"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 he 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.
And as if to punctuate his 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." I didn't understand much of what they said, no matter what they said—and didn't much care. I was beginning to feel trapped just being here, and I tried turning my thoughts to mulling what I wanted to write next in my novel manuscript. 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 didn't have any claim on Nico. It was obviously that these men were inbred and fucked each other almost indiscriminately affected only by their own insular jealousies. I could either fit in for a brief time or take a hike. I intellectually accepted that. I had no right to want anything more from Nico—or any of the rest of them.
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 situated 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.
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 reflected 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.
"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, "It is none of those men. But it is someone every bit as compelling and sensual."
After that, the discussion drifted off into esoteric points of ancient Greek legend on the topic of beauty that, again, went completely over my head. As I sensed the discussion coming to a close, with the more frequent mention of hunger and the possibilities of what and where for lunch, I quietly left the house. 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. 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 to 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 no matter what region they came to to play. 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 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.
