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

by Robin Rinaldi

  As we talked, we encircled each other’s waists. Gradually, I turned onto my other side, away from her, and she spooned me.

  “Have you been with many women?” I asked as she burrowed her face into my neck.

  “Six of them,” she said. Her voice was soft but she spoke with authority. “What about you?”

  “None. You’re the first.” I had French-kissed a friend once in a bar, a stunt enacted for the sake of the male bystanders. This was different.

  “I like going down on women,” she said. “Would you want that?”

  “Yes.” I giggled from embarrassment. On the nightstand was a small packet of Valentine candy hearts, which I’d been passing around to my friends. I picked up a white heart that read “Kiss me” and handed it to her over my shoulder. She popped it into her mouth as I turned to face her.

  “I can lead the way,” she said after she’d swallowed it.

  I felt like one part hormonal seventh grader experimenting with a best friend and one part anonymous porn actress, that serving as my only mental image of two women having sex. I also pictured myself bigger and stronger than Grace, even though I wasn’t, even though she was the one now hovering above me, exploring my mouth with her tongue.

  The female body. The core of my fascination revolved around the breasts. I ran my hand over hers, firm in appearance but soft beyond belief, thumbing her nipple to stiffness before sliding it into my mouth. She moaned, grinding her hips against me. As I sucked, my hands moved down. We slid off each other’s pajama bottoms. I grabbed her by the hair as I bit her nipple, and she dug into my shoulder and kissed me more hungrily. She was more layered than solid, a hydra of pale ivory arms and legs encircling me.

  “Push against me,” she said. I pushed her up by the shoulders, causing our hips to hinge tighter. I could feel her strip of short pubic hair against mine, the sliver of wet insides exposed and then hidden again as we moved. I lost track of time as we alternated between making out and my kissing and sucking her breasts. It could have been five minutes or a half hour. I gathered her ass in my hands, then reached into its crevice as far as I could, sliding her pussy open, dipping my finger in and then trailing it back upward. When I was on top of a man, this was one of my favorite ways to be touched, perched on his teasing finger, my tits in his mouth. As I tilted her ass up, she threw her head back and groaned. I inhabited both her body and my own, felt her excitement and the intoxicating power of producing it. I was subject and object. A quiet, pronounced orgasm ripped through me without a shred of warning.

  She sensed it. She looked at me and smiled.

  “Oh my god,” I said. “I came!”

  “I know. It felt amazing.” She rolled to the side and snuggled against me. “I can go down on you next time.”

  “Don’t you want me to go down on you?” I asked.

  “No. I feel completely satiated.”

  I wasn’t sure I believed that, but Grace was known for her honesty, and I wasn’t sure how to proceed.

  After a few minutes she asked, “Want to have another date next Thursday?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. I’m going to go back to my room to sleep now.” We put our pajamas back on and hugged.

  “I love you,” she said, looking me in the eye. She meant it in the usual way, friend to friend, though a little shock zinged through me.

  “I love you, too,” I said automatically, my throat tightening around the words.

  When she left, I closed the door and lay down, staring into space, trying to trace the ripple of anxiety. Was it the lesbian taboo reaching out its prongs across the years? I couldn’t remember ever climaxing with a man so quickly, other than Alden. Was it the combination of the physical intimacy and the “I love you,” something that never happened on the first instance of sex with a man? No. It was the simple fact that I couldn’t bullshit her, and that I had to be as careful with her feelings as I was with my own. That’s what scared me: her female combination of perception and vulnerability.

  A week later, Grace knocked on my door in her pajamas again. We repeated the ritual of snuggling, talking quietly, and slowly kissing for what seemed like a luxurious hour. When a new man went down on me, I tended to brace for the possibility that he’d start off too fast, with frantic flicks and switch-ups that killed my mood before I could even get started. But I opened my legs for Grace with complete trust. She made small, slow circles, her tongue flattened and soothing. She pulled away every minute or so to let me rest, and by the time she returned I was more swollen than before. In five minutes she made me come with no effort, tension, or hoping on my part.

  Okay, maybe I was a lesbian after all.

  I switched places with her and attempted the style she’d used on me. She seemed to enjoy it, but after about fifteen minutes she said, “Okay, that’s all the sensation I can handle tonight.” I felt inept. If Liam had turned me into a teenage girl again, Grace turned me into a teenage boy, all raw lust and incompetence.

  “I want to use a strap-on,” I said as we cuddled.

  “Yes! Let’s do that next.” But a week later, Grace told me she was putting all connection on hold for several weeks while she worked through some emotional issues that had come up.

  Her prioritizing of emotions conflicted with my prioritizing of sexual goals. I was drawn to her body but shrunk back when she expressed unfettered feeling. I got off, she didn’t. It only took sleeping with one woman to help me understand the behavior of nearly every man I’d ever known.

  * * *

  As if to allay any misgivings I harbored about my heterosexuality after sleeping with Grace, along came Roman, the six-foot-four man-god whom I’d witnessed rising from the ooze during the male OM demonstration. Size was just one aspect of Roman’s overall sense of physical ease. He was always smiling, and his flirting was devoid of hungry sneers or sideways glances. He displayed no fear of women, no need for either conquest or approval. Whenever our eyes met or even when I sat within three feet of him, something rich and steady vibrated between us.

  Roman was engaged to Annie, the fieriest little soul in the commune, only twenty-three and smart as a whip. The first time I met her, during my second OneTaste workshop, she materialized in front of us wearing a pink pinafore, her hair pulled into tight pigtails, and sang an a cappella tune I’d never heard that sounded part Broadway lament, part Grimm’s nursery rhyme. She looked like Dorothy of Oz gone astray. In groups, she had a habit of contradicting the approved-of responses, blithely stating how much she hated intimacy. She did so not with the reactionary rebelliousness of youth but with a weary air of self-deprecation usually reserved for the mature.

  Roman and Annie had an open relationship, even though they planned on leaving OneTaste later that year to move into their own apartment before getting married. They were both free to do as they wished, as long as they got preapproval from the other.

  I looked forward to the morning OM session when Roman was my scheduled stroker. His long legs and body shielded me from the rest of the room. He had a knack for intuiting the right amount of pressure. My breathing tended to match his, audible, building in intensity. Holding on to his arm was like holding on to a grounding pole; he never dropped me by shifting attention or losing focus. Our OMs filled my being—more than just my body—with a liquid gratification, like a plant that had been watered.

  Afterward, Roman said, “I feel this amazing chemistry with you. It turns my whole body on.”

  “I feel it, too.”

  “We should make out.”

  “Yes, I want to! When?” There was no time to play it cool. I had little more than a month of the project left.

  “Let me clear it with Annie and we’ll shoot for next week.”

  “Okay, let me know.” He squeezed my hands, then pulled me into a long embrace.

  A week later, he showed up at my door around 7:00 p.m., wearing jeans and a T-shirt and smelling of soap. He lay down on the bed, propped a few pillows behind his head, stretched out
his right arm, and gestured for me to come lie against his shoulder.

  “So how are you doing?” he asked. “Tell me what’s going on with you.”

  I paused, mentally reviewing how much of my life he knew about.

  “Well, I’m overworked, as usual. I go from this job with constant deadlines to living here with all the OMing and making out to being married on the weekends. It’s a lot.”

  “I don’t know how you pull it off.”

  “I feel like my body’s leading me on this intense journey, and then it takes a while for my heart and mind to catch up.”

  He nodded, pulling lightly at a corner of my shirt as if grooming me.

  “I don’t know if I told you, but I started this whole open marriage thing after my husband got a vasectomy. I wanted to have a baby with him.”

  “I remember. Do you still want to have a kid?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it sounds stupid, but I can’t seem to imagine having one with anyone else. Maybe that just means I don’t want one badly enough.”

  “It doesn’t sound stupid,” he said.

  “I have no idea what’s going to happen. I feel like I’m at the halfway point of my life and I can’t see beyond it. I can’t envision a future.”

  “That’s good. It means you’re living in the present.” Roman was still at an age where those kinds of platitudes sounded believable.

  “Are you and Annie going to have kids?”

  “Yeah, we’re pretty sure,” he said. A jolt of envy flashed through me regarding Annie, her youth, her devil-may-care assertiveness, her unabashedly masculine fiancé with excellent communication skills, and as many children as she wanted.

  “I’m jealous of Annie,” I said apologetically.

  “She’s jealous of you, too. She’s a little nervous about me being here. She’s been less open to me having intercourse with other women since we got engaged.”

  “Are you allowed to have intercourse today?” My hand rested on his sternum. I could feel the hair on his chest through his thin T-shirt.

  “Yes,” he said, smiling.

  “Good. So what about you? How are you doing?”

  He said he liked OneTaste well enough, and was happy he had met Annie there, but he was eager to get off the farm, return to running his own moving company, get married, and start his life.

  “Have you slept with a lot of women here?”

  He ran down a short list and summarized the problems that inevitably arose when they wanted more than he could give. It reassured me to hear that regardless of the antiromance dictate, the urge to not layer story over sensuality, the women at OneTaste were still acting on their own feelings. Personally, I didn’t buy Nicole’s theory that our monogamous urges were mere social conditioning.

  “There’s something different about you,” I said. “The fact that you can handle Annie speaks volumes.”

  “She is a handful, isn’t she?” he said with affection. “She’s so fucking smart, too. I’ve never met anyone like her.”

  “You seem so comfortable with women.”

  “A great mom and lots of aunts who adored me,” he said, stretching wide and yawning with one arm still around me.

  We must have talked for an hour. His patient, focused attention readied me more than a finger ever could. I was hovering, eager to pounce by the time he pulled me toward him. We made out for ages, his hands on my face. Every so often he gathered my hair from underneath and tilted my neck back to kiss it. After a long time, he slipped my shirt off and unhooked my bra with one hand.

  “Mmmm,” he said, running the rough stubble of his face and shaved head down over my breasts. “That’s a good girl,” he said as he tossed my pants aside. He still had one hand on my nape. I was a feline caught by a larger animal. Its penis unfurled from the foreskin. I climbed up and guided it into me, leaning forward to fit it all inside.

  “It hurts.”

  “I’ll go slow,” he said, his hands holding fast to my waist. “How’s that?”

  “Oh my god.”

  “Fuck,” he whispered. He growled but didn’t speed up. Inch by inch, over the course of a minute or so, he entered me fully.

  It lasted two hours, which I only realized when I looked at the clock later. He used dirty talk as highlight, not narration, alternating tenderness with force. His cock inspired fellatio to new heights. He was the first man to voluntarily go down on me the first time we were together. When we were done, we lay naked in our initial position, completely at ease. His capacity to talk and listen was breathtaking.

  “I really loved this,” he said. “I hope we can do it again.”

  “It was perfect.”

  Well, almost perfect: I hadn’t come. But I was beginning to trust my body’s wisdom on this. The only other lover who’d held this much promise, Alden, had hurt me terribly. I’d no doubt hurt him, too. Roman was too good to be true, combining Scott’s capacity for patience with more force and presence. He was also taken, and so was I.

  Roman and I made out again the following week, though Annie told him she didn’t want us to have sex for the time being. His boundaries were impeccable. He didn’t even let us come close to intercourse. Whenever I ran into him, he smiled wide, scooped me into a hug, kissed the crown of my head, and said, “Hello, love, how are you?” If he was with Annie, we said hello while staying a few feet away. I began to notice the other women whose eyes traced Roman through the room.

  He updated me on their negotiations. “She knows I want to have sex with you again. I think she’s working up to it.”

  “I don’t know how you guys do this with so much honesty,” I said. “Isn’t she hurt that you’re so attracted to someone else?”

  “A little threatened maybe, but not hurt. My sex drive is a lot higher than hers. We’ve known it from the beginning.”

  A few weeks later, perhaps with the knowledge that I was on my way out, Annie gave him permission to have sex with me again, three-hour sex that couldn’t have been better if I had scripted it. When it was over and he was enfolding me in one of his signature embraces, I pulled back and said, without a hint of sarcasm, “Tell Annie I said thank you.”

  It was noteworthy that of all the men at OneTaste, the one I found most virile was engaged to be married, planning to have children, and on the brink of moving to the suburbs. “Some men are good at containing,” Sabrina had once said in casual conversation. “Others are good at penetration. It’s rare for a man to be naturally good at both.” Roman seemed to be that rare man, but how could I tell—after a mere ten hours total—whether that was his true nature or just his best behavior magnified by my own projections? That, for me, was the inherent flaw in nonmonogamy. It sufficed beautifully as a tool of exploration, but I couldn’t imagine bonding with a lover to the depth I craved if we were constantly allowed to seek out shiny new objects on which to cast our fantasies. Of all the women who lingered around Roman asking for more, I was sure there was only one who actually knew him.

  25

  The Other Woman

  THE MAGAZINE was owned by the same company that published Spin. Early one spring morning, the arts editor said out loud, “Is anyone free to drive to San Jose tonight? Spin.com needs someone to write up the Bruce Springsteen concert.” That’s how I ended up in the fourth row of a Boss concert by myself, jotting down the playlist in a reporter’s notebook, singing along to my favorite East Coast anthems and feeling lonely.

  It was 1:00 a.m. by the time I got back into the city. Most of the SoMa parking spaces were taken at that hour. I found one near an underpass where the homeless tended to congregate and walked several blocks to OneTaste. When I got there, I couldn’t locate my front door key. I dug through my purse and pockets. I backed up and scanned the second- and third-floor windows of the residence, looking for a light that signaled someone was still awake. They were all dark. The 6:00 a.m. alarm meant most people fell asleep long before midnight, and made me loathe to rouse anyone. I decided my best bet was to just drive
home to the Castro.

  I hadn’t been home on a Wednesday night in nearly a year, and though I was pretty sure Scott wouldn’t have anyone at the house during the week, I texted him just in case.

  I need to come home, I’m locked out. Is that a problem?

  He didn’t answer. Scott usually fell fast asleep at 10:00 p.m. sharp.

  I made a lot of noise letting myself into the house: the front door, the door to the flat, my keys, my shoes. “Hello?” I called out. “It’s me, I locked myself out.”

  I waited in the living room in my socks, at the far end of the hallway from the bedroom. Cleo emerged out of the dark and snuggled up to my shin. I scooped her up and padded back to the bedroom. It was empty. I turned on the light and sat on the bed, surprised at my surprise. I hardly ever let a man spend the night with me, other than Jude, platonically. I’d slept at Alden’s only once.

  I undressed and got under the soft blue comforter Scott and I had recently bought. To my right was the locked antique trunk holding our photos and my journals; to my left, Scott’s latest batch of wine, bubbling away in the tiny en suite bathroom; and in front of me, William Blake’s illustrated “Proverbs of Hell,” framed in black and hanging in four installments from the picture molding.

  The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

  He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.

  You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

  The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.

  I fell asleep trying to envision the room Scott found himself in. Was it cramped or spacious? What was the view outside the window? Was he sleeping on his usual side of the bed? And who on earth was this new person here under our covers, the one who used to shriek with envy if Scott happened to brush by another woman too closely or let his eyes linger too long? Had I really matured to some level of sanguinity or was my jealousy just one more little demon lying in wait, ready to circle back around when the time was ripe?