A Furtive and Hidden Embrace
What is love but an inordinate desire to receive passionately a
furtive and hidden embrace?
Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love
There was the blazing moon, a waxing crescent. It was intensely pale and shining, a cradle halted in its swing, hanging low in the darkened azure. It was at rest above the minarets of the Hagia Sofia.
Julian stood transfixed in the outer garden watching the exploding luminous and misty columns of spray veiled in metamorphosing colors, watching chromatic waters shiver into feathers. He was intrigued by the dance of transformation the spectrum of light performed, sliding up and down the scale of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Parabolas of spray gushed up from the gray circumference of the fountain in front of the temple, arched and tumbled in foaming fragments into the illuminated basin.
The April air was warm. He wore tight-fitting, soft, faded old blue jeans, tan boots, and a soft gray velvet jacket over a faded orange t-shirt and a blue and green paisley scarf. His thick and close-planted raven hair was cut short and shone sleek with gel.
He pushed his dark glasses up to the bridge of his nose and turned toward the hippodrome where he stopped at the café he had taken a liking to in the past few days.
Under a street lamp, a beggar with a blackened stump for a leg sprawled in a wheel chair in the road on the way to the café. Julian rifled through his pockets and put a ten lira bill in his tray.
Julian did not take tobacco at the café, but unlike with most tobacco, he enjoyed the scent with which it perfumed the air.
Over the past couple of days, he noticed a guy in the corner, in a lighted enclave, absorbed in a book.
It was hard for Julian to keep his eyes away from him. He was beautifully handsome; his features strong, but cut of a delicate, almost feminine sharpness. His eyes were violet, Julian noted once when he looked up, looking into the invisible distance, to reflect on something he had read. His lashes glowed as if he had teased them with mascara. His lips were full, fleshy, wide across, and barely parted. His hair like Julian's was raven, but thick and wild rather than disciplined by gel. He had removed his jacket and was slumped back only in a black long-sleeved t-shirt, and the nubs of his little nipples teased the fabric of his t-shirt with the slight hint of their presence. Julian wanted to stroke his long inner thigh, upholstered in black corduroy, exposed along the length of the sofa.
Julian sighed and wondered how to make his acquaintance, but before he could formulate a strategy for approach, the object of his gaze stood and placing some Lira inside a wooden box, left the café.
Julian followed him out after paying his own bill, but by the time he got outside, there was no one anywhere. It had begun to rain. He wandered through the hilly streets of the Sultanahmet. He did not notice that he was being followed.
The next morning, Julian only had time for a coffee. He was on his way to the Grand Bazar. He was in Istanbul to buy carpets, scarves, and blankets for the store he ran in the Marais.
The beauty he hoped would be in the café again was not there. Was he still in Istanbul or had he gone back to someplace where he'd be forever gone?
Julian cast the thought away and made his disappointment light. Missing a trick was commonplace. He was grateful for such random sightings through, as it were, one of time's keyholes. There would be others. Sometimes cream turned to butter. Sometimes it was pointless to churn.
Inside the ancient labyrinth that housed the bazar, a woman brushed past him, her head turned toward the displays on her right and she collided with a young man in a waiter's jacket carrying one of the cage-like trays they use to serve coffee and tea -- from its hook. The three glasses of apple tea slid off and crashed to the floor getting tea all over the ancient tiles. The woman rose with Julian's assistance and grinned foolishly. "I'm alright, thank you," she said thickly accented in English.
He smiled back, saying nothing, and turned left down a vaulted alley to a brightly lighted carpet store, where the proprietor was waiting for him.
He did not see a gaunt man with scraggy whiskers hand the woman fifty liras.
"You bastard," the carpet merchant cried with delight and shook Julian by the shoulders.
"What's the matter?" Julian said.
"I did not think you would come."
"Here I am," Julian said.
"I give you some apple tea," he insisted.
Julian sipped the tea and looked at the show the merchant put on for him, swirling carpets this way and that to show the variations in color, texture, and luster.
He bought half a dozen sizable carpets, a few small kilims and prayer rugs, and made arrangements for their shipment to the store in Paris.
"You're going to send the ones I bought," Julian said, looking into Ibrahim's chocolate eyes and taking out his phone, snapping a photo of each item.
"Since I have begun going to Mosque," Ibrahim explained with nearly tearful sincerity, taking hold of Julian's hand, "I have found a peace" – he was smiling now – "that I could never disturb by treating another with anything but honor."
Julian shook his head, not quite convinced.
"Cash on arrival," he said.
"Half and half," the merchant said.
"Twenty-five, now," Julian said. "Seventy-five, shipment received. You trust me, I trust you."
"How can I not capitulate when my customer reminds me of a Hollywood star? The name I cannot remember."
"Before you go," he added, not releasing Julian's hand but now wrapping his free arm around his shoulder, "I will show you something I have kept specially for you, because I know the refinement of your taste."
He looked over his shoulder as he spoke and a handsome man who watched them, fit and with cropped gray hair, nodded slightly in acquiescence.
Jordan looked up from his book. It was Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. He was reading it because he was interested in Tolstoy's ideas about farming. His eyes settled on the workers with their mallets installing cement squares in the roadway.
He had graduated seven years before from Reed College with a B.A. in Latin and Philosophy, and had decided to stay in Oregon and become a grape farmer and a vintner.
Scholarships had freed him from the curse of student loans. He found a job on a hazelnut farm and convinced the farmer to let him begin to plant grapes on some of the land that had been left fallow.
"Go ahead," the owner consented. "I run a boutique operation here. I want to stay small. I'm all for diversification."
He was a wiry man with a full head of gray hair. He had been a member of the Students for a Democratic Society at Columbia in the late sixties but left the group and the school when violence and ideology became the mainstays of rebellion instead of humanism and the freedom of the imagination.
"I make a respectable living providing quality," he said. "I don't need to make a killing. The only way I could anyhow is if I increased production so much that I simply could not produce premium quality."
"I admire you," Jordan said, as they closed the deal with a handshake.
Jordan worked long hours on the farm, growing hazelnuts as well as grapes. He was graceful, lithe of body, indefatigable. He became part of the landscape and part of the community. His fingers flashed with a vitality that made green things grow.
"You are more like a girl than a boy," Maxim, who had lived in Burgundy much of his life, said. He was referring to Jordan's beauty and, despite his strapping appearance and his actual strength, to the graceful litheness of his movements and the open, violet-eyed beauty of his face.
His grapes were abundant and hung in majestic clusters.
Six years after he began, the wine he produced was the first ever grown in Oregon to win a Médaille d'Or at the Concours Général, in Paris. Before he returned home from Paris to the Chehalem Mountains in Oregon, rising in gentle slopes from the Willamette Valley, he decided he would see Athens and visit the Acropolis and then take a boat from Piraeus to Istanbul to see the Hagia Sofia, Topkapi, and the Blue Mosque. He booked a return flight from Ataturk airport.
He would do well to go to a hamam a few times, too, he thought, as he rubbed the kinks in his neck without getting rid of them.
To say he did not know how good-looking he was would be a misstatement. More accurately, he insisted on not knowing it. He refused to acknowledge it or make it part of the arsenal of the known things that attach to you and that make up your sense of your identity as yourself. Being good-looking made him uneasy. Being looked at made him even more so.
He paid attention to his work and to the pursuits that interested him, reading, painting, writing poetry, and singing in the state university chorus. His bumbling shyness when startled out of one of his many reveries when he was among the friends on the farm with whom he worked and who called him Jody was endearing. He had a brief affair with Maxim, and when passion cooled they remained friends.
"How do you stay so sweet?" Maxim asked him in amazed seriousness one evening several weeks after Jordan had told him that the kind of exclusivity that he wanted was just not possible for him.
Jordan grinned sweetly and cast the question away shyly with a twitch of his shoulder.
He walked back to his hotel from the café and showered before he went out again to wander around the old city and cross the Galata Bridge.
"Finally," Julian said, as he spotted him walking towards him on the lower level of the bridge, above the Bosporus and beneath the traffic. "You did not leave yet."
Jordan smiled, but was confused.
"Have we met?" he said, excusing himself if his forgetfulness had caused the inadvertent rudeness of neglecting to greet someone he ought to have known.
"I've been wanting to," Julian said, extending his hand, "and now that we have, will you have a coffee with me?"
The men who had been following Julian sat three tables away from them facing each other, a backgammon board on the table between them.
"Aren't they pretty," said Muctah, a tall man, most of whose ancient acne scars were covered over by a scraggly beard.
Peno signaled to the waiter. After a few words with him, the waiter approached Julian and Jordan.
"Those gentleman in the corner would like to offer you some apple tea."
"That's very kind," Julian said, "but we have just had coffee."
"It is not the way things are done in Istanbul to refuse a stranger's gift," he said, and indicated to the boy beside him to place the glasses of tea before them. The men looked over and smiled.
"Thank you," Julian said, nodding his head in acceptance at the two backgammon players. They bowed their heads imperceptibly in return and raised their own glasses of the scalding tea to their lips in salute and in invitation to share.
Smiling at the very stereotypicality of this exotic moment, Julian and Jordan, too, took sips of the burning tea.
Their new found friends grinned and sipped again, again inviting reciprocation and Julian and Jordan complied and after another sip returned the tiny glasses to their white saucers.
They looked at each other with features empty of expression, surprised by the vacuity each saw on the other's face, but before either one could say anything, both slumped backwards on their couches in a heavy sleep.
The two men rose from their backgammon game and each took hold of one of the sleepers, tossed him over the shoulder, the way firemen are said to do, and carried him out to a waiting van, where the young men were laid on blankets in the back.
When they woke, they were naked and chained to each other, wrist to wrist and ankle to ankle so that they had to face each other and their bodies could not help but almost touch. When they did touch, an electric field between them became supercharged and despite the fearsomeness of their present, incomprehensible state they lunged for each other – hadn't they wanted to even before this inexplicable change had caught them? -- clung to and tore at each other, and bit into each other's mouth. Their breath was palpable.
The chains pressed into their flesh, and that excited them. Lost in their passion they had forgotten their fright, or converted it into a frenzied dance of writhing ecstasy. It was out of their hands. They were at the mercy of an irresistible domination.
"Young men must not walk so openly in Istanbul if they are as lovely as you two are." It was a warm and gentle, a mellifluous voice, a male voice that spoke.
He was tall, young although gray-haired, a man, trim and handsome, in a dark gray business suit with the slightest hint of a midnight blue check woven in, and a brown and white striped cotton shirt, opened a few buttons to reveal, or, more precisely, to suggest, a still-hidden, sculpted torso. He wore clothing as if he were naked.
"You need not worry," he added.
Despite the warmth in his voice, it was frightening. It assumed, you could hear in it the timbre or the rhythm or in something that went beyond hearing altogether, that there was no other voice but his.
He snapped his fingers and a young man whose ears and nipples were pierced and ringed and who wore only a scant black bikini, undid the locks on the cuffs.
"There," said the gentleman who had astonished them into silence.
"Who are you?" Julian said, breaking it.
"A much more interesting question," he responded, my friend, is: "Who are you?"
Julian was silent, and Jordan said nothing. They realized without having to be told that they would be what he determined they were to be, and that even if they resisted, he would prevail.
He approached them and lifted first Jordan's and then Julian's head by the chin with his index finger and they let him, and when he looked directly into their eyes, neither one blenched and both were secretly pleased by the words of approval that followed his appraisal.
He smiled and nodded his head in satisfaction and a feeling of ease spread over them both. They looked at each other and their gazes froze, locked in one shared beam. They understood each other even though they could not speak. They touched in their minds even as their bodies could not. They agreed to resign themselves to what must be, but consult the time when they might go beyond it, when their more complete selves would have a place.
The young man – he was a permanent slave -- took hold of them, each by a hand, and led them away.
From a long and relatively narrow ante-room, they were led into a grand chamber with a ceiling of plaster clusters: leaves, grapes, and drunken male angels with trumpets, all covered in gold leaf. The walls were richly decorated, too, with moldings shaped like columns and grand floor-to-ceiling mosaic encrustations in the walls
"Nothing has really been accomplished if a memory only leaves a trace in your mind. It is much better if it does not but rather if it eats its way into you. It becomes assimilated and once it has become a part of you, it disappears."
They heard the words without understanding them.
The speaker had exchanged his western garb for eastern. Instead of a suit he wore silk trousers of scarlet and a silk tunic of midnight blue. His feet, bare and exposed to the ankles, were strong and beautiful.
His words meant nothing to them, but, had they tried to think about them, confusion would have been their only reward.
He lay back on a couch beside a shallow pool of water, aquamarine, in an atrium of oval shape. They stood before him and he gazed upon them with commanding eyes. They were draped in coarse oatmeal colored cotton fabric belted at the waist.
Julian's head had been shaved to within an inch of baldness so that his hair was a black five-o'clock shadow capping his scalp, and it only served to emphasize the beauty of his face.
Jordan's hair was thick and full and windswept. His lips had been rouged and a black liner defined the almond ovals of his eyes.
"You must get rid of those hideous bed sheets before you recline."
Each undid his belt and the cloth fell to the floor leaving them naked but for a black mesh and leather thong serving as much to discipline as to highlight their genitals.
"That's much better," he said. "It makes everything as clear as it needs to be."
They watched him as he picked raisins, slices of mango, pieces of blood orange, and figs from a silver salver on a mahogany table and listened as his words waited to emerge from his lips.
"You both will remember this for a long time with an unquenchable desire to have it happen again. But it never will." He smiled. It is once in a lifetime.
They remained silent, braced against a gnawing fear.
"You will see I do not exaggerate," he said, more as a guarantee than a threat.
There was reason for fear they realized as they were led through dark passages and down ancient stone staircases to a musty room that could only have been used as a dungeon for captives during the fierce days of the Ottoman Empire.
"This is always a possibility," the man whose name they still did not know said without malice, "a possibility you both will, unless I am losing my ability to read men, will like to keep from becoming an actuality." He smiled, pleased with them, pleased with himself.
"Instead, I think you will prefer what we show you now."
It was a vast gilded hall they saw. They stood under an archway leading into it. It was a throne room with a great red and gold couch set on a raised marble platform, five steps higher than floor level. Surrounding it were half a dozen other couches upholstered in leather.
"But it is not a room you may enter until you have been prepared for it."
They were taken away to a makeshift dispensary and placed side by side in a bed that just accommodated them. Sleepiness fell upon them. As they slept, their nipples were pierced and silver rings, delicate circlets, were pulled through the holes.
This alteration was the only physical sign of this encounter that they took away with them.
It may have been odd, Julian recollected, but he had no need to resist, and after the first fright, he had no real sense of fear anymore.
In the morning they were brought coffee, a profound brown brew stronger than anything they had ever had before, and strongly but not overzealously sugared.
It set their whole bodies aquiver and as they were scrubbed with strong brushes by plump women with heavy breasts, wide hips, and muscular thighs, uniformed in olive drab bikinis, their skins began to ache with desire to feel the brutal touch a man.
Blindfolded they were brought to the bed of the man whose name they did not know.
He stroked them on the chest, caressing and exciting them as you would a precious canine, and they responded by nuzzling their muzzles in his neck and adoring him with appreciative kisses. With incredible gentleness, he rubbed their inions and they fell asleep.
Waking they were greeted by a recurring sense of disorientation, but quickly disregarded it when two of the permanent slaves entered and led them from the bed in which they awoke beside each other but empty of their captor, into a large tiled room of baths and mirrors, where they were washed and pampered until they glowed to an incandescence that made them flame with mind-silencing desire.
"Did anything happen?" Julian asked Jordan.
They were in a large luxurious room with baths and mirrors and shelves of unguents and ointments and delicate cosmetics and mind-evaporating essences that perfumed not only the air but their senses, where they were being dressed in Turkish harem costumes.
"I can't remember," Jordan said.
Julian grinned.
"Neither can I," he said.
As if inadvertently, as he spoke he went to scratch his nipple which suddenly began to itch and he felt the silver ring strung through it instead of its fleshy nub, and when he touched it he understood and looked at Jordan's firm chest and saw his nipples be-ringed also and raised his fingers as if in wonderment and touched one of the rings on Jordan's nipples. Jordan smiled and shook his head yes.
A slave took each of them by the neck, cradling the necks in their palms and massaging them, and as the necks were stretched to their tallest, each slave circled each neck with a leather collar set with three blue pearls.
They wrapped around them gauzy silk cloaks of gold, blue, and red which billowed and draped but did not hide the hard grace of their limbs, pelvis, and torso from being seen.
They led them to couches beneath his couch. Most were filled by silent young men as beautiful as they were, enraptured by the sense of their own perfection. But two were empty, one for each of them. They smiled to each other and bowed slightly in mutual acknowledgement as they were separated.
His couch was also empty, and the room warm with the glow of candles, nevertheless, was haunted by an unnerving sense of incompleteness. It was the outward presence of the incompleteness of the soul when the master who serves as its defining focus is absent.
One of the permanent slaves approached Julian's couch and helped him into the position in which he was required to recline.
Jordan lay luxuriantly, his limbs bare and exposed through the drapes and folds of the silken gauze that surrounded him like a mist.
"You are very beautiful," a slave said softly, looking into his eyes. "Very beautiful." His warm strong fingers trembled as he stroked Jordan's chest. "You are as beautiful as a girl. You know that."
Jordan was silent, but the slave would not be put off.
"You are beautiful," he said. "I want to hear you say it. I want to feel what you feel like when you surrender your beauty, when you offer it to the admirer who gazes at you, when desire flutters in you the way it does in a girl who can do nothing but long to be ravished and wishes to be turned to embers and who feels the unquenching of desire spark her limbs."
Jordan could not keep his mind from spinning as the slave spoke to him. He gasped when he felt his nipples twisted and his lips forced open, and he felt himself pulled in response from his very depths and he found himself grasping onto the slave who was conquering him.
"Tell me," the slave said refusing to bring his face near enough to Jordan's for their lips to meet. "Say it. Tell me how it feels to know you are beautiful."
Jordan hesitated.
"Tell me how wonderful it feels to be gazed upon."
Jordan looked at him and understood. He opened himself and offered himself. "I love being beautiful. Because I am I can offer myself to you."
"Not to me," the slave said, "to my master."
Julian watched as Jordan writhed and begged and was taught to transform her sensitivity.
He watched her – he could use no other pronoun; the transformation was complete and effortless. Jordan radiated receptive femininity. Julian burned with jealousy he had never known, so complete he had always been in his self-satisfaction. Now he wanted Jordan more than he wanted himself. He wanted to bring to Jordan's face exactly the bedazzlement he saw flaring in it now.
But that was not to be, for as he looked on, Jordan was led by the slave to whom he was drawn like a magnet, mindless of everything but an overwhelming duty, away from the company and through a gate that gave into an enclosed garden.
From his perspective, Julian could see in the distance the slave take Jordan by the shoulders. He said something, but Julian could not hear what, and Jordan fell into his arms and raised his head and bared his teeth and hungrily kissed him, feeding off him until the slave pushed him away and slapped him across the cheek.
Julian strove to rise from the couch and run to his friend, to the beauty he had seen in the café, innocent Jordan, the wine farmer from Oregon, but it was impossible. The more he endeavored to rise from the couch, the more he was bound to it, the more he became a reclining marble figure on a couch, as if a sculpture in a museum gallery, on display forever for those with eyes for it to pass it by dragging their gazes across the marble vistas of its beauty without ever being able to penetrate to its secret humanity.
Jordan dropped his head, dizzy with the bliss of surrender a current of desire propelling him even as he stood without moving waiting without impatience or, really, even the consciousness that he was waiting.
It was more than a fluidity of consciousness that he had surrendered to. It was a loss of self-centered awareness.
He became when he was taken to the gray-haired man's chamber, a mirror of himself in which he saw himself reflected in the gaze of the man who was looking at him as if he were gazing at himself with that man's eyes.
When he was touched he felt the pleasure of the man who was touching him. His ecstasy belonged to the gray-haired man whose excitement leaped to extraordinary stages as Jordan lost all control of himself and writhed in agonies of joy.
No sensation was specific anymore. Everything he felt was joined in the turbulence of a rushing ocean within him, a current running faster than and alongside of the flow of the blood. The snaking shaking ascendency of endless climbing took him, and as it took him took them both, his gray-haired master to whom he clung, to the highest volumes of stars and sparkling clouds until the storm of majesty appeared to them and Jordan became himself again and gazed into the man's eyes and felt the man's magic firmly embedded in him.
Remember what I said, the gray haired man said kissing him. Now you know what you never will, ever again.
Jordan trembled in his arms, swooned and lost consciousness as the man slid like a flaming meteor out of him.
It was raining when they became aware that they were in a taxi.
Where are we? Julian leaned forward and asked the driver.
On the way to the airport. You would not want to miss your flights, would you?
Each then realized the presence of the other and felt a pang of embarrassment without knowing why, but sensing they had surrendered to a debauch that had marked them could find nothing to say to each other although unformed words, like a melody that keeps evading the singer, teased them.
I guess this is it, Julian said, flustered and shy, as he parted from Jordan once inside the airport as they searched the monitors for information about their flights.
I'm sorry we did not get to know each other better, Jordan said.
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