A Good Sport

Chicago, especially the Committee on Social Thought, wanted us to treat Caesar and St. Augustine, Terence and Cicero, as if they’d been writing just yesterday and as if they’d proposed views of the world we were all equally competent to embrace or reject. I’m someone who’s never liked generalizations or conclusions. They make me nervous. I’d rather devote six months to a grammatical oddity such as a juicy example of hapax legomenon or hendiadys than to a consideration of man’s natural goodness or to the theory that all new knowledge is the recovery of prior knowledge.

In any event, in retirement I ended up not in the countryside outside Florence or Rome, as you might have expected, but here on Naxos, where I can read the street signs and exchange greetings with the old Greeks (by “old” I mean my age) who live up here around us in the Kastro, the walled city the Venetians built when the island was still part of their empire.

“Venice” and “empire” might give the impression of grandeur, but in fact the buildings, which run into each other and are daubed with plaster and lime-washed white, look more like sandcastles than palaces. Every wall is on a slope (it’s a devil to hang a picture true), every stair is slightly taller than the one below and slightly shorter than the one above, every twenty-foot-high beamed ceiling systematically rains plaster dust like dandruff, and once I’m up in my sleeping niche I can look out onto the kitchen through an arch that appears to have been patted into shape. If you study the arch carefully you can see fingerprints. In the winter when I’m up in my niche I feel like a kulak in a Russian novel gratefully sleeping on top of the oven.

The downstairs apartment of the house where I live has windows only at either end, so the inner two rooms are dark and cavernous, cool in summer and damp in the winter (one whole wall is wedged right into the hill beside it and is always showing patches of humidity).

My English friend, Helena, lives upstairs – and there again a simple fact might be misleading, for you might assume we’re a couple, though I’m gay (non-practicing) and she’s straight (non-practicing). The Greeks all assume we’re married, and it’s convenient for us both to let that fiction stand.

Helena and I have known each other since 1981 or so, when we met at the very pensione in Florence where Forster set A Room with a View. Now it’s been entirely tarted up, no doubt, but back then it was a classic pensione with lots of British spinsters living there year-round and a ferocious landlady who charged extra for each bath you took. It was the whole slightly dismal world of shabby gentility, of retired teachers addicted to dog-eared Agatha Christie novels and visits to the Uffizi only in February when it was empty. The cynical, flirtatious Albanian waiter, who himself was getting long in the tooth but was, even so, thirty years younger than the average pensionnaire, would bring out each guest’s wine bottle (the level of liquid carefully marked on the glass in grease pencil, the cork carefully half-inserted) and set it beside the used, egg-speckled napkin in a ring and the oval, plaited-fiber placemat, into which old toast crumbs were permanently wedged. Adnan kissed the old ladies’ hands before and after dinner, having already been the recipient of several small legacies much contested by nieces back in Brighton. He ogled me as well, on the (generally safe) theory that all well-behaved American men on their own and past a certain age are homophile.

One day a deaf American biddy misunderstood Adnan’s routine flattery and took it as a serious come-on, which she answered by looking him in the eye unsmilingly and whispering, “All right, then, come by my room at five, after my siesta, as we say in Italy.” Well, dear, that’s not what we say anywhere east of Madrid, and Adnan looked so small and alarmed that Helena and I fell about laughing as soon as we escaped and ran up and down the Lungarno. By suppertime we were joined at the hip. Both of us were there because of Forster – Helena because she was doing an article on Forster in Florence, and I because he was one of my favorite writers.

I’m not terribly sociable, though I’m no misanthrope either – which is to say I can afford to be highly selective in my companions because I don’t at all mind ending up alone. I rather prefer it. I made the whole trip one spring break to Angkor Wat without exchanging a word with anyone but the tour guide and the desk clerk, ignoring the other members of our group, all half-gaga Golden-Agers determined to enthuse. My mind is like one of those big baskets rural grandmothers used to keep full of scraps of cloth and ribbon to amuse little girls before the era of commercial toys. I can just dip in at any moment and find odd associations, memories, imaginary dialogues, sexy scenes, translation problems, moments that make me wince, and even a few that make me smile with a sense of quiet triumph.

But with Helena I found I shared an instant complicity. And she was as beautiful as a carving on the outer walls of the Miracoli church in Venice, that small white marble chapel shaped oddly to fit onto a corner where two canals meet at an angle and a humped-back stone bridge leap-frogs behind. In low reliefs there are heavenly musicians in three-quarter profile tapping tambourines or breathing into a flute or opening their lips to sing, and the purity of their features, the precise carving of their nostrils and the philtrum below and the commissure of their lips, the way their long, smooth lids fit over their eyes (am I making all this up? Misremembering it?) – well, all that ideal beauty recalled Helena’s at the time I met her. She had pierced ears freighted with delicate gold wires and gold oval frames holding translucent, carved bits of tourmaline and on her left wedding finger glowed a dark Bengali emerald.

Straight women sometimes assume that we gay men are indifferent to their beauty because we don’t lust after it. Or they think we don’t notice it unless we want to dress it or blow-dry it. But I’ve never wanted to be either a womanizer or a hairdresser, yet I can have my breath taken away by an old-fashioned Pietro Lombardi kind of beauty like Helena’s.

She had only two or three conversational modes, but I have no more and hers suited me. She could bark out orders with regal impatience. She could be full of mischief and covert satire, alert to pomposity or absurdity on every side but not cruel except to other women she perceived as rivals. She could curl up and be cozy while endlessly analyzing what some handsome man had said. “‘See you later’ – now what exactly did he mean when he added ‘later’?” she demanded. ‘‘He was under no obligation to say ‘later.’ Or was he just being a tart like most men?”

And she might be airily dismissive of anything she deemed “pedantic,” though as a good journalist she could swot up on almost any subject and she owned thousands of books, most of which she’d read and Post-It-noted. Sometimes during orgies of idleness she read nothing but whodunits, which she consumed in industrial quantities. For me reading has always been such a conscious, fastidious activity (the midwestern self-improver in me) that I was invariably puzzled when she’d pick up a Carl Hiaasen and mutter, “Wonder if I’ve already read this one.” Now I don’t read much, except one novel on Istanbul, over and over.

We were very compatible from the start. She’d lived a big life in many countries and was good at languages. She knew all about court etiquette but scoffed at Americans drooling over titles – and our inability to get them right. She had lots of stories to tell, always new ones. She was usually on time, curious about my life but not prying, quick to roll her eyes if a conversation or guitar recital in the lovely ducal chapel went on too long.

We were famous for taking French leave (bolting without a good-bye, which the French consider an English failing, filer à l’anglaise).

She was fiercely opinionated and independent-minded in the best English upper-middle-class way and was quick to dismiss an idea she disagreed with as “rubbish.” I kept telling her to tone it down around Americans, who are notoriously thin-skinned and often only a step away from actual physical violence, but nothing could tame her. She was extraordinarily courageous. Once a dreadful man was telling us he’d refused to make love to Pamela (one of Helena’s childhood friends, unbeknownst to him) because she’d been “mutilated” by breast surgery. Whereupon Helena said in a loud voice in front of everyone, “Funny, she said you tried but couldn’t get it up – and that was before the surgery.” She was fearless like that – and fierce in defending her pals.

We often took vacations together over the next twenty years. With her blonde mane and zaftig beauty and elegant speech she was a male magnet, especially in the Caribbean, I recall, though I was the one who did slightly better in Morocco. We’d often wonder if a particular man would be one of hers or mine.

I’m small, well-knit, with round, gold-rimmed glasses, the perpetual half-smile of a little devil about to deliver the punch line. I have small, perfect teeth, small, carefully manicured hands, a nearly hairless torso, high-arched size-seven feet, which a big Welsh bear once kissed all night long with fetishistic insistence. Helena and I called him my transi, which in French means something like a bashful, passionate lover. He was my transi, and not the first. There was a Tokyo stockbroker with a wife and children and traces of a bad case of adolescent acne who turned out (much to his chagrin and my total indifference) to be Korean, heaven forfend. Once I knew the supposedly shameful truth of his origins he could never bear to see me again.

Then there was a Swiss-German conference interpreter, who could translate into and out of five languages at hour-long stretches; he was ten years younger than I but domineering and perfectionist; he worshiped me, and not just my feet, even though his passion took him by surprise, given his Nicaraguan wife and his usual preference for ethnic women or artsy, long-haired youths with gold ear hoops in their early twenties.

Many men adored me, which gave me a quiet feeling of satisfaction, though I never paid it much attention. It’s as if I never looked up from the chess game to see the fireworks.

For me the game was sometimes my scholarship, often my teaching, but most generally my own slightly smug pleasure in merely existing. I like making myself little meals, doing yoga in a patch of sunlight, motoring up to Saugatuck, Michigan, for a golden September weekend and renting a cottage there. Then, I liked rereading Evelyn Waugh or Ronald Firbank or E. M. Forster novels or bad French novels of the 1890s (I’m very good in French, it’s my only modern language). Or thumbing through a new cookbook and turning down the corner of recipes I might want to try out some day (but never did). For a year or two I took up the harpsichord just so I could play Scarlatti’s Sonata K. 24 and Couperin’s “Les barricades mystérieuses.” For several years I toyed with doing a verse translation of some racy medieval Latin poems, homosexual doggerel written in the margins of holy missals by horny copyists, but then I reread my efforts and decided I wasn’t gifted with words.

Into this china shop of a life Helena would come crashing from time to time. She found my way of living in Chicago intensely “boring,” she said the one time she visited me there. “Next thing you’ll be growing violets!” she cried. “Competitively! Good thing you like mumble-mumble…”

“I like what?”

“Like being mumbled.”

“Like being what?”

“Screwed!” she shouted, tossing back her great mane of blond hair and letting her fine eyes blaze before she crumpled into a puddle of hot-faced giggles, because she had a convent girl’s love of shocking and a convent girl’s penchant for wetting her knickers after she’d uttered a gross word. She was persuaded that only my sex drive saved me from total old-maidishness.

Three years ago, when I retired, I moved in here with Helena on Naxos, a lively enough island during the summer but rather dreary and underpopulated in the winter. Thank heavens for my Bulgarian friend Boris (though Helena hates him). Helena has a wonderful eye and has filled every room with old clocks that no longer work, little wood dressing tables painted pale blue, old sea chests draped in nineteenth-century embroideries from Crete, a great glowering sepia-tinted photograph of a heavy-lidded Cavafy, fine silk rugs emblazoned with the Byzantine tree of life that she brought back from Anatolia, mismatched water glasses, and chipped old plates, all lovely and suggestive of a story. Her quarters upstairs are grander but messier (she’s terribly messy if squeamishly clean – the washing machine never stops churning from dawn to dusk though the maid has to load and unload it since Helena is too fastidious to touch dirty clothes, even her own).

My quarters are both tidy and clean; I don’t like even Eleni, the cleaning woman, to come in – she only disturbs things by dusting them. Helena has five cats, all of them with highfalutin’ names like Dido and Arete (which means “Virtue” in Greek). I have no cats, perhaps because I am one, tiptoeing gingerly through life or gathering myself into a glossy ball of indifference and self-sufficiency.

I keep thinking I should have a project, but already three years have slipped by and I’ve done nothing useful, which infuriates Helena. She and I have taken endless car rides (she drives – the car is hers) and prospected every old Venetian tower or ruined monastery on the island, but now we don’t often leave the port town where we live unless it’s to show the sights to American or English friends, who show up only in July or August. The first year, I escaped Naxos in January and flew to Key West, where I have two friends even older than I am, but the flight exhausted me with its change of planes in Athens and again in Miami. The second winter Helena and I traveled together through Morocco by rental car; she had an assignment from The Telegraph that paid for our luxury hotels. I receive a modest but adequate income from my savings and social security and teacher’s pension (TIAA-CREF), but I don’t like living close to the margin. We have an adorable doctor here but if I ever became seriously ill (which does happen to old people) I’d have to be flown to Athens and pay all the bills out of my own pocket since I’m not a Greek citizen and my medical insurance doesn’t cover me here. Up till now everything in my life, but absolutely everything, has gone surprisingly well, though I recognize that now I’m on the slippery slope.

This winter I’m not traveling except in my head. It’s February and a constant wild rain keeps lashing our five-hundred-year-old walls, and here from the kitchen (I’m writing on the kitchen table) I can see and hear a shutter banging next door at the abandoned monastery, which is never used except in the summer when the church rents out very uncomfortable beds to Spartan Eastern European backpackers.

I’ve OD’d on reading and listening to my hundreds of CDs. Helena has gone into hibernation, or maybe she’s just vexed with me. She has a terrible flu, which she’s nursing with single-malt Scotch in a squalid heap on her big bed, weighted down by all five cats. She complains of the cold but says she can’t bear central heating – so English. I’m quite happy with the hot-water system I had installed – I just flick a switch and moments later the whole vast domain is toasty and noisy with clanking pipes, a regular calypso band. And I keep a fire burning in the fireplace most days.

To fight the blues I do my daily calisthenics at nine in the morning, I bathe and dress with care at nine-thirty, I drink coffee and eat yogurt and a banana at ten, I check my e-mail at ten thirty (usually just Viagra ads) – and then I have absolutely nothing to do and nowhere to go. If I’m feeling conscientious I try to memorize a Greek verb in all its many puzzling forms, but I find that at my age any kind of learning by rote is hard to master. But I must confess I haven’t been very rigorous about anything recently. In fact not at all.

And then? Well, the days are very long and I’ve taken up the habit of daydreaming for hours on end and telling my memories as a Catholic like Helena says the rosary. Aided by the exquisite black gum my Bulgarian friend has taught me how to smoke. Yes, it’s opium, but I’m too timid, basically, to become addicted, though I do love the dreams it induces. And it’s true that it releases one from all sexual longings, which you may be surprised to learn still beset me. My opium amuses me, as does the old novel I’m reading – The Isle of Princes by Hasan Ozbekhan, published in 1958, written in English but obviously by a Turk.

Why, just today I sank into an extended recollection of Istanbul, a memory prompted by staring at an old Ottoman ruby water glass, hand-painted with pale-green glazed designs of foliage. I bought it in one of the little antique shops to be found at the very heart of the covered Grand Bazaar in Instanbul. After wandering through miles of kitchen equipment, cheap sandals, rolls of linoleum, and racks of crudely stitched leather jackets (aubergine seems to be a favorite color), you finally get to a gate that when open admits one to a section that sells old Korans, nineteenth-century nargiles, pawned brooches and recycled rings, battered heavenly blue tiles from Iznik, dark carved furniture with tulip cut-outs.

Helena and I spent three months on Büyükada, one of the Princes Islands in the Sea of Marmara, and there I had one of the great romances of my life, a moment I keep coming back to in my thoughts as I look out at the world through my ruby glass. The opium helps me re-create the best moments but also dissolves the limits between remembering and wishing. I suppose Helena would say the whole adventure was just a pipe dream.

We’d happened to visit Büyükada three or four years after we’d met, about 1984, when the Turkish tourist bureau invited Helena and a companion (me, as it turned out), all expenses paid, for a ten-day visit. Our plane fares on Turkish Air, our hotel room at the Pera Palas Hotel, our meals, our car and chauffeur, our wonderful guide Cansen (pronounced “Johnson”) – everything was free. The idea was that with their weak currency the Turks couldn’t afford ads in glossy foreign travel magazines but they could provide luxurious tours within the country to prominent foreign travel writers, with the understanding that such a boondoggle might eventually result in a favorable article in those very magazines from which their budget had excluded their ads.

Now Turkey is such a popular holiday destination that even Greece and Spain are suffering from the competition, but back then Westerners still feared rape, torture, imprisonment – all dire visions inspired by a popular movie of the time, Midnight Express. Of course the direness was not entirely exaggerated; once when I asked Cansen where I could buy some marijuana (I’ve always been partial to what the French call stupéfiants), she automatically clapped her wrists together in the universal symbol for arrest. Her eyes widened and she said or needed to do nothing more.

It was Cansen who took us out one day to Büyükada. Now there’s a high-speed boat that gets you there from Galata in half an hour, but then there was only the sluggish little ferry from Eminönü, which dawdled over to the Asian side and the imposing train station built in the Edwardian era by the German Kaiser; then the boat pushed off for the four Princes Islands, calling on each one before it reached the largest, Büyükada, which means simply “big island.” We were put up overnight by the government at a grand white wood summer hotel, the Splendid, with its red shutters, so striking against a backdrop of pine-covered hills.

Two-thirds of the island is planted with forests, the whole hilly interior, but the coasts are lined with magnificent wood mansions rambling down to the sea. A few of the houses are constructed in unpainted weathered wood, a sandy brown pale enough to show the grain, invariably carved into a carpenter’s gothic, which strangely enough resembles the wood lace that covers old houses on Key West or Martha’s Vineyard.

These are the “cottages” of rich people with their acres of showy gardens tended by dark-skinned blue-eyed Kurds. No cars are permitted on the island, just horses and phaetons, and many day-trippers come over for a buggy ride (the “little tour” or the “big tour,” the cuçuk-tura or the büyük-tura). Oh, there’s nothing more peaceful or poetic than a clip-clop through the cool, dry forests as we glimpse the Sea of Marmara through the branches, everything smelling of resin baking in the sun. The pines turn brown under the intense sunlight, though you can say in favor of Istanbul weather that it changes every day, now cool and blowy, now hot and airless, now rainy, usually dry.

Once we stopped under the trees and out of nowhere a boy rose up like a genie with a big tin samovar and small green tea glasses. Suddenly we felt a bit like Rumi, contemplating the rolling, darkening sea and sipping our heavily sugared tea (so sweet it attracted little bees) as we sat cross-legged on the slippery, redolent pine needles. We fell into a very pasha-like indolence, one that resembles those that are opiate-induced, a rich pleasure that absolutely requires the anxious attendance of onlooking servants. Just a hint of cruelty enhances any pleasure.

Our idyll lasted just a day. The next night we were back at the Pera Palas, rising slowly in the filigreed cage of an elevator (a hydraulic relic of the 1890s) to the small, hot rooms under the eaves that the Turkish government had arranged for us.

We conferred. We had no choice. We had to find an apartment or house on that island, which was so unusual, so impossible to “place,” that I was convinced it could be used as a surreal backdrop for a dreamlike film. When we happened to be there it was at the time of the Greater Bayram, the Festival of Sacrifice, which commemorates the ransom of Ishmael (or is it Isaac?), ram substituted for boy. On the streets of Istanbul I saw an elegant businessman at Eminönü in his tie, German eyeglasses, Oxford shirt, Italian shoes, and three-piece suit leading a brightly dyed live sheep by a leash onto a waiting barge headed for Büyükada. The contrast (the city of course straddles Asia and Europe) struck me as telling and picturesque – no more folkloric than our own Easter egg hunts or Passion Plays, to be sure.

THE ONLY PROBLEm about renting a place on Büyükada was that all the people who lived there were rich and had no need to let their flats, especially given that the season was short (no one except servants lived there in the winter). And it was a respectable place, reserved for married parents with children and no riotous habits. Even the resourceful Cansen came up empty-handed. Ordinarily when one asked her a question she had a severe, almost curt way of grunting assent and nodding minutely without ever blinking her huge eyes, the color of the sea on a cloudy day; the grunt and nod indicated, as in this case, that she’d taken in the request without necessarily having figured out a way to grant it. We were so eager this time, however, that we pressed her. Then she seemed almost startled out of a trance, shrugged her big shoulders under the heavy padding of her Soviet-style bureaucratic suit jacket. “I really don’t know – but I’ll sink.” And she tapped her forehead with her outstretched index and middle fingers to indicate serious “sinking.”

Her thinking produced an invitation for a glass of cold cherry juice on the shaded balcony of a Mrs. Tekhinan. We crossed the Bosphorus via the new Japanese-built suspension bridge and drove through endlessly proliferating brand-new slums of ten- and twelve-story projects on the Asia side, streets without trees or lights or even in some spots paving. At last we arrived at the elegant old houses lining the Sea of Marmara. That’s where our hostess lived under blue-and-white-striped awnings. She was a trim, fifty-something woman with a fine, slim-hipped figure, her graying hair pulled back in a severe bun decorated with a paper gardenia, her face tan and lean with a large nose and a wen at the end of one eyebrow. She reminded me of Maria Callas. She had a low, musical voice, and she moved us rapidly through rooms that could have belonged to any bourgeois lady on the Cap d’Antibes, save for the spindly brass tables and a big creepy painting of turbaned officials with white impassive moon-shaped faces beating a prisoner with exactly the same face, all sporting the same pencil-thin mustache. Everything in her apartment was immaculate. I’m sure she had a maid or even several, but they were nowhere to be seen.

It seemed she had a house to rent, a vast old wood yali, as the nineteenth-century mansions were called. She and her husband were going to Switzerland in a week, to Arosa for a cure, and she saw no major reason against renting the yali to such a sympathetic couple, especially if we kept on the same servants – one of us was a scholar, no, and his wife a writer, no? Mrs. Tekhinan averred that she adored foreign intellectuals and counted many of them among her friends. She even knew a French academician named Jean-Louis Curtis, such a charmer, were we familiar with his delicious novels?

And then I saw him, the son, in a long white coat without a collar that buttoned down to his knees with small white irregular shell buttons, a shirt-coat that had been bleached and ironed to blinding perfection. He was twenty-eight or nine, I guessed, not tall, his hair a glossy black cap, his body dark and slender inside its full white tunic, which at the time I assumed must be Turkish at-home mufti but that later I deduced was a summer garment of his own design. He had a canny, intelligent face. His shoulders were hunched slightly forward, which hollowed out his chest.

His mother glimpsed him too and called him to join us. His name was Davud.

I SHOULD MENTION THAT when I met Helena she sometimes annoyed me by mocking gay men. She acted as if we were sexual imbeciles who hadn’t yet gotten the point of women. In talking about gays she was by turns too bawdy or obtuse or dismissive or pitying or just openly contemptuous. Once when I referred to an old college girlfriend of mine she croaked with laughter and said in her swoopiest voice, “You! With a woman! Why, you wouldn’t know which end to approach. It is the front side usually – you do know that at least, I trust?” When I appeared irritated with the tone she was taking she said, “Men and women were built to fit together, tongue and groove, you will concede. Everything else you people do is just a form of groping. There have been men I would only grope. I’m not against groping – but it’s not the tongue and groove God intended.”

I teased her going on about tongues and about “divinely ordained cunnilingus.” To be frank, I myself shift through many negative thoughts about homosexuals, but Helena’s responses always seemed slapdash, condescending and out of synch with my own. I suppose you could say I’m hyper-discreet, the sort of closet queen the French call une honteuse (an “ashamed woman”), though I am by nature secretive and would have been just as elusive if I’d been straight (Helena has no idea how often my Bulgarian friend visits). And in the Third World, where I’ve worked most spectacularly as a ‘‘sexual operative,’’ flamboyance in men is frowned on.

Or worse, once when I was in Yemen as a tourist, four bare-chested Germans in tight leather shorts and sporting gold nipple rings roared into the town of Taiz on motorcycles. Within minutes all four were shot and killed (every Yemeni in that area carries a Kalishnikov). It’s best to play (what I actually am) the mild-mannered little professor with the friendly smile, a few words of polite Arabic, and an inexhaustible patience in debating the relative merits of Christianity and Islam (both of which, truth be told, I despise, though in seductive talks with earnest young fedayeen I always favor the Prophet).

So you can imagine how grating Helena’s sneering could strike me. Luckily she is a diplomat’s daughter and she quickly reformed. Perhaps she’d been a bit superior when we first met because she was much courted back then. In her favor it should be said she’s always been an impulsive, generous friend, someone who might suddenly send you (me in this case) twenty-three antique lace pillowcases through the mail with a two-line note saying she was sharing them given what a sinful quantity she’d accumulated. Or she might mail an air ticket to London to a New York painter friend quietly starving to death on the Lower East Side.

That generosity co-existed initially with the conviction that she, as a desirable heterosexual woman, was a player while I, as a poor childish gay, was a mere onlooker at Belshazzar’s Feast. She’d say, “Oh, Harold’s not jealous of you. He likes it I have an amusing little capon.” And then she’d reach out to touch my sleeve with an adorable little hand and sing out, “I’m just teasing you!”

If I looked fussed she’d add in a softer contralto, “It’s enough he has to put up with Langdon” (her husband). “He couldn’t cope with another whole rival. Anyway, he said cicerone, not ‘capon.’ I said that, or the imp of the perverse did.”

Her personal life was very messy; we were going to write her memoirs and call it Messy Loves. Her older lover, Harold, was a rich man, someone who’d started out as a greengrocer and ended up as the proprietor of a small Elizabethan castle. Though he’d been born on the East End he’d acquired a posh accent and lots of first editions and some good pieces of Ch’ing porcelain. He was married to a stylish, bookish Italian called Concetta whom he refused to leave (she was a baronessa). When he became overnight through some adroit purchases a media giant and was himself under scrutiny he insisted Helena throw everyone off the scent by getting married. The only problem was that her designated new husband, Langdon, Harold’s porcelain dealer, didn’t grasp that their marriage was meant to be one of convenience, hers. And Harold’s. Langdon wanted to consummate the mariage blanc. Helena was a good sport and sort of complied (maybe that’s where she got her notions of “groping,” for after all Langdon was her husband and he wasn’t ugly), but when Harold discovered what was going on he was livid. Pretty comical if you think about it: the lover cuckolded by the husband.

Not so funny the way it all ended. Spy got hold of it and The Sun, then all the other – I won’t say “tabloids” since every news-paper in the U.K. is a scandal sheet now, even the Times. Messy divorce, and then Baronessa Concetta was obliged to call her Harold to heel. Helena limped out of the ruins with a reputation; all those debutante tarts who publish their desultory little “diaries” in the papers called Helena to wheedle out of her a “tiny thought about adultery.” Helena became very skilled at hanging up on people.

After that she had more affairs, of course, but if the man was rich or famous it got onto the third or fourth page (“Hopalong Helena Mounts Another Labor Lord”). Once the night watchman at a magazine where she was working freelance caught her “at it” as he elegantly put it and ran – I mean ran – to phone it in to Spy. Helena sued and won but never worked there again.

She fell asleep too early, put on weight, spent more time with her cats than with people. After six in the evening she was hopeless; she turned on the “wind machine,” as we called it – she was always yawning and couldn’t concentrate and talked to her cats even when her guests were saying something.

It took a while but gradually Helena was giving up on London. She spent much of the year in Greece or the Caribbean or Southeast Asia churning out her articles. Of course her mother thought she was only inviting “disagreeable misadventures” by traveling to such places, but as Helena put it, “Cairo has a lower crime rate than Winterthur, Switzerland.”

She sold her London flat and bought her vast ancient house on Naxos. But I should point out that her disappointment in love, the notoriety she’d acquired, soured her on men, heterosexual men. She decided that sex – pure, exciting, unfeeling sex – she didn’t much like except once every three years with a thrilling stranger. Otherwise, with steady beaux, she could tolerate the act only if it was accompanied by heaps and heaps of devotion and tenderness and buildup. Since fewer and fewer men were wooing her now, she hung up her gloves as a sexual contender. “I never miss it,” she said. “I never even think about it. That chapter is closed. I lead an entirely virtuous life,” she said half-humorously but with a serious intent. She went to mass every Sunday.

Until I became so close to Helena I never understood how fragile and romantic women are by nature. Very few men seem to fathom that essential difference between men and women, their fragility. Oddly, I think she’s come to prefer my company and that of two other gay male friends, though they live in New York (they’re Welsh but have worked in America for the last fifteen years). She doesn’t see them often; me she sees every day, unless we’re on the outs, as we are now.

She and I are well suited. I’m certainly not fragile, yet I’m a good deal more “civilized” if you will than most of the gay men of my generation. I’ve probably not slept with more than thirty men in my entire fifty years of sexual maturity. That may sound like a lot but believe me, some of these gays get up into the hundreds and even thousands. I don’t like big muscles or strict role-playing or any sort of to-do about gay identity. I think private life should be private. A casual pickup does nothing for me. I’ve never marched in a gay parade and when the Rainbow Club of Bloomington invited me to be the gay faculty advisor I refused. I like mystery and subtlety. That must be why I prefer the bisexuals I find in out-of-the-way places to New York or San Francisco clones or circuit queens or ghetto ladies. Like Helena I enjoy being courted; the game of seduction, with all its false starts, dead ends, and sudden rewards, is something I prize as much as the old bump-and-grind.

Helena and I are both good cooks and we both appreciate good wines.

“PERHAPS I CAN GIVE YOU a tour of our yali on Büyükada,’’ Davud was saying there under the striped awnings as we sipped our cherry juice.

Cansen grunted and even produced a tiny Comintern smile. For some reason I blushed – I hope my tan hid my confusion.

“But no, Davud,” his mother said in a voice of delighted protest. “Pity, Davud, pity, please – you know you hate anything to do with…” She searched for the word and finally said, “…with commerce.”

“What a big word, Betty, for such a delightful outing.” To us he added, “Our house may not be much but I love it. It’s where my grandfather lived and died and his father, Ottomans of the old school.”

His mother, whom he kept calling Betty to her vexed amusement, puffed out her cheeks in mock impatience. “Ottoman? Yes, if that means your grandfather never worked a day in his life, denounced Atatürk constantly, much to our detriment, and lamented the good old days of eunuchs and smelly old wandering dervishes.” She held her very large nose with a tanned finger and thumb to indicate distaste for the glamorous past.

Helena and I exchanged a quick glance to acknowledge this snobbish mother-son game of pretending to lament what one secretly plumes oneself over. We’d spotted this maneuver in other people and had already laughed about it.

As we were leaving, Betty shook her head operatically and said to Helena, “I can’t imagine what sort of spell you’ve cast over my lazy, impractical, whimsical son!” (She shouted the “whimsical” while bugging her eyes at her son, or rather at her vaudeville partner.)

When we were back at the Pera Palas and relaxing in its vast Edwardian lobby, an Orientalist version of a West End men’s club, the Garrick on the Golden Horn, Helena said nothing beyond asking with a faint smile, “That dishy wog today, do you think he likes boys or girls?”

TRUE TO HIS WORD Davud greeted our ferry on the long, windowed landing at Büyükada, which was decorated with Turkish words written in the outmoded Arabic script.

Davud gave us a big friendly wave and a dosed smile. He had Helena on one side and me on the other as he hurried us along, touching us both lightly on the shoulder. “We must hire a carriage to get out to the yali.” Behind some stores, faced in unpainted wood like serfs’ houses in a Tolstoyan village, lay a big taxi rank of horse-drawn phaetons, if that’s what you call these open carriages with facing seats accommodating four and a convertible roof that can be raised. Most of them had shiny plastic-covered seats in an improbably bright green or purple with gold stars in their translucent depths, but some had proper sun-faded leather upholstery and suspended hands of Fatima or glass eyes on strings for good luck.

There were dozens of carriages inching their way up to the raised landing dock where we waited our turn and then boarded without needing to step up or down, though the carriage bounced on its springs under our sudden weight. Davud was careful to put Helena and me together on the seat that faced forward and then he sat opposite me, our knees nearly touching.

“I thought your great Atatürk had banned veils and burkas,” Helena murmured, indicating with a twitch of her chin the women in the party just ahead of ours, all three sheathed in something black and synthetic that even covered their faces likesome horrible cocoon.

“They’re Arabs,” Davud said. “Saudis, probably. They often come here during Ramadan, which we’re less, uh, rigorous about observing. We’re much more laissez-aller here.”

As if on cue we could hear a muezzin, his bleating voice electrically amplified, calling the faithful to prayer, though none of the merchants in the stores we were trotting past seemed fazed by the summons. When I mentioned that, Davud shrugged, as if my observation was uncool and touristy, though after a while he said, “Many of the people on the island are Jews. The Sultan took 20,000 Spanish Jews and many of them have summer houses here.”

“When was that?” Helena asked. “After the war?”

Davud smiled. “In 1492. During the Inquisition.”

“Help!” Helena cried, “He’s going all historical on us. We can’t bear pedants.”

For once I wished Helena hadn’t spoken for me.

“Wasn’t a synagogue blown up recently in Istanbul?” Helena asked next with a hint of aggressiveness in her voice, as if to darken Davud’s rosy picture of Turkish tolerance.

Davud merely squinted and said, “Up here is the butcher we use, though I hope you’re not squeamish about flies, which cover the meat, which hangs from hooks. No refrigeration. And there, that’s where I buy the sour cherry juice we Turks affection. Do you say ‘affection’ or is that a verb only in French?”

“‘Like’ is what we say,” I said, looking at him steadily.

“My English,” he complained, shrugging.

“But it’s excellent!” Helena protested as the official keeper of standard pronunciation. “Did you study in England?”

“I went to a little law school near London, just south of London, for a little semester. Not a known school, just a little –”

“In English men don’t say ‘little.’ We don’t speak in diminutives,’’ Helena announced.

Davud pretended he hadn’t heard. “But I’m not studious. I don’t like the law. I was homesick.”

There was a cool sea breeze siphoning up through the trees as we climbed the leafy, hilly road that wound past the old yalis in their splendid gardens of roses and big, grandmotherly mauve hydrangeas. Some of the houses were set back behind fences of impressive iron staves tipped in gold, though others were smaller and leaned out over the pavement and looked modest and approachable like ski chalets. “Those shutters,” Helena said, “have carved-out tulips.”

“The flower we invented,” Davud said. "When we tried to conquer Vienna we failed, twice, but at least we did leave behind tulips – and coffee, which the human central system of nervous seems to crave.” He appeared to be very pleased with the word crave, which he worked into the conversation again.

He was being gallant with Helena (though she was muttering again about pedantry) and deferential with me, but he also laced his beautiful manners with a certain coolness that was unmistakably aristocratic (if Helena heard me saying that, she would whoop with laughter, since she thinks Americans are clueless about the aristocracy).

I was intensely aware of his white hands on his knees – not exactly white, more the color of weak tea. The backs of his hands and the top knuckles were covered with fine black hair, which seemed to me (how to say it?) somehow “fatherly” and “decent,” as if they were a family doctor’s hands and all they lacked were a stethoscope and a gold wedding band. His manner was tricky and dandified, but his hands were honest and reassuring. The most natural thing in the world would have been to lean forward to kiss them.

The whole house had been kept closed for a long time, I imagined, and everything smelled of airless hot wood, of brass wiring and good tar soap. He and a reluctant old servant, whose nap we’d visibly interrupted, led us through. There must have been twenty rooms, each another half step down the hill toward the water’s edge and a freshly painted boathouse.

The minute I saw the narrow entrance hall with its boot rack and coat tree I thought to myself, “I’m going to become so familiar with all this that breezing past it will become second nature. I’ll soon be on cozy familial terms with these blue-and-white floor tiles, the ormolu grandfather clock so shallow it seems to be pressing itself against the wall like a hiding child, the silk shade dripping fringe over a green faience vase. My muscles will memorize where the step comes and how deep it is, where to find the switch without looking to turn on that outsize crystal chandelier hung with the million dusty Bohemian crystal lusters. I’ll learn how to squeeze past this flotilla of armless slipper chairs covered in dusty rose silk to arrive at the sunroom that gives onto a secret garden.”

The next sitting room was obviously “the Turkish corner,” with its inscriptions in gilt Arabic calligraphy spelling out the ninety-nine names of Allah along the low cornice – or so Davud said, though he shrunk away comically from Helena’s upraised warning finger. We looked at its brass hookah, its couch pressed up against one wall, and its thick Persian carpet laid out for contemplation with woven patterns of fountains and paradisal flower baskets, and its mirhab on the side, presumably, facing Mecca.

“Here’s Madame’s room,” Davud said at the next door. We crossed it and he pulled back the royal-blue satin curtains to illuminate a Venetian bed worthy to be an empress’s sleigh, freighted with hundreds of embroidered cushions the light blue of shadows on snow. The wall sconces were electrified candles backed by scalloped antiqued mirrors narrow at the base and rounded and flared at the top. There were four, five, six! sconces and an enchanting three-mirror vanity table, all stoppered unguents and perfume atomizers in cut rose quartz. “You may think it’s in dubious taste,” Davud said, “but at least it’s Late Ottoman kitsch. They liked everything French and English but they – or rather we – gave it that extra twist, to turn it into a sickly sweet bonbonnière, something to make you think of the harem and drugged sherberts of watermelon ice. And cruel. The cruelty is an important ingredient.”

“Oh, you’re such a ham!” Helena scolded. “Say what you will, it’s heavenly. So feminine.”

“Is there anything more feminine than a harem? Think of Ingres,” and he leered comically and stroked an invisible handlebar mustache.

Here I’ve taken a little break from writing this up to greet my Bulgarian friend. There now, I feel much better. On with my Turkish delights…

“Did your grandfather,” Helena blurted out before she trailed off, wondering where her question might lead us, “keep a harem?”

“My great-great-grandfather did.” He counted the generations off on his fingers, starting with his thumb. “Yes, great, great, grand . . . he had many women. By the time my grandfather came along we Turkish men had entered an era of diminished expectations.”

Helena and I could see by the twinkle in his eye that we were meant to laugh and we did.

“Now, Helena, if I may . . .”

“But you must!”

“You stay here for a moment in your pale-blue kitsch harem and I’ll show Monsieur his austere little cubbyhole.”

“All right,” she drawled dubiously, though within an instant she’d danced around her room, flopped, and was luxuriating on the heavily quilted bedspread; she looked like a very pretty cloud riding low over neatly tilled springtime fields.

Davud didn’t say anything as he led me down one corridor and then another (I’m feeling dizzy for some reason). He waved the servant off. We crossed a garden, he opened a heavy wood door and once inside closed it and gave me a passionate kiss – yes, it felt as if someone had just pressed a fresh ripe mango over my face, that’s how it felt, yes. Though I was twelve or fifteen years older than he, suddenly he was whispering in my ear, “My little boy.”

“Am I really?” I asked idiotically, an octave too high.

“Yes,” he said, “that’s what you are.”

I said, “We’ll take it – the house.”

HE ESCORTED US EVERYWHERE on the island in a carriage he retained for days on end. He showed us where the carriage drivers lived in makeshift cottages down in a valley surrounded by trees. He led us down a steep pathless hill to a tiny hidden beach where we swam and sunbathed in solitude. Later he invited us to lunch in a grove where a sort of witch with wild hair and dirty hands served us grilled lamb. Again we were quite alone.

He flirted with Helena so much and so convincingly that, despite her famous “gaydar,” she said, “He’s one for my side. He’s one you’ll never get.”

But she also wondered if she’d ever “get” him. “Do you think I’m too fat for him?”

“You’re not fat,” I insisted. “Anyway, you see how these Turkish men worship you – you’re like their sultana Rozelana, the Russian. They never take their eyes off you.”

She brightened up. “Did I tell you how the masseuse at that hammam near the Blue Mosque told me that her husband would give ten years of his life for one night with me?”

“No,” I lied, so she’d have the pleasure of repeating it.

“I asked would he prefer me over that lovely French girl over there? I pointed out a mannequin the next slab over. But no, the masseuse said, she’s as skinny as a boy! Madame is a real woman.”

“Hear, hear!” I said.

What I didn’t dare tell her was that Davud had put me in my austere cubbyhole because it had an outside door. He visited me every night after we three had spent a long wonderful day together, and he’d taken his leave, bowing at the waist in ironic salaams.

I’d yawn and stretch and murmur my bored assent while Helena parsed Davud, praised him for his looks and charm and speculated about his exaggerated interest in us. “He can’t be that bored. Maybe he’s a fortune hunter and he thinks I’m some other Helena,” she said. “After all his mother pretended they were renting the yali out just this once because they were all heading off for Davos or Arosa or whatever, but yet here they still are.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” I said.

“Right? Which part of what I just said, pray, is right in your opinion? You’re hopeless about Davud. I think they need the money, that they’re nouveau pauvre and fighting to keep up appearances. I love the yali but it’s a wreck. Face it. My theory jibes with her asking us not to say we were renting but rather to pretend we’re her guests. She’s says it’s not the Turkish custom to rent out homes. Then she said she doesn’t want to declare our rent on her taxes. But she just doesn’t want the other ladies at the country club to know she’s hard up.”

“Oh,” I moaned, “that country club.” We’d seen a group of chubby, heavily painted Turkish subteens giggling and rushing into the country club, all wearing long-sleeved sweaters laden down with heavy gold appliqué. Davud had snorted something about la jeunesse dorée.

“No wonder he likes me given the competition,” Helena said. “I’m blond and sophisticated and I speak several languages, not one of those Bedouins in lamé jumpers.”

I couldn’t figure out how to end the evening except by kissing her on the forehead and miming sleep by resting my cheek on joined hands. “You’re hopeless!” she shouted, then patted me vaguely and whispered, “Nighty-night.” She withdrew into her pale-blue chamber, which at night, all six wall sconces alight, glowed like the inside of a pine branch on fire.

As soon as I was in my room someone locked the door, yes, locked it from the inside, someone naked and warm who pulled me to the bed. “I thought you’d never come,” he said.

He held me and told me all the things he’d never confessed to anyone. I felt that no one had ever really listened to him – to his stories of school sports (he’d been a soccer champ), to his mixed feelings about his family’s exalted military past, to his pride and regret that he was so caught up in the famous melancholy of Istanbul. He talked and talked while holding and probing all the most sensitive parts of my body while I listened, sometimes for hours.

I like men who are elegant in the drawing room and savage in the bedroom – imperious and demanding. Davud suited me perfectly. His torso – his whole body – was as hairy as the backs of his hands but with black glossy filaments that lay flat on his skin. By night he did things to me that were sometimes sharp and painful but that by day I nursed a bit sulkily when my shirt brushed against, say, a wounded nipple. I wore long-sleeved, high-collared shirts to hide the hickey or bruise. “Soon you will be wearing a burka!” Helena shouted. “Look at you, covered from chin to waist.”

“You know how sensitive to the sun – “

“ – that new medication makes you,” she said by weary rote.

She didn’t like the idea of pills of any sort, even prescribed ones.

NOR DOES SHE LIKE my opium pipe. In fact she violently disapproves of it. Today she let herself into my apartment without knocking (I must get around to telling her to phone first). She sniffed the air and said, “What are you doing lying in that clothes hamper?” When she dislikes something she pronounces it with all the disdain of a Lady Bracknell.

It’s true I’ve filled a big osier-woven hamper with quilts and pillows. “It’s my nest, Helena. You have your bed and your cats. It comforts me on rainy days…”

“And that smell of cheap perfume you buy down at the chemist’s. When you spray it about – you can’t possibly like it – I know you mumble mumble…”

“What?”

“The opium smell, you’re trying to disguise it.”

“Picasso called it the least stupid smell in the world.”

“Mumble.”

“What?”

“Whatever that fucking means! The effect” – here she was over-articulating – “certainly doesn’t render its victims intelligent. You’re the only person I’ve ever heard of in Greece who could even find opium. Hash, yes, but opium never. I could murder that Boris for getting you addicted to it.”

Helena snooped around the room with a proprietorial air. She does own our house and I do merely rent, but she hasn’t grasped the concept of a renter’s privacy. She’s always leaning over the balcony above my laundry patio where I like to take the sun and read the Herald Tribune. Or she traces a finger through the plaster dust on my desk; it falls so fast I can’t keep up with it.

“I was just daydreaming about that nice Davud we met in – “

“Nice! Davud? Devious wretch, you mean. And I’d hardly dignify your stupor by calling it ‘daydreaming.’ Americans certainly have a gift for euphemism.” And without another word she rushed off, accompanied by three of her skittering cats like Hecuba on a rampage. I felt tempted to pull the hamper lid down over me.

BY “DEVIOUS WRETCH” Helena perhaps is referring to a Sunday (the Turks observe our weekly calendar) when Davud showed up for our daily carriage ride with a young woman, thin and fastidiously dressed in dark colors and a Missoni sweater as muted and subtle as the old Kilim in my bedroom – no lamé appliqués for her. Her name was Belkis. Davud said in a soft voice, “Belkis is my fiancée and I thought it might be amusing – ”

“Your what?” Helena exclaimed.

“We will be married next spring,” Davud said, closing his eyes as he spoke.

Belkis was lovely; she asked me questions with a sweetness and curiosity that seemed a perfect emblem of today’s evolved Turkish woman. I took their engagement in good stride since we gay men never expect things to work out anyway. My good grace was remarkable given that I had the most to lose or at least was the most affected, but Helena had been given no way to know that. She spoke little and then in icy tones. She barely looked at Belkis and never smiled at her.

Davud had what he called the “genial” idea (again a Gallicism, meaning “brilliant”) to hire us all donkeys to clamber up the highest hill to an old Byzantine monastery. “This is where the deposed Byzantine princes were imprisoned.”

“I’m glad to know the cruelty started way back then,” Helena said, tipping her head back and staring loftily at Davud as though he were personally responsible for centuries of unpleasantness.

“I warned you,” Davud called out gaily. “Sweetness and cruelty!” He cracked a huge smile.

Madame was not amused. She said she’d skip the monastery and donkey. For once Helena wasn’t a good sport.

That evening as soon as we were alone after a long, tense dinner by the sea, Helena exploded: “I’m sick of bits of charred octopus and electrocuted guppies and cucumbers in vinegar longing to be pickles.”

“But Davud says the Turkish ‘kitchen’ rivals the French and the Chinese.”

“I don’t care what that bore says.” We had a very long debriefing that night about the “faithless Turk,” as he was now called. “How dare he not tell us he was engaged? He obviously likes them thin the way they all do. Well, good riddance. It’s obviously an arranged marriage – she’s even more of a bore than he is.”

“I thought she was sweet,” I hazarded, “though she didn’t say much.”

“Oh you did, did you? Sweet? Another American euphemism for a colorless little pushover.” She listened to herself and then added grumpily, “I could have pushed her over that cliff when she was trying out poetic modern dance steps to celebrate the sunset. And by the way, have you noticed how his treats are always penny ice creams whereas ours are whole electrocuted squid dinners?”

Soon we were both roaring with laughter over the very idea of the squid dinner. I didn’t mind lingering with Helena for once. She needed the comfort after the blow she’d received, and I assumed that when I returned to my bedroom it would be empty.

But no, he was there, his face, neck, and hands tanned a dark Darjeeling brown from the day while his body remained jasmine pale. The wait and possibly the tensions of the day made him rougher and more eager than ever before, as if this time he wanted to climb right inside me like an incubus – or djinn.

Afterwards (or rather between bouts, for he was tireless) he told me that his engagement meant nothing, it was just a formality, that Belkis was a cousin and a delight but that his marriage would in no way diminish his feelings for me. This part of the story is all a bit vague, like a dream . . .

“In fact,” he said, pulling my whole body against his so that our nipples matched and our genitals touched and my feet were stepping on his (he was taller) and his words, which smelled of my semen, were breathing right into my face, “in fact I want you to move here and live here. There’s the University of the Bosphorus out by the Rumeli Tower, and I’ve spoken to the dean, and they’d be thrilled to have someone of your caliber – though at first it would be just a part-time position . . .”

NOW, LET ME PUT JUST a bit more of this in my pipe. I feel like the nineteenth-century French traveler and novelist Pierre Loti, who wrote The Disenchanted, a wonderful dreamy book about the oppression of women in Turkey. In the novel he’s always meeting up with these three veiled ladies in a safe house and there they all drink tea and discuss their souls. Loti loved drag of any sort – pharaonic, military, courtly – and would get himself up in a fez and baggy trousers and a scimitar and smoke opium and drink sugared tea in that melancholy little café above the Golden Horn next to the old Ottoman cemetery. We went out there once to the Eyüb Mosque and saw twelve-year-olds running around in Zorro caps and drum majors’ hats, getting ready for their circumcisions. It was Davud who took us there and pointed out that the six or seven unmarked tombstones nearest the café were those of executioners who feared that if they were identified their graves might be desecrated by the families of their victims. Davud taught us all the symbols on the Ottoman tombs – the various stone fezzes on top of steles that indicated notables of differing degree, the stoneveils that commemorated virgins. When we were alone he liked to call me his ‘‘Little Loti.’’ Come to think of it, I once visited Loti’s house back in France, now a museum, in Rochefort on the Atlantic coast. Loti had had an entire miniature mosque built inside so that he could lounge around in his vaporous trousers and turbans and smoke opium while outside the winter storms raged.

There! Now I do feel like a little Loti if that’s the plural of lotus, floating in my hamper as in a stagnant pond.

I WAS UNABLE to accept Davud's offer. I didn’t want to give up my good pension or the solitary pleasures of my snug little Chicago apartment. Much as I adored Davud and shivered when he touched me, I’d lived too long as a hermit and celibate to endure his embraces (all night every night). I longed for a whole night alone – “craved” it, as he would say. I wanted a virginal veil to be dropped over my stele. My body – every surface, every orifice – felt chafed, invaded, and his insistent voice had replaced my own thoughts. For a while all I could hear when I thought was his voice talking about Belkis and how she’d been raised by his family, of his grandfather’s death in the yali and his way of refusing to relax into death – how he’d sat up rigidly in bed until death had felled him suddenly as if with a scimitar blade. He talked of his loneliness in law school in England, how his ‘‘exile’’ there had made him realize, not altogether happily, how much he depended on his family legend, how sometimes he thought he wasn’t really an individual, not in the way an Englishman might be – that he was tribal before he was individual. That voice, alternating with his fingers probing me and his bites wounding me so sweetly, consumed me completely – ate up every last fiber of my individuality.

Nor could I envision living in Istanbul, learning an impossible new language all dactyls and slurred s’s and sustained umlauts. I’d be a back-street mistress to a married Turk who was always restless and on the prowl because his pride as a fallen grandee was permanently wounded and his well-tailored pockets were permanently empty. He had no profession but idler and he couldn’t afford that.

And then for me there was Helena. Her father had just died and she was bereft. Her bitch of a mother had actually told her at the graveside, “You know why Daddy was so disappointed in you? Because you’ve become so grotesquely fat.”

I knew she’d feel terribly betrayed if she ever discovered my intense secret two-month affair with Davud, especially since in the beginning she’d thought he was pursuing her. Which would be worse – admitting that her gaydar was on the blink? Or confronting my faithlessness?

She’d already remarked on the dark circles under my eyes, and once she’d seen a love bite on my neck and said, “Been sneaking off to the carriage drivers’ encampment, I suppose.” She raised an eyebrow.

I’d let my secret go on too long. She’d never trust me again if I confessed to it at this late date. Besides, even back then, twenty years ago – more! – we were already talking about living together somewhere, some time. “When we retire!” we cried, never imagining that day would come so soon.

She’s such fun. We always laugh a lot, though lately she’s tired and depressed in this eternal rain. But soon it will be spring and we’ll go tootling off in her car out into the countryside where wildflowers will be rioting like Bacchantes on every slope. We’ll buy our whole lamb for Easter and carry it up all our steps on our shoulder like Isaac and it will be such a lark.

Last night she walked in on me as I was dozing, foundered in my cozy hamper, and she dragged me out of it, rooted around in the blankets until she found my black lump of opium. She broke it into bits and flushed it down the toilet, though she’s the one who forbids anyone to flush toilet paper lest it stop up the narrow pipes (I find soiled paper in a wastebasket sort of disgusting). Then, still in a fury, she saw my old copy of The Isle of Princes and shredded it with her hands and cast it into the fire. I was high and indifferent though I didn’t much appreciate her bossiness to the degree I could take it in at all. Opium dissolves frontiers and makes every country delightful and calm.

“You’ve got to come back to the present,” she said, and she picked up my ruby-red glass and hurled it to the floor. “That lazy Turkish runt wasn’t such a jewel. He didn’t even like men. You remember that fake list of damages they put together at the end of the summer just to soak us some more? Even that corrupt sinister Cansen stood behind them. What’s wrong with you? If you’re going to dwell on the past it should at least be a viable memory.”

Her words hung in the air and soon we were weeping with laughter over the absurdity of the whole concept of viable nostalgia, choking with great gulps of laughter, though she might have judged the situation differently if I’d disclosed my full deceit.

Yet truth be told I’m no longer certain about this whole story. How much of it did I read in Ozbekhan’s book or Loti’s and how much of it have I been filling in during one of my long winter pipedreams?