I found what I was looking for fairly quickly. The Cypriot door leading into the hidden garden had been the clincher.
I felt I needed the autumn offβor at least I needed a change of scene and more mystery in my life. I had been in great demand in Savannah, but that was why I needed the autumn off. There had just been too many men. I didn't want to lose the enjoyment of it; if I did that, I'd lose my edge. And if I did that, it would all be over. I'd have to find a harder job. And any job would have been harder than laying under a man and watching him make lust to meβfor the price I had specified.
The idea came to me when I posed for Sami. Sami was a Turkish Cypriot art teacher at the Savannah Institute of Art and Design. He had picked me out at a cafΓ© on River Street one afternoon, saying I would be the perfect art model. He was all smiles and good humor and dark and hirsute and powerful looking, especially those strong, expressive hands of his. As we walked back to his row house on Chippewa Square, he asked me what I liked about Savannah. I told him I liked the distinctive doorways of the old Savannah town homes and the glimpses of lush gardens beyond them, hidden by the houses. Sami laughed and then started telling me about his own home, Turkish Cyprus, and how different and yet how the same it was to the feel of Savannah. And he praised me, because he thought I'd honed in on what was attracting in bothβthe distinctive doorways leading into lush inner gardens. He said I had an artistic eye and an appreciation for mysterious beauty.
As I knew would be the case, Sami wanted me to pose nude. He posed me on chaise lounge, stripped himself, and took up a sketch pad and three charcoal sticks that he managed to dexterously hold between the fingers of one hand and use separately. Sami had a magnificent body, but I would have gone with him just for those strong, sensitive, expressive hands. He handed me lubricant and told me to prepare myself, that he wanted to watch me do that, to see my expressions as I became aroused and open to him. He sketched while I got in the mood. He was straddling the chaise, between my knees, his throbbing tool dueling with mine as I worked the lubricant into my hole and he sketched my face in broad strokes. At his instruction, I rolled a condom on his horse-hung cock and moved its bulbous head to my pouting hole. And then he was fucking me and sketching at the same time, claiming to be delighted with the expressions of passion and lust that his cock was producing in me and that he was translating to the paper.
Afterward I asked him if all Turkish Cypriot men were as well endowed and as exuberant in the fuck as he was, and he said "Yes, every one of them."
A very few weeks later I had landed at Ercan airport in Turkish Cyprus via Istanbul and was trolling the streets of Kyrenia and Famagusta in search for just the right house. The house could be simple, but it must have a lush hidden garden separated from the world by one of those large, ornate wooden-framed double doors with the iron scrolling trim. I found just the house in Bellapais, a village enveloping an ancient, ruined abbey on the slopes of the Mountains overlooking Kyrenia and the Mediterranean to the north. The house was a basic four room, with large central hall stuccoed bungalow in some need of repair but loaded with atmosphere. But the hidden garden and its entry door were perfect.
I moved some furniture into the house, paying especial attention only to the trappings of the bedroom, which opened out into the garden by a set of weather-beaten French doors. And then I was ready for business in this change-of-pace setting. I worked by night and spent the lazy, hot afternoons lolling around in my garden. I managed to read Lawrence Durrell's entire Alexandria Quartet that autumn in addition to his Bitter Lemons, which had had its own part in luring me to this Mediterranean isle.