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

by Robin Rinaldi

  Climax or not, OMing had a tangible upside. I began to notice that on the days I OMed I ran a steady supply of long-lasting energy, similar to how limber and clearheaded I felt after a good yoga class or massage. After the OM, several of us would order breakfast at a homey diner next door. Then I’d shower, put on my editor’s outfit, and walk briskly to the office down Sixth Street, through the ugliest part of the city, humming along to my headphones. On those days, my energy rarely lagged even in the late afternoon and I often went until 11:00 p.m. feeling alert. It was as if OneTaste was stirring up all my shit and, in return, handing me the physiological fuel to process it. Not such a bad deal.

  My regular friends disagreed. When I told Paul I had moved into the residence, he winced and said, “I’m worried, Robs.” He called and texted less often after that, which saddened me more than any disappointments taking place at OneTaste.

  “What do the men get out of it?” Ellen asked.

  “Let’s see.” I paused for dramatic effect. “A nonstop selection of hot women who are amped up and wanting sex all the time? Starting out each day gazing at a constant rotation of naked young pussy? Sanctioned nonmonogamy?”

  “But isn’t it all about the clitoris?”

  “Yeah, for fifteen minutes in the morning and fifteen minutes at night. That leaves twenty-three and a half hours for anything else. OneTaste is a male dream.”

  My friends’ main concern was that OneTaste was a cult. People were certainly free to come and go as they pleased and no one was discouraged from contact with their family or outside friends. Nevertheless, it was cultish, with its charismatic leader, esoteric language, guided rituals, and the dopamine highs generated by all that physical contact. The gap between the way people operated at OneTaste—showering together, touching one another daily, taking an eccentric woman’s word as gospel—and the way they operated in the larger world was huge. Sometimes it troubled me. I knew exactly whom to seek for perspective.

  “Are you afraid I’ll get sucked too far into OneTaste?” I asked Scott one Saturday at home. “A lot of people think they’re a cult.”

  “I don’t worry about you, button. I’ve seen you dive into all kinds of things, but you don’t drown in them.”

  I went and sat on his lap sideways, clasped my arms around his neck, and lay my forehead on his shoulder.

  “I’m only staying three months anyway,” I said into his collarbone.

  23

  Infinite Games

  NICOLE DIDN’T LIVE AT ONETASTE. She lived with her boyfriend, Reese, splitting her time between his house in Russian Hill, one of San Francisco’s oldest and grandest neighborhoods, and his place out in Stinson Beach, about an hour north of the city. It seemed that only the inner circle got invited to the beach house—OneTaste teachers routinely disappeared from the residence and stayed out at the beach for days at a stretch.

  One Monday afternoon a few weeks after our makeout session, I got a text from Noah while I was at work.

  When are you coming up to the Stinson house? it said.

  As soon as I’m invited.

  How soon is now?

  We had just shipped the magazine and it was one of our two slow days of the month.

  Give me the address and I’ll see you in a few hours.

  I left work, packed a change of clothes, and headed across the Golden Gate Bridge into the Marin Headlands. The winter sun was low in the orange sky and I had to drive slowly in its glare around Highway 1’s single-lane switchbacks. It was dusk when I finally descended into the windblown little town of Stinson Beach. Reese’s house was a large, shingled beauty just steps from the sand. Noah let me in and I set about helping him with dinner. He said Reese had just gotten home and was in the bedroom with Nicole.

  We cut up bell peppers, mushrooms, and zucchini and Noah prepared them with tofu, no butter, salt, or spice. Nicole and Reese joined us and we sat down in the dining room, drinking water and eating our vegetables. From what I’d gathered, Reese was some sort of Silicon Valley entrepreneurial genius; he’d been there at the birth of the Internet and was currently involved in a handful of futuristic think tanks. But you’d never know it. Reserved and self-effacing, he ate silently, as did Noah, while Nicole and I did most of the talking.

  She casually delved into her past, which had included a long bout of celibacy. She described living with Ray Vetterlein, by then in his seventies, for three years and him stroking her clitoris daily.

  “You need to write a memoir,” I said.

  “Oh, I already have. I’ve had two different men try to edit it, but it didn’t work out.”

  “I should edit it.” In fact, Noah had already hired me to edit some of Nicole’s writings—her thoughts on relationship, the limbic system—and I found that I could barely keep up. She was no mere touchy-feely hedonist. There was a multilayered abstraction to her writing that reminded me of when I’d tried to read geniuses like Ken Wilber.

  “Maybe you should,” she said. “It probably needs a female editor.”

  “When is your interview with The New York Times?” I asked. They were sending out a reporter to do a feature on OneTaste.

  “Supposedly in a few weeks.”

  “Be careful,” I found myself saying. “It’s an easy target, a bunch of California new-age types taking their clothes off. I’m sure the Times is going to be even-handed, but if I were you, I’d focus on the aspects of OM that appeal to the average woman, you know? The housewife in Kansas, the busy working mom. What can those women get from it? How it might help their marriages, for example. Just think how it could affect their energy levels and well-being.” I had to stop myself from the sudden urge to ramble on.

  “Exactly,” she said. “I don’t want it to be a fringe thing. One day OMing will be as routine and accepted as yoga is now. When women finally access their turn-on and take responsibility for it, the whole world will change.” She smiled wide at this thought.

  I felt strangely split. I was all too aware of OneTaste’s shortcomings, its complicated terminology and guru worship. For me, orgasmic meditation wasn’t anything close to the sexual or emotional grail others claimed. So far I actually found it to resemble all other kinds of meditation—physiologically healthy and a little boring. At the same time, I couldn’t help cheerleading its female focus and even Nicole herself. Sitting with her now, I realized that her appeal wasn’t that of a guru. It was something much more uncommon: the sensual power of the courtesan combined with the intellectual power of the scholar. Nicole was a fully formed woman, equally comfortable operating from her body as from her searing intellect. That, I believed, is what pulled people to her, so rare was the sight of a woman truly at ease with these dual aspects of her power.

  After dinner we went into the great room, a library-like central space laid out in Oriental carpets and faded, elegant sofas. Bryan, a former OneTaste teacher, arrived from San Francisco with his girlfriend, who sat eating a salad while he and Nicole exchanged elusive communiqués I couldn’t follow. I got the impression that there’d been some kind of falling-out between Nicole and Bryan, and that he’d perhaps been connected to Werner Erhard, the founder of Est, which had gone on to become Landmark Forum. Lots of OneTasters were fans and alumni of Landmark, a hardcore self-improvement program that stressed self-responsibility and aggressively stripped away participants’ defenses over the course of a weekend. Whenever anyone mentioned Landmark, I glazed over, uninterested. Bryan must have sensed this. He turned to me at one point and impatiently asked, “Why are you here?”

  Good question. I was tempted to say, “Believe it or not, because my husband didn’t want to have a baby!”

  “Noah invited me,” I said.

  Nicole motioned to Noah with her eyes and he came over to me and reached out his hand. “Let’s go take a walk on the beach,” he said.

  We bundled up and walked down a narrow footpath to the sand. It was soft underfoot and lit by an almost-full moon. He touched the small of my back as we climbed over
a thick stump of driftwood and sat down. The inky plain of the Pacific was broken only by a lace trim of whitecap on the small waves that rolled in. Noah had approached and retreated so often that I had no idea whether he’d take advantage of the obvious ripeness of the moment. A few weeks prior, he’d said he was waiting for me. Then, a week ago, he’d told me that he saw himself more as a producer of my experiences than a participant. That statement had landed like a punch. I didn’t need a producer.

  “You just don’t want me badly enough,” I’d responded.

  “You mean I’m not desperate?”

  “I don’t want desperation. Okay, maybe a little bit of desperation, an edge of it. Controlled desperation.” We’d laughed.

  “I am attracted to you. I want to make out with you. But I feel like our friendship is on a different level than sex. I’m past the point where I have to sleep with every woman I’m attracted to.”

  Fair enough. Now we sat on the log making small talk. The dense buzz his touch had generated was already beginning to fade. When we got cold, we headed back. I walked through the living room, bid everyone a quick goodnight, and Noah showed me to one of the guest bedrooms, a farmhouse-chic little accommodation made up in cozy, thick white bedding. I stood beside the bed while Noah went and got a stack of towels.

  “Here you go,” he said, handing them to me. I put them on the bed and faced him.

  “Okay, thanks,” I said.

  “You’ve got everything you need?”

  “Yep.” I hugged him, achy but resigned to his standoffishness. “Thanks again.”

  “I’ll be in the bedroom right next door.” A smile lit his eyes.

  “Okey-dokey.”

  “Just knock if you need me.”

  My chin angled itself in query. “Okay … goodnight.”

  I climbed into bed and pulled up the covers, listening to the dimmed voices in the living room, mostly Nicole’s and Bryan’s. Through the opposite wall, I heard Reese on the phone with what sounded like a colleague. It was 11:41 p.m. I heard him say “shareholder” and “dollars.”

  What was I doing here, anyway? Witnessing the birth of the next sexual revolution? San Francisco was full of risk-taking, independent thinkers who founded companies and nonprofits instead of climbing corporate ladders built by others. Even so, what kind of woman would have the guts to found a nonmonogamous commune based on female orgasm, sign herself up for the suspicion that would inevitably comprise most people’s first reactions to such a concept? Whether I agreed with her or not, I couldn’t help admiring Nicole’s brio.

  Now Noah joined in the conversation. I could hear his low voice a few feet from my bedroom door.

  And then I realized what was going on. Noah was probably playing one of his “infinite games.” That’s why all the back-and-forth, the approach-and-withdraw. He’d sized me up, possibly with Nicole’s input, and decided that I needed to take charge. Just as Jude had said: You could be more assertive in bed. Just as I’d failed to do with Liam. Instead of hanging back and waiting for the man to make the move, I needed to initiate.

  It was true. I wasn’t very assertive in bed. Did I want to work on changing that? Did I want to work on anything anymore, other than my actual job? Suddenly I remembered George, our therapist back in Sacramento, sitting in his leather chair wearing his shiny oxford shoes, listening as I debated whether to fly home to Pennsylvania for my tenth class reunion. “Let your body decide,” he’d told me.

  “What does that look like?” I’d asked. I was twenty-seven at the time and hadn’t yet fallen off my bike. I couldn’t tell you at that point what I felt in my little toe; the entity called Robin existed only from the neck up—unless I was in the midst of a breakdown, at which point every repressed bodily sensation would ambush me at once.

  “You’ll either walk over to the phone and call the airline to make a reservation, or you won’t. You don’t have to think about it. Your body will do it for you.”

  I’d sat staring at the wall above George’s head, trying to comprehend what on earth he was talking about, how my body could walk to the phone without my brain’s direction, and how my brain could direct anything without agonizing over all the possible outcomes first. It had taken eighteen years to understand what George was trying to teach me.

  I flashed forward to texting Paul from the Castro bar that rainy night, chasing him to Denver, plowing ahead with the open marriage regardless of my fear of losing Scott. I thought of Susan driving to a fertility center, filling out form after form, going alone to appointments to be injected with donor sperm. She had recently emailed me about some letdown or other. The last line of the email said: “Let’s get everything we want, Rob, and if we don’t get it, then let’s decide we didn’t really want it.”

  That struck me as the smartest thing I’d ever heard anyone say, Nicole Daedone included. She and Noah were speaking now, probably turning in for the night, because I heard footsteps walk toward the bedroom adjacent to mine and its door close.

  My arm reached up to switch off the light, my torso snuggled under the covers, and my eyes closed. That’s how I decided to stop waiting for Noah.

  24

  Girl on Girl on Boy

  I SAT STARING DOWN at Dara’s inner labia, layers of dark flesh pierced with a silver hoop. I had never seen another vagina up close. I’d only begun looking at my own a few years ago, during Mama Gena’s pleasure course. Dara’s looked exotic and vaguely dangerous. Grace sat nearby, coaching me on where to place my fingers and how to gauge Dara’s reaction. I’d decided it was time to learn what it felt like to be the stroker.

  I followed Grace’s instructions, keeping my index finger on the outer edge of Dara’s clitoris and stroking lightly upward. I was afraid to move too roughly and hurt her and simultaneously afraid of touching too lightly and boring her. Her breathing grew fast and she began to emit loud, sharp “Ah” sounds, jerking a little with each one. I felt like a first-timer given a bucking bronco to steer instead of a pony. Alarmed, I looked to Grace. She quietly said Dara was just releasing stored-up emotion. If I wanted to calm her I should switch to a downstroke, from the apex of the clitoris toward the vagina. When I did, Dara’s “ahs” mellowed into a smoother rhythm and her breathing lengthened again.

  Thank god the fifteen-minute timer went off. The complexity of the clitoris, the responsibility for awakening it or failing to, the knowledge of what depths it lay connected to, was all so much more intimidating than the resilient, straightforward penis.

  In my teens, I never gave same-sex attraction a second thought. In my twenties and thirties, on the rare occasions when the topic came up, I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to explore it and bear the brunt of the lesbian taboo. Now that I had a second chance at sexual experiments, I finally gave myself permission to ponder it.

  But there was a hitch. Though I found the female body sublime in the abstract, I’d never met a woman I felt personally attracted to. In a room, my eyes gravitated to men, continually if discreetly scanning the field between myself and any of their species, a psycho-spiritual urge toward completion that bloomed into sexual attraction when a number of key signals lined up. Women’s beauty far outweighed men’s—the olive smoothness of skin, the bountiful sphere of ass, the long hair falling over geometric collarbone. And Sabrina’s circle was proving that women were actually better than men at helping access the femine energy that made me feel happy and fulfilled. Still, the thought of an intimate one-on-one relationship with a woman scared the hell out of me. I could only imagine it as myself times two, exhausting and potentially treacherous.

  A few weeks after my OM with Dara, Grace stroked me. Just like taking my pants off for the first time in a room full of people or stripping down and entering a communal shower with two strangers, it proved surprisingly simple. After a few seconds of initial awkwardness, a comfortable sense of instinct took over.

  As Grace began stroking, I noticed the absence of a subtle layer of tension, which always accompanied a
new man’s touch. I didn’t ponder her reaction to seeing me naked, whether it turned her on, how my pussy might rank in comparison to others’. I didn’t worry about making too much or too little noise. I didn’t give a thought to whether or not I climaxed. The result of all this lack of thinking was that I could feel more.

  Eventually, Grace and I decided she would come to my room one night around ten and we would cuddle and see where it led. No plans, no pressure. I showered and changed into warm pajamas—it was early March and the residence was chilly. When she knocked lightly on my door, she was in PJs too. Grace and I both had strong builds and snappy tempers. But she was strawberry blond, a decade younger, and more visibly vulnerable than me. Her freckled face hid no emotion at all. Sadness, mirth, anger, and joy passed over it like weather systems over a tropical island. In an effort to manage it all, she instituted very clear boundaries, which she articulated slowly and with purpose.

  “I’d like to get under the covers, face each other, and chat,” she said after we hugged hello.

  We got into bed and turned to face each other. I left the bedside lamp on. “It’s like a slumber party,” I said as we pulled the blankets up to our faces. We talked like any two women would when catching up: one at a time, excavating the feelings that lay below the surface of events, while the other nodded her understanding and asked occasional questions designed to encourage further revelation. She told me about her ex-boyfriend, the man she was currently involved with, her confusion over the next step in her career. I told her where things stood with Scott, how I missed him and my home but was also nervous to move back in full-time, how I still secretly pined for Alden.