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 work that week, which was 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.
No one else seemed to be doing that, 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. 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 over the din the voices of 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. I had even managed my way back into Carolyn’s bed.
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, as 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 bandwagon 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.”
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 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.
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 afterward that 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 and unbuttoned and pulled my tuxedo trousers 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.