The Oregon Experiment Read Online Free PDF Page A

was reflected in the garage window, a line of broken glass running between his eyes, over the bridge of his nose, and across a cheek. He reached through the hole where the other side ofhis face should have been. It really
had
happened. Shards lay on the sill and inside on the floor—the tinkling strangely continued to sound in his head. How stoned was he?
    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 skirtsand 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