The Oregon Experiment (2 page)

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

She’d never smelled his scalp before. Dried figs or dates. “I’m just so tired,” she said, and his hand on her thigh stopped moving, then after a few minutes he rolled away and she could hear the heavy breath of his sleep.

But Naomi was wide awake, her heart racing. She stretched her neck toward him and sniffed his scalp again. She got up from the air mattress and walked around the empty house, smelling old grease mixed with Ajax under the stove’s burners, the woody smell of closets, scorched carbon and ash at the fireplace. She opened the back door onto the night: the new smells a particular combination of laurel leaves, mulch, salty dew pushing in from the ocean (
Pacific
salt), and dozens of ferns and mosses and rotting stalks. These couldn’t be files from her olfactory memory bank.

Her nose was back.

A train whistled in the distance as she pushed the door closed, looking across the room at her husband asleep on the Aerobed. The smell of his scalp was a surprise—not what she’d imagined—and she wasn’t sure she liked it.

·   ·   ·

In the morning, while Naomi slept, Scanlon opened the front door to a small older man, his thick gray hair neatly combed.

“Mr. Pratt,” the man said, waggling his clipboard. “I’m Edmund.”

But Scanlon was gazing over his head at the green Mayflower tractor-trailer barely visible through the fog; there was a long screech as someone pulled out the ramp.

“Marvelous Monday,” Edmund said.

Scanlon looked down at him. “What time is it?” he asked.

“We’re early birds. But it’ll take us a minute to get connoitered.”

The back doors of the truck swung open. Edmund turned and scurried down Scanlon’s new front walk, nearly disappearing into the mist.

In the living room Scanlon searched for his watch in the heap of clothes. Almost seven. He opened a shade. Naomi was snoring, curled up fetally. The snoring was new since she’d been pregnant. He touched her hip, and she raised her eyelids.

“I’m freezing,” she said, hugging her shoulders.

“It’s the movers.”

She rubbed her eyes, squinting at the window. “Why’s it so gray out? You said it didn’t rain in the summer.”

“I don’t think it’s raining,” he said.

“Four full months of sun. Rain the rest of the time.”

“That’s what they told me.” He watched fog creeping into the house through the front door as he’d only ever seen in black-and-white movies set in London. Dickensian fog.

Naomi pulled on yesterday’s clothes and went to the picture window as big as a garage door. As a boy, Scanlon had envied his best friend for having a picture window, and now, in the twenty-first century, thirty years too late, he finally had his own. Driving around Douglas with the realtor, he’d wanted one of the Craftsman bungalows closer to campus—roof timbers exposed at the eaves, deep overhangs supported by chunky columns over a solid front porch—but those were either too expensive or student rentals. He’d been enraged by the blocks of beautiful old houses split up into apartments, couches out front, beer kegs on the lawn, shiny 4×4s parked in the street with doors flung open and stereos pounding for the kids drinking beer on the porch.

“The air’s opaque,” Naomi said, staring out the window.

Who were these Oregon kids—these kids who’d be his students—with better stereos in their pickups than their living rooms? “I’ll go for coffee,” Scanlon said. “You want a decaf?”

“I can’t take eight months of rain and four months of fog. I can’t do it, Scanlon.”

Three quick raps rattled the screen door, then Edmund popped in. “Morning, missus,” he said. “It’s a wonderful day to be alive!”

“This fog,” Naomi said to him. “Is it unusual?”

He looked out the door, combing his fingers back through his pelt of hair. “Like this now?”

“The fog,” she said.

“Oftentimes it’s a little more soupier.”

Naomi’s shoulders fell.

“Coffee!” Scanlon said. “What do you take in yours, Edmund?”

“Not for me.” He was jouncy with extra energy, his bones loose in their joints. “One cup at breakfast primes my pump.”

“How about your partner out there?”

“Clay’s got his pop.”

Naomi passed across the beige carpet as Edmund hooked the screen door open. Once she was in the bathroom, Scanlon asked, “It’s really foggy all summer?”

“Most mornings,” Edmund said. “But it burns off by nine or ten.”

“Then it’s sunny?”

“No sun like Oregon sun, Mr. Pratt. Warm honey in a deep blue sky.”

Scanlon cracked the bathroom door, then pushed it open just enough to step inside and give Naomi the good news.

She was sitting on the toilet, one hand flat on her belly, the other holding a clean puff of toilet paper to her nose. “That’s good,” she said, sounding distracted. She was, he feared, feeling unmoored and uncertain, waking up in a house she never thought she’d live in, in a place she thought she’d never see. “It’s going to be fine.” She rose up like coming out of a squat—a pregnant woman—and splashed water on her face. “Everything’s really fine.”

But it wasn’t fine. The history of their relationship was this: Scanlon was her caretaker; he kept her afloat. When they met, seven years ago, she’d been without her sense of smell for fifteen months and on Paxil for six, yet she was still depressed. The rush of their love drew her into the daylight, but the presence of the drug, and the possibility that it was an essential
lubricant in their day-to-day relationship, even an elixir for their love, always weighed on his mind and, he felt certain, on hers. When she got pregnant, a surprise to them both, she quit the drug, and—another welcome surprise—her spirits didn’t sink. Still, the dynamic established early on remained an unspoken arrangement between them: Scanlon protected her from industry friends when dinner conversation turned to the nose, navigating her through a world in which she felt lost, deprived of the pleasures she most loved, like living in a foreign country whose language she’d known intimately then forgotten entirely.

Scanlon had become her guide—her surrogate nose. She taught him to distinguish between a dozen different lilies, breeds of dog, the smells of the city at seven a.m., noon, and midnight. When they were pretending to peruse a menu inside the front door of a new restaurant, he’d describe the smell of the place; if it wasn’t delicious, they didn’t sit down. She taught him to identify the vegetative barnyard odor of bad cabernets, and each spice in an Italian sausage. She asked him to describe the smell of his past lovers (he had no idea) and herself (crisp apple, buttered toast and, when she hadn’t showered in a few days, molasses and capers). After a month with Naomi, Scanlon realized he’d never known what peanut butter actually tasted like. Or ginger ale. Or the smell of an elevator, a museum, or freezing rain melting from an ice-encrusted branch in the morning sun. He sometimes disappointed her with his average olfactory pipes, but then he’d describe an aroma so exquisitely she was elevated, as if by music. Naomi had taught him to experience the world more fully—which was as good a definition of love as he knew.

“Why don’t you drive downtown to Starbucks,” he suggested as Naomi washed her hands. “I’ll stay here and deal with the movers.” If he could get their couch in place before she got home, hang some art on the walls, unpack the Takashima lamp she’d brought from Tokyo, she might see how the house—how this life—could work.

From the front stoop, he again offered the movers some coffee.

“You could walk to the edge of campus,” Edmund said. “
Nice
walk in the morning. Any number of coffee shops.”

“Perfect,” Scanlon said, and they followed him to the sidewalk.

After giving Naomi directions, Edmund tipped a wardrobe box from the deck of the truck to his back and humped it into the house.

Scanlon spread his arms and leaned over Naomi’s belly to hug her, holding her head to his chest. “It’s gonna be great,” he said.

“I know.”

“Just as soon as we see our stuff in the place.” Their voices sounded close, like the fog was a blanket they were talking under.

“Anyway,” she said, craning her head away from his chest, “it won’t be for long. Only until you get your book out.”

“Right,” he said. This had been the promise.

Naomi set off, covered up in sweats and a baggy fleece. He loved how every day she grew fuller. Her skin tightened over the swell of her belly, her breasts grew heavy, her face softened—she was filled up, brimming. He loved how pregnancy stretched the thin fabric of the tank tops she’d been wearing since summer began, and in the last weeks, after her belly button popped, that private nub of flesh was sexier than a swollen nipple. Her fertility, her womanness, rose to the surface of her body like a reminder of their lovemaking.

A dozen steps away, her figure disappeared, enveloped by the fog.

At the ramp of the truck, Edmund’s helper was sucking on a straw sticking from a quart-sized Pepsi cup. Scanlon extended a hand to shake, but the kid turned away, pretending not to notice, and dropped his cup, ice cubes rattling, on a stack of boxes. He reached to the top of the load and tugged on the corner of a furniture pad until it spilled open, and an end table, the one from Naomi’s grandmother, tipped into his hands. Ignoring Scanlon, he banged down the ramp.

Scanlon put a foot up on the moving van’s bumper and gazed at the outline of his house through the fog: a perfect rectangle except for the chimney—which the home inspector said needed repointing—and the TV antenna banded to it.

Their bikes were leaning against the side of the truck, so Scanlon rolled them down the driveway into the garage, where rough wood shelves jutted from the studs, bare except for gallon- and quart-sized rings of paint: the colors of the siding, the trim, the kitchen walls. Rusted spikes angled up, waiting for the rake, hedge trimmer, loppers, extension cords, and brooms that Scanlon didn’t yet own. He would organize nails and washers in jars; he’d screw in hooks for their bikes; he’d build a workbench beneath the window where he’d assemble the strollers, baby swings, and exersaucers that were about to come into their lives.

Fatherhood would change him in ways as obvious and pronounced as the changes to Naomi’s body. He, too, would become bigger and fuller, carrying his love and their family within him. He was counting on it. He was
aware that he often became too obsessed with his work, and looked forward to the baby refocusing and deepening him, just as paying attention to Naomi’s well-being, especially in the early years, had made him a better man.

He’d start his first project tomorrow: an Adirondack chair and footstool for Naomi. Along with the rest of her body, her ankles had swelled, and after the first week in the car they were throbbing. In a South Dakota Days Inn lobby, while Naomi slept, he’d printed out a plan he found online that required only a jigsaw and a drill. He’d pick out some clear cedar one-by-six, and by midweek Naomi could recline in the chair with her legs and feet elevated on the scroll-shaped stool.

Back at the truck, Edmund was lugging an old Fender amp that Scanlon had barely plugged in since college, when he’d played guitar and sung backup for Imelda’s Shoes, a dance band with a rowdy and loyal campus following. “Last time we moved,” he said to Edmund, a little embarrassed by the sheer quantity of
stuff
, “we did it all with a U-Haul mini mover and a car.”

Edmund stopped. “Couple of young people making it,” he said.

Scanlon started to say what he’d really meant, but Edmund continued: “The wife and I, first time I moved her, it couldn’t of been no more than three thousand pounds into a one-bedroom. Then, in seventy-six, I moved fifty-two hundred pounds into a three-bedroom. Eighty-four, just shy of seven thousand pounds into our first house, and ninety-seven, eight thousand nine hundred pounds into the new house down in Silver Lake. And now we’re empty nesters.” He shook his head, grinning, baffled and pleased as hell at this pound-for-pound recap of his life.

“Goes to show you,” Scanlon said, looking down the street and trying to gauge if the fog had begun to clear. The apple tree in the neighbor’s yard had been invisible twenty minutes ago, hadn’t it? He peered into the gray for a glimpse of Naomi.

“Now,
this
one,” Edmund said as the kid pounded up the ramp. “He’s a sort of monk. Real ascetic. Doesn’t have a bed or a TV. Just a room. Four walls.” He wore black jeans, a black sweatshirt, and combat boots—not really Scanlon’s vision of a monk. “Tell him, Clay. Tell him how you sleep on the floor and eat all your meals at the bus station.”

Clay yanked on a strap holding back the load, releasing it. “Who’s had more hot-dog burritos this week?” he said, more soft-spoken than Scanlon
had anticipated. Like the jingling loops of steel chain dangling from his back pockets, his voice was light and musical.

“Point taken,” Edmund said. “Point taken.” He turned to Scanlon. “Have you tried them, Mr. Pratt? Hot-dog burritos?”

Scanlon shook his head.

“They taste just like it.”

“A real blending of cultures,” Scanlon said.

Edmund watched him, seeming to wait for Scanlon to finish his thought.

Dew drew out the essences of lavender and sage, tomato and zucchini leaves, roses and jasmine. Moisture in the air, the fog’s weight, kept the scents from dispersing. It was real. She drew in the smells. Creaky olfactory receptors sparked from her nostrils to her brain. She was lightheaded, absurdly happy. These gardens were tremendous: herbs, vegetables, perennials, and annuals filling front yards, spilling onto the sidewalk and filling the narrow strip along the curb. Many were populated with Buddhas, teak benches, broken teapots, hunks of quartz, or colorful blown glass. Then she passed a house with four cars and three ATVs parked in the yard; another with busted bikes and toys strewn in unmowed grass, a fence gate hanging by one hinge, and a sheet tacked up for shade in the picture window; a third house had a white sign nailed to the front offering
$CASH$ FOR YOUR HOUSE
with a phone number.

According to the mover, campus was two blocks ahead, but she could walk like this forever, endowed again with her capacity to experience the world. And then came another garden, and this time … basil, rosemary, and—yes, woolly apple mint. She bent down, pinched off a leaf, and flicked it beneath her nose as she walked, remembering the mint fields last night. The whole night smelling of mint.