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

by Robin Rinaldi

  The circle showed me what it looked like to trust women, not only to keep my secrets, listen to my problems, or chatter away happily over cocktails, but to nourish me and let me nourish them. In her circle I accessed the deepest part of myself directly, stripped of even the strongest archetypes—Wife, Lover, Mother. I learned I didn’t need a man or a child in order to experience true womanhood.

  * * *

  That central lesson, though, hadn’t yet registered when I first walked into Sabrina’s in January. As February 1 approached, the deadline I’d set with Scott to reassess things, I wasn’t ready to end the project. If I was going to return to monogamy, there were still a few things I needed to experience, like sleeping with a woman and having a threesome. I worried about telling Scott that I wanted to extend it a little longer. Over breakfast in our dining room one Sunday, I got up the courage and said, “February is right around the corner. What would you think about going to May first with the project, and making it a solid year?”

  He looked up from his eggs and paper. “Yeah.” He nodded. “I’m good with that. May first is good.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. One year is a nice round number.”

  “And then it’ll be over and done,” I said, taken aback.

  “Well, yes, but I’m imagining there’ll be an adjustment period. It might take a while for things to get back to normal.”

  I nodded, and he went back to his paper.

  We spent the following weekend in Yosemite, one of Scott’s favorite places. He’d taken me there early in our relationship and we’d returned several times, always in winter because he hated the summer crowds. We hiked in the snow, read in the Ahwahnee Hotel’s grand sitting room next to the roaring fireplace, and ate in the pitched-timber dining hall looking out at Half Dome. On the way home, as Scott was outside pumping gas, his BlackBerry beeped on the console. It was a text message from a South Bay area code. The phone was three inches from my hand. All I had to do was push one little button to see the content. A photo appeared of a pretty redhead in a black turtleneck, black miniskirt, and black stilettos sitting cross-legged and leaning suggestively so as to accentuate her curves. Her heart-shaped face, porcelain skin, and smiling apple red lips appeared to be a good several years younger than mine. Below the photo she had typed simply, xo, Charly.

  I glanced back at Scott, his breath visible in the January air, the gas pump still running. I hit the End button on his phone, returning it to the home screen, and the little red text indicator shut off.

  He replaced the pump and got back into the car, blowing on his hands before starting it. He pulled out through the slushy parking lot onto the small highway that connected Yosemite to I-5. Over the past eighteen years, we must have driven a hundred back roads like this one. We’d once spent the summer solstice weekend driving his antique Dart convertible from Sacramento through Nevada to Salt Lake City, down through Zion National Park to Vegas, and back up through California in a 1,600-mile loop. We’d driven a Winnebago across the country four times, through thirty-seven states, taking a different road each time.

  As we made our way through the snowy foothills down into the flatlands of the Central Valley, I put my hand over Scott’s on the console. He smiled.

  “I’m looking forward to being home tonight,” I said, leaning my head against the seat and closing my eyes.

  He squeezed my hand. “Me too, kitty.”

  22

  The Commune

  MOST PEOPLE WHO CHOOSE TO LIVE at a commune probably do it for reasons more freewheeling than economics. For me, the cheap rent at OneTaste—only eight hundred dollars a month for a tiny room of my own, half of what I was paying for the Bluxome studio—is what cemented the deal. I reasoned that for the project’s final phase, I could at least lessen the economic impact to our household if not the emotional one.

  By this time, OneTaste had abandoned the open-style loft I’d read about in the newspaper and begun refurbishing a three-floor single-residency hotel next to the workshop center on Folsom Street. Beneath its new coat of paint, its elegant prewar bones were apparent in the hallway wainscoting and doorway moldings. The rooms varied in size, though most were like mine, big enough to fit a bed, small dresser, and not much else. Each floor had two old-fashioned water closets and one recently installed unisex bathroom where three people could shower at once across from a long mirrored vanity.

  On a quiet Saturday afternoon, I packed up my single carload of clothes and books, said goodbye to the Bluxome studio, and drove with Scott to OneTaste to unload my things. It was strange to have him there. Lots of couples, monogamous and otherwise, attended OneTaste workshops together, but each time I’d asked him to come, he’d said no. His disinterest had frustrated me at first but by now actually caused me relief.

  Few people were around. As Scott screwed together the rods of a clothing rack while I unpacked boxes, Roman walked by my open doorway and stopped. Only twenty-eight, he was Scott’s height but beefier, and his ominous neck tattoo had failed to add an iota of menace to his cheerful face. He wore paint-splattered jeans and big suede work boots. I’d once seen Grace demonstrate the male version of orgasmic meditation on a supine Roman, slathering his penis in lube and kneading it gently with both hands until it hardened to its full impressive height and girth, his torso rising involuntarily off the table, jaw and biceps clenched. Afterward, when we took turns sharing our impressions of what we’d witnessed, I’d voiced the first image that came to me: “Primordial man rising from the ooze.”

  “Hi,” Roman said, leaning against the doorjamb.

  “Hey, Roman,” I said, my heart suddenly thumping. Scott looked up from the clothes rack, screwdriver in hand.

  “Roman, this is my husband, Scott. Roman lives here with his fiancée.”

  “Howdy.” Scott nodded.

  “Great to meet you, Scott,” Roman said. “You guys let me know if you need anything, okay?”

  “Will do,” I said. “See you later.” He made his way down the hall and I closed the door.

  “Once that’s up, honey, we can go,” I said. “I’ll unpack the rest on Monday.”

  * * *

  My closest neighbors across the hall at OneTaste included soft-spoken Joaquin, who had just arrived in San Francisco after spending a few years in Mexico; Hugh, a barrel-chested, bearded mensch who wrote code; and Dara, a purple-haired creature with a sonorous voice and haunted eyes. Liam had a room upstairs where several of the instructors lived, including Noah, whose large corner room was the brightest in the building.

  When I said Noah looked like a rabbi, I meant a rabbi just shy of forty who worked out daily and still had a thick head of black hair. In his previous life, Noah was a numbers man—accountant, stock broker, something like that—with a high-paying corporate job, which he’d chucked to follow Nicole’s vision and keep OneTaste running in all practical aspects. Noah had been OMing daily for years, so if anyone knew the technique, it was him. By the time I moved in, I had already met with him for a private OM in his room. Now I knocked on his door for a second one, which we’d scheduled the night before.

  Noah was a busy guy. He kept his laptop open and his iPhone in hand. He showed up a few minutes late, straight from another OM, and let us in. I dropped my bag on his floor and sat down on his thick beige duvet, afternoon light casting shadows on the white minimalist room, the swoosh of traffic echoing outside. I slipped my jeans and panties off, lay back on his fluffy pillows, and butterflied my legs. He sat to my right, took off his watch, set it down on the nightstand next to a jar of lube. He slipped on a new pair of white rubber gloves and dipped his left index finger into the lube. Only then did he look down at me. “Ready?” he asked.

  I nodded yes. He started the timer.

  As he began making small, light strokes, I had to let go of the habitual urge to help him along by shifting underneath his finger or by uttering sounds to encourage him. After a few minutes, the sensation began to build, though not in the usual wa
y. The constant, mostly unvaried stroke failed to ignite my sexual yearning, the one that happened when that part of my body brushed against a hand or penis momentarily, then ached to return. Instead of this gradual reaching and subsiding, which allowed my sex to open of its own accord, Noah’s insistent fingertip caused a purely physiological reaction. My breath quickened, my thigh muscles twitched. Every few minutes the pressure built to the point where I moaned and arched my back, my pelvic walls contracting for several seconds. My nose and lips tingled and my head swam. Noah’s role felt more like a bodyworker’s than a lover’s. Yet I gripped his left forearm with both hands, feeling a familiar tug, a vulnerable nub of self that reached toward him tenderly.

  Suddenly his cell phone rang, jerking me to awareness as if from a dream. Rage, distilled and irrational, surged through me and I glared at him. He kept his gaze on my crotch. I closed my eyes again, trying to focus on my breath, but I was having none of it. If we have to turn our goddamn phones off during a stupid fucking InGroup, then maybe you should turn yours off while you’re touching my clitoris.

  What the fuck was this place anyway? He and his gynecological gloves, running from one OM to another like a clock-puncher on a pussy assembly line. Fuck you, Noah.

  It was common for strong feelings to arise during an OM, they said. Stay on your breath. Stick with the sensation.

  When the fifteen-minute timer went off, Noah pressed gently on my pubic bone, looked down at me, and smiled.

  “So how many times do we have to OM before we can fuck?” I said as I zipped my jeans.

  “Twice,” he said. Nice comeback.

  “Tell me,” he continued when I didn’t respond, “what does your body want?”

  I turned toward him. “I have no need to OM before we fuck.”

  “Well, you can have sex with anyone, but OMing is my specialty.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.”

  “You’re sassy,” he said, grinning as he tossed his rubber gloves into the wastebasket.

  * * *

  My childhood had trained me to absorb emotional chaos and plow forward with daily life, regardless of the broken glass, the hole punched in the bedroom door. Just keep going, each day a clean slate. And delayed reactions—by weeks, months, even years—were still my modus operandi. I could absorb a great deal of experience before needing to process it. Living at OneTaste broke that pattern, causing far more frequent ups and downs. Daily contact with so many other sexual experimenters flamed my desire as well as its flip side: rejection and competitiveness. My old defense mechanism, which consisted of casting myself as special for either my brains or my passion or some combination thereof, proved useless. Everyone here was passionate. Everyone had abandoned convention. And they were smart. They had MBAs or were working on PhDs in somatic psychology. A handful of them could diagnose and fix nearly any hardware or software problem. There was no drinking at OneTaste and no drugs. They ate healthy vegetarian meals and talked continually about their new workout regimens and yoga classes. It was nothing like the puppy pile of lost souls that many outsiders imagined when they heard “urban commune.”

  In this crowd, not only was my hardworking, hard-thinking personality common, but so was the little treasure between my legs, usually dependable for so much currency in the broader world. The men here differed from men elsewhere, whether single or attached, good-looking or not, in that they had twenty-four-seven access to a surplus of pussy. The power dynamic I’d taken for granted since I’d sprouted breasts at age thirteen dematerialized. Now I was just one of several dozen wet, available women of all ages, shapes, and temperaments in Nicole’s orgasm army.

  I didn’t enjoy this healthy ego bashing one bit. I’d pass Liam in the halls and he’d flirt for a minute, touching my hip, his cheeks flushing, before vanishing into the crowd. He’d text to say let’s make a date and never follow through. One night, when we finally did meet up in his room, we made out for several seconds before he stood up, unzipped his pants, and demanded with a smile, “Get on your knees.” I couldn’t help thinking he’d just learned that move in one of the men’s classes.

  “Later,” I said, refusing to go that easy on him this time. But there was no later. He fucked me for five minutes, this time from behind, and then we went next door to the pizza place where everyone hung out. While we were eating, Amanda dropped in, another resident who was Liam’s age and kept a detailed spreadsheet of everyone’s chores. It soon became apparent that Liam was infatuated with her. After she left, he kept mentioning how seeing her threw him off balance and wondered aloud how to proceed. I offered a few lines of advice and hoped he’d shut up about it.

  But as we headed back toward the residence, he said, “This is unbelievable. I’m literally shaking from seeing her.”

  I could forgive myself the first encounter with Liam, since I’d never slept with such a beautiful man in my life, but how could I let this happen again, a five-minute fuck, this time with the added insult of his openly obsessing over another woman?

  “Hey,” I interrupted, stopping short on the sidewalk to face him.

  “What?”

  “You just fucked me a half hour ago. I know we’re all friends here but I don’t want to hear about your crush on Amanda right now. I’m a woman, Liam, not a machine.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “Thanks for telling me that.”

  That’s how everyone talked at OneTaste. When informed of another’s perceptions or feelings, they habitually responded, “Thank you,” as a way to acknowledge what they’d heard without reacting to it personally.

  “And the next time we have sex?” I added. “I want it to last an hour.” In retrospect I can’t believe my ridiculousness, waiting around for a twenty-five-year-old to make his move, refusing to coach him through it, and then acting disappointed afterward.

  “Okay.” He smiled. “Thank you.”

  It wasn’t only Liam who rattled me. The push and pull continued with Noah. His solid physicality—large-boned, dark, full-featured—both calmed me and fired me up. I went soft whenever he touched me in passing. One day, after our OM ended on his bed, he took his gloves off and lay down next to me, hugging me for a good ten minutes. When we finally pulled back to look at each other, he removed his glasses, put his mouth on mine and kissed me fervently. I reached up and pulled him closer, still dizzy from the OM and hungry for his weight. Our baroque kisses made me wetter than fifteen minutes of OMing had. After a long while he sat up and put his glasses back on. I sat up and put my pants back on. OneTasters touted this type of makeout session as a contained research experiment that went beyond the structure of an OM but didn’t stir up as much “story” and potential enmeshment as actual sex.

  Jude was still hanging around as well. He had several friends at the residence and often stayed overnight with me. Some weekends, he borrowed my room. He’d recently gotten back together with his ex-girlfriend Elise, a tiny, beautiful actress with a choppy shock of pink hair, whom, he reported, he could make come seven times in a row. He hadn’t made me come even once. During an InGroup, Elise got on the hot seat, and when someone asked what was running through her head she said, “I was just thinking how awesome I am.” My face went hot. Jude was next to me; I inched away so that my knee no longer touched his. When Elise sat back down on the other side of him, it was all I could do not to reach across and wrap my hand around her awesome, swan-like, multiorgasmic neck.

  I’m no one special, I repeated silently, closing my eyes. Goals, competition, winning: the sturdy hooks I hung my fragile self-esteem on as a child. They were all that kept me from drowning in heartbreak. My father might rage but it wouldn’t be because I was ill behaved or failing. He might consider women discardable but I’d never let him think of me that way. I’d forbid it by excelling. He could hurt me all he wanted—there was nothing I could do about that—but one thing he could never do was look down on me.

  That’s what made ordinariness so hard to swallow, and yet it was also a relief
to let go of my little egocentric melodrama, which had long outworn its utility. “No one special” became my mantra. Rejection and anger, sadness and yearning were my medicine. I chewed on them slowly.

  * * *

  Nicole would say that this new stew of emotion wasn’t just a result of communal living. It was also because I had begun OMing on a regular basis, and stroking the most sensitive part of a woman’s body opens up her entire, interconnected limbic system. Three days a week, I’d set my alarm to 6:00 a.m., brush my teeth and wash my face, then pad over to the workshop center in my yoga pants to OM with the group. My partner changed each time. Noah’s strokes were solid and rhythmic; Hugh’s fluctuated according to my mood; Joaquin’s I could barely feel yet they could unleash me to tears; Liam’s finger annoyed me. And now that the focus was all on me, whatever I was experiencing—pleasure or numbness, intensity or boredom—I secretly questioned. Two or three of the women predictably climaxed about ten minutes into the OM, their breathy moans rising steadily before dying down. This pissed me off mightily.

  When I asked myself why them and not me, the answer was that the light, insistent stroke used in OM put too much direct pressure on my clitoris without a break, and not even the whole clitoris but just one small edge of it. My sexual being went almost claustrophobic when reduced to a single point swollen with nerve endings; turn-on happened when I entered a full-body, intimate force field with a lover—kisses, looks, neck, nipples—a field that, contrary to OneTaste dogma, encompassed our hearts and words and the story between us.

  Trusting my sexual response was not something that came easily, even at midlife. When I heard those few women coming at the drop of a hat, the eternal female mantra rose up to proclaim: Maybe there’s something wrong with me. With time I began to see that my orgasm had a mind of its own, a discerning I could barely predict but always understood in hindsight. It had surfaced with Andrew because of a certain self-sustaining presence he offered that freed me; with Alden because of his fearless penetration; with Paul only once, right after we confessed how much we cared for each other. Inwardly, I was glad my surrender didn’t happen easily, that it lay buried and tethered to the realities of each relationship. My clitoris was an astute barometer. It knew things before I did, and unlike me, it neither sought approval nor performed on command. It dealt solely in truth.