of freak-fest?”

“This is the Pacific Northwest,” Scanlon said. “This is what goes on. It’s what I study.”

For years Geoff hadn’t allowed himself to be surprised by anything. He knew it all. But now he looked stunned, like a witness to the apocalypse. “You should move down to Vegas,” he said. “It’s a pleasant life.”