“No,” Maria said. “You’re not a bad person. But you’re definitely nuts.” They both smiled, which made me smile, and we swigged our beer like we’d been doing since ninth grade and moved on to other topics.
* * *
I sat in the front pew of St. Mary’s with Scott, Rocco, his wife, and the baby’s godfather. Though he was only thirty-one, Rocco sported the elegant suits and receding hairline of an older man. The youngest of my brothers, he was the closest thing I had to a child of my own. His wife, five years his junior, was a long-limbed natural beauty with huge brown eyes and luminous dark hair twisted into a heavy ponytail. She held the baby, a peek-a-boo of pink face bundled in white satin.
Scott remained sitting and the rest of us, the parents and godparents, filed up to the marble baptismal font at the altar, where the priest waited in gold robes. He began his ablutions, casting out Satan and claiming the baby’s soul for Christ. I took my turn making the sign of the cross on his forehead. I didn’t feel like a hypocrite. Though I was no longer a practicing Catholic, I did believe in God—in the mysterious force that had shielded me as a child, the light that had filled me after my first panic attack. I believed in a darker, pagan aspect of the divine as well, the one personified by the painting of Pele in Delphyne’s office, the goddess who creates new life by burning away the old. I believed without a doubt that the image of Demeter, the goddess of motherhood, inscribed on the candle Delphyne crafted for me had somehow helped bring about the pregnancy crisis that finally ended the dilemma Scott and I had clung to for years. And I was even starting to believe in Christ. The older I got, the further I ventured from the church, the more I saw in His eyes and words a quiet, all-pervading presence, a power untainted by dogma, scandal, patriarchy. I wanted to get to know Jesus not in the timid way of a well-behaved girl frightened of punishment, but in the way of a flesh-and-blood sinner, which is to say, intimately.
Rocco’s wife handed the baby to me and I clutched all eight pounds of his squirming, precious mass to my center. The belly-deep urge to protect him emanated from the same channel through which orgasm had flourished on my honeymoon, traveled the same current that now carried me to the beds of lovers. I looked at Scott, sitting in the front pew wearing a salmon-colored shirt and tie beneath a crisp suit. Behind his quiet smile, his strength was unmistakable, strength he kept to himself. Part of me longed for him to grab my arm and say, “This open marriage nonsense is over. You’re my wife. We’re leaving San Francisco and we’re going to…” Where? Take me somewhere, Scott. If you can’t take me to motherhood, then take me somewhere else.
The baby squirmed in my arms, his tiny hands and feet punching at the air around him, little gusts of breath punctuating each effort. He snapped me out of it. My life was nearly half over, if I was lucky. There was simply no time left to wait for anyone else to take me anywhere.
14
The Writer
AS SOON AS I SAW THE MESSAGE in my Nerve.com inbox from a man named Alden, a writer in his late thirties living about an hour north of the city, I sensed I was in for something different. The first clue was when he said my profile jumped out at him because it listed Middlemarch as my favorite book. Any man who could appreciate the genius of George Eliot was worth at least one date.
He kept his emails short and focused. He suggested meeting in Dogpatch, an industrial neighborhood on the edge of town where a smattering of bars and restaurants had recently cropped up. He wrote, “Let me know what night you’re available and I’ll arrange the details.” When the night arrived and I texted to tell him I was on the way, he responded, You can’t miss me. I’ll be the tallest man in the room.
Attention. Assertion. These were apparent the moment I saw him seated at a corner table near a window. He asked what kind of wine I liked, then chose a Viognier for me. He asked if I was hungry, and when I said yes, he called the waitress over and ordered a cheese plate. He was indeed the tallest man in the room, dressed in a crisp white shirt, cashmere pullover, jeans, and weathered black boots. His wide cheekbones and close-cropped hair evoked a secret agent. His countenance easily switched from a courtly sort of handsome to roguish.
After a glass of wine and the requisite recitation of our first-layer personas—jobs, schools, hometowns—I got up to use the restroom. As I rose, I was keenly aware of Alden’s eyes on my backside, sheathed in a black jersey dress with white polka dots. At forty-four, I had never felt so comfortable in my skin. The loss of some youthful collagen was compensated for by a sensual ease in my walk. In a few years, the balance would tip, but right now I was at peak ripeness. Firmness had just started giving way to juice.
As I slid back into my seat and crossed one leg over the other, he glanced blatantly at my exposed knee, bit his lower lip, and said, “How about we leave here and go have dinner?”
We went to Slow Club, a small restaurant on a hidden corner in Potrero Hill. Inside, it was crowded and so dark we had to read the menu by candlelight. Throughout the course of burgers, fries, and more wine, we talked about literature, music, and a trip around the world he had recently taken alone.
“So, your ad said only three dates,” he ventured.
“Yes.”
Without missing a beat, as if only half-aware of doing so, he reached across the table to where my hand lay and lightly took the fingertips in his. His fingers were long and elegant as a pianist’s but larger, more masculine. “Do you think we’ll be able to do that, to limit it?”
His confidence buoyed me. “I guess we’ll find out.”
We decided he wouldn’t come back to the studio just yet. We both had to get up early the next day. We walked to his car and he unlocked the passenger door, then turned to face me, pulling me gently toward him. “Can I have a kiss?” he asked.
“Maybe.”
“Why maybe?” he said, leaning back and smiling.
“Because maybe’s more interesting than yes.” This amused him for half a second, then he kissed me. A confident kiss, soft yet urgent. Afterward he cupped my cheeks in his palms and said, “You’re such a good kisser.”
“I’m just following you.”
On the drive home, the lights and sounds of the Mission receded outside the car window as I entered the liminal space between my world and his. I basked in the anticipation of those moments before the curtain rises: another human being, thirty-nine years in the making, all his joy and sorrow bound up in its one-of-a-kind tapestry. He parked at my curb and turned the car off, and we slipped into another dimension, a universe of two where we recognized each other like long-separated travelers. I know we spoke as we touched though I don’t recall what we said. At some point I reached under my dress and leaned back in the passenger seat. There was a streetlight shining directly down onto the black gear shift. I don’t know how long we were there or whether anyone walked by the car. I’d never touched myself in front of a man before.
My subsequent memories of Alden are sharp foreground against the rest. Him emailing the next day to say it was one of the most erotic experiences of his life. Chatting with him online and verging into chat-sex—another first—that proved more satisfying than most real sex. Meeting him in the darkened Presidio, halfway between our two places, at midnight, and climbing onto him in the backseat of his Mercedes. I was menstruating heavily and wearing my favorite white shirt. I couldn’t get the stains out. Even today, reading the word “Presidio” or glimpsing the large green corner it occupies on a San Francisco map delivers the precise, jewel-like memory I had set out to gather from the project: My bloody animal body once roamed this earth, mingled with it.
Alden wanted to cook me dinner at his house. I drove over the Golden Gate Bridge on an August evening as the sun inched behind the headlands. He was on his deck grilling lamb. He handed me a bright red negroni with a twist of fresh orange, bitter and bracing. He flipped through his vinyl collection and put an album on the turntable, Nina Simone’s Pastel Blues. His sparse furnishings were carefully selected, some geometric and m
odern, others built for comfort. While he cooked I scanned his bookshelves. He had so many books, beautiful hardcover editions of nearly every writer I loved and many I’d been meaning to read. Thick classics, coffee table tomes on architecture, fiction by James Salter and Italo Calvino. The latest bestsellers were absent from his nonfiction; instead there was Lao Tzu, Kierkegaard, and Passionate Marriage, which had caused a fight with Scott a few years prior when I’d asked him to read it with me.
My eyes landed on a handful of titles by David Deida, a teacher of—for lack of a better word—neo-tantra with a small but devoted following. I’d run across Deida a year ago while numbly perusing Barnes & Noble on my lunch break. The book was called Finding God Through Sex. Integral philosopher Ken Wilber had written the foreword, and Marianne Williamson and Gabriel Cousens penned introductory blurbs lauding Deida’s ability to commingle the sexual and the spiritual. In short order, I’d scooped up seven of Deida’s books, entranced by his descriptions of universal masculine and feminine energies and how to channel them. A few months ago, I’d nearly signed up for a weekend workshop in the Bay Area, but the thousand-dollar price tag gave me pause.
I went out to the deck and sat at the table where Alden was setting out dinner. He poured me a glass of dark Pinot Noir. The first stars peeked through a periwinkle sky.
“I love your books,” I said. “I can’t believe you’ve got David Deida. I’ve read everything he’s written.”
“I just discovered him last year when I was house-sitting for a friend. I went to one of his workshops this past spring.”
“I almost signed up for that!”
“Weird. I would have met you. The group wasn’t that big, and you change partners a lot, so you get to work with everyone. I’m actually going to another one of his workshops next month in L.A.”
I dug into the lamb, which was as good as a restaurant meal. I tried to picture myself meeting Alden at a Deida workshop instead of on Nerve.com. “What kinds of exercises does he do?” I asked.
Alden described a row of women closely facing a row of men, looking into each other’s eyes. “The woman would rate my presence on a one-to-ten scale. So when she felt I was really with her, she’d say eight or nine, and when she felt I lost focus or spaced out, the number would start descending: seven, five, four … It was a little disconcerting, to tell you the truth. Then we switched places and I rated her on radiance.” He smiled wryly.
I shifted in my seat and took a sip of wine.
“Then you step down the line and do the same with the next woman. That’s the basic setup. I remember one exercise where we repeated phrases Deida gave us. Let’s see.” He looked down at the napkin lying on his lap. “Okay, I had to tell the woman, ‘You’re beautiful.’ Then we paused and she said, ‘I’d follow you anywhere.’”
“Are you kidding?” I said, putting down my fork. “An affirmation of beauty in exchange for her turning her life over to you? That doesn’t sound like a fair deal.”
Alden laughed. “Well, you know the premise, right? Deida’s more concerned with polarity than fairness.”
I knew the premise. Deida defined three stages of relationship. Prefeminist stereotypes of masculine authority and feminine submission, adhered to from fear or dependency, were the first stage. Modern relationships that focused on autonomy, equality, and talking things out were the second stage, and the cost a couple paid for all that meticulous interchange was a lack of juice in the bedroom. Deida tried to usher couples to the third stage, in which the man consciously, temporarily relinquished his feminine side, allowing the woman to embody energy and emotion, while the woman temporarily gave up her masculine direction and focus, letting the man take on that role. What this model lacked in political correctness, claimed Deida, it more than made up for in physical and spiritual ecstasy, a result of the interplay of the divine polar energies: masculine consciousness and feminine light.
I stabbed at my lamb with a steak knife and sliced off a hefty bite. I routinely reacted this way to Deida, a spontaneous combination of righteous anger and painful longing that left me with an unscratchable itch. I didn’t know whether to spread my legs or scream, and yet I kept buying his books, inexorably drawn to them.
“I have a love-hate relationship with Deida,” I said. “I long for polarity, but if I’m all energy and you’re all consciousness, then you’re the only one who’s fully human. I mean, plants and dirt have energy.”
“A lot of women have that reaction,” Alden said. “At the workshop, he was talking about how makeup and jewelry are necessary aspects of the feminine and some of the women were railing against it.”
So, good. Alden wasn’t necessarily buying the whole spiel. Anyway, my delight at the fact that he was drawn to Deida more than outweighed any fear that my feminist moorings might come undone.
In his bedroom, where a large platform bed sat flanked by two midcentury nightstands, a pile of fascinating books spilling from one of them, I let Alden push against my verbal and physical boundaries more than anyone ever had. Whatever he wanted to call me, I let him call me. Wherever he wanted to place his hand, however much pressure he wanted to use, however sharply he angled into me, I welcomed him.
He pushed energy outward, and I played with it. It didn’t feel submissive or even receptive. It felt creative. Each word he uttered became my cue, considered for a moment and then embodied. In his sheets, I uncovered women who had lain dormant in me for years. Each time he exerted force, it caused me to grow larger—rather, it reminded me how large I was. He pressed against my edges until they expanded so far as to seem infinite. Then he looked into my eyes and told me I was a goddess, that he worshipped me.
After several hours, we went to the living room naked. I lay on his wide couch while he put another record on. He poured a glass of water and sat down, leaned over to kiss me, and within seconds mounted me again, this time with no condom. Before my mouth could form any words about safe sex or my marital agreement, my hips arched up to meet him and the moment he was inside me, I came. That had never happened to me before, to climax so immediately upon being entered.
We didn’t stop at three dates. I rode across the Golden Gate Bridge five, six, seven times. I met Alden in the city. We texted daily and chatted online. On a Friday night at the end of August, when Joie had to suddenly move back into her studio full-time and I was left without an apartment, I packed all my things into my Volkswagen convertible, drove to a bar to have a drink with Alden, took him back to Joie’s empty studio for an hour, then drove home. It was past 1:00 a.m. Nervous that Scott would smell sex on me but afraid to wake him with the noise of the shower, I slipped into bed as quietly as possible.
* * *
With Joie having moved back into her studio full-time and me now living back at home until I could find another apartment, the only way to see Alden was to schedule a few discreet hours here and there. And Alden was torn. He’d had his share of uncommitted relationships and was ready for monogamy. One month into seeing him, I could feel my lifelong tendency toward exclusive attachment rearing its head. I fantasized about living with him. I listened as he talked about his travels, previous relationships, and his writing. He had published in a few literary journals. He loaned me a copy of one and I read his work, a nonlinear story about a stroke victim in love with his caregiver. The narrative twisted, circled back, made me work to keep up with it. It dove deep and stayed down, putting words to grief and longing that I believed only women and writers knew. I read it motionless in one sitting, and by the time I put the journal down, I thought, I belong with a man like this.
But I couldn’t bring myself to leave Scott and I couldn’t give up my sole attempt at adventure just to settle right back down with someone new. When I tried to imagine the reality of a daily relationship with Alden, I drew back. It looked, in equal parts, richly nourishing and impossibly treacherous. The trust and history I had with Scott, by contrast, loomed solid as the earth beneath me. This foundation gave me the strength to vent
ure into the unknown to begin with, though with each step I strayed further afield of it.
The night before Alden left for the Deida workshop in Los Angeles, we arranged for me to spend the night at his house. He picked me up at work, drove us over the bridge, and for the first time, we awoke in the same bed. The next morning, he tossed an overnight bag in his trunk, drove me back into the city, and dropped me off in front of my empty house. “Wait here a second,” I said spontaneously. “I want you to meet Cleo.”
I carried the little calico out to Sanchez Street in my arms. “She’s cute,” he said. She yawned and looked out at him from drowsy lids. When he reached up to scratch her cheek, two little fireworks went off in my heart: one of terrible loss, one of distant hope.
I bent down and pecked him on the lips. “Drive safely,” I said. Cleo purred as he pulled away. I went inside and dropped her onto her usual spot on the couch, then walked into the bathroom and stood gazing at the mirror. Rosy cheeks, bright eyes, hair that seemed to have quickly grown an inch, as if I’d swallowed a secret elixir. I got my phone out and took a picture. I needed to remember how this felt.
15
Sanchez Street
OVER THE YEARS, I hadn’t just asked Scott to live with me, propose, move back east, have a baby, plan romantic weekends, and look at me during sex. I also asked him how he was feeling (fine), how I could help him (he’d let me know), how I could be a better partner (I was a good enough partner). I bought an introductory tantra video (which we watched once) and books on relationships (a few of which he eventually read). I tried to interest him in couples communication workshops (we attended one). I asked him to try out churches (we went to a Unitarian Universalist church for about six months) and whether he wanted to join me in meditation (no thanks). I asked what kind of lingerie he’d like me to wear (he preferred me naked) and whether he’d like to watch porn together (not really).
The Wild Oats Project: One Woman's Midlife Quest for Passion at Any Cost Page 10