Nevis went to a travel agency and, posing as a prospective tourist trying to join a friend already in Crete, got a listing of the hotels they represented with addresses and phone numbers. He called the Lissos and the Porto Veneziano in Chania. He called the El Greco, the Ideon, the Orion, and the Rithymna Beach in Rethymnon. Just to leave no stone unturned he called the Horizonte Ikaros village, the Kernos Beach, the Malia Beach, and the Sirens Beach in Malia. (Because it was spelled a bit like Mythios.) And because Radomir’s father was sure about the spelling of Rethymnon on his card, he tried Hersonissos also, calling the Creta Maris. At the Creta Maris an obliging desk clerk said there were no Americans employed there but he believed there were three of them at a nearby hotel. Nevis asked him if his hotel was the only one in Hersonissos. “Oh, no,” came back the answer, “there are dozens.” Nevis realized that perhaps Crete was as big and complicated as the Freytag map suggested, but perhaps he’d had luck. Maybe the three Americans were Radomir and the Californian couple. The obliging desk clerk didn’t have the other hotel’s number but he promised if Nevis called back in a few hours he would check it out and get names. Nevis gave him Radomir’s full name. And when he called back at six o’clock, heart beating as though an Oscar was about to be his, the desk clerk had bad news. There was only one American at the other hotel, his name was Bill, and he’d been there five years.
Then he called the Hendriz, the Kriti, the Alkazi in Chania. One clerk also mentioned the Olympic, the Panorama, the Santa Marina, and the Irena, but he was sure there were no Americans there. In fact, all of the clerks expressed great surprise, and many great suspicion, that someone would be calling from Paris looking for an American working at their hotel as all the employees were Greek as they were required to be.
Undeterred Nevis attacked Rethymnon. He was beginning to feel like a very compulsive Sam Spade. Thank God obsession gives you energy, he thought as he spent the evenings calling, each call taking three or four sorties into the erratic Greek telephone system.
He called the John and the John Apartments in Rethymnon. Weird name, he thought. Followed by the Calden Beach, the Leskonica, the Xymia, the Olibyc, the Monos, the Striti Beach. These followed by the Calden Sun. Who are the Caldens, he wondered. Probably some awful English people who fill their hotels with pale, plodding guests, treading the sands in large, straw hats and rubber sandals. He could imagine it all. And then called the Dies, the Sandy Beach, the Rethymnia Bay, and the Mesali.
He called the town of Hersonissos again, adding the Silveama, the Nicol Village, the Hersonissos, the Golden Beach, the Cretan Sun, the Marimate, the Maura, the Nona Beach, the Firena Beach to his list. No Radomir.
And again, many of the people he talked to thought he was some kind of government spy from their suspicious reactions. “Why are you calling?” they kept asking. “There are no Americans working here.”
Then Nevis remembered once wandering past the Greek Tourist Bureau near the Place Colette and dropped in on a lunch hour. They had a brochure of Crete, listing hotels. And there Nevis found the village of Mirthios. Almost Mythios. She must have gotten it wrong, he thought. Only two hotels were listed. The Esperides and the Myrthios.
Both hotels in Mirthios professed to have no Americans. One clerk told him there were only 500 people in Mirthios, so he was sure of what he was talking about. But perhaps it would be worth calling the Petrovilla Apartments, not listed in the guide Nevis had. The Petrovilla wasn’t answering, so Nevis called a restaurant on the beach one hotel had given him the number for. Radomir was unknown at the Acti. But the Acti suggested the Flisvos. The Flisvos suggested the Porto Marino. The Porto Marino suggested the Votsolos.
Finally there was someone at the Petrovilla. A rather nice man who spoke rather terrible English. But (Nevis’s heart stopped) he did know an American man who visited some people who were living at the Petrovilla. “Very nice,” he said. “About twenty-eight. Dark. Nice guy. Quiet. Right?” Nevis agreed he was right. “I’ll get him. He be here at six o’clock. You call back.” Nevis felt like a gold miner who finally saw a few flakes in his pan. The prisoner who feels the bar he’s been picking away at with a nail file for weeks give a little, just a little. The man in the haystack who suddenly feels a little prick of metal that could not be hay.
While waiting for six o’clock to inch its way into being he had vivid fantasies of Radomir in Mirthios. The desolate, sandy dry Greek town on the beach. Radomir walking disconsolately through its streets, hands in pockets. Very much like Maria Schneider had in the dusty square at the end of Antonioni’s The Passenger. Working in some beaten-out taverna on the beach. He briefly revived some of his fantasies about the English woman with a taverna with whom Radomir was sleeping, but dismissed it. There was something even sadder going on, a running out of energy, a not knowing what to do next. Of that he was sure.
Feeling faintly sick he called the Petrovilla Apartments again at six and got through on the third try. “He’s here!” was the announcement when he told the man who he was. And a voice he had never heard before came on the line.
“Hello, who’s this?” Nevis said.
“It’s Paul. Who’s this?” came back on the line.
And Paul, a young American who had been living in Mirthios for a few months, told him he was sure Radomir wasn’t there. He might have passed through, but he wasn’t there now. Paul told him there were many more restaurants than he had called, and certainly a number without telephones, but he was sure if another American was living there he would know it. “Why are you looking for him? What’s his connection to you?” Paul wanted to know. Nevis wondered how Paul would handle being told that the man he was searching for was the man he loved and that he was going to crack up if he didn’t find him very soon. Then he decided to say, “I’m a friend of his family and they’re worried about him. I’m trying to find him for them.” Paul took his name and number and said if he happened to run into Radomir he would ask him to call. He also said Mirthios was a mountain village, not on a beach. Nevis was confused. And then they said good-bye to each other.
The next day Nevis called Radomir’s parents again. They still had heard nothing, according to his mother. Earlier when he had told the father that he knew Radomir was in Crete and that he was working in a restaurant his father replied huffily, “Can’t he do any better than that?” Nevis explained that it was a lark and that any job at all for a foreigner was a great accomplishment and left him mollified to a degree.
During this call the mother seemed airily unconcerned about her son, from whom she hadn’t heard in a month, and ended their conversation by saying, “Oh, I’m sure he just wants to get away and think things over for a while.”
When Nevis told this to his neighbor, Fritz said, “She knows where he is. She just isn’t telling. I’ll call her and see what I can find out.”
He did, and the following day reported that Radomir’s mother did know where he was, but that Radomir had sent a list of people who could know. Fritz wasn’t on the list, nor was Nevis.
Radomir and Nevis left the restaurant and headed for the beach. Although Radomir had made the point that he was always nude on the beach, Nevis noticed that he had put swimming trunks on under his shorts before leaving for lunch. Nevis had, too.
The beach curved away past a row of tamarisk trees and as they walked through assorted families and aging American couples Nevis was finding it a little difficult to imagine stripping to the buff in this holiday camp atmosphere. But as they walked further along the beach breasts began to appear, and then buttocks. Thank God I’ve still got the body for this, thought Nevis as he saw some tanned but sagging buttocks pass by. He thought there was nothing worse than a man’s buttocks when the muscle tone was gone and the flesh hung down like a folding Gladstone Bag. Or an elephant’s rear end. Elephantiasis of the ass, he thought. Not nice. It hadn’t come to that yet in his own case, so when they stretched their reed mats out he dropped his trunks before Radomir had to lead the way.
; ~7~
Radomir’s Body
As they lay side by side under the Cretan sun, he thought about Radomir’s body next to his, and of how well he knew it. There was the little scar on the hairline above his forehead. He inquired about it each time he massaged Radomir’s scalp. Radomir didn’t remember precisely how he got it. Nevis gave Radomir massage and scalp treatments like his own, which Radomir allowed him to do somewhat grudgingly. What Nevis didn’t tell Radomir was that his hair seemed to be thinning already on the top of his skull, and the hairs in the tub and sink didn’t look promising either. But he said nothing of this and had gotten an electric hand massage unit to give even more circulation to Radomir’s scalp.
On Radomir’s left eyebrow at the corner was another small scar. When he was in high school some friends and he were drinking one evening at a playground. They decided to upend some bicycle racks and managed to do so with two smaller ones. They got a larger rack on its way up, but it began to skid on the wet grass. One of the boys just let go, and the entire weight was upon Radomir. As the rack fell his head got between the wheel holders, and ricocheting back and forth, he got cut badly. His friends took him home, but his parents were out so neighbors got him to the hospital. To avoid explaining that the prank began with getting drunk, he told his parents he had fallen on the metal steps of the store where he worked part-time.
His opposite cheek didn’t have exactly the same conformation of its partner because of having been smashed in an automobile accident, also in high school. Speeding down a country road at night, the driver tried to make a turn and the car went off the road, smashing into a telephone pole and some trees. Radomir’s cheekbone was crushed, but his doctor left it unset. Several years later the unset cheekbone continued to give him trouble and he had to have it rebroken and reset. At the same time he had his nose altered slightly.
When looking very closely at Radomir, you can see two minuscule scars under his nostrils. The shape of the nostril hides each scar unless one looks very closely. At the time that his cheekbone had to be redone, Radomir decided to have the width of his nose reduced. When Nevis asked Radomir what his nose looked like before the operation, he said, “Like my father’s. You’ll see it someday.”
There were other small scars here and there on Radomir’s body, some of which may have been due to a second automobile accident he had on an approach ramp to a highway in Chicago. The steering wheel of the car he was driving jammed; his car struck an oncoming car and went through the guardrail, falling on a grassy slope below, and turning over. Neither Radomir nor the friend who was with him were injured. They clambered out of the car and scrambled back up to the ramp to see what had happened to the other car. When a policeman arrived on the scene he didn’t believe they had been the occupants of the car below. They finally convinced him they were, and also convinced him they were neither careless nor drunk but had actually had a steering failure.
This accident caused a major confrontation between Radomir and his father when he got home, as his father didn’t want to hear any details and was immediately convinced that the accident was Radomir’s fault. Radomir remembered the scene particularly clearly, as it was one of the rare times that his mother took his side and the two of them stood up to the old man. Radomir ran out of the house and down the street and stayed overnight with friends without telling his parents where he was.
Radomir’s lips were rather thin, and his teeth were small in size, the incisor on the right side a little bit shorter than the other teeth. Radomir never showed his teeth very much when he talked or smiled. Neither did the Empress Josephine, Napoleon’s consort, or the Empress Elisabeth of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Both were self-conscious about their teeth, and the Empress Elisabeth practiced an almost inaudible murmur to avoid opening her lips too far.
Radomir’s rather narrow jaw gave him a very different appearance from the front and in profile. When Nevis first met him he continually changed his opinion as to whether Radomir was good-looking or not. From the front his features tended to close in upon one another. The forelock that fell over his forehead made his brows and eyes seem even more beetlelike and deep set than they were. And there did not seem to be enough space between his nose and upper lip. The absence of a sharp jawline also seemed to focus the lips and eyes too closely to the nose. But in profile, another face altogether was suggested. The line of brow, nose, lips, and jaw was sharply drawn and boldly masculine. It was always a surprise when that strong profile turned and the too-tightly grouped features appeared. Nevis encouraged Radomir to push his hair back off his forehead. He frequently mentioned how handsome Radomir would be with long hair, knowing the long hair would fill in the jawline. Radomir experimented with pushing his hair back from time to time, but not until he was in Crete did he start using a gel so that it was always swept back.
As for letting his hair grow, he had only once let it grow out a bit but found it uncomfortable or unmasculine and had it trimmed short again.
Radomir’s shoulders were those of a swimmer, heavily muscled and forming a strong, unbroken curve with his back down to the base of his spine, with one shoulder, the left, sloping more than the other. From lifting weights, the neck muscles, too, were thickened, and he tended to carry his head forward and his chest depressed. Some day, Nevis thought, he’ll have trouble with second chins, dewlaps, from not holding his head erect. Nevis from time to time would put his hand on Radomir’s back as they walked together, spreading his shoulders and making his pectoral muscles lift up into place, pushing his head up. It gave Radomir an extra inch in height, but he wasn’t comfortable with his body held in this position. His slouchy athlete’s walk was natural to him, and he felt better posture was a body attitude that suggested he was aware of the beauty of his body, which although he certainly was, he made a great point of pretending he was not.
Radomir’s chest was actually rather well developed from his weight lifting, but because of his body stance it seemed flat. Radomir’s arms were his second-best feature. They were very powerfully muscled as a result of his years of weight training in California.
He had told Nevis that at one time he had weighed considerably more than he did when they met. Had run regularly and was evidently quite a bruiser. When he was lying on his back with his arms raised over his head, the form of the muscles rising out of his back and spreading into the fine, white skin of the underside of the large muscles on his upper arms were complex, sculptured, and beautiful. Radomir did not have much underarm hair, and the sharp, clean lines of the muscles framing his head were in somewhat surprising contrast with his features, which were round, curving, and much less finely molded. His facial skin, too, was coarser and more porous than the fine skin on the inside of his arms. Although very male looking, Radomir didn’t have to shave very often, perhaps every two days. When they first met Nevis noticed that he had no hair on his chest but some months later noticed a handful of fine hairs sprinkled across his pectorals. They were too pronounced to have newly arrived, so Nevis concluded that Radomir had been in the habit of shaving them.
Radomir’s best feature was his abdomen: very flat and very hard. As a child and a young teenager he claimed to have been very thin. What remained was his very flat and tough rib cage, descending directly toward his crotch without a hint of bulge. He had a very small waist, out of all proportion to the width of his shoulders. Sitting on the edge of a bed, with one knee up pulling on a sweat sock, the curve of his long, powerful back ending in the small waist, held tightly in the elastic band of his jockey shorts, seemed almost improbable. The silhouette had the sharp line of the Petty and Vargas girls of the old Esquire magazine. The rarity of these idealized proportions in actual existence makes the eye wonder if it is seeing correctly. The proportions were much like the subtly smiling kouros of the early Greek period in sculpture. Radomir had done much to create the body he walked around in, and Nevis felt there was much to be known about him by studying that body.
As Nevis turned to look at Radomir
in the sun, he saw that he was lying on his back, resting his elbows. The powerful arms and shoulders braced the flat torso that moved down to the groin without a pause. One knee was up. The tan was uninterrupted, and Nevis could see that the skin of his cock where it fell between his legs was even darker than the tan of his skin. A large vein showed under the dark skin, skewing somewhat to the left side.
The curious thing about Radomir’s cock was that, although they had shared an apartment for the better part of a year, Nevis had never had a really good look at it. His only real impression was from the gymnasium where they both went, Nevis taking aerobics classes, Radomir doing his weights. Nevis was in the shower one day when the curtain flared out as another body flashed by into the next stall. In that moment he saw a jaunty, uncircumcised penis bob by at the base of a flat stomach between a pair of sturdy thighs. That’s Radomir, he thought, but didn’t speak out or rap on the wall. But from that time on he was convinced that he had seen Radomir’s cock, as jaunty and bouncy as Radomir himself often was.
Now on the beach he realized that the passing cock had not been Radomir’s at all. In fact, when Radomir rose to get into the water he saw that he was quite extremely circumcised, a quite long expanse of exposed skin reaching from where the foreskin had been cut away to a fairly sizable head. A really good-looking, rather threatening adult cock hung between Radomir’s legs, not the bouncing bit Nevis had seen on someone else. Nevis felt relieved, because he had recently read that the incidence of AIDS was much higher among uncircumcised men than circumcised.
The Millionaire of Love Page 5