At night, the talks would begin. “Just tell me why you don’t want to try,” I’d start.
“I’ve just never felt the need. I don’t want to spend Saturdays at soccer games. I want to do other things with my time.” He measured each sentence out in reasoned strokes, using only the necessary amount of words.
“I can do most of the work,” I’d say, some distant, rational part of me shocked at such an offering. “Once the baby is born, you’ll fall in love with it. I’m not asking you to go to great lengths with fertility. I just want to take the birth control away.” We’d been religiously using a combination of cervical cap and spermicide forever.
I approached the topic from every angle—the purpose it would bring, the sense of connection, the emotional and physical challenges, the spiritual growth. Given my background, my latent desire to create a family with Scott felt weighted with significance. It attested to the enormous trust we shared, a trust it had taken more than a decade to build. Yet he always responded with some version of a calm shrug.
“We don’t have to give up our lives just because we have a kid,” I’d say. “People with kids still travel. They write symphonies and novels.” My verbal style was the opposite of Scott’s. Every sentence I uttered stripped away another degree of self-control. Each word seemed to land on him with less impact than its predecessor.
One day after Scott left for work, our neighbor Catherine, a political consultant who was my age and seeing a fertility doctor with her husband, showed up at our door in her tailored business suit, a briefcase slung over her shoulder and a plain brown paper bag in hand.
“I want you to have this,” she said. We had talked once or twice about babies and age. I peered inside the bag to find three plastic urine specimen cups, their bright yellow tops secured with white labels that read “Sterile.”
“Fresh sperm stays viable for thirty minutes,” she said. “All you have to do is collect it and get it to a lab. They can separate out saliva from the sperm, too.”
It took a few seconds for that last piece of information to register. I laughed. “Are you kidding?”
“No, I’m not,” she said, her eyes shining with resolve.
I lowered my voice. “I don’t think I could do that.”
“Robin, you’ll resent him forever if you don’t make this happen. Do you understand?”
I nodded. “Yeah.” I hugged her then, because she reminded me that there was indeed a sisterhood at work behind the dealings of the world. “Thanks, Catherine.” She squeezed my arm and strode off to work.
I didn’t use Catherine’s little sterile cups, though she wasn’t the first friend to recommend trickery. Later that day, however, as I hid them away under the bathroom sink, the solution dawned on me. It was so reasonable, so mathematical that I couldn’t believe it had taken me this long to see it.
I bolted into my home office and looked up fertility rates by age. When Scott walked in the door that night, I sat him down at the dining room table.
“I did research today,” I said. “It takes the average thirty-eight-year-old sixteen months to get pregnant naturally, when she’s trying. If we try for sixteen months straight, I have a pretty good chance of getting my way. If we don’t try at all, you have a hundred percent chance of getting your way.”
Scott leaned a few inches back in the chair, so I sped up the presentation. “So, if we tried for eight months and then stopped, it would be statistically fair. We’d both have a fifty-fifty chance of getting our way.”
He furrowed his brow.
“If we don’t get pregnant in eight months, we could go back to birth control and I’ll never bring it up again. Fifty-fifty. Mother Nature decides, and we accept the outcome.”
Scott stood up from the table. The sun had just gone down and bluish light angled into the room. “No!” he boomed, raising his voice for only the third time since we’d met. “How many times do I have to tell you? I don’t want to have a kid!”
I watched him ascend the spiral staircase to our bedroom, wondering if it was the airtight logic of the proposal that had enraged him. At the same time, I knew no amount of logic could persuade someone who didn’t want children. If the tables were turned and he were pressuring me, I might get angry too.
The fleeting thought arose: I should leave him. This is never going to change. Before it fully formed, it dissolved into impossibility, for when I removed Scott from the equation, my desire for a family flew right out the window with him. I couldn’t do it myself and I could never trust another man with such an endeavor. Thus we spent the next several years locked inside a dilemma born of extreme stubbornness or extreme love or both: I wanted a child, but only with him. He didn’t want a child but wanted to keep me.
I began to awaken at 3:00 a.m. I’d lie in bed listening to Scott breathe. He slept on his left side, facing away from me, and he could fall asleep no matter how stressful the day had been, even immediately after an argument. I always tried hard not to wake him. In our twelve years together, we’d never once made love in the middle of the night.
In my dreams, my body morphed into subhuman form. I tugged at the charred flesh of my arm and it lifted away like snakeskin, revealing new pink growth beneath. My back bloomed into a sea anemone, its spongy white tentacles swaying. My chest became a starburst-shaped succulent, the swollen green leaves tinged in red. Repulsed and awed, I tapped their pointed tips gingerly, wondering if the desert plant had taken the place of my heart, whether its insides flowed with its own milky water or my blood.
I looked up the succulent to find a clue to the dream’s meaning. It had a long Latin name and was commonly known as a hen-and-chicks plant.
* * *
According to Mama Gena, arguing was not the way to convince a man to do anything. Seduction was. That was just one of the many skills she taught at the School of Womanly Arts in New York, which I’d stumbled across while researching a newspaper assignment. Mama Gena was a leggy middle-aged Manhattanite named Regena Thomashauer. Photos on her website showed her styled in all manner of hot pink minidresses and feather boas. High-powered career women flocked to her classes to learn the ways of flirtation, sensuality, and abundance. She claimed to have studied ancient matriarchal religions and aimed, she said, to put the feminine back in feminism—out with suffering, in with pleasure. Her pupils called themselves sister goddesses.
At an earlier point in my life, phrases like “sister goddess” and “womanly arts” would have sent a serious woman like me running. Feminism wasn’t a label I felt free to choose or discard. It was a fundamental shift, a tectonic righting that might have completely changed my mother’s life had it appeared just a few years earlier than it did. In college I marched in pro-choice rallies, picketed in front of porn outlets, and made a short documentary on domestic abuse as a senior project. That same strident year, I tossed all my makeup straight into the wastebasket. The minute college was over, I grew just as intent about healing as I had about equal rights. I would die a feminist but I was long overdue for some fun.
My first teleconference class found me sitting on my bed with ten other women from around the country on speakerphone as Regena instructed, “Okay, sister goddesses, time to take off your panties.” Thus began a lesson on the anatomy of the vulva and the best way to stroke the clitoris’s eight thousand nerve endings—twice as many as in a penis, she noted. Our homework was to “self-pleasure” daily, flirt with everyone we met regardless of gender or age, and continually ask ourselves what small thing we could do to increase our enjoyment. Our mantra was, “I have a pussy.”
“From now on you must brag at least once a day,” Regena said. “Ditch the communal bemoaning that usually passes for female bonding. Brag to your girlfriends instead of complaining.”
Frivolous as it initially sounded, Regena’s advice proved life-changing. As I began to make pleasure the basis for my decisions, I relaxed. I wore brighter colors and laughed more. I took up the habit of smiling at the barista, the cranky ca
shier, the wrinkled old man sitting on a park bench. I didn’t have to try to argue less with Scott; I simply lost interest in it. When a discussion became entangled, I changed the topic. It was like I’d switched my wavelength from the work to the play channel.
Regena was a proponent of “extended massive orgasm,” a state of whole-body ecstasy that could theoretically go on for hours, as opposed to a regular climax, which she liked to call a “crotch sneeze.” I bought the book she recommended, The Illustrated Guide to Extended Massive Orgasm, complete with detailed instructions on the exact spot where my clitoris should be stroked—one o’clock, if you were facing it. It didn’t hold my interest. I thought of it as an alternative technique for women who couldn’t have, or weren’t satisfied with, a real orgasm. Unless I was exhausted or ill, I climaxed with Scott every time we made love, often through intercourse alone. I counted myself as one of the lucky ones.
5
The Return
WHEN THE CAB FROM PAUL’S PULLED UP to my house, it had finally stopped raining. Ours was the smallest building on the block, an oasis of warm yellow stucco tucked between taller homes on Sanchez Street. All the lights were off. I put my key in slowly and turned the lock silently, afraid to drag what I’d just done into our safe space. Scott was asleep. I unzipped my boots and padded into the bathroom to wash my face and hands, then climbed into bed. He barely roused. I lay in the dark recalling the last time a new man had put his hands on me, how it had taken Scott months of patient seduction and gentle backing off before I gave way during that picnic at Electra Road. How he couldn’t bring himself to abandon the girlfriend in Spain, so he waited for her to return and let her do the breaking up. How more than one friend, upon meeting him, told me, “He’s so self-contained he makes me nervous.” How once, early on, when I turned to him and thundered, “I’m so angry!” he stepped closer, took my hand, and said quietly, “You don’t seem angry. You seem hurt.”
That was the conundrum I lived inside: Was Scott’s kindness inspired by love, or made possible by his nerve-wracking capacity for self-containment?
Scott was facing away from me. I nudged up behind him as usual, hanging my arm over his waist. He didn’t stir. I waited for something to happen, some fracture that made it clear things had changed forever. When I was twenty-six, the minute I took my clothes off, my sense of self went with them, and it took days to recover it. That’s how it had been with my lovers before Scott, too. Regardless of feminism or birth control, I’d completely absorbed the generational lessons of my Catholic hometown: that every act of sex was something the woman gave and the man took. Now, seventeen years later, the situation had miraculously inverted. I was the plunderer. I felt larger instead of smaller, more powerful instead of less so.
My warm bed enveloped me. A hiss echoed far in the back of my mind: adulteress, adulteress, adulteress. It was drowned out by my husband’s steady breathing, our cat purring peacefully at my feet, and the surprising recognition that my house was still standing, my life still intact.
6
Madonna (San Francisco)
ONE OF THE PHRASES Scott had picked up from his time in the south was “putting lipstick on a pig.” That’s what he felt about Philadelphia and the East Coast in general: No matter what enticements it offered, nothing could hide the fact that it was an old, ugly sow compared with California.
“I miss the western sunsets,” he said.
“But if we move back west, I’ll miss my family,” I said.
“Philadelphia isn’t the place to buy a house.”
“I could leave my family more easily if I knew we were going to make our own family.”
“I’m not going to give in to ultimatums.”
I felt the familiar powerlessness creeping in, immobilizing my chest, wanting to erupt as tears. I kept it in check. I’d dreamed of San Francisco for twenty years, since the first time I’d driven over the Bay Bridge and seen it shimmering all white and kinetic out in the water. I was nearly forty, and Regena was teaching me to focus on the positive, focus on desire.
“Then I want to live in San Francisco,” I said.
* * *
Within a year of arriving, I found my ideal job—senior editor at a city magazine—and we set out looking to buy our own place. For eight months, we spent weekends traipsing from one open house to the next until we found a Georgian duplex that had been built in 1892 and survived the 1906 earthquake. It was located in the center of town on Sanchez Street, between the Mission and the Castro, and the ground-level flat was for sale. As the real estate agent gave us a tour along with several other couples, I stood in the front room gazing down a long hallway into the sun-drenched kitchen. The hardwood gleamed, the brick fireplace was painted picket-fence white, and the deep tub was lined in marble. My heart skipped with possibility. I tugged Scott’s sleeve and leaned in, so no one could hear me. “This is the one.”
On the day we were due to sign papers on our five-year adjustable-rate mortgage, I found myself unable to sit still at work. My stomach clenched and I couldn’t see straight. I called Scott at the law office, just a mile down Market Street from the magazine, and asked him to meet me for lunch.
“What’s wrong, button?” he asked when he sat down.
“I’m afraid if I sign those papers this afternoon, in five years I’ll be childless, infertile, and unhappy.”
He reached his hand across the table and took mine. “Have faith in us.”
I signed. No matter what the scope of the dilemma, it was easier to have faith in us than to imagine the opposite.
One of the first things we did after moving in was to install a stripper’s pole in the living room. Some of the sister goddesses who lived in San Francisco raved about their pole-dancing lessons at a place called S Factor, and I figured I’d give it a try. Each Sunday I drove to a class in the Marina, where I learned to walk in six-inch Lucite platforms, spin around the pole in various graceful positions, and perform a sultry lap dance to songs by Hooverphonic and Spiritualized. The studio allowed no men inside, and the dark classroom was lit only with red lamps, eliminating outright most of the lethal self-criticism a roomful of seminaked females would endure in the light of day. Outside in the dressing room, my classmates were average-looking women of all sizes and ethnicities, ranging from their early twenties to their mid-fifties. In the dark studio with the music on, each of them transformed into a vision of sensuality. I began to see that, for how much we all agonized over our features and shapes, beauty didn’t actually live there. It didn’t dwell, static, in skin and muscle; it emerged in how we moved.
Once I’d mastered the routine, I pulled a chair up several feet from the pole and sat Scott down in it. I started facing away from him, hands against the living room wall, slowly gyrating my hips in wide circles. I turned and flattened my back to the wall, legs wide, bending to a low squat, then crawled to the pole and pulled myself up onto it. I swung around it, hitched my legs overhead and grabbed the top of the pole with my ankles, spiraling down toward the floor, my hair landing first. From there, I slithered over to where Scott sat, kneeled up in front of him, peeled off my shirt, and climbed into his lap.
Scott watched, a sliver of smile signaling bemusement. His hand brushed my leg as I hovered over him, my breasts nearly touching his face. We both held our breath. When the music ended, he said, “Very nice, doll.” I picked up my clothes and we went to the bedroom.
Scott exercised religiously and was in better shape than most men half his age, still as muscular and narrow through the waist as when we’d met. Our lovemaking was patient. He took his time kissing me. He spent a long time touching me, lightly at first, barely at all, until I could stand more pressure. He went down on me gently, circling my clitoris until it emerged. He allowed my layers to unfold. By the time we switched places and I took him in my mouth, I was hungry, writhing against his leg until I almost came. Then I inserted a little transparent square of spermicide film and climbed on top of him. His erection was solid and d
ependable, just like him. I could go as slow as I wanted without worrying that it would flag. What I couldn’t do was go fast. It wasn’t in our repertoire.
After I came, I got under him. At that point I wanted pressure. I wanted to tell him to fuck me hard but I couldn’t get the words out of my mouth. More than anything, I wanted him to look me in the eye. Instead, we silently kept pace, faces buried in each other’s shoulders, both saying I love you. When he came, he put his mouth over mine. Often, during either my orgasm or his, tears brimmed and fell down my cheeks, leaving me cleansed and centered.
Afterward, Scott got up to go wash off. Then I threw my knees back over my head in a yogic plow pose, hoping to somehow wriggle his sperm past the contraceptive. By the time he returned to the bedroom, I was lying flat again.
“Why don’t you look at me during sex?” I asked. We had been together so long and I’d only recently noticed this.
“I can focus on the sensations better with my eyes closed.”
I couldn’t summon a response to that, so I lay there staring into the guest bathroom a few feet away, where Scott kept his homemade wine. Huge glass jars of cherry-red liquid sat fermenting in the shower stall, burping out carbon dioxide. Guests were always impressed by Scott’s array of mead, limoncello, and homemade absinthe. When we weren’t away for the weekend, we’d throw dinner parties for the editors, artists, and biotech entrepreneurs we’d quickly befriended since arriving in the city. At some point during the evening, we’d gather in the living room, the stripper’s pole looming. I could see the looks on their faces. I imagined the women thinking They must be having great sex, the men thinking That lucky shit, and a few of each thinking Oh boy, midlife crisis.
The Wild Oats Project: One Woman's Midlife Quest for Passion at Any Cost Page 3