Tom Robbins - Tibetan Peach Pie - A True Account of an Imaginative Life

Our “relationship,” if it could be called that (it was as much a prank as a flirtation), progressed no further, as well as it shouldn’t have: I was in my fifties, she eighteen and surrounded at all times by a battalion of such sturdy, cheese-fed, vigilant Wisconsin chaperones they could have prevented King Kong from getting within an arm’s length of Fay Wray. (Potential hanky-panky was also thwarted due to my having met in 1987 the love of my life, a milepost encounter about which I’ll have more to say later.)

So nothing came of it — except that for years now, somewhere in Middle America, a former drum majorette has been reminding her husband and her children that in Russia she had her own CIA agent. “Is that for real, Mom?” one of the kids will ask, and she’ll slowly crank up that old clandestine smile and answer, “Yes, it’s true. He had a beard and was kinda cute. His name was Tom, and I guess he also wrote books on the side.” And in his English-lit class, her oldest son will tell the teacher, “My mom used to be guarded by Tom Clancy.”

Sometime in 1986, I performed a wedding ceremony for a couple in Seattle. Am I legally qualified to officiate at weddings? Yes, in a sense, and so are you, but let’s not get into that here. Suffice to say that of the five couples I’ve joined in holy matrimony, only one has been torn asunder, a record even a Roman Catholic priest would be hard-pressed to equal. In any event, weddings always seem to make me amorous (funerals, as well, but that’s another subject we should skip for now), and once the vows had been exchanged and pronounced that afternoon, I started looking around for female companionship.

Having spotted a cute little blonde who appeared unattached, I introduced myself, and there being no food at this rite except wedding cake, I suggested she and I repair to some venue de victuals for a bite to eat. She not only agreed but volunteered that she was night manager at a large restaurant on Lake Union, where we might dine well and for free. We did enjoy a reasonably good meal, and though I ended up paying the bill after all, I had no complaints. Not that night, at any rate. However, in the weeks that followed, Kathleen commenced to pursue me, sending me cards, flowers, and fine cigars. I didn’t encourage this behavior but neither did I strongly object: flowers are pretty and as the firm of Twain, Kipling & Freud has seen fit to remind us, a good cigar is a smoke.

When one Tuesday late in the year, Kathleen telephoned to report that she would be traveling up to San Juan Island for a long weekend and would like to stop off in La Conner on Friday night and take me to dinner, I agreed. I had no plans for Friday and as the saying goes, “Give me liberty or give me dinner.” Kathleen neglected to mention that she would be accompanied by a young woman she had recently befriended, one Alexa d’Avalon, an actress who’d been attracting quite a following for her insightful tarot readings at a Seattle cabaret called the Pink Door. Neither did she disclose that she’d shown Alexa an article about me in People magazine (once again, People was to influence my life), declaring, “I’m going to marry Tom Robbins and have his babies.”

On the drive north, Kathleen warned Alexa, “If Tom and I get something going romantically tonight, you’ll have to sleep in the car.” Never mind that she’d made the all too common error of using “romantic” as a synonym for “sexual”; never mind that vocabulary malfunction, it was December, the car in question happened to belong to Alexa — and it was a VW Bug.

We spent a pleasant evening. Alexa was as tall and jet of hair as Kathleen was petite and fair, and sitting between them at dinner I felt as if I was sandwiched between the dual aspects — the dark and the light, the life-giver and the destroyer — of the universal goddess, though admittedly that notion didn’t occur to me until midway through my third Bloody Mary. After dinner — for which I paid, Kathleen making no demonstrable move for the check — we repaired to my nearby house for a toke and further conversation. There, Alexa and I had a lengthy discussion about my mineral collection, with me arguing that I admired rock crystals for their physical beauty alone, regarding their alleged healing properties to be even more suspect than those of certain TV evangelists, who, I’m convinced, are more likely to cause indigestion, anal strictures, and nervous breakdowns than to cure them. Impatient with this two-way discussion and sensing that she and I weren’t going to be making any babies that evening, Kathleen announced it was time to go.

At the door, Kathleen and I exchanged a brief good-bye kiss. Then Alexa, who’d been following behind, turned up her face in kiss mode, too. Now, while I’d certainly liked Alexa well enough, I hadn’t felt any strong attraction to her. In preparation for a rustic weekend on San Juan, she was dressed, boots to cap, like a boy. I’d actually been unsure of her sex when she’d first arrived. But with that kiss… It was chaste, not so much as a bubble of saliva or flicker of tongue tip, yet it was somehow magnetically charged to a degree that for reasons beyond our intent or control — an instinctive reaction, an automatic, involuntary response — we kissed a second time, just as briefly but with just as much voltage. (What was that about?) Then the boy/girl departed and that was that.

No, not quite. Feeling bad that Kathleen had conned me out of another meal (apparently her modus operandi), Alexa sent me a letter the following week apologizing for her friend and thanking me for dinner. I responded with a note of my own, assuring her that conning food and drink was all part of Kathleen’s Irish charm, to which I had no particular objection. I thanked Alexa for her concern, and in regard to an upcoming theatrical audition to which she’d alluded, wished her multiple fractures in the lower appendage of her choice. And that, I once again assumed, was that.

I ought to explain that I was living alone at the time, an unusual arrangement for me, and for once I was thoroughly content with domestic solitude. Surely I’d long been aware that one can never hope to live harmoniously with another until one has learned to live contentedly with oneself, but such was my deep appreciation of female companionship that I’d seldom put that awareness into practice. Now, however, since the amiable termination a few years earlier of a torrid relationship with savory Donna Davis, a union defined most markedly by the size, scope, and frequency of the blips we made on each other’s bedroom radar, I’d been traveling alone and finding the company most satisfactory. Yes, I was dating the prominent sculptor Ginny Ruffner, an extraordinarily talented, intelligent, and delightful individual, but both of us being Southern, Cancerian, art-oriented, and fiercely independent, we were simply too much alike to suit Cupid. So I’d been semi-reclusive for a while and enjoying it to the point of being almost prideful about it. In other words, ripe for a fall.

Christmas — that old pagan holiday that seems to come once every ten years when one is a child and once every ten days when one grows up — was again bearing down on an ill-prepared populace; and Alexa, still feeling a tad guilty about Kathleen’s little con, decided to send me a token gift. The present she chose was a key chain, one of those “magic wand” affairs in which the chain itself is attached to a clear plastic cylinder filled with a viscous fluid in which is suspended a churning galaxy of tiny colored stars. As she prepared to wrap this trinket (which I still possess, by the way), her gay housemate Eddie scolded her for the impropriety of giving someone a key chain without a key attached, whereupon he removed from his own chain a key which he claimed unlocked the door to “some drag queen’s apartment.” As befitting its history, I suppose, they made the key more festive by painting it with purple nail polish.