The Wild Oats Project: One Woman's Midlife Quest for Passion at Any Cost

by Robin Rinaldi

  He told me about his dad, a radio announcer who’d built the family’s homes in his spare time, and his mom, a woman who’d loved flowers and making things with her own hands, and who’d died three years earlier at only fifty-eight from colon cancer. From his backpack Scott took a printout of a story he’d written called “The Replicant.” Lying on his stomach, he propped himself onto his elbows and began reading. The story told of a grown son who downloaded his dying mother’s memories into a robot. After her death, he’d turn the robot on whenever he missed his mother, then turn it off when he left the house. Upon returning from work one day and seeing the robot motionless and silent in the corner, he was stricken with guilt and sorrow for leaving it alone.

  Scott suddenly dropped the pages and hung his head, tears bursting from him so unexpectedly, I didn’t even think before wrapping my arms around him.

  “Sorry,” he said, pulling himself together. “I’ve never shown that story to anyone before.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” I said. It was too good to be true—that this worldly man was more emotional than he seemed, not so different from me after all. My fear evaporated. A few minutes later, we were kissing. He rolled me onto my back and slipped his hand down my shorts. His body was so long, his shoulders so broad, I was cast completely in shadow. He climbed on top of me. “Not here,” I said. “Someone might come by.”

  We drove home listening to Bonnie Raitt. When we got to his house, he dragged a mattress out from his guest room to the living room floor. Perhaps he avoided the bedroom because of the framed photo of his Spain-dwelling girlfriend on the bureau.

  In the months to follow, we drove all over Northern California’s back roads. He showed me the high Sierras, the small foothill towns like Volcano and Nevada City, the ramshackle bars and outposts on the Sacramento River Delta. We drove down mountain roads and around hairpin curves listening to an audiotape of the poetry of William Butler Yeats. I learned every word of “Sailing to Byzantium.” Scott got me reading T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell,” and Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself. I began to feel like I might just get a chance to live after all.

  One Sunday afternoon, on our way down Highway 1 where it hugs the Mendocino coast, Scott ejected the Yeats tape and inserted Brian Eno and John Cale’s Wrong Way Up. Eno began singing “Spinning Away”—One by one, all the stars appear, as the great winds of the planet spiral in—a lone violin string tugging an octave above the lyrics. I stood up on the passenger seat, stuck my upper body out the sunroof, and threw my arms back, letting the sea wind hit my face until the road became too curvy to keep balanced. I plopped back down in the seat, laughing, and looked over at Scott. He said, “I’m so happy I feel like my heart could burst right out of my chest.”

  In my memory, that statement stands as the most passionate one he ever uttered, and the tears he shed at Electra Road were the last for nearly a decade. But I shunned the general dating wisdom of the time, which advised seeking out a verbal, “emotionally available” man. I wanted Scott and no one else. Though I often wished he would offer more of the vulnerability I saw on our first date, his reticence only ended up pulling me in deeper. He was solid and large, and against this solidity I surrendered body, heart, and soul.

  We would come to call that day at Electra Road our anniversary. We’d use it ten years later as our wedding date.

  * * *

  During those ten years, Scott was the still point around which I revolved. I fed him passion and he fed me stability. It also felt, at times, like I was a crash test dummy and he was a wall, and the only way to obtain information, or a reaction, or any kind of headway, was to ram into him. You could look at photos of us talking at a party or lying on a couch and see instantly why we put up with each other, a depth of mutual adoration evident in our eyes and bodies that surprised even me when I saw it captured in freeze-frame. You could note that for those ten years, and throughout the entire marriage that followed, we never entered or departed each other’s company without kissing. I showed my love by asking him to live together three years in and then haranguing him to propose seven years in; he showed his by eventually giving in to my requests. Many others had tried to secure Scott’s monogamy and failed.

  When Scott did finally propose, over a Valentine’s Day dinner at my favorite restaurant, my reaction astounded me. There was no ring yet, just a letter he’d typed—about the origins of Valentine’s Day—in which he’d buried the words “Marry Me” in a slightly different, slightly larger font. As the letters coalesced before my eyes, I began to cry from happiness. Within moments, though, a cloud swooped in, a chill that caused me to say, unbelievably, “Can I think about it?”

  Soon I announced that I needed space. I’d become too dependent on him; I needed to live alone one more time before we married, just to make sure I still could. By this time I was finally working as a journalist at a newspaper downtown. I rented a tiny apartment near the paper and routinely went to sit in its kitchen at lunchtime, silently staring out the third-floor window at the tops of palm trees. But I spent very few nights there. Away from Scott and the house we’d shared for years, my hands shook. Ordinary activity fatigued me, as if I were moving through something viscous. Was it the pathological anxiety of being alone—something I wanted to purge myself of—or the more acute anxiety of threatening my relationship with the person I loved most? I couldn’t tell and I got sick of trying. When the six-month lease was up, I was ready to set a wedding date.

  From the convoluted way we got engaged, such a far cry from the scenes in movies and Tiffany ads, it was easy to assume we weren’t meant for each other. But I knew that our commitment fears originated outside of our relationship. I wasn’t sure where Scott’s came from—possibly a fiancée who’d broken it off when he was only twenty, possibly a subsequent girlfriend who’d betrayed him. It mattered little, because once he made a commitment he’d work on it and succeed at it every day, just like he worked on running a certain number of miles and saving a certain amount of his paycheck.

  My fear of commitment was much more obvious in origin. I tried to picture a man so ideal that marrying him would feel natural. I couldn’t. One of my clearest memories was of a morning in eighth grade, on my way out the door to school. My father was on the couch, sleeping off a hangover. My mother stood at the kitchen counter, wiping it. There was a crying infant on her hip, a two-year-old crashing a toy against the floor, and an eight-year-old downing cereal at the table. She looked up at me, exhausted but determined, and said, “Robin, don’t ever get married. And if by chance you do get married, then whatever you do, don’t have kids.”

  I wasn’t planning on it. And since marriage occupied so little importance in my youthful mind, it was a no-brainer, when my foreign boyfriend’s student visa ran out soon after we got to California, to drive to Nevada with him and marry him on the spot. We were in love, monogamous, and living together, so I couldn’t see the harm. But deep down I knew it wasn’t forever. His family and friends called me his wife, but to my own family and friends I continued to refer to him as my boyfriend.

  With Scott it was different. I was thirty-five and this was for real. I was ready and willing to push past my mother’s indictment of marriage. The only hitch was that I’d never done what I’d imagined most women my age had done: date a variety of men, sleep around a little, have a one-night stand. An incomplete, restless feeling came over me every so often, and I occasionally brought it up with Scott, but even when he’d once given me permission to fool around on a weekend trip to New Orleans with my friends, I couldn’t go through with it. I wasn’t built for casual sex. Scott and I had a healthy sex life, a bit vanilla perhaps, but it worked. From what I’d gathered, my sexual peak was still a few years away, and since monogamy looked to be my natural state, why not just cross that bridge when we came to it? There were all kinds of things married couples could try. Tantra, for instance. New positions. Toys. We had time for all that.

  No, there was
no way I could give up a man like Scott just to get a few more lovers under my belt, lovers I probably wouldn’t even enjoy. I would sacrifice breadth for depth. Scott was the only man I could conceive of marrying, and certainly the only one I could ever have a child with. We had our share of issues, but there was also a deeper battle going on inside me: fear versus hope. I clung to hope.

  3

  The Leap

  I STOOD ON PAUL’S PORCH at the edge of Pacific Heights, listening to the rain and the foghorn, willing him to answer the doorbell quickly. He did. Though in his late thirties, he had a baby face—smooth pink cheeks framing emerald-green eyes. His rumpled shorts and T-shirt hung over thick bone and muscle.

  He drew me into a hug. I lay my head on his shoulder, hiding beneath the humid tangle of my hair. “Kiss me,” he ordered, and though lusty commands were half the reason I was there, I was too shy to instantly obey. Instead I took off my raincoat and walked to his couch, where he’d opened a bottle of Cabernet. We took a sip, and as soon as I put the glass back down on the coffee table, he was on me. His kisses were lingering and firm. His hands—one against the small of my back, the other on my collarbone, then the tie of my halter top, then my breast—emitted a slow, insistent pressure to which I simply yielded.

  The entire time, he whispered steadily into my ear. “I want to fuck you from behind, then turn you over and suck on your tits until you come. When I fuck you will you keep your dress on?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you keep these boots on while I bend you over?”

  “Yes.”

  He leaned back and unzipped his pants, taking out his penis. “Do you like it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you suck it?”

  “Yes.”

  He stuck his finger in my mouth and I sucked that instead.

  “When you suck it, can I come in your mouth?”

  I nodded yes.

  “Will you swallow?”

  I looked him in the eye and nodded more slowly. I was drunk on dopamine, ecstatic. It was more than just his touch. It was all the pent-up words I’d craved for years. Words my husband didn’t say, that I couldn’t make myself say to him.

  He took his finger from my mouth and put it between my legs, pushing it high up into me against the front wall. I arched back and my eyes watered. Reflexively I gasped, “Stop, Paul, stop,” but what I meant was that if this didn’t stop, I would go skidding over a precipice and never return. And even though I was verbally, instinctively pressing the brakes, I had no intention of stopping. I wanted him to hook his middle finger into my center and hurl me over, landing me in a heap of bones at the bottom.

  We went on like this for two hours, just hands and words. I wasn’t avoiding intercourse out of some misguided theory that what we were doing didn’t constitute cheating. I was simply taking it one step at a time, and since our foreplay produced more heady intoxication than I could ever remember from an act of coitus, I didn’t mind waiting.

  It was almost 11:00 p.m. when we finally sat up, fastened our clothes, and called a cab. We sipped our long-ignored wine and chatted about his relationship problems while we waited. Paul had recently begun dating a woman I’d met a few times, but things between them were vague and rocky.

  “I don’t want to ruin your marriage,” he said.

  “You won’t,” I lied.

  “Are you afraid I’ll fall in love with you?” he asked. This was exactly why I’d chosen Paul, for the good heart evident beneath the bad-boy demeanor. I knew without a doubt that he was salt of the earth, someone I could actually call in an emergency. That’s how I categorized people: those I could and could not depend on in a crisis.

  “No,” I said. “I’m more likely to fall in love with you. That’s what I do.”

  When the cabbie phoned to say he was outside, I stood on syrupy legs. As I bent to gather up my purse, Paul slapped my ass, hard.

  “Ow!” I yelled, turning to him. We both laughed and he winked. Then he walked me down the long hallway, opened the door, kissed me on the cheek, and freed me into the damp night.

  4

  Wife (Philadelphia)

  GEORGE WAS THE WISEST PERSON I’d ever met. Trim, in his sixties, with a thick head of salt-and-pepper hair, he was always dressed immaculately in creased slacks, button-down shirt, shiny oxford shoes, and a silk tie. George was not the kind of therapist who listened for forty-five minutes and then announced that time was up. He routinely doled out practical advice that I could tell he’d learned from his own life. I wrote the best nuggets down so I wouldn’t forget them.

  “Let yourself experience the distance your conflicts create, so that you’ll have the space to fall in love again.”

  “You are not responsible for your pain but you are responsible to it.”

  “Apply Occam’s Razor: Always use the simplest possible explanation.”

  George could often get Scott to admit feelings that remained otherwise inaccessible to me. We sought him out for premarital counseling to talk about kids. Scott had never wanted them, and I couldn’t say that I did either. I’d entered adulthood with my mother’s anti-childbearing warning firmly in place. Yet telltale signs of a biological clock began to emerge. Right from the start I told Scott that if I accidentally got pregnant, I’d have the baby. I’d already survived one abortion at nineteen and didn’t feel I could handle, or justify, another. “I’ll support whatever you decide,” he’d said. “It’s your body.”

  Shortly after we began living together, two of his friends got vasectomies. He scheduled a consultation for one as well at Planned Parenthood. When we showed up and the counselor asked if I was on board, I instinctually said no, so he canceled without a word. By the time we got engaged, I’d had nearly a decade of therapy, and the further I got from the chaos of my upbringing, the more I noticed myself drawn to children. At parties that included kids, I often excused myself from small talk to huddle on the floor with a toddler. If a friend was being run ragged by her infant’s crying jag, I habitually scooped the baby up and began bouncing and rocking it, as I had my brothers. I suspected my maternal instinct might intensify once we married, and worried about how far Scott would dig in his heels.

  George was not one to let emotional explorations go on forever. He was there to help us decide whether and how to move forward. After several weeks of hashing it over, he put down his pen and said, “I think we’ve talked this out as far as we can. Scott, I have to say, you’re one of the most understated people I’ve ever met. And Robin’s the opposite. You remind me, Robin, of that old commercial for gelato: ‘So Italian, so intense.’ Remember that?” We all smiled.

  “Yep, that’s her,” Scott said.

  “But you balance each other out, and, more important, you love each other. In most couples, there’s the partner whose job is to rock the boat and instigate change and the partner who keeps the boat steady.”

  I took Scott’s hand while we waited for the punch line.

  “I don’t know whether you two will end up having kids. But my feeling, Robin, is that if you eventually want children badly enough, Scott will get on board.”

  That was exactly what I wanted to hear. After all, he’d eventually gotten on board with every new phase I’d initiated. I’d remained in Sacramento much longer than I’d wanted, because of Scott’s job and the house he owned, but after many years of my waiting it out he’d agreed to move back east.

  Scott bowed his head, mulled it over for a second, then looked up at me and arched his eyebrows as if to say, Well, that’s that.

  George put his notepad on the floor next to his chair, signaling an end to the session. He folded his hands in his lap, smiled warmly, and said, “There’s no way you two are getting out of this without getting married first.”

  His unexpected, world-wise conclusion soothed me into a sense of clarity. It seemed as close to a commitment as a driven and doubtful woman like me could possibly hope to come.

  * * *

  After w
e married, ten years to the day from that first picnic, we quit our jobs, bought a small RV, and drove around the country for a while. Eventually, we landed in downtown Philadelphia on the second floor of a three-story brownstone with soaring ceilings, built-in bookshelves, and a five-foot-high marble fireplace. Scott got a job as a project manager in the IT department of an international law firm, and I landed a job as a food columnist at the weekly paper, which meant we ate at a new restaurant once a week. In the stainless steel kitchenette, Scott delved into his home-brewing hobby, emptying cans of malt over the stove, boiling honey and fruit juice to make mead.

  If the anticipation of marriage had frightened me, the experience of it agreed with me. I liked calling Scott my husband and being referred to as his wife. I loved receiving Christmas cards and invitations addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. Mansfield,” even though I hadn’t officially changed my name. My favorite thing was to cook him dinner and, while it was simmering, bring him a drink or ask if he needed anything.

  Living just two hours from the family I had fled sixteen years before submerged me in a whole new layer of anxieties. I suddenly had a hard time navigating bridges, supermarket aisles, large pedestrian intersections, and especially the Pennsylvania Turnpike, a road with few exits, unlit at night, that cut a swath through endless forest from Philadelphia north to Scranton. At the halfway point loomed the Lehigh Tunnel, two lanes blasted into an imposing mountain. As soon as the car entered the fluorescent-lit passageway, my heart hammered violently, my skin prickled, and my vision faltered. I had to count my breaths to get from one end to the other.

  But the fear was worth it, because amid the same sensory cues that could press in around me claustrophobically—the smell of fresh-cut grass in summer, the sight of red and orange leaves bundled into a patchwork so thick it obscured the tree trunks, the silent blanket of winter snow—I found relics of my soul. Little by little, I was returned to myself. We spent more time with our five-year-old nephew, and out in California, my best friend, Susan, decided to have a child and began the process of finding a sperm donor. No sooner had my pieces begun to coalesce into something resembling a crooked, weary whole than they began vibrating with the urge to reproduce.