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

by Robin Rinaldi

  * * *

  The woman was Charly, the redhead I’d seen on Scott’s phone. She was a thirty-five-year-old software programmer whom Scott had met in a bar six months prior. He’d been seeing her once or twice a week since then. She knew about the project and our plans to reunite in a month. He told me all this the next day when I mentioned that I’d come home the night before.

  “Once or twice a week for six months, and you spend the night. What happened to the no-relationship rule that you wanted so badly?” I had no right to ask this after the rules I’d broken. But the words tumbled out of my mouth like a train pulling out of the station too early.

  “After we decided to continue past New Year’s, things changed,” he said. “I’m too old to be out in bars picking up a new woman every week. I’m not interested. I’d rather see one person over a long period of time.”

  “So you’re saying Charly is the only woman you’re seeing? For the past six months?”

  “Yes.”

  “And are you the only person she’s sleeping with?”

  “Yes.”

  I threw up my hands. “And you think she’s just going to let you go without any drama when May first comes around? A single, thirty-five-year-old woman you’ve been fucking for half a year!”

  “Yes. It won’t be easy for her, but she knows the deal.”

  It won’t be easy for her. The words stuck in my gut like six little arrows.

  Scott found with Charly what I’d secretly wanted with Alden: a love affair. In a bar, by chance, without joining a dating site or an urban commune or putting up with the jerks on Craigslist, he found a woman twenty years his junior who quietly accepted his marriage and the temporary nature of their relationship. He was better at this than I was.

  I counted three distinct reactions to Charly. Intellectually, I told myself I had created the situation, Scott had done nothing (or at most, very little) wrong, and I had to cease and desist from further questions. I prayed for self-control. Over and over I whispered, “Please stop me from asking Scott any more questions.”

  Emotionally, the knowledge of his exclusive relationship with Charly threw me into what I considered my underlying reality, the dark pit of abandonment above which my life had hovered well before the project, and which I secretly feared had even helped initiate it, all so that I could wreck my marriage and fall reliably into its gaping mouth. I lost sleep, endured heart palpitations, imagined myself old and alone with no one but me to blame.

  Most interestingly, a third part of me began to look at Scott with new eyes, admiring his ability to seduce, respecting the fact that I had thrown him such a huge challenge and he had risen to it. My awareness of young Charly caused Scott to grow larger somehow, almost as large as he looked all those years ago when I was unsure and he was strong, long before he had collapsed in despair at the thought of impregnating me. And so while my less mature self resented Charly for entering my marriage more deeply than any of my own lovers had, the woman in me silently thanked her for giving back a reflection of the Scott I’d fallen in love with.

  Oh, how I swung back and forth between the self-contained woman and the wounded girl. One day I was a liberated hedonist, planning out my last few weeks of freedom, the next a shivering urchin locking myself in the office restroom to sweat out a wave of panic, the next a righteous harpy tearing into a cell phone bill for clues to the scope of his involvement with Charly. I had no idea how to manage my lurching emotions other than to ride them out, like I was riding out everything I’d set in motion—riding a tidal wave begun a year ago far out at sea. There was nothing to do now but let it crash us both into the beachhead and hope to survive.

  * * *

  On the morning of my forty-fifth birthday party, Ellen and Caresse, another officemate of ours, picked me up and took me to Foreign Cinema for brunch. Once we had settled in on the crowded patio and ordered, Caresse wrapped her hands around her cup of coffee, leaned forward, tilted her chin down, and shot me an interventive look.

  “How is it going with Scott?” she asked.

  “Great, other than the fact that he has a thirty-five-year-old girlfriend and I’m living at a sex commune.”

  Ellen laughed. Caresse didn’t. I was sure they could see through my blitheness for the defense it was. It rattled me when my friends expressed concern.

  Nevertheless, I continued in the same vein. “Thank god he had that vasectomy. If he ever mistakenly got this girl pregnant, I’d murder both of them.”

  “I think what happened is that after the vasectomy, you lost all respect for him,” Caresse said. I could tell she’d been rehearsing. “But now that you’re moving back in, you have to find a way to regain it. Your marriage will never work unless you forgive him and start to respect him again.”

  “Actually, knowing about his girlfriend increases my respect for him,” I said more earnestly. “Don’t underestimate Scott, Caresse. He’s stronger than you think.”

  “All I know is that if I told Martin I wanted an open relationship, he’d dump me.”

  “And you think that makes Martin stronger than Scott?”

  “That’s not the point. The point is I’d never ask because I respect Martin too much. I think between the vasectomy and Scott’s agreeing to go along with this, you’ve lost all regard for him.”

  “That’s partly true,” I said. “There were times I wished he would have stopped me. Just said ‘no fucking way.’ But I’m not sure what would have happened if he had.”

  When approached with words, truth was as multifaceted as a crystal. Everyone’s opinions fell on it at varying angles, illuminating so many versions of truth as to render them all moot. For as many friends who counseled me against the project for reasons of fidelity, there were others who counseled prolonged infidelity instead of open marriage. By now I was long past the observational approach: Is A true or is B? Which is best? Which is right? It took too much energy and produced little change. Working from instinct, feeling my way through the situation half-blind was a savage method, amoral if not worse, but I trusted it would yield a more foundational truth than the myriad versions at the surface.

  That night, fifty people crowded into our house for my birthday. I’d invited only a handful of OneTaste friends, none of whom I’d slept with. Among them were Margit, a raven-haired Austrian, and her Swedish boyfriend, Oden. They both owned their own companies, Margit’s based in Vienna, Oden’s in Stockholm. They didn’t live at OneTaste. Oden had a flat in Nob Hill, where they met when not working in Europe. I’d been through many workshops with them in the past year. Though they planned to marry and have a family, they considered themselves primary partners with no need to prohibit sex with others, even after marriage. Margit spent many evenings with both male and female lovers while Oden had a long-term liaison back in Stockholm. They took tango lessons, sailed the Caribbean, and vacationed in Lake Como. Margit spoke five languages.

  Margit saw all my dilemmas—about children, nonmonogamy, my marriage—through the opposite lens than did Caresse. I wasn’t struggling because I’d demanded too much of Scott but because I’d expected so little. As soon as I owned my desires without drama or apology, without waiting for the other shoe to drop, it would be smooth sailing. Whenever Margit framed things this way, I let her talk, not wanting to say what I believed: that she was an extraordinary woman—gifted and fearless, not to mention lucky—who should refrain from touting her embarrassment of riches as easily attainable.

  Margit had made it clear that she was attracted to me. When I told her I wanted to try a threesome, she suggested we share a man.

  “How about Roman?” I asked her at my birthday party. I’d already mentioned the idea to Roman and he’d lunged at the prospect.

  “Ooooooo, yesssss!” she purred. She’d given me a long string of pearls as a gift and was now holding on to them as we danced. Oden had just done a comic turn around the stripper’s pole.

  “You’d like him. He’s a little aggressive.”

&nbs
p; “Can we do it next week?” she shouted into my ear over the music, her strong Austrian accent flipping her w’s almost into v’s.

  “Yes, I’ll set it up.” I had only three weeks left.

  It was a good thing, too. I could feel the marriage sputtering toward the project’s finish line like a marathoner about to collapse. The emotional swings and attendant discussions around Charly opened a more forthright channel of communication. Scott no longer verbally evaded me every time we talked; crisis mode rendered him more present. But after an initial surge of sexual exploration—a playful slap here, one abandoned attempt with a blindfold there—the damage now showed itself in bed. In the month following my discovery of Charly, he stopped going down on me. He no longer climaxed when I went down on him. Foreplay practically disappeared. One Saturday night, he suggested we go out to dinner and treat it like a first date. Over seafood just doors away from the bar where I first texted Paul, we sat across from each other asking probing questions about our worldviews, our likes and dislikes, things we already knew. But Scott and I had long ago explored every last nook and cranny of our significant intellectual connection. The new territory didn’t lie in that direction.

  The day after this failed date, both the AmEx and cell phone bills arrived. As I brought the mail back to the kitchen table, Scott quickly tried to scoop them away from me. I pinned them to my chest.

  “Don’t,” he said. I kept my eyes on his as I split open the AmEx. Two charges leapt off the list: a florist and an expensive dinner at A16, one of the city’s best restaurants. On the phone bill, a dozen calls to a South Bay number that had to be Charly’s. Calls at 6:30 a.m. and on weekends.

  Quite unlike myself, I put the bills down, changed clothes, and went to the gym.

  When I got home an hour later, he came into the bedroom as I was undressing. “Yell at me if you want. Go ahead. But please don’t go silent.”

  “I wish I’d learned to go silent years ago. It gets more of a response from you.”

  “I really don’t think I’m in the wrong.”

  I sighed and sat on the bed. “You’re not in the wrong. I’ve broken the rules too. But flowers, A16, calling her on weekends? I don’t call guys on the weekend, Scott, when I’m here with you. I begged you for years to romance me, and it kills me to think it comes so easily with someone else!” Even as I spoke I couldn’t help remembering his belated attempt to woo me at Michael Mina, and how I had checked my text messages in the restroom. The daily love notes he used to leave for me on the dining room table in Philadelphia.

  “Of course it comes easily with someone new. I can’t help that. You’re the one who wanted the open marriage.”

  “And you’re the one who wanted to make sure neither of us got into a relationship.”

  “I’m too old for casual sex, Robin,” he said.

  “Do you love her?”

  “No. I love you.”

  “You don’t call a woman at six-thirty in the morning unless you’re in love.”

  “She needed to talk that morning.”

  I closed my eyes and took a breath, trying to digest the idea of some redheaded programmer needing to talk to my husband at 6:30 in the morning. Did I blow this marriage open because it had given me too little or did I feel compelled to go and ruin it precisely because it had offered me so much?

  “Well, okay, she needs to talk to you the minute she wakes up, so she must love you.” Women had always loved Scott. When they left, it was only because they wanted more of him than he could give.

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  After we’d sat in silence awhile I asked, “What have we done here, Scott? This is all my fault, right? I should have just quietly given in to having no children and no passion?”

  “New women seem to think I have plenty of passion. They don’t seem to have trouble feeling fulfilled around me.”

  “That’s because they’re new,” I said wearily. “It’s all so easy when it’s new. Just like it’s easy for me to get what I want from new men.”

  Stating the plain truth out loud drew us toward each other somehow. Eventually he leaned over to kiss me. We lay back on the bed. When I reached down to feel him, he wasn’t hard—a first. I stroked him slowly as we kissed, but nothing. I pulled away and looked at him.

  “Are you not attracted to me anymore?”

  “That’s not it,” he said. “It’s not you.”

  “Of course it’s me.” I was a bitch and a castrator who had finally destroyed the last vestige of my marriage.

  “It felt like you were really open to me while we were talking,” he said, “but you just shut down.” Rarely in eighteen years had Scott voiced an emotional observation like that.

  “Can I tell you what I appreciate about you?” I asked. I had no idea where this was coming from. I hadn’t read it in a book or heard it on a Deida CD.

  “Okay.”

  “Most men would never have the strength for this whole thing, but you do. You take care of the house and Cleo all week. You’re fair. You treat me like an equal. You suggested the first-date idea last night. You took me to Michael Mina. You’re kind. No matter what happens you don’t give up on us.”

  I paused. “It’s weird but I even respect you for getting the vasectomy. You stood your ground.”

  I bent over and kissed his cheek, running my fingers through his thick hair. He pulled me into a kiss, then pressed me against the mattress. After several minutes of kissing, I felt him get hard. He entered me carefully, as if afraid of disturbing the fragile thread of connection we’d spun from the conflict. But I pulled at his neck desperately and arched my hips to meet his. I felt his cock rooting a poison from my system, cleaning up debris that words could only scatter. In no time an orgasm burst from me in sobs.

  His orgasm, however, was small and quiet. Afterward, when he returned from washing up, he lay down next to me.

  “I think things will get better in bed once we’re back together full-time,” he said. “It might take a while.”

  Would it ever be enough, though, given my new breadth of experience? Even in the midst of my afterglow I thought: probably not. I recalled the other steps Scott had taken—the vibrator he bought, the lingerie set, the weekend at a romantic inn—and how my reaction to each had been too little, too late. For the first time, I found the guts to admit that this cycle of need and lack actually brought me a strange kind of comfort.

  I was so used to wanting more than Scott delivered, to living in a state of frustrated compromise, that the thought of him—of us—changing for good scared me. If the marriage headed to more fertile ground, I’d have to commit to it, mentally close all other options. That was something I’d never done. I’d been physically faithful to him for seventeen years prior to the project but I’d never fully committed. Part of me knew, without wanting to, that I’d chosen Scott precisely because he wasn’t terribly interested in, as he put it, deep psychosexual connection. That way, I’d never have to endure its rigors, and yet I wouldn’t need to blame myself for missing out. Just like with motherhood, I could point to Scott as the reason I didn’t have it.

  26

  The End of the Bucket List

  I CHANGED into the flowery cotton pajamas I’d bought especially for OneTaste, a long-sleeved thermal top, and big, floppy slippers shaped like monkeys. The sun had just gone down and dinner was over. I turned on the lone lamp in my little room, ripped out a blank page from a notebook, and made a sign in thick marker that said: “Tonight I’m yours. Knock on the door, tell me what you need, and I’ll try to give it.” I taped the sign to the door and got back in bed to read and wait.

  Joaquin knocked first. I let him in and we sat on the bed cross-legged, facing each other. He’d spent two years living in Mexico and moved into the residence about the same time as me. He had the look of a wanderer, a man who’d seen things: thin and dark haired, with intense, knowing eyes and a soft voice. He moved and spoke slowly.

  “I just want to talk,” he said. H
e told me how he’d reconnected with his ex-girlfriend, how he couldn’t stop thinking about her, but each time they made a date for coffee or a drink she canceled. He took out his phone and showed me all her text messages.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “The more you chase the more she’s going to back away.”

  “I know. But how do I not chase?”

  “She’s the one who contacted you, so if you give her a little space, she’ll probably approach in her own time. Look where you are, look at all these beautiful women. Why not focus on them for now?”

  “Why is that so hard?” He said it more to himself than to me. “I always want the one who runs away instead of the one right in front of me.”

  “I think we’re all like that. It’s not just you, it’s human nature.”

  As he got up to leave I pointed to the canvas I’d painted at Joie’s, which had followed me from Mission Dolores to Bluxome to OneTaste, and said, “I’m moving back home in a few weeks. When I go, I want you to have that.”

  “Really? Thanks.” He hugged me and smiled, lamplight reflecting in his brown-black irises. Someone knocked.

  Hugh entered as Joaquin exited. “Was it good?” Hugh asked him, laughing.

  “Hef, my man,” I said. “What can I do for you?” I called him Hef to counter his chubby, nerdy persona with a reminder to let out his inner playboy. He was actually sturdily handsome and had killer rhythm. Whenever one of the workshops called for dancing, people cleared the floor around him.

  “I’m just here for a good long hug.” I walked up to him, got on my tippy toes, and sank my head onto his shoulder, letting his big arms engulf me. We took several breaths like that. I pulled back and kept my hands on his biceps.

  “And I want to OM with you tomorrow morning,” he said.