Platres Conclave

By Habu

Blessed with an absence of his high-powered deputy-ambassador wife, the recent purchase of a vintage Jaguar convertible, and a reservation in the room Daphne du Maurier occupied while she was writing Rebecca, bisexual American novelist Collin Stevens taps his inner carefree nature to take a week’s vacation from settling in to a tour at the American embassy. He escapes to the venerable British colonial-period mountain hotel, the Forest Park, in Pano Platres, Cyprus. Upon meeting charismatic, sensual, and seductive Greek Cypriot actor, Nico Christou, at the hotel, Collin is quickly taken up—literally—in the arms of a group of talented and randy artists, musicians, and writers conclaved in Platres for a week of creativity, during which the young American novelist finds himself celebrated in both art and casual sex. Much as he subsequently tries to write the whirlwind week off as a last fling before dutifully settling down as an embassy spouse, Collin finds he cannot escape the intensity and arousal of either the conclave experience or Nico Christou.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BarbarianSpy
• Release date: May 12, 2011
• ISBN: 9781921879555

Habu

Habu is one of the pen names of a former supersonic spy jet pilot, intelligence agent, male model, movie actor, and diplomat. A wild youth in South East Asia was spent enjoying whatever sexual opportunities came his way, and much of his gay male writing is about recalling incidents from those days and inventing ones he’d perhaps have liked to experience. He now leads a very quiet and ordinary life.Check out our blog and get free stories. Feedback and reviews are always appreciated.

Book preview

Chapter One

Who could have guessed that the sense of freedom and exhilaration could come in the form of a feeling of calm, of floating above the world, and of experiencing and rejoicing in every moment? I had escaped—escaped Nicosia and the embassy and the American Center and all of the questioning—and judging—eyes. I was beyond the reach of Carolyn—of her antiseptic, instructional phone calls and, most of all, of who she was. The who that she was was diminishing the who that I was. But not today. Not on this mountain road up under the peak of Mount Olympus. Not in this classic Jaguar XKE I bought in defiance of my wife’s admonition that the embassy standard was to buy Kias and, as she already was shipping the BMW, one of us should follow the standard.

The weather was fantastic—quite warm, the sun shining, as it almost always did in Cyprus—and the smell of the spring flowers and the filling out of the grape leaves in the vineyards on the sides of the slopes were transporting me to the world of no worries. I put a Wes Montgomery CD in, the CD player being the only modern convenience that had been added to the green 1968 Vicarage XKE I’d fallen in love with on the dealer’s lot on Grivas Avenue. I sat back into the soft leather seat, fully alert, not just to the road but to life to its fullest, and luxuriated in concentrating on holding the ragtop to the curves as I climbed into the Troodos mountains, past Galata and Kakopetria, on my way to the Forest Park hotel in Pano Platres.

It had been both a brilliant and a desperate idea, I was thinking as I drove the winding road, to retreat to the mountains for two weeks before Carolyn descended. I had been pulling my hair out, harried at all sides, and tired of the constant looks I was getting in the embassy, everyone wondering how I fit in, how deeply I was going to intrude into their business and normally well-ordered community. The presumably nonfunctional male spouse appendage of a woman of substance always raises questions that are both a nuisance and an invitation to worry about favoritism and the informal pecking order. These worries were natural, I knew, even though I didn’t want to intrude at all. All I wanted to do was become invisible and write. Imagine my surprise and delight when not only could I get a reservation at the stately old British colonial mountain resort hotel, the Forest Park, but I could also book the room Daphne du Maurier had occupied while she was writing Rebecca. This was the best of all worlds.

I had come out to Cyprus two months ahead of Carolyn because she was still facing confirmation hearings in Washington, the lease was up on our New York apartment, and I fancied I’d be getting time to work on my new book. Thus far, though, I hadn’t been able to write more than a couple of pages of prose, and I very much suspected those would have to be ripped out before I was finished. I couldn’t concentrate in Nicosia.

First it was settling on a house, a process that wrung me dry as I played middleman between the embassy housing board and the persnickety Carolyn. She won out on all of her demands in the end, which, of course, I could have told the housing board she would before they even started the process. Then our shipment arrived, and it was a matter of making the house a home, combining what the embassy was providing and what Carolyn had sent. Carolyn hadn’t sent any of my favorite furnishings, of course.

It wasn’t much better at work. Even though I hadn’t made such a request, a job had been found for me at the American Center—as an assistant director. This seemed natural, as I had gained a fair reputation as a novelist. But it wasn’t a full-time job. Everyone I asked to apprise me of its duties could do little more than hem and haw and, in the end, could do no better than suggesting I’d be the artistic representative of the embassy, attending gallery openings and such—which I’d already be doing as the husband of the deputy chief of mission, the deputy U.S. ambassador. The more snide of the employees managed to let me know in indirect ways and looks that there really hadn’t been a position before Carolyn was assigned to the mission and would be coming with a husband in tow. There was another, existing assistant director of the American Center, and she handled the business and financial end and gave no indication she would be giving up any of her duties, DCM’s husband or not.

So, that was me at the embassy—the informal cultural ambassador, have scissors, will cut ribbons.

Everywhere I went while we were all waiting for Carolyn to make her entrance people drew back a step from me and scrutinized me for signs of gigolo, aka useless appendage. Everyone knew Carolyn. And if they didn’t like her, they did respect and fear her. She cut quite a swath in the State Department. This, while her first, was certainly to be her last DCM position. It would be ambassador after this. This was just a short training course for her before greater, more visible positions. If her own blond beauty, dynamic personality, and driving ambition couldn’t see to that, her daddy, U.S. Senator Lawrence Grayson, certainly would.

It was natural that people would think that I had jumped on Carolyn Grayson’s band wagon for the cushy ride—and, yes, of course she kept her own name rather than taking mine. She was the dynamo and I was twenty years younger than she was and, in the eyes of many, of no substance. It didn’t really matter that I’d had a couple of almost best-selling novels. What is a novelist anyway in the world of international affairs, if not just a nonfunctional dilettante—especially an eye-candy sort kept by a powerful woman as a well-dressed escort and nice cock to ride in bed?

And how much more dismissive would they have been of me, I wonder, if they knew that indictment now was only half true. Carolyn hadn’t thrown me out of her life when she discovered the affair I was having with the poet, Richard Thornton, but she had insisted on separate bedrooms since then. She’d known I was bisexual when we’d married and it hadn’t bothered her then, but I suppose she thought it some sort of defeat that she couldn’t straighten me out and consume me all on her own—and Carolyn didn’t like even the hint of defeat.

But neither the absent Carolyn nor the present staff of the American embassy in Nicosia could consume me now, today. With each of the ninety kilometers I was clicking off between Nicosia and Platres as I snaked around the climbing, winding mountain road in the luscious sports