The doorbell rang. Joie’s buzzer didn’t work, so I ran down to let Jude in. He stood outside the glass door with a backpack over one shoulder and a tiny potted hen-and-chicks plant in the other hand. “This is for you,” he said, handing it to me.
“Wow,” I said, looking down at it. “This is my favorite kind of plant. I’ve actually had dreams about it. That’s weird, right?”
“I’m a little psychic,” he said, coming through the door.
“Thank you so much.” My hands and hearing and eyesight quavered as he followed me up the steps. I couldn’t believe he’d just handed me a hen-and-chicks plant, out of all the gifts he could have chosen.
He trailed me around the kitchen as I made dinner. I handed him a glass of wine. “I’m not good at talking while I cook, but I can listen, so chat away.”
He told me about his parents’ divorce, his background in astrology, and how he’d inherited enough money from his grandmother to not have to work full-time, but needed more income so he could help his mother. Mostly we talked about music. He hooked his iPod up to Joie’s stereo. I was thrilled to find that the playlist he’d made contained many of my own formative songs: Dire Straits, Talking Heads, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
“You were, like, six years old when this music came out,” I said, closing the refrigerator door.
“You are, like, my perfect physical type,” he said, inching up so I could feel his breath on my skin. “Your face, your hair, your body, everything.”
“I am?” I winced, though I was overjoyed. This was the kind of attention I’d missed in my twenties. Either my early boyfriends were too young to give it, or I was too insecure to hear it. Scott no doubt appreciated me; one of his many nicknames for me was “Sex.” But if I asked how he liked my hair, he said, “If you like it, I like it.” If I asked whether I looked pretty, he said, “You’re attractive. You have an energy that draws people in.” It disoriented me to have such long-held yearnings instantly fulfilled, and by someone other than Scott.
We sat on Joie’s couch eating, sipping wine, and listening to his playlist. Neither his talk of spirit guides nor his non-leather vegan shoes bothered me. I could see the East Coast–raised, guitar-loving Jewish kid underneath the beanie. He took it off and rubbed his elegant musician’s fingers over his closely cropped scalp. “I’m insecure about my receding hairline.”
“I love it,” I said, and he brightened. He unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled up his sleeves, revealing two Gaelic-looking tattoos, one word on each of his forearms. I turned his wrists over to see them as he held his arms out. “Go Love,” I read. “Very cool.”
“It says, ‘Be Love,’” he corrected me.
I stared at his left forearm. “Oh, right. I like ‘Go Love’ better, though.”
I began to slide my hand away but he took my arm and pulled me toward him. “Uh-oh,” I said, laughing nervously.
He kissed me softly. I’d never kissed a man with fuller lips than mine. We walked the five feet from the couch to the bed and he lifted my shirt over my head, then gently pushed me back onto the mattress.
“Your breasts are amazing.”
“You should have seen them in my twenties,” I said, cupping my black push-up bra with my palms.
“You’re cocky. I dig that.”
“It’s just a front.”
“I figured,” he said, sliding my bra strap down. The opening chords of Roxy Music’s “More than This” came out of the speakers, the same song I used to listen to repeatedly with the long-ago man who shared my birthday.
Again with the dirty talk and the penis show, and again I wasn’t complaining. He was graceful, full of energy, unafraid to take. “Suck that cock, girl,” he said, his hand firm on my head. The length of it on my tongue actually made me contract with pleasure.
“Open those legs up,” he commanded, and when I did, he slid his finger up into the same notch Paul had located the first time he touched me, probably my G-spot. It sent an arching jolt up my spine, a shock that filled me with a devouring urge toward annihilation. I could have swallowed him whole like some madwoman. Once we started fucking the pace never changed, as if we’d attached and gone unconscious, leaving our bodies to function as one organism.
Afterward I lay flushed and vibrating. What was a seven-second orgasm compared to this euphoria of mind and body? I didn’t need the pleasure that suffused me to wax or climax or wane; I didn’t need a bell curve or any kind of path whatsoever through it; I was happy to drift in it. The feminist in me might have wanted to editorialize against this—I vaguely recalled some treatise from my college women’s studies class stating that women who claimed to enjoy sex without orgasm were lying to themselves—but she was too tired and well fucked to rally much of an argument.
I’d expended so much effort as a teenager and young woman trying to avoid the shameful female pitfall of “being used.” Why had no one ever mentioned the satisfaction of being useful, of sharing pleasure and sustenance through my body? As I nodded off, the physiological process of infatuation, the urge to care for Jude and delight him, began to course through my veins.
* * *
It wasn’t difficult to go from my promiscuous single life in the Mission back to my cozy domestic life in the Castro on Friday. In fact, it comforted me. The excitement of answering Nerve.com ads, hanging out at OneTaste, and juggling flirty texts with Paul and Jude balanced the domesticity that awaited me on weekends. I looked forward to making Scott dinner, waking up in our bed, walking to brunch in our neighborhood. By Monday morning, I was ready to return to my busy job and rotation of lovers. Any disappointments that emerged at home lost their sense of urgency.
For years I’d intermittently pleaded with Scott to romance me. His response had alternated between “I know, I’ve gotten lazy, I’ll do better” and “If you want romance, make it.” I’d tried making romance for Scott with the getaways I planned, the womanly arts lessons, the stripper pole. What I couldn’t figure out was how to make romance for myself. A woman planning her own romance is like a cat chasing its tail. A decade earlier I’d bought and placed on his nightstand a book of couples’ getaways in Northern California. After years of nagging, he had planned one weekend with it.
The morning after I kissed Jude goodbye at Joie’s and headed into the office, I got an email from OpenTable informing me that Scott had made a reservation at Michael Mina, the city’s most expensive restaurant.
“Michael Mina?!” I typed in response. “And all I had to do was move out!”
“You know I’m a slow study,” he wrote. “But I learn eventually.”
That Friday after work, I walked to the St. Francis Hotel in Union Square, through the marble lobby and into the temple of gastronomy. Scott was waiting at the table with a glass of wine, reading his BlackBerry. At the height of summer his skin teemed with healthy color. His broad shoulders filled out the lines of a sage green sports jacket.
I kissed his cheek—warm scent of clean earth—and sat down. “What are you reading?” I asked. Our current reading material was our no-fail entrée to conversation.
“The Barbary Coast,” he said, sliding his BlackBerry into his pocket and taking off his black-framed reading glasses. “This town was absolutely batshit crazy during the Gold Rush.”
“How so?”
“Not far from here, right over on Embarcadero, they had saloons with trapdoors in the floor, and these kidnappers would spike a guy’s drink, slip him through the trapdoor, and he’d wake up on a ship headed for China. That’s where the word ‘Shanghaied’ comes from.”
“Why, though?”
“For free labor. The guy could be stuck on the ship for years. I mean, it was just lawless. This place was the wild frontier.”
“It still is.”
“Socially, maybe. Politically. But nothing like it was. We’re a bunch of babies today compared with back then.”
A tuxedoed waiter in white gloves took our order: good French wine, oysters, sashimi, Mina�
�s famous lobster pot pie. As we ate, Scott continued to talk about the Barbary Coast, the characters who ran the boardinghouses, the corrupt politicians who swept the kidnappings under the rug. History animated him, and I’d always resented how he seemed to take more interest in the lives of dead strangers than he did in what was happening between us here and now. Not just dead strangers, come to think of it—living strangers interested him, too. His eyes had stayed dry during our entire wedding ceremony, even when he first saw me in my dress, but I’d expected that. It didn’t bother me until a few years later at a friend’s wedding, when he pushed back tears as the bride walked in. Somehow their big moment had moved him more than ours. Later that night, after our friend’s wedding reception, I had cried myself to sleep.
I’d always tried to engage Scott by asking how he felt about issues that affected him or us: work, money, family, his childhood, his friendships, sex. After a quick recap of his oft-quoted position—and he maintained a thought-out position on every subject, to the point of keeping a file on his laptop called “My World View”—the conversation typically ran dry, leaving me frustrated and locked out. The more I tried, the more wretched I felt. What’s worse, I considered this stilted dynamic due to some shortcoming of mine, some lack of either communication or understanding or, failing that, detachment.
At this point, though, I couldn’t complain about him focusing on impersonal topics. After all, it wasn’t like he could ask me how my week went. In fact, the hushed luxury of the restaurant relaxed and invigorated me. The seventy-five-dollar pot pie was a once-in-a-lifetime dish. Scott looked so handsome in that shade of green.
“… so this guy rents out a boat, invites about a hundred sailors on board for a party, laces the drinks with opium, right? And dumps these guys by the dozens onto three different ships, all in one night…”
My phone vibrated inside the purse resting against my thigh. When I used the ladies’ room, I checked it: one text from Paul, one from Jude, and another from a number I didn’t recognize.
Hi Robin, it’s Andrew, from the OneTaste workshop. You up for a drink next week? He must have gotten my number from the online contact list.
Sure, I typed. How’s Thursday?
Scott was signing the bill when I returned to the table. I bent over his shoulder to kiss his cheek. Four hundred dollars. Three times the money we’d ever spent on a date. “Thanks so much for doing this, honey,” I said. “It was so delicious. I love you.”
“You’re welcome, darling,” he said, returning my kiss and patting my hand on his shoulder. “I love you, too.”
After seventeen years I’d finally achieved some detachment. I left Michael Mina a satisfied wife.
* * *
On Monday night, Jude came over again, ripe with anticipation and hormones. This time he brought me a shiny new paperback copy of Autobiography of a Yogi. I made more vegan pasta and he played more music. The sex was much like the first time: fast, verbal, intense. I lay there afterward thinking about May singing out in orgasm as Joe stroked her.
On Tuesday night, I went to a women’s group at OneTaste. We sat cross-legged in a circle on oversized pillows and talked about jealousy, competition, sex, and body image. I learned that women often stroked other women; there was no rule that said the stroker need be a man. When I got home around eleven, I called Jude.
“Hi,” he said in his calm, husky voice.
“Hi. Want to come over?”
“I do, but it’s late. By the time I got a cab it would be midnight.”
Silence.
“Don’t be mad,” he said.
“I’m not.” Three dates in and the trouble was already starting. I couldn’t let myself indulge it; my problem-solving energy had to go toward my marriage, not casual lovers. We chatted a bit and hung up.
Five minutes later he texted me, I’m in a cab. Be there in a half hour. Happiness.
When he arrived, though, he climbed under the covers, made out with me, and went to sleep. I noticed a fullness slowly growing at the base of my throat that usually meant I was readying to say something uncomfortable.
In the morning, as the light poured in from the northern windows, I asked, “Have you ever done that OMing thing?”
“Yeah, a few times.”
“I want to try it.”
He smiled. “Get on your back, woman!”
I took the position I’d seen May do, opening my knees wide and crossing my hands over my belly. Jude sat up next to me, crossed his legs lotus-style and laid my right knee over them. He put lube on his left index finger and asked if he could touch me.
“Yes,” I said, subtly bracing myself. Receiving a new man’s full sexual attention put me on the spot. It was safer to just perform, go down on him, get on top.
My clitoris had always been so sensitive that direct contact would often produce irritation before pleasure. When a man did apply his finger or tongue, I needed it slow and steady. Jude’s finger was slow enough but his stroke—or perhaps it was OneTaste’s signature stroke—was too light, causing a little internal jump every time he brushed by, sending a familiar coldness down my legs into my feet.
My job was to communicate my sensations and anything I wanted changed. This was difficult. Even when I touched myself I had to withstand a bit of trial and error; each time could be different depending on my mood and my cycle. It was like trying to explain music.
“A little more to the right,” I ventured. Then, “Yeah, there. Now a little more pressure.” That was better, but within half a minute the sensation changed again. I decided to just relax and observe the process instead of trying to control it. After fifteen minutes, Jude put his thumb inside me, pressed down on my pubic bone, and I got up and dressed for work.
* * *
On Thursday, I met Andrew at Dalva, a bar in the Mission known for its great jukebox and back-room poetry slams. He was as tall as Scott and dressed like him, loose jeans and a loose denim shirt, as if he cared little for fashion. Still, his good looks and strong build made him stand out. He was five years younger than me. He ordered bourbon, I ordered wine, and we began the what-do-you-do rundown.
“I’m a senior editor at 7x7, the city magazine,” I said. He seemed less impressed with this than most. “How about you?”
“I’m working on my dissertation at CIIS.” That was California Institute of Integral Studies, a local school that mixed academics with mystical spiritual traditions.
“Wow. A PhD? What’s the dissertation on?”
“Basically it’s on the relationship between Schopenhauer’s theories and the Bhagavad-Gita. That’s an oversimplification, but…” He shrugged.
“That seems like an immense task.”
“It is.” He laughed, swirling his bourbon. “I’ve been working on it for four years. I’m broke.”
I had to focus intently to follow the meanderings of Andrew’s intellect, and even then, I had trouble repeating or remembering them later. He told me he also studied something called holistic sexuality with a couple who held workshops through CIIS and at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. He described it as “a way of integrating your spiritual and intellectual energies, which live up here”—he framed his hands around his head—“with your vital and sexual energies, which live down here,” moving his hands to his belly.
“So, do you have sex at these workshops?”
“No. Not actual sexual contact. It’s more like people placing their hands on you, to help you get in touch with your energy centers. It’s about integrating it all inside yourself, not necessarily with another person.”
Andrew had grown up in Philadelphia, which gave us a nice common ground. “I lived there for three years and grew up near Scranton,” I told him.
“I liked being around you in the workshop because you felt strong,” he said. “Solid. Like I could push up against you and you wouldn’t break.”
“That’s what happens when you grow up near Scranton,” I joked. “Seriously, though, I’m not very tough. I gr
ew up obsessed with ballet and academics. I was the valedictorian, for god’s sake.” I must have felt compelled to throw that in, given his mental scope.
He put his drink down and sat up straight. “You were the valedictorian?”
“Yes. It was a small class, though.”
“I have a thing for valedictorians.”
“What a coincidence. I have a thing for guys who like valedictorians.”
We had another drink, then walked down busy Valencia Street to get some falafel. Andrew needed everything to be cheap, as he was living on a pauper’s budget. After we finished eating I said, “My studio’s only a few blocks away.”
Once there, we sat on opposite ends of the couch drinking wine, our feet up, continuing to talk about the East Coast, our screwed-up childhoods, and Eastern philosophy.
“Show me an example of what you do in the holistic sexuality workshop,” I said.
He lay back on the couch and put his palms on his chest, then his solar plexus, then his pelvis, describing how he felt the energy moving among the three. He used phrases like “I feel very present to” and “what’s moving through me right now,” as if he were less a personality than an observant vessel. He looked happy to be with me though in no hurry to seduce. We’d been together more than four hours.
When he was done, he sat up and told me to lie back. He put one hand on my lower belly and the other on my forehead. “Just feel the sensation there,” he said, pressing my belly, “and then feel all the thoughts and tension coagulated up here in your head. Imagine the mental tension dropping down and the primal energy moving up until they meet here.” He touched his fingertips to my sternum.
His hands on me produced the same rush as they had at OneTaste. Soon we were kissing, then slowly walking to the bed. He got on top of me, both of us clothed, and pushed down on my arms. He was by far the largest man I’d been with, even larger than Scott. Unlike the light-as-air brushstrokes of orgasmic meditation, his full weight settled me into my body. I spread out, grounded into the bed. I unbuttoned his shirt and unzipped his jeans. He lifted my dress off. He didn’t talk dirty, but let himself make all sorts of loud organic sounds. When he did speak, it was to say what he wanted or ask what I wanted. He felt fully present, with no mask and no show.
The Wild Oats Project: One Woman's Midlife Quest for Passion at Any Cost Page 8