The Oregon Experiment (8 page)

He was holding what looked to be a dictionary open in front of him, running his index finger down the page. “There it is,” he said. “Hah!” Then
he looked up. “Do you know what the German word for ‘pretzel’ is?” He clapped the book shut. Bright-eyed and very pleased, he announced:
“Brezel.”

Fenton’s research concerned reunification, and his latest book was on Germany. Scanlon knew all through the interview process that his own interest in mass movements was helping him with the chair, and probably hurting him with the other members of the department.

“Are pretzels what got the two sides back together?” Scanlon asked, regretting his flippancy even as he said it.

“Exactly the opposite. The pretzel developed differently on the two sides of the wall, and now they can’t stand each other’s versions. You’ve got East Germans living in the West who travel back to their old neighborhoods to stock up. So, will they ever fully reunite?”

“Keep your eye on the pretzel,” Scanlon said.

“Bingo.”

They looked at each other for an awkward moment; Scanlon was unsure whether they were joking. Then Fenton offered his hand and they shook. He was deeply tanned, especially over the top of his shiny bald head, which, since Fenton was a small man, Scanlon viewed from above. What hair he had was dark, flecked with white, and buzzed short. His scraggly beard was completely at odds with the rest of his presentation—neatly pressed khakis and a fussy yachting belt, boy-sized tasseled loafers, a peach-colored polo shirt clinging to the lithe, compact body of a man who’d done fifty sit-ups and toe touches every night before bed for the last thirty years.

“Getting settled in?” he said. “How’s the house?”

Scanlon remembered that even in February, during his campus interview, Fenton had been tan. “It’s all great. We’re just trying to get ready for the semester. And the baby.”

“Of course. I’d forgotten. What’s your wife’s name?”

Svelte. Could a man be
svelte
? “Naomi.”

“You don’t know how lucky you are. There’s no place like Douglas to raise a child. The parks, the mountains, the ocean. You have no idea of your fortune.”

“How about the mass movements out here? Have you done any work on them?” Scanlon knew he hadn’t published anything on the Pacific Northwest.

“There’s nothing to reunite. We’ve got secessionists, though. Survivalists, polygamists, anarchists. Take your pick.”

“What about the secessionists? Anything there?” Scanlon asked, pretending this was the first he’d heard of them.

“PNSM? Pretty ragtag, from what I know.” Fenton kept looking, back and forth, from Scanlon’s beard to his eyes. “I doubt there’s any real political theory worth speaking of. Certainly no successful action. Might as well be Thursday-night discussions on recycling Styrofoam, or how to make yogurt from goat’s milk.”

Of course Scanlon already knew this was the case, but part of him had hoped that just maybe the group had a drop of credibility—if not a movement then an inclination, a shambling drift.

“No,” Fenton continued. “Nothing local. Not for me, anyway.” His fingertips crawled through his beard like a blind man reading a face, apparently feeling out the thin spots. “The Dakotas might unify,” he said wistfully. “Mostly, though, I look across the ocean.” He gazed out the window as if trying to spot reunifiers in Korea or Cyprus.

They were both silent for a moment until Fenton blurted, “To discuss!” still looking outside. “The spring issue of
Domestic Policy
ended up on the dean’s desk and he—Well, with funding cuts in recent years, we haven’t had many hires. So there’s lots of ‘what ifs’ and twenty-twenty hindsight and egg on the face. I went out on a limb for you, Dr. Pratt, so I want you to front-load your research and pull the trigger. An article or three, rat-a-tat-tat, a monograph A-
SAP.
” Then he stopped as abruptly as he’d started.

Scanlon’s heart sank.
Shit!
A warning. A threat!

“Your office,” Fenton said brightly, and Scanlon followed him down the hallway to a tight dogleg and a door with a plaque that read,
PROFESSOR PRATT
. Fenton worked a key in the lock and opened the door partway, and when Scanlon took a step forward, Fenton stopped and turned back so they nearly bumped into each other. They stood inches apart.

“I notice you’re growing a beard,” Fenton said.

Scanlon smiled. “It’s sort of silly. I read about the Mr. Douglas competition—”

“So that’s it.” Fenton cut him off, pulling on his own whiskers. “How long since you shaved?”

“A couple weeks.”

“See this?” Fenton slapped at his own chin. “Six days. Five, really. Today’ll be the sixth.” Then he forced another laugh, stepping around Scanlon and down the hall. “Good luck,” he said, chuckling.

Scanlon pushed the door open. An oak desk, heavily shellacked, was dappled with sunlight coming through two tall windows. A new computer sat on the desk, a dusty IBM Selectric next to it on a typewriter table, a file cabinet was stuck in one corner, and empty bookshelves lined the walls. He leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the desk. “What the fuck was that?” he said, hearing the quaver in his voice. Fenton had rattled him. Goddamnit, why did his job have to start off like this? A quick article or three was already the plan. Now he’d have to get them out even quicker. He felt confident the writing would come easily. Sequoia had pleaded with him to become involved right after the PNSM meeting, and Hank had worked on him over beers. Well, he would. And he’d one-up the bastards who ripped his work apart for being rosy-eyed about mass movements. Scanlon had studied every secessionist movement on the planet. He knew why they failed, and he knew the blueprint for success. He’d nudge the PNSM along—maybe a token secession, merely symbolic, but a little taste was better than nothing—and he’d study every detail of the process and turn it into a book. There was no reason he couldn’t become the leading scholar on American secessionism, with the street-cred to back it up.

He picked up the office phone—no dial tone—and then he pulled out his cell and called Sam Belknap. “I’m tearing the protective plastic off the padded arms of my brand-new desk chair,” he said.

“Getting right to work?” Sam said, delighted.

“I’m gonna make my mark from this office, Sam. Radical change and mass movement flow through the air and water out here. Distrust of government, anger, fear—they’re all juiced up, and I’m in the spot to make sense of them. Kosovo is old news. Quebec’ll never happen. The Basques and Tamils will always be considered terrorists. But a tiny secession from history’s greatest empire by the Pacific Northwest Secessionist Movement could shake the world.”

“I never heard of them.”

“They’re small but fierce, and with a little help from me—”

“You’re joking.”

“Not at all. Plus there’s these extreme right-wing Christians north of here and hippies living off the grid—”

“Stop!” Sam barked, then fell into a fit of coughing. Scanlon heard him
take a drink and clear his throat. “Look, you’ve got a first-rate mind, but you need to publish some solid work. Enough of smoking pot with anarchists. You’ll be sending your CV to East Jesus State if you don’t buckle down.”

Except for Sam’s breathing, the line was quiet, and Scanlon gazed out the window at a tree with the biggest leaves he’d ever seen. Beyond it, students played soccer and Frisbee and jogged around a track. Beside the field, a fenced patio was connected by sliding glass doors to the swimming pool. It was so far off that when he saw Naomi in her black one-piece—gently padding across the white concrete—at first he didn’t recognize her.

He’d never told Naomi or Sam about the strange e-mail he got in the spring—“just checking in,” Fenton had said, confirming that Scanlon still wanted to move “all the way across the country,” reminding him of the “onerous teaching load, the dearth of research funds, the high expectations for publishing.” And he wouldn’t tell them about the threat Fenton made today, either.

Scanlon gazed at his wife in the distance. He knew he’d presented her—and Sam, too—with an optimistic scenario, full of bravado for instant success and a prestigious offer back east. He couldn’t bear the thought of disappointing either one of them.

When he finally said “I know,” his voice cracked. “Of course you’re right, Sam. Take care of yourself, and I’ll call soon.”

He raised the window and leaned out on his elbows. Standing beside a chaise longue, Naomi was stretching her back and rolling her neck. She bent down for a towel and pressed it to her face, turning toward the sun. And there was the shape of her: long tan legs, her huge round belly and full breasts. How was it possible she still had a month to go? How could her belly grow any bigger? Although Scanlon was excited for the baby, part of him wanted to keep Naomi exactly like this forever.

She dropped the towel and lowered herself onto the chaise. She drank from her water bottle and screwed on the cap. He hoped he told her often enough how beautiful her hands were, how they moved like music, and how much he loved to follow the ridge of her collarbone from her shoulder to her throat, to breathe in the cinnamon-pepper smell of her ears.

She’d settle in soon enough. She’d be herself again, and it was about time; since they’d arrived in Douglas, not once had she wanted to make love. He turned from the window, smoothed his hand over the top of his oak desk, and switched on his computer.

Ideals, hopelessness, and cynicism
, he would have reminded Sam if he hadn’t been struck dumb by the scolding. Yes, it was naive to think that secession of any scale would be granted without a struggle, but it was equally naive to believe that restoring morality to the U.S. government—its treatment of the poor, its support of dictators, its focus on profit over humanity—was any more plausible. Equally idealistic, equally hopeless.

When he heard the Microsoft chimes and his computer screen popped on, he looked back toward the pool, but Naomi was gone.

As she lowered herself down the ladder, her wedding band clanked on the stainless steel and the baby tugged hard against her spine; her hips ached, and she tried not to consider the mechanics of her bones literally being pried apart. She let go and bobbed in the chest-deep water. Graceful. Light.

She pushed off the pool wall, gliding for a moment, then doing the breaststroke down the slow lane. She frog-kicked and pulled her fingers through the warm water, imagining her baby doing the same thing inside her. Last night, Scanlon had read aloud from the
Pregnancy Journal. Day 219: If your baby is born today, it might have a callous on its thumb from sucking in the womb
. A hardworking baby, he’d said, his hand on the southern slope of her belly, a place she no longer could see.

Naomi would revel in the baby, skin to skin, day and night, lapping up every flutter of his eyelids, every flail of his chubby arms and legs, and with her nose back she’d be able to smush her face into his rolls of fat and take in his smell as he, with a newborn’s olfactory keenness, would know his mother from oils in her skin and hair, from her breath and the smell of her milk. Mother and baby would become one, inseparable—an experience her industry friends warned her against putting her career on hold for. “Professionally, intellectually, emotionally,” one of them, Liz, had said, “it’s not good for a woman.” But none of them understood what this baby meant to her.

After some months—eight, ten—whenever she felt ready—she’d planned to take the baby with her to boutiques in the Pearl and Portland’s other trendy neighborhoods to see if they had any competent buyers. But now, with her nose back, she could work to create her own Pacific Northwest perfume, maybe even a breakthrough fragrance—seaweed, piñon, cedar sap, lichen, lavender, wild grasses—with the refinement of the new
San Francisco and Seattle cuisine, a Pacific Rim sophistication, silky hints of Japan and Hong Kong. She could finally work with ambergris, with which she’d had only a passing acquaintance.

There were ways to make it work. Eventually, for her career, she had to be back in New York, but Scanlon needed time and she owed him the chance. She’d been unfair to suggest this morning that he wasn’t working fast enough. He was very smart, her husband, and she believed he knew as much as anyone in his field, though he always got antsy with projects. He had trouble focusing—reaching in other directions that complicated his argument to the point where it wriggled out of his grasp. There was also the issue of analytical distance: when he went out—no,
came
out—west to write on the Yucca Mountain protests, he ended up living with protesters in a tent city, where his notes and laptop were stolen, and getting himself arrested. In the end he produced a short piece for
Mother Jones
; the academic article never coalesced.

After a couple laps, muscles fired in her chest and glutes that had been dormant for years. While long walks in the heat had become too strenuous, she’d never felt more powerful. She’d been off Paxil for eight months, she could smell again, and soon she’d be holding her baby, and she’d never let him go. For years the shadow of loss and depression were always just two steps behind her, waiting for the chance to throw a heavy, sour cloak over her head. Those days were now gone.

With blood surging through her limbs and belly, she reached for the pool ledge but instead gripped a foot—ten toes curled over the blue tile. “Excuse me,” she said, tipping water from her goggles.

“No worries,” the woman replied. She was sitting on the edge, hugging her knees, water dripping from her arms. She was about fifty, Naomi figured, a racer’s bathing cap and a Speedo suit stuck tight to her lean body, a dark splotchy tan. “You’re doing a good job in there,” she said. “Nice efficient strokes. Despite the ballast.”

In this age of political correctness, pregnant women seemed to be the last unprotected, objectifiable subclass. She took a deep breath of chlorine fumes.

“How much …” the woman began. “I mean, just how pregnant are you?”

“Thirty-four weeks,” Naomi said.

“You’re big.”

Basta!
Naomi thought. “Do you work at the university?” she asked.