On Facebook, Liam and I talked music. We texted. He sent me several iTunes and I reciprocated. He was a newly minted chef, raised by liberal parents in Los Angeles, and had been meditating since puberty. Experimental communities were no big deal to him.
He flirted, pulled back, flirted, pulled back. By the time he asked me to dinner, it was nearly Christmas. I met him outside the Bluxome lobby door and we walked, hands in pockets, a few blocks away for Thai food. I ordered a glass of wine and he ordered tea. He didn’t drink.
“I get panic attacks,” he said casually, “and alcohol makes them worse.” It had taken me until age thirty-nine to admit to my panic attacks without shame.
“I’ve had them since I was twelve,” I said. “Bad. They wake me up at three a.m.”
“Do you sweat and puke and all that?”
“Sweating, intense nausea, palpitations. If I try to sit or stand up, I faint. Then when it’s over, horrible chills. When the chills come I know I’m home free.”
“Oh, I puke. I do the whole routine. It can last for hours.”
“They can be really isolating,” I said. “If you’re ever in the midst of one and you need help calming down, you can call me.”
“Thanks. Sometimes I think it’s just that I’m holding too much energy in my body. Too much sensation.”
It was strange to hear that much vulnerability coming from an athletic-looking man. He embraced such contrasts. He was equally interested in Zen meditation and sensual pleasure. He alternated sensitivity with an edge of bravado; when I asked if he liked a song I’d sent him, he said, “Yes, but I like music more when I discover it myself.”
Back at his car, I asked, “So where are you heading now?”
“Nowhere. I want to come up and see your place.”
That was the moment when the mature forty-four-year-old who acted maternally toward Liam began switching places with the fevered eighteen-year-old who couldn’t believe what was happening.
He sat on the edge of my bed. I put Wilco’s A Ghost Is Born on the CD player, forwarded a few tracks to “Muzzle of Bees,” and settled into the small love seat about four feet away. We listened awhile in silence as the song slowly built from contemplative to rousing layers of guitarwork. “Listen to this,” I said, holding a finger up just as Nels Cline launched into the climactic solo. Liam closed his eyes and didn’t open them until the song was finished.
“If electricity could have sex, that’s what it would sound like,” he said.
I laughed. “That’s one of the best descriptions of Wilco I’ve ever heard.” But his sternum tensed and his forehead wrinkled.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I’m having a dilemma.”
“What’s the dilemma?”
“I’m very attracted to you, but I fear losing your approval.”
He was very attracted. To me.
“How would you lose my approval?”
“By pulling back after we get physical. When it comes to women, I want to get what I want and then get out.”
I couldn’t help smiling.
“Me too, Liam. I wouldn’t worry about it. I’m in an open marriage, but I’m still married.” I held up my wedding ring finger.
His face relaxed and brightened.
“But I’m not going to initiate,” I said. “I’m old enough to be your mother, and … I don’t want to feel like a cougar.”
“But I like older women.”
“Still.”
“We could talk it to death,” he said.
“No, let’s not do that.”
“I’ve made a decision,” he announced after a few more seconds of silence. “I’m coming over there.”
He’s coming over here. My mortality-stricken midlife self had somehow succeeded in snagging this gift to my inner teenager. I could feel myself getting younger by the second.
He sat down next to me and took my hands in his. He leaned in close and paused a full ten seconds near my lips, which drove me wild. His kisses probed in a tentative, youthful way. When I turned his chin in my hand and began nibbling his ear, he moaned.
“I have to run down to my car for condoms,” he said.
“I have some here.” I reached toward the bedside drawer.
“Those won’t work. I’ve got extra large ones in my car.”
“Oh.” I tried not to clap.
He returned emboldened, tossing four black-packaged rubbers with gold lettering on the nightstand. “You smell so good,” he said, sliding his hand under my blouse. “You’re the softest thing I’ve ever touched.” He took off his shirt, and I stopped to gaze at him: flawless, Platonic. What power flesh wielded, how easily it could incite worship.
“Touch me,” he said, and after I had spent a while doing so, “Tell me what to do.” I couldn’t think how to answer him. If I were honest I would have said, “You don’t have to do anything. Just lie back and approve of me. Retroactively reclassify me from the smart girl to the sexy one.”
I sat him up on the edge of the bed and knelt in front of him. As I explored his cock from tip to base, he covered his face with his hands. “Everything you’re doing is perfect,” he said. Yes, that’s what I was looking for. Before long, he opened the condom and put it on. I climbed onto him carefully, worried it would hurt, but it didn’t. I moved slowly, worried he’d come too fast. For the first time ever during sex, I worried what my breasts looked like. He sat up and wrapped his arms around my waist. “You turn me on so much,” he said. Bingo. Here I was, a full thirty years after a youth in which I’d never felt pretty or thin enough, in bed with the masculine ideal, and I turned him on. He got on top, held my hands down, and came. From start to finish it lasted all of ten minutes. He was the only lover with whom I practically remained silent.
Suddenly we were getting dressed. I immediately regretted not taking the lead and slowing it down.
I put another CD on. I could sense he was itching to leave. When he said he wanted to get in and get out, I didn’t think he meant in the scope of twenty minutes. As he zipped his jacket, he motioned with his chin toward the condoms and said, “I’m going to leave the rest here. Save them for me, okay?”
When the door closed behind him, I was hungrier than when he first walked in. If there was any encounter during the project that should have made me feel used, it was this one. And yet I felt the opposite: like I’d used him, and not even very well.
* * *
On the Deida Connection, I started up friendships with women and men living in Scandinavia, Australia, Italy, India, and all over the United States. As I browsed through members’ profile pages, I came across a face I recognized: Susan’s former sister-in-law Val, now divorced and living in Los Angeles. I’d met Val a few times way back in Sacramento and reconnected with her now online. I also stumbled across a Virginia woman I knew from Mama Gena’s. What a small world this Deida tribe was. Then, scanning through profile photos one day, my hand froze on the keyboard. A close-up of a male forearm emblazoned with a tattoo of a snake. I clicked on it and Alden’s page came up. It was empty: no personal data, blog entries, or additional photos.
I took my hands off the mouse pad and sat motionless. Just looking at the purple swirls of his tattoo caused my arms to go cold and my chest to constrict. I wondered if he’d gone browsing too and seen my photo, my blog posts about nonmonogamy and how I often felt as penetrated by good music as by sex.
I took Alden’s note out of my prayer box and read it over. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.” I slipped it back into the envelope, turned it over, and stared at the small, tight curlicues of his return address and my name. I got a matchbook and a stainless steel bowl and set the corner of the envelope aflame, waiting until it had shriveled to black before dropping the charred remains into the bowl. I scooped the remains into a plastic baggie, drove across town to the Golden Gate Bridge, parked the car, and headed out onto the walkway with the Sunday tourists. Walkers used the eastbound side of the bridge, which faced th
e bay and city, and cyclists used the westbound lane, facing the Pacific. As I made my way to the bridge’s midspan among kids and parents and grandparents, six lanes of fast traffic swishing by us all, a yellow emergency phone about a quarter mile out urged potential jumpers to push a large red button for help. “There Is Hope,” it read. “Make the Call.” About two dozen people a year ignored the sign and went over the edge, the epic skyline the last thing they saw.
A half mile in, I turned toward the city, leaned as far over the rail as I safely could, and emptied the ashes into a headwind that blew most of them straight back onto me. Only a small twirl of dust spiraled down away from the orange railing toward the water.
21
The Women’s Circle
WHEN I WAS TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD, I stumbled across a slim book called Circle of Stones in the feminist bookstore in Midtown Sacramento. It contained nothing more than vignettes describing women gathering into circles to speak of their lives. In the primeval images the author drew, elders sat as witnesses and guides for women entering menarche or menopause, pregnant mothers, women suffering through loss. Interspersed between the impressionistic chapters were meditations that each began “How might your life have been different…?”
HOW MIGHT YOUR LIFE HAVE BEEN DIFFERENT IF, AS A YOUNG WOMAN, THERE WAS A PLACE YOU COULD GO WHEN YOU HAD FEELINGS OF DARKNESS? AND IF THERE HAD BEEN ANOTHER WOMAN, SOMEWHAT OLDER, TO BE WITH YOU IN YOUR DARKNESS … SO THAT, OVER THE YEARS, CHAMPIONED BY THE WOMAN, YOU LEARNED TO NO LONGER FEAR YOUR DARKNESS, BUT TO TRUST IT … TO TRUST IT AS THE PLACE WHERE YOU COULD MEET YOUR OWN DEEPEST NATURE AND GIVE IT VOICE. HOW MIGHT YOUR LIFE BE DIFFERENT IF YOU COULD TRUST YOUR OWN DARKNESS?
The vision haunted me. It came to me during my lowest lows, when I was alone on a gurney awaiting surgery, praying for my dad in rehab, struggling not to be rendered housebound by anxiety. In my mind’s eye I saw a group of women seated in a warm cave near its entrance, night gathering outside beyond distant mountains. In the circle sat teenage girls, women in their prime, and fat old ladies, their silver hair plaited into long braids. Among them sat my mother, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers—not the smiling faces in family photos, hair curled and lips painted en route to some special occasion, but their essential selves, stripped of finery and social mores, freed from all circumstances of history. The women in the cave could bear anything. No terror was too engulfing, no truth too painful, no rage too calamitous for them to hold. They carried a wisdom found nowhere else.
I looked for some semblance of this cave intermittently for decades—healing circles, women’s group therapy, meetings of outcast neo-pagans looking like they’d just returned from a Renaissance Faire. By the time I hit my forties I gave up. Nowhere, it seemed, could I find what I needed: a place where the emotions that ran through me were not analyzed or transcended but simply expressed and contained. A place where I could contact an aspect of the divine that didn’t come attached to a male visage. Yahweh, Buddha, Bill W., Carl Jung, even Jesus—each of them glorious in his own way, each of their systems invariably putting me at a certain remove.
My search wasn’t polemical. I told no one. I just quietly ached for a spiritual practice guided by the feminine. I had a book of candle spells written by a half-crazy Hungarian witch, a figurine of the heavy-breasted Venus of Willendorf, and a vague but indelible knowledge that I was somehow connected to an ethos that predated every book of rules and myths ever written by a man. I had resigned myself to let these suffice.
* * *
Imagine my surprise when David Deida, of all people, led me—albeit indirectly—to just such a practice. I learned about one of Deida’s assistants, a San Francisco woman named Sabrina, who held women’s circles at her home. Because of her link to Deida I was half expecting instruction on relating to men, how to increase polarity, or some such. Instead, the moment I set foot in a large room inside her Castro flat, I felt the metaphorical cave close in around me.
A dozen women gathered on embroidered cushions arranged on the floor in a circle. Colorful silk depictions of Hindu goddesses hung from the orange walls. In the center of the circle, a small black statue of a fertility goddess stood enshrined in a golden veil. The women ranged in age from their twenties to their sixties, some dressed in jeans, some in yoga pants and florid tops. Soft instrumental music with an underlying world beat played in the background.
Sabrina, in her early fifties, was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen of that age. Of Asian descent, petite as a dancer, she had flawless cocoa skin, lustrous black hair, dark eyes, and billowy lips that framed a wide smile. Her radiance was far from delicate, however. Small and soft as she appeared, her eyes and posture emanated quiet strength. She spoke in a low, melodious voice and allowed herself long pauses, during which she’d look slowly around the circle, gazing at each woman in turn. There was something of the jungle cat in her.
After we introduced ourselves, Sabrina had us stand. She turned the music up and told us to breathe, unwind, and move around however we wanted. “Make sounds,” she said. “Let go of any energy stored up from your day.” Some women gently stretched, others began to sway to the music. As I closed my eyes, I immediately felt where my body was tense. I shrugged my shoulders, rolled my neck in circles, bent forward to loosen my lower back, stretched my jaw wide.
Once we relaxed, Sabrina looked around the circle and paired us up. My partner was Natalie, a woman about my age with a thin, pretty face and square black glasses. She was dressed unassumingly in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. Sabrina instructed us to gaze at each other—each looking into the other’s left eye only, which made it easier to focus—and breathe.
After an initial wave of nervous laughter, Natalie and I settled in comfortably. Without the usual words, expressions, and gestures, my mind scrambled for something to occupy it. I had to keep returning to her eyes and my own breathing, like a shared meditation. After a few minutes, Sabrina instructed the woman with the curlier hair (me) to go first. I would “feel into” Natalie and tell her what I sensed residing in her heart.
This scared me. I knew nothing of Natalie except that she was from the East Bay and wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. Sabrina said, “Instead of thinking, instead of assessing your partner or analyzing her, feel her. Use your own body and heart to feel into her body and heart. Speak from your body, not your mind. Don’t worry about saying the wrong thing. If she’s okay with it, you can also touch her. Go ahead and speak to her now.”
It was like diving into a pool not knowing if the water was shallow or deep, warm or cold. Without a clue, I took a breath and dove into Natalie. The locus of my awareness switched from her eyes to her chest and belly. My first words came without thinking. “You’ve taken care of many people,” I said. Then: “You’re a mother to many.” As soon as I uttered a sentence, the next one became clear. “Your wisdom is strong. Others seek you out for it.” Her dark eyes moistened. Once I silenced my mind and homed in on her with my senses, it wasn’t at all difficult to see the stiffness in her jaw, the sadness in her smile, the thicket of frustration tangled in her throat. “May I touch you?” I asked. She nodded yes. I placed my palms on her hips and applied gentle pressure, rolling them slightly right and left, then placed one hand on her abdomen and another on her lower back. She closed her eyes.
“I feel like your energy wants to move here,” I said. “It wants to flow. You help others do this and now you want to help yourself.” As I guided her hips slowly left and right, back and forth, she bent her knees and let her chin drop to her chest, her long hair falling over her face.
I can’t recall what Natalie said about me when her turn came. I do know that by the time we stopped, my nervous system had softened to the point where every small ache, tension, or worry had dissolved. Natalie and I hugged, not a social pat or an overly empathic new-age squeeze but the long, relaxed embrace of old friends. She told me she was a midwife. As we reassembled into the original circle, I saw that all the women’s faces had eased
into soft, authentic smiles. Their bodies swayed ever so slightly in a buoyant warmth that suffused the room, a flock of mermaids come home to a welcoming ocean.
For the next nine months, I spent every other Monday night at Sabrina’s doing some variation of that initial encounter with Natalie. We gave each woman two short minutes to speak her feelings, then gathered round to put our hands on her as she cried or moaned or laughed. We danced, sang, rolled on the floor, pounded our fists. We took ten-minute breaks to drink tea and eat fruit in silence. When it was my turn, I usually went still, bowed my head, and focused downward, wincing as I drilled for what lay buried. Soon, I became familiar with the mundane layers through which I had to plow for the truth: the weariness of work, the burden of obligation, crankiness, resistance. As I squirmed my way through these, I inevitably unearthed seething anger, and below that grief, and below that a pure longing that quickly resolved itself into love. The energy could turn on a dime, carnivorous growls to innocent tears. Once I clawed at the collar of my shirt so violently that I popped five buttons off it. Another time I unintentionally knocked the black goddess statue to the ground, threatening to torch her ornamental scarf in a nearby candle.
Sabrina’s circle showed me how to recognize my own intuition, a tug inside my solar plexus leaning left or right, yes or no, like a divining rod. While chronic fatigue had taught me to observe my emotions in stillness, the circle taught me how to move them through. “Emotional energy only becomes a problem when it gets stuck,” Sabrina said. Instead of trying to lock down anger or sadness with lengthy explanations and judgments, I expressed them bodily, which took all of about thirty seconds.
The Wild Oats Project: One Woman's Midlife Quest for Passion at Any Cost Page 15