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

Author:Robin Rinaldi [Rinaldi, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780374710811
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2015-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

18

Orgasmic Meditation

I WALKED INTO ONETASTE for the weekly Wednesday night InGroup and immediately sensed a difference. The downstairs room, where everyone gathered beforehand, went lopsided, its locus tilted to a corner where a tall, long-haired woman sat talking with a few others. I recognized her as Nicole, the founder, and even though people scattered about the room, all eyes aimed in her direction like compass needles leaning north.

Eventually we came within each other’s orbit. It was hard not to stare. Her beauty was classic enough to surpass most women’s yet unique enough to warrant inspection. She was of Sicilian stock, lithe, olive-skinned, and almost golden-haired, dressed in expensive jeans, high heels, and a silky blue top.

“Nicole, this is Robin,” Noah said. They were friends from way back, before OneTaste.

She reached out a tapered hand, the ring finger adorned in a thin band of diamonds shaped like an X, and offered a hearty handshake. “Oh, I’ve heard a lot about you,” she said, beaming. Her strong Roman features sat slightly off-kilter, and she spoke with the tiniest hint of a lisp. These imperfections only added charm.

“I’ve heard a lot about you, too,” I said. The few articles published about OneTaste painted a somewhat murky portrait of her past: She had studied semantics and Buddhism, been married and divorced, and suffered a kind of breakdown in her late twenties after the death of her father. All this brought her to the hands of octogenarian Ray Vetterlein, a holdover from the seventies sex-commune scene in California, who took her under his wing and taught her about orgasm.

The remainder of what I knew I’d gathered piecemeal. I’d heard, for instance, she was currently on a macrobiotic diet, and noted that some others were trying it too. Several of the female instructors tended to dress like her. The group sessions she led were called darshans, the term traditionally used by Hindu gurus. Most strikingly, she had coined the highly specialized language used at OneTaste, which nearly everyone mimicked. Positive attention of any kind was an “upstroke,” negative attention a “downstroke,” and feelings of attachment were “limbic resonance.” She preached the long-neglected virtues of the mammalian limbic brain as opposed to the rational cerebral cortex. Whatever she posted on Facebook, OneTaste members echoed word for word, thought ripples on a lake.

I barely recall the rest of that first brief meeting, perhaps because I tried to just stand my ground and not give in to the general swoon. The only swoon I craved happened in the bedroom, far from the realm of language and the power of naming.

After she left, I turned to Noah.

“She reminds me of someone historical,” I said. “I know, Helen of Troy. The face that launched a thousand ships.”

“I think of her more as Hector,” he said. “The warrior.”

*

Though I disliked the guru aura that surrounded Nicole, and the groupthink of OneTaste in general, neither worried me enough to quell my curiosity. My time in twelve-step groups had taught me to “take what you like and leave the rest.

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