In one ear I heard Deida’s promise of integrating spirit and flesh through polarity, and also the harsh truth of how I hindered that polarity with my own melancholy, not to mention my clumsily expressed demands, all of which probably emasculated my husband more than inspired him. In the other ear, Nicole and my OneTaste friends expounded the merits of delving deeper into orgasmic meditation. They were reporting layers of emotional and sexual blocks giving way, moments of breakthrough and even physical healing, all as a result of consistent OMing. Noah had said he was breaking his “addiction” to long-term partnership and Margit was taking on new lovers even as she became engaged to Oden. But I wasn’t built like them and didn’t want to keep up this level of breathless flux forever. My life was neither infinite nor a game.
I’d confided in Susan and Ellen. I didn’t want to put either of them in a sticky situation with Scott, but I desperately needed advice. Knowing me as well as they did, what would they suggest I do? Susan said, “I love Scott so much, and I love you two together, but Rob, I honestly think the marriage died when you saw how he responded to that positive pregnancy test.” Ellen had a different outlook. “I vote for Scott,” she said. “We all know how this story ends. After two years of passion you’ll want your steady, loving husband back.”
And then there was Scott himself, waiting, on some level possibly even knowing, standing firm as always in his commitments and his principles. Next to him stood Alden, saying I was the only woman he wanted, and that he would wait for me to decide until it became too painful to wait. And far in the distance, framing them both, lurked the shadow of my parents’ marriage, the way it sent me reeling for safety with Scott only to be sabotaged in the long run by hunger; the walls it built in me against both solitude and commitment, leaving me to wander the cramped and sterile space between them; and the fact that it had finally ended when my mother was forty-five—the age I was now.
* * *
The last big vacation Scott and I had taken was to Paris, a full year and a half before the project started. It came right on the heels of the positive pregnancy test and his announcing, that December day in Delphyne’s office, that he was going to get a vasectomy. The week between Christmas and New Year’s found the city cloudy and bristling cold, the sky lowering to evening by 5:00 p.m. We stayed in a small hotel in Saint-Germain and walked the streets each day with other tourists, mostly European couples and families. In the dark afternoons we sat in cafés drinking hot mulled wine and perusing guidebooks. The couples around us were so good-looking and well dressed that I couldn’t stop staring as they lifted their coffee cups, lit cigarettes, leaned in to talk quietly. The strollers parked next to their tables inevitably held a sleeping or otherwise silent infant.
We walked beneath the bare, wintry branches of the Luxembourg Gardens, through the endless hallways of the Louvre and Musée D’Orsay, climbed the steps to the top of Notre-Dame and the cobbled streets leading up to Montmartre. On our last day in town, Scott went to visit another museum while I headed off to shop. I took the Metro to the Marais and browsed the boutiques, practicing my few mangled French phrases with each proprietor, until I found the perfect blouse, charcoal gray cotton embroidered with eyelets, by a Parisian designer. I headed back to Saint-Germain to find a skirt to match and wandered into a shop where a tall, dark man of about forty with a thick mustache stood smiling behind the counter.
“Bonjour,” I said.
“Hello. What can I help you with, young lady?” His English was perfect though thickly accented with what sounded like Spanish.
“I’m looking for a skirt to match this,” I said, pulling the edge of the blouse out of its shopping bag.
“Very pretty!” he said. “Let’s see what we have.” He led me to a rack of beautiful woolen A-line skirts. As I looked through them, he stood behind me chatting. He was from Argentina and had been in Paris twenty years, had a wife and family now, would never dream of living anywhere else.
I picked up a skirt with black paisley swirls on it, reveling in its soft folds. Behind me he asked, “Are you married?”
“Yes,” I said, nodding absentmindedly.
“Do you have children?”
“No.” I looked up at him.
“No children!” he bellowed good-naturedly. “Why not?” I couldn’t help smiling at his Latin-American bluntness, his assumption that we were all one big family who could, and should, talk about anything.
“My husband doesn’t want them.”
“Then get a new husband!” he yelled, tossing his large hand behind him in the air. We both laughed. I went into the dressing room to try on the skirt, which fit perfectly. I bought it and said goodbye and he wished me good luck and Happy New Year.
The image of his large eyes and laughing face came to me regularly over the years, the impervious surety of his accented words. Get a new husband.
Whom should I listen to, the yogi preaching radiance and softness, telling me to slap myself, get my energy moving, and give my husband a chance, or the Argentine shopkeeper hawking wool skirts and free advice in Saint-Germain?
* * *
As I follow 101 North into the city, Bon Iver is on its fourth go-round in the CD player. I pass the Castro and head straight over the Golden Gate Bridge to Alden’s, then, a half hour later, return on the bridge’s southbound lane, trace the edge of the Presidio to Divisadero, follow its crest through Pacific Heights and down to the Castro, and park in front of my little yellow house. Scott is sitting at the kitchen table, typing on the laptop. I hug and kiss him and sit down.
One final interpretation of the Wild Oats Project: an elaborate attempt to dismantle the chains of love and loyalty holding me so fast to my husband that all else was rendered impossible. They had to be loosened first. It takes time—several years, really—to wreck a marriage.
“We have to talk,” I say. How many times has he heard that? The girl who cries wolf.
“I think it’s time to part,” I say. The hammer is down. The loosened chain slides away.
A word catches in his throat. He barely gets it out. “Divorce?”
I nod yes. I am appalled, in disbelief. How am I doing this? I can’t do it, but I have to. It’s like the day I walked into the abortion clinic. It’s like I’m pointing a gun at his head and just pulled the trigger. No, no, no. Somehow I mouth, “We want different things.” I look up and meet his eyes.
Color has drained from his face. This is the moment I will not get over. Two decades—my youth, his prime—half the years I’ve lived on earth are all swallowed up in his ashen grief, already swirling down into his silent realms of strength, disappearing forever. I don’t know what’s worse, the pain of hurting him or the black-pit terror of losing him.
We sit for a long time holding hands, crying silently. This is why people pack up and leave while the spouse is at work: a desperate urge to flee the scene of the crime as quickly as possible. Hit and run. But I won’t let myself. I will sit here with him for hours, days, weeks, at least until the first shock is absorbed. I owe him that.
Time slows and darkens. We enter the path to grief hand in hand. Two weeks later he comes home drunk, hangs up his coat, and sits down next to me on the couch. “I don’t get it. How are you doing this? Are you crazy? I know every inch of your body.” For some reason he is whispering, as if the force of the words scares him. “No one’s ever going to love you like I do.”
“I know,” I say. “No one will love me like you do. The most I could hope for is a different kind of love.” But what if Scott’s kind of love is actually the truest? Charitable agape versus lethal eros. Is it a soul connection and a feminine awakening urging me to throw it away or a maelstrom of hormones, leftover childhood trauma, and middle-aged panic? Or is it all of that? Would you believe me if I told you that I still can’t say for sure?
“I’ve thought about it over and over. It just doesn’t make sense. Are you leaving me for someone else?”
Alcohol has softened the lines of communicati
on, created an opening for me to abandon my cowardice and tell him about Alden. Thus far I’ve convinced myself I’m saving him pain by not divulging the truth, but I’ve also resolved that if he asks me outright, I can’t lie. I brace myself. First I take his hand and ask, “Do you really want to know the answer?”
“No,” he says immediately, waving his hand as if to push my words away and shaking his head. “I don’t want to know. Don’t tell me.”
He gets up and goes into the bathroom. The next week, I move out.
34
The New Year
A MONTH LATER, my first Christmas without Scott. I spend it in Pennsylvania, he in Sacramento with his group of lifelong friends. No doubt they hate me at this point, but all I can feel is grateful that he has them.
When I return, Alden picks me up at SFO and drives up the coast to Tomales Bay, where he is cat-sitting for his friend Matt. Matt has recently become engaged. His three-story condo is lined with photos of him and his fiancée embracing Matt’s young son. There is a roaring fireplace, a well-stocked kitchen, and a long deck overlooking the water. Oversized bottles of prenatal vitamins line the counter in the master bath.
We spend most of the long New Year’s weekend crumpled in the soft white sheets of their king-sized bed. Thick winter light slants through the wooden shades. In the evenings we make it out to the living room to play games and watch movies, and to the kitchen to cook short ribs and drink wine. The world beyond the condo’s terrace and the sliver of bay it overlooks has been put on hold, as if the Earth’s rotation has paused. In five days I leave the house once, to pick up a few groceries and a pregnancy test. My period is once again a week late.
“No way will it be positive,” I say as I sit on the toilet while Alden opens the test. “I’m forty-five, for god’s sake.” Though my last physical showed that my hormone levels haven’t quite abandoned the fertile zone yet.
“Either way, baby,” he says. We haven’t officially tried to get pregnant, though we definitely haven’t tried to prevent it.
“I’m still too nervous to look at it, though,” I say, putting the stick down on the sink. “It needs two minutes. Can you look and then come out and tell me?”
“Sure.”
I go sit on the bed naked, gathering the comforter around me to ward off the winter chill. Alden comes out with the stick in hand and sits down, putting his arm around me.
“It’s negative,” he says.
“Yeah, I knew it would be.”
“Are you sad?”
“Maybe a little.” When I search my feelings, however, I find that the bliss of the past seventy-two hours has made even sadness feel sweet. If it were up to me the Earth would never rotate again. I would live and die in this condo and it would always be 5:00 p.m. on a Sunday in early January.
“Your cycle is probably just changing,” he says, leaning back on the bed and taking me down with him. “Who knows, you could be ovulating right now.”
“Probably not.” I push against him playfully.
“We’ll see,” he says, pressing down on me so I can’t escape.
When we’re done, he rolls away, props himself on his right elbow.
“Put your legs up,” he says. Something catches in my chest.
I lift them, not completely into plow pose the way I used to after Scott left the room, but straight up. With his long left arm he reaches up and pushes against my ankles, slightly tilting my hips back.
“How long do they need to stay up there to give the little guys a chance?” he asks.
“I’m not sure. I guess about ten minutes.”
* * *
How many stories begin with a woman striking out into the unknown seeking adventure, wholeness, healing, and end with her marrying, having a baby, or both? I never quite buy it. She may indeed adore her husband and child, yet we know they bring a whole new set of challenges—and if they don’t, then time will. The happy ending depends entirely on the quick fade-out. But keep the eye pinned to the frame, unfurl a few flash-forwards, and you’ll see a different kind of happiness—wiser, less dependent on circumstance, and, even in the midst of beloved others, unfolding inside a deepening solitude.
A year after I leave Scott, I’m living with Alden in Potrero Hill, in an apartment furnished almost completely with his belongings. Apart from my clothes, books, a nightstand, a desk, and a stained glass lamp that was my first adult purchase back in Sacramento, I’ve left nearly everything behind in the house with Scott. I stop by Sanchez Street every few months to either pick up or drop off Cleo, and when I do, I find that I can’t catch my breath. Sometimes, upon entering the front door, I simply walk into his arms and sob. He tears up too. Then he leads me back to the kitchen, past the stripper’s pole, and pours me a glass of homemade strawberry wine.
Even as Scott fills the house with more wine and art and equipment to use in the classes he’s begun teaching, and even though I’ve left nearly all of our marital possessions in place, the once-cozy rooms somehow appear empty. Even when his new roommate brings in her cookbooks and photos, the fully stocked kitchen looks bereft. In fact, the house doesn’t start coming back to life in my eyes until two years later, when Scott finds a girlfriend whose hobbies are biking and craft beer instead of tantra and therapy.
By that time, when I quit my magazine job to begin work on this book, the grief has landed hard. What I couldn’t foresee is how even an amicable divorce would sever me from almost all aspects of my previous self, not just Scott and our home and mutual friends but from our entire shared history, which is my history. The list of things I avoid out of pain includes countless daily routines, hundreds of songs I used to love, at least a thousand photos of the girl I used to be. Somehow, the divorce has even weakened my link to my own family, regardless of their unconditional support.
I find myself awake until 2:00 a.m., 4:00 a.m., and when it nears 6:00 a.m. and I still haven’t slept, cold black dread fills me. Alden is off in another town working or writing. We find that, in order to sustain itself, our relationship needs regular periods of separation. I drag myself from bed, force down a protein shake in lieu of food, make feeble attempts to leave the house for a few hours. My heavy body trembles; all its exposed surfaces recoil from air, noise, motion, hence walking to the coffee shop becomes a sensory marathon. To get through the day I must employ a fistful of prayers, texts to Susan and my mother, and a stinging hot bath.
I am able, though, to regularly make it to a park at the top of Potrero Hill that looks west over the city toward Twin Peaks, where Sutro Tower looms above the Castro. The fog flowing in from the Pacific obscures three-fourths of the giant red and white antenna tower, leaving only its two upper spires hovering in the clouds like a masted ship lost at sea. I trace my eyes down to the terra-cotta bell tower of Mission Dolores, then strain them a few blocks north, trying to locate the corner of Sanchez and Market. Somewhere down in that ever-changing city I had my first real home. It took me forty years to find it, and I cherished it for less than two years before I began tearing it down. The arithmetic is unbearable to ponder.
One year later, Alden and I are living in Los Angeles, and as the grief settles and makes itself a permanent part of me, coincidences begin to take shape. How sometimes, when Alden gets upset, I turn focused and reticent, a silent grounding rod to counter his emotion. How adjusting my voice to a slower, calmer register, which at first feels suppressive, begins to feel, after a while, like kindness. How his expressiveness, which fires up our relationship, also requires me to put aside my own needs sometimes. I shake my head at the karmic process by which I’ve gradually come to understand my marriage only by leaving it.
Expecting marriage to provide passion, in addition to the security and friendship it offered, seems, in the calm wisdom of hindsight, naïve and unfair. And yet, even though I knew that passion and safety don’t often commingle, I couldn’t give the desire up. On midlife’s stark stage of last chances, decisions must be made. In choosing Alden, I had thought I
was tossing aside one for the other, but instead I got both—passion with him and security from a new, unexpected source: myself.
This is how desire wound its way around the lessons I failed to learn through self-discipline.
I don’t regret going into the dark; I don’t regret my wildness. No matter what price I had to pay in guilt and heartbreak—and I wish I’d been the only one to pay—I stopped doubting my decisions early on, back in that bedroom overlooking Tomales Bay in the first days of January. Alden holds my legs aloft. As you might have guessed, baby will not make three. There is no baby; there is instead the book you hold in your hands. As I lie silently with him, my feet dangling in the darkening blue light, the room shifts into focus and suddenly I recognize it as the place that has been calling to me for years, where yearning is honored and everything new is conceived. A sacred place perched halfway between this world and the next, so beautiful I would have given anything to glimpse it, even if only for ten minutes.
Acknowledgments
Thank you first and foremost to Jay O’Rear, my kindred spirit, for leading me in myriad ways to the birth of this book, and for generously supporting it despite the difficulties involved.
Thank you, Scott Mansfield, for encouraging me to write this story on top of everything else, and for your unfailing example of kindness.
Thank you to Chris Bull and Matthew Lore for emphatically stating, “You have to write about this,” before I had any intention to do so, and to David Hochman for believing in the book before I did.
Thanks to my agent, Ethan Bassoff, and my editor, Sarah Crichton; I feel very lucky to have landed you both.
Thanks to Sarah Lynch, Leilani Labong, Margaret Jones, and Maraya Cornell for patiently reading drafts and providing invaluable feedback.
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