Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

27. the letter

When had it begun, my fantasy of the golden letter? It was probably in my late teens or early twenties that I first became inexplicably possessed of the notion that one day the mailman would deliver a letter to my door that would dramatically alter my life. For the better, I should add: this conviction was in no way a premonition of misfortune or sorrow. In fact, in my daydream the letter was surrounded by a kind of golden aura.

It was sometime in 1966 that I opened my street-side mailbox to find an envelope with the words “Doubleday & Co.” in the return address. Hmmm? Was that a flicker of gold I detected? Impatient, a teeny bit atingle, I read its contents on my way up the stairs to my aforementioned apartment above the machine shop. A fellow named Luther Nichols and claiming to be the West Coast editor of the famed Doubleday publishing house had written to inform me that he would be in Seattle two weeks hence and wished to discuss with me the possibility of my writing a book. Had he been reading my mind?

Entering through the kitchen, where Eileen was making lunch, I held up the epistle. “I think this is it!” I said. She seemed puzzled. “The letter,” I said.

“What letter?”

“The letter.” I waved the document as though it were the paper flag of an impoverished but prideful country. “The letter.”

Eileen may be excused if she didn’t immediately share my excitement. Not everyone has an eye for golden auras.

A fortnight later, Luther Nichols and I met in the coffee shop of the Benjamin Franklin, long since demolished and replaced by the twin corncobs of the high-rise Westin. A lanky, distinguished-looking gentleman, Mr. Nichols ordered a cup of the hot beverage for which Seattle was not yet famous. I — then, as now, clean and sober when it comes to Sunday-school-sanctioned addictive drugs like caffeine (Methodist meth) — I opted for a dish of ice cream.

Following five or ten minutes of small talk, Nichols cut to the chase. Someone had been sending him (he was stationed in San Francisco) my columns — Tom Robbins on the Arts — from Seattle magazine, and he wanted me to consider writing for Doubleday a book about Northwest art. My disappointment was as hard to conceal as the bride’s belly at a shotgun wedding. If he had, indeed, been reading my mind, he needed new glasses.

“Uh,” I stammered, “I was, uh, hoping we could discuss me writing a, uh, novel.”

Now it was the editor’s turn to hide disappointment. How many times during a typical week was he subjected to some delusional hack pitching a novel for which he or she lacked the fortitude much less the talent to pull off. Nichols was a true gentleman, however, scrupulously polite, so he stretched a thin film of interest over his letdown, his ennui, and inquired (yawn) what my novel was about.

I didn’t hesitate. I spit it right out. “It’s about the mummified body of Jesus Christ, stolen from its secret hiding place in the catacombs under the Vatican, and its subsequent reappearance in a roadside zoo in the Pacific Northwest.”

The eyelids of Luther Nichols rolled upward with an almost audible force. His nose twitched, rather like the muzzle of a coyote that has caught the scent of jackrabbit. His spine stiffened. He pushed his coffee cup aside. “Tell me more,” he said, his interest now obviously genuine.

There was one small problem: I didn’t know any more. The Corpus Christi germ had infiltrated my brain back in New York, and gradually realizing then that developing it into a novel (answering at last the call I’d been hearing since literally the age of five) was where my true bliss lay, well, that’s why I’d not been loath to abandon the diligently researched dual biography of Soutine and Pollock. Alas, for one reason or another, I’d yet to attend to that development, not even in my musings. So, I didn’t know any more, no more than what I’d just blurted out. Nichols looked so expectant, so eager, however — and realizing that this was the opportunity the long-awaited golden letter had finally arrived to present — I commenced to improvise a plot on the spot.

It was helter skelter and definitely unorthodox, but my impromptu synopsis (from which I would ultimately deviate considerably) held the editor’s attention, and when I’d concluded my monologue, he asked, “When can I see it?”

“Well,” I said, crossing my fingers, “it’s still a bit rough.”

We separated with me promising to send Nichols the manuscript as soon as I could make it presentable. And that afternoon I sat Eileen down and announced as solemnly as if I were claiming responsibility for the telltale bulge in the bride’s white gown, “I have to write a novel.”