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

by Robin Rinaldi

  “No. Don’t tell him what to do,” Deida said. I stood back up, stymied. I took another deep breath and began running my hands along my hips.

  “Do you see how her energy is stuck?” Deida asked the room. “This is what men call a cold fish. It’s why they cheat. She’s the kind of woman who needs to be slapped, and I don’t mean that offensively. She really needs her energy moved.”

  I turned to Deida in all seriousness and said, “All right, so slap me.”

  “I can’t,” he said. For legal reasons, I presumed.

  “Then help me. Tell me what to do.”

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Act like a porn star?”

  My eyes widened. A thousand bucks and three thousand miles to hear the man who wrote Finding God Through Sex tell me to act like a porn star.

  “Really? Just let loose on him?”

  “Yes. You can’t kiss him or touch him sexually, but anything else is fine.”

  I straddled James’s lap, pulled the elastic from my ponytail, and began running my nose and lips along his neck. He was about thirty-five and sternly handsome. I squeezed his biceps, ran my fingers through his hair, pushed my chest up against his collarbone, tilted his chin back and hovered my mouth above it. He held me by the hips. I ground them into his, making the circles I liked when I was on top during sex, ran my hands over my breasts, moaned, threw my head back, then tossed all my hair over his face and growled at him, making use of the aggression Deida’s comments had engendered. When I finally sat up, I was panting and the room was applauding. Deida looked only slightly more satisfied than before. I got up from James’s lap and a man in the front row raised his hand. Deida called on him.

  “So, speaking for myself, that was a lot,” the man said, and a few others laughed and nodded. “I’d personally prefer something between what she was doing at first and what she ended up doing.”

  “Right,” Deida said. “Every man needs a different variety and level of feminine energy.”

  It occurred to me that I had Nicole in one ear preaching slow sex and the harm of the porn model, and Deida in the other preaching, at least on some level, the opposite.

  “Cold fish my ass,” Val whispered as I returned to my spot beside her.

  In the final exercise of the weekend, the men took seats and the women had to choose a man and sit astride him. Precisely because he intimidated me, I walked straight up to a muscular blond in his late twenties whom Val and I had jokingly nicknamed Hollywood for his leading-man looks. Loud, tribal drum music began playing. Deida directed us to follow the man’s breath and gaze while moving in his lap. Hollywood was a good breather. Following his lengthy inhales and exhales dizzied me. His hands went around my lower waist, fingers pressed to my sacrum. I held on to the back of the chair and rocked my hips in his lap. We began sweating. The music got faster and louder. Several woman were making noise now—ahhh, oooh, ohhh. Some flailed their arms wildly and threw their heads back, building up to what looked and sounded like fully clothed tantric orgasms.

  Could breathing really do that? Perhaps if you had a transparent body made of light and held your hands and spine correctly, or if you truly believed that the way you moved could ever trump the things you said. But not, let’s face it, if you were a bookie’s daughter from Scranton, a melancholy ballbuster whose sexual response was as capricious as her unrelenting consciousness.

  32

  The Brutal, Slippery Truth

  HAVING SPENT MY CHILDHOOD DENYING—quite naturally and without a thought—the fact that someone was hurting me, it proved easy to fall back on denial when I started hurting Scott. I told myself I was lying to protect his feelings, leaving unspoken the fact that my main impetus was to protect myself: protect my options, keep them open. But it didn’t work that way. The longer I lied, the more my options closed. Deception, I found out, adheres to its own metaphysical rules, as stable as the laws of gravity. Scott and I were so deeply connected that hurting him had to hurt me, even if a sheen of self-delusion kept me from feeling it at first. My lies buried themselves like slow-growing tumors. I wouldn’t feel the full extent of them until years later, when they woke me up at night, haunted my waking hours, forced me to sit down on a busy curb and cry.

  And yet, as loaded as adultery is with sorrow and guilt, there’s a reason people continue to practice it. It was so incredibly satisfying to find myself regularly traveling the two poles that rounded out my life—stability and passion—instead of withering away in the cold security of one or burning to dust in the flames of the other. How fully they balanced me. How often I daydreamed of having two husbands, of letting each of them also have two wives. Not an endless polyamorous supply, just two. Would that work logistically? Doubtful. But in the several weeks during which I lived in the gray area, I came to think of the Golden Gate Bridge as a long hallway in my ideal mansion, a bedroom at each end of it where I could finally express both the tenderness and the ferocity in my heart. It was that very combination I’d once hoped Ruby would help manifest.

  Ruby. A baby to cement a relationship, fill in its weak spots. Talk about a daydream. Babies don’t improve sex lives, they kill them. They don’t complete marriages, they stress them. Babies don’t even complete women, or at least not women like me. Right?

  Then what to make of the clipping I stumbled upon one afternoon? Scott was gone camping, Alden was out of town, and I spent the day sitting in my kitchen with Cleo, sorting through old letters and cards. Poking from a folder dated 1988, a yellowed page of The New York Times. I slid it out and opened it, recalling at once how I’d stowed it away when I was only twenty-four, before I’d ever harbored a single conscious thought of motherhood. In it, Anna Quindlen announces she will stop writing her Times column because she has just birthed her third child, a girl named Maria, and some experiences should simply be lived, not pondered.

  I remembered where I was the day I read it, a sunny, run-down apartment in Midtown Sacramento where I lived with the boyfriend who preceded Scott. I’d painted the walls gray and sewn lace curtains for the bay windows. I was sitting near one of those windows reading the paper, and when I finished I sat looking at Quindlen’s words, fingering the newsprint encoding this dual symbol of womanhood—mother and writer, a life encompassing children and self—as if I’d never seen anything like it. I walked to the kitchen, took scissors from the drawer, snipped around the even borders of the text, folded it in thirds, and stowed it away like a secret.

  Biology. Fast-forward a few years from my affair with Alden, around the time I find myself waking up at night crying, recounting my lies, experiencing physically their steely, loveless edges, as if they have the power to fray my insides. My joy has circumnavigated to focus once again on the kitchen, the fireplace, the dinner with girlfriends, the engrossing novel. I’m reading an interview with a gynecologist about the hormonal changes women endure in their forties. She describes how estrogen, which she calls “the hormone that makes us want to look pretty, have lots of sex, and make babies,” surges in a woman’s early forties, one last hurrah before trailing off into perimenopause. The body’s final chance to do what it came to earth to do. “You can always tell a woman has passed into perimenopause when all she wants to do is stay home, wear yoga pants, and read.” I look down at my yoga pants. I marvel that this doctor just summed up the most event-filled years of my life in one sentence. But no functioning adult can get away with blaming her behavior on hormones.

  Right?

  “Truth is often not simple,” George was fond of saying when I would press us to land on some conclusion regarding my childhood’s effect on me. “As you turn inward and dig through the layers, notice how at some point, you become a mystery even to yourself.”

  * * *

  Back when we first arrived in San Francisco, before Scott and I bought our house, before the positive pregnancy test and the vasectomy, we lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Pacific Heights. Each morning before I started in on my freelance writing, I went to the caf
é across the street and sunk into an old red leather couch with the newspaper or a book. I was reading On Mexican Time when a tall, well-built man sat down next to me and said, “Love Mexico. Love the Mexican people. Such a gentle, graceful people. Hi there, I’m Jake, great to meet you.” He leaned forward and reached out his hand to shake mine. “Look at those sandals. You must be a real girly girl.”

  “Not really,” I replied, closing the book and looking into his slate blue eyes. “My husband and I are driving down to Baja next week in our RV.”

  “Derrriving an arrrrveeee,” he exclaimed, dropping his dimpled jaw in mock fascination and holding it there a second. “Love that idea.”

  Several times a week for the next many months, I had coffee with Jake and listened to him talk about his youthful adventures abroad and his simple quest for a warm, nurturing girlfriend—with whom he could eventually have a family—in a city of fleece-wearing, ambitious career women. Because I was a writer, worked from home, wore girly sandals, and loved to cook, Jake thought of me as the exception, and I did nothing to counter this assumption. Jake was my age and Scott’s height. He reminded me of the Italian boys I’d grown up with: athletic, outgoing, confident almost to the point of aggression.

  One day he came into the coffee shop straight from a run in a pair of shorts, waved at me, and got in line to order. I was sitting on the couch, our usual meeting spot. The line was long, and as I looked up from the paper a minute later, my eyes happened to land on his perfectly formed knee, midway between the long stretch of his thigh and the taut runner’s muscle of his calf. Something slipped between my shoulder blades. There were no words attached to it, just a skipped heartbeat, a sense of some small thing reviving itself. I went back to the paper and tried to ignore it.

  A few weeks later, Jake sat in our living room in navy blue dress slacks and a white business shirt, the collar of which he’d unbuttoned. He’d come straightaway from his job downtown. Scott was kitty-corner to Jake in a big armchair, barefoot in jeans and a T-shirt. They were talking politics—Bush, Iraq, Afghanistan. I wasn’t listening closely, just noting the balance between the two. Jake made passionate, sweeping statements about Republican ethics and Scott responded with budget details and Iraq casualty statistics. “Dude, you are blowing my mind,” Jake said. “You’re on a whole other level.”

  Eventually, Jake put down his coffee and placed his big hands on his knees, preparing to leave. “Oh my god,” he said, “what an incredible meal, what amazing conversation. You two are the warm, thoughtful couple this cold neighborhood needs. I am so impressed. So impressed.” He slipped on his navy blue suit jacket, shoved his loose tie into its pocket, and said goodnight.

  Scott and I walked back over to the couch and sat down.

  “He’s a character,” Scott said.

  “I think I want to sleep with him,” I said, the words erupting from me unbidden, an underground jolt rupturing a fault line.

  Scott got up from the couch, paced, then turned to face me. “While I’m out in a cubicle earning money, you’re here at your café finding guys to sleep with?” He went to the closet, put on running shoes and a coat, and left. He was gone several hours.

  “Where did you go?” I asked when he came to bed around 2:00 a.m.

  “Walking through the Presidio. I was thinking of how I dated Rosemary all those years and her husband gave his blessing.”

  He paused and I waited. He didn’t often delve into the emotional details of that relationship.

  “He had no choice. All he could do was watch while he slowly lost her. And now it’s coming back to bite me. This feels like the first symptom of a disease that’s going to kill me.”

  We drove a hundred miles to Sacramento to see our old counselor George. He suggested we up the romance. He told me to greet Scott at the door when he got home, show him I was glad to see him. He told Scott to plan dates for us, look at that book of romantic weekend destinations I’d given him years ago. “The feminine is the soul and center of life,” George told Scott. “A man who doesn’t recognize that and nurture it will be left in the far outer reaches, alone.”

  Then George turned to me, cautioning against my urge to go outside the marriage for any kind of intimacy. “Nonmonogamy creates a kind of fracturing that’s just the opposite of integration. And I know you, Robin. You seek integration. If you want to sleep with others, I advise you to end the marriage first.”

  The idea was unthinkable. I loved Scott too much to leave him. I just wanted him to show more passion because I didn’t know how to show less. Just a little more passion, Scott, just enough that I won’t become unglued at the sight of another man’s knee. I can see now in hindsight how much easier it was to keep believing he was holding something back than to conclude the obvious: He was giving it his all, and his all wasn’t enough.

  I thought: I will do my part. I’ll take the feeling Jake rouses in me and give it to Scott instead. I’ll keep practicing all those skills I learned at the school of womanly arts: flirting with Scott, focusing on pleasure, wearing bright colors, keeping my own juices flowing. I’ll sign up for those pole dancing lessons.

  Later, at home, I said, “Scott, when I was younger and at my most vulnerable, and you were calm and steady, I felt so close to you. But that can’t be our only way to connect. And you don’t really need me like I needed you. So we have to find a new way.”

  Scott listened. Perhaps he was thinking about the time he handed me condoms and a weekend pass to do whatever I liked in New Orleans, and I came home with them unopened. Perhaps he was wondering about all those years when I was sick or depressed and he was the rock, when I needed him to be slow and sensitive to my sadness, not forceful and penetrating. Maybe he was riddling over my nagging to get engaged, then moving out after he proposed. Quite possibly he was wondering, Why am I with this woman when I know I can never win?

  “When we met, there was a wildness in you,” I said. “Where has that gone?”

  He looked at me in exasperation, as if I’d pried out something he’d rather not say.

  “I had to kill that in order to remain faithful to you.”

  * * *

  If I could bring myself to forgive my father his violence, you’d think I could have forgiven my husband a vasectomy. If I could drum up empathy for my father’s addiction, for other members of my family or friends in need, why not for my own husband? For a long time I blamed Scott’s lack of expression, his understatedness, as George would call it, for conveniently blinding me to his suffering. If I’m honest, however, there was also a more germane barrier to my empathy: the fact that unlike the other people in my life, Scott had needs that interfered with my own.

  I could understand why one or two friends had asked whether the project’s main impetus was revenge. But the truth was uglier than that, as revenge at least implies blind emotion. Vengeance may have helped fuel my initial reckless impulse to knock on Paul’s door that first night, but it did not fuel a whole year’s worth of open marriage, and it certainly didn’t fuel my affair with Alden, which was leaden with guilt the moment it began. My approach was tactical. When I realized I couldn’t prevent the vasectomy, I used it as a bargaining chip to get something I wanted: a little freedom to explore the burgeoning sexuality that time and again came up against the walls of the marriage. I had begged Scott to nail me down the way men had been doing for ages—get me barefoot and pregnant, hold me fast under his roof, bind us by blood. Spare me the responsibility of choice. Fulfill my maternal desires in order to save me from other, less sanctioned ones. Those are my sins against my husband: abdicating responsibility, failing to empathize with him, cheating and lying. In the end, I was the one who needed to ask forgiveness.

  33

  The Crossroads

  WHEN I GOT HOME from Miami, I told Scott about the rage exercise, the dance contest, the full moon. I didn’t tell him about my question to Deida.

  “He called me a cold fish.”

  “Are you kidding me?” He laug
hed. “Is he nuts?”

  “He said my energy was stuck and I needed to be slapped.”

  “If your energy is stuck I’d hate to see energy that’s moving.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to come to the San Diego workshop with me?” A ridiculous question at this point.

  I stood next to him at the stove as he stirred a batch of mead. “Yeah, I’m sure, kitty. It’s your thing, not mine.”

  “And you don’t mind me going alone?” I employed this volley as a vague meter of his detachment. “I mean, I look into other men’s eyes, I cry, they say I’m beautiful. It’s pretty intimate.”

  He stopped stirring and looked at me measuredly. “I’m not worried. But when you get back, let’s plan a trip, okay? We haven’t been on a real vacation since Paris.”

  The second Deida workshop had a much lesser impact on me than the first. What affected me most was the drive down the coast to San Diego and especially the return trip back home. I drove through beachside towns, orchards, wineries, and long stretches of windblown grassland. A taco stand in Santa Barbara. A cookie-cutter strip mall where I bought a pair of comfortable pants. All the while I kept hitting repeat on Bon Iver’s “Skinny Love”: And I told you to be patient and I told you to be fine … And now all your love is wasted and then who the hell was I?

  I needed the music to take up all the space in the front of my mind while in back, I clawed my way through a thicket of urge and reasoning. The good girl was long dead but the smart girl was not. She made her case. Enough of these antics, she said. This is your future on the line. Don’t let desire outsmart you. It’s a shape-shifter, a charlatan. Alden looks like some beacon, but it’s going to circle right back around to you. Wherever you go, there you are.

  In the opposite corner, the rumblings of the body. My body craved Alden irrefutably, and in that craving I felt real hope for the first time in years. The body said, You have one shot at this life. One. It didn’t elaborate. While ideas like spiritual advancement, transcendence of self, goodness, and growth swirled through my head, my gut kept throbbing with the same repetitive message: one life, one shot.