Under the Sun

Paris had been rainy and chilly all the way through to the end of July, unseasonably so. On many nights the Eiffel Tower became invisible not far up from its base as its crown and slender-rising girders became absorbed by the fog.

The gloom of the bad weather made Jonas irritable.

At least, it was the weather Jonas blamed for his mood, although the way Martin had behaved the last time they saw each other undoubtedly had been far more perplexing to him than the weather. But he refused to let it affect him, or so he misled himself to believe. He did not want to think about it.

Inviting Robert over without telling him! After they had already made plans for a quiet dinner together! And then proposing a threesome. And then becoming miffed when Jonas demurred. And then saying if he did not want to join in he could just watch! And then beginning to undress Robert slowly.

And Robert just stood there posing like a Greek statue, posing like he was Adonis -- and he just about is, and he knows it -- letting Martin worship him! Jonas did not care to see it. He pulled himself away before he smashed all of Martin's quaint and dainty little hand-painted nineteenth-century porcelain figurines that he was so fucking proud of. And after that it would have been his netsuke.

It was not just sexual jealousy that was piquing him. It was worse than that, deeper, not so tangible. Jonas had had something on his mind when he called Martin and they agreed to meet. Martin knew that. He knew Martin knew that. How could he so recklessly ignore it?

Something troubled Jonas about the piece he had been working on. He could not identify what was bothering him and he wanted to talk with Martin as he used to, anticipating that the conversation would help him focus. And if there was a bit of a buried agenda, well, so there was. But a solid conversation, just a conversation, had become impossible. The Martin that Jonas had known, the man he could trust to listen to him and to bring him out, who could listen to him and make him know that what he was saying was important, was not there, nowhere to be found. A stranger was there. Jonas was by himself just at the time of pressing need. It was getting hard for him to think straight.

He had moments of dizziness and moments of rage. A grinding noise rattled incessantly against his skull. Because Martin had not been there for him? He shuddered to think so, but he could not avoid thinking it.

He pressed his lips together fiercely and shook his head as he passed St. Eustache. He headed towards the river.

The pulse of the water, visible in shimmering darts of undulating light, amber outreachings, gave the Seine its life. The triple headed lampposts with melancholy eyes on the arching bridge made him melancholy with desire. He was looking to forget and lose himself in some kind of elation. It was late. Jonas wanted to find a congenial place to go in for a drink, where he could forget himself for a few hours.

He could always get something back, reconnect with something that kept life vital for him, in a place where pretty boys hung out, but the bars on the rue des Archives, as he passed them by, were overflowing with older men who broadcast only ugly desperation, and it took away his appetite and defeated his desire.

Instead of gazing at pretty boys, he walked through the grim night and revolved recurring anxieties round and round. He was torn between outrage and not giving a damn.

His story on corruption in the Greek cement industry had appeared in the paper the day before yesterday. This morning he had finally heard from Helmut Larz, the German-born kingpin of the Greek cement industry. Jonas had been trying without success to get hold of Larz for a week before he went to press with his story. No luck! He even held back some information because he did not want to print something without first giving Larz the chance to confirm, deny, or rebut it.

In the end, it was not such a bad thing that Larz had put him off. What he'd left out would become the matter for a second article. He always had been responsible as a journalist. He was conservative, never sensational. He was at his best when he became absorbed in a story and could forget himself.

Now that Larz chose to respond, he would see him in person and talk about nasty rumors and shrouded accusations. He could, at least, try to, and if he got nowhere, so much the worse for Larz.

The sky over the Atlantic that had absorbed Cary Miller when he looked up from his computer was leaden grey and was hardly distinguishable from the leaden green ocean it pressed against. Its angry clouds repeated the episodes of turbulence that disturbed the ocean's surface with broken pieces of foam and, just by that congruence, comforted him. He understood their vexation.

Terry sat in the armchair by the fireplace reading The Iliad. It annoyed him, as his son had always annoyed him, by the way he stubbornly kept to himself. He had always been like that. It might have been something he could have admired, an indication of a strength of character, if only Terry had made him an exception – if he had included him in his solitude. If they had been allies in a conspiracy of opacity, there would have been a strength in that mutuality that he would have thrived on. But not this. This was only spite. That was the only way he could see it. Every choice the boy made, everything he did was powered by spite.

It was clear to him that Terry was cutting him out by cutting himself off, by his flight from destiny. That was the only way Cary could think of his son's determination to travel through the Greek islands all summer long. Just when he could have gotten so much going into the city every day and learning the ropes.

He had lost him, he who never lost anything. He had no heir, and without an heir, what good was an empire? It was a vain thing.

In the morning Terry would be gone, this time for good.

The telephone interrupted him. It was bad news from Athens.

Athens!

Jonas had a journalist's faith that honest men talk openly about their business. As a good reporter, he could tell when someone was not being honest. He could tell when words were being piled up like rocks in order to build a wall to hide behind.

What Jonas had already established to his own satisfaction, with documentary evidence to back him up, he knew could get Larz in front of a tribunal if not into a jail cell.

He could not show his hand, yet he wanted to be fair, and it was always tempting if he could be the stronger in a contest for the truth.

You don't have a very good understanding of how we do business, Larz said in a tone that was smooth and lay halfway between ingratiation and threat. For the shadow of an instant Jonas wondered if Larz knew more than he thought he did.

Jonas was afraid. He knew very well the extent to which Larz would go to protect his interests and to ward off perceived threats. It was a foolhardy task and as tough and dangerous, and probably as pigheaded, as covering a war from inside enemy lines. But he also was driven. He had to prove himself.

That need never let up. He had to measure up to the sense of himself he had to assume in order to get anywhere. Without it, he would have collapsed.

What did I miss? Jonas said casually, knowing a great deal about what Larz was not saying, about his involvement in several rogue monetary operations, how Larz was running and ruining the entire economy of Greece.

So much, my friend, Larz laughed, always a master of evasion, more than I can tell you over the phone, more than you really want to know, I'd venture. And your point of view! How can you allow yourself to be so wrong, so mistaken? Hypotheses don't make a news story. Not at all the way to understand anything, by making hypotheses. Why don't you come here to Greece? I will be free for a few weeks in August. We can meet some time then, have a drink, a coffee, and enjoy a friendly exchange of ideas. Away from Athens! It will be a treat for me.

It was not a bad idea, even if Larz failed to open up. Jonas doubted he would. But it was Greece. And Jonas wanted to get out of Paris.

It was not only Martin that was the reason for his malaise. Jonas knew that. It was everything. Without a lover whose eyes were there to gaze with longing into his, he became melancholy.

It crossed his mind that it could be some kind of trap, Larz's invitation, but he dismissed the idea as too melodramatic. And, in the end, it did not matter if it were.

He doubted he would get much from Larz if he looked like he knew something. That would not work. He had to be humble, deviously humble. It was a behavior he knew too well from too many failed relationships.

Larz would become defensive; worse, he would become vengeful if he suspected Jonas had anything more than hunches. But once he had spoken to Larz and gauged what he said, he could write without the risk of having overlooked something. Although still with the risk that Larz would become vengeful. It would not be the first risk he had taken. He had been in Sarajevo. He had seen colleagues ambushed in Sierra Leone when they continued to follow trails he had almost taken, too.

No matter how deviously, he felt driven to get at the truth, to expose the reality hidden beneath the appearance.

Tilbury had not quit smoking. He'd thought about and decided against it. It was bad for his image as a newsman. He could not picture himself being an editor without a cigarette in his hand.

When Jonas left for the Cyclades, Tilbury, who was his editor at the Herald Tribune, crushing out a half-smoked cigarette, said it was global warming that was responsible for the lousy weather in Paris. Jonas said it was just the weather. Not everything had to have a cause. Some things just were. There was an angry edge in his voice that he usually managed to smother when he spoke with Tilbury. Weather could be nasty, just like people. That was not news.

Right, Tilbury said, wishing to placate. Remember that when you see Helmut Larz. You're a good reporter. I don't want to lose you.

The escape of such dangerously resonant words took them both by surprise. They were embarrassed.

Jonas took his hand and shook it warmly.

It was the closest they had been in a long time.

He liked the idea of himself as a man who put himself in danger for the truth.

Each of them remembered how it had once been with them before Tilbury had married Emily. It had hurt Jonas, but he had to admire Tilbury's honesty and his integrity. He did what he had to. He had made a noble sacrifice. Too noble: they both knew that. He had sacrificed himself -- and what had belonged to them. Maybe it wasn't honest. Maybe it was cowardly.

Now, Tillbury always had a sad shadow in his eyes. It worried Jonas, but there was nothing he could do, and he was afraid to ask. Sometimes he wanted to kiss his eyes. But he could not even express concern. Any show of tenderness would take them back to the territory they had quit and could not return to. It was not there anymore. They knew better than to go looking for it. That was what made him angry.

• • • Jonas landed in Athens. It was hot. The sun baked the air. He was wearing the wrong clothes. He was sweating before he could get into a taxi.

He gave the driver an address and they wound up in a generic neighbourhood – if you were dropped into it from nowhere, you would have no reason to think you were in Athens and not an old neighbourhood in Queens. It was a block away, but around the corner, from the bus station.

Jonas paid him, gave him an extra twenty euros, and told him to wait. The driver said no problem, in English.

Jonas walked to the bus station. He stowed a briefcase with all the papers relating to the Larz Cement business in a lock box in the lobby. Then he went back to where he had left the cab and directed the driver to his hotel.

If he had it right, Larz was the prime mover in a mortgage scheme, comparable to the sub-prime scam in the United States, operating throughout the Cyclades. It looked like Larz was in cahoots with certain Greek investment banks, backed up by certain shipping magnates, to push unsecured high-interest loans onto small-time contractors. That would start them building all over the islands. Then Larz got the banks to securitize those mortgages and sell them. He was selling debt at a profit. He had it made. He sold cement to the builders and mortgages to the bankers.

From the lobby of his hotel that night, Jonas e-mailed Tilbury the location of the bus station, the combination to the lock box, and a telegraphic, Story tomorrow or later. Notes, citations, sources in box. Everything safe, secure.

In the morning, Jonas was aroused from a heavy sleep, at six a.m., by the bedside phone and the old man at the desk's telling him a boat was waiting for him at the port. Larz had insisted on picking him up, and Jonas had consented. He was not afraid that accepting hospitalities would bias his reporting. He was not about to let himself be bought. This attention could not change what the facts were. It did, however, cross his mind that he was putting himself in Larz's power by going into his boat. He was trusting him with the power of life and death. Once again he chided himself with being melodramatic.

He would meet with Helmut Larz in Naxos and see what that yielded, showing his hand carefully and only as much as he needed to in order to get a reaction from him. Showing him he trusted him could not hurt.

Afterwards, he could put everything aside for a few weeks of sun, swimming, and maybe some good luck. There were still souls to subvert.

Feeling, nevertheless, an uneasiness that showed itself by a steady hissing in his ears and a general torpor, Jonas thanked the old desk clerk and said he'd be down in ten minutes. He said he wanted a double Greek coffee sent up to his room, sweet. Just as he came out of the shower there was a knock on the door. He opened it. A boy no older than fifteen, whom he had not seen the night before, in a sleeveless t shirt that flattered his slender slightly-muscled, growing, glowing arms, came in with his coffee on a small tray. Alongside was a basket of thickly cut golden bread and a small jar of honey.

The boy placed the tray on the bedside table, looked at Jonas holding the door to the room, fresh out of the shower with only a towel wrapped around him. The boy had unmistakeably eager, laughing eyes. Jonas gave him a euro. The boy grinned happily and left him alone, patting his shoulder as he left, as if he were the older of the two. Jonas drank his coffee, got into a pair of jeans, flip-flops and a faded purple t shirt, and went down to the dock. The boy ran after him, pulling his one suitcase.

Jonas arrived in Naxos with a surprisingly bad headache and a bad taste in his mouth. Unlike the usual pleasure he took in speeding over the water in an open boat, this time, he felt sick, and the wind was harsh and made his body ache.

He had read about Larz and thought he knew what to expect. In person the man was worse than his press. He was handsome, rugged, tall, seductive, self-assured and commanding. He was actually rather alluring. His hair was thick and sandy blonde. His eyes were blue and pale like stones. He held himself gracefully, but gave the impression of a tightly coiled spring. He had the look of a very violent man who had it all under control. He had mastered himself and was assured enough to believe that he could and should master everybody else. He was a man who would not take being crossed lightly.

Jonas did not want to admit it but he felt the man was attractive. He was afraid that Larz saw that he wanted to yield to him bodily, to be taken by him. He knew it was something he had to resist. He imagined that this overwhelming and dangerous attraction to Larz was common, that there was hardly anyone who was not affected as he was. That's why Larz was a man with the manner of a man who was accustomed to getting his way. He usually succeeded in breaking down the resisting will of others. It was inevitable.

He bullied waiters and cab drivers, too, but his manner was flirtatious. He looked like he was doing it to show them respect; that he recognized them as men who were equal to him who happened to hold those jobs. Courtesy would have signalled condescension. They were workers, not servants or inferiors. He was letting them know by his brashness that he recognized them by their manhood, not by their class.

He never let anyone forget that he had started with nothing. He was disorienting. He was a man of easy pride who was comfortable with his capacity to buy and sell his competitors and who knew they could never touch him.

A fashionably punk young man whom he referred to as Rory travelled with him, always. He looked at Larz with bottomless admiration and smiled at everything he said, when that was appropriate, and looked grave when that was called for. His lips were soft and thick. His sky blue eyes shone with pure and worshipful deference. He seldom spoke and then only in monosyllables. He was the model of quick, quiet, and happy obedience. When he left the table to get a pack of cigarettes for Larz, Jonas noticed that he carried a pistol strapped to his belt over his lean right hip.

Yes, Larz said, noticing that Jonas had noticed the pistol. He's a good shot. Dead aim.

I bet, Jonas said.

You would not lose, Larz responded. But you did not come here to speak about Rory, did you? he said, as that young man rejoined them, as beautiful as he is, Larz said, squeezing his hand, as the young man offered him a box of Karelias. I will tell you what you want to know, he said to Jonas, and proceeded not to. I will tell you a little about myself so that it might be useful to you when you think about what you are going to write next.

I am, in fact, Larz said, expansively, over lunch in Naxos, savoring the grilled octopus, the artichoke hearts in yogurt sauce, the stuffed grape leavers, and the slices of baked red peppers and feta cheese that he had ordered for them, the Cement King. Like every king before me, I live well. He raised Rory's hand to his lips. Why ought I not to arrange matters to suit what benefits me since that always proves to be to the benefit of everyone else, also?

The Greeks did not overrate Democracy. That was not their mistake. I suggest you read Aristotle if you don't believe me. Certainly Plato was not guilty of such naiveté. It was only those who mythologized a certain, very short, period in Greek history, who mythologized and distorted it, who made that mistake. I am a benevolent despot, no? He laughed. I admit it. I am not ashamed. Nothing to be ashamed of or to hide! Have you noticed the amount of new construction throughout the country, or have you not yet had a chance to? That is my cement being turned into homes, villas, villages, and cities. I give people work and make it possible for them to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

He passed his left hand with a swipe over the perfect skull of his boy. It was covered only with the five o'clock shadow of his strong black hair. Rory smiled with contentment. If he had had a tail, Jonas thought, it would be wagging.

Such amour propre as Larz showed would have been ludicrous except for the fact that he was a formidable man and he did control the Greek cement industry. That much was out in the open. And the Greek cement industry, as anyone who has travelled through that country and seen its numerous splendid, dazzling white structures can tell you, must be a mighty industry.

Their meeting did nothing to shake Jonas' belief that Larz had corrupted an entire industry as well as several government bureaucracies and the country's banking system in his accumulation of power. He had documents that indicated nothing else.

He will turn the country into a nation of waiters, chambermaids, and receptionists, Jonas thought but did not say that.

Instead he said that he worried that the sort of development that Larz was behind was destroying the country, the essential ecology of the landscapes of Greece as well as its financial wealth and the lives of its people, and its spirit, too.

That ecological mumbo-jumbo, Larz said laughing, is a piece of utopian fiction that dissatisfied hippies who have not been able to say good-bye to the sixties and their lost youth still cherish. It is a sad phenomenon, but hardly one worth noticing. As for those who are afraid when the free market is allowed to play itself out, they are only showing that they are weak and frightened of challenges, that they are constitutionally inferior men who must be told what to do.

Jonas nodded.

You really believe that? he said.

You really don't? Larz shot back with a good-natured grin of astonishment.

Jonas just nodded and said nothing. He would have to bide his time. The world would have to bide its time. Men like this could not be toppled. He wished it were not so, but he had learned that it was. All he could do was send in his story. Maybe it would become bread upon the water. Tilbury would print it. What would change? You have to wait for them to undo themselves. That's what tragedy was about. And the Greeks had invented it. One day Larz would overreach, and all one could hope for was to have helped in that happening and to live long enough to see it happen.

Anafi is a small island in the southern Cyclades. It is nearer to Santorini than it is to Naxos, but sticking to a policy he had followed since the only time he had been on Santorini, Jonas chose Naxos for his meeting with Larz. Naxos was not free of faults, but Santorini represented the mentality that insisted on converting every centimetre of space into something to be dedicated to making money. The place seemed to represent everything Larz stood for and that Jonas could not abide. The landscape had turned to cement.

The best thing a travel agent could possibly tell you about Santorini, Jonas had often said, was to avoid it, especially its central city. Fira was a high-priced cheap whore and you had to spend a lot of money before she would even begin to open up to you. And even then, you might not want to know her if you had any taste. The only way she knew to be intimate was by grabbing.

But Anafi was something else, a tiny island surrounded by a golden halo of sable beaches and natural cathedrals of caves and rocky cliffs jutting out from and forging themselves into the magnificent Aegean.

Jonas first saw Terry Miller on the beach at Anafi. He looked to him like an American college kid who knew he was hot stuff and got off on being able to get away with teasing and not following through. Jonas had seen this kind before. He was angry that he found himself almost exclusively attracted to that type. Angry that he was hungry for them! It was a type that had always dismissed him. It was a black secret of his: he was attracted to people who excluded him and then he got hurt and angry when they did, and then he swallowed it. A psychologist friend to whom he had once confessed it said that was why he had become an investigative reporter.

Jonas wanted to break the kid; the moment that he saw him, he wanted to break him the way they break horses, not just break through to him or to break him in. He wanted to break him down -- and make him get over himself. He wanted to subvert him. He wanted to see him fall apart. He wanted to get under his skin and fill his mind with admiration and desire. He wanted to own him. The thought of owning a beautiful boy thrilled him. He wanted to kiss him and grab him and hold him and fuck him. Desire surged palpably through him.

Terry was, indeed, a beauty, the way a long-arm, lithe-muscled, rich kid, a thick-haired, golden-skinned guy with soft and rugged good looks wearing a skimpy black bikini that looked like it was painted on, who had a flat belly and a sleek, smooth, contoured chest, with delicately carved pecs that were just emerging, could be. He stood, legs apart, his side, not his front, to the sea as he searched the curved line of the edge of the island out to the horizon.

That was how Jonas first saw him, and sat up, supporting his head with the palms of his hands, his almost naked body exposed to the sun he had tamed by becoming its color.

Jonas wanted to have him and keep him for as long as he wanted him, maybe forever and maybe only until he could not say when. The thought of being adored by such a boy made a shiver swagger snakelike across his body. He would make the boy see that he could be mastered, that he could be had, that despite all his charm, he could be dismissed, banished from Jonas' life, if he felt like it.

He can learn that nothing ever lasts. Nothing ever does.

But what makes that such a certainty?

As he ruminated, Terry strode out to where the sea gets deep, plunged himself in; with a strong grace he swam out to beyond where people usually swam. He met the openness of the sea with the expansion of his desire to merge with it, to be like part of the water he occupied.

Jonas swam out to where he saw Terry, his graceful form riding the sea, and swam alongside him when he reached him.

Terry knew that the man wanted to swim with him, and he did not mind. He was not the way Jonas thought he was. He had seen Jonas on the beach, too, and had wanted him, but it had been modesty and shyness, not stuck up arrogance, that held him back from approaching a man so obviously his superior. All the same, because he was so drawn to the man and because he cannot help but act upon his desire, in time he would have sidled up to him and with soft eyes begun to speak to him.

They swam together, beside each other in the crystalline blue sea for less than half an hour, their chests breasting the waves, their arms, like water mills, propelling them through the undulant sea by the power they generated, each feeling a reserve of strength greater than they knew about being opened up by the other's presence.

This water of the Aegean, sparkling, crystal, blue, alive as no other water is alive, was the medium in which their spirits met.

Hey, Jonas said, the first time either of them spoke, as they trod side by side, afterwards, with swim-braced strides, vigorously walking up the lightly-sloping sandy beach called Kleissidi, the beach of golden sands and walls of massive and sun-bleached rock that emerges from and commands the blue Aegean Sea.

Hey, Terry repeated. His searching, questioning eyes gleaming as brightly as his teeth did in the radiance of his smile.

You're a good swimmer, Jonas said, squinting even under his sun glasses as they walked into the sun, making no secret that he was admiring the boy's body. He folded his arm around Terry's shoulders.

Let's have a drink together.

Terry did not resist his embrace.

You're a great swimmer, he said, as unable to keep his eyes off Jonas as Jonas was unable to take his away from Terry. And you have a body that shows it, he said snuggling closer so that they walked with one gait.

Under fern-like salt-palm leaves that kept out the three o'clock sun, they sat facing each other, their eyes bare and intent in a cementing mutual gaze, sipping icy lemon vodkas laced with champagne.

This is wonderful, Terry said, delighted.

Have you been here long? Jonas asked, reaching over the table and covering the young man's hand with his own. Terry could feel in it the tremble of a current he had never felt before. Their eyes were locked on each others'. The intensity was overwhelming.

No, he said. I am spending the summer going from one island to another. It is the last gift of my youth. After this my father says I am on my own.

What does your father do?

Investment banker.

And you will follow in his footsteps?

No, Terry smiled and shook his head. That's why I'm on my own. I am not sure what I want to do but I don't want to do that.

Have you ever been fucked? Jonas said, turning on a dime, but with a gentleness that belied the question's audacity and made it seem like a natural continuation of the conversation they were having.

I'm a virgin, Terry said, casting down his green brown eyes.

Stay here with me, Jonas said.

Ok, the boy said, grinning.

I want you to stay with me.

Yes, the boy affirmed. Here?

Here, unless I decide to go someplace else.

It frightens me, Terry said.

Going someplace else? Jonas said feigning misapprehension. But he felt himself thrill in response to Terry's confession of fear.

Terry knew he was teasing him and felt helpless.

You're beautiful, Jonas said, unlike anyone I have ever met before, and innocent. I can see it. I want to take you to bed and drive you crazy. Would you like that?

Maybe I would, Terry said, grim determination lurking in his open laugh.

Away from the beach, the island quickly became hilly. The hills were steep. Terry sat on the back of Jonas' rented motorbike as it negotiated the twisting roads that rose above the sea. The wind blew harshly. It felt like it could threaten the balance of the bike. He was exhilarated when Jonas brought the bike to a stop inside a garden of stone paths winding around lemon, fig, and olive trees.

The villa Jonas rented was the last on the dirt path. From the terrace you could see the panorama of the Aegean all the way to the horizon. Above, the path became a mountain trail of dust-breathing paths full of small rocks, paths that sometimes seemed to be leaving the earth and dissolving into the astonishing blueness of a beckoning sky.

They showered together washing sand and salt off each other and gently arousing each other to a sustaining excitement by their ministrations.

They stood on the terrace covered only by the white towels knotted around their waists.

I have some stuff I got in Athens. Have you ever been stoned? Jonas said, opening a leather pouch.

No, Terry said. But I'd like to try.

I want to get you completely off balance. I want you to forget who you are. I want the only thing that you know for certain to be that you belong to me.

Terry sighed and Jonas put the joint to his lips and said, Breathe it in.

As Terry inhaled, Jonas pinched his nipples. Before he could exhale Jonas grabbed his mouth with his and drew the pot smoke that had mixed with the boy's breath into his lungs, held it there, and then gave it back to him. The joint hanging in the fingers of his arm fallen slack behind him, warmed his fingers, and he dropped it suddenly when it began to burn them.

Jonas could feel how both of them were getting dizzy by the way they swayed in each others' arms. Jonas pushed Terry backward through the sliding door into the room and with one more push made him tumble backwards on the bed.

They laughed with nervous anticipation, laughed, lunged, and clawed at each other. They tore off their towels and pressed their bodies together.

The hardness of Jonas's cock met the hardness of Terry's. With a fist wrapped around his tall, hard cock Jonas pulled Terry upward, arcing him like the bridge of a tightly strung bow, drawing his hips up from the bed, exposing him to penetration. With the spit of his fingers he greased the hole by which he would enter him.

Terry's entire body tightened. He gasped and cried yes repeatedly as Jonas pushed himself into him and pulled out and moistened him with the ooze of anticipation. Jonas gloried in his submission and felt like his lord as he brought him nearer to oblivion and obliteration. He broke to pieces in him and he felt him shatter as if he were part of his insides.

They slept and the falling sun was burning orange on the western horizon, sinking into the water at the end of the world as they awoke. In that crepuscular light they saw each other glimmering and embraced once more.

I'm hungry, Terry said afterwards.

They went down to Margarita's by the beach. They ate Greek salad, tomatoes and cucumbers, onions, olives, capers, and feta cheese. They ate tzaziki. They ate red peppers stuffed with rice and rice rolled in grape leaves. They ate charred octopus in vinegar and large and fleshy shrimps. They ate figs and watermelon and honey laced yogurt.

Stelios watched them as they ate, Stelios, the one whose love shone like a star through his broken and hungry heart.

*** Like so many of those Greek beauties who have youth and no future, Stelios came to the small port of Anafi with its golden beach and sumptuous caves to dream, to look at the boats and the sea and the silhouettes of distant islands and the tourists who had the money to come and go as they pleased.

He envied them and could not say whether he hated or loved them. He could not tell if he wanted to serve them or to rob them.

Jonas saw that he was looking at them, saw him from the corner of his eye, felt as if he were taking their picture with an invisible camera and later would not be able to stop looking at it.

What are you looking at? Terry said.

Look, Jonas said in response, indicating the sun-burnished boy with the slightest movement of his chin and eyes. Do you think he knows how beautiful he is?

Terry resisted the blow. Jealousy was petulance, and he strove to show a healthy maturity based on generosity and self-confidence.

He is, he smiled.

Careful, Jonas said, teasing, laughing brightly. I could get jealous.

Stelios stretched his bronzed body carelessly like a long cat in the moonlight. He sensed that they were looking at him. He felt a surge of desire rush through him, desire unlike what he knew when he was with the men who cruised the waterfront and paid him to blow them.

He would approach them -- he knew it -- not now, but soon. It was his fate, his moira. He recognized it when he saw it.

He was waiting for something: a father, a brother; for something to be his, for someone to devote himself to who would love him for his devotion. He was searching for someone who would give him a world, for someone unlike his mother.

You, she said, too many times. You, the burden of my life. You, the curse your father left me. Greek men, all foul sons of Odysseus. They charm us, marry us, trick us into bearing their children. But once they have us locked in their homes, they abandon us for their greatest love, their love of adventure, their search for death on the sea. Yes, they leave us for the sea, for the inevitable loins of the sea, just as you will soon, the sooner the better.

Other times she said to him, What do you know? What do you know of the way I suffer? A boy like you, tall, strong, well knit, the mirror of your father? Why are you not your father? Why do you not come in the tenebrous night and hold me in your muscled arms and dispel the gloom from my murky soul as he did once, before you were born, when I was still young and he desired me, before the fat of childbirth clung to me?

He ran from her in terror, as from a cracked mirror. He was old enough to live by himself. Money was not a problem. There were many men who came and went daily, and it was not difficult to see what they wanted or to learn just how much they were willing to pay for it.

He learned quickly how to please them and how to get the most out of them. He entered into their desire and made them dance the shivering dance they had only been able heretofore to dream of.

He wandered the streets and alleys around the waterfront in Athens, hung out in the bars, cafés, and tavernas, prowled the streets below the Acropolis. He stowed away on a boat from Pireaus to Anafi and slept in a cave by the sea on the beach off the port.

One night after he listened to a sad college professor from America tell him that no one in his town really knew who he was, he lay on the sand thinking of the two he had seen in the taverna.

He could not sleep because of envy.

He put on his loose trousers and his small t shirt, soft to the point of being worn thin, and went barefoot on his rock-hardened soles.

He climbed up to the Chora. It was late. The tourists were gone.

From the height he saw the lights shine amber in the harbour. Beyond, the crowning sky illuminated by such a vast array of piercing stars; in the distance, across the distance, all the black Aegean.

The door to the chapel at the height of the village was open. The chapel was empty and only a small flame burned in the center of the sandy repository that held the lighted candles. He lit a candle and placed it in the sand before the icon but he did not cross himself.

Emptiness tearing in his heart like hunger drove him down to the port again. In the morning he would find a boat to take him back to Athens.

Tilbury was uneasy in a way he seldom was. Jonas. Something about Jonas, when he thought of Jonas, made him uneasy. He felt a sense of the great heaviness of the kind of loss that will always ache and make you cringe with grief.

He held the galley with Jonas's story and looked at it.

Here we go, he said.

•

Stelios was in Piraeus by noon.

Soon he regretted it. Athens was hot and dirty and crowded with foreigners who clogged the streets. The streets were lined with cheap souvenir shops stuffed with mass produced, hand-made alabaster figurines of ancient Greeks, philosophers and gods. The restaurants were expensive, the food was second rate, and hucksters stood by the menu boards haranguing and flirting with the perplexed tourists in an effort to draw them in.

At the end of August, Jonas returned to Athens with Terry.

Jonas was unexpectedly moody, unaccountably transformed. It perplexed Terry. Was it the change to the city? He had expected what they had found during the summer to last forever.

One evening they walked through the Plaka, returning from the Acropolis. Terry could feel Jonas's irritation.

Will you tell me what is troubling you? he said.

Nothing is troubling me.

Why won't you trust me?

Why do you insist when I said there was nothing? Why must you make yourself the center of everything?

I don't know anything about you, but I have known you more intimately than I have ever known anyone. And now I think I have no idea who you are.

It was a lament for a loss that Jonas would not recognize. It only increased his irritability.

Terry was going back to New York. He was to finish his last year at Columbia.

Now that I am going back to New York, I know I will lose touch with you, he said. It feels like I have already.

It was a moment getting rarer, when they could sit in a taverna or a café, and enjoy being high together, lost in the mood of their conversation, when they could still speak with words that touched like flesh for them and that caressed them as much as their hands did.

I don't want to leave. I want to stay. But I can't. I have to finish school. But I want to have you...you, not just the memory of you. I want the future to be you

You can't hold on to things, Jonas said. You need to learn that, through pain and regret. Terry shivered. Jonas drew him to the breaking point of desire just by his gaze as he spoke.

I feel like you are gone already, Terry said through an unaccountable welling tears. I want some tangible mark on me that once I was yours, he said.

As they rambled slowly on the marble streets, they passed a shop that did body piercing. A ring through my nipple? Terry said. Only one. It will mark the incompleteness I feel as well as keep the feeling of you on my body.

Jonas smiled.

You won't come back? he said.

Will you have me when I do?

Jonas did not answer but only said, Let's see what kind of rings they have.

It perplexed Terry, but he dismissed it and did not let it undermine him, as he almost suspected it was intended to do.

Afterwards, after it had been done, Jonas looked at him and did not smile. Terry had cried with a gasp of agonized bliss when he was pierced. He reared like a stallion fighting for his freedom as he battled the fluid insistence of seminal longing.

This fetishistic encounter with ecstasy made Jonas angry with jealousy. It was transparently revealed to him that Terry's erotic sensorium was Terry's own and not the manifestation of the power of Jonas's agency working upon him. He had to fix that.

But Jonas was wrong, for as he was pierced, it was of Jonas entering him that Terry thought and it was that that brought him to the writhing release that delighted his piercer and wrought consternation in Jonas.

Jonas made sense of his rage by revolving the fact that Terry was going, that he could even be able to go. Or willing to go! Of a sudden, without intending it, he thought of the proprietary role Larz played with that beautiful boy he had tamed and envied him with painful shame.

Terry dressed and took Jonas's arm as they returned to the street, snuggled up to him and kissed his neck.

Thank you, he said.

Jonas smiled cynically. For what? he said.

For this, Terry said, lightly touching the place beneath his gauzy black shirt where the pain still burned.

I love you, Terry said softly, thinking that his young sincerity could penetrate the mystery of his lover's shadowy gloom and convince him to tenderness.

For the time, it seemed to. Jonas took him round the waist and led him to a vine-covered wall off the avenue on a side street leading to the Acropolis. He had already begun what he had intended from the start. He kissed him violently and pushed him against the wall. Terry swooned with surrender and almost blacked out when Jonas pressed his wound.

From his perch on the steps in front of the hotel at the corner of Cherefondos and Adrianou, Stelios saw Jonas and Terry as they turned the corner and entered the square. He watched as they leaned on the wrought iron fence, white in the moonlight, forlorn like two parts of one Pierrot being torn away from himself. He saw Terry press against Jonas and Jonas receive his embrace. They kissed; they shone like silver in the mercuric moon's extensive radiance. They gazed into the expanding sky. Its midnight blue pulsed luminous and endlessly deep. They could not tell, their hands grasping, whose hand was whose.

Stelios approached them slowly as they were gazing into the night and asked if they wanted to buy some pot.

They looked at him with shining eyes.

He smiled.

His English was better than you would expect.

I watched a lot of television when I was a boy, he said, explaining his idiomatic proficiency. Before my father left us for the timeless sea. We had satellite. I stopped watching after I heard he was dead.

Where are you staying? he asked. I'll bring it to you, referring to the quarter ounce they said they wanted. Then you can pay me.

You don't have it on you? Jonas said, entranced and aroused by Stelios's unselfconscious beauty.

I don't carry stuff on me, Stelios said.

Here, Jonas said, pointing to a small house with a roof garden across the square from the hotel.

It's ok to ring the bell? It'll be fifteen minutes.

Wait a minute, Jonas said. You were in Anafi, weren't you? I saw you watching us there.

Yes, Stelios said.

What for? Jonas asked.

I envied you because you had each other, and you looked so sure of yourselves and of each other.

Do you live in Athens? Jonas asked.

I don't live anywhere, Stelios said laughing at the absurdity of the question.

You must come from someplace. You are Greek?

I ran away.

From where?

Ithaki.

Where do you stay now?

Nowhere.

Where do you sleep?

Last night I slept in that garden, he said, pointing over the fence to the dense collection of shrubs and hedges planted above the site of an ancient excavation beside an old domed church. Its façade formed one of the boundaries of the square.

What do you do when it gets cold? Terry said.

What do you suggest? Stelios said, flirting.

I suggest you sleep with us tonight, Jonas said.

With sincere naiveté Stelios asked if he meant it.

After all, he said, it has not yet begun to get cold at night.

Yes, Jonas said. I mean it. Sleep with us tonight. I want to feel what your body is like. I'm sure Terry does not mind. In fact, I know that he wants to get his hands on your beautiful long muscles too, Jonas said and grinned.

They shook hands, all three of them. Stelios's palms were soft and dry. His fingers were graceful and long.

Jonas felt his electricity. It was madding. He knew what would happen; he knew what he wanted to do. He saw it like a preformed vision. It came to him whole, like Athena from the brain of Zeus.

It was cruel, and it drew him on like an irresistible impulse. Terry did not know what it really meant to be marked. It was nothing so simple as having your nipple pierced with a tiny silver barbell.

Being marked for the rest of his life, not just marked, but broken, meant making some part of him become unavailable ever again to anyone the way that he had been available to Jonas. Love is a fierce and jealous god.

Love is not about the body. It has to do with something essential and immutable. He would pith the spirit shimmering in Terry's flesh that had drawn him to Terry and by that dissolution make Terry available to adulthood, but never again be able to experience the kind of love that would torment his memory. Love meant following a god who has abandoned you.

Terry dreamed that he was lying spread eagle on the beach, his palms pinned under his head, his legs apart. He was struggling to rise from the burning sand. The roar of the sea raged in his ears. There was a dog between his legs licking his perineum and another, near his chest, tonguing his arm pit. He knew that they were preparing to use their teeth. He writhed in the agony of his effort to escape. When he finally broke awake with a sudden start, he sprung to a sitting position; the bed that the three of them had slept in was empty but for him; his heart was beating hard.

The room was empty. The window was open. The morning was bright and clear. The sky was as astonishingly blue as it always is. He was newly astonished every day. Until three days ago it had been with another realization of joy. But that was a paradise lost now.

He stepped out onto the small balcony that overlooks the garden in the church square. He saw them, as Jonas intended him to. Jonas held the bare-chested, long-muscled, bronzed boy, Stelios, in his arms and pressed him close and lost himself kissing his full mouth, crushing his yielding young hips.

The idea of the treachery enflamed Jonas's passion and enhanced Stelios's desirability exponentially. It was not treachery because he was with another but because he was with another in order to cause Terry pain, to pierce him with agony. They shivered with the excitement of volatile desire. For Jonas, desire had become the knife to use to cut his mark on Terry. The pain he knew he was causing him cut into himself as well, branding him with excruciating excitement as he vibrated with the knowledge that this moment of betrayal would always be with Terry.

He knew it would always stay with him, too, that desire was a knife that separated lovers as much as a force that drew them together. There was nothing Jonas could do about it but yield and play his part.

Innocent of complicity in Jonas's plot, Stelios was pilloried by the force of a passion he could only attribute to the power of a sexual divinity inhabiting his ravisher.

Afterwards, when the three sat in a square drinking coffee, Terry could not speak. He dropped his eyes in shame as if he had been the one who had violated their bond.

Jonas took Stelios' hand and kissed it, but he cast his eyes in Terry's direction.

He's jealous, he said.

Stelios took Terry's hand and, in turn, kissing it, said, But he is part of us.

Jonas said with great solemnity, He always will be.

Back where they were staying, when it was time for him to go and a cab was waiting to take him to the airport, Terry stammered stupidly as he thanked their host, an old friend of Jonas', who looked at him he could not tell how, for his hospitality.

I'll take the cab by myself, he told Jonas with studied determination. You don't need to go to the airport with me. But Jonas had not finished with him and insisted that the three of them go to the airport so that he might get a proper send-off.

He wrapped his arm round Terry's shoulders and drew him to him as if he were going to kiss him. Instead he bent his head and spoke, with a warm inviting smile, words of reproach and disappointment:

If I'd known, Jonas said with indignation, this is the way you would be, I never would have sought you out to begin with. Don't make everything we shared lose its meaning.

It was a body blow. Terry was silent. He was being drawn forth and pushed back by the selfsame action in the selfsame moment. His mind turned inside out because what Jonas was saying was a hideous distortion. He had not betrayed their special meaning. How? Was there something wrong with him? Was he unreasonable? Was this a matter of reason? What had happened? Jonas was not himself. He was not the person he had been. He was not the man he had known.

It was because of Terry? Terry was incapacitated by perplexity.

From inside the crush by the boarding gate Terry could see Jonas and Stelios, to the right, through a Plexiglas wall. He fought to prevent his tears and to find the strength to remain strong.

They were there to see him off, but they were not waving or even looking in his direction. They were gazing into each other's eyes with such hot desire that they were repeatedly drawn together in shameless kisses, as if they were the parting lovers.

Terry could not shake the despair that chilled him inside, nor melt it with hot tears. His inability to comprehend and thus to accept how such recent bliss he had felt had become such grave misery pressed down against him, on his shoulder blades and made him bend under the weight.

Boarding was called. As he stumbled through the boarding sleeve toward the airplane, he saw a dying wake, an after image of their happy sea travel on the Aegean less than a week ago. Then it was gone and he was pressed into his seat looking at the plastic tray tucked into the back of the seat in front of him, waiting.

Stelios was too far gone in the rapture Jonas had spun to be aware of the role he had been cast in or how he was being used. He was hardly aware that anyone else even existed. It was not just Terry who vanished to his awareness.

But after the plane was gone and they had taken a cab back to the Plaka, Jonas thought of Terry who was gone now, beautiful Terry, devoted Terry, heartbroken Terry. He could see now from how Terry had suffered that he had succeeded in making him entirely his, but what good was it if he was gone? He pulled himself away from Stelios and turned on him, pushed him away and scoffed at him saying, You are only a whore.

I hope I am a good whore, Stelios said, smiling, without irony, unsure of himself and of what was happening, only wanting to please, trying to keep his balance.

And all you want from me is money to spend, food to eat, and a place to sleep, Jonas said with an unexpected and tangled mixture of anger, contempt, and sadness. You don't know what love is. You only know appetite. You sell yourself and you would betray me in a moment.

No, Stelios recoiled. It is not like that, not with you.

Jonas said, You don't take my money?

I don't want your money, he said. I want you. He was unable to believe that Jonas could not see that he had given him his soul. You are stupid if you think anything else.

Jonas was stunned as if he had been slapped, but he could not relent.

You know how to play your part very well, don't you? Aren't you taking my money when you live with me, sleep in my bed, eat the food I buy?

Stelios felt the wind knocked out of his chest. Do you want me to sleep in the street again?

Do you want to?

If you make me, I will.

Until you find somebody else to sell yourself to.

Stelios said nothing. His knees buckled and he dropped to a crouch right there on the curb, let his head fall into his open palms, and began to cry.

It excited Jonas. His body swelled and he was handsome. The bone structure of his face was sharper than often. He lifted the boy up, roughly but with tenderness. Stelios could feel it, but even more he felt the strength of Jonas' body.

But until that happens, Jonas said, you have nowhere to go. He put his arm around the defeated boy's shoulders and drew him to his chest.

The scales of misery fell away from him and Stelios surrendered like the swell of the tide ebbing back into the sea.

He sighed and his eyes became soft and doggy, begging to be allowed to offer devotion.

Jonas was exhilarated by the victory of his will.

Perhaps I will put you on a leash, he said.

A leash? Stelios smiled.

You'd like to be my dog, wouldn't you? Jonas said, drawing his thumb over Stelios' lips, and from them drawing eagerness for kisses.

Do I have a choice? Stelios said.

Do you want one? Jonas said.

I want you, Stelios said.

That, Jonas said, leaning against him and taking a bite of his lips, is not...a choice.

Jonas took hold of him and fingered him as if he were a flute. Stelios trembled in his captivity and burned with desire whose peaks Jonas kept scaling and subduing.

Jonas sat with his bare toes curled around the thin wrought iron swirls that enclosed the terrace.

Stelios brought him his coffee.

Do you ever think of Terry?

Why should I think of Terry? Jonas said.

Don't you miss him?

Do you miss him?

Yes, I do. I'm surprised you don't?

What makes you think I don't?

I don't know. That's why I asked you. Because you didn't say you did.

You think too much, Jonas said with annoyance that was surprising to hear when it slipped out.

He was jealous, and it unnerved him to be. In his understanding of things he was the one who could create jealousy in others, not be its target.

But you told me that it is essential to think about things and not believe what appears to be, until you're satisfied that it really is.

That's different, Jonas said.

Stelios could not see the difference and also understood that it did not matter whether he did or not. That did not matter. Everything dissolved in his surrender and was burned in the fire of his need for Jonas to make him vibrate and tremble and sound from within.

But it was just the very sense of being lost to himself, and his craving for it, that made Stelios gather his Odyssean wits and flee to the open streets and closed gardens around the Acropolis, tearing himself from the flowers of oblivion whose smell alone could be his undoing.

As the airliner touched ground in New York and the cabin burst into applause, Terry knew he had been damaged. He knew inexorably that his future had been determined and that it was bound irretrievably to his past.

The time of his deepest glow and highest shine was finished. He had spent his fortune.

His backpack hung heavy upon his shoulders as he followed the crowd to the customs check. He did not have to wait at the baggage carousel because everything he had was in his knapsack.

A scar of anger had formed in his belly and he could not help picking at the scab with the edges of his thoughts.

A cab would have been nice, but he was no longer a rich boy. It was a rainy New York morning, so different from the sunshine skies and the blue Aegean he no longer was a part of.

Given where his heart was, everything was just as it ought to be.

He took the subway to Sheridan Square. Before he could account for it, a transformation had occurred. He fell in love with New York -- it was a melancholy love, as all real love is, because he knew that love, to be love, needed to know loss -- and that was what New York was: a city that knew loss and offered it freely to anyone who lived by his heart. It teased, for it also knew the hope that swelled blind to loss when first possession is achieved, and it knew the impossible despair-driven hope afterwards, when your lover has gone and you congregate among the broken hearted who make love to each other in the shadows, or you become one of those who only look to find and never do. New York was a song of nostalgia for something that had not yet been lost.

And he was also in love with New Yorkers. They made it through loss daily, and somehow they always came out on the opposite side with a twinkle of cynicism and a spirit of corny cosmopolitan optimism that allowed them to be generous. They knew when something mattered so much that it could not matter at all. New York wasn't a place about holding on to anything and New Yorkers were tenacious about letting go.

An assortment of plumbers and pipe-fitters, black and Latino, ranging in age from somewhere in the twenties to somewhere in the sixties sat across from him on the C train gossiping and complaining about their losses and their bosses, their jobs, and their frustrations, their money fixes, and their girlfriends.

Getting off the train at Hoyt-Schemmerhorn, a lanky black guy with kinky gray hair looked at him. Don't worry; you gonna get through it, he said.

Thanks, Terry said, giving the man a serious and grateful smile. How in the world did the guy know he was troubled? And whether he really was going to get through it?

Gray September rain met him at Sheridan Square, but the winding Village streets shone with their proper melancholy. Manhattan rose from sidewalks. The rain-slicked roads reflected the streaks of street lights, green, red, yellow, that were reflected inside the slick black surface that rain created. Everything lulled him into a peaceful resignation, a resignation that was nevertheless, despite it all, tinged with the hope of something that was as yet unknown.

*** Rory did not know if it would be a good thing to meet Jonas in Athens or not. Would it advance his own interest or not?

Jonas was obviously onto something. And if everything went a certain way, Jonas would be an international celebrity.

And Jonas wanted him. And Larz, of course, did.

So he met Jonas and he let him take him to bed. It felt pretty good.

It was new all over again. Rory was letting himself be discovered. He loved being discovered, being gazed on with wonder by a man he could twist around his little finger but who could never encompass him, who could never get enough of him. his gaze promised and gave but also withheld. That made what he gave even more toxic. He was shivering with bliss and writhing out of himself as Jonas held his precious sack in his palm and softly caressed what was inside as he lay under him and was penetrated by his kisses.

From deep inside the thrill of being desired charged his skin with electricity and his shaft was swollen and hard with molten energy.

Jonas knew that he had become addicted to playing with fire, that he got off on daring fate.

But later Rory spent the days tormented. Every time Larz looked at him he was filled with fear and it was all he could do to keep himself from trembling. He was afraid that Larz would find out, or had found out already and was enjoying watching him in torment, tortured by the fear of what would happen. Anytime, Larz could explode.

Rory knew his master. Larz knew. He knew. He watched with pleasure as Rory struggled with fear and redoubled his effort to be submissive.

Larz was in the library, lying on the sofa. The room was warm. There was a fire that Prentiss had made and Larz had taken off his shirt. He was reading a financial report and biting his lip as he did, revolving something.

Rory came to the door and knocked although it was open.

Come in, boy, Larz said, and patted his lef.

Rory bounded over to him, knelt and rested his head in his lap.

Larz caressed his hair.

You are trembling, he said.

Rory confessed.

Larz raised his head so that he could look directly into his eyes.

Do you think I'd even look at a boy who does not have a guilty edge cutting into him all the time? You will never be able to control yourself. That is good. When you need control, you know you come to me.

Yes, Rory said.

Keep seeing him, Larz said.

Rory was silent. He was not sure if it was alright to let his heart leap with glee as he had just felt it jump.

Maybe it will do you good.

You think so? Rory said, taking the nape of Larz neck in the palm of his hands.

Just might, Larz answered ripping Rory's shirt open so the buttons all fell onto the rug and his beautifully tanned-to-golden and delicately contoured chest was exposed, something it was a delight just to savor in your gaze.

Rory leaned in and gave himself into a kiss and felt himself becoming Larz, too. He gripped him deeply to himself and knew that he would kill for him if so commanded. His truncated desire for Jonas made him know that it would only make sense, only be meaningful, show the depth of his submission and his enslavement, if he were the man he would be commanded to kill, the man he wanted to devour.

He held onto Larz's kisses with his teeth and could no longer tell the difference between devouring and being devoured.

*** When Elisabeth and Hans Rheimer got divorced, she kept her married name.

That tells you just how much I can't stand my father, she said.

That's why you got married? her friend and colleague, Werner Marcus said.

It was early September. They were sipping sweet icy frappés on a café terrace in the shade on the way up to the Acropolis.

Funny, I ran away from my father right into the arms of a man who was just about his double, she said.

It could not have been otherwise. It's a Freudian law that goes all the way back to Sophocles.

Ah, Sophocles, she said. You know many, if not most, Greeks have not even read Sophocles. He's like the older brother they cannot live up to. I mean the whole classical history is. They feel like it's a dead weight dragging them down. And they are the only ones who know it is dead.

But you did not live with your father, Werner said, pulling her back to herself.

Hardly, she said, smiling at being caught. They divorced when I was three. I lived with my mother on Central Park West, in New York City. She owned an apartment near the Museum of Natural History and the Planetarium, overlooking the park. I visited my father once or twice a year in Berlin before he moved to Athens. Then I came here. That's how my interest got started in Greek excavation sites. He took me with him to see where he was building and developing. All this is mine to play with, he would say.

I got to see the land, she continued, how it was before it was denatured and transformed into something man-made that defiles the shape of the earth and has contempt for it. It seemed to me that earth had something to say. You just had to listen to it. But all he could do was tell it to shut up and stop its mouth with cement.

What do you expect the earth to say at Malia? he grinned.

It can only tell us what we already suspected but tried to keep buried.

What are you trying to keep buried? he said.

You never stop digging, she said.

Come on, he coaxed her grinning.

She made a mouth and shook her head in dismissal.

What am I trying to keep buried? A terrible combination of hatred and sadness. I'm trying to keep that buried. It's dead and I don't want it coming back. Besides that, I could turn the question back on you.

What am I trying to keep buried? A deep cynicism about the world.

My, oh my, she said laughing. How German is it!

Terry's attic room in an old brownstone off Hudson Street was just as he had left it: barely furnished -- a bed, some books of poetry and philosophy, a desk, in the corner, the manuscript of a book he had once thought highly of but that had fallen from grace, a reading lamp, and two twenty pound weights under the radiator.

It was good to be back home and comforting to see the rain streaking down the slope of the skylight.

He looked at himself in the mirror. For as bad as he felt, he looked good. He was brown and smooth and the glow and glamour of healthy young manhood was upon him. The allure of his skin made him Aphrodite's rival. It was alive and so were the long ropey muscles that danced under its cover.

He felt the way Jonas would caress him. He pulled his shirt off entirely and caressed himself like that. He imagined he gazed into Jonas's returning eyes.

He came with a flush and fell to the floor weeping.

Several mornings later, he was awakened by an insistent banging on his door. Through the peephole he saw three cops and opened the door in his black briefs, which he had slept in.

In the fog of waking they told him to get some clothes on and come with them.

He rubbed his shaggy head of unkempt hair that still had the Greek sun in it.

What's going on? he said.

Get dressed, one of the cops said and, throwing a glance at his pierced nipple, winked at him.

We'll ask the questions, a second cop said.

He wondered at how well he'd got his part down, and he knew better than to disobey or to say anything else.

The police station was clean, cold: cinderblock walls painted lime green and mustard yellow. A sharp shiny horizontal brown stripe cut the wall slightly higher than half way up, separating the color on top from the color on the bottom

They showed him pictures of Jonas and pictures of himself with Jonas. There he was with Jonas on the beach and there he was sitting with him in a backstreet taverna on a hill in Athens. He remembered that they had been arguing about the design of a silver chain they had seen and whether it would look good around his neck after his tan had faded. And here was a picture of them kissing.

What is all this about? he asked.

That's what we want you to tell us.

Tell you what? Terry said.

What you know about this man.

Terry looked at them without saying anything.

We were friends. We were in Greece together this summer.

Did you know him before that?

We met on the beach at the beginning of August.

What do you know about him?

Not much. Nothing. He did not speak about what he did.

And you were not curious?

I don't know. Everything was...intense.

Intense?

Terry blushed.

One of the cops understood.

He was shot outside The Bank of Athens yesterday morning and was DOA when they got him to the hospital. What can you tell us about him?

What are you talking about?

He was shot outside the bank. Do you know why he might have been there? Enemies?

Terry went insensate. He said nothing for a beat.

I didn't know.

What?

Terry looked at them blankly.

What didn't you know?

That he was killed.

You were involved with him.

I knew him for less than a month, Terry said, realizing how short a time he had taken for a lifetime.

And he never said anything that could lead you to think someone might be out to get him.

No, Terry said.

A week ago he would have been gripped by the grief that accompanies loss. Now, it was by a meaningless confusion. The loss had already occurred. Now a mysterious finality was stamped upon it that ruled out any chance for resolution. Jonas was dead. And he was alive.

It was hysterical. He braced himself against the competing waves of sobs and laughter that crashed in him and trembled as one does whose teeth chatter at the cold.

They could tell he was shocked and they sensed that he was not dishonest.

Don't worry, the police said. You are not a suspect. You were on this side of the Atlantic when it happened. But we need to now anything that you might know that can help us.

I knew him, Terry said, without really knowing anything about him.

You don't know what he was doing near the bank.

No, Terry said. I don't.

Or why anyone would want to kill him.

No, Terry said.

He wandered home in a daze, fingering the barbell piercing his nipple through his t shirt, twisting it to make himself feel it pinch him.

In his room, he crouched against the wall, pressed his palms against his face, trembled and shook. The laughing sobs erupted and he pressed his back hard against the wall and kept hitting the wall with it.

In Athens the police were holding Stelios. He slumped in his cell crying after the beating. But he had nothing to say. He knew nothing. He was not even near the bank when Jonas was shot. He was not even seeing Jonas anymore. He was living on the street.

He had no political affiliation, no record, he was not a member of any group. He was a boy who hung out on beaches and turned tricks. He was what he said he was. The dead journalist had befriended and abandoned him. It was an old story. The kid had not even known he wrote for a newspaper.

Stelios was in the garden outside the Acropolis at the time the gun was fired. He got twenty euros for jerking off an English sailor. He told them that. They laughed and teased him as they beat him and held him over night and then let him go. They had nothing.

Before they released him, an older officer who had not been present the night before spoke to him. The body was a temple, he said, ignoring the bruises that showed on Stelios. It was in man's nature to give himself to one particular woman, he explained patronizingly. He was young enough, the policeman said, to turn his life around. He gave him the card of a religious counselor. Father Dimitrios was a Greek Orthodox priest who had a degree in psychology from the University of Athens.

Stelios took the card. He would have laughed in their faces, but he knew better, and his ribs hurt when he breathed, no less when he laughed.

Athens was hot and he plunged into its busy center. He looked around at the bustle of the outdoor markets and wandered over to the dark and cavernous vicinity around Sophocleous Street, hoping to score some pot. Night was falling but he did not linger there. The streets were not what they had been a year ago. There were groups of police on every corner now hanging around and checking papers. The trade in dope, cheap watches, pirate-brand sunglasses, defective appliances, and lots of other contraband was over.

He took the metro at Omonoia, evading ticket control, changed at Syntagma, and got out at Monastriaki.

The noise and the lights of the square made him dizzy and he felt faint.

That's a pretty shiner you've got there, a lithely muscled German, probably in his middle thirties, in khaki shorts and a pale blue tennis shirt, spotting him, said in English. It looks good on you, he added, facing him and gripping Stelios' shoulder in his strong palm.

Stelios looked at him without speaking.

It really does, the German said, ingratiatingly.

It doesn't feel good.

It's not supposed to, the German said and winked. Buy you a coffee?

Sure, Stelios said, why not?

Werner Marcus, the man said, formally introducing himself, archeologist. I am on my way to Crete, to work at a site not far from Heraklion. But I have another week in Athens before I have to be there, he said. Do you live on the street?

Sometimes, Stelios said. When I don't have any money.

Like now, Werner Marcus said.

Like now, Stelios said.

What are you going to Heraklion for?

To work at a Minoan site that's being excavated and reconstructed.

Stelios shook his head. We have too much past, he said.

It's a great past, an amazing heritage.

I live on the streets, Stelios said. Don't talk about my heritage when I have no future.

Moved by this unexpected demotic eloquence Marcus dropped his eyes. I'm sorry, he said.

Then he added, as if by way of explanation or excuse, They are two different things.

To you, Stelios retorted. To you.

I will be going to New York in November, Marcus said.

You aren't American.

I was born in Berlin.

But you live in New York.

I live in several cities, where ever work takes me. I have no permanent address. I'm a nomad.

Why does your work take you to New York? Stelios asked.

I'm collaborating on a book that has to come out of this project. My collaborator has a large apartment there, in Manhattan.

I have never been to New York, Stelios said.

Would you like to go there? Marcus asked.

I like to go everywhere, Stelios said. I'm a nomad, too.

It would have made sense for Terry to remove the tiny barbell from his nipple. It could seem morbid to have a dead man's token piercing him.

But it became a token of living strength for him. It brought together the pain that would always be with him and the strength that it had brought to him, the strength that he kept developing and refining, to transcend his own sensations and attachments.

Showing it off whenever he could became a matter of pride.

In his last year at Columbia, he joined the swimming team.

What is that, his father gasped when he met him after a swimming meet and they ate lunch in a falafel place near Columbia, that you have stuck in your nipple?

Do you like it? Terry said.

I hate it, Cary Miller said looking at his son with cold disdain. It's barbaric.

There isn't much about me that you do like, is there? Terry said, not with animus but as if stating a fact just realized.

As I understand it, that goes both ways, his father retorted, having trained himself never to let someone he was talking to get the better of him.

You mean my declining to become an investment banker? Terry said, as if it were a subject they had beaten to death already and that his father could not let go of.

It's your choice, Mr. Miller said with the unrelenting finality of someone who puts his faith in tough love and does not really believe at all in anyone else's right to choose something of which he does not approve.

Yes, it is, Terry said, not allowing himself to be intimidated.

But I'm not going to support it, his father countered. Or you as long as you adhere to it.

You made that clear, Terry responded, defusing any bang the threat might hope still to have.

And you made it clear that that did not matter to you, his father said, reminding him that he was making his bed and would have to sleep in it.

It depends what you mean by support, Terry said, his clarity not undermined.

What are you trying to say? his father said, getting irritated, although it seemed entirely clear to Terry.

I'm not trying to say anything, he answered with the softest emphasis on trying. If by support you mean your love and your good will, he explained, I'd rather have them than not. As for your money, I won't live a bought life. I want the life I can earn for myself.

You were always good with high-sounding phrases and keeping aloof, Miller said, unable to hold back the rush of his anger. But life is not about words, he said, masking his wrath as experience. It's about what you do. And you do not know what you want to do. You only know what you don't want to do. And you don't earn a damn thing by doing nothing.

Terry said nothing. In fact, he seemed to be staring off into space.

Are you listening?

I know what you're saying, he said calmly. You've said it before, and that's how things are right now. I've made a choice and I'm willing to take the consequences.

Well, they are beginning right now, his father said, standing up. I've got to get back to the office.

With contempt, as if getting rid of a hooker, he tossed ten dollars on the table and walked out of the restaurant.

It was sunny outside and through the plate glass window, Terry saw him at the curb hailing a cab, an impressive figure his father departing, a handsome man, lean at fifty, with hair graying at the temples, today dressed casually in a soft olive green corduroy jacket over a creamy oatmeal colored cashmere crew neck sweater and a pair of well-fitting faded dungarees, proving once again perversely, Terry thought, that you cannot judge a book by its cover. A taxi stopped for him, no sooner than he had stretched out his hand to signal for one.

Cigarette, the fellow Terry had been looking at when he seemed to be staring out into space said, approaching his table with a pack outstretched. Although there was a late October coolness in the air, he wore only a chest-hugging black t shirt that flattered his ropey upper arms, a pair of tight jeans that fit like skin and a pair of soft leather shoes that flattered his bare ankles.

Thanks, Terry said. I don't smoke.

I need to quit, the young man said. Terry had seen him around the city, maybe even his face had been on a poster, but they had never met.

It looked like you needed one, the young man said, sitting down in the seat his father had vacated. He looked a bit old for you.

Terry laughed. He's my father. Happy families are all alike.

Janos, the young man said, extending his hand.

Terry, Terry said, taking it.

•

When Elisabeth Rheimer remembered how she loved her father as a girl and despised him once she knew what he did to make money for himself, she remembered the way she stood on street corners when she did not need the money, late at night, after hours of pouring over and chewing up archeology and anthropology books.

She waited in heels, showing her long legs, and let men come to her and brushed most of them off with oblique conversation.

But a few made her tremble with fear at the desire she felt.

She did not let fear stand in desire's way. She tangled with mean men and fought clawing fights in bed that made them mad with blissful rage and rode them beyond their endurance.

These things she remembered as she danced as if it were seventy years ago and she were her great grandmother, bright and young and happily oblivious to the horrible misery that was burning the flesh and choking the spirit of millions who could just as well disappear, for all she was concerned, and she shuddered.

Werner Marcus felt the current as he held her and they danced in an old-fashioned way to a 1940s type arrangement of Easy to Remember by a pretty good band.

He felt it and he misunderstood it and he kissed her and she responded and when they went home together that night, they slept together, but maintained a mutual and impervious refusal to admit they were doing what they were doing because they were colleagues and felt most comfortable keeping a sense of reserve mediating their contact.

The leaves on the ginkgo trees in Morningside Park were turning yellow. The boys walked carelessly as the light began to fade.

I've coasted, Terry said, all my short life. Or really, I have not even coasted. I stayed still and everything I could want seemed to present itself without my doing anything. And everything was always just as I wanted it. Until last summer! So maybe this is a gift.

What is it exactly that your father does? Janos said, torn between that question and What happened last summer?

Well, Terry said, winding it up to let a narrative of atrocities roll out, he has begun to securitize life insurance cash-ins.

Huh? Janos said.

You don't know what that is? Terry said.

I went to Julliard. I was a dance major; remember?

My father buys life insurance policies from people who want to cash them in before they die. He gives them a settlement, say four hundred thousand on a million dollar policy. Then he breaks up the debt that he bought and creates derivatives. Some of it he calls bonds and some, debentures, and he sells them to speculators. They own the debt. He's free of it. He's got his and it does not matter what happens or to whom after that. He recovers his cost and pays off the capitalists who fronted him credit when he needed it, and he keeps the sizable profit from the sale.

Like with the sub-prime mortgages.

Exactly.

Isn't that looking for trouble?

Yes, Terry said. He gets off on it. But it's not what I want to do.

Why not? There's big money in it.

I don't like trouble.

Well, I intend to give you a lot of it, honey, Janos said, taking him to his side by the arm and flashing such eye sparkle at him that Terry could not help but be drawn to kiss him with his lips parted.

It's socially destructive, he said when they reached the river. It's not making anything real.

What do you want to do? Janos said, brushing his nose against Terry's neck.

I'm not sure, Terry said. I think I want to write.

And that's making something real?

I want to write things that reflect the real world and investigate the nature of reality. I want to turn intangible things concrete using the medium of words. You do it with motion when you dance.

Have you ever seen me dance?

I'd like to.

I'd like you to go home with me, Janos said, smiling and putting his arm around this new-found beauty.

I'd like to, Terry said, feeling Janos's electricity surge through him.

They took the subway when once Terry would have thought nothing of going in a taxi down to Sheridan Square.

I have a roommate, Janos said as he turned the key and led Terry into an apartment larger than he anticipated. It was in a doorman building. The windows of his room rose from floor to ceiling and stretched out over one entire wall, giving a magnificent view of the Hudson.

I could never afford this on my own, Janos said laughing.

Even so, Terry said.

My father died before he could find out enough about me to strike me from his will. Look at the river.

The Hudson was undulating and throwing off sparks of silver in the leaden night. The young men kissed and a warm current of desire spread through their limbs.

I know you don't smoke tobacco, Janos said. But what about pot?

Terry looked lost suddenly.

What's the matter?

Nothing, he said. Just a memory. Yes, I've smoked it a few times...in Greece, last summer.

Greece again, last summer: Janos registered it and held back from further inquiry out of an intuitive sense of discretion and caution.

Would you like to smoke some with me now? was all he said.

Sure, Terry said. But why don't you take off your shirt first and let me look at you.

Do you like what you see?

Very much Terry said, grasping the sides of his gleaming chest and pressing his lips to Janos's.

But Janos pulled away before oblivion overtook them.

Now you, he said.

Terry's sun-bronzed, swim-toned chest gleamed like the gods of Greece, proud after centuries, towering in the new Acropolis museum.

Janos gazed in lost admiration, a slave to his devotion.

It was not they by themselves who drew them together but the force of craving that had overtaken them.

I can't stop looking at you, Janos said.

Don't, Terry answered, sliding his fingers and palms over the magnificently muscled dancer's lean chest.

Look at me the way everybody looks at you.

In the morning, Janos did not recognize the boy he had taken home with him last evening and loved. He awoke as he felt the wave of sobs coming from the body lying next to him, but not touching him, completely withdrawn, estranged.

Fearfully he put his hand upon the small of Terry's back and felt an immediate shudder of withdrawal, pushing him away, so different from the magnetic field of the night before that had drawn him in.

I did not know it would hurt so much, Terry said, turning to lie on his back and look at Janos.

Janos misunderstood him.

I'm sorry, he said.

For what? Terry said, biting down an unidentifiable anger.

I tried to be gentle, Janos said tenderly and with coaxing contrition.

Terry understood and he began to laugh through his tears. Rising on his elbows, he sat straight up and took Janos in his arms.

I don't mean that. I mean I did not think that the feeling of renewal would be so painfully connected to a sense of betrayal.

I don't know what you are saying, Janos said as he returned Terry's embrace and turned them on their sides so that they lay in an embrace facing each other.

What betrayal are you talking about?

Mine.

Who are you betraying...or who betrayed you?

Janos raised the palm of his hand upwards and lifted an eyebrow, as if to say, What can be done with what has happened but live with what is happening now?

Terry laughed. It came to the same thing, he said.

Janos looked at him waiting.

Jonas, Terry said.

Terry said nothing but took hold of him and gently held him and gently rocked him and pictured himself unwinding knotty strings, clearing them and separating them.

He breathed deeply softly as he held him and Terry began to breathe with him.

His tenderness made Terry's entire frame shudder and he buried his forehead in the curve where Janos' neck and shoulders met and wept as Janos comforted him.

I am sorry that you hurt.

Terry squeezed his teeth together at the pain as he sobbed, and then without his will, they released themselves. They unlocked and the ache was expelled. He held Janos tightly and began to laugh and kiss him and take him by his beautiful masculinity and to draw the hardness of desire from deep within him, and surrendered himself again.

Janos understood without understanding. He became the pliant instrument of their mutual pleasure. Entering his lover, he found him among the dark reaches of a reddening night where thighs and garters lured the senses to ecstasy and the leaping torsos of maddened dancers wild within their discipline hurled themselves in an apotheosis of dance spinning toward the mercury lamps that swirled like stars within the swollen swirling galaxy called Milky Way.

•

The often unbearable heat of the relentless August sun in Greece had abated, but the days were still hot. Work had resumed at the archeological site at Malia, not far from Heraklion. Marcus had taken a room for himself and Stelios. He had taken the boy with him from Athens and gotten him hired as a non-professional apprentice to help with the new digging.

I hope you'll forgive me, he said to Elizabeth Rheimer when he introduced them.

She looked at him with a disappointed smile and his heart would have sunk if he had let it.

Much of the site was already exposed and had been reconstructed, but on the periphery the digging and piling up of ancient stones continued. From a platform above the completed site of excavation, one could walk around the ancient outline below and see the remnants of what had been a city.

Elisabeth had set up her tripod on that gallery and was taking pictures of the unfolding city below.

The sun was setting toward the west and its blaze spread a gauzy glow, rose over the Sea of Crete along the circumference of the horizon.

Stelios had been gently combing the red clay with a rubber-tipped dibble. With his fingers, in chamois gloves, clawed into the shape of a dibble, he searched for ancient fragments, artifacts of a defunct world. Things came to his fingers that eluded the searching attempted by others. His knees were red with the clay he crawled through. Streaks of the ancient earth were smeared over his torso and his face like cuts and scars.

From time to time he looked up and watched Marcus, wearing only cut away blue jeans and high work boots cuffed by heavy grey socks, stretching his wonderful frame as he puzzled over the assembly of some unearthed shards or climbed carefully conveying some precious discoveries up from the trenches of the ancient town lying below his work table standing on the platform above it. The glaze of sweat made his torso gleam as if it had been oiled for exhibition or combat.

Stelios watched him speaking with Elisabeth as she packed up her equipment. She was a handsome woman, dressed in loose-fitting khakis and a floppy yellow t shirt. She kissed Marcus on each cheek and walked away to the periphery of the site to her car.

The light was failing; it was becoming impossible to work.

Everyone but Marcus and Stelios had left the site.

Look there, Marcus said, one arm around the boy's shoulders, their sides pressing and sticking together, glued by their sweat, the other arm outstretched over the historic remnant, pointing to a preserved fragment of a pale white tile floor on which a swirling geometric pattern of faded red and blue could be discerned.

They climbed down the wooden ladder into the antique world and crouched by the edge of that ancient floor under the weakening daylight.

What had it been? Stelios asked turning his head and catching Marcus's eyes prying him open.

Marcus did not answer but kissed him savagely and pressed him to the primitive earth beside the artifact and conquered him.

Stelios' breathing was frantic. He pulled at the breath drawn up from the depths of his masterer. It plunged into his own lungs and belly. He was swooning in obedience to Marcus's demand.

Marcus pinned his arms above his head and devoured Stelios, surveying his outstretched torso like a landscape, exploring his mounds and hollows, discovering the treasures of his molten flesh.

Stelios yielded to his excavation, laying open for him his maze of ancient streets.

With their gods to couple them, Minoan youth flung themselves in dance through those antique streets in dazzled celebration.

•

Bright oblongs of sun slanted across the dark face of the black wall, the wall at a right angle to the window. The wall across from it was painted gold. The wall across the way from the window, between those two, was of an intense and deep ruby color. The window wall was pure white. Terry was dressed. He stood looking out the window down at the crowds traversing Fourteenth Street, biting his crooked index finger until there were teeth marks left after he stopped.

On the corner, under a tree that was nearly bare of its leaves a man was slapping a woman and yelling at her. Her knees buckled. She slumped to the ground, her back against the tree, her hand covering her face as she keened with sobbing. Not looking back at her the man walked to the curb and, crossing the street, joined the common traffic.

What is it? Janos said, still standing naked, elegant, even then, for his perfect body and his dancer's posture, looking through the top drawer of the dresser for underwear and a loose t shirt.

I was wondering what really happened to Jonas, who he really was.

Janos turned to face him. He had to master a twinge of jealousy whenever Terry spoke of his time in Greece with Jonas. He felt his abdomen contract.

You may never know. You can't go back there, Terry, he said, taking him in his arms and looking with sweet, imploring sympathy into his eyes.

I don't want to go back there. I don't want to go through...I don't want to be put through, that again. I like where I am now, he said, touching the dancer's lips with his finger.

Janos smiled a smile of innocent gratitude, his dancer's heart dizzy with delight at their love and still upright with confidence. On stage or face to face, he became luminous when he was an object of desire.

I don't want to change what happened or to bring it back, Terry continued. Really, but that past is here now, too. It is part of me, even more so because I got through it. I want to know entirely what happened. I don't want to be the victim of mysteries. I want to know the story. It's mine. Why did Jonas suddenly turn against me and why was he killed? Is there any connection between those things? It eats at me.

Janos was dressed now.

You ought to write a book about it, he said, serious. Then his pixie emerged. Your first novel: a roman a clef drawn from the adventures of your insoluble international youth.

Terry took him by the shoulder. He was grinning. He drew Janos to him and kissed him hard and as he kissed him bit his lower lip almost to the point of hurting it.

You gonna be marvellous tonight, Terry said, exhaling breaths of words into his ear. I'll come backstage right after, but the way you're getting known these days, I know I'll have to wait.

I'll wink at you while you wait.

If I wait.

Janos was good, very good, more than good. He held the stage, and the audience remembered him. When he danced, it was perfect and not a discipline imposed from outside his body. He filled the role. He had strength and technique but what you saw came from within. It was the extension of his soul within the gestures required by whatever the dance was. Every role he danced became him, and his name became familiar among aficionados of dance.

Have you ever, Janos asked Terry as they were walking by the Hudson, have you ever googled Jonas?

No.

Try it.

You have?

It's not the same.

Leaving the theatre one night, having stayed longer, after nearly everyone had gone, and walking by himself, on his way to meet up with Terry at a reading he was doing at a bookseller's in SOHO, Janos felt he was being followed.

He slowed his pace when he came to a lighted window showcasing handmade boots for men.

Wow! he heard the young man whom he had suspected, say, those are great boots.

You like them? Janos said, grinning at the openness of the handsome face he was looking into.

Don't you? the youth answered, with a taunt that made it seem like he was not only talking about boots.

Janos grinned.

You are very pretty, he said. But I am taken.

I am, too; smitten, in fact.

Janos looked at him.

With you, the youth went on. You dance like an angel, or a devil. I don't know which. The thought of feeling the pressure of your body as you dance in me...

Hey, hey, Janos said, gently warning. You've got some heavy passion to unload, but I'm not your man.

How do you know?

Janos shook his head.

It's not going to happen, Janos said with a smile.

Take my card, at least. If you happen to change your mind, you'll know how to get me.

Before Janos could refuse, the young man took his hand and put his card in it and closed his fingers around it.

Take care of yourself, Janos said, pocketing the card without looking at it, and moving on.

I will, Jack Esperance said. You do the same.

Janos shivered and rubbed his neck.

You don't seem happy, Janos said as they sat by themselves after the reading in a pseudo-working class bar near the waterfront. Isn't recognition gratifying?

Have I earned it?

What's the matter with you?

You have to earn things, and feel like you did. You've got to earn the right to sleep by the things you did when you were awake, Terry said.

What are you saying? You have trouble sleeping? Janos asked.

You have to be available, Terry said.

Janos decided to follow where he led. Available for what? he said.

For the real thing that's coming.

What do you think is coming? Janos said.

I'm waiting to see, Terry said.

Janos refused to let himself feel as inadequate as he felt.

He reached over and Tterry returned his touch.

It had been a fruitful period for Terry. He published a slim but substantial volume of...verse, he called it -- actually a dense and highly metaphoric meditational poetry of awareness, memory, and desire. It had a lyrical quality and a lushness that made you immerse yourself in it.

And he published A False Memoir of a True Summer, the roman a clef Janos had suggested. It was a wry fiction about a young man who was cut off by his father, an international banker, because he refused to follow in his trade. Travelling over the summer in Greece on his own savings, he found another father, an unpublished novelist. He becomes his lover and offers him a world nearer to the bohemian world he yearns for. Then the man to whom he had surrendered turns on him, unaccountably, and takes another lover, but keeps him, too. Finally, he is shot to death in a street fight outside a bank in Athens. It never is clear what the fight was about -- or who the lover really was. The hero at the end stands at the edge of a second encounter with the world and a half-hope that he will be sufficient for it. The story is told from the young man's point of view. He is clearly a stand-in character for the author.

Lost behind the haze of his memory, specific details, strangely, the color of Jonas's eyes, which he had gazed upon so many times, and ambiguous affects, like how he felt at night, enveloped by the sky, as they walked along the topmost heights of the island, became fiction's creatures.

But accomplishing these works was not what was compelling Terry to remain awake and without sleep. It was his sleeplessness that filled itself with the run of sentences that kept his past and his frustration with its mysteries alive in him, that kept him scanning his brain to find a way out of the cage his mind had become, to find an opening into the world itself.

Finishing the book did not accomplish anything. It brought him publicity. It put money in his purse. Finishing the book did not put the story out of his mind. He had tried to turn reality into a fantasy, but in the end, he had not caused what had been to dissolve into gauze. He had just blown on the bellows of his appetite.

He was not satisfied and he did not know why.

He was refusing to feel something he was feeling: thereby blocking off the capacity to feel.

The reviews were good; sales were good; the book enjoyed a good run and a long time on best-seller lists. There was talk of a movie. He was not surprised. The book was easy and glamorous, a gay romance he had managed to make into a psychological thriller and pull into the mainstream.

Janos felt his discontent daily.

It is nothing to dwell on, he said. Go on to your next book. What did you expect?

An end.

But?

It doesn't feel like it.

Why should it?

What do you mean?

What does end mean? What does it feel like?

Terry looked at him, bewildered, feeling an unaccountable need to cry.

Janos took him in an embrace, stifling the anger that had unaccountably just broken out of no place.

I want to ask you something that I'm confused about, he said. In the book, why do you make Jonas a novelist rather than a journalist? And why don't you ever say what his novel is about?

Security was tight at Kennedy Airport. Werner Marcus and Stelios waited nearly half an hour before they cleared customs.

German, huh? But last in Greece. You like to travel? Work take you around quite a bit?

Marcus explained that they were archeologists who had been working at an ancient Minoan site in Crete and that now they were in the United States to write a book about the site and what they had uncovered, with the writer, Elisabeth Rheimer, and that they were going to stay at her apartment on Central Park West.

Let's see what we can dig up on you, the agent said putting their passports trough a scanner. Then he stamped their passports and moved them on. They waited another half hour before their baggage came around on the carousel.

Stelios was dizzy; the artificial air and light and the smells of metal and rubber made him sick, this island boy.

The cab stopped in front of Elisabeth's building after midnight. She was ready for them with champagne and lobster.

Welcome, she said, to New York City and to my home, she said, as she handed each of them a champagne glass.

To our book, Marcus said, lifting his glass.

And to beautiful Stelios, Elisabeth said.

Stelios smiled and returned the toast with gallantry. And to the beautiful Elisabeth, he said.

She took his hand and raised it to her lips.

But it is not my bed, she said, you will grace, but this man's, whom I hope you will allow me from time to time to take into my bed, she added, taking Marcus's hand but not letting Stelios' go. And I will make you welcome, too, if you like, she said, smiling into Stelios' eyes with the sharp intuition of someone who scans the surface of the earth to find hidden things.

She turned then to Marcus and winked at him.

Elisabeth believes in the old Greek customs and rituals, Marcus said to Stelios, nodding at her and grinning. That's why she's so eager to dig up more of them.

And which custom am I paying homage to now?

Sacrifice to the gods before taking one's own portion, Marcus said, almost as a taunt.

Like spilling out the first cup before you drink the wine? Elisabeth said with a slight edge of reproach in her voice.

Like that, or giving the best cuts of beef to the gods, Marcus responded with a slight laugh.

While the aroma of burned flesh and fat makes you drunk, Elisabeth said.

Why are you bitter? Marcus said with gentle but uncomprehending concern.

Because I could never figure out if I really felt what I felt and meant what I meant, desired what I desired, or if I were just behaving according to my father's wishes and deceiving myself.

That's steady ground to stand on, Marcus said recognizing how precariously she experienced herself.

Firm as poured concrete, she said winking and taking a sip of champagne.

Which is something you know about, Marcus said.

More than I want.

Helmut Larz was hitting his palm with the bowl of his pipe and revolving something in his mind that showed its effect in the grinding of his jaw and the compressions of his lips.

What do you expect me to do? he said finally looking up and addressing the American who was sitting across from him at his desk in his office in Berlin. I can't go back to Athens right now.

Being in Athens is not the issue, Cary Miller said with a knowing smile.

It is very much the issue, Larz snapped back.

Miller nodded his head as if he were considering the matter and said, The issue is a matter of six billion, four hundred and thirty seven million, four hundred and ten thousand, one hundred and fifty euros. In dollars that is...

I know what it is, Larz nearly barked at him. In dollars it sounds even worse. But I don't see why money needs to be an issue.

It needs to be an issue, Miller explained quietly, because you do not have it.

And you never would have known I did not have it had it not been for the story in the Herald Tribune calling attention to how much cash on hand I have access to.

Why do you talk about such things? Miller asked, solicitous momentarily, paternal despite the necessity of enforcing unavoidable discipline.

I said nothing, Larz responded grateful for the chance to clear himself. He uncovered it, I don't know how.

It was a lower functionary in the Bank of Athens, Miller explained. Careless mistakes allowed him to see documents he had no need to see and...

Larz looked at him with hopefulness. Miller was acting as if they were both injured parties, not like he was the culprit.

...and he saw them and Jonas found him.

Larz shook his head ready to return to Miller's good graces.

But all that is irrelevant to our business because it does not change the fact that you do not have that money.

•

In April all the green of Central Park is new.

Stelios stood on the sixth floor terrace, protected by the curving, tapered stone balustrades. He was standing outside the French windows of Elisabeth's apartment, surveying the park. The sun beat upon him as he toweled his back. He had come from the roof garden pool with the glass ceiling. He swam every day, but it was nothing like swimming in the Aegean. It was only exercise to gratify his body but there was nothing that brought his spirit into the ether, the azure ether of Hellenic magnificence. He was wearing only a slight black bikini that looked wet even when it wasn't.

The light glistening off the lake was melancholy even though bright, and it lacked the diamond sharp edge of the pieces of sunlight that danced on the ripples of the blue Aegean. There is a light that enters your lungs with the air.

How long have you been here? Marcus said coming up behind him in his bathrobe.

You are up early, Stelios said, needling him.

I guess I'm getting old and need my sleep, Marcus said. You, on the contrary, have already been swimming.

And in the gym before that, Stelios said with a mock boast.

And now what?

And now I make you breakfast as you shower and bring it to you when you come out and then we finish our chapter on Minoan palace culture and the community that had organized it.

That said, he groped Marcus, lingered momentarily with delicate propriety, and bowed in the direction of the bathroom.

I ought to change first, Stelios said, teasing his nipple.

Nah, don't, Marcus said. Stay that way.

•

Terry looked at Janos almost worshipfully.

How do you manage?

Manage what? Janos said grinning.

To live with such lightness and ethereal grace.

Practice, mother, practice, Janos said with a cheap imitation of an inebriated jazz musician.

It's why you are the dancer you are.

And what makes you so heavy?

That I am not light.

•

It became clear to Janos that Terry wanted to be punished, but he could not figure out why, except that it would relieve him of the burden of punishing himself.

It is for my past, Terry said, shaking his head in wonderment, when Janos finally asked him during the intermission as they stood in the midst of the buzzing throng at Lincoln Center, each sipping champagne.

You want to be punished because of your past?

I need to expiate something.

I don't understand, Janos said.

Of course not, Terry said. You are a dancer. You move through a continuous present, but I keep being pulled back into the past and that past keeps messing up the present.

But what about that makes you feel guilty?

I am betraying the present.

Janos felt a shudder of understanding as the lights dimmed to indicate that the intermission was ending.

You mean me, he said. It was a realization, not a question.

At the same moment he noticed two young women standing near the bar, their heads nearly touching, as one seemed to be pointing him out to the other.

In part, yes, Terry said. But not the way I think you think, he said, as if explanation could be mitigation. I feel bad because I am not here enough for you. I am wandering through some intricate and ill-lit paths in my memory. I'm drawn to something I can't remember, but that does not make it any less forceful. I have the feeling that I'm betraying myself the most, that I am representing somebody else's interests, not my own.

Whose interest? Your father's?

Jonas's, Terry said, quietly, casting his eyes downward to the gold and black carpet.

Perhaps it was the champagne and the gloriously carpeted foyer and the gilt scrollwork decorating the intensely scarlet walls or the great beveled windows against which the blue night pressed its face that allowed him to say that much. It was not enough, and it was too much. Jonas was not someone he spoke of easily, nor how it ended. He had not broken Jonas' grip on him with the book or the painful grip of how he felt at the end when it crept up on him.

Terry took Janos' hand and brought the palm to his lips in a sincere show of devotion, but the gesture was unable to eliminate something melancholy that gave resonance to it.

The degree to which Mahler is indebted to Schubert is real hard to measure, Marcus said to Stelios as they made their way down the grand staircase, but Stelios had stopped listening.

It can't be, but he sees Terry, Terry whom he has never thought he would see again. But it is Terry, tall and sweet and beautiful with a cloud of something essential dancing around him like a halo. But he cannot think of Terry without thinking of Jonas and of himself.

Scrambled patterns of confused and disordered feelings grip him suddenly and show on his face.

What is it? Marcus says.

It will be ok, Stelios says. I got dizzy for a minute.

Marcus put his arm around him. Let's get out into the air, he said.

I'm ok, Stelios said. It was something that passed in a minute.

But it did not pass and Stelios was haunted by the afterimage of the person he thought was Terry. And by something that had no form, a feeling that was present but hidden.

•

Why is it difficult for you to believe that people can understand each other? Elisabeth asked,

It has not been my experience, Stelios said.

That does not mean it cannot be different.

No, Stelios said. I guess not, but he did not sound convinced.

Elisabeth was making coffee, stirring sugar into steaming coffee slowly swirling and bubbling in the pot as she stirred.

Their publisher called to invite them to a Christmas party for the authors of several imprints.

She flipped her phone shut.

She poured the coffee into the mugs waiting on the old colonial table that stayed in the kitchen.

I won't be here, she said, handing Marcus a mug.

What? Marcus said.

Neither will you, actually. That's the weekend you'll be at Harvard. And I will be in Chicago. That leaves you Stelios, she said, offering him a mug, which he took and inhaled the aroma of her coffee with pleasure.

What are you talking about? Marcus said.

•

Never before had Stelios needed to think about arranging and organizing things. He had lived on his resources, in the on-going present, following the dictates of his needs. His intelligence was in his movement, in always staying in motion.

Now, his mind was separated from him. He was using it. It had become a tool to employ in deploying what he knew in a sequential and coherent way. That's what writing was about, about figuring things out and showing how you did it, and showing the meaning and the place in an ancient society of each piece you had. His mind had become his employee.

He no longer did touch the outer boundaries of the world while gazing mindless, absorbed by an infinite and an infinitely deep horizon. Central Park was not the Aegean Sea. He had lived through the waves of sensation. He had lived inside heat, water, sand, rocks, and sunlight. He had been part of the winds and the promiscuous breezes as they rolled and rushed through the high streets crowning the winding and circling islands.

Now he was caught in a life that forced him to block everything out but the things he must force himself to concentrate on. Wring about excavation was not the same as digging in the earth under the sun. And Marcus was no longer the lithe body in the sun that pulsed with life; a harassed engine of intelligence he sat with bowed head and hunched shoulders before a screen, puzzling out sentences.

Stelios was graceful. As he had been graceful and lithe scrambling along the rocky cliffs, spending days going from one beach or cove to another, so he was graceful when he imagined life in half reconstructed ruins during the years so long ago when they were centers of love, living, contention, and commerce.

He had only to look at the sea and breathe the air. He stood, exposed to the sun, and imagined himself into a distant-beckoning reality that did not exist and enjoy the magnetism of his flesh and the sense that his wishes metamorphosed into reality. Afterwards he had to scramble as best as he could to endure and survive the more brutal existing hungers of present reality, the one that continuously bit at you.

Pantheon and several other imprints are sponsoring a Christmas gathering of authors, the 23rd , Elisabeth said to Stelios. And we are both going to be out of town. So that leaves you to represent us.

You ought not to smoke, Marcus said.

Me? Stelios said.

Why not? said Elisabeth, pulling on her cigarette. You have as full a knowledge of the work as any of us. If people even speak about books. What you really have to do is manage not to pass out and to be friendly to fools.

•

Stelios made the first move.

He had been standing at the bar sipping champagne, cornered, as it were, by a monster of a man telling him how fascinating it must be to dig things up that have lain in the earth for thousands of years.

Stelios sipped his champagne and smiled, nodding in agreement, looking for an opportunity to break away without offending. But his eyes shone with a glazed gaze that made him seem, although opaque, entirely available.

All his time spent with men on the beaches of Greece and the alleys of Athens made him into a perfect listener. He could feign absorption while straying far into oblivion. They were men who were strangers who were trying to gain possession of him, even if only temporarily. They spoke to him from their hearts, some of them, and showed him the pain or the hope of their souls as if he were a long-known and trusted friend.

I don't believe it, Stelios said, confounding his hirsute and large interlocutor, to whom this sentence made no sense.

I'm sorry, he said, putting his palm on the confused man's sleeve, as he freed himself from his corner.

Where are you...? the man began, but Stelios stopped him.

There is someone I just missed the other night and he's here.

He edged himself towards Terry, but before he could introduce himself, he was grabbed into Terry's embrace, an embrace charged with more trembling excitement than either of them knew they had felt.

I was so afraid you were going to be angry with me, Stelios said with a grin, standing a little away now.

Why should I be angry with you, or with anyone? Terry said, staring at him. Dressed as he had never seen him dressed before, nevertheless he knew who it was without a second's doubt. He reached over and caressed his hair with delight as they gazed at each other.

Because of what Jonas did to you. And my part in it. He was a powerful man. I was in a trance. I did not understand what had happened until later. And then he was killed, and the police arrested me and beat me, held me over night and then let me go.

But how did you get here? Terry said, unable to contain the happiness he felt at seeing Stelios.

Right after the police let me out the next day...

And then Stelios told him how he met Werner Marcus, an archeologist, at Monastriaki and how he went to Crete with him to help at a site and actually became absorbed by the work he was doing.

But how did he get to New York, and was he staying?

We are working on a book about it and staying with a woman who is one of the co-authors.

And you? Terry said.

I'm a co-author.

Congratulations, Terry grinned.

Are you here alone? Stelios said.

I have a boyfriend, Terry said. We live together. But he's not here.

Stelios looked at him and smiled.

He is performing in Amsterdam, Terry said. He's one of the principals in the Manhattan Ballet Theater.

There was an awkward moment. Each felt a wave of desire for the other.

Do you want to go for coffee when we get out of here? Terry said.

Sure, Stelios said. Coffee will keep me up, but tomorrow's not a working day and I can sleep late.

Will you stay in New York? Terry said facing Stelios, his forearms resting on his shoulders, as they gazed at each other and spoke. Their lips were near enough to interrupt speech with kisses, tender, libidinal kisses filled with regret and anticipation, with separation and reappearance.

I don't think so, Stelios said. I miss my own earth.

You don't like New York?

It is dirty and unnatural.

Terry pressed his mouth to Stelios with passion like a cry for help.

Stelios felt himself shocked into desire.

Something hurts beyond your ability to feel it.

Something hurts beyond my ability to feel it. Perhaps you are right.

I will have to hold you while you cry until it is finished.

Can it ever be finished, whatever it is?

Not the question to ask, but can I be finished with it? Yes, is the answer, Stelios said.

•

It was painful the minute Stelios saw Werner. He had a perverse intuition that despite what had happened and how he had discovered he felt, as long as he did not talk about it, Marcus would never know, and it would not matter. But it did matter. It mattered to him.

It was not possible for him to lie to himself and say that everything was alright. Everything was not alright. Everything was off. Everything was not the same as it had been when everything had been good. And Marcus did not even notice. Perversely, that angered him. He would always know something Marcus did not know, and Marcus would not even know that he did not know. That undermined his sense of Marcus's mastery. Stelios had outsmarted him without even intending to. Marcus had been discredited without having done anything to discredit himself.

The way that Marcus touched him would feel different when they touched. Marcus would feel different when he touched him.

The spring in Stelios' love for Marcus broke.

•

It turned out not to be such a difficult thing to accomplish.

Rory held Jonas in his arms. After covering his face gently with kisses, he said, Will you meet me tomorrow?

I can't. Jonas said.

Why can't you? Rory said, interrupting every word with a hungry kiss.

I just can't.

You are lying, Rory said. You just don't want to.

That's not true, Jonas had said.

Yes, it is, Rory snapped back. You're afraid.

Of what am I afraid? Jonas said, dumbfounded, his heart jumping up to his throat.

You don't need me to tell you, Rory said.

Jonas looked at him, unsure what was happening or why it had to. He was there now, and if the boy would let him, he would take him in his arms now and let them feel what joy there is in life, rather than this gut spinning confusion.

It was not to be. As Jonas imagined their reconciliation, Rory rose and walked out.

I'm yours, he said, when you are man enough to have me, pointing his thumb first at himself, then at Jonas.

Jonas cringed. How hackneyed and melodramatic, how clichéd it all was. Perhaps it was that that made it sting so sharply and recurrently. He did not know. He held his head. He was dizzy.

The kid was cheap. He wanted him. This time he would not get him.

•

It was not his unsuccessful desire for Rory that made hatred of Jonas burn in Larz. He was determined not to be beaten, or at least not without consequences.

Cary Miller had seen the story in the Tribune and had read it carefully and had deduced correctly that he was floating on credit rather than standing on his assets, on solid ground.

He had been subordinated.

That could not be permitted.

•

Rory laughed with a snort that shook his body as he stepped into the sunshine of end-of-summer Athens.

He winked to a kid on the corner and the kid smiled back, but they did not exchange any words.

You are late, Larz said as Rory approached his desk.

I did not wake up.

You are tiring yourself out. It's a quick way to wear out your youth.

Rory stood in front of him with eyes cast down.

You are spending too much time with Jonas.

But you...

I said to lead him on a little, and I told you to enjoy yourself doing it. I am not a prude. But you must remember that he is a dangerous man. I am preparing to make him less dangerous.

Rory understood Jonas. A compulsive and unabatable excitement rose up in him and filled him with a need to explode in an overwhelming climax. He was under the spell of desire.

It will be my last act of love, he said, and he meant it. I will get inside him with a bullet and never withdraw but I will flood his consciousness until it becomes one great blank.

I remember how the clouds parted over Dresden, Larz said looking fixedly into the boy's gazing eyes, when so many souls fled to the heavens. And my enemies have the indecency to say that I cause damage when I build houses.

•

How long are you going to live with this? Marcus said, taking Elizabeth in his arms and speaking with an air of earnestness.

How do you get rid of a thing like this? she said through tightly-held teeth.

I thought I knew, he said. But that didn't work.

It was not your fault, she said, but that did not remove the fact that it was. Inadequacy had marked him and trailed him.

It is lucky for me and not for nothing that most of my time is spent among the dead.

And Stelios.

Stelios is ephemeral. He will dig the earth and pick out rocks for a little while, but he needs the water and islands and lots of open sky. He needs that sunlight and that sky. He needs to be out of his clothes. He does not thrive in cities.

He does not thrive with you, she said quietly.

It took him in the chest because it was so.

•

Knowing and doing are separate dispositions of the soul. There is generally a gap between the two. Sometimes, in some people, they align. That does not mean that they become one; they are not one; but sometime those separate parts get aligned. Those people are fortunate. They get strength, whether or not they get wisdom, from their integrity, Tilbury said putting down his coffee.

Jonas was not such a man. He was never together, but he managed to keep his separate parts clear of each other, until he didn't, and then...." he threw up his hands as all he could do to finish his sentence.

But you loved him, Terry said.

Love does not depend on that, Tilbury said sadly.

On what? Terry said.

On anything, really, except...an unexplainable attraction. Something that exists prior to our individual identities. We recognize ourselves as we really are, in someone else. It is magical. It is pure being. It comes before categories, before ideas, before abstractions and stolen identities. There's only one thing that's certain when this passion masters you, you need to dig yourself out from the depths if you are ever going to realize yourself as you ought to be, that is as you really are, and it drives you crazy, Tilbury said.

You don't know what Jonas' death was about, why it happened?

Yes, I do, Tilbury said quietly. I do.

Terry sat still by Tilbury's side.

He was killed by a cartel that, essentially is being run by your father.

My father, responsible for my lover's death?

Not that, not quite. One of his lieutenants a German who's a big man in Athens...he was the focus of several of Jonas's pieces. It became clear from Jonas's story that he was very cash poor. Cary visited him and took him down several pegs and now is lord of territory that once was his. Do you see where this is going?

I think so, Terry said. This...lieutenant...

...Larz, Helmut Larz...

Larz, Terry repeated, killed him.

Had a kid named Rory do it.

How'd you know all this?

I put it together. That's what newspapermen do.

[When you write, please put the name of the story in the subject slot. Thanks.]