Do You Remember Tulum?

Alex Jeffers

In early 1977, in search of adventure and exotica to fuel his fiction, a callow young would-be novelist from California relocated to the small southern Mexican town that gives the ancient Maya city-state of Palenque its modern name. A few months into his residence, he was visited by his absentee boss, a prep-school teacher, and ten of her students on spring break. Among those youths come to explore Palenque and other sites of the Maya lowlands were darkly magnetic Peter and sly, secretive Keenan. Over the next few weeks, travelling from Palenque to the Yucatán coast and back, Peter and Keenan would overturn the writer’s comfortable expatriate life and make him question everything he knew about love. Eleven years later, the writer returns to Mexico on a spur-of-the-moment memorial trip. At Tulum above the blue Caribbean, he begins a letter to his boyfriend back in Boston to explain his abrupt, inadequately explained departure. Over five days and some seventy handwritten pages, he revisits the dramatic events of that earlier trip and, one eye always on the future, tries to understand and explain how a confused and frightened youth became a man capable of love.