The Oregon Experiment (31 page)

Still holding the dipsticks, she opened a bottle of IPA and set it in front of him on the kitchen table, then refilled her water glass and sat down.

He wiped beer from his lips with the heel of his hand. “None for you?”

She shook her head, reaching across the table with a stick and holding it under his nose. “I’m working.” It felt good to say it.

His head jerked back. “Rank!”

“Powerful stuff.”

“Who’d want to smell that shit?”

She put the stick to her nose again. “What does it smell like to you?”

“Like shit.”

“It smells nothing like shit,” she told him. “Urine, maybe, but not really that, either.” As he warmed up in the kitchen, the smell of the street grew stronger—creosote and dirty motor oil, exhaust, hot steel and rubber. But she was missing something essential, something that evoked nighttime alleyways, flickering streetlights, a dark car moving too fast.

He sucked down the beer in minutes, and as she opened him another she decided to try an exercise. “Would you like to see how it works?”

She had him carry a straight chair into the room they called the nursery—baby-blue and sunny-yellow paint swatches taped to the white
walls, an unassembled crib in its carton, boxes still unpacked, with her organ set up in the middle of the floor. “Quiet,” she said, pointing to their bedroom, where Sammy was sleeping in the bassinet.

She pulled his chair close so she could smell his clothes and the back of his neck while she dipped sticks and held them under their noses. “Think of a perfume like a tree,” she said. “The fruit is at the top—grapefruit, orange, lemon, the most volatile smells. The flowers are in the middle, the heart notes. And the roots and mosses, like patchouli, are the base—the most lasting.” She told him about the hypothalamus and how smells traveled to the brain quicker than sights or sounds. She held out dipsticks, their faces nearly touching, and together they smelled mints, tobaccos, and herbs, and she thought about Scanlon giving the Oregon Experiment to Sequoia, how it felt like he’d shared with her the most intimate, sensual details of their lives.

She impressed Clay with a few party tricks, quickly approximating Mountain Dew on a dipstick, then a corn dog, an orange creamsicle, beer. As he smelled the sticks, she smelled his unnerving watchfulness, his animal wariness, and finally what she was after: the street.

But his beery breath was overpowering. She pushed up the sleeve of his sweatshirt and said, “Smell your arm.” Then she gripped his arm and smelled it herself. She added cedar to the frog juice, then fir. She tried laurel, knowing it was wrong.

Street
, she kept thinking. She could see the ad for the fragrance already—a gritty black-and-white nighttime photo on the cobblestone of the Meatpacking District, steam rising from manholes, a woman’s wrist gripped by a stranger. Passion or threat?

She held another stick under his nose. “Revolting,” he said, still not getting it, and she wished Blaine wasn’t going to Vienna. She could challenge Naomi in ways that Clay never would; he didn’t have it in him. She also wished Scanlon understood that without friends or her career she couldn’t be the stable mother Sammy deserved, nor, for that matter, the lover Scanlon desired. And with a hollow guilt she conceded that he was right about one thing: she wanted to be in New York, to be close by, when Joshua turned eighteen.

As she reached over the organ for essences, she caught Clay looking where her robe had fallen partway open. It was the second time she’d seen that he desired her. And his desire was a relief because she felt no obligation to respond. She could let it be something uncomplicated between
them, like good music or a shared piece of pie. With Scanlon, if she submitted to
his
desire, he expected something in return, in body and spirit, despite her explanation that after nurturing their baby and her own health she had nothing left to give.

“This is supposed to be perfume?” Clay said. “Nobody would want to smell like that.”

She tried another tack, opening essences and lining up the tiny bottles on the organ—the frog juice on the left with some other base notes, middle notes next, then top notes on the right. She opened aqueous essences—seaweed and an ozone blend—and astringent grassy notes of juniper, lemongrass, and dill. “Like this,” she said, and stood up and leaned over the table, taking a long breath as she moved from left to right—her nose six inches above the bottles—then back the other way, from top notes to base.

As he stood and passed his nose over the lineup of fifteen bottles, she smelled the back of his neck, and the damp collar of his jacket, trying to get the missing piece. He turned and shook his head.

“You edit it down now,” she said. “Pull out the bottles that don’t seem right. Think about fabrics. Do you want cotton—light and airy? Or velvet—heavy and smooth? Or thick and scratchy wool?”

His head snapped back. “You’re asking me what I
want
?” he said, and she clutched her robe at her throat.

“Wool,” she said, taking a step back. “Scratchy and thick.”

“What I
really
want?” he said, moving closer.

“You edit it down,” she told him and retreated to the kitchen, where she stood at the sink gulping a glass of water, looking out the window hoping to see the Honda pull in. And then, needing to pee, she went in the bathroom, thinking Sammy would wake up any minute for a feeding, and just as she sat down on the toilet, he let out a cry.

She would tell Clay he had to leave.

Then she heard his bootsteps on the floor. “Clay,” she called, but he didn’t reply. The bedroom door rattled—“Clay, what are you doing?”—and, yanking at the toilet-paper roll, she no longer heard Sammy’s cry. “Clay!” She jumped up and raced down the hall, pulling her robe closed. The bedroom was dark but Clay’s smell filled up the room—explosive and volatile, the spoiled sulfur of gunpowder—and Sammy’s scent was gone! He’d taken her baby!

She slapped on the light to see Clay sitting on her side of the bed over the bassinet, rocking the burbling boy in his arms.

She took Sammy from him, and when he saw his mother he remembered his hunger and wailed, nuzzling and pawing at her chest. “You need to go,” she told Clay over the cries.

His bitten-down fingernails scratched at the edge of the bassinet. His head twitched. “You got some odd jobs soon? Should I come back tomorrow?”

“Ask Scanlon,” she said, wondering if he was waiting for her to open her robe to nurse. “Go now. Please.”

As he brushed by her, she sensed the element she’d been missing in his smell tonight. His black boots stomped across the living room and the kitchen door shut behind him, and she yanked her robe open and scooped Sammy—wailing hysterically—to her breast. Clay’s smell hung in the air: danger.

When he left the Green & Black, there were three missed calls on his cell—all from Sequoia. The fact was, he didn’t want to go home: Naomi’s nightly rejection had become quietly humiliating. He’d go home when he knew she was asleep.

He stood on Sequoia’s porch for a minute before tapping on the door.

She threw the door open and flung out her arms. “You were amazing!” she said, giddy, ecstatic, pressing a finger to her lips and lowering her voice. “Trinity’s sleeping.” She pulled him inside and hugged him. “You got us on the news.” She kissed his cheeks and forehead, then said in a mock reporter voice, “The director of the Oregon Experiment.”

“You make me feel like the
king
of the experiment.” He couldn’t stop smiling.

“You should. You
are
the king. You’re
my
king. I’ve gotten over a hundred e-mails since the newscast, and the website had a thousand hits. A few people think we’re anti-American and should move to Iran, but ninety-nine percent are from new members. They want to join! You’re doing it, Scanlon. You’re making it happen.” She hugged him again. “I’m so grateful.”

“There’s still a long way to go,” he said.

“Did you talk to America Sanchez about covering a meeting?”

“It all happened so fast,” he admitted.

“All in good time,” she said, then a ding sounded from the kitchen. She took him by the hand and led him there, apron strings and her long hair bouncing behind her. “I’m trying out some new scones,” she said. “A few
are complete disasters. But doesn’t buttermilk-ginger-cashew sound tasty?”

“Yum,” he said.

“Like a sneaker. A terrible combo. And the cashews go soft.” She bent over and slid two cookie sheets out of the hot oven, then used a steel spatula to move the scones to cooling racks on the table, and back-kicked the oven door closed with her heel. She wore an airy skirt under the apron; her legs and feet were bare. “I hope your wife wasn’t too freaked out by the chicken pox party.”

“She was fine. Sammy just hasn’t had all his vaccines yet.”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” she said, “but that’s your business. Still, I could show you an article—”

“We’re pretty set on having him vaccinated.”

She slapped him on the chest with the spatula. “In our new country, or at least in my province, there’ll be no injecting innocent babies with toxins.”

He smirked. “Then my first lady might insist on visas before you can visit my province.”

“We can negotiate that.”

“And no car alarms,” he said.

“Or leaf blowers,” she added.

“No ‘W’ bumper stickers allowed over the border from America.”

“Let’s remove ‘W’ from the alphabet.”

“Replace it with a Circle-A,” he suggested.

She touched a scone—still too hot. “By the way,” she said, “did you talk to Ron Dexter?”

He nodded. A little coy. “Gimme some time. I’m working on him.”

She reached past him to turn off the oven. “I believe the universe sends people where they’re needed, and I’m grateful that you were sent here. You’ve done more for the movement in a few months than we’ve done in four years.”

She broke off the end of a scone, blew on the steaming piece, then held it in front of him until he opened his mouth. “Buckwheat-banana-raspberry,” she told him, laying it on his tongue.

“Good,” he said, although it tasted like old layer cake.

She took a bite. “You liar,” she said, then walked around the table to the fridge and reached inside for a bottle of milk. She poured a glass and looked him straight in the eyes. “Don’t you lie to me,” she said. “Just never lie to me.” She leaned back against the stove and dipped a hunk of scone in
the milk and pushed it in his mouth. “Sourdough-craisin-dried-apricot,” she said. “I always test them on their own first, then dipped in milk, then with butter, then dunked in coffee.”

“That’s good,” he said, still chewing, this time really meaning it. “The sourdough and the milk balance out the sweetness.” He swallowed. “Really good.”

“There’s more where that came from.” She fed him another hunk and dipped some for herself. “Uh-huh,” she grunted, nodding, her mouth full.

Without giving him a chance to swallow, she swiped butter on new kinds of scones and shoved them in his mouth and her own, scones dripping with milk, flavored with butterscotch, caramel, lavender. He edged closer, her body heat indistinguishable from the oven’s, smells of baking in her hair, the lavender stirring up visions of Naomi, asleep by now, rejuvenating her precious nose. If he took her at her word, she needed a break because Sammy drained her so completely. That was part of it, he was sure. But when she turned her face away every time he tried to kiss her, he felt a deeper rejection that he didn’t understand. Through the years she’d often told him how much she loved the urgency of his desires, but what did she think would happen if she stepped out of the picture? Could she fairly expect to bask in his desire whenever she wanted to, and expect him to shut it down when she didn’t?

Sequoia wiped milk from his chin with her thumb. At the fair, the honey-dripping tofu pancakes had been about her, about all that was available to him. She planted her palms on the warm stove and raised her hips up over the edge. He moved closer as she pushed milk-soaked cinnamon scone into his mouth. Her knees touched his hips. Her breasts rose as she pulled the length of her hair over her shoulder and brushed the dyed brown ends on his cheek and nose, his chin and throat. Unbuttoning the top of his shirt, then brushing his chest. Lifting the front of her apron.

Scanlon drove slowly through the newly developed hills of Douglas, streets with names like Deer Run, Pinot Place, and Burgundy Hill. He went left on Laurel Lane and turned into the cul-de-sac of Marionberry Drive. Massive new houses with three-car garages, stonework, and expansive decks, out of his price range by a factor of five or six. It was nearly midnight and most of the windows were dark, except for dim lights in upstairs bedrooms where
couples were reading, sharing a lively passage from a mystery, watching TV, or making love. Couples ending the day together.

He drove out to the university’s research forest, where a family of raccoons sneered into his headlights before hauling themselves up a trellis on the Forestry Department’s log cabin and squeezing through a hole under the eaves. He drove halfway to the coast before nodding off on a dark curve near Burnt Woods; idling in the gravel lot of a closed-up café, he knew that eventually he had to turn back toward home.

And now, as he rounded the corner onto their block, his headlights flashed on a huge RV with
Horse With No Name
painted on the side above an airbrushed collage of an Indian riding bareback, a Mississippi riverboat, Half Dome, the Statue of Liberty.

Scanlon parked in the driveway and peeked through the living-room window between the curtains. Naomi had left the three-way lamp on low; the fleece blanket was folded over an arm of the sofa; the magazines and remotes were neatly laid out on the coffee table. As peaceful as a crypt.

At the curb, a plastic stool stood in front of the RV door, and above the door an airbrushed green street sign with reflector letters spelled out
Ventura Highway
. Twenty years ago, Geoffrey Pratt had used a piece of his Beirut Blast commission to buy the RV at a bankruptcy auction, its former owners an America cover band busted up by bad blood and worse debts.