Inhaltsangabe
Naomi and Scanlon Pratt are at the threshold of a new life. East Coast transplants to small-town Oregon, Scanlon has a position at the local university—teaching mass movements and domestic radicalism—and Naomi is pregnant with their first child. But everything changes when they meet Clay, a troubled young anarchist who despises Scanlon’s self-serving attempts at friendship but adores Naomi. As the Pratts welcome their newborn son, their lives become so deeply entwined with Clay’s that they must decide exactly where their loyalties lie, before the increasingly volatile activism that they’ve been dabbling in engulfs them all.
A love song to the Pacific Northwest, The Oregon Experiment explores the contemporary civil war between desire and betrayal, the political and the personal.
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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor
Keith Scribner is the author of two previous novels, Miracle Girl and The GoodLife, a New York Times Notable Book and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. He is a recipient of Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner and John L’Heureux fellowships, and is currently a professor at Oregon State University in Corvallis, where he lives with his wife, the poet Jennifer Richter, and their children.
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From Chapter I
Naomi awoke to mint. With her cheek still burrowed in the pillow, she opened one eye. Black fields buzzed past, the engine whined. She felt the baby move in her belly, the warmth of her husband’s hand on her thigh. She and Scanlon had been driving cross-country for a week, and tonight they’d arrive at their new home in Oregon. Without lifting her head, she cracked her window, and the smell of mint filled the car. Fecund earthy mint carried on moist night air. She used to love mint. Mint tea, mint jelly, mint gum. Like basil, a taste that’s mostly smell. Peppermint, apple mint, crinkle-leafed spearmint. She’d never known an entire night to smell of mint.
She’d had these dreamy remembrances before. Like an itch on a phantom limb, her olfactory neurons—understimulated and bored—would register simmering veal, river algae, the powdery aldehyde of Chanel No. 5, sweaty palms on a subway pole. Visual cues often prompted these olfactory apparitions; she’d turn the page of a magazine to a Cheerios ad, and her brain would light up with “dusty grain going soggy in warming milk.”
Before she lost her ability to smell—anosmia, the doctors called it, sometimes psychosomatic but in her case not—she’d occasionally wish she could switch her nose off. Eye masks and earplugs were readily available, but nothing for the sleeper awakened by toast burning half a block away or a roommate in the shower before dawn sudsing up with fennel shampoo, nothing from Bose to mask the ammonia on restaurant tables or food scraps sitting in drains, no way to shut out the treacle of mildew, feces, or halitosis.
She was a nose. At least she had been. She’d trained at École Givaudan- Roure in Grasse, worked two years for Dior in Paris, a year for Shiseido in Tokyo, then back in New York for Calvin Klein and Manhattan Scents. Her perfume creations were defined by sharp and leathery base notes in the tradition of My Sin, a flapper perfume from the twenties—an era, in her mind, to emulate. (To Naomi the twenties were like the late sixties but with better clothes and some discretion, and without politics to distract from the pure indulgence of the senses.) The quick dry-down from the initial spark of her floral and citrus top notes led to a darker primal place forested with agarwood, lichen, and moss; Naomi’s fragrances were a drop of orange-blossom honey sucked from the tip of a lover’s finger while sprawled in lusty sheets.
Like many noses, her favorite fragrances were her own. She knew she was creating the same perfumes over and over, trying to chase the scent back through layers of her own memory. Trying too hard: this had been the common complaint through all her years in the industry. Her nose was one in a million for perception and discernment, but her fragrances were too specifically evocative and didn’t interact fully enough with the skin of the wearer. Or so said her critics.
For bread and butter she’d scented hand creams and hair products, designed three facial scrubs and the rosemary shampoo Scanlon used. She’d been influential in a Calvin Klein project (eventually shelved) to impregnate jewelry and fabric with fragrance. She’d worked on dish soaps (one for Palmolive called Summer Breeze that Scanlon said smelled exactly like camp), pumpkin bread mix, Cap’n Crunch (“preserve its essential smell,” they told her, “but tweak it healthier”), shoe polish (to remind us of “all our dads”), a “leather” fragrance for leatherless car interiors, and, for a Japanese fruit importer, an injectible that made their peaches smell peachier.
Then one night her father came into Manhattan to take her out to dinner. Though she could see that something was on his mind, they chatted normally in the restaurant; but his anxiety steadily increased, so much that while driving back to her apartment he rear-ended a taxi. As they waited for a tow truck on the sidewalk in front of Tower Records on Broadway— Natalie Merchant’s voice floating down from the awning—he finally divulged what he’d come into the city to tell her.
She shook her head at the news: the wife of her old boyfriend Clair had given birth to twins. “That’s what you’re so anxious about?” she said, hugging her dad. “Next time tell me at the restaurant, and we’ll keep the airbags in the dash.”
They had believed no one was injured. But the next morning Naomi woke up with her neck so stiff she could hardly turn her head. She popped ibuprofen and called in sick, and with her first sip of tea she realized she couldn’t smell it.
She saw doctors. She had CAT scans, MRIs, and endoscopies. At work she told no one. Sitting with dipsticks at the organ, surrounded by five hundred essences, she created fragrances from memory alone. Surprising, evocative fragrances, she was told by colleagues. She thought about Beethoven composing while deaf, simultaneously flattering and pitying herself, but mostly struggling to even fake it. Finally, after months of anosmia, the work turned depressing, and she quit.
When she met Scanlon she was a consultant, a perfume buyer for New York boutiques. She didn’t like it and found herself working only enough to pay the rent. She burned through her savings and too many Dyptique candles, certain that the lavender and rose, anise, sage, green fig, and coffee hanging in the air would heal her. She’d put on Chopin’s nocturnes then search the air above the burning candle, knowing there was a smell hovering there that was more physically present than the music she could hear.
She began leaving melon rinds and swordfish scraps in her garbage pail for days. She left un-rinsed yogurt cups, tuna cans, and tubs of cottage cheese out on the kitchen counter, sure that the next time she stepped inside, she’d get knocked flat by the rotting stench. She never did. But the first time she brought Scanlon back to her apartment for tea, she saw his face pucker. She lit a stick of incense; he sat by an open window. She knew it was time to give up.
And now she was leaving both New York and the industry behind, her departure freighted with the fact that in her twelve years as a nose— through the hundreds of candies, cleansers, Pop-Tarts, and ointments for athlete’s foot she’d worked on—not one of her perfumes ever made it to the bottle.
Through a half-open eye, the lights of Douglas, Oregon, came into view. She imagined mint still hung in the car. And stronger smells: gravel dust, macadam, and soda-pop sugar infusing their floor mats and the soles of their shoes from ten days of rest areas and fast-food parking lots, all of it now cooked up with the heater on their feet.
She sat up straight. She really thought she was smelling. Was it possible? Since her pregnancy there’d been hints—a whiff as she passed an Indian restaurant, a cloud of diesel smoke blasting from a city bus—but they never lasted more than a moment. As she drew air slowly through her nose, Scanlon switched off the blower and the smells were lost.
They rose up the east side of the bridge crossing the Willamette River, then dropped down the west. Scanlon eased to a stop at a red light on the edge of downtown. An alarm was ringing from the Wells Fargo bank on the corner—an actual bell, like the fire drills at school when she was a girl. Apparently, somebody had thrown a brick through the bank’s front window. Two other cars waited at the intersection, their drivers and a few pedestrians glancing...
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