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

A week or two after Christmas, I mailed Alexa a note, thanking her for the magic wand. As much out of politeness as any burning curiosity, I also inquired as to what lock might be opened with that small purple key. She responded directly and succinctly, “It’s the key to your heart.” (Now what could she mean by that?) She also happened to include, as if an afterthought, her telephone number. Later, she was to profess that she’d never before been so forward or so bold.

So yes, I did call her but not right away and it wasn’t until I heard her speak — Alexa has a phone voice that if properly channeled could defrost Lapland and half of Siberia — that I decided to invite her (sans Kathleen) to dinner. Even so, my invitation was contingent upon her driving the sixty-five miles to La Conner. (So self-contained was I, so disinterested in anything remotely resembling a relationship, that I wouldn’t even make the effort to meet her in Seattle.) She agreed, and it was on January 17, 1987, that she rapped on my door — stood there in high heels and a tight chic dress, lips rouged, hair beautifully coiffed, looking no more like a boy than a Ferrari looks like an oxcart — stood there radiating a level of vivacity that caused the ink to run on my personal Declaration of Independence.

Surely Oscar Wilde was pulling our leg when he advised us to choose our friends for their beauty and our enemies for their intelligence, yet it can undeniably heighten the pleasure of a meal if the diner across the table surpasses in his or her good looks the sesame bread sticks or the mustard jar. On the other hand, unless one is oneself a shallow twit, ennui is bound to set in long before the dessert course should the personality of one’s dinner date prove less substantial than the odd sprig of parsley, if they have nothing stimulating or at least colorful to say. Based on our first meeting, I was reasonably certain that Alexa would not buckle under the weight of conversation, but just in case the professional psychic should turn out to be a New Age airhead after all, I had the proprietor/chef of La Conner’s best restaurant procure a bottle of Cristal champagne (normally not on the wine list) and have it chilling in a bucket of ice at our table. This most blissful of beverages was my insurance policy against a dull or disappointing evening. Sure, Cristal is expensive, but so is Blue Cross and Mutual of Omaha.

As heavenly as the champagne was, and as well equipped to compensate for any tedium in our interaction, it proved no more necessary than lace on a lily or paint on a rose. Alexa explained that she used the tarot deck and its symbols, refined over centuries to trigger subtle responses in the collective unconscious, primarily as a focusing device. What she actually and actively did in a reading was to tune herself to a frequency that could register subtle signals from the client’s emotional and/or intellectual state, signals that were often as clear to her as if they emanated from a radio transmitter.

She’d had this gift since she was a teenager, she said. Certain other members of her family had it as well, though a little spooked by it, they’d chosen not to develop it, whereas Alexa had embraced it and learned to harness it during a long convalescence following a skiing accident. She took pains to point out that while her sensitivity to patterns of behavior allowed her readings to appear predictive, neither she nor any other psychic could “see” the future. In recent weeks, she’d begun to read my novels, and casually, matter-of-factly offered keen psychological insights into several of my characters, illuminating qualities and motives which I’d developed instinctively rather than analytically during the writing process. Her training as an actress may have contributed to her prowess as an analyst of character, but it didn’t matter: I was impressed. She was not only prettier than I expected, she was smarter.

After dinner, on the short walk from the restaurant to my house, we paused under a streetlamp and impulsively kissed. Instantly, the light blinked out. Scoff if you must but I’m willing to submit to a polygraph test. Once home, we kissed some more, and while these kisses were not as electrified, they were sweeter, deeper, positively nectariferous. At her lips I felt like a drunken bee at the open tap of an orchid. I suggested we take a soak in the hot tub.

The tub was kept clean and heated for my volleyball team. Following a tournament or games against a rival, the Fighting Vegetables would pick up some beer and gather at my house for a tub party. We were a coed team, the Fighting Vegetables, and though the female members all had boyfriends or husbands, those guys were not included. Naturally they weren’t pleased, but our girls, especially those whose mates were sports fans, appeared to get a kick out of this small show of defiance, and the exclusionary tradition persisted; though I should point out that while we were all buck naked, there was never any conspicuous hanky-panky. Bathing together proved great for team spirit, for camaraderie, although I don’t necessarily recommend it for your office staff, your marching band, or your Bible study group.

At any rate, Alexa concurred that getting in the hot tub, minus a gang of sweaty volleyballers, was a reasonable idea. And here, reader, good taste dictates that we fade to black.

The next morning, I took Alexa to breakfast at a Mount Vernon truck stop. Conditioned by my boyhood in economically contrastive Blowing Rock, I’ve always been attracted to both sides of the tracks, equally disposed to the high life and the low life. My date had handled the white-tablecloth dining, the Cristal champagne, with good-mannered aplomb; now I wanted to see how she dealt with biscuits-and-gravy, longneck Budweisers (no glasses), and a jukebox loaded with country music, some of it recorded before she was born. My motives for testing her? Damned if I knew. Fortunately, there was someone present who was privy to my subconscious intentions, and whatever my ulterior objective, she seemed as much at home in this Bubbaesque mise-en-scène as if she’d grown up in a trailer park somewhere south of Big Cherry Holler. It was I who behaved like a goon.

It might have been the first time the subject of the tarot had ever been broached in Crane’s Truck City, but as we waited for our second round of Buds I suggested rather nonchalantly that maybe Alexa ought to read the cards for me someday. She smiled. It was a small yet knowing smile. There was a cryptic light in her green eyes. “I already have,” she said quietly.

“Oh yeah?” I was curious but not overly so. I was mainly making small talk. “So what did they say?”

She smiled again. “They said,” she answered matter-of-factly, “they said you were going to lose your heart.”

I raised my eyebrows. I straightened my back. I might even have puffed out my chest a little. (Don’t you hate overconfidence in a man?) “Oh yeah?” I scoffed “ Really. To whom?” At least my grammar was correct because otherwise… well, that’s how ridiculously cocky I was, how smugly inviolable in my reconfirmed bachelorhood. Alexa, still gently smiling, did not reply. She just looked at me and shook her head ever so slightly, as if to say, “You fool. You poor, silly fool. You don’t know what’s happening to you, do you?”

She was right. I was a fool. A stubborn goon of a fool. And I had only the dimmest notion that something significant might be happening to me. But something was. And I lost my heart, all right; lost it so completely that after twenty-six years and counting, I’ve yet to get it back. From that weekend forward, Alexa and I have been virtually inseparable, at one another’s side day and night, to Timbuktu and back. Literally.