With that painting and a little persuasion from Teddy, I was accepted into the Instituto and given a scholarship, which, combined with the strength of the dollar against the peso, would get me through a semester before I ran out of money. Teddy had a plan for that problem too.
Her friends Pancho and Murray lived in Barrio San Antonio, close to the Instituto. San Antonio was just then beginning to be revived by the droves of wealthy gringos who were moving to San Miguel, buying up crumbling houses far from the city center, gutting and demolishing what was left of the villas, and replacing them with homes better suited to their extravagant tastes.
We arrived at an ornate door behind a barred entry gate. Teddy rang the bell, and a few moments later, Pancho appeared in a lemon-colored guayabera and cream-colored muslin slacks. He had pale-blue eyes and a shock of curly red hair that swirled wildly around his forehead and ears. He looked me up and down and smiled.
“Hello, my dear,” he said. “And hello, Charlie. Please, come in. Murray’s on the terrace.”
We followed Pancho into a courtyard lined with columns and arches. An architect in his former life back in the States, Pancho had designed the house himself. A narrow spiral staircase led up to the second floor; balconies overlooked the fountain and the palms between the master bedroom wing and the guest rooms and an art studio on the opposite side. We passed through a great room with a giant fireplace and high vaulted ceilings out to the patio, where Murray sat at a wrought iron table smoking a fragrant Cuban cigarillo. He was barefoot, in jeans and a white T-shirt.
“Welcome, Charlie,” he said.
Murray was around seventy, lean and compact, with a shiny bald pate. He had a familiar air of authority, softened by the languor of retirement. They were a handsome couple, clever and gentle and funny.
Pancho and Murray wanted someone to look after the house, especially when they were traveling. Pancho had brought a decent nest egg to the relationship—he’d inherited a bundle from his father, who had owned a shoe company in eastern Pennsylvania (his real name was Eugene; he’d taken on the Spanish sobriquet to signify the shedding of his closeted life back home)—but Murray had been lead business counsel for Exxon in South America for nearly thirty years.
They offered me the room at the front of the house and use of the kitchen. I was to maintain the gardens, look after repairs when needed, run errands, be their driver.
“How’s your Spanish?” Pancho asked.
“No hablo,” I said.
“We can fix that,” Murray said.
Murray knew a great teacher, Mariela Suarez, who met with me at the house three hours a day; by the end of the summer, I was fluent in both the language and the rhythms of life in what I thought then would be the last place I called home.
I came out of a portraiture class a few days after I started at the Instituto that fall to find Jim Haltom waiting for me.
“Hello, Mr. Haltom,” I said.
He smiled—a little sheepishly, I thought.
“Seems a little formal, don’t you think, Charlie?”
“What would you prefer?” I asked. “I don’t think I’d feel comfortable calling you Dad.”
“How about Jim?”
“All right,” I said. “Hello, Jim.”
I wasn’t entirely unhappy to see him. We all get a little charge out of being pursued.
“How’s my mother?”
“Well,” he said. “The baby will be coming soon. Everything seems to be going fine.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“Is there someplace we can talk?”
I let him buy me lunch and answered all of his questions about school and life and money before he made his pitch with the old “your mother’s worried sick” line and a lot of crap about throwing my future away. I told him I wasn’t going back.
“If you’ll come home,” he said, “I promise you’ll have all the support you need to do this art thing for as long as you like, here or anywhere else. New York, Paris. Wherever you want to go.”
I lit a cigarette.
“You’re breaking your mother’s heart, son,” he said.
“With all due respect, Jim,” I said, “go fuck yourself.”
I stood up from the table and walked off, with the fierce pride of a child who has just announced his plan to run away from home until he realizes no one will come after him.
I spent the rest of the afternoon desultory. I came very close to caving in and calling to beg for forgiveness. But that stubbornness I’d inherited from my mother kicked in and screwed my courage to the sticking place. I might have been more likely to give in if I’d been living in a hovel instead of the guest room of a swank villa in which I could sit and paint the Parroquia over and over again against a dozen brilliant sunsets.
Seven years after I’d last seen Arch and Vanessa on the lawn at Yeatman, I stumbled upon their wedding announcement while reading Murray’s New York Times. Beneath the photograph was a short paragraph describing their illustrious accomplishments. (I also learned from the announcement that Jim and my mother had finally married.) They were living in the city; Arch managed something called a hedge fund. Vanessa was an associate at a law firm with a string of officious-sounding names. The wedding had been in Nashville, at Saint John’s. They were honeymooning in Bali. Opening the paper to find the two of them gazing back at me, Arch’s arm draped around Vanessa’s shoulder, he grinning, she close-mouthed and demure—even a little wistful, I thought, but that was probably just a projection—left me feeling as cold as if I had drifted off to the edge of space, far removed from their bright center but close enough to remember what it felt like to be warmed by it.
This was the last I knew of them until that afternoon when I looked up and found Arch in front of me. And yet I felt as if I’d been waiting for him there—as if the two of us were merely keeping an appointment.
Arch hadn’t had breakfast. I suggested a place in the Jardin, which was what the locals called the central square.
“You should have let me know you were coming,” I said.
“I wanted to surprise you.”
“I’m glad I was in town. I was in Guanajuato all of last week. And I’m leaving Thursday for Mexico City.”
“I know. We’ve been keeping tabs on you.”
“Really?” I asked. “What, do you have someone following me?”
“No, no. What I meant to say was that we’ve been watching your career. Vanessa says you’ve developed some serious fans among the bridge ladies of the South. She called your agent, or manager, or whatever he is.”
“He’s just Pancho to me.”
“Well, Van called your Pancho to see where you’d be and when.”
“I wonder why he didn’t say anything.”
“She didn’t mention that the two of you were old friends,” Arch said. “I’ve seen some of your work. It’s good. You’re a real artist, Charlie.”
A real artist? Was I? No. I understood the unadventurous taste of my target audience: churches and landscapes, blue skies and sunsets, women in traditional dress manning vegetable stalls at the open-air market. Pictures that complemented a piece of furniture or a fabric pattern, vaguely exotic but still soft and quiet—and, hence, tasteful. So I did well enough. But I was less an artist than a purveyor of high-end souvenirs.
“I found my niche,” I said.
The Jardin was filling up with vendors. Children chased one another around the feet of viejos and abuelitas sitting on the wrought iron benches beneath the ficus trees. We took a table in the portal outside the café and ordered coffee and huevos rancheros. The coffee was hot and fresh and strong.
“I saw your wedding announcement in the Times a few years ago,” I said. “How’s life in New York?”
“We’ve been reclaimed.”
“Reclaimed?”
“Do you remember Alice Hudson?”
“Sure,” I said. “We went to senior prom together, remember?”
“That’s right. Well, Alice finally found herself a n
ice fellow to marry,” Arch said. “Van was in the wedding. At the reception, I was swarmed by a bunch of Belle Meade blue-hairs. ‘Archer,’ they said, ‘when are you going to bring poor Vanessa back to the South?’”
Arch sipped his coffee.
“We were ready,” he said, “New York is great, but I don’t want my kids to be Yankees.”
It was sort of a track for Yeatman alpha males: Ivy or Vandy or W&L, a few years on Wall Street or the junior executive track, an MBA, then a few more years in the city before migrating back home, marrying a Steptoe girl, and going to work for a firm full of partners who still wore their high school rings. Thereafter, a lot of hunting and fishing and playing golf. The Steptoe wife would get into tennis or golf or whatever happened to be the trendy workout of the day, get the occasional nip-and-tuck and plumping injection, work part-time or volunteer at the private schools. Together, they would raise a slew of beautiful children destined one day to do the same.
“How is Vanessa?” I asked.
“Busy,” he said. “Since we moved back to Nashville, she’s been an associate at Wilton, Mosby, and Cobbs. Contract law.”
“Sounds thrilling.”
“Well, it isn’t sexy, but it pays,” he said. “Besides, she won’t be doing it much longer.”
“Why wouldn’t she?”
“Vanessa wants to be a stay-at-home mom.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said.
“She doesn’t want our kids to grow up the way she did.”
“In what sense?”
“Raised by the help. She’s scared to death they’ll end up like Jamie.”
“I can understand that,” I said. “How is Jamie, by the way?”
“Remember Café Divorcée? He bought it,” Arch said. “The old owner got into a little trouble with the IRS. Jamie was looking for something to do with his trust fund. He hired a consultant from Dallas to come in and rebrand the place. They reopened last year. He calls the place Harpeth Junction. It’s actually a pretty nice place. Good food. Jamie gives away too many free drinks, but he doesn’t really need it to be profitable.”
I laughed. “I can’t see Jamie running a restaurant.”
“He pays someone to do that for him. Jamie just shows up whenever he likes and holds court.”
“I guess he’s still boozing pretty hard, then.”
“He’s cooled out a little since his son was born.”
“Jamie has a son?”
“Yep. Name’s Isaac. Three years old. Real sweet kid. The mom’s a little rough around the edges. Crystal was a cocktail waitress at the restaurant. I warned Jamie it was a bad idea to sleep with the waitresses. ‘Don’t shit where you eat,’ I said. But when did Jamie ever take advice? Anyway, when the girl told him she was pregnant, he insisted on a paternity test. Once he was sure it was his, he accused her of getting pregnant on purpose. So they didn’t exactly get off on the right foot.”
“Your mother-in-law must be thrilled to have another cocktail waitress in the family. Especially one named Crystal.”
“Don’t be a snob.”
“I’m not,” I said. “But the former Mrs. Haltom is.”
“Fair enough.”
“How happy is Aunt Cici to be a grandmother?”
“I think she’s seen Isaac maybe twice. Won’t even be in the same room with Crystal. Aunt Cici and Jamie don’t cross paths much anyway. She spends most of the year down in Florida now. Found herself this French Canadian guy. Kind of her ‘kept man.’ When she’s home, she stays in this little town house she bought out near Cheekwood.”
“Who bought the house?”
Arch scratched the back of his neck.
“Actually,” he said, “we live there now. Vanessa and I. Aunt Cici offered it to us. Made a big pitch about not giving up the family home and so forth. Signed over the deed and everything.”
“What about Jamie?” I said. “Isn’t he entitled to half of it?”
“Aunt Cici wrote him out of her will after Crystal,” he said. “Don’t worry about Jamie. His tastes are too unimaginative to run through his trust fund for at least another ten years.”
The food arrived. The bells from the Parroquia pealed. Nine o’clock. It felt earlier.
We talked about Nashville, and painting, and the Yeatman people Arch kept up with. He’d joined the Young Alumni Board. Kip Dodd had retired. They’d had a bust made of him to be displayed in a glass case in the library. Walker Varnadoe had died, of pancreatic cancer.
“Varnadoe gone,” I said.
I thought of the last time I saw him, reciting El Brocense in the art room. For a moment, sadness overcame me, as if all the truths in Varnadoe’s Latin aphorisms had died with him.
“He’d been sick for a long time,” Arch said. “He was already dying when you were still in school.”
“Is that another thing you knew but thought better of telling me?”
“No,” Arch said. “No one knew. Not even Dodd.”
“I haven’t seen the man in ten years,” I said. “I never expected to see him again. So why do I feel so sad?”
“Because you’re a good person.”
“Am I?”
“Indeed you are.”
I couldn’t fight it; my heart swelled. This was part of Arch’s great gift: he could not only make anyone believe in him, but he could also make anyone believe in themselves.
“What about you?” Arch said. “Are you married? Kids?”
“No,” I said.
“Girlfriend?”
“Not at the moment.”
“So you’re alone?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “I have a roommate.”
“I thought you lived with your manager.”
“I did, for a few years, until the work picked up and I could afford my own place,” I said. “Say, what’s with the interrogation?”
“Just curious, that’s all,” Arch said.
An awkward silence fell over us. I can’t speak for Arch, but the feelings stirred in me by the sight of him after what seemed then to me a very long time made the small talk feel hollow. Yet I couldn’t find my way beyond it to what I really felt or wanted to say.
“Would you like to see where I work?” I said. “It’s not far from here. About five minutes in a cab.”
“I’m ready when you are.”
My work space was a barren room in a repurposed textile mill. There were a few easels, a cheap clock radio on a shelf in the corner, a desk with a phone, a lone lightbulb hanging from a wire in an iron safety cage, and a single picture window in an unpainted cinder-block wall, delivering a dusty shaft of light to the paint-strewn floor.
“So you’re making a living at this?” he asked.
“I do all right.”
A voice called to me from outside. Teddy stepped through the door gingerly, but prattling in rapid Spanish. She was wearing a pair of old jeans and a paint-spattered hooded sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up, her hair pulled back in a messy ponytail.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know anyone else was here.”
“Teddy, you remember Arch,” I said.
She frowned for a moment before smiling.
“Hello there, Arch Creigh,” she said.
“Miss Whitten,” Arch said. “You look well.”
“And you also,” she said. “You haven’t changed a bit.”
It was an odd moment.
“Where are you staying?” Teddy asked.
“The Sierra Nevada,” Arch said.
“That’s a great hotel,” she said. “And how long are you planning to stay?”
“Did you need something?” I interrupted.
“Mariela called this morning,” Teddy said. “Lupita fell last night. They think she broke her hip.”
“That’s terrible news,” I said.
“Mariela called me because Lupita was supposed to clean the Aldama house today. So we’re going over there to do it for her.”
She glanced at her watch.
“Okay. I left the keys on the kitchen counter.”
“Pancho and Murray are coming over for dinner tonight, remember?” she said.
“Oh shit. I forgot.”
“Charlie can’t remember what day of the week it is half the time,” Teddy said.
“He was never much for details,” Arch said.
“Will you come for dinner tonight, Arch?” she asked.
“I’d be delighted,” he said.
I followed Teddy to the door. “See you at home.”
“What’s going on?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “He just showed up.”
“You don’t think that’s strange?”
“Do you?”
“Charlie,” she said.
“You can ask him at dinner.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I will.”
I waited until I heard the door to the studio outside slowly close and latch. When I went back inside, Arch was appraising the work leaning against the walls to dry.
“You’re living with Teddy Whitten?” he asked.
I shrugged.
“That must be a dream come true for you.”
“We’re just roommates, Arch.”
“Sure you are.”
“Really,” I said. “I’m not her type.”
“You’re joking, right?”
“The person she was talking about, Mariela?” I said.
“Yeah, what about her?”
“Mariela is Teddy’s type.”
“I see.”
“Mariela manages the kind of places you and Vanessa are accustomed to,” I said. “Teddy helps her out. They’re pretty serious. I’ll probably be needing another roommate before long.”
“Well, good for Teddy,” Arch said. “We all deserve to be happy.”
He glanced around the room. “Is there some place we can sit down?”
I led him out the back door. We sat on the stairs leading to the parking lot. A car door slammed shut, followed by the distant laughter of small children and the sound of a radio through an open window.
“You haven’t asked me about your mother,” he said.
“I was waiting for the right moment.”
He looked at me, and then he looked away. “She’s sick,” he said. “Stage four breast cancer. She’s dying.”
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