I Met a Man

Chapter One: Clifford

I had to go by ferry. The flight was not an option for me by then. But I had needed to escape, and when I was younger, I had once taken a fancy to visit the villa on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus where the British novelist Lawrence Durrell once lived and wrote, where he wrote much of his acclaimed fiction series

The Alexandra Quartet

. I had recalled that fancy in the last few months when I read one of Mark Amalfi's novels, the one he wrote about his time living in that villa. I got it into my mind then that I'd like nothing more than to write a novel there myself, that if I could do that, I'd be content to die. And northern Cyprus was a warm dry place, where they spoke English and that I could reach by sea from Turkey. Air travel was unpleasant for me now.

I arrived in the castle harbor town of Girne, as the Turks call what the Greeks refer to as Kyrenia, in the afternoon on a spring day, and I immediately felt content, Yes, this was a good place to spend my last months. This was somewhere I could find inspiration for more stories than I could ever write in the time left to me. The fresh air, the old houses, the sea, the wild mountains, and the crusader ruins. All of it. It was perfect. And the people, the tourists, retirees and locals, the handsome young men, the interesting looking older men. Yes, there was everything I needed here.

And when I finally arrived at the villa on the mountainside overlooking Girne in the artists' village of Bellapais after a hair-raising drive in the old convertible I'd foolishly hired for a month, the old landlady, Layla Ergun, dressed all in black, showed me through Lawrence Durrell's old villa, Bitter Lemons, and I discovered that was perfect too. When I'd started looking into booking the villa, I'd been told that the landlady there had been the model for one of the characters in

The Alexandria Quartet

. Thus, I was anxious to meet her and to find out which character it was. Upon sight, I decided it must have been Justine, but I didn't want to be intrusive enough to ask. It did, however, prompt me to be warm toward her from the beginning, which I sensed she returned. She admitted that she had a fondness for men authors and that the villa had gone to several of those. She considered that a fitting homage to Lawrence Durrell.

"You will be here for some months?" She asked. "I like to know a date, you know, for when my gentlemen will be leaving."

"I'm sorry I can't say," I replied. "I have paid you for four months in advance. I . . . may stay a bit longer, though." I wanted to think positive thoughts. "I'm sorry," I added, "I have been ill and . . . and I will need the name of a good local doctor," I added. She looked at me and sighed.

"You will leave here well," she said grimly. "All my guests, my gentlemen, except the very old who come to die, leave here healthy. The air of Cyprus is good. The food is good."

"I hope you are right," I replied, happy to smile at her grim certainty, knowing at the same time that it was unlikely I would leave the island alive. I had come here for something else; the urgency of finishing my last novel with a minimum of distractions had brought me here. "And can someone come and clean for me, maybe cook me lunch too? Is there a local woman?" I asked.

She looked at me. "What do you want someone for? You are young and strong. You will soon find company here."

"I am not as strong as I look," I replied sadly. "And I want to write, to have all the time there is to write. I just want someone to come in for a couple of hours a few times a week."

"The café, the Tree of Idleness, in the Bellapais village square, makes good food. I will tell them you may want food delivered to you. But better to eat there each day. That is best. You will go there anyway. The old women you might get to come in, they will rob you, say they need so much to buy food and feed their whole family with it. But if you need me, I can come and clean once a week," she said, making it sound final. "But I will think if perhaps there is someone else who might be suitable."

She left me, with my luggage sitting inside the big old wooden doors to the courtyard, and once she was gone and the doors were closed, I knew I had entered another world, a warm and sensual one. In the clear light the house itself seemed to throb with life as Mark Amalfi had described. And I immediately grabbed up my bags and took them inside and then returned to sit at the small table in the courtyard that overlooked the Mediterranean. Opening up my laptop, I began to compose.

When I finally closed it, it was because I was being seduced by the distant murmur of voices and laughter coming up from the café in the Bellapais square, just as Mark Amalfi had described, and I knew I had to discover the place they were coming from. I had been so lost in my writing that I had forgotten to take my pills on time, and now I needed food. I hurried to the kitchen and took my medication with part of a chocolate bar, the only food I had with me. Chastising myself for not organizing supplies first before starting to write, I turned off all but the entry area light and walked down to the café in the square.

Ahh, that first evening. Entering the Bellapais square, bordering the ruins of the Byzantine abbey, so timeless and eternal yet so alive and vibrant. Cyprus, a place where, away from the main tourist centers, men have lived much the same way for an eternity. A land still in touch with the fundamental and primitive nature of us all. I wanted that, to embrace that, the sense of life flowing by as a never-ending stream of birth and growth, decline and death, the natural rhythm flowing onward, with me just a small ripple in it. A ripple that I wanted to believe would always be felt as a small part of the great whole even long after I was gone.

Ah, to be a part of something so unchanging as the Tree of Idleness café on a warm night. I took a seat and observed and smiled. Yes, I had made the right decision. And the young men? Yes, many of them were beautiful, all of them were raw and full of the animal hungers of youth. Hungers I had never allowed to be free, never felt it was appropriate to give in to. But here I could see it in their eyes, the way many of them looked at me, because on the outside I had not yet changed. I still looked like a golden-haired athlete, lean, muscular, straight. An illusion. All an illusion, but one I cherished and guarded as jealously as any lover.

Several of the young men I could see were discussing me, looking over and smiling and laughing. And then just as one of them was about to rise and move in my direction, I saw him turn his gaze off to my left and then turn away and sit back down and mutter something to the others. I turned my eyes to where he had directed his and saw a young man who took my breath away entering under the fairy lights in the overhanging branches of the tree through an archway leading back to a small courtyard at the side of the café. The tall, dusky, sultry-looking youth looked at me and then started to walk toward me and . . . I smiled. I had come to escape, "and I might as well start now," I mumbled to myself, suddenly nervous and even a bit afraid of his masculine swagger and dark possessing look.

Chapter Two: Erol

It was getting late in the square, and the men seeking as well as the younger men still needing to earn their suppers and brandy were becoming a bit frenetic and not so selective. The lights would continue to dance in the branches of the Tree of Idleness embracing the café on the square for hours yet—and some of the older men would still be here sitting on their rickety blue-painted, straw-seated chairs on the uneven dirt under the tree, drinking their coffee and brandy and bragging of the days of the liberation until the light of dawn crept over the tumbled stones of the monastery ruins across the square. But the younger men, like Nazim, Tabib, Basir, and I, needed to be alert in the morning so as not to fall from the scaffolding onto the rocky shore of the Mediterranean.

The four of us worked construction when we could, usually outside of tourist season, when those of us who attract attention worked the tourists. We could make more from the German and Israeli—and occasional British—tourists, both men and women, when the Mediterranean waters were warm against the northern Cyprus shores. But before the weather turned from the depth of winter to mid spring, we needed other work as well. We four had been lucky; a new resort hotel was going up west of Girne toward Invasion Beach, and we'd all been taken on. But the work was high off the ground now, and the footings tricky and the ground beneath rocky, so we must be careful—if only for the season—not to drink too much brandy in the square or to stay in the hunt too late in the evening.

Besides, the better arrangements—the men and women who paid well and made the fewest demands—the British, and, when Allah was particularly kind, an American—normally were people who did not stay in the hunt late into the dangerous hours of the night. It was the Germans and, particularly, the Israelis, who one had to be careful about when the evening was late as it was now.

"Come, Erol," Nazim was saying to me, as he plucked at my arm and laid his hand on my thigh. "I do not think your American is coming tonight. And I am horny and have had no luck myself tonight. I am in the mood for having you inside me."

"A bit longer, Nazim," I said. "I promised Layla. And he is American, and is in the Durrell villa. There is no better opportunity to be had."

"But she says he is sick, and I am not sick," Nazim murmured in my ear as he brought his lips close and gently closed his teeth on my earlobe. "You know you like what I can do to a man's cock inside me. And I am in the mood."

"You are always in the mood," I said with a laugh. I looked away as I caught a glimpse of Tabib rising from the table beside me. "What is it, Tabib?" I asked. "Do you see a possibility?"

"Yes," the youngest of us, barely a man and of slight and delicate build, said softly. "That man over there. He's been eyeing me for a while—and no one better has been paying any attention to me. And he has motioned me and just received another bottle of brandy and an extra glass."

I looked over to where Tabib's chin was pointed as his long eyelashes fluttered. Tabib was almost too pretty to be a man. It served him well these evenings at the Tree of Idleness café in the Bellapais square, but it also made me fearful for him. The young, delicate, vulnerable almost feminine looks of one as handsome as the dusky Tabib attracted some of the worst in men.

"Him, Tabib?" I muttered. "No . . . I wouldn't. He's an Israeli, and I've been warned about him. I would just . . ."

Tabib interrupted me, however. "It's late. There's no one else. I need the money." I reached out for Tabib's arm, but he was already gone.

I looked back at the table where the Israeli, now smiling a cruel smile that I hoped the foolish Tabib could see, sat. And as I looked, I glimpsed at a table beyond the Israeli the stocky, but presentable middle-aged Italian businessman I had fucked two evenings previously. He had been satisfied quickly and paid well and now was beckoning to me. For some reason, I was feeling protective of Tabib and the Italian businessman's table was close by—and the evening was passing and the American had not yet appeared. And I needed the money as well.

"Erol," Nazim said as I rose from my chair, but his hand on my arm was no more effective in restraint than mine had been on Tabib's arm, and I moved under the boughs of the Tree of Idleness and smiled for my Italian businessman as I stripped off my black T-shirt, tucked the edge of it into my back pocket, hooked my thumbs in the waistband of my low-slung jeans, bringing them down to my pubic hairline, and sauntered in what I knew was an arousing way into the shadows where the tables of the seekers were located.

No sooner than I sat down at Luigi's table, unfortunately with my back to the Israeli's table, then the Italian began to chatter to me in broken English and to unbutton the fly to my jeans below the rim of the café table.

"Brandy, Luigi," I said. "And I do not have time to come back to your hotel. Mehmet has rooms here, back through that archway over there. Twenty lira for him and twenty for me for a blow job. If you want to be fucked, it will be thirty more, but it must be quick." Quick had not been a problem with Luigi the other night. He had started coming just from seeing what was swinging between my legs—which he had now found inside my jeans opening and was squeezing with a fist.

While Luigi was taking this rushed foreplay in, I turned my head to check on Tabib and the Israeli, only to find that they were gone already. The full bottle of brandy and the second glass sat there, untouched.

"Well, I really don't have all night, sorry Luigi," I said when I turned back. If he wanted to just play squeeze the dick, I didn't have time for him. I felt the urge to go back through the arch to see if I could find Tabib. I had no idea what I'd do if I did. Tabib was a man now, although he didn't look like one, and he could make his own decisions. I just would feel better knowing he was OK.

Luigi had a silly grin on his face and had his wallet out and was counting out lira. Thirty, forty, fifty, seventy. He slapped the bills down on the table top, and I brushed them to the side with my hand and folded them and tucked them into my jeans pocket. I rose, not bothering to button my fly, but pushing my cock, semihard from the attention Luigi had been giving it, down between my thighs inside the denim, and led Luigi through the archway into a small flagstoned courtyard with doors leading off it at regular intervals. These were Mehmet's rooms; I'd been using them for years with the horny tourists. Mehmet made more off his rooms than he did from the café. I knew each one of them as well as I knew my own small room down in Girne. A rickety straw-seated chair, a match to any of those out in the outdoor café, all painted a bright blue, and a cot with a thin mattress and a loosely bolted iron frame that made grating noises and knocked against the stone wall as the fury of the fuck set it into motion.

Music to my ears. Not pleasant music, but a familiar tune that sometimes woke me up in the night at the memory of it even on the rare night that I was sleeping alone down in my room in Girne. A cacophony of sound at various pitches and offsetting rhythms, echoing across the small courtyard, bouncing off the flagstones and stone walls. The sound of men fucking men in a frenetic concerto—setting the groaning iron frames of small cots into rasping motion.

I could hear it now, as I pulled the Italian along into the courtyard, dimly lit by the fairy lights in the branches of the Tree of Idleness that hung over the courtyard wall. At least five instruments—at varying pitches and rhythm—the music of the fuck as at least five of Mehmet's rooms were occupied by copulating couples that had paired off under the Tree of Idleness at the height of the mating hour—the loose-fitting cots serving as instruments set in motion by thrusting cocks inside paid-for holes.

The familiarity of the sounds—knowing what cot gave off which pitch—drew me to what I thought was an unoccupied room. The door to it was open, which contributed to my mistaken impression. But as I got to the door, I saw that the room wasn't unoccupied and I understood in an instant why I had been fooled. The couple wasn't on the cot, and the way the clothes were scattered about—the familiar red T-shirt virtually ripped to shreds—and the intensity with which the Israeli was fucking Tabib told me that the Israeli had been so anxious to get his cock inside Tabib that he had not bothered with preliminaries let alone closed the door to the room.

Tabib was on his knees on the dirt floor, facing away from the door, brought to ground as he was walking into the room. A mere doll-like figure as his pert little butt cheeks were wedged between the thighs of the hulking, heavily muscled Israeli. The Israeli was riding the youth hard, in long strokes of a heavy cock inside what I knew was a tight hole, as I had used it before myself—but only after considerable preparation and coaxing. Tabib's head was arched back hard with a fist of the Israeli buried in his curly mop of hair. And I felt myself jerk with each sharp slap of the Israeli's other hand on Tabib's butt cheeks. Tabib's mouth was open in a large O, and he was crying out and whimpering hard at the taking.

I wanted to go to Tabib, but he was a man now and had been warned—and I knew he needed the money—and I knew that Mehmet was about and claimed the right of determining what was too much in his establishment. Those who took his responsibilities upon themselves found themselves banned from the Tree of Idleness. And the café life here was too much a part of my life as well as that of all of my for-hire friends for any of us to take Mehmet's responsibilities upon ourselves.

Angry now, I hustled Luigi into the adjoining room and pushed him roughly down onto his knees on the dirt floor at my crotch and spread my jeans wide, permitting my cock to pop out, and thrust it into the Italian's surprised but willing mouth. I fisted his hair in both of my hands and deep-thrust face fucked him while he gasped and gagged and gurgled and I listened to the sounds of the brutal taking in the next room. I was hardly aware that I was matching the intensity of that with the Italian, who wasn't begging me to stop.

Luigi cried out when I pulled him up, turned him, thrust his belly against the wall, jerked down his trousers, and thrust my cock strongly up into his ass, lifting him off the floor. He groaned and moaned and babbled in rapid-fire Italian as I fucked him up against the wall, knowing from the sounds I was hearing from the next room that the Israeli was doing the same thing to Tabib with just the width of the cold, moist stone wall between us.

Gaining some control over myself at last, I became aware that some of the sounds of brutal taking were coming from the Italian. I had been so lost in listening for Tabib's cries of distress that I hadn't realized the degree of brutality I had been bringing to the Italian.

I stopped in midthrust, feeling the Italian trembling within my grasp, and put my lips to his ear.

"I'm sorry, I'm hurting you. I can't say . . . I'm just sorry. I'll stop."

"Oh, god, no, don't stop," Luigi cried out. "Fuck me. Fuck me just like that. Oh, god, I'm going to come again!"

Minutes later, when I'd given Luigi the filled condom deep inside his ass that he had paid for, I helped him to the cot and left him there to recover, an extra twenty lira now in my jeans' pocket. I hadn't taken my jeans off, so I just needed to pull them back up my trim hips and button them. I then just tucked my black T-shirt in my waistband and walked out into the courtyard.

The old familiar music of the groaning cot springs and frames assaulted my ears. Without thinking, I turned toward the door into the room where the Israeli was still drilling Tabib, not being able to control myself anymore.

But I felt a strong grip on my forearm and turned and saw that Mehmet was standing there in the shadows.

"No, don't go in there," Mehmet murmured. "Tabib will not thank you for it. I've already been in there and told the Israeli what the price of killing a young Turkish Cypriot in my rooms would be."

"Then they are . . .?" I started to ask.

"No, the Israeli is still fucking him," Mehmet answered. "But just to his money's worth. Tabib said he's paying 100 lira above my fee. So, he gets 100 lira worth of fuck. If you go in there now, you will dishonor and emasculate Tabib, and he'll never forgive you."