Platres Conclave

by Habu

4 Aug 2019 619 readers Score 9.0 (27 votes) PDF Mobi ePub Txt


In the ensuing months I shouldn’t have gotten so busy in my duties of following my wife around or earning my keep in keeping up with cultural affairs on the island. If I’d gone less with the flow in my attempt to fit into the embassy community and into Carolyn’s life as she wanted and tried to concentrate on who I should be rather than who I wanted to be, I might have been able to avoid what was coming. Then again, perhaps it was just inevitable. The longer I went without sex, the more that evening of debauchery in Elias’s Platres studio manifested itself in my memory.

I had only seen the tip of the iceberg of the rich cultural heritage of Cyprus when I came down the mountain from Platres. In the following months I discovered not only the depth of art and culture in the country but its breadth as well. There constantly were gallery exhibit openings and plays and concerts to be almost continually in attendance at and to encourage—sometimes two or three events each day. And I did whatever I was asked to do at the American Center, taking on anything that was a burden or beyond the scheduling capabilities of the other officers there, whether American or local staffers. I was polite and solicitous and helpful so that, when Carolyn arrived, I had managed to carve out a function and a fund of good will of my own. That helped considerably in keeping me from being seen as just her nonfunctional appendage.

It helped that Carolyn was such a dragon lady. Others at the embassy came to look upon me with sympathy rather than malice as I did what I could to fit in with and help them.

Invitations came in by the bucketful and only increased twofold when Carolyn arrived. She had whole new categories of political and economic and ceremonial events to cover—including ones where the spouse was expected to accompany her. I had thought that two tuxedos and three dinner jackets would be enough, but I had to have two additional sets of each tailored just to keep up with the dry cleaners. It didn’t help that Cyprus had such a hot climate.

The only invitations I strove to shunt aside were those to attend performances at the Theatro Ena, the national experimental theater. I didn’t give too much thought as to why I avoided these invitations, but, of course, it was because I was afraid of coming into contact with Nico Christou again. It was rather funny that I didn’t feel the same way about the others I’d encountered at the Platres Conclave, and from time to time I did find myself in the same room with one or the other of them. But I just pretended not to know them—or only to know them in passing—and, if they recognized me, they were pretending to do the same. No one conversing with us together would have had any inkling that they all had fucked me—all but Elias, of course.

Mercifully, I never again saw Elias in the flesh.

What suffered most in those months of me pretending that I could control what my life was to be was my writing. I wrote not a word on my new manuscript from the last day I had worked on it in the Du Maurier room at the Forest Park. I picked it up from time to time in the rare evening when I or Carolyn and I weren’t scheduled for some dinner, event, or concert, but nothing came of the effort. My protagonist had become Nico. He had become who I, in my fantasies, had made of the Nico that I wanted. But Nico hadn’t been that man. And to continue my manuscript, I would have to go back through and tear Nico out. But what it was becoming with Nico in it was so much better than it had been before. I just couldn’t bring myself to gut the manuscript before I knew what would make it better again—and these revelations just weren’t coming.

And I couldn’t blame Nico, really. I had gone to Platres for just the sort of fling I had gotten, although I didn’t realize I had until I had arrived there. From the beginning, expressed even while Nico and I were coupling, I had declared that I was only investing the weekend in the relationship. Could I really blame Nico for not even investing that much time—or in believing, when he saw me taking on the rest of the conclave, that I had no serious interest in him? How could he know that my interest in him had become very serious indeed?

This whirlwind of keeping myself busy and exhausted to pretend that life was wonderful became a tempest the night Carolyn and I attended a special exhibit opening at the Famagusta gate, which was a commodious cultural center established inside what had been one of the major gate passages through the sixteenth-century city walls of the capital of Nicosia.

Carolyn had told me that the exhibit had been established to honor one of Cyprus’s greatest artists, who had recently died. What she didn’t tell me, however, was that the artist was Elias Mikalaides, who had succumbed to a heart attack just a few weeks after I’d last seen him, and that the exhibit was a combined showing of the works on “beauty” from his last conclave—the very same spring Platres Conclave I had attended and fled from in its initial day.

I got a hint of what was to come, although I didn’t identify it as such at the time, as we entered the stone floored, walled, and ceilinged space through an old city gate. The gate area was wide—it had been designed to accommodate horsemen abreast as well as market stalls at the sides. What first assailed our senses was a haunting melody that played over and over for the time we were at the exhibit. It, of course, was the self-same tune that Xanthos Economou had been composing in his mind and humming on his lips that day in Elias’s bungalow when I had provided the principle entertainment.

It did not occur to me where I had heard this tune before, though, until we walked into the exhibit space and before us, in all of its glory, under lights that brought out all of its life and vibrant colors, was the last major painting of the celebrated Elias Mikalaides.

“It’s gorgeous, whatever it means, isn’t it?” Carolyn murmured to me as we walked toward it.

“Yes, it is,” I choked out, my eyes immediately going to the criss-cross work on the two oblongs of color flowing out from the sides of a center oblong with its two globes at the base—the oblongs with the criss-crosses representing my spread legs in the ancient Grecian sandals, and the centering oblong being Spiro Charalambou’s back rising up from his bulbous buttocks.

We stood there for several moments, Carolyn looking bewildered. “But what is it?” she whispered.

Dutiful husband that I was, I moved closer and leaned over and read the title on the brass plaque on its frame.

“It says it’s the ‘Eternal Dance of Beauty,’” I faithfully reported.

“Ah, yes, ah, yes,” she murmured. “I see it now,” she continued, ever the diplomat. But of course I knew she didn’t see it for what it was. Thank God. I, however, couldn’t help but see it and feel it slicing into me, viscerally, as the insult and put down that Miklalaides had intended it to be. I was sorry then that I hadn’t destroyed it.

We moved on, or, I must say, Carolyn dragged me on, into the exhibit. I didn’t know if my debacle would come when she saw the other painting and bust or when we encountered the members of the Platres Conclave. But the knife didn’t fall anywhere near that fast. Happily, the conclave had produced other works that week, which were on display and which took the spotlight off the works I could see in all their damning glory.

We stood in front of the painting by Spiro, which he had titled “Grecian Boxer,” and I held my breath for the “oh, but that’s you” from Carolyn. But it never came. I had suspected that Carolyn hadn’t really looked at me in years, and now that was confirmed, because Spiro was an excellent painter—and I had not the least bit of trouble identifying myself in the painting.

I was a little shocked to see farther down the display wall that he had painted a second painting that undoubtedly was of me. He had held me in his mind after I had fled Platres. I recognized my torso and the tuxedo I was half wearing in the painting. But, beyond that, I’d recognized the pose. Spiro had obviously painted this one from the photograph Nico had taken in my room at the Forest Park when he first fucked me. I was more happy than ever now that Nico had not included most of my face in that photo. The painting didn’t supply one either, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t expect someone to say “Isn’t that . . . ?” at any moment. I thanked the heavens that I didn’t have any distinguishing birth marks on my torso. I leaned down to look at the title of the painting. “After the First,” it said. I heard someone murmur something about two much partying on New Year’s Eve and was grateful that Spiro had picked a title with a double meaning. I could almost hear him and Nico laughing over the joke of the title choice.

No one else, thank goodness, seemed to be speculating on model names, either, with that painting or Thanos Adamou’s bust of me that he had titled “Perfection.” Still, as we moved through the hall, I kept lowering my face and avoiding large groups of people. I kept waiting for the exclaimed, “but isn’t that . . . ?” but it never came. I learned something interesting then—that people saw only what they expected to see most of the time. Take a man out of the context in which you know him and he becomes unrecognizable elsewhere. For some reason that made me feel more free in one sense—even in the current context where I was feeling more constricted in another sense. I think that revelation had something to do with how easily I fell into what followed the next day.

We had arrived just before the ceremonial part of the evening, during which I had to stand there and endure, my cheeks turning red, I knew, the reading by Costas Spyrou of his poem “Shared Beauty,” in which I both heard—knowing that I was personified as beauty in his poem—words that he had whispered in my ear directly to me as he fucked me and “beauty” used as a metaphor that men of culture and art shared to inform their art and set lose their creative juices. Nemo Constantinou’s short story was typically straightforward and brutal on controlling beauty by mastering it and sucking everything out of it that the artist needed to survive and thrive. It typically was about Nemo himself—and he probably didn’t realize that it also was about me.

Nico mounted the platform next, and I shrank behind Carolyn, using her as a barrier between him and me. He started into a dramatic soliloquy on the delicacy of beauty and how it had to be nurtured and not neglected or it would melt away and leave only despair and regret in its wake. He had a beautiful voice. Like the two before him, he gave his contribution in Greek and then in English, and the people in the hall were held spellbound by the richness of his voice and the sincerity of his delivery through both versions. His eyes were searching the crowd, but I cast mine down, not wanting to meet his.

We only stayed for a while during the ensuing cocktail hour, as I heard Spiro, Thanos, and, Nico, their voices ringing out over the din of the crowd in the stone, echoey vault. It was almost as if I was on their wavelength, as they were nearly on the other side of cavern. I instinctively made the mistake of looking up and locking eyes with Nico.

If abject apology and contrition and longing can be rolled together in one facial expression, Nico had mastered that look. And at that moment, that’s what I had to believe—that he was acting. The man he had curried favor with and given precedence to in all, Elias Mikalaides, was dead. Nico was free now to backtrack, to make amends, to reclaim whatever he wanted. Nico was a master actor—not only had he told me he was, but I also had seen him turn on the charm and treat each person as if they were the only one in the universe throughout the day we had spent on the southern coast together.

That would not work with me, I was determined. I was creating an entirely new persona for myself here.

Claiming I was bored and reminding Carolyn she had a stack of documents to work on, I coaxed her to leave with me even as Nico was trying to work his way toward us—this being very difficult for him to accomplish, because everyone in the hall wanted to greet and have a few words with Cyprus’s premier dramatic actor.

It wasn’t at all difficult to convince Carolyn we should leave. She had endured the core ceremonies, and she neither understood nor cared for art and culture. She was an ecopolitical person to the core. She never even had read any of my books, which I considered quite fortunate indeed, considering how free spirited and revealing I’d been in the earlier works.

We made it home with me entirely unscathed despite the disaster that had loomed over my head in the Famagusta Gate. I deemed it a miracle that was a dream.

Dreams can become nightmares too, though.

The next night was one in which we ourselves were holding a dinner party. A congressional delegation was in town, and Carolyn had managed to snag just the right Cypriots to rub elbows with the senator and two U.S. representatives and their band wagon of accompanying staffers. One last guest was expected—the Cypriot foreign minister. I didn’t hear the door chimes, so Carolyn’s motioning of me to the door she had answered was all the warning I got. Within the context of the evening’s event, though, it was no warning at all.

“There’s a gentleman here to see you Collin,” Carolyn turned and whispered to me as I approached the door. “I do believe he is one of the artists from last night. Do get rid of him, please. I expect the foreign minister to arrive at any moment.”

Nico Christou was standing out at the edge of the light. He was wearing a tuxedo—typically in charming dishabille, though, just as he was that first night he had approached me in the Olympia Bar in the Forest Park Hotel—and reminiscent, purposely I knew, of our first night of lovemaking. And he looked magnificent.

Not far behind him a limousine had drawn up and the Cypriot foreign minister was approaching. Carolyn’s eyes immediately went in that direction as she hissed out of the side of her mouth a repeated instruction to clear the area.

Nico’s held his hand out and said, “Please come with me, Collin. I cannot go on without you.”

Carolyn hadn’t heard him well enough to understand what he said, and she was already all smiles and welcoming words for the foreign minister, who was now parallel to Nico and moving closer.

I looked into Nico’s face and crumbled. I put out my hand and he gripped it and pulled me gently down our front steps as the foreign minister was climbing them and Carolyn was turning to take the foreign minister’s arms in hers. She turned and looked at me over her shoulder with a question in her eyes, but after only that brief look, she and the foreign minister had entered the house. She had made her decision many months ago.

It was time now for me to make mine.

The first time Nico fucked me was half way down the hill from the mesa that our house stood on in the Makedonitisa suburb of Nicosia, near the Green Line that divided the Greek sector from the Turkish zone. He pulled into the drive of a half-finished house and, after pulling me into the backseat of his Mercedes, covered me with kisses and apologies and declarations of undying love.

“Stop talking, Nico,” I said. “Just get on with it and fuck me.”

He laughed as he unbuttoned and pulled my tuxedo pants off and popped the studs on my shirt and devoured my nipples while he unbuttoned his own fly and pulled out an already-hard cock. He pulled my channel down on his cock as the ankle of one of my legs was hooked on his shoulder and the sole of my other foot found the ceiling of the car and I used that for leverage to counterpunch his thrusts.

The second time we made it into his apartment, but only half way toward the bedroom, when he pushed me down on all fours on the living room carpet, mounted me, and doggy fucked me.

The rest of the night, he was civilized and fucked me in his bed.

He nudged me awake for what he said would be breakfast. I held his head in my hands and kissed him as he lay on top of me and fucked me again.

“Please, please, let me apologize and explain,” He murmured as we were laying stretched along each other’s bodies and panting ourselves back toward regular heartbeats. “I thought it was only—”

“Shush,” I said, laying two fingers on his lips. “That’s not what I want from you now. Don’t pretend with me, Nico. Just be you. That’s more enough for me.”

“Oh, god, I don’t think I can do it again until I’ve had something to eat, Collin,” he whispered in an exhausted voice.

“No. If you have a laptop, I want you to bring it out. You can go fix breakfast. My mind is exploding on what I want to write into the manuscript for my new book. I have to get this down before I lose it. If it flies away, you’ll have to do exactly what you say you’re too exhausted to do—fuck me until the muse returns again.”

-FINI-

by Habu

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