The Oregon Experiment
teacher and “father” was a journalist. They enjoyed cross-country skiing and European travel, and had three long-haired Dachshunds; they’d built an oven from clay in their backyard for baking bread; they lived in the state of New York.
    Naomi had not seen her baby. She hadn’t smelled him. She possessed only a tear-hazed memory of a lump in a blanket passed between hands, the sound of a confused cry, and the odor of her amniotic fluid and blood. Because this was all she had to know and remember him by, the bodily smell of his birth came to represent her baby. Each month her menses conjured a visit, bringing not only a sense of loss and regret but also a comfort and even joy that she’d come to rely on. Losing her nose felt like losing her baby all over again.
    When she thought back to those first weeks with Scanlon, she mostly remembered him from a distance, as she’d first seen him—across the living room engaging strangers with a joke, across a busy café delightedly penning questions in the margins of student essays, or through the doorway of his kitchen on a Sunday morning competently scrambling eggs in the nude with a quick wrist and a dash of salt as she lay curled up in his bed, warm, cared for, ravished.
    He’d saved her, and she fell in love with him for it. But throughout those years she’d remained disconnected from her sensuous life. Scanlon remained fine to look at—from a distance or up close—but the spark of newness faded quickly, which she attributed to her useless nose, marooned career, and the futile longing she felt for her baby. Of course, she reasoned, the rush of falling in love was bound to lose its surge, just as the rush of her entire life had diminished to a trickle. But Scanlon was the best thing in it. Naturally their lovemaking became less exciting to her, even as he revealed that it became better and better for him; if she couldn’t smell him, shecouldn’t know him, couldn’t fully connect with him. When she got her nose back, she’d convinced herself, their love and passion would roar back to envelop her.
    “The Pacific leaping frog,” Blaine was saying. “That’s a misnomer. He inhabits only a tiny region, a few hundred square miles in the Oregon coast range. A true leaper. The males are especially powerful. No one understands how they can leap as far as they do.” She hesitated, then leaned in conspiratorially. “I’m on to something, though. Between the base of the leg muscle and the testicles there’s a tiny gland that produces a hormone that seems to supercharge the muscle the instant before it springs. And the hormone … what a smell it has. Incredibly powerful. It makes us all a little loopy in the lab.”
    “What’s it smell like?” Naomi asked, suddenly fascinated.
    “I can’t say. I’ve never smelled anything like it.”
    “But if you had to. If I held a gun to your head.”
    “A gun?” Unzipping a pant leg, Roger paused. On his left leg he was now wearing shorts; on his right, long pants.
    “It’s unpleasant,” Blaine said. “
Very
strong.”
    Naomi’s hands were in fists. “But what does it make you think of?”
    Blaine didn’t shrink in the face of this challenge from a trailing spouse but rose to it with greedy pleasure. “Like a chemical that could make five grams of muscle propel a ninety-gram reptile nearly three meters. Like exertion. Adrenaline. Drive and desire and hunger coiled up in the groin.”
    “Language, dear,” Roger quietly scolded, though Blaine was obviously pleased with herself.
    “I’d like to take you up on your offer,” Naomi told her. “I’ll drop by your lab.”
    Their plates were empty. Scanlon returned from inside the house with fresh drinks, setting a cold glass in Naomi’s hand and sitting beside her with his arm over the back of her chair. He was perspiring.
    Over the years, much as she created fragrances from memory, she’d invented smells for Scanlon. The few times he’d picked up someone’s

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