The name on the awning of the taverna struck me and brought up memories so rapidly and fully that I wasn’t completely aware of the guitar music wafting up in my brain. If I had been, I wouldn’t have climbed the two terrazzo steps to the terrace level of the Tree of Idleness restaurant and sat at a table under a spreading olive tree.

Even then, though, I knew I was tempted to enter the restaurant because of its similarity to the one Adrianna and I had often frequented in the village of Bellapais in the northern, Turkish, enclave of Cyprus. As it was, the memories brought back so much pain that I collapsed more than sat, breathless, in one of the straw-bottomed chairs, and was pinned to the spot because the young Greek Cypriot waiter was so quick to take my order of a bottle of chilled Palamino wine and a plate of sheftalia.

I was on somewhat of a pilgrimage of nostalgia to try to hang onto memories of the good times with Adrianna—the years before she had contracted breast cancer and our world was sent spinning. But this was, perhaps, too much nostalgia too quickly. And running into a restaurant named the Tree of Idleness was more than I had bargained for.

Adrianna and I had met at a restaurant called the Tree of Idleness in northern Cyprus. She ran her own seaside pool bar west of Kyrenia on the northern Cypriot coast, but her then husband, Jalil, was a musician at both her bar and the Tree of Idleness, and I went to the latter restaurant in Bellapais one evening. I was in my first year following journalism school and was traveling around Europe. I told everyone that I was looking for out-of-the-way vacation places and was compiling a tour book, but I acknowledged to myself that I was hiding.

Jalil wasn’t playing his set when I went into the restaurant. If he had been, I wouldn’t have gone in. The open terrace under a spreading olive tree was nearly empty except for the usual elderly Turkish men, lining the wall in their straw-bottomed chairs, drinking the sludge they called coffee, and ogling all of the pretty girls walking through the Bellapais central square.

There was a girl for me to ogle too. She was sitting alone at a table and looking pensive. I was bold and asked her if I could sit with her while I drank an Efes beer. She was amenable to that. She was a mere wisp of a girl—a young woman, surely, but waiflike, with dark hair in a pixie cut, which made me think of her as a girl. I discovered in chatting her up that she was English. She said that she was there to hear the guitarist who would be playing in a few minutes. I almost left then, the mere mention of a guitar being what I was trying to escape, but the young woman—Adrianna—seemed almost to beg me to stay with the look in her eyes.

Then Jalil, a dark, handsome Turkish Cypriot man, who wasn’t much older than I was and was strongly built, perched on a stool next to the door into the interior of the taverna and began to tune his guitar. Adrianna stopped speaking in midsentence and almost looked frightened when Jalil first appeared. But when Jalil started to play his soft, but insistent, Spanish guitar music, she became mesmerized. So did I for that matter, much to my chagrin.

Jalil was as compelling as his music was. His features were rugged in a way that promised to make him ugly in old age, and he was powerfully built, evoking surprise that he was strumming a guitar rather than working on a fishing boat. But he was beautiful now, and there was a sensuality in what he played and how he played it that seemed to hold Adrianna in thrall. It did me, certainly.

When he’d finished his first set, he came over to the table and demanded—I can’t say asked, as it certainly seemed like a demand—that Adrianna tell him who I was, an American taking a year away from entering into a professional writing life to discover Europe, and, primarily, the Mediterranean. She introduced us and then, almost immediately, said she’d have to leave. I started to rise when she did, but Jalil asked, almost with a pout, if I wasn’t going to stay to listen to his next set, which would be his last for the evening. As compelled as I was to do so, I would have said no, but Adrianna insisted that I do so as well.

The music of his concluding set was so compelling and sensual that I almost couldn’t speak when he finished and came back to my table.

“You seemed to enjoy that,” he said, with a smile.

“Yes, it was incredible,” I answered.

“I watched you as I was playing. It enhanced my playing, I think,” he said in a low, hoarse voice. “It was almost like having sex, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” I murmured in answer. It was exactly like that. That’s what I was hiding from, and that’s why I probably should have left as soon as he started playing.

“That was my last set, but there is more that I’d like to play for you. I live on the coast, down west of Girne, but I have a room here too, above the taverna. Will you come with me?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, instinctively knowing what he was asking of me. I knew the ancient castle-guarded harbor town the Turks called Girne and the Greeks called Kyrenia.

And then in a lower-register voice, his eyes drilling into mine, and his fingers lightly brushing the hair on my forearm, causing chills to go up my spine. “And will you come for me?”

“Yes,” I whispered.

Later Jalil told me about the pool bar on the Mediterranean coast that he and his English wife, Adrianna—he only told me they were married after he’d fucked me—ran, and he invited me to move in with them and use the bar as a base to do my tour book research.

I accepted. I knew it was a mistake to do so, and perhaps if he didn’t play the guitar so divinely...

Once I’d moved into the pool bar house, I found that Jalil was often drunk and, when so, was a brutal, rough lover. I could take it—in fact I rather enjoyed being taken totally and roughly and slapped around a bit. But he fucked his wife this way too.

In time, after she’d been brutally assaulted in the night after the pool had closed down and I had to sit in my room and listen to his taking of her—knowing exactly how it felt to be grabbed and slapped and forced down under him on the bed and have my legs forced open and the hardness of him thrust up inside me and the plowing start as he choked the breath out of me—I could not ignore it anymore. I never reached the stage of trying to intervene. We were in his country, with its traditional laws. She was English and I was American, and she was his wife—almost his possession, in Turkish terms. And as long as he played his guitar for me, I was virtually his possession as well.

But later, after he’d left her sobbing to go drink himself further into a stupor, I’d come to her room and comfort her and tend to her bruises. In time, comforting her included giving her the gentle fuck that her husband wouldn’t give her.

All the time he was fucking me too. When he found out that I was fucking Adrianna, we had to flee him and northern Cyprus. We went to London, where I wrote and she worked in a pub. We married when her divorce from Jalil went into effect, and we returned to Cyprus—this time to the Greek side—where we opened a small boutique hotel and taverna on the southern coast, near Limmasol. It did well—and my travel writings were doing well also. When Adrianna contracted breast cancer, we owned and operated a larger boutique hotel in the Lake District of England.

It took Adrianna two horrible years to die. I sold the hotel and went wandering, enabled to do so because writing about this was my bread and butter. But in my wanderings I found I was both seeking and hiding from something—something that I now was free to do, but that I still thought was wrong for me to do.

My wanderings and search for places Adrianna and I had been happy brought me back to Greek Cyprus. I was lodged at the Nicosia Hilton, in the interior capitol of Cyprus. Restlessness had sent me walking in an ever-enlarged circle around the hotel. And that was what brought me to the taverna, on the small side street, named the Tree of Idleness, just as the taverna on the square in Bellapais on the Turkish side had been named.

I was still deep in reverie when the music began. The guitarist hadn’t come out to the patio under the olive tree. He sat on a stool inside the taverna, which was really used only in the colder winter months, so he was the only one inside. It was dusk and he was under a spotlight, though, so he was hard to miss. He was playing Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Corcovado,” which had been one of my favorites in college when I heard Cat Ralston play it.

I couldn’t leave now. I was a prisoner to the music—and to the guitarist. He was considerably older than I was, maybe forty-five or so, of medium height, but he was hard-bodied in a sinewy way and with rugged features that showed wear and tear but, when put together, exuded power and sensuality. I couldn’t help myself; I was already thinking of him as a lover and wondering if he’d be gentle or rough—was he long, thick? Jalil was both.

I shook my head. What was I thinking? Just because he played the guitar divinely and was sensual looking didn’t put us in bed together. I’d finished the sheftalia and nearly finished the Palamino. But suddenly I knew I couldn’t leave—at least not until he finished for the evening and left. When the waiter came by, I ordered a brandy. He didn’t care how long I stayed. When Greeks came to a taverna in the late evening, they were in for the night.

There was something about the guitarist that wasn’t completely Greek. If he were in the movies, he’d play a gangster part or the grizzled cowboy, long experienced to the hard life of a ranch.

When he finished the set and left the little platform he’d been sitting on and disappeared into the back of the taverna, I felt like I’d been in a trance. For the first time I noticed that there were CDs on the tables. On the front was a photo of the guitarist, set half in shadows. A black-and-white shot. It only added to the rugged sensuality of his aura. I looked at the name. Paul D’Alessandro. That wasn’t a Greek name. There was a short bio on the case. He was Cypriot back to the period in which the Genoese owned the island. So, he was of mixed Italian and Greek origin. It was a good mix, I thought.

I found myself reading the bio, looking for any evidence that he was married. And then laughing at myself. Jalil had been married and it hadn’t mattered. I had been fucking Adrianna during the same period that Jalil had been fucking me and it didn’t matter. Still I chastised myself for having any fantasy of a hookup with this guitarist. I had foresworn all of that. This was why I was backtracking and trying to capture all of the good times I’d had with Adrianna. I was determined to keep her and what we’d had for seven years firmly in my mind.

“You like the music?”

I looked up sharply. He was standing there at my table, his guitar in his hand.

“Yes, yes, I liked it very much,” I said.

“My name is Paul. Paul D’Alessandro,” he said.

“Yes, I know,” I answered. And then, embarrassed, I pointed at the CD. “Oh, sorry. My name is also Paul. Paul Matisen. A coincidence.”

“Yes, a nice coincidence you come to the Tree of Idleness. You come here before?”

“Yes. No, not this Tree of Idleness.”

“Ah, you have been to the one in Bellapais, on the Turkish side, then.”

“Yes. Years ago. But...”

“Yes, I know about the one on the Turkish side. That’s the original one, but it belonged to Greeks. They opened this one on the Greek side when the Turks invaded and pushed the Greeks off their land there.”

“Oh.” I didn’t quite know what to say after that. It naturally was a sore subject with the Greeks who had been dispossessed of their homes and businesses on the Turkish side, much the same as the Turks who had lived on the Greek side of the line experienced.

“No matter what brought you. It’s good you found us. I watched you while I played. It was as if you were spinning on every note.”

“Spanish guitar music does that to me,” I said with a nervous laugh. “It’s so ... so...”

“Sensual?”

“Yes,” I answered in a small voice.

“I could see that in your face as well. That was what I meant by spinning—the thought of you spinning on what I might have for you. I believe it made me play with more feeling.”

I felt I would hyperventilate. I’d heard that line before—the declaration that I made him play with more feeling. That’s what Jalil and said right before he told me he was going to fuck me—and I had almost begged him to.

“Well...”

“‘Corcovado’ is a nice song. But someone like you, I think a bachata in flamenco style is for you.”

“Bachata?” I asked. “Flamenco I’ve heard of.”

“Yes. Something very Latin. Something for lovers. Like Ravel’s ‘Bolero.’ You know ‘Bolero’?”

“Yes, doesn’t everyone?” I said with a catch in my voice.

“I play a bachata in flamenco style for you. For you, I play ‘Mon Amor’ now. Not the famous song by that name. A bachata by that name. One I have often played ... for a lover.”

“Really, anything you play will be fine,” I answered hurriedly. “I have to leave soon anyway. Your playing has been—”

“And then you come with me, yes? My sets will be over. I have a room nearby. I play just for you. Then I play you, yes? I make sex with you like I make love to my guitar. You go with men, do you not? I can tell these things. Yes, you go with me. You will go with me.”

I froze. Before I could say anything, though, he had turned and gone to his high stool and was preparing to play.

The music was mesmerizing. It began slow and the tempo and volume built. I had an insistent, pounding rhythm to it when it got into full swing and it, indeed, was just like the rhythm of the fuck. I found that I was holding my breath and that my hand had gone under the table top to my engorged cock through the thin material of my trousers. His eyes were locked on mine and mine on his and I felt we were having sex as he played. He said he wanted to make sex with me like he was playing the guitar. I watched his fingers caressing and brutalizing the strings of the guitar in term—and that’s what I envisioned him doing with my body. The image was overwhelming.

He reached a crescendo and I couldn’t take any more. I threw bills down on the table, far more than I owed for the food and drink, and stumbled off the patio and onto the street. At the corner of the building, I turned into the darkness, moved behind a thick stand of bougainvillea winding up a trellis, unzipped, and barely got my cock out when, the clearly heard music reaching an even higher, more insistent pitch, I ejaculated against the stuccoed wall.

I stumbled back to my hotel room, took a shower, and got into the bed naked. Weaving a scene in my mind then with Paul D’Alessandro, I masturbated to another ejaculation and fell into a deep sleep.

Jalil wasn’t the one who taught me the sensual effect that classical guitar music—and guitarists—had on me. That had already happened and, in many ways, was what had brought me to Turkish Cyprus to begin with—to hide from myself and my weakness.

I studied journalism at Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C. While there, I met a young woman my age who was going to American University and studying Latin American studies. Inez was her name. She had dreams of being in the Foreign Service and serving in South America. Although my dreams weren’t limited to South America, I too wanted to travel the world. She was shy, as was I, but that drew us together, not apart. She was serious in everything she did and wanted to study all aspects of every problem closely. She wanted to make the world a better place for all. I was just a dumb kid who narcissistically groomed myself to look hot without having any inkling of what the goal of that was. I was in the “make the world better for me” phase. We were contemplating a lasting relationship, and she initiated sex—to ensure, I guess, that I was what she really wanted.

At the time I was still searching for my preferences. I thought that perhaps I was gay. It was only later that I was happy to think of sex being sex being sex, and was content with being bi and practicing bisexuality.

She didn’t say I wasn’t good at it after we’d rather clumsily, I thought, fucked a couple of times. She seemed to remain on track to her goals, one of which was me. I was just going with the flow, assuming that marriage was something you did upon graduating from college—although both of us intended to go on to graduate school and we both had the means and grades to do it.