Platres Conclave

“English. English, please. We have an American guest.”

I normally would have taken that as a friendly gesture, but I felt the sarcasm and condescension at the core of Elias Mikalaides’s request that the men of the conclave discuss their topic in a language I could understand when we had gathered at Elias’s bungalow late the next morning. It was like he was sticking their bilingual fluency at me, and I wondered how good his French was. He was sitting at a long table, the cat, Ele, curled in his lap and purring, every inch the Oriental potentate.

As if to punctuate Elias’s tone of superiority, all of the men immediately switched from Greek to impeccable British English. It wouldn’t have mattered much, really, if they had remained in Greek, as I was sitting off to the side and they were discussing esoteric references in ancient Greece to the concept of “beauty.” It wasn’t until they progressed to talking about what they said was the overworked motif of Venus—Aphrodite here in Cyprus—arising from the sea on a clamshell that I could be completely sure that they were talking about the concept of beauty at all.

This was the first time in the day that Nico had turned to me and directly addressed me—he hadn’t answered my knock at the door to his room at the Forest Park before breakfast, and I’d seen him just finishing his breakfast here in Elias’s house as I arrived. So, I then assumed he’d spent the night here, with Elias.

I almost hadn’t come. Elias had been dismissive of me the previous day, and I couldn’t get the image of Nico topping him the previous night out of my mind. Just the thought of it disgusted me—but it also raised my hackles and my jealously. This, in turn angered and frustrated me, as, though I had wanted Nico to fuck me—continuously—I’d told myself it was just a week’s fantasy fling before returning to real life.

I tried to pretend that I hadn’t come really so that Nico could see Spiro showing interest in me. But I’m sure there was some painful truth that this was the case. And Spiro, indeed, was showing interest in me—more than Nico was.

When the names “Venus” and “Aphrodite” were invoked and were being used interchangeably, Nico turned to me. “Venus is the mainland Greek version and Aphrodite is ours, Collin. Our Aphrodite rose from the waves near some distinct rocks out in the water on the coast between here and Paphos. We’ll have to visit there.”

I merely nodded, still stinging that he had so readily deserted me—for this . . . this walrus of a man sitting there on his throne in his own living room. Living room was a good term for it, I thought, as I looked around. It was a large room—an enormous room, really. There were a couple of conversational areas sitting around composed of old, run-down, but comfortable-looking upholstered furniture, but the room swallowed these up. This also was Elias’s dining room. The conclave was sitting around a massive pine table, aged almost to black—all except for me, of course. I was sitting off to the side in a rush-bottomed peasant chair. All of the chairs at the table were similar to mine except the massive armed and carved oak chair at the end of the table where Elias sat, stroking his fat, contented cat.

The room, mainly, though, was Elias’s studio. Paintings in various stages of finish were hanging on the walls and propped up against each other and various pieces of furniture throughout the room. As Elias’s primary style was exuberant naïve landscapes, the room was dressed in a riot of color. There also were some abstracts—Elias had had his Picasso period, apparently—but these too were quite colorful. The impression I got from Elias’s paintings was that he insisted that the painting dominated, almost to excess, any space it was in. In this, I thought the paintings represented the artist well. Set at the far end of the room from where the conclave sat was a raised wooden dais, positioned under theatrical lighting trained at it from the ceiling. At the moment a high-legged bench was sitting on the dais, covered by a gold lamé cloth that glittered in the stage lighting.

“What we could do in art, of course,” Spiro Charalambou said, “was turn the clichés on their heads. For instance, I could take the Aphrodite image and substitute a sexy man—a George Michael or a Ricky Martin, or the movie star Henry Cavil—rising naked from Petra tou Romiou—that’s Aphrodite’s Rock in English,” Spiro said, turning his face and a sultry smile to me. “Or, more to hand, I could paint our young American friend here.”

“And so, you have already chosen your model for this week, have you?” the novelist Nemo Constantinou asked in a gruff voice?

“Yes, yes, I have,” Spiro answered, still looking directly at me. He motioned for me to come to the table, to a seat next to him. He had his hand in my lap before I had settled myself in the chair. I put my hand on top of his, holding his there on the outline of my cock. Yes, you can fuck me; just tell me where and when, I was transmitting to him as best I could.

After that, the discussion drifted off into esoteric points of ancient Greek legend on the topic of beauty that went completely over my head. As I sensed the discussion becoming more intense and technical, with the momentary mention of hunger and the possibilities of what and where for lunch during brief lulls in the conversation not showing any signs of bringing the session to a close, I moved Spiro’s hand from my lap—without him seeming to notice—and rose and drifted around the room, looking at the various artwork.

It was a gesture—I wanted Spiro to understand that I was bored with the discussion and that, if he wanted me, I was ready to go somewhere with him. But Spiro was as much into the discussion now as any of them were, as was Nico. I could hardly play two men off against each other who had forgotten I was in the room.

I quietly left the house. Spiro wasn’t keyed up enough to focus on me in this minute. And I suddenly didn’t know what would happen when the conclave did break for lunch. Although I had been seeking him ever since the night before, I suddenly felt I didn’t want to endure a meeting with Nico. I didn’t know what to say to him. I could hardly be indignant; I had no hold on him. His change in focus had just been too abrupt. But I should be able to understand that. Elias Mikalaides undoubtedly was the island’s foremost artist. It didn’t matter really what he looked like; the strength of his personality obviously was enough to attract Nico, who was no slouch in the charisma category himself—at least in relationship to me.

I walked briskly back to the hotel, hoping that Nico would not come after me—but aching for him to do just that—and half hoping that Spiro did come after me. When I reached there, rather than going into the hotel, where Nico may, in fact encounter me at lunch—I asked the attendant at the entrance to bring around my Jaguar and I drove up to Prodomous, just below the peak of Mount Olympus, for lunch and then on up to the peak, the highest point on the island. It seemed that every highest point in a Greek region was named Mount Olympus—as a signal to the gods where they could touch the earth. I had intended to make this excursion during my vacation anyway, so I wasn’t really escaping anything in Platres—or so I could pretend to myself.

I managed not to return to Platres until almost 5:00 p.m., having driven on from the peak to the Kykkos Monastery and arriving when the monks’ choir was in the process of giving a concert of Gregorian chants through the ages. Sitting and listening to them calmed my nerves—at least until I looked at the program, which was in Greek, but was able, with the lessons I took before arriving in Cyprus, to pick out the name of Xanthos Economou among the composers of the modern section of the concert—the same composer who was in the spring Platres Conclave. It seemed I could not escape this group now. I couldn’t be inside it, but I couldn’t draw away from it either.

I had intended, really, just to cut away from the group, but as I came down from the heights and into Platres, I found myself parking on the main road of the village rather than driving up to the hotel, and my feet carried me to the door of Elias’s bungalow, where the conclave was scheduled to reconvene for individual work on their projects at nearly this precise time.

Most of them had already gathered in Elias’s spacious studio living room. Nico wasn’t there and Elias wasn’t in the room either. He was still snoozing away his siesta in his bedroom, which opened directly off the main room and the door of which wasn’t closed. He lay on his bed like a beached whale, once again in his orange kimono and—as it had partially fallen away from his body—in nothing else.

The composer, Xanthos Economou, wasn’t there either, and I noted in my mind that I should mention when I saw him that I’d heard his music at Kykkos and was very impressed.

Costas Spyrou, the poet; Thanos Adamou, the sculptor; Nemo Constantinou, the novelist; and Spiro Charalambou, the fine artist were all sitting at the table. Arrayed in front of them was a massive collection of wine bottles.

“Come, come, Collin,” Spiro called out to me with a big smile and an expansive wave of an arm, “as we contemplate the beginning of our separate searches for beauty in art, we are having a wine sampling—trying to decide what is the best wine produced by Cyprus. Come help us decide.”

I had already developed a weakness for Cypriot wine, so I moved to the table and sat in the chair Spiro was holding out for me—close beside him. And I must admit that I was comforted when Spiro’s hand immediately took a possessive position below the surface of the table on my basket again.

We sipped and, increasingly, more fully drank of the wine there. And we laughed and joked, and I came as near as I ever had—or ever would—to feeling part of the conclave in the hour and a half in which we all became quite mellow indeed—with the possible exception of Nemo, who kept himself mainly in glowering reserve, although he didn’t stint on including himself in the drinking.

Spiro started me with the light, white Aphrodite as, he said, a bridge from the discussion earlier in the day, and we moved to the Palamino, which was my favorite white. I’m not sure at what point we switched to reds, but I do remember the full-bodied Othello and the much fuller, almost port, Commandaria. It was during Spiro’s explanation to me, with me very much in a haze but enjoying the musky thickness of the wine, that Commandaria was the oldest named wine still in production, dating back to 800 b.c., but named during the crusades of King Richard’s time in the twelfth century, when he suddenly changed gears and asked if I would be his model—in the nude. He was touching me lightly on the arm again with that soft, electric touch of his, fondling me under the table top, and looking at me under his thick eyelashes like I was some sort of sweetmeat.

He was gorgeous, and I was frustrated by whatever was or was not happening between me and Nico, and I was more than half way to drunk. I said yes. I would, of course, have gone off with him and let him do anything he wanted to do with me. Posing for him in the nude in front of the others, though, was, without the fortification of the wine, a harder “yes” to give.

From the other side of me, Thanos said he would also like to sculpt me as his image of the beauty theme, which I found flattering.

Spiro than asked me if I’d model right there so that Thanos could work too. And I said yes, aglow with the attention I was receiving—not to mention weakened by the wine.

Nemo, who had been glowering at us from across the table, stood, said something about starting to work on a short story, and retreated to a desk in the corner. This appeared to be a signal to the poet, Costas Spyrou, as well, and he went to the porch across the back of the room, overlooking a ravine, and sat in an armed bamboo patio chair with a tablet of paper on his lap, a pencil in his hand, and a pensive, withdrawn look on his face.

Spiro decided to pose me as an ancient Greek boxer resting from a victory in the games. As I stripped for him, he and Thanos went out into the garden and selected laurel vines, which Thanos formed into a wreathed crown as Spiro went through a door into what seemed to be a bedroom at the other end of the bungalow from Elias’s bedroom and next to a kitchen. Through the door, I could see the figure of a woman, with short hair, in a red silk dress sitting at a vanity. The image surprised me, and I suddenly felt conscious of being nude in a way that I didn’t feel just in the company of men.

Spiro shut the door on the room when he came back into the main studio. He was carrying a pair of lace-up leather sandals and some earthen-colored leather thong strips. As he posed me on the bench on the dais, he explained to me that all I would be wearing as an ancient Greek boxer were the sandals, which laced in criss-crosses up my calves to just below my knees, and the thongs, which he said were called himantes when used this way, wrapped around my knuckles to protect them from scrapes during a boxing match, which was a no-holds-barred one in the ancient tradition.

Both men touched and ran their hands along the lines of my body as Thanos set the laurel wreath on my head and then held my head this way and that and ran his long, sensitive fingers along the contours of my face and neck, getting the measure of me so that he could start working on a clay lump sitting on a small pedestal stand nearby. Simultaneously, Spiro was manipulating my body to the pose he preferred. I was sitting in the middle of the bench, still covered in the gold lamé, one foot resting on the bench at an angle from my body, with the elbow of one of my arms propped against this leg. The other leg dangled off the front of the bench, only touching the surface of the dais as my toe reached down for it. My other arm was stretched out toward the end of the bench. This left me, chest stretched out at an angle, in a pensive pose, as if at rest, contemplating a recent hard-won victory. Spiro set the wreath slightly askew around my brow and asked me to smile slightly and luxuriate in a victory reverie.

I was glad that they didn’t take too long in manipulating my body, as I was working hard to control its response to their delicate, seductive touch.

Spiro went to an easel and Thanos to his pedestal, and for a good hour silence reigned over the studio. Eventually, however, I realized that I could hear a hum from the room where I’d seen the women. She was humming a haunting tune in a low contralto, and she seemed to be playing with the tune, developing it. It was start and go for several bars and then stop and start again and go for a few longer bars than the first time.

It became clearer, as if no longer beyond a closed door. I so wanted to turn my head to see if she had come out of the room, and I felt trapped, not wanting a complete stranger to see me naked like this. Then I knew that she was coming into the room; I could both sense her presence—and there was a floral scent in the air—and hear the rustling of the silk dress. She floated into my peripheral vision and beyond. She was moving over to the desk where Nemo was furiously writing. She leaned down, over his shoulder, lifted his face up to hers with a hand under his chin, and the two began to kiss. Nemo lifted a hand to her bodice, unbuttoned her dress there, and inserted his hand.

I watched as they became increasingly intimate and then, nearly lost my pose in shock and surprise as Nemo stood and turned the other figure in an embrace and started to guide them both over to an overstuffed parlor chair. It wasn’t a woman at all, I realized. It was the composer, Xanthos Economou, in a woman’s dress. Nemo sat in the chair and Xanthos knelt in front of him and unbuttoned the fly of his trousers and fished out a short, but impressively thick cock and began to suck him off.

I tore my eyes away from that spectacle at the sound of someone entering at the front of the bungalow. It was Nico. He walked in and then stopped, dead in his tracks, as he saw me on the dais. I saw his eyes narrow and a flash of anger slice across his face, which immediately after turned into a look of nonchalance and detachment. I followed the movement of his dance-like gait as he turned and went into Elias’s room.

With an anger and frustration of my own, I watched Nico put his hands on Elias and move the kimono away from the older artist’s corpulent body and then move a hand down to cup his cock and balls while leaning over and kissing his nipples and throat and then his mouth until Elias stirred and opened his arms to the younger man. The cat, Ele, which had been in the crook of Elias’s arm, stirred and stretched and settled down by Elias’s side, seemingly oblivious to the coupling of her master and Nico.

My eyes went back to Nemo and Xanthos. Xanthos was sitting in Nemo’s lap, facing him, the red silk dress gathered up around his chest, his channel skewered on Nemo’s cock. Their chests were plastered together and they were kissing deeply as Nemo pumped his cock up into Xanthos’s channel. Xanthos’s legs were spread and raised over the back of the upholstered chair. Xanthos’s pasty legs were sheathed—but only up to the knees, in sheer silk stockings.

I shuddered at this image and looked back into Elias’s bedroom, where Elias’s legs were open to Nico now and Nico was crouched between them and lost in the rhythm of the fuck. The cat slept on against Elias’s side as if nothing was happening.

I shut my eyes for several moments, trying to close it all out. When my eyes were shut, though, I realized how tipsy I had become. When I was all alone within myself like this, I realized how easily I had agreed to strip and sit here in the nude. The world of my mind was spinning in flashes of images and swirls of color on the insides of my eyelids.

I felt the lips on mine before I opened my eyes. And I left them closed, as I opened my lips to him and gave the sweet taste of his tongue—the Commandaria still thick on it—free access. He was flicking his tongue in and out between my parted lips and I sighed for him.

I opened my eyes to see that it was Spiro leaning over me, adjusting my pose now, so that I was fully facing him and he was leaning into me between my knees. he was naked and I felt his hard cock pressing at my belly. He embraced me in his arms, supporting my torso as I leaned back and moaned at the touch of his lips moving to my throat and then to my nipples. His attentions went to my sternum, pausing to flick his tongue in and out of my navel. Down my lower belly into my tightly curled pubes and swallowing my cock and pressing his tongue into my piss slit and flicking it there until I jerked and came, filling his mouth with my cum.

He rose back up to where he was looking down into my face and smiling as I rolled my buttocks up and hooked my legs on his hips.

“There, I want to capture that look in your eyes in a painting too,” he murmured. “Postcoital, satisfied and mellow.”

I lurched and started to give a little cry as he began to enter me, but he leaned down and took my lips in his again and we went into a deep kiss until he had entered me fully.

“And your expression like this, too,” he said when he released my lips. “Possessed. Giving yourself to another man.”

He pulled his face away from me then and gave me a questioning look with his eyes.

“Yes, oh yes,” I whispered and then I groaned and starting moaning deep in my chest as he began to take me in long, deep strokes.

I looked beyond Spiro and saw that all attention was on us now. Xanthos was still mounted on Nemo’s cock but their faces were now turned to us. Thanos was standing nearby, his hands covered with clay, the bust on the pedestal already well formed into a human head. The poet, Costas, was standing in the doorway to the porch, watching. Even Nico and Elias were watching. Elias had come out of the bedroom and was seated at an easel with a large canvas in front of him. He was peeking around the side of the easel at us, and his right hand, in which he held a paint brush, was racing across the canvas. The cat, Ele, was winding around his legs and purring.

I was leaning back, Spiro’s arm under my waist giving me support and holding me in place. My head was arched back and my hands were clutching Spiro’s shoulder blades and my knees were hooked on his hips as his cock slid in and out, fucking me deep. I was both self-conscious about all of the others watching us fuck, but I was completely under Spiro’s control, moaning to the working of his cock inside me.

Nico was lounging in the doorway into Elias’s bedroom, leaning provocatively against the frame, his cock-ringed manhood hanging low between the legs that were crossed at his ankles. He had a tight little smile, but his eyes were frowning and were dull, as if he had transported himself somewhere else altogether.

Spiro came with a long sigh and withdrew. Later I decided this was the point that I should have taken some charge, but I didn’t. As Spiro withdrew, the hard, lust-laden face of Nemo swam into view. He took my hands and stripped the thongs off my knuckles. Then, with a strong, firm, no-nonsense, no-questioning grip, he pulled me up and turned me and laid me back down on the bench on my belly.

I didn’t struggle—possibly I should have—as he used the thongs to tie my wrists and ankles at the four legs of the bench. It was all a haze, though. As if it wasn’t happening. As if it was, I’m ashamed to say, what I wanted to happen—what I wanted Nico to see. I think I wanted Nico to step in, to save me, to carry me off to our love nest in the Forest Park and to reclaim me. To fuck me silly.

But he didn’t. Nemo was being rough, manhandling me as he bound me in place, on my belly, my ass presented for all comers.

And all comers it was. Nemo crouched over me from behind and reached around and grabbed my chest and brutalized my nipples between thumbs and forefingers while he thrust his thick cock into me and I writhed under his hard, pistoning fuck.

Thanos was next. I could tell by the cool clay feel of the hands on my hips as he slowly stroked me, leaning over and thanking me and telling me how beautiful I was in whispers near my ear after he had come. The poet, Costas followed. His cock was curved and he knew how to find the prostate with it, and I moaned and came as he also leaned his lips close to my ear and whispered love poetry, in praise of beauty—or so he said.

Even the transvestite composer, Xanthos, took his turn, which I could tell by the feel of the folds of the bunched-up silk dress on my lower back. Although with him it was tentative and weak, half-hearted irregular, off-beat strokes, which I believed, confirmed by the two separate tones of grunts and groans behind me, were controlled by Nemo being inside Xanthos from his rear while Xanthos was mounted on me.

Could this be any more demeaning, despairing than this, I thought, as Xanthos pulled out of me, not having ejaculated as far as I could discern. And then the answer came. Yes, it could. Nemo was forcing himself inside me again, pistoning me hard. And someone was on the other side of the bench now, cupping my head in the broad palm of his hands, lifting my mouth to his cock—a cock with a thick silver cock ring in it.

While Nemo was taking me a second time, Nico was working my mouth with his cock. My savior had arrived. But not to save me. When Nemo was finished, the hard ring of Nico’s cock was working my channel—almost endlessly—before he came with a huff and a little cry of release.

By then I was drained, drained and bereft, and totally cowed, my limbs just flopping down along their imprisoning bench legs. I knew that the thongs would not have been strong enough to hold me if I had wanted to just pull away and gather up my clothing and walk out of the bungalow. But I had wanted Nico to save me. I had wanted him to make a choice, and for that choice to be me, not the conclave.

But the choice he made wasn’t me.

The ultimate insult of all—ironic considering the circumstances—was that Elias did not take a turn. To the end he was insulting, above me, disdaining, dismissive.

I don’t know how I came to be in Elias’s bed, but that’s where I was taken, with Spiro embracing me from one side and Thanos from the other, and both of them, using their artists’ hands to explore and memorize and bring to life from the earlier despair a body that responded to their baser needs, one after the other, until finally I drifted off into the stupor of wine-drenched sleep. I participated fully in each of the fucks this time. I had no reason to hold back. I was totally free—more free than I obviously had wanted to be.

In the end, I knew this would be good for me. I could go back to Nicosia having gotten what I thought I had come to Platres for—a wild, hedonist weekend. A final fling before Carolyn descended on me and my cage was shut once more. I had almost gotten more. It was a blessing, I told myself, that I hadn’t gone there—or if I’d gone there, that I’d been jerked back from the brink.

When I woke, it was dark outside and I felt a crushing aloneness. I could hear the festivities in full swing across the street at the Plaka. I could hear Nico singing there and Spiro playing his guitar and the boisterous voices of various members of the conclave. They had moved on. Without me. What a surprise.

I wondered if my inclusion in their conclave was an anomaly, or if this was the routine. Did Nico always pick out and seduce some unwary tourist to be the group’s fuck slave for the week? Was I just a planned part of the entertainment?

I struggled off Elias’s bed, feeling squeamishness now at having had sex in the same bed Nico had fucked him. I padded out into the main room and surveyed the art work my taking had inspired. The cat, Ele, rubbed against my ankles and purred as she had done for Elias—no doubt only friendly because he wasn’t here. Both Spiro’s painting and Thanos’s sculpture were unfinished, but were well on their individual ways. Both were fundamentally rendered, only needing polishing and touch up, and both would, I was sure, be masterpieces.

Elias’s painting, in contrast, was completed, although still wet. At least I couldn’t see what further stroke would make it more arresting, masterful, provocative, or awe inspiring than it was. He had chosen abstract, with everything being just strokes of color and oblongs and swirls until one looked at it closely. Even at this level, it was full of life and a brilliant, completely balanced combination of shape and color. But for those who were discerning—who knew—there was a deeper level that was disturbing and foreboding. I was no art expert, but for me the giveaway, the clue on how to begin seeing the painting for what it really was, were the criss-crossed markings along the oblongs that projected out, left and right and toward the viewer, from the center of the painting, their intersection interrupted by another, v-shaped blob with rounded corners and two globular circles at the base. The criss-crossed marks: unmistakably the leg lacings of the sandals I was still wearing.

Given those reference points, I could see the figure in the background, legs splayed open, and reclining backward on a golden surface. And then the figure in the foreground materialized, crouching between the oblongs with the criss-crossed leggings. I could even see where he had worked the cat into the design. For those who knew, the coupling pose would be obvious.

What was just as obvious, though, was that, study the painting as I would, I could not lose the sense of femininity, vulnerability, and subservience of the figure with the splayed legs. Elias had accomplished my total emasculation. He had painted me as a bitch, just a casual lay, a couple of hours entertainment, for the boys of the club. I was nothing else than that to him and I never would be.

And the love that Spiro and Thanos had made to me—not just in the mutually impassioned coupling we had enjoyed on Elias’s bed in the end but also in the art they had produced from my posing for them—contrasted in how Nico had treated me. It was obvious to me that I had only been his bitch for a weekend—just as Elias had painted me.

And perhaps that was all I was to the other artists as well. Would they expect me to be here when they returned from the night at the taverna, holding my legs open for them, one at a time and in combination, to dip their cocks in for release? Or would they bring some other young man here tonight—someone to take my place?

At least Elias had been honest from start to finish.

I picked up a painting knife from the table next to the painting. I raised my hand to slice through the painting, to make it go away. But then I couldn’t do it. Its artistic value was obvious. More important, I didn’t want to give Elias the pleasure of knowing he had insulted me to the quick.

I gathered up my clothes and dressed and went out on the road, walking away from the raucous noise of the Plaka taverna to my car. I drove up the hill to the Forest Park, packed, checked out of the hotel, and drove back to Nicosia. I had to drive down the main street of the village, between Elias’s bungalow and the Plaka taverna to reach the main road down the mountain. I had intended to look neither left nor right at this point, but a movement to my left caused me to look up and I saw Nico there—not at the taverna, but across the road. He had been coming out of Elias’s bungalow. When he saw the Jaguar drive by, he let out a yell and started moving out into the road. But I applied the gas and was quickly beyond the village—and didn’t look back.

And once I got to Nicosia, I turned my full attention to preparing for the arrival of my wife and in learning what I could do that was constructive in my new position at the embassy. I turned my face forward and didn’t look back.

At least not then. As time went on, any bitterness I might have had from the experience melted away from me—to be replaced by a sense of need and longing.