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 try 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.
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. The gallery exhibit openings and plays and concerts were almost constant, and it was my duty to be almost continually in attendance and to encourage those putting them together—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 of my own. That helped considerably in keeping me from being seen as just her nonfunctional appendage and boy toy.
Invitations came in by the bucketful and only increased twofold when Carolyn arrived, and 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 came to 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 gates, a long, wide, winding tunnel, through the sixteenth-century city wall 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 four 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 in 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 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.
