The Oregon Experiment (4 page)

He could complain to Edmund, probably get Clay fired on the spot. But he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t do anything. And the punk knew it. A lesson in anarchy.

And Scanlon needed a few lessons. His last paper, in last winter’s issue of
Domestic Policy
, had left hiring committees around the country under-whelmed. Other than Douglas, only one department—Arizona State—had invited him for an interview, and they never made an offer. He’d played up the publication so much—it
was
a big deal,
Domestic Policy
was tops—that Naomi panicked when interviews didn’t come through with Stony Brook, Rutgers, Cornell, Binghamton, or the other six universities with openings. She’d asked him point-blank: “When do we explore other options?”

“We don’t!” he blurted, and the ensuing argument made clear that with their baby in her belly, with midlife waiting in their next cracked-linoleum college-town apartment, any romantic illusions Naomi had harbored about academia—the life of the mind, the noble pursuit of teaching—had swirled down the drain of low-paying one-year stints, the irrelevancy of academic work to the rest of the world, the incomprehensibility that a shot at tenure in Douglas, Oregon, was an offer too good to pass up.

He assured Naomi they’d get back to the Northeast. He didn’t want to spend his life in the sticks any more than she did. But this job put him on the tenure track, he’d explained, even pleaded. He would immerse himself in northwestern radicalism, get his book out, come up early for tenure, and leverage a job back east—in Binghamton, where they liked him, maybe even Princeton, Columbia, NYU. He’d do it before the baby enrolled in pre-K. Any doubts he had about the plan’s viability he kept to himself, and often, he had to admit,
from
himself.

He wove between end tables and stacks of boxes through the living room to the kitchen. Naomi wasn’t there, but he found a white paper cup standing on the orange table. He sat down, spun around in the chair, and took a sip of the coffee—lukewarm and too creamy—looking out the front window as Edmund and Clay carried Naomi’s bureau down the ramp. Her T-shirts and jerseys stretching tighter as her belly grew, short black skirts
and perfumed sweaters, the blouses she wore for work. And sometimes no blouse. Just a fitted blazer buttoned up to her cleavage, with nothing but a black bra …

“Sort of bizarre,” Naomi said.

He swiveled again and was face-to-face with her belly. “Cheers,” he said, raising the cup.

“The woman who runs the café—”

“They’re bringing in your clothes,” he told her. He loved the pucker of her lips when she spoke.

“Her daughter was like three or four—and still nursing. What surprised me is that it made me so uncomfortable.”

The fullness had come to her face in the first few days. She’d known immediately. They spent Thanksgiving weekend in a barely heated cottage on Cape Cod, so chilly they ate their turkey and mashed potatoes under the quilt on a bed made of driftwood. She had forgotten to pack her diaphragm, and before they went back to New York on Monday, her cheeks and breasts had begun to swell.

“What’s wrong with you?” Naomi said.

He tipped back his head and sucked the last drops of coffee through the hole in the lid. “Is there more?”

“Your eyes,” she said.

He loved her dark eyes. “Did they bring in the bed yet?” He lowered his voice and reached for her leg. “Wanna go to the races?”

“Are you high?” She, too, lowered her voice. “You’re high.”

“Research,” he whispered. “That mover’s an anarchist. And his weed. Holy shit, Naomi. I’ve heard of this Oregon homegrown. Communes and cults in the hills. Free love, organic lettuce, killer dope, and they don’t pay taxes. Welcome to my fieldwork. We’re living on the fringes.”

“Couldn’t you drop out of society
after
we unpack the nursery?”

“We’ll name our baby boy ‘Free’ and dress him in black onesies.”

“Let’s just start with the kitchen.”

“I’m starving,” he said.

“There’s grain bars in the car. And get the cleaning supplies from the trunk.”

“I could go for a doughnut. A glazed doughnut. I can’t remember the last time I had a doughnut. Or chocolate glazed. With steak and eggs, and—”

Suddenly she was crying, her hands in fists by her cheeks. “I’m freaking out in this place, and you promised you’d help me make it work, but instead you’re acting like this is high school.”

He reached his arms around her, but she pulled away.

“For God’s sake, we’re having a baby,” she said. “In Oregon.”

“It’s gonna be okay. Let’s just take a breath and—”

“I don’t want to breathe. I want to get the kitchen unpacked.”

He needed to settle her down. It’s what she relied on him for. His reassurance. But he was too stoned and couldn’t trust his judgment to not say the wrong thing. She turned back to the sink, and he said, “I’ll get the 409.”

From the driveway he could see the anarchist at the top of the ramp, sipping on his soda. Scanlon grabbed a grain bar from the car and tore the wrapper with his teeth as he lifted the box of cleaning supplies onto his hip, the whole time watching Clay. The asshole had busted the window right in front of him! Performing, Sam would say. Scanlon would stay close to him, see him again soon, and he’d let him act up, then discover whether there were any real principles behind the antics.

He wouldn’t even try to explain to Naomi that getting stoned with him today was the first step in building trust that could lead to primary source material for his book and get them back to the East Coast. Much of the criticism of his
Domestic Policy
article had been unfair, though some of it—especially that his critical perceptions had been compromised by his sympathy for the movements he wrote about—probably had some merit. But it wouldn’t happen again, because his analyses would now be unassailable. He’d no longer have to guess what, for example, Pacific Northwest anarchists believed. He had a live one. And he would never again endure the humiliation of last spring’s issue of
Domestic Policy
, in which the first seventeen pages were devoted to five scholars in the field brutally slaying his article from the previous issue. To remain a player and not let the beating force him into the hall of shame from which scholars often didn’t emerge, he needed a quick, impressive publication, and the kid stomping down the metal ramp in black combat boots, shouldering the mini bureau containing silky puffs of Naomi’s bras and panties, lacy nightgowns and slips, was just the sort of source that could make it happen.

In the kitchen he slid the cleaning supplies onto the counter and swallowed the rest of the grain bar.

Naomi tore open a Mayflower box. “Utensils,” she said, pointing to the end of the counter with a spatula. “Start with that drawer.”

Scanlon sprayed. He smelled the 409 fragrance that said
clean
, and could almost taste the antibacterial solvents. He scrubbed the drawer, digging at years of crud in the corners and wiping it all away.

After a time Naomi was standing beside him with fistfuls of knives and forks. “That one’s probably done,” she informed him.

Edmund pounded across the living-room floor and set a dish box down in front of the fridge. As he walked off, Scanlon turned to Naomi and whispered, “We should smoke pot more often.”

“For Christ’s sake.” She arranged cutlery in the plastic organizer.

“I mean
after
the baby. After you’re done nursing. You know. In life.”

“Good plan,” she said, popping the band of packing tape on another box.

When he finished all the drawers and cabinets, as Naomi stacked plates and nested bowls, he drifted into the living room. Touching the mantel, he thought about having a corner for kids’ stuff—a toy sink and stove set, a Playskool tool bench—and where to hang his oversized photo of the Yucca Mountains, golden under a glorious sun, a thin line of protesters blocking the road, himself among them.

Hefting one end of their mattress, the anarchist wobbled backward through the front door.
A quick publication
, Scanlon thought, falling to the couch. Out the window he could see the blueberry bushes at the far end of the yard. The fog was lifting. He closed his eyes.

In the kitchen Naomi set steel canisters of flour and brown sugar at one end of the counter, then pulled the toaster from a box and plugged it in beside them. She chose a cabinet for spices, and one to keep empty for now—reserved for bottles, nipples, sippy cups, and tiny plastic dishes with bunny ears. As she clanked dinner plates and cookie sheets, the movers lumbered from room to room—smells of cardboard, coffee, and sweat. With each trip they anchored the house a little more solidly, weighing it down with books and bureaus, Scanlon’s boxes of research, her leather chair. Each trip into the house made moving out more difficult.

Suddenly exhausted, she filled a glass with tap water and sat back in a kitchen chair, a hand on her belly. She fished in her pocket for the snip of woolly apple mint, then dropped the leaves in her glass, closing her eyes and breathing in the smell as she took a long drink, and when she opened her eyes, the young one was standing in the doorway, his arms around a
box marked
COOKBOOKS
, staring at her. She slowly sipped her drink, sucking at the mint, then rested the glass on her belly, watching him slide the box on the counter and leave the room without looking back.

Mint. As a girl, she made long summer trips to her grandparents’ in Vermont, where she and her summer boyfriend Clair, a French Canadian, would slip easily back into their heated romance. When she was nineteen—one of the last times she saw him—as the morning’s first truck of raw milk arrived, she’d left her grandparents’ house, passing through their small creamery, the routine she’d been repeating most summers of her life. The cement floor and three stainless steel pasteurizing drums were hosed down and shiny, but the smell of sour milk stayed with her as she walked the half-mile toward town, crossed the tracks (creosote and biting rust), cut behind a home-heating-oil depot, then caught the first whiffs of auto-body putty wafting from the body shop Clair’s father owned.

She’d intended to give Clair a muffin and continue on to the drugstore for her grandmother’s prescriptions, but he was on his coffee break, his coveralls unzipped and peeled down to his waist, and within minutes they snuck up the back stairs to the vacant apartment over the shop, crashing onto the bare mattress and making love to the whirr of grinding wheels and the rumble of compressors.

Afterward, downstairs in the office, she lifted the lid from the cut-glass candy dish and clicked a sugary Canadian mint against her teeth with her tongue.

Smells were all that remained of that day: strong sharp base notes married with tender top notes. This is what she seemed bound to re-create over and over, the combination of smells that revived that moment. It was the fragrance the industry had pegged her for.

She should tell Scanlon she had her nose back. Not yet, though. It was still too close. This new olfactory life took her into herself, not out to the world. She wouldn’t even be able to say it.

When he opened his eyes, the house was quiet. Sun flooded through the picture window. The living room was a maze of cardboard towers. How could they have so much stuff? In the kitchen he opened drawers and cupboards. Except for a stack of cookbooks on the table, Naomi had done it all—Cheerios and raisins, salad tongs and olive pitter, the cups and saucers from Grasse had all found their place.

And next to the cookbooks, weighted down with Naomi’s keys and cell phone, was a yellow sheet of paper: the Pacific Northwest Secessionist Movement. Meeting next Thursday. He stared at the paper. He read it again, laughed out loud, then snatched the phone and dialed Sam Belknap’s number.

“Pratt, my lad.” Sam’s voice sounded strong and clear.

“How’s the hip?”

“Better than ever.” He was lying.

“What did the doc say?”

“The man doesn’t know a hip from a jawbone. Did I tell you he’s British? Couldn’t get rich enough under socialized medicine, so he sets up shop at New York–Presbyterian.”

“But did he say the hip needs to be replaced?”

“The good doctor had read a piece I wrote for
Food and Wine
about British naval traditions around the drinking of port.” Scanlon knew Sam had become an authority on port wine twenty years ago while writing his book on the Basques and Andorrans. “I’m wearing a paper nightgown, and he’s pumping me for recommendations on decent bottles in the
fifty-dollar range
. Brags that he did his medical training in the British navy. ‘Naval man,’ I say to him. ‘So you know on a ship the port bottle is always passed to the left, typically preceding a jolly round of buggery.’ ”

“And then he said your hip was fine?”

“Precisely. Doesn’t want to see me again. But what about
you
? How’s Oregon?”

Scanlon told him about Clay and the flier he was holding in his hand. “I can do good work here. Solid,
important
work.”

“I’m glad to hear the fire in you,” Sam said. “It’s always been there, even when it sputtered.” He was referring to when Scanlon, mid-dissertation, declared he was quitting. He’d laid it all out in Sam’s NYU office, tracing his passion for radical action and mass movements to a recurring childhood dream in which he was in danger, a threat lurking around every corner or chasing him at a sprint, until he spotted a cop, or a man in a suit and tie, a nun, a soldier, a mother—night after night he runs to the authorities to be saved, but when they turn and show their faces, they’re the menace he’s desperate to escape.

The dream wasn’t hard to interpret: his father and mother were narcissists whose parenting philosophy blended strict moralism with hypocrisy and neglect. Like the parents of every other kid he knew, they
eventually divorced. He was forced to go to Catholic school and church on Sunday, where he couldn’t drag himself up from the boredom long enough to even consider its foolishness. They moved frequently when he was a kid; his father blamed the weak job market on OPEC, his mother on feminism and Japan. Born into a world of assassinations and race riots, weaned on the lies of Vietnam and Watergate, he grew up in recession and oil crunch, then watched Americans swallow trickle-down economics and secret CIA wars as the cure. By the time he was watching the Iran-Contra hearings in college, having lost all faith in government, religion, and family, he was bound for grad school. But once there, studying historical challenges to institutional powers, he concluded they were so entrenched that the only logical reaction was despair. “I’m done,” he’d told Sam years ago, snow falling outside his office window and melting when it hit the street. “I’m going to Nova Scotia to raise sheep.”