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

by Robin Rinaldi

  He got dressed, drove us to a convenience store, and went in to get me Advil. Two minutes after I swallowed the pills, the pain migrated to my stomach. I broke out in a sweat, my vision spinning. I opened the passenger side window and hung my head out. Back at the hotel I shook on the toilet, holding on to the sink and breathing slowly so as not to pass out.

  “Are you okay?” Scott asked from the other side of the closed door.

  “Yes,” I moaned. “I’ll be out soon.” Twenty minutes later I shuffled to bed, clammy and exhausted.

  The next morning, I awoke to a fully formed certainty flickering in the space behind my eyes. It said: I refuse to go to my grave with no children and only four lovers. If I can’t have one, I must have the other.

  When we arrived home, Scott dropped me off in front of the house and went to park the car. As I approached the door, I bent down to pick up a scrap of cardboard lying in the entryway. No more than an inch long, it looked as if it had been ripped off the corner of a cereal box. I unfurled it, turned it over, and saw written in minuscule, perfect script: “Find for the defendant: not guilty,” like a note a juror had written during the trial of an innocent person.

  I looked around, wondering who wrote it, why, and how it had blown into my doorway and landed at my feet. I’d always been a believer in synchronicity, the symbol that appears at the moment it’s needed, a reassurance that life is proceeding according to plan.

  Find for the defendant: not guilty. I was indeed guilty: of lying, stubbornness, and, worst of all, betrayal. I wasn’t deluded enough to read the note as absolution of my actions. What I took from it was absolution of my desire. Make that plural: all my desires. To marry Scott despite his imperfections and mine. To have his child though he didn’t want it. To try to harness my sexual energy within the marriage. To now turn that energy elsewhere. My competing desires for security and newness, domesticity and passion. My selfish desire to nurture. My desire to fuck as well as make love.

  I might not get what I wanted, but I wasn’t going to stop wanting. I was done talking through my dilemmas. It was time to follow my instincts and see what wisdom I could gather up through my body.

  As I pocketed the little slip of cardboard and put my key in the door, I heard Scott’s beloved Walt Whitman singing down across the ages: “Urge and urge and urge, always the procreant urge of the world.”

  Four days later, Scott went to his vasectomy appointment alone.

  8

  Whore

  AFTER THE VASECTOMY, Delphyne constructed a ritual in which Scott and I each wrote down our vision of the future. She asked us to imagine, among other things, how we could stay in our marriage without losing too much of ourselves. That’s how I broke the news to Scott that I wanted an open marriage.

  “If we sleep with someone and the sex isn’t good, we’ve threatened our marriage for nothing,” he said. “And if the sex is good, we’ll want to repeat it, and the more we repeat it, the more invested we’ll become.” He knew this from the five years he’d spent with a married girlfriend.

  I believed him. An open marriage was risky and emotionally messy. And given both his history and my restlessness over the years, this wasn’t the first time we’d discussed it. In the past we’d quickly dismissed the idea. This time I just kept repeating the words that came to me in Napa, but out loud: “I won’t go to my grave with no children and four lovers. I refuse.” Sometimes it was “I won’t”; sometimes it was “I can’t.”

  On the train downtown in the morning, I found myself staring at men. Just imagining their hands on me during the twelve-minute commute was enough to keep my whole day ambling along pleasantly. When a stocky Russian-speaking repairman came to fix our kitchen window, I sat at the table pretending to work while secretly drinking in the shape of his arms, the sound of his voice.

  We lit candles, read our answers to Delphyne’s questions, and buried the pages in our backyard under the bright pink flowers of a weeping fuchsia tree. I saw a chasm opening up ahead of us and I could imagine no way to close it short of turning back time. Together or alone, it had to be crossed.

  It took months to construe what an open marriage might look like. Rule number one was obvious: We would practice safe sex. Everything else was up for debate. We talked about constraining the “side action,” as Scott called it, to out-of-town trips, but decided that was too unwieldy. Instead, I would get an apartment. I’d spend weekdays at the apartment and weekends with Scott. We agreed that we wouldn’t sleep with friends or acquaintances we both knew. To allay our fears, we cracked the occasional joke about free love and began half-seriously calling it the Wild Oats Project.

  Of course, I’d already set my sights on Paul. I told myself I’d make him a temporary exception to the no-friends rule, my set of training wheels before venturing out into a sea of strangers. So a full two months before I had secured an apartment, I planned a business trip to Denver for a weekend when I knew Paul would be there. Paul had no idea until two weeks prior; I practically chased him down.

  I left on Friday night from the office, taking the train to the airport, which was strangely quiet. I ordered a glass of wine on the plane and relished its sharp warmth, spreading from my chest down through my legs, smoothing out the edges where my skin met my clothes and settling me into the seat. I fingered the gold medal my mom had given me on my wedding day. It hung on a long chain, in the shape of a four-leaf clover. Jesus was carved into the top leaf; the Virgin Mary, St. John, and St. Christopher into the other three; and on the flip side was engraved in small type, “I am a Catholic. Please call a priest.” I hadn’t practiced Catholicism for a long time, and I probably wouldn’t ask for a priest if I were dying, though I wouldn’t send one away either. I only wore the medal when I flew, just like I only said Our Fathers when I flew, or when someone I loved fell direly ill. The rest of the time I did yoga and burned incense and prayed to pagan and Hindu deities.

  The moment we touched down, Paul texted from a bar. Have you landed yet? Text me when you get to the hotel. Are you nearly there? You said 25 minutes it feels like 45. I could sense him getting drunker with each message and I understood why. He felt guilty about Scott and was only doing this because I’d instigated it. Paul’s plan had been to steal one kiss from his married friend in a cab, not to spend a weekend with her.

  I got to my room and began unpacking. He texted that he was a few blocks away, downstairs in the lobby, in the elevator, and by the time I opened the door he was already rounding the corner. He wore a black jacket and dark jeans, his hands thrust into their pockets like a nervous kid. His green eyes gleamed from flushed cheeks, and his smile betrayed a hunger that, for a split second, pierced my heart with sadness.

  “Paulie,” I said, reaching out to hug him. He pinned me against the wall and began kissing me. I laughed and said, “Let’s go into the room.” He pushed me back onto the bed, threw off his jacket, and climbed on me, holding down my arms, looking at me a few seconds before diving in to my neck.

  “I love you,” he whispered, running his hand over my sweater, then under my skirt. “Would you run away with me if you could?” It was mostly the liquor talking, yet I sucked up his words like oxygen. If he produced two plane tickets that moment, I probably would have run away with him. His body on top of me was all I’d wanted for months. His erection was like stone beneath his jeans. I unzipped them and reached in to touch it. “Get a condom,” I said.

  “I don’t have one.”

  I pushed his chest up and away from me. “You didn’t bring condoms?”

  “No, I wasn’t sure I’d actually show up.” I believed that.

  “You need to go get some.”

  He pressed his mouth to mine, tried to put himself inside me.

  “Listen,” I said, holding his face immobile in my hands. “We need a condom.”

  He paused, then kissed me again.

  “Are you kidding me?” I said, louder this time, rolling out from under him and sitting up. “I’ll kick yo
ur ass. Go get a condom.” I pointed to the door.

  He sat up and looked at me, catching his breath. The vulnerability on his face was more than I could bear. It made me want to cry. We sat in silence a few seconds, his way of saying we could stop if I wanted to. I knew I should leave and go get the condoms but I couldn’t tear myself away from his body or the urgency it was trying to contain. Then time was up, and he was on me again.

  In truth, I was sick of protecting things. I wanted the joy of being overcome.

  He entered me, lifting my knee in one hand while grabbing my breast with the other. He pounded, then pushed all the way up and held it there. It hurt, a good kind of hurt. As I relaxed into it, it felt better and better. After a while I rolled onto my stomach and raised my hips in the air. He pulled them back and plunged forward—in and in and in until a dizzy, blissful trance descended on me. He grabbed my hair and wrapped the length of it around his palm like rope, arching my chin toward the ceiling. That’s how he came, my head yanked back in one fist while he pulled himself out of me at the last second with the other.

  Afterward he went and got a warm towel and wiped me off, and we turned the lights out and tried to sleep. He tossed fitfully, seeming to struggle in dreams. I lay half-awake and unnaturally still all night, his body a magnet, a force field I dared not touch in the quiet. I was only allowed access in the fire of drunken passion. In the morning we ordered breakfast: eggs for him and oatmeal for me. I could barely choke it down. I felt ill with a kind of dark ecstasy. I’d never behaved so destructively, and yet in the shadows through which I descended I caught a glimmer of something, a recognition.

  After breakfast, Paul left, saying he’d return that night to pick me up for dinner. I closed the door and got back into bed. Beneath me I felt something cold. My medal. The chain was lying on the mattress, snapped in half.

  I picked it up, and a little surge of horror chilled up my spine and evaporated. Ten Commandments, gone. Marriage vows, gone.

  I slept with Paul again that night—this time with condoms, at least—and the night after that, and on Monday morning he drove me to the airport. We also went out to eat and had drinks with his work friends, all just restful distractions to punctuate the main event taking place in the hotel bedroom. Scott knew Paul was in Denver and that we had plans to have dinner; we talked and texted several times over the weekend. All those years I’d spent as a faithful girlfriend, then a faithful wife, I’d imagined lying to be an impossible feat. It turned out I had quite a capacity for it, at least in the moment. I had yet to learn how lies turn cancerous in the long run.

  When I got back to the office straight off the plane on Monday morning, there was an email from Scott asking if I’d slept with Paul.

  “No,” I typed. “We’re friends, that’s all.” I knew he’d have too much discipline and dignity to ask twice.

  Two rules made, two rules broken, like sand castles at high tide.

  That should do it, I thought as I hit Send, launching my lie into the ether to kick off our progressive and enlightened open marriage. That should do away with the good girl once and for all.

  PART TWO

  The Wild Oats Project

  There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

  —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

  9

  Mission Dolores

  BY THE TIME my forty-fourth birthday arrived two months later, I’d found a studio in Mission Dolores to sublet during the week. Its renter, Joie, spent weekdays with her boyfriend in the Haight. From Monday morning until Friday night, Scott and I would have an open marriage with three rules in place—no serious involvements, no unsafe sex, no sleeping with mutual friends. From Friday night until Monday morning, we’d be together and monogamous. Though I’d already broken two rules with Paul, I resolved to start over and try to stick to them from here on out. It was a relief to have the open marriage officially in motion, to have some semblance of equality and boundaries around it.

  Several of Scott’s long-term friends and their wives still lived in Sacramento, forming a little community of couples. We’d vacationed and spent holidays with them over the years. Most were on their second marriage by this point; almost all of them were more conservative than us. Thanksgiving dinners often turned into raging debates, yet Scott and I considered them family. As the move-out date approached, Scott told the guys about it over a weekend camping trip. When he got home on Sunday he relayed their general response: Why was he allowing it? Why didn’t he just leave?

  “What did you tell them?” I asked.

  “Same thing I tell myself. It’s a terrible idea, but since you’re determined, what’s the harm of trying to see if we can come out the other side? I’ve had two affairs with married women, I’ve cheated on girlfriends, I have friends who’ve cheated, and all of that was okay with me. Now I’m going to be a hypocrite and leave you because you want to try the same thing I’ve accepted in others and myself?”

  I was surprised to hear that his acquiescence was built on flawless reasoning instead of simple guilt over the vasectomy. I was a slow learner where Scott was concerned.

  By Monday, the wives began emailing me.

  “I don’t approve of what you’re doing,” wrote Andrea, the one I was closest to, “but I love you both and want to stay as neutral as possible.”

  “You have not asked for my feedback,” wrote Marilyn, an attorney, “so I will refrain from giving it.”

  Heather was less diplomatic. “If you want a child so badly, why don’t you get divorced and adopt one? This is no substitute for children, which you knew Scott didn’t want when you married him. After I got divorced, I met lots of men and had lots of adventures, but now that I have Cody, I wouldn’t trade my marriage for all the adventure in the world. Where are all those people now? Where will they be when I get cancer? Nowhere. Cody will be there.”

  I saw Heather’s point. At forty-four, I had unequivocally crossed into middle age. Menopause, declining parents, illness, and death loomed like increasingly dark signposts along the path. Scott was the perfect partner for the rocky changes ahead and for the quiet companionship of old age, just as he’d been the perfect partner for the oversensitive, underparented girl I’d been in my twenties.

  I sat looking at my friends’ names at the top of my inbox, feeling small and unsure. In the cold light of day, could I really do this, risk not only my marriage but my friendships? Even as I wished, momentarily, I could put everything back in its neat little box, I knew that retreat was no longer an option. I’d been striking some version of the who’s-going-to-be-there-to-drive-me-to-chemo bargain all my life. I knew without a doubt that this was my last chance to choose differently. If I opted for safety this time, something crucial would die, something without which my marriage, my friendships, and even my physical body were nothing more than mere shells.

  * * *

  On May 1, I took a carload of clothes, books, art supplies, and toiletries to Joie’s studio. It was L-shaped, with a double bed in one corner, a modernist couch and audio-video setup in another, and an office area leading into the small kitchen, all flooded with light. She had cleared half the long closet for me. I hung my clothes, lined up my toiletries in the bathroom, and arranged my books by the bedside. The studio sat at one of the best corners in San Francisco: Twentieth and Church, the very top of the hill overlooking Dolores Park, the downtown skyline spiking itself into the horizon. My house, my husband, and my cat were only six blocks down the hill, but they felt a world away.

  I’d secured my freedom and now I had to use it. I wasn’t about to try my luck at bars every night after working ten hours at the magazine. So on a lunch break, I went to Craigslist and composed an ad under “Casual Encounters”:

  GOOD GIRL SEEKS EXPERIENCE

  I’M A 44-YEAR-OLD PROFESSIONAL, EDUCATED, ATTRACTIVE WOMAN IN AN OPEN MARRIAGE, SEEKING SINGLE MEN AGE 35–50 TO HELP ME EXPLORE MY SEXUALITY. YOU MUST BE TRUSTWORTHY, SMART, AND SKILLED AT CONV
ERSATION AS WELL AS IN BED. WE WILL FIRST MEET IN PUBLIC FOR COFFEE OR A DRINK. IF THAT GOES WELL, WE’LL HAVE DINNER, POSSIBLY FOLLOWED BY SEX. OUR TIME TOGETHER WILL BE LIMITED TO THREE DATES, AS I CANNOT BECOME SERIOUSLY INVOLVED. I’M NOT POSTING BECAUSE I’M HORNY OR WANT A FAST HOOK-UP. I SEEK ENCOUNTERS WITH MUTUAL RESPECT AND COMPASSION, EVEN IF THOSE ENCOUNTERS ARE FLEETING.

  I hit Continue and checked my email. The confirmation from Craigslist was already there; I clicked it to publish the ad.

  Five minutes later, when I tried to view it, it said, “This ad has been flagged for removal by Craigslist users.”

  Confused, I went to the Help page, where I learned that Craigslist was community moderated. Users could flag posts for one of three reasons: if they were miscategorized, if they violated the terms of use (which included pornographic or hateful content), or if they were posted too frequently. My ad clearly breached none of these rules, so I posted the text of the ad on the Flag Help Forum, asking why it had been removed.

  Within minutes, the responses appeared.

  “Probably because you are a cheater,” one user wrote.

  True enough, but he (she?) couldn’t know that by looking at my ad. I clicked back to Casual Encounters, hit “m4w” and typed “married” into the search box. There were more than five hundred ads by married men looking for hookups. Then I did the same on the “w4m” page. There were eleven ads: About half of them were married women seeking trysts, the other half women clarifying that they did not want a married man.

  “The ad clearly stated that I’m in an open marriage,” I posted back on the Flag Help Forum.

  “That’s just another word for cheating,” someone else responded.

  I couldn’t believe my eyes. This was Casual Encounters, widely known to be a clearinghouse for any imaginable sex act between strangers. Yet it suddenly looked like the Boston town square circa 1642.

  I emailed Craigslist staff explaining that I wanted my ad reposted. They never responded.