I thumbed my way to the bus station. You didn’t need a passport to cross the border in those days, and I was eighteen, old enough to travel abroad alone.

By midafternoon on the sixth day, I was standing in the courtyard of the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico, asking people if they knew Teddy Whitten.

She seemed less surprised than amused to see me.

“Charlie Boykin,” she said. “Did they really kick you out over a silly painting?”

“No,” I said.

“Then what on God’s green earth are you doing here?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You look hungry,” she said. “Are you hungry?”

I nodded.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get you something to eat.”

Teddy Whitten understood better than most people that sometimes, one has no choice but to follow reckless urges.

Part two

Vaulting Ambition

one

More than ten years passed before the morning when, while sitting on a bench in the Parque Juarez, drinking coffee, I heard a familiar voice and looked up from my newspaper to find Arch Creigh standing in front of me.

“Hey, bud,” he said.

For the first few years of our estrangement, whenever I thought of Arch, I felt dizzy with the wounded resentment of a jilted lover. Later, my feelings softened into longing. I wished something would occur to give me an excuse to contact him, something that would feel less humiliating or risky than the facts. Eventually, a gauzy film of nostalgia settled over that time in my life, such that I stopped hoping as I once had that I’d look up one day and he’d be there, as he now was.

“Arch,” I said.

“That’s some beard,” he said.

Arch looked different too—hairline rising a bit on his forehead; crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes when he smiled—but still young, still beautiful.

“I’ve missed you,” he said.

“I’ve missed you too,” I said.

When I’d first found Teddy Whitten in San Miguel de Allende, she took me home and fed me tamales. She had a small place, the corner of an old building a few blocks from the Instituto—a tiled kitchenette; a living room with a futon couch, a bookshelf, and a woven rug spread out on the floor; a single bedroom with a twin bed strewn with clothes. It seemed just the sort of place someone like Teddy would have.

I told her what had happened, what had led me to follow her.

“Does anyone know where you are?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“You should call your mother,” she said.

I shook my head.

“They’ll find you, you know,” she said.

“They can’t make me go back.”

“I’m not sure about that.”

“Let them try.”

Teddy lit a cigarette.

“Can I have one of those?” I asked.