Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

38. russia with love

Although I’d found my first three books to be generally satisfying from an artistic perspective, and though they’d attracted a loyal following among readers who’d discovered a slice of Tibetan peach pie to be their just dessert after far too many predictable potlucks of good old meat-and-potatoes American social realism (how many protagonists can one watch come painfully of age, how many bad marriages resolve or dissolve; and after a while who really gives a damn if the butler did it?); despite those early successes, I don’t think I hit my stride as a novelist until Jitterbug Perfume. Published in 1984, it remains, aside from Still Life With Woodpecker, my most popular novel, perhaps because it explores from a fresh perspective the pervasive human yearning to somehow nullify that death sentence that each of us is handed at birth, and dramatizes without sentimentality the possibility of an eternal romantic love.

Jitterbug Perfume was followed in 1990 by Skinny Legs and All, a novel inspired not by the Joe Tex tune from which I took the title but by a fascination with the biblical bad girls: Delilah, Jezebel, Bathsheba, Lot’s horny daughters, and most especially Salome, upon whose so-called Dance of the Seven Veils the book is systematically structured, the dropping of each veil signifying the casting off of one of the illusions that limit human advancement. Set in modern times against a backdrop of the New York art world, Skinny Legs and All explores the Jewish/Arab conflict from both an interpersonal and a mythological perspective, and shoves so many pies in the collective face of fundamentalist/apocalyptic Christianity that, considering the violent nature of some true believers, I thought it might be a good idea to accept the invitation I received that June to travel to Moscow with a high school marching band.

The opportunity was provided by my friend Lee Frederick, a basketball star at Bradley University who went on to coach in college and with the Detroit Pistons. Lee had given up coaching to form Sports Tours International, a specialized travel company that organizes tournaments and takes U.S. collegiate sports teams to play and soak up a little culture in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Europe. His clients are mostly basketball and volleyball programs, but he once organized an overseas tour for a chess team, and now he’d been hired to take to Russia a champion high school marching band from New Richmond, Wisconsin. He wondered if I’d like to come along. Well, yeah.

Lee and I hooked up in Amsterdam, where I sometimes go to take the waters, and flew to Moscow together on Aeroflot. His staff had been in Russia for some weeks and everything was organized. The Wisconsin group arrived in Moscow the same day as Lee and I, and all of us were quartered at a quite large and quite bleak (Soviet chic) hotel on the outskirts of the city. That evening, in a dining room nearly the size of Stalin’s paranoia, Lee spoke to the assembly and introduced his staff to the band, its directors, and its entourage: there were seventy-five kids in the New Richmond Marching Tigers and it seemed as if every other one of them had a chaperone. At one point, I stood and was introduced simply as “an American writer” with no hint that I might be on the run from Jerry Falwell.

The following day, the band — all seventy-five uniformed members — assembled on the hotel grounds for a brief rehearsal. It was at that point that I noticed the drum majorette. She was hard to miss: very tall, very blond, striking in her white boots, plumed cap, and short skirt; commanding in the way she twirled, tossed, and caught a baton. She was obviously the prettiest girl in school, the reigning social queen of New Richmond High. As I admired her teen-queen confidence, her regal bearing, her polished moves, I decided to have a little fun.

During a break, I sidled up to her, and with a stern expression said softly, “I know I was introduced last night as a writer, but” — lowering my voice another octave now and glancing furtively over my shoulder — “but I’m actually with the Central Intelligence Agency. My assignment here in Moscow is to protect you.” I paused for her to take that in. “In public you’ll be on my radar at all times. In private, should you ever detect anything even vaguely threatening, my room number here is 804.”

Her blue eyes, naturally large, seemed to widen to the circumference of Frisbees, but before she could utter a word I turned on my heel and strode away. All that week, as the band marched through Red Square, Gorky Park, and along Moscow’s broader boulevards, toodling, tooting, trumpeting, and generally blasting “Jesus Christ Superstar,” its signature number (amazing, baffling, and sometimes obviously disgusting the Russians, who’d never seen or heard anything remotely like it), I, too, marched along — off to the side, over in the gutter — but staying always abreast of the drum majorette, careful to match her stride for stride. From time to time, I’d catch her eye and nod ever so discreetly, indicating that the situation was under control, that I had her back, and by the second day, she would acknowledge me with her schoolgirl version of a conspiratorial smile.

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.

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.